by Ian Wedde
We were driving up in separate cars with our office gear and minimal possessions. It was high summer, and on the southern motorway approaches to the city I saw the shimmer of heat rising from mirages of water on the asphalt, the approaching high-rise horizon, the gassy, hot blue of the sky with its motionless heaps of grey-white cloud, the trashy signage and brightly coloured bunting of the service areas and used-car lots – and market-garden signage advertising strawberries. All this rushed into the space in my mind and the adjacent breathless chest-space where memory resides, and I let out a yell of exhilaration; my eyes filled with tears. I felt as if I was coming home, or coming home again.
Three of our boys, Mischa, Conrad and Penn, were back living in the house on Mount Victoria, together with Mischa’s girlfriend Laura and her baby girl Bella. We expected some of them to follow us north once the house sold. Jack had settled in Melbourne but most of his stuff was still at the house in Wellington. Carlos, Sarah and their son Sebo were back there too, but in their own cosy house on Ohiro Road that leads down to the stormy, rocky Cook Strait coast I’d loved for thirty-odd years – the one that connects, through the tides I sailed in my cousin John’s yacht, with Dieffenbach Point and my mother’s ivory bracelet, my father’s Seamaster watch.
My exhilaration on the southern motorway approaches to Auckland City wasn’t at the expense of the kids or a sense of home grounded in the sight of our children and their girlfriends and cousins sitting down together to eat at the big table Carlos and I built in our house on Mount Victoria. Rather, whatever sadness I’d been transporting north was swept aside by a memory of arriving in Auckland as a fifteen-year-old, in 1961, after crossing the space between the dark, bitterly cold drive to London from Odcombe Lodge, and the hot, mown-grass-scented sunshine we drove through from Whenuapai airport to our new home in Rarangi Road, St Heliers, Auckland, on the wide Hauraki Gulf.
Linda and Chick met us at the airport; they were both tanned and wearing sunglasses. Chick had shorts on, Linda a light cotton sunfrock. We hadn’t seen them for over two years. The immigration officials’ uniforms had short sleeves, and I remember a kind of incredulous excitement building from the moment I watched one of those bronzed, freckled arms reaching over to stamp my passport. Where was this? Where was I?
The guy gave Dave and me a droll look – we were still dressed in versions of our best-behaviour English clothes. A Masport mower was revving around the grassy area by the car park; as well as the scent of hot grass-clippings and aviation fuel the place seemed to smell of space and light.
We drove past market gardens and roadside fruit and vegetable stalls with honesty boxes. At one of them Chick pulled over, and Linda came back to the car with punnets of fresh strawberries. The fruit was warm from being out in the sun; we ate our way through a couple of punnets while driving into the city. We flicked the stems out the car window into warm, humid wind.
Soon, we were driving past second-hand car lots festooned with strings of brightly coloured plastic bunting. The footpaths outside some of them were shining with hose-water where the cars had been washed. This is what I remember most vividly after the strawberries – a bright glamour I associated with California, as different from the dark drive to London as you could get. Soon, we’d be hastily sinking our pale bodies out of sight in the tepid water of Ladies Bay below the headland at St Heliers; Rangitoto floated its exotic volcano shape on the turquoise horizon; there were immense piles of sodden cloud motionless in the glaring sky, and when rain fell out of them the asphalt steamed and dried in minutes.
Before long, we were tanned like the others at the beach, and we lay about on towels or walked to the dairy on the corner to get ice creams. We hopped back to 47 Rarangi Road in bare feet along red scoria footpaths that were so hot we had to jump sideways on to the springy Buffalo grass of berms that people mowed with Masports at the weekend. It was a paradise that couldn’t be home because it was so fresh and unfamiliar, but that was going to be home because our mother and father were there; because they’d asked us to be there, to be here, with them.
When I talk to Dave about this, he remembers a similar feeling of exhilaration. In his case it’s not the punnets of warm strawberries or the bright second-hand car-yard bunting he remembers as representing this paradise that was going to be home, but the awnings and canopies that were supported on posts along the shopping strips we drove through towards St Heliers. My paradise of strawberries and coloured plastic bunting was Californian; Dave’s reminded him of the Wild West. Both of us had come home to a place that was more like a movie than … what?
I don’t remember when the letter came to England from our parents telling us they’d decided to return to New Zealand, and I can’t, now, find it. Sometime around my first year at university in Auckland in 1965 I burned a whole lot of stuff associated with the years between leaving England and moving on with my own life after finishing school in Auckland. I remember that their letter said they were going to live in Auckland, and they wanted to know if we’d like to leave school in Bruton and come back to New Zealand to join them.
What I remember as the choice we were being offered was also their admission that they couldn’t take our compliance or wish to be with them for granted; they’d forfeited both. The possibility that they may secretly have hoped we’d prefer to stay put in England did occur to me during the sour years that ensued. Now I know that wasn’t the case; I recognise a kind of honesty in their invitation. We’d earned the right to say no to them. But of course we didn’t.
I was happy at the school in Bruton, perhaps happier than I’d ever been except as a small child, and certainly happier than I would be for some years subsequently. I was at home there in ways I couldn’t be during the holidays at Reg and Peggy’s. I felt safe at Bruton: in the homeliness of its knockabout rooms and in its tolerant, congenial culture. I mostly liked the schoolwork and felt valued for what I was good at, especially writing and languages. My furtive imaginative life was coaxed from its secret places. What I brought out was rewarded. Both Dave and I had fun with our friends at school. I even lost my virginity with a girl from a neighbouring all-girls school, behind a white-flowering hedge full of bees. She had a slightly French-sounding name and no breasts that I could find; she made me sniff the fingers she’d pressed against her cunt. The deflowering had nothing to do with my initiative, but it gave me boasting capital with which to approach the rural dandies and their rich social lives – though not enough to make me a desirable house-guest during the holidays when, wearing glassy leather shoes, I might have learned to dance, ride horses, crack jokes and fuck. In the holidays, for a short time, Dave and I paraded in solemn silence around Montacute Park and the surrounding lanes with a couple of girls we’d met from a village near Odcombe Lodge. We had nothing to say, and for the girls the appeal of our tongue-tied, hand-holding strolls quickly wore off; they were soon seen with locals who wore their hair swept back Elvis-style, and whose cultivated sneers froze us in our tracks.
Why did we say yes to our parents’ invitation to join them in Auckland? Now, my answer has to be, why wouldn’t we? Yet I do remember hesitating. Linda and Chick had also written to the headmaster, Davy. They must have put the possibility of us leaving in contingent terms, because he asked if we wanted to go. I remember him suggesting there would be opportunities for us if we stayed. For example, we might be able to go to a good university in England.
I don’t remember the discussion Dave and I had, if any. Perhaps the decision made itself; perhaps the childless unhappiness in Reg and Peggy’s house made it; perhaps we both, deep down, hoped for the kind of home we saw our school friends had.
I remember Davy’s air of resignation when we, or I, said we wanted to go to New Zealand. He made arrangements for us to sit three O-level exams early, in French, German and English. Perhaps, a little patronisingly, he saw these as the least he could do to help us make our way in backwater New Zealand. More likely, given what I remember of him and his oblique strategies for
generosity, he just wanted to do the most he could for us. I have a copy of Dylan Thomas’s collected poems which I’m sure he gave me as a goodbye present, but the book was published by J.M. Dent & Sons in 1962, so he can’t have, unless he had an advance review copy. In any case, I want the book to have been his farewell present. Even if I bought it myself after getting to Auckland, I’d have done so because of him. And so I left what had become a home, and the father-figure in it, and went home to what, at first, looked like an exciting film set, and a father I no longer felt much connection to.
While working through these memories I had a bizarre dream. I was dressed in clothes that were inappropriately natty – a pale linen jacket, a pair of stylish Italian loafers – as if I was anxiously expecting someone I needed to make a good impression on. The jacket and shoes were splattered with blobs of plaster and paint that came from work I was doing to fix up what resembled a kind of boarding house, old and somewhat decrepit – it could have been our house on Mount Victoria, with a full complement of family in it and the usual list of things to fix at the weekend. In my dream there was only one of my children in the house, a little blond boy who looked like Jack, or like my grandson Sebo, but a large crowd of other people was moving about in the dim rooms.
Then my mother and father came in. It was an anxious moment. My father at once began to remonstrate with me about the state of the place – he got peeved about an old sofa (in real life there was one, with stuffing coming out of it here and there, on the back veranda of the Mount Victoria house). He began to lecture me about the proper way to finish off gib-plastering and how to do a decent job of stripping and painting doors. I was annoyed – couldn’t he see that I’d been ruining my special clothes in the course of doing the renovations? And why was he interfering? This wasn’t his home, it was ours. I told him to mind his own business and then, as if to make a point, picked up the small child and began to make a fuss of him. ‘See?’ I seemed to be saying. ‘This is how it’s done.’
It feels disloyal to admit that I may have preferred Headmaster Davy to my own father; may have wished that my father was more like him; may have wanted Davy to be my father, not Chick. It’s even harder to admit that I may not have, or may no longer have, loved my father. For a time I didn’t really know who he was, and he didn’t really have a clue about me. He had ambitions for me that were irrelevant, given what interested me – and about which he knew very little. He thought I should be a lawyer because I was argumentative; he thought I should be a diplomat because I’d been lucky enough to get a good start in languages; he considered the English accents Dave and I had come back with to be career assets when in fact they were social stigma.
He didn’t consider writing to be anything more than a hobby, and when I began to look for ways to say it was central to my life, he’d respond with advice about making writing pay – I could send stories to Argosy, for example, a magazine he subscribed to, which published short fiction. It was clear that he believed the investment he’d made in our education deserved to pay out a substantial career dividend. Now, I can see how his ambitions for us grew from his own early disappointments; but, back then, as the film-set bliss of our first weeks at home in St Heliers began to generate its own routines, I wanted him to be more like Davy and help me to feel good about what had become central to my happiness.
I’d begun to build a belief system around the idea that happiness was the result of being at home in the world, which could happen only when the imagination acted as an open channel between inner and outer realities. But I couldn’t get Chick to buy into the idea that it was more important to make happiness than money through writing, that having an imaginative life was more important than having a career.
Many years later, this changed; his pride in what I did was unconditional if slightly baffled, and I even discovered his own desire to ‘write a book’ about his life. Later still, after he died, I sat up night after night clicking my way through the thousands of 35mm colour slides that had been his own rich and complex imaginative channel between the places he and ‘Lindy’ passed through or lived in and his own inner life. In the months before he died I even saw a kind of bewilderment come over him, as though the limited circumstances of his life had begun to close those imaginative channels down; he became introspective and moody in ways that were at odds with the energetic, resourceful man I’d re-encountered at intervals throughout my life.
What I did like about him after we came back to live in the house at 47 Rarangi Road, and what began to restore the channels through which love could circulate again, was the Chick who began to emerge during the brief time we were all back together. I think that in some ways this was the father who’d been left behind in Blenheim when we went to Chandraghona. Now, he had a job as the chief accountant at Fisher & Paykel in Panmure. He’d come home and have a beer down on the back lawn he mowed with zeal and enjoyment at the weekends. He established a vegetable garden with a compost bin, and under the house he built a workshop with a heavy-duty bench-vise, with saws and other tools hanging on nails against the wall, and screw-cap jars of recycled nails, nuts and bolts fixed to the undersides of shelving above the bench. The old, crusted gluepot from my childhood was there, and so were various timber oils and varnishes whose aromas I remembered. They must have been stored somewhere while my parents were away all those years. I took over much of this stock when Chick died twenty years later. Some of the tools had been his father’s, including a set of sash cramps used to tighten tongue-and-groove timbers or pull together widely spaced joinery. His grandson Carlos and I made the tongue-and-groove matai table with the cramps – as the boards drew together and the smell of linseed oil rose from them, I felt my father’s workshop at 32 Francis Street, Blenheim, being gripped into a present forty years later.
Chick began to accumulate a stash of timber among the cobwebby foundations of the house, in dim spaces that extended beyond the workshop, where the piled-up evidence of his and Linda’s travelling years were stacked: suitcases, tin trunks and tea-chests in which they’d shipped home their accumulated household stuff and a trove of exotic furnishings, rugs and ornaments. The house above was filled with these trophies.
My father seemed to be relaxed and at ease in these surroundings. Number 47 was on a knoll at the corner of Rarangi Road and Glover Road. It was a modest, single-storey, two-bedroom weatherboard villa with a drive-in garage and a laundry underneath. Out the back was a grassy section with citrus trees. The large front picture-window faced north-west from a lounge and dining area; off this room was a small kitchen that looked out over the back garden. On summer afternoons the front room had to be shaded by venetian blinds. Linda and Chick had a front bedroom that looked out across the neighbouring houses below ours, but not as far as the sea.
The room Dave and I carried our suitcases into that summer day in 1962 was at the back, along a short corridor with the bathroom and a lavatory opening off it. There was a door to the outside at the end of the corridor. After dropping my suitcase on one of the beds in our room, I stuck my head out this door and encountered an inquisitive neighbour looking at me through a hedge.
‘Gidday,’ he said. ‘Welcome home.’
Lunch with Dave
But the most dramatic aspect of this fabulous homecoming was that we almost immediately left again. We went to boarding school at King’s College out at Otahuhu, a place I loathed. In the end, my hostility paid off – I got booted out after three years on grounds of ‘incompatibility’. We went ‘home’ for the holidays at first, as we’d sometimes wished we could have during our time in England. But then the mother and father who’d suggested we might like to come back to New Zealand and live with them packed up the home at St Heliers, rented it out to a young family called Brown, and returned to their wandering life, first of all with Chick’s posting to a UNDP job in Seoul, South Korea, and thence, with spells in Geneva between times, to Egypt, Jordan and Zambia.
Dave and I saw them for a few weeks in Seoul over Chris
tmas and New Year 1963–64, after we’d been at boarding school in Auckland for two years; again when they returned to New Zealand on a brief sabbatical during my first year at university in 1965; and (for me) again when I went to Jordan in 1969–70.
An unsettling dissonance plays around these stretched-out dates, and around the sequence of events that led up to our coming back to New Zealand.
Soon after moving up to Auckland with Donna, and remembering the bliss of Dave’s and my arrival fifty years earlier, I walked the short distance from our home in Ponsonby to a small Herne Bay beach. I was feeling very happy. I swam out through the tepid water far enough to be able to look around at the shoreline, the harbour bridge, the Chelsea Sugar Refinery, the diminishing, hazy view down the Gulf. I began to remember a lot about those first months when we came back to New Zealand from England at the beginning of 1962. And then, in the midst of this happiness, I experienced a sense of dismay.
It’s one thing to write about memories which are, after all, only objects of a kind. Sometimes, as in the case of the grass catcher or my mother’s ivory bracelet, memories are barely separable from the things that embody them, or that we hold while speaking or writing these memories, as if the talismanic object we’re turning over from hand to hand is itself speaking – as if we are the tranced mediums through which the magic object speaks from a past we have, ourselves, forgotten. But it’s a more difficult thing to write about memory itself, that untrustworthy engine of consciousness.
The vivid memories I do have fill me with confidence in memory. They persuade me that my consciousness is doing a good enough job, even if it’s getting some facts wrong, rewriting the narratives, relocating or layering events. The memories I don’t have, for example the ones that my brother Dave does, give me another kind of confidence, since what I don’t remember belongs with what Keats, in his grandly off-hand letter, called Negative Capability – the licence to see an imaginative opportunity in whatever you can’t be sure of. Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
