Something Fishy

by Derek Hansen

  ‘First the constant bad temper, then the shakes. It wasn’t Powerade I took from his room,’ said the cook. ‘It was the two bottles of Absolut vodka he mixed with it. The imported stuff, one hundred per cent proof. And a half of crème de menthe.’

  ‘I never picked it,’ said Mick. ‘And I shared a room with him.’

  ‘Sometimes it takes one to know one,’ said the chef.‘Now, what’s the word on the barramundi?’

  ‘Salt and fried fat,’ said Carlton. ‘Absolute crap. I’ve had better wrapped in newspaper.’

  His laugh set the tone for the remaining three days.

  The Burden of Responsibility

  I think I was twelve at the time, which meant it was 1956 and I’d spent two-thirds of my life in New Zealand and could no longer be regarded as a Pommie. At least, that’s what I hoped. Both of my older brothers had picked up a Kiwi accent, although nowhere near as broad as mine. Neither had worked quite as hard at it as me. Neither had felt the need as keenly. I played soccer not rugby. Soccer, in a country in which rugby is both religion and sport, and playing it is regarded as an affirmation of national identity. I also belonged to the Church of England, which, as far as my schoolmates were concerned, was further evidence of my Englishness and lack of New Zealandness. That was two strikes against me. I’d managed to persuade my mother, through a mixture of argument, pleading and tears, to stop buying the long-legged, English-style khaki shorts and let me wear grey boxer shorts like all the other kids my age. And I took off my sandals, which my mother made me wear to school, as soon as I was out of sight, tucked them into my schoolbag and proudly walked barefooted like the rest of the kids. You couldn’t be a Kiwi unless you could walk on scorching pavements, on gravel and on prickles and kick a ball around barefooted.

  Let me tell you, nobody did more to look and sound like a Kiwi. I could make the local Self-Help store sound like Sowf-Owp, which was the way Maxie, part-Scottish, part-Samoan but one hundred per cent Kiwi, said it. I said ‘hooray’ for ‘goodbye’ and referred to strange kids we met down in Grey Lynn Park as ‘sonny’, which was a put-down. I said ‘tramping’ while the rest of the English-speaking world said ‘hiking’, and I said ‘really tramping’ when I described a car or motorbike exceeding the speed limit. I tried my hardest to be a Kiwi, a pig-islander, and I had to. I had a third strike against me. Unlike every other kid I knew, I liked writing essays; in fact, I liked writing anything. If pushed, my pals could understand why I played soccer because it was the English game and they thought my parents — being English — had probably forced me into it, thereby denying me the right to play rugby. But there was no excuse for liking essays, none at all. That, as much as anything, marked me as different when all I wanted to do was belong.

  I lived in Auckland, across the road from Richmond Road School, smack on the border between Ponsonby and Grey Lynn. In those days Ponsonby was not regarded as a nice place to live; in fact, it was one of the poorer suburbs. There were even brothels, two that I knew of, which we used to ride past on our bikes expecting to see something akin to the gates of hell, adorned of course with fallen women in various stages of undress. But all we saw were wooden bungalows much the same as the ones on either side, but with their blinds down. This, apparently, was significant.

  For some reason Grey Lynn was considered altogether more salubrious although I never could see any difference in either the houses or the people who lived in them. My mother, however, could and it was important to her. She always told people we lived in Grey Lynn even though, technically, we lived in Ponsonby. The richest people I knew lived in Grey Lynn. Not only were they a two-car family in a suburb where the vast majority of homes had no car at all, both their cars were brand-new Morris Minors. Both of them. For years they were the only people I knew who’d bought a brand-new car and they’d bought two. We had a 1934 four-cylinder Chevrolet which my father used to slip out of gear every time we went downhill so he could save petrol.

  I’m telling you this so you can get a feeling for the times. Nobody had much, and most of that was second-hand, yet New Zealand was credited with having the third-highest standard of living in the world. As far as I can remember, most people were pretty happy, probably happier than people are today. For the most part I was happy too, even if there was an essay to write and I stayed home to write it when I should’ve been making up the numbers in a scratch game of soccer or touch footy. My pals regarded this as an act of treachery, if not outright treason. That’s when they called me a ‘mummy’s boy’ or, worst of all, a Pommie. The funny thing is, my pals used to make me read my essays to them as soon as I’d finished them. They really seemed to enjoy them.

  I used to make up my stories but that day in 1956, when I was twelve, everything changed. I wrote a personal story, a story about my family and me. The teacher gave us the title of the essay — The Burden of Responsibility — and we were expected to write a couple of pages in praise of people like the Prime Minister, Keith Holyoake, who had the burden of running the country, the mayor, who had the burden of running Auckland, the headmaster, who had the burden of running Richmond Road School, the captain of the All Blacks, who had the burden of carrying national pride, or our fathers, who had the burden of keeping a roof over our heads and food on the table. I wrote instead about the burden I carried.

  I wasn’t born with a fishing rod in my hands because in those days they were a luxury. No, I was born with a fishing line in my hands. The rod came much later. I went fishing whenever I could. I used to catch the trolley bus to town after school and race down Shortland Street to the Admiralty Steps or to the steps alongside the ferry building. Bread didn’t get a chance to go stale in our family so I had to nick a couple of slices when Mum wasn’t looking to break up and throw into the water to attract the fish. For bait, I made dough.

  For years I was small fish’s worst nightmare. I was deadly on sprats, piper and pakiti, which, thinking back, I suppose was a species of wrasse. There were afternoons when my mother encouraged me to go fishing whether I wanted to or not and I’d come home with twenty or so sprats and piper. They became dinner and I became my mother’s hero for the night. She called the sprats ‘herrings’ and that somehow dignified them and made them more than they were. My father and brothers weren’t exactly thrilled because they didn’t like having to deal with the bones — and there were millions of them — but the alternative was splitting cauliflower cheese five ways. So at least one night a week we had ‘herrings’ for tea, just as we had ‘pork fillets’, which was really tripe in a white sauce accompanied by a mountain of mashed potato.

  In my essay I made the point that I had the responsibility of providing at least one meal a week, although I didn’t see it as a burden even though some nights I had to hang around until it was almost dark to catch enough fish. When the wind was in the wrong direction it could get really cold down there on the Admiralty Steps.

  Once I got a bike, an old back-pedal-brake Rudge, things started to change. I decided I was too old to catch sprats and piper. I saved every penny I could get my hands on. I delivered newspapers, groceries and prescription medicines for the local pharmacy. I mowed lawns even though it was a job I hated and everyone expected me to trim the edges as well with hedge clippers. Mostly I got a shilling for my efforts. Every penny I earned went into the fund to buy a fishing rod and reel so I could go after snapper.

  It took a while but I finally managed to buy a split cane rod with a side-cast reel, and enough line, hooks and sinkers. That was when my problems arose. That was when I assumed The Burden of Responsibility.

  Real fish, like snapper, required real bait. I couldn’t get by any more on two slices of bread and a scone-sized lump of dough. I required real bait and real bait cost money, which I often didn’t have. I’d have to ask Mum for money and this put her in a real quandary. Nowadays you’d say she was between a rock and a hard place. She usually had just enough money to buy something for tea and if she gave any money to me for bait she had to gamble th
at I’d catch enough snapper to feed everybody. How’s that for a burden of responsibility? Fishing never comes with a guarantee. Even the best fishermen miss out at times. Yet I’d set off for the breakwater at Mechanics Bay with my rod tied to my crossbar and a shilling’s worth of liver in my saddlebag, knowing I had to deliver — or else. I made this point in my essay as well.

  Nobody ever fished with greater dedication or earnestness. I nearly wept every time a snapper took my bait and I failed to catch it. But I caught enough on enough occasions to justify my mother’s faith in me, although sometimes the fish I brought home were kahawai instead of snapper. Mum made fishcakes with the kahawai, which was the only way we knew to make them palatable. In those days we didn’t know that the qualities that make kahawai break up in the pan are precisely what makes them sensational for sashimi. Even if we had known back then, we wouldn’t have eaten sashimi anyway. Just the idea of eating raw fish would’ve made us sick. Besides, anything Japanese was on the nose. Still, kahawai was better than nothing and there were plenty of times nothing was all I caught.

  Up until then I’d thought pressure was what occurred when I was trying to score a goal to win or draw a soccer match in the dying seconds, and that wasn’t really pressure but tension. Pressure, I now discovered, was what occurs when your mother is depending on you to catch fish for tea and the fish aren’t obliging. Pressure is also what occurs when a mother gives her youngest son the tea money in the hope that he’ll catch fish. My mum and dad argued on the nights I failed to provide. My dad comes from South Shields in the northeast of England, and meals that consist entirely of cauliflower or macaroni cheese just don’t hit the spot. They don’t now and they sure didn’t then.

  To improve my chances and reduce the number of arguments I started consulting the wisest fisherman I knew. His name was Mack, just Mack, and he lived in Brown Street, which ran alongside Richmond Road School. Mack had spent most of his life on Great Barrier Island which all of us kids knew was the best place in the world to catch snapper. Great Barrier lay on the horizon about ninety kilometres east of Auckland, a low dark smudge visible only on really clear days. We all knew about Great Barrier Island but the closest any of us had ever got to it was Waiheke Island, and that wasn’t even a quarter of the way there. As far as we were concerned, Great Barrier Island was as unreachable as England. The only way we knew you could get there was by flying in Fred Ladd’s Grumman Widgeon flying boat from Mechanics Bay. Flying, for heaven’s sake! Flying wasn’t even a remote possibility. In those days flying was strictly for the rich and privileged.

  Mack had come to Auckland because his wife was sick and needed hospital treatment. I never knew what was wrong with her but she seemed to take an age dying. By the time she died Mack had grown old and couldn’t face moving back to Great Barrier and living alone. Besides, he’d had to sell his house there to help buy the one he lived in by the school. All this was irrelevant to me at the time. All that mattered was that Mack had lived on snapper heaven and knew all there was to know about catching them.

  I could testify to the fact. One day in the Christmas school holidays he’d taken me out on the La Rita, a one-hundred-and-twelve-foot Fairmile charter fishing boat that went way out into the Hauraki Gulf. It wouldn’t leave port unless it had at least forty paying customers and I never went out when there were fewer than fifty. Unless it was a really bad day, most people caught more snapper than they wanted, certainly enough to cover the seventeen shillings and sixpence it cost for the trip. There was always a sweep for the biggest, second-biggest and third-biggest snapper. When I went out on the La Rita with Mack he caught the three biggest snapper. It was never a contest. And he was smart enough to slip the second-biggest snapper into my sugar sack so I could claim the prize for second. (Nobody was allowed to win more than one prize.) Catching the three biggest snapper was typical of Mack. He’d be hauling in big snapper while no one else was getting a bite.

  I can’t tell you how many times Mack stopped me going fishing because the tides, moon or winds weren’t right. When he said go, I rarely missed. But tides don’t rise and fall to accommodate school hours so the number of times I went fishing declined dramatically. Often on the nights I didn’t go fishing we had liver for tea, which Mum called lamb’s fry. Call it whatever you like, only the bacon she fried with it made it edible as far as we kids were concerned. Even Dad started pushing me to go fishing. So I went down to the breakwater when Mack said don’t and came home with fish about the same number of times I came home with nothing. Those were the nights we didn’t even have lamb’s fry and I felt my failure to provide so keenly that I used to slip away to the bedroom after the dishes had been done and try not to cry. I hated letting my mum down. I hated letting Dad down. Never did any burden feel heavier; never did fishing feel less like a sport.

  I concluded my essay with both of these points.

  A funny thing happened when I read my essay to my pals. They were used to me writing stories that made them laugh or hold their breath with suspense. But this story was different. I think it hit them where they lived, touched nerves and made them think about their own lives. I knew for a fact there were days when some of my pals only had toast for tea. Or copped a few bruises to take their minds off their rumbling bellies. They never said they liked the story but I could tell that I’d suddenly gone up in their estimation. In telling my story I’d captured something of them. I made them realise that each of us had our own burden of responsibility and were important in our own way.

  My teacher, of course, thought he’d finally hit the target after twenty years of casting his pearls before swine. (Well, we were pig-islanders.) He felt vindicated, rewarded and, I swear, he almost broke down. He read my essay out loud to the class. He read it out loud in the staffroom to all his fellow teachers at morning break. He went to the headmaster’s office and read it to him. The headmaster read my essay to the entire school at assembly the following morning. I had teachers and kids coming up to me to congratulate me on my essay and talk about it. It was amazing. I could see the wonder in their eyes as they tried to figure out where the hell the story had come from.

  Of course I read the story to Mack. My mum wasn’t really keen on my going to see Mack because he lived alone and was inclined to drink far more than was good for him. On the other hand she was proud of me going to see him because he lived alone and was obviously lonely. Nevertheless, I could never go to Mack’s without telling Mum I was going and how long I’d be. It was years before I understood why, when words like paedophile and ‘kiddy-fiddler’ reared their ugly heads.

  When I read my essay to Mack I expected a pat on the back and a ‘good on yer’. After all, Mack played a key role in my essay and it was clear that I thought the sun shone out of his tackle box. I’d been taught to look up at my audience while I was reading and since I knew every word of my essay by heart, I looked up a lot while I was reading to Mack. His smile faded and he seemed to turn grey in front of my eyes. He started to shake. His reaction scared me. I began to wonder if he’d had a heart attack or something. He heard me out, attempted a smile, then got up and walked out into his backyard. I followed him and found him sitting in an old kitchen chair between his tomatoes and his gherkin patch, crouched over, elbows on his knees, head in his hands.

  When I asked he said he was all right. I didn’t know what else to do so I said I had to go home. He told me to hang on, said he’d be all right in a couple of minutes. I didn’t have a clue what was going on.

  ‘I didn’t know you was a writer,’ he said, which was a lie because I’d told him all about my essays. ‘At least, I didn’t know you was a good one.’

  Mack told me to sit tight while he went and poured himself a beer. The way he was behaving had me worried so I spied on him through his kitchen window. He filled his glass and drank it straight down. His shoulders slumped and he sighed like he was carrying the weight of the world, a burden of responsibility beyond anything I could imagine. I’m ashamed to say it but I c
ouldn’t help suddenly thinking there was another essay there, one with which I would wow everyone all over again. There was, but it wasn’t the one I expected. Oh, no.

  Mack poured himself another beer and turned to walk out to the yard with it. I bolted back to the beer crate I’d been sitting on. In those days beer came in wooden crates as opposed to the cardboard cartons you get nowadays. People usually only bought crates of beer when they were having a party or a celebration. Mack bought his beer in crates all the time, which was how he’d earned his reputation as a drinker and why there was always something for me to sit on.

  ‘Your story reminded me,’ said Mack heavily. ‘I’ve got a story, too. Never told a soul, no way. Spent years trying to put it out of my mind.’

  I didn’t say a word. I just sat there quietly, waiting for him to elaborate. I didn’t know at the time that this is a standard technique of reporters. It just seemed the right thing to do. Mack stared at his beer, stared at his hands, stared at his feet, clearly trying to make up his mind whether to tell me or not.

  ‘I got picked up by a submarine,’ he said eventually. ‘A German submarine. June 1940. Can you believe it, a U-boat, straight out off Medlands Beach?’

  It was as though he’d drawn a cork out of a bottle that had been sealed sixteen years earlier. It took a while for the story to realise it had finally been set free and the words came hesitantly, uncertainly. For me it was like slow torture. I knew Medlands Beach was on the southeast coast of Great Barrier Island. There was a map of Great Barrier Island on the wall of the school library and my pals and I knew it by heart. We’d studied it while teachers had tried to teach us about Latvia and Estonia, where the school’s newest arrivals — three astonishingly blond kids — had come from. And Mack had been picked up by a German submarine straight out from Medlands Beach. That was — and still is — the most enthralling, amazing, wonderful, stimulating, gob-smacking snippet of information anyone had given me. Imagine how I felt! My mate, Mack, had been picked up by a German submarine.