The Years Before My Death

by David McPhail

  I don’t remember my first year at Christchurch Boys’ High School with any fondness. I was still overweight, a condition I was reminded of daily by the boy-men of 4SW. One afternoon, with nothing better to do, they began calling me a whale and threw me in the swimming pool. But, as the year drew on, they tired of the jibes and by November I was something of a class mascot. Unhappily, it took me six months to rid myself of the nickname ‘Duds’.

  During the early months of my second year I was told I would be leaving woodwork; however, I would not be joining a language class. My French had been forgotten and anyway I would have agreed to any class that would get me away from timber. Although my maths remained primitive I was, for some arcane reason, to join a commercial practice class in preparation for a life in accountancy, as someone on the staff felt this was my natural calling. I steeled myself for a gloomy year and then I met the Pavitt brothers, Neil and Ian, and discovered the Art room. Not so much the room itself but the boys who spent most of their time there. In particular, Ken Ellis, Hugh Coley and Allan Godfrey, Geoff Pickles, Malcolm McNeill and later Lyndon Taylor.

  Here, at last, was a group of people with whom I could hold conversations that didn’t always involve girls or contraceptives. There were two other things that instantly appealed to me. We shared the same sense of humour and also an outlaw attitude to the rules of the school. We did not consider ourselves any better than our colleagues, only different, and we poured increasing scorn on the traditions that dictated their lives. With this came a rising disdain for certain masters and a habit of belittling those boys who seemed in awe of them. It wasn’t so much a gang as a collection of boys who agreed. It was in their company I first heard the poetry of Dylan Thomas and the wonder of Thelonious Monk. We began to discuss certain philosophies. I felt for the first time in nearly 18 months that I needed to go to school. And, yet, this was an education that had nothing to do with the classroom. The old teachers were repeating the consequences of the Reform Act of 1832 or pointing to the spleen of a frog, but in the Art room we were arguing about what TS Eliot really meant when he wrote about midnight shaking the memory, comparing it to a madman shaking a dead geranium.

  Unlike for many former pupils, Christchurch Boys’ High School did not leave an uplifting impression on me. My friends did that and we remain friends still over 40 years later. However, there were two masters who did exert an influence. The first because he revealed to me the marvels of Shakespeare and the second because he accidentally introduced me to my wife-to-be. ‘Chops’ Sinclair acquired his title because he possessed a striking lantern jaw. He was a short, severe-looking man who walked with precise military strides. The story was, Mr Sinclair had been an intelligence officer during the Second World War and retained a martial bearing. One afternoon he entered the English classroom with a pile of books and began distributing them to the boys. This, he said, was Shakespeare. Had any of us heard of Shakespeare? Only a couple of the swots put their hands up. Sinclair observed this was typical of the illiteracy that was rampant among teenaged boys. However, that was going to change.

  The play was Romeo and Juliet and we were going to read a selection of scenes that would introduce us to the most glorious words in the English language. He returned to his desk, spun around and eyed us ominously. ‘Judging by the standard of your writing and the level of your conversations, most of you will be unfamiliar with many of the words in this magnificent tragedy. If you come to a word you don’t understand, do not on any account attempt to pronounce it. The work is too precious for that kind of nonsense. Now we shall commence.’

  To my surprise, he selected Neil Pavitt to be Romeo. I had thought my slender connection with the Drama Club would have made me an excellent choice for the role. Various members of the Montague and Capulet family were chosen and still my name was not mentioned. Then, Chops turned to me. ‘And, you McPhail will play Juliet.’ This produced a gale of spluttering laughter. ‘Quiet,’ Sinclair shouted and there was silence. We all knew he kept two canes in his cupboard and if you were to be chastised he would ask which cane you would prefer.

  Chops explained the early scenes in the play and then instructed us to turn to Act II where, as he said, ‘the fated lovers meet’. Neil gave a convincing if rather slow reading of the ‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks’ speech. Then, it was time for Juliet to speak. Chops had given no indication of how the part should be delivered, so when I spoke my first words ‘Ay me’ in a squeaky falsetto he looked up sharply.

  Neil went on about me being a bright angel and I prepared myself for ‘O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?’ I belted into it with my falsetto on full power. Suddenly, there was a crash. ‘Chops’ had slammed his copy of the play onto his desk and was rearing out of his chair like an angry bull. ‘Stop,’ he shouted. ‘Stop, stop, stop, stop.’ He began moving around the desks, violently snatching back our copies. ‘I will not permit the superlative words of the world’s most inspired playwright to be mangled and mashed by hopeless school boys with the dramatic flair of hat-stands.’

  Chops stared at us grimly and announced, ‘I shall read it.’ And he did. For the rest of the afternoon. Many in the class stared sightlessly at the ceiling or filled in time with exaggerated yawns, but the more Sinclair read the more I became entranced by this lush and unfamiliar language. A week later I bought my own copy of Romeo and Juliet.

  He was short, stout and always immaculately dressed, but the most striking feature was his stare. Clifton Cook had the unique and alarming tendency to address you while appearing to look at a boy three desks away. There was nothing wrong with his eyesight. He would simply stare in your direction, shout, ‘That boy there stand up,’ and point at someone on the other side of the room. Maybe he had what was then called a wall eye.

  Clifton Cook was Christchurch Boys’ High School’s music master. He could be passionate and fiery, and became frequently frustrated dealing with mobs of toneless boys and yet somehow he created a standard of music that was envied by other schools. A gifted musician himself, Clifton Cook generated a sense of delight in musical achievement and, although we got weary of singing ‘The Fishermen of England’ all the time, we were generally proud of the sounds we made. Clifton Cook’s music classes had a reputation for being unpredictable.

  Once he threatened a boy with a caning. Unfortunately he chose the biggest and strongest teenager in the class — a boy who clearly disagreed with the proposition he should be hit four times on the backside. So, he grabbed the cane from Cook and snapped it in two. The boy’s name was RC Breach. You don’t need a degree in creative writing to work out his nickname. Breach’s defiance created an uneasy impasse that was only broken when Cook sensibly left the room. Moments later he returned and, with undisguised glee, ordered the boy to the headmaster’s office where a usable cane would be wielded by a stronger arm.

  On another occasion Clifton Cook was applying his musical muscle vigorously to the grand piano as he accompanied a song — probably the blasted ‘Fishermen of England’ again. He was so enthusiastic he didn’t notice we’d positioned the piano precariously close to the edge of a narrow, raised platform. We swung into the final chorus and, as planned, Clifton’s energy pushed the piano off the edge. It tipped over dramatically and crashed onto the floor in a clatter of discords. The pedals were smashed and one leg was broken. Everyone except Clifton Cook was trying to stifle their laughter. After a pause, he announced quietly, ‘I think we’ll end the lesson here. It will be a little difficult to continue given the condition of the piano.’

  Some months later he took me by surprise. We all knew he was also the organist and choirmaster at St James’s Anglican Church in Riccarton. He announced that the choir needed more male voices and called for volunteers. I kept my head down. I was unaware that Clifton Cook had a particular approach to volunteers. He appointed them. So, Neil Pavitt and I found ourselves reluctant baritones in the St James’s church choir. On the first afternoon of rehearsals, as I was cursing
our bad luck, I noticed the other members of the choir assembling. One of them was an extremely striking young girl and from the remarks Neil and I exchanged I knew immediately we both considered ourselves suitable suitors. As the rehearsal droned on and I kept watching her, I began to realise she was out of my league. She was beautiful and sophisticated and, when I saw her lighting a cigarette as she prepared to leave the church grounds, I convinced myself she was far too old for me. My adrenalin spiralled when, at the next rehearsal, she arrived in a school uniform. Her name was Anne McLeod and I fell thunderously in love. I never told Clifton Cook how grateful and indebted I was to him that he had volunteered me for the St James’s church choir.

  Also in the choir were Anne’s sister Christina and her mother Sally. It was later I learned Sally was an alcoholic and singing in the choir was a united effort by her daughters to keep her away from the sherry. Sally was intelligent and poised, although I came to see her showing less elegance as Anne and I grew closer. The fact that I was going out with a girl from Riccarton whose mother had a drinking problem threw my mother into fainting fits. She firmly demanded I cease seeing Anne. I refused. I could not understand my feelings for Anne. I was still a raw adolescent. But, I had seen Anne fighting to keep her mother sober and her family together and my admiration grew almost as quickly as my love. There was another factor. I genuinely liked Sally. I’d heard she had told Anne that I was a nice young man.

  She had replied, somewhat scornfully, ‘Yes, but he’s sooo young.’ Anne had recently ended an association with a divorced man. Later, when I was on television, Sally would ring to gently reprove me on my syntax or carefully explain why the vulgarity of a McPhail and Gadsby sketch could not be justified because the jokes were not very funny. I grew to love Sally and admired her greatly when she overcame her alcoholism. I don’t think Anne would have married me if Sally hadn’t called me ‘a nice young man’.

  The friendships formed in the Art room grew stronger, so strong that we foolishly decided to go on a camping trip together. I had never camped in my life. After much discussion but very little planning we decided our destination would be Goose Bay on the Kaikoura coast. We would travel north by train, disembark at the bay, pitch our tents somewhere, and gather shellfish of some kind.

  It was late in the afternoon when we gathered at the Christchurch railway station. We had assembled an alarming collection of camping paraphernalia. Pots, pans, primus stoves, packs, tents, sleeping bags, even a suitcase. It took some minutes to actually get into a carriage of what was accurately called ‘The Cabbage Train’. Our gear was strewn over four seats and the other passengers watched with distaste.

  After an uncomfortable couple of hours the train approached Goose Bay and we began loading up. Then to the accompaniment of clanging pots and muttered curses we thrashed our way to the door of the carriage. At that moment, the guard entered and asked what we were doing. One of us replied, as if stating the obvious, that we were preparing to get off at Goose Bay. There was a faint smile on his face when he replied, ‘Well, you’ll have to jump because the train doesn’t even slow down there.’ This led to some heated exchanges centring on each other’s inability to organise a ‘piss up in a brewery’ and the train roared on along the coast.

  At 11 pm we stumbled onto the Kaikoura railway station. It was deserted and the only door that wasn’t locked was the ladies’ toilet. We were cold, nearly 20 kilometres from our destination, and it appeared our first night in the open would be spent in a public lavatory. There was a suggestion that we should stay at the station, wait for the train to return and go straight back to Christchurch. Then someone flagged down The Press truck. This vehicle was returning after delivering newspapers to the north of the South Island. The driver agreed we could ride in the back and he would stop at Goose Bay.

  Finally, we stopped somewhere near Goose Bay, thanked the driver, unloaded the gear and searched around for a camp site. We found a stretch of scratchy bush on the hillside above the railway line and pitched our tents. When the sun rose my first task was to walk to a small dairy and pick up the bread we had ordered. Or, more accurately, the bread I had ordered. For some reason it had been decided that while we would get shellfish, eat canned food or the bacon and egg pie my mother insisted on baking, there was a dire need for fresh bread. I set off for the dairy. I had telephoned the owners a week before to order 10 loaves of bread. Back then, a loaf of bread consisted of four quarters. I thought I had asked for 10 quarters. In fact, I’d ordered 40 quarters. This may have accounted for the look of curious anticipation on the face of the owners when I announced I had come for the loaves. As they piled loaf after loaf on the counter, I started to protest. There was a mistake. I did not want so much bread. I would only take 10 quarters. The husband stopped stacking and gave me a cold look. Calmly he said this was what I’d ordered and now would I be so good as to pay for the bread and get it out of his shop. It was cluttering up the counter.

  It is hard to describe the looks on the faces of my friends when I returned. They always regarded me affectionately as being an unreliable noodle-head. Now, they thought I was unhinged. They began hurling loaves of bread at seagulls and didn’t seem interested in my explanations. So far, the camping adventure had not gone to plan. This was mainly because there was no plan. But, stoically, we settled into our camp in the confident reassurance we wouldn’t run out of toast in the morning.

  Malcolm McNeill was to join us later in the day. When he arrived it was obvious he had broken the first rule of the camp. There was a girl with him. It had been firmly decided there would be no girls at Goose Bay, due, in part, to the fact that none of us had a girlfriend.

  Malcolm decided to pitch his tent on the beach and we sat, staring enviously through the scrub, wondering what was going on inside. Allan went off searching for shellfish and I began to understand why I had never camped before. That evening, Allan prepared cockle chowder. By the following morning most of us had food-poisoning. Later that day we thumbed down a bus and headed for Christchurch. To pass the time we tried to frighten Hugh by all agreeing we could see a tsunami on the horizon. It was a long trip and nobody ever mentioned camping again.

  I should describe my contemporaries. Ken was tall with an expressive face and voice that might have been created in a thunderstorm. When Ken spoke he could make curtains flutter. He wore distinctive glasses and, after we left school, tight trousers called Chinos. For some reason he removed the cloth flap over the fly to reveal the zip underneath. I was never sure if this did him any good.

  Allan darted around a lot and would scoot off on his bicycle with two pigeons perched on the handlebars. He was surprisingly well-read for his age and determined that his growing library would not be savaged by forgetful friends. When I asked if I could borrow his copy of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, he agreed but then produced a small notebook. I had to write my name in the book and note the day on which I would return it. He was determined to become a doctor. His father, Noel Godfrey, was a short, slightly hunched doctor who had already determined his son would be another doctor.

  Hugh Coley was tall and slender with a daunting vocabulary and a stammer almost as ferocious as my own. Oddly, although we shared the same annoying affliction, we never talked about it. Hugh played the cornet enthusiastically and was already showing his flair for painting.

  Geoff Pickles held strong ideas about design and beauty and would surprise me by dismissing something I admired by quietly informing me it was rubbish. Malcolm McNeill was already a jazz singer. Even as a youth he possessed an elfin-like eccentricity that delighted us all.

  These were the boys and later the men who had a profound effect on my life. I admired them then. I love them now. We all intended to enter university. Some, like Allan, had clear ambitions. He would become a doctor while Geoff wanted to become an architect. Malcolm was already singing at a Christchurch restaurant, but Ken and I were uncertain about our futures. Hugh, being a talented musician and a skilled artist, had a
choice of opportunities.

  He was commissioned by the Board of Governors to paint a canvas depicting the traditional and revered place of Rugby in the school’s life. They were expecting a pictorial version of the creaky, old song ‘On the Ball’. It went like this: ‘On the ball, on the ball, on the ball, through scrum and three-quarters and all. While sticking together, we’ll keep on the leather and shout as we go “On the Ball”.’ Hugh created an extraordinarily vivid and startling abstraction. The colours of Rugby jerseys swirled around the painting in a flurry. At the centre of the canvas was a perfectly painted player’s lower leg wrapped in a sock of the school’s colours. But what stood out was the large and heavily studded football boot. We all thought it was brilliant. What the Board of Governors thought was clear because the painting was never hung and eventually disappeared.

  The same thing nearly happened to a magazine Hugh and I helped write during our last year at school. There was a tradition that senior boys could produce a light-hearted journal poking gentle fun at the school and its masters. It was called Te Kura and was named after a short street that led to the gates of the school. Hugh produced a series of madly accurate and wildly offensive caricatures of the teaching staff, showing them chained together in neck-braces and linked by shackles. As in: chained to a system and looking vaguely Neanderthal.

  I wrote an impertinent parody of a book one of our English masters, Gordon Slater, had stitched together — an improbable thriller A Gun in My Hand. The plot was implausible and the characters as thin as tracing paper. My satire was called A Gin in My Hand. It wasn’t very good but I managed to reproduce the thuggish language of a B-grade novel as written by a timid secondary school English teacher.

  Neither Hugh’s nor my contribution had been submitted to the supervising master. When the magazine was published our work and other offensive articles enraged the staff and the magazine was withdrawn. That might have ended the matter but I approached a small publishing company in Riccarton and after promising a school boy’s salary we printed 200 copies. There was nothing on the cover except the word ‘Censored’. Maybe that’s when it all started.