Tinkering

by John Clarke

  Ted said this was the first sense he had of being home again and he never forgot it. Whenever he came to Melbourne he always went to the Shrine of Remembrance. He didn’t go inside. He just wandered around the huge courtyard and stood by the eternal flame for a while and then he said, every time, ‘They do this very well, don’t they? They’re very good, the Aussies. If you’re ever in a war, try to make sure you’ve got the Aussies on at least one flank. They’re very tough and very smart. I saw a lot of them in the desert and they’re terrific in battle. They never give up. They never know when they’re beaten.’

  In 1944 in Senigallia, in Italy, when he’d been wounded and was working at headquarters for a while, Ted met Neva Morrison, who was from Gisborne and was with the New Zealand army secretarial corps, the WAACs. Anna and I are the children of Ted Clarke and Neva Morrison. When we were growing up they were living in Palmerston North, where Ted was the manager of the McKenzies store. He used to tell the story of employing people on staff and if they were honest and responsible people he’d hire them but he always asked them one question. ‘Who wrote Grey’s Elegy?’

  Once a bloke seemed confused and Ted said, ‘It’s not a trick question. An elegy is just a poem. It’s like being asked, ‘Who wrote Grey’s poem?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about poetry,’ said the bloke.

  ‘No, you don’t have to know anything about poetry’ said Ted. ‘Who wrote Grey’s poem? Look out the door there. You see that shop across the square. What is it?’

  ‘Hopwood’s Hardware.’

  ‘Right. Hopwood’s Hardware. Do you know who owns it?’

  ‘Mr Hopwood.’

  ‘Right. Mr Hopwood owns Hopwood’s Hardware. Who wrote Grey’s Elegy?’

  ‘Oh,’ said the bloke. ‘Mr Hopwood.’

  He once got sent some kerosene heaters from head office. He’d asked for one. They sent him ten. They were terrible and they smelt and no other branch could sell any. Ted sold all of them. He put one out the front of the shop, turned it on so it glowed and felt warm, and he put up a sign: ‘Limit One Per Customer.’ He was a particularly good retailer.

  Ted’s brother Stewart went away to the Pacific War and had also come back into McKenzies and during the 1950s he was the manager in Rotorua. They were both pretty smart boys and in 1960 they were both promoted to head office, Ted as the buying controller and Stewart as the sales controller. Ted was on the board of Manakau Knitting Mills and other companies in the McKenzies group, and he travelled overseas in 1962, 1964, 1965 and 1970, when hardly anybody did, including going very early into China, buying merchandise in Europe and Asia (I think his favourite country was Austria). Business was good, the company grew and eventually the parent company, Rangitira, sold the McKenzies stores; the McKenzie Trust, which is an investment company, became the biggest philanthropic organisation in New Zealand history. The Clarke twins helped build this great enterprise.

  Ted and Neva’s marriage was not a runaway success and Ted buried himself in his work and for some years refused to acknowledge that he and Neva were effectively living separate lives. After their divorce they both remarried and Ted retired and took on some consultancy work.

  When he had grandchildren, Ted gradually began to drop his guard. He managed this rather well and he was wise enough to recognise the benefits.

  ‘These feminists,’ he would say. ‘Good grief.’

  ‘I’m a feminist, Ted,’ one of his granddaughters would say.

  ‘No, no, no,’ he would clarify. ‘You’re a very beautiful young woman.’

  ‘Do you know what a feminist is, Ted?’ she would say.

  ‘You tell me,’ he would reply, and he would then sit back and enjoy a small tutorial from which he would emerge wiser and smiling with pride. ‘I just had the most interesting conversation. God those girls are intelligent. Absolutely wonderful.’

  As he drifted through his eighties and into his nineties, Ted was sustained by his great love of the family, by which he meant a slightly fantastical skein of connectedness and common interests and ethics running from his mother, whom he adored, through his children and grandchildren. He also loved his sport and music, which he took up in a big way in retirement and from which he got a great deal of pleasure. He was a perceptive student of the human race. He had an excellent memory, a great gift for words and talk, an interest in world affairs and ideas and a very dry sense of humour. When he had an operation a few years ago to remove a cancer from his temple I rang him and said, ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m good thanks.’

  ‘Was the operation a success?’

  ‘Yes. They seem very pleased.’

  ‘Are you any better looking?’

  ‘I don’t know about better looking but I caught sight of myself in the mirror this morning and I can certainly see what the fuss is all about.’

  Ted was a dignified, gifted and remarkable man. He started with nothing and succeeded in almost everything he did. He was interested in history, language and the society he lived in. A generation later and he’d have been at university and may have had some other choices. But Ted made the best he could of the situation he was in, as he saw it. He was unhorsed from time to time and there were difficulties. And he was troubled by these difficulties. He looked at these difficulties and in later years he tried to address them. If he didn’t deal with them or didn’t deal with them effectively, he would want to acknowledge his own failure. It was not because he did not want to. He was a loving, attentive and frequently hilarious grandfather and he said repeatedly in the last week of his life, ‘When I go into orbit, I’ll go into orbit with a smile on my face.’

  Edward Alexander Clarke (1914–2008)

  Ted’s Advice

  The following is the text of a lecture given to John by his father between 1948 and 2008.

  Neither a borrower nor a lender be. Polonius said that. Shakespeare. Excellent advice. You young people; I hope you never have to go through what we went through. With any luck you’ll be OK, you’ll get some opportunities and you’ll be able to grab them when they come along. We couldn’t. I didn’t even finish school. I had to leave. There was a worldwide depression. The stock market crashed. It was terrible. No one had ever seen anything like it. We had to leave school and get a job. My parents didn’t have any money. We didn’t starve but it was pretty tough. I was working at fifteen. I was lucky to get a job. You were lucky to get a job in those days. I had to leave school and get a job. I’d like to have gone on to university but it wasn’t an option. Economics. I wanted to do economics.

  Anyway, so there I was working. I was a manager at nineteen, different branches of the company, all over the country, then bigger branches, and then when I was twenty-five the war started and I got sent to the Middle East for four and half years. It wasn’t exactly my idea. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want anything to do with it. But you didn’t have much choice. Anyway there we were, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Tunisia and then up through Italy. Sand everywhere. Battles all the time. We were artillery. Unbelievable noise. You can’t hear yourself think. I’ll never forget some of those battles. You wondered how anyone could survive. The Germans didn’t seem to like us very much. They got particularly annoyed with me a couple of times. I don’t know why. I hadn’t done anything. They tried to kill me. Repeatedly. Repeated attempts to skittle Ted Clarke. It wasn’t much fun. I’d rather have been playing tennis.

  After the war we bought the house and had you monsters and I’ll tell you something. The worst thing you can do is get into debt. It’s a terrible thing to owe someone money. Never do it. They’re making money out of you the whole time and, if you can’t pay, they’ll take everything you’ve got. That’s how it works. If you don’t owe anyone anything, you can hop into the cot at night and sleep the sleep of the just. Don’t laugh. I’ve seen it happen. In the Depression. People had nothing. They lost everything. People were out on the road. Living out on the road. Literally. I had to leave school and go to
work. I was lucky to get a job.

  Look at all this credit these days. Lending people money to buy things they don’t need. They don’t need these things. Do you think people need a radio with buttons rather than knobs? What’s the matter with knobs? Perfectly good knobs. You don’t need buttons. Does Mrs Wheelbarrow need a new cake-mixer every five minutes? What’s the matter with the old one? Nothing. And why are they lending Mr and Mrs Wheelbarrow the money? Because they’re charging them interest. They’re making money. That’s what they’re doing. And what are they producing ? Absolutely Fanny Adams. ‘Usury’, that’s called in the Bible.

  We could do that. We could go out and borrow a lot of money and say, ‘Yes please. We’ll live beyond our means. I’m a senior executive in a big retail firm but yes, you’re right, we don’t have enough. A boat? Yes, that’d be fantastic thanks. Have you got a big one? A very new shiny one? It would need to be very bright and shiny because I’ve got plenty of friends I need to impress. Great. And has it got buttons on the radio? Good. Put it on the account, will you? We’ll pay you later and yes, charge me interest, by all means. I realise the value of the boat will halve as I drive it out of the showroom and I’ll use it three times a year but I’ve just recently arrived in the last shower and I have no brains at all and that’ll be fine.’

  And now we’ve got all these executive clowns paying themselves millions of dollars a year just for turning up. And you know what they’re doing, don’t you? John? Are you there? You know what they’re doing? They’re stealing money from their own shareholders. The company makes money and they’re taking it out before it gets to the shareholders by paying each other in bonuses and golden handshakes. That’s theft. And they’re borrowing money to run the company. Why the hell do the shareholders let them do it? I’ll tell you why. Because the shareholders are superannuation funds. The holders of the funds don’t even know what they own. And as long as they’re getting a return themselves they don’t care. Well, I’ll tell you what. It’ll all fall over. You can’t have companies borrowing these huge amounts and not have the bloke come round at some stage and say, ‘We’ll have the money now, thanks.’ The whole house of cards will go over. You watch.

  And I’ll tell you another thing. The world is being destroyed by greed. And these people who are all opposed to regulations. They don’t mind driving on the left-hand side of the road and they’ll be the first people to call the police if they see some bloke coming out of their window with a video-machine under his arm. And this environmental disaster we’ve got on our hands. What’s caused all this? Greed. Same thing. Capitalism. I was in business for over fifty years but I have to tell you this is wrong. They’ve destroyed their own system these people. I’m ninety-three now and I’ve never seen a bigger mess than this. This is a real mess. Somehow someone’s going to have to make some rules and some of these clowns might find they have to take their rattle and go home. Someone should give them a lift. I’d do it myself but I’m a bit busy talking to my son.

  Beginnings

  The New Zealand Sense of Humour

  Thinking about humour, I am reminded of an old army story. In 1945 the New Zealand Division fought a costly street-by-street battle against the retreating German army to take the city of Trieste in northern Italy. Once the city was secured, the Americans decided a victory parade was in order, to be headed by the elite US Marines. It was pointed out that the Americans had arrived after the battle had finished and that the fighting had been done by the New Zealanders. The Italian campaign was nevertheless being run by US Army command and the parade went ahead as planned. In front came the US Marines, with a large banner bearing their emblem and the words ‘US Marines. Second to None’. Behind them marched the New Zealanders carrying a large sheet upon which was written the word ‘None’. This squares my shoulders nicely. I’ll have what they’re having.

  The New Zealand sense of humour is said to be laconic, understated and self-deprecating. Even if true this is not very helpful, as the same claim is not unreasonably made for the humour of the Scots, the Irish, the English, the Australians, the Russians, the Canadians and the ancient Greeks among others. North American humour rests on a writing tradition also rich in irony, laconic delivery and litotes. Mark Twain, Robert Benchley, Thurber, Dorothy Parker and Ruth Draper were all people whisperers. Dave Barry and many other writers enrich this tradition today.

  In ancient Greece, irony was considered ‘the glory of the slaves’, suggesting that you can’t have irony from above. How the world can consist only of underdogs is an interesting question. It may be that an ironical perspective emerges from the underclass of each society or in each of us, and that these are not national characteristics at all.

  When my generation was growing up there was no television and no New Zealand radio comedy. This was not because New Zealanders weren’t funny. A lot of our parents had just returned from the war and if they had a gift for humour it wasn’t much use professionally; it was just part of their personality. They didn’t tell jokes, they just talked very well, often about local things. A man once described a friend from the hill country as having ears a bit further back than the rest of us. ‘It’s the wind,’ he said, ‘They get these very big westerlies. He had to go and get his wife from up near Opotiki the other day. She’d gone to hang the washing out. She still had the peg basket.’

  The Second World War was the biggest conflict in human history. Seventy million people were killed. An important aspect of dealing with the carnage, the tragedy and waste was humour. It helped articulate what the Allies were fighting against and it fortified resolution and hope. There was humour in concerts for the troops, in books and magazines and there was radio. Humour that is identifiable as coming from New Zealand emerged at this time.

  The most famous cartoonist in Britain was David Low. He reinvented the drawing style and purpose of the newspaper cartoon, removing crosshatching and class-conscious trivia and introducing bold lines and a moral stance on political issues. He spotted Hitler and the Nazis well before they came to power and portrayed them as liars, thugs and murderers. He opposed appeasement and was deadly and relentless in subjecting Hitler and Mussolini to continuous open mockery. His depiction of the Nazi Soviet Pact became one of the most celebrated cartoons of the century. After the war it was discovered that Hitler had prepared a list of the people he would kill when he conquered Britain. David Low, a Presbyterian socialist from Dunedin, was number five.

  The most successful wartime radio show was It’s That Man Again, broadcast by the BBC from 1939 to 1949 and featuring the comedian Tommy Handley. The show, known as ITMA, was the comedy equivalent of Vera Lynn and it sustained the civilian population through its dark night. It also changed the way radio comedy worked, establishing new forms to which the television sitcom owes a significant debt today. ITMA was written by Ted Kavanagh, from Auckland.

  During the campaign through Greece, Crete, the Middle East and up into Italy the New Zealand Division experienced a steady procession of successes and setbacks, not always of their own making. One danger would be averted, one cock-up survived, one victory won, when a fresh disaster would arrive and all hope would seem lost. In response to this pattern the division adopted intelligence officer Paddy Costello’s sardonic and perfectly balanced ‘Hooray fuck’.

  A major point of contact between my generation and these men and women was The Goon Show. It ran on radio through the 1950s but was essentially a Second World War show in which the madness witnessed by soldiers like Milligan and Secombe and the New Zealand Division was defused by logic disposal experts using surreal language and operating in a landscape of idiots, explosions and death. Only the British class structure held firm, just in case you didn’t get the point that the system was absurd. I didn’t know any of the history. I laughed at the jokes and the funny voices. Even when my father despaired of his children and had developed a rhetorical shaking of his head in disbelief while moaning, ‘What have we reared?’ we still laughed at the same bits in
The Goon Show. We looked at each other and we smiled and laughed. When nothing else worked, The Goon Show convinced us we were related.

  Television and the internet have not changed humour a great deal and we shouldn’t expect them to. In writing about humour, Freud quotes a joke from Sophocles, which dates from as recently as about 400BC. A king is touring his kingdom and as he passes through a town he sees in the crowd a young man who looks very like him. He arranges for the man to be brought to him privately and he asks him, ‘Was your mother ever employed at the Palace? Did she ever work at the Royal household at all?’

  ‘No, Your Majesty,’ replies the young man. ‘No, she never did.’ Then he adds, ‘But Dad did.’

  Paul Holmes

  Early in 1970, when we were about twenty or twenty-one, John Banas, Ginette McDonald, Paul Holmes and I generated a series of late night comic shows at Wellington’s Downstage Theatre, which then occupied the upstairs floor of a boating club. Our shows were presented on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights after the main play had finished. We built an audience quite quickly and we wrote and added new material about every four or six weeks to keep them coming back. Some of the sketches parodied film and television but were filled with references to New Zealand life and politics. The News in Briefs, for example, which featured Holmes in his underpants reading the news and which the audience loved, was full of standard sketch material but with scurrilous references to prominent locals.

  Holmes was a likeable and rather naughty boy from Hastings. I arrived to pick him up one night before the show. He was working as a waiter at a place in Oriental Bay and we were running a bit late and Holmes whipped a bloke’s coffee cup away from him in his haste to clean up and leave.