by Tom Scott
There were plenty of other distractions in the neighbourhood—the forbidden junkyard of dead plane parts and munitions casings in the gully at the end of the runway, the swimming baths sitting beneath the turreted water tower that looked like it belonged on a giant chessboard. One day the pool was empty for cleaning. Sister Sue and I perched on the edge at the deep end, absorbed in the task of watching a man in overalls with a broom sweeping up brown sludge on the bottom—maybe the movie boy was a keen swimmer as well—when curiosity got the better of me.
I have always had a large skull. It partly accounts for my father calling me ‘Egghead’ and Mum’s claims of an excruciating birth. My centre of balance is critically governed by where my cranium is positioned at any given moment. In this instance, it was cantilevered a smidgen too far forward, and I dropped six feet to the damp concrete below me. All I can remember after this is Mum screaming when I got home because blood was streaming down my face and my right eye was rolling drunkenly in its socket. An optician in Bulls said I would need eye operations when I was older, and fitted me with wire-frame spectacles that slowed down the rotations, corrected my blurred vision and more importantly prevented others feeling seasick when looking in my direction.
Mum at a fancy dress party at Rongotea hall.
Dad quit the Air Force shortly after this. For years, I proudly assumed he’d been thrown out for refusing to salute an officer that he didn’t respect, but the truth was far less swashbuckling. Farming was booming and he wanted to start his own topdressing and weed-spraying business. We moved ten miles south to the dairy factory hamlet of Rongotea, which seemed to have more churches than people. My father claimed it was too small for a village idiot, so the locals took it in turns.
RONGOTEA PRIMARY SCHOOL WAS A grand hall of learning consisting of three classrooms at the end of a dusty street on the outskirts of the hamlet. Mum walked Sue and me there on our first day, which began with the raising of the Union Jack and singing of ‘God Save the Queen’. It passed uneventfully until the last period, when we were allowed to draw on brown butcher’s paper with waxy crayons. Other children drew stick figures and squiggles. I drew the Phantom, ‘the ghost who walks’, in this instance riding his horse Hero, with his trained wolf Devil running alongside. They were good likenesses, but it wasn’t fair, really. I had been practising secretly in my bedroom.
The other kids gathered around dumbstruck. When the teacher saw what I had drawn she shrieked and ran from the room, returning moments later with the other two teachers, one of whom was also the headmaster. They too gasped in disbelief. The words ‘child prodigy’ may even have been bandied about. They certainly came later. And not just from me.
I loved the attention. I was in approval deficit at home, so it was hugely gratifying. Then I discovered I could make other kids laugh. I liked making other kids laugh. I became a revolting little show-off on multiple fronts.
This was my undoing one winter morning. I was larking about on the upper playground as another man in overalls mowed the lawn below us. I slipped on the frosty grass. Gathering speed, I shot feet first into the spinning blades.
Years later, in a vet-school physiology class, I discovered that I have negative buoyancy. It’s very rare. My bone density is such that I don’t float in water. Aqua jogging, even wearing two floatation vests, is risky and a snorkel is advisable as backup. On planes, when they go through the safety procedures I surreptitiously check the passengers on either side of me to see who is the smallest, because in the event of an emergency that poor bastard is going without a lifejacket. When I swim, I send up plumes of spray like multiple depth-charges, yet I barely move forward. Any trajectory in water is diagonal rather than horizontal.
This rare phenomenon, coupled with my recurring nightmare, meant I lived in fear of swimming sports and avoided participation. In my last year at Lytton Street School in Feilding (the school motto was ‘Learn by Doing’—bugger that!), I was forced against my will to participate in the all-comers, across-the-pool freestyle, an event dominated by new entrants. At Feilding’s aging municipal baths we lined up in order of height. Even crouching I towered head and shoulders above excited five-year-olds. I was big for my age, with a large purple scar on my left knee, which could pass for a duelling injury at a pinch, but there was no way I could pass for a teacher.
Burning with shame, I edged down the pool until I was opposite the high diving board, the deepest part. The water was essentially chowder in those days, with dead sheep substituting for clams. Without my glasses I couldn’t see the bottom, which was a relief, but I knew it was down there somewhere.
The crowd in the stands behind me tittered as we got on our marks. They didn’t know it, but I would soon wipe the smiles off their smug faces.
The gun went off. Paralysed with terror, I dropped like an anvil into the opaque depths. Later I would claim that I began walking briskly along the bottom and was making good time so what happened next was totally uncalled for, but that wasn’t the case. Noticing my failure to surface, two fully dressed male teachers dived in to the rescue. Encasing both their arms up to the elbows for safekeeping were kids’ watches. Hissed threats followed me across the playground for months afterwards, but nothing was as bad as the kid who, just when I thought the whole affair was safely behind me, yelled out in the street, ‘Look, Mum—it’s the boy who nearly drowned!’
Bone density is a huge plus when you fall into a lawn mower, however. I stalled the big machine dead in its tracks. There was no pain that I can remember. There was a lot of screaming and shouting, but not from me. I dimly recollect people carefully unthreading my left leg from the mower’s maw. In an ambulance, I watched in fascination as a small red dot on a white woollen blanket spread slowly outwards as we wailed towards Palmerston North. I don’t know how much blood I lost but I’d made a passable Japanese flag by the time we arrived at the hospital.
They saved my leg. The lawn mower had to be put down. I wore a calliper for the next six months. People assumed I had polio and detoured around me. Polio was the Zika virus of its day. Everyone was terrified of catching it. A boy around the corner was rumoured to have died from it. Even in my calliper I sprinted past his house. The fence, garage and verandah of his home were choked with a dark ivy that I have associated with death ever since.
WE LIVED IN A DEAD house of our own—dank and decaying living quarters at the rear of an abandoned shop, with an outside toilet with a can—the contents of which had to be buried in a back yard where the grass came up to my waist and sullen nectarine trees barely bore fruit. It was Mum’s job to dig the holes, even when she was heavily pregnant with Jane.
This didn’t stop her boarding a bus to Palmerston North with Sue and me, to stand for hours with thousands of others lining Featherston Street hoping for a glimpse of young Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip on their 1953–54 Royal Tour of the Dominion. Excitement had been building for months. Every school-kid in the country got a concertina booklet that unfolded to show the Coronation procession, a special medallion attached to a blue ribbon and little Union Jacks on sticks.
After an interminable delay, word came down the line that the motorcade was approaching. Hushed conversation gave way to cheering. A forest of arms began frenziedly waving flags, obscuring my view. Within seconds they had passed and were gone. Pat Lawlor’s writing in the Evening Post (15 January 1954) is supposed to have summed it up best: ‘This slip of a girl has made flames leap as if from a mighty furnace … a woman has sat at the keyboard of our thoughts and her charm has made music in our hearts.’ Shame I missed it.
Before going into the maternity home to have Jane, Mum bought a dozen new nappies, washed them to make them fluffy and stored them proudly in the hot-water cupboard. When she was gone I developed ringworm symptoms on my scalp. Working on the theory that ringworm was averse to sunlight, my father cut off all my hair with hand clippers—a laborious task that included terse instructions to keep still, accompanied by painful taps on the head with the fl
at of the blades if I transgressed. At the finish there were small hedgerows of mousy ginger curls that he had missed, along with nicks, cuts and a bruise or two. Thoroughly miserable, I stole a beret of Mum’s and pulled it low over my ears like Frank Spencer would later do in Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em. Returning home with baby Jane, my mother let out a heart-rending howl when she discovered rats had chewed holes in every single nappy, and another piercing scream when she saw what was under the beret.
In the foreword to his recent biography, David Cornwell, who writes his bestselling spy novels under the pen-name John le Carré, asks if true stories can ever be told from memory. He writes that truth to a lawyer is fact unadorned, but to the creative writer fact is just raw material—an instrument to be used and not a taskmaster. He argues that first you invent yourself—then you get to believe your invention. If this is the case, I had my first moment of self-invention shortly after my head was shaved.
Trudging to school in my wire-frame glasses, wearing the beret, scraping my calliper along the dusty gravel—a moment when my self-pity should have been off the charts—I started giggling. It suddenly occurred to me just how daft I must look. Other kids hurtled past hurling insults but rather than bursting into tears, my default setting at home, I exaggerated my limp and revelled in the laughter this generated. I was learning that self-deprecation takes the sting out of almost any embarrassment if applied swiftly enough to the affected area. Self-mockery makes you if not a redundant target, then a less satisfying one at least. To paraphrase the Dalai Lama—what is the point of taking the piss out of someone if he is already drenched in his own urine?
Sue, me, Jane, Dad and Michael.
The house we lived in is no longer there. It was bulldozed long ago. There is just an empty section filled with weeds next to the Rongotea Town Hall, where we went to concerts and fancy-dress parties. Girls had dancing lessons there. The village policeman, Bow Pike, very kindly took it upon himself to teach boys Graeco-Roman wrestling there. When he wasn’t tirelessly throwing himself around on the mats demonstrating various holds on boys in string singlets and loose shorts, he sat on a box at dusk outside his house and played the bagpipes. Across the road a blacksmith forged horseshoes in a furnace that glowed orange in the gathering gloom. Dairy-factory chimneys and more church steeples than Vatican City were silhouetted against lipstick sunsets. It was like living in a Constable painting.
At the back of his long section, Bow Pike had a small orchard heavily laden with fruit. When my calliper was removed I scaled a high fence to steal some. He caught me and dragged me to an outside toilet, locked me in and went off to fetch something. I wasn’t overly familiar with police procedure at this point in my life, but this didn’t seem right.
It was a classic shithouse door made from vertical planks attached to a double ‘Z’ frame with a narrow gap at the bottom for ventilation. Something told me I didn’t want to be there when Bow returned. I lay on my back and kicked like mad at the vertical planking. Two boards broke away and, like Peter Rabbit escaping Mr McGregor’s garden, I wriggled out and raced to the fence, expecting to hear running steps, fierce blasts on a policeman’s whistle and shouts of ‘Stop, thief!’, but there was nothing apart from the thumping of my own heart. I wasn’t sure of the statute of limitations on stolen apples, so I avoided eye contact with Bow after that, which wasn’t necessary. He was frantically avoiding mine. Years later I read in the Manawatu Evening Standard that he had been sent to prison for buggering small boys. What had he gone to fetch, I ask myself. Vaseline? On second thoughts, maybe it was more like living in a painting by Brueghel.
Shortly before we left Rongotea, Mum walked Sue and me to the rugby clubrooms, where an upright piano and an uptight piano teacher were waiting. Sue and I sat mute with incomprehension while she went on and on about the need to practise scales on our piano at home. Finally, Sue interrupted her. ‘Please, miss, we don’t have a piano at home.’ The teacher leaped to her feet and slapped her temple, screaming, ‘Maoris are always doing this to me!’
Mum was quite unruffled on the long walk home. ‘Yee’ve had a music lesson, kids. Don’t let anyone ever tell ye otherwise. Yer mother has ticked dat box for ye!’
CHAPTER FOUR
TELLING STORIES
ON A CANAL-BOATING HOLIDAY IN England in the spring of 1997—the spring that never sprung—we travelled down the Grand Union Canal towards Stratford-upon-Avon on a long-boat, Brummagem Lass, at full throttle—a pace so glacial pensioners wielding Zimmer frames caught up with us easily and eventually disappeared around bends in the towpath ahead. I didn’t mind. With deep snow carpeting meadows and weeping willows draped in hoar frost, it was a world of crystalline beauty and hushed tranquillity. I half expected Ratty and Mole—well wrapped up—to come around the corner in a skiff. Glimpsing stately homes through curtains of oak and ash reminded me of something that I couldn’t quite place.
In the Bard’s place of birth it was demoralising not being able to afford tickets to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Somewhat disconsolate, I took washing to a laundromat instead. Waiting for the dryer to finish I picked up a copy of Tatler and read about a gymkhana and a girl with a name something like Lady Priscilla Burke-Pounding coming first on a pony called Little Nigger Boy. I laughed out loud. And it came to me. This stretch of England reminded me of arriving in Feilding for the very first time in 1954.
We drove in from the south, up a broad boulevard lined with tall trees and grand mansions. Feilding regularly wins the title of New Zealand’s prettiest town. Before the arrival of the wrecking ball it had two magisterial picture theatres and a square lined on all four sides with exquisite two-storey colonial architecture. After Rongotea, things were looking up.
But our topdressing truck laden high with possessions didn’t slow. We kept heading north, through town out into flat countryside and a farmhouse with a rotting verandah, another copper that needed firing up, another outside toilet with a can that needed emptying, and a clothesline sharing a house paddock with moulting hens and grumpy Southdown rams with scrotums so grotesquely swollen they could barely walk.
There were no rats, but the house was a little the worse for wear. Real estate agents talk about places being tired—this place was exhausted. The linoleum in the bathroom had brown lakes in it where it had worn through to the floorboards. Mum put up with it for several years, then used free sample pots of Dulux pastels to approximate the original pattern. Unable to afford a paintbrush, she dabbed on the colours with Dad’s shaving brush. The end result looked like someone had eaten copious quantities of Frosty Jack shocking pink and lime green ice cream washed down with Blue Lagoon soft drink and then been violently sick.
Mum couldn’t afford turps either. Despite her best efforts with Sunlight soap and scalding water, the bristles of the shaving brush solidified into something approximating a lobe of diseased liver. Understandably, Dad went apeshit. I admired Mum’s strenuous denial of any involvement, despite standing on the proof.
I was recounting this tale for neighbours who lived two miles up Kimbolton Road when something immensely gratifying happened. Rosemary Ogle, a tall, sweet-natured, elegant woman, who had been laughing hysterically, suddenly exclaimed in surprise, ‘Oh my God—I’m peeing my pants!’ There can be no higher accolade.
The Ogles had a Romney stud farm with a spreading, handsome homestead, a circular driveway, a grass tennis court, and a cosy cluster of white stables, a woolshed and a barn. Their huge kitchen had a walk-in pantry and a walk-in cool room, where carcasses of lamb hung from hooks. The contrast with our place could not have been greater, and I loved being invited up there. Mrs Ogle would lean forward and ask sweetly, ‘What’s happening at home, Tommy?’ And I was off like a racehorse on starter’s orders, snitching on my family for cheap laughs, her hot scones and delicious homemade quince jam.
I told numerous stories about Sidney, Dad’s giant worker who dragged bags of slag and superphosphate to the r
ear of our topdressing truck and emptied them into the hopper. This was a demanding, dusty, choking job that my brother Michael and I took over on Sidney’s weekends off, which meant we developed forearms like blacksmiths well before puberty.
I told them Sidney’s personal hygiene skills were somewhat rudimentary. Like one of the witches in Macbeth, her favourite play, Mum would emerge out of the steam swirling from the wood-fired copper in the washhouse and wave a furry wooden paddle at me, dangling colossal underpants smeared in excrement. ‘Look at dis, would ye! The filthy bastard can’t wipe his arse properly!’
I also told them how Sidney was deadly with a shanghai and could shatter ceramic power-pole insulator cups from 50 yards, and how he once knocked a female possum clean out of a macrocarpa tree. Sister Sue found a bald, blind baby possum in its pouch that we brought home and fed with an eye-dropper.
The wallpaper in the kids’ bedroom hung down like Everglades moss, which the possum loved running up as it got bigger, until it reached critical mass and started stripping the paper and hessian off entirely as it climbed, exposing bare dusty sarking.
Mum, Sue and I went to work with flour-and-water paste and newspaper and relined the room, transforming it into a papier-mâché cube. When it eventually dried, I painted the walls blue, added a coral reef, bright tropical fish and a pirates’ chest spilling doubloons. My crowning touch was a large cardboard shark hanging from the ceiling. Kids up and down Kimbolton Road, who had swags of Meccano sets, Hornby trains, Enid Blyton books, Rupert annuals, dolls and dolls’ houses, abandoned them in droves to visit my undersea world.
