At the End of Darwin Road

by Fiona Kidman

  Jessie sat in an olive and mustard-coloured Road Services bus as it trundled through rolling plains, then the wasteland of desert space in the centre of the land, the starry tussock glinting under an erratic sun, the mountains leaning towards her from the west … As the bus pushed north she saw a line of army tanks ploughing through the grass, firing practice rounds of shells that made puffs of dark smoke, and then the bus descended towards the lake country, the dark iris of Lake Taupo trembling on the horizon, and on past it, until they reached their destination.

  It was through the Shambles, back in Rotorua, that I met a Turkish woman, Nina (actually Niyaz) Martin, now Niyaz Martin Wilson, who lived on the far side of Lynmore. We hadn’t known of each other’s existence up until then. Niyaz was the most strikingly beautiful woman I had ever met, tall, with tawny skin, huge kohl-rimmed eyes, and an irrepressible laugh that could easily turn to tears. When she was seventeen, she had married an older Englishman and the following year left Turkey against her family’s wishes. She and her husband had moved restlessly to live in various parts of the world until he finally decided they would settle in New Zealand. Their son was close to Giles in age, and the two little boys got on well. Niyaz was not a Plunket mother; instead she was involved in setting up Playcentre in the district and became director of training for the Rotorua Playcentre Association.

  There was an absolute electricity in the air when she walked into a room. We quickly became confidantes; I usually went over to her house, filled with colourful rugs and large gleaming copper kettles and pans, while she made Turkish coffee, then told my fortune in the cups. Both of us were chafing against life in the suburbs. Francis Batten came to take a mime workshop at the Shambles. He spent the entire day showing us how a man (but it could as easily have been a woman) tries to get out of a box in which he is trapped. I was entranced as I watched Batten’s hands move backwards and forwards across the walls and ceilings of the invisible box, while we tried to tell him where he would find the exit. With him, we all believed in the box. And then, I don’t remember how, the box vanished. It simply wasn’t there any more. What fascinated me was that, even with the walls gone, his character still searched for them. At some point, he realised that they were not there, and began a little hip-hopping dance, reaching out for the freedom of space.

  I stayed with the Brooke-Whites again in Wellington, this time on assignment for the Daily Post, which had asked me to cover the conference of the South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO). Set up in the 1950s, it was an international organisation, in which the United States played a key role, ostensibly for the collective defence of the area, but primarily intended to subdue communist activity. The US was seeking, but ultimately failed, to make the Vietnam War into a SEATO problem. All the same, New Zealand had sent more than 3000 troops to Vietnam, and in the cities there were protest movements. That much I did know, but apart from this, I barely understood what SEATO represented, let alone the dynamics of the war. I thought I was against it, but that was not very helpful. I wouldn’t have dreamed of saying that to my neighbours or family beyond Ian. War was war, and you were staunch in support of our troops.

  In Wellington, I was armed with a press badge, but woefully unfitted for my journalistic task. I didn’t know where to begin. On the opening night, I went to a party bristling with gold braid and military stars, held at the White Heron Lodge, drank my first martini and persuaded one of the press officers to arrange an interview with the wife of Admiral Ulysses S. Grant. As far as the real business went, that was a men’s world, not a job for a ‘press girl’ in an orange mini-dress with Indian braid on the sleeves. The next day I made my way along Lambton Quay towards Parliament, hoping that, with my magic press badge, I could fight my way into a meeting or, at the very least, a press conference. What I didn’t know was that the Peace, Power and Politics in Asia movement was holding its conference at the same time, with a line-up of leading international speakers. (A paper by Jean Paul Sartre was presented, although Sartre didn’t attend in person.) All of a sudden I was in the middle of a crowd of placard bearers and a sea of slogans saying, ‘Stop Your Bloody War’, ‘No Aid for the US’ and the like. People wore headbands and scruffy jeans; I had on a twinset that day. This tide of people swept me along, and I found myself shouting, ‘We don’t want your bloody war.’ Somewhere near the cenotaph, I pulled myself together. What on earth was I thinking about? Shaken, I made my way to Parliament, pretending I hadn’t seen the protesters. I got into Parliament, but nowhere near the action. It was becoming clear that I might have to content myself with the admiral’s wife.

  I headed back out to the White Heron near the airport, where the generals and their entourages were staying. It was the morning of 1 April 1968. I was ushered into the presence of a small woman with iron grey hair. Nancy Grant seemed pleased to have someone pay her attention. I asked all the usual patsy questions about how she spent her days while her husband was off at war and closed my notebook.

  On my way out, I stopped to thank the press officer who had arranged the interview. Admiral Grant and a number of military personnel were clustered at the front of the room. A briefing was taking place and, from the corner where I stood, I heard that President Lyndon Johnson had announced he would not be seeking re-election to the American presidency, and also that he had ordered a halt to bombing over a major part of North Vietnam. Johnson, of course, was keeping the wheels of the war machine oiled. I can’t remember the exact words, but they indicated that public pressure had played a role in his decision. Loud exclamations of anger erupted around the room, and quickly turned to turmoil and shouting. Grant’s face was very red, several of the men appeared to collapse inwards on themselves and one began to weep. You could see their dismay as the news that the war might be about to disintegrate began to penetrate. A man looked over and saw me. ‘Get that woman out of here,’ he shouted.

  Later that afternoon, standing in the central city, I found myself overwhelmed by a desperate need to get home. I had no idea what I was doing there. I felt foolish and ignorant. I saw that I had no real idea of how the world worked, that difference was not merely personal, but part of some wider global movement. Most of all, I wanted to be with my family. The whole trip had been a professional fiasco and, as I made my way home on the first bus I could get out of town, I resolved not to accept work that took me away like this again. I was guilty that I left the children so often. Joanna had had pneumonia in the spring and Giles had broken his leg at kindergarten a few months earlier. I carried him around on my hip for weeks with his leg trailing in a thigh to foot cast. Today, my life would seem staid, but back then troubles like this could be seen as neglect. I loved the children beyond words; my family was a major reason for my own existence. And yet I was in the midst of a turmoil that was more than I could handle.

  Back home, I went through another brief bout of depression. I took long walks at night, as I had when I was a girl, tramping the Lynmore streets after Ian returned from night school classes. Sometimes, I would pick the children up in their pyjamas and walk along the road in the dark with one on each hip, waiting for him.

  And I was not the only person finding life difficult. Somehow, in the midst of my own crises, I had not properly noticed the toll Ian’s job was taking on him. He had now spent some years working for Ted Hamill, the principal who had replaced Neville Thornton. Hamill was, quite simply, a sadist. If there had been a violent culture in the school when I worked there, it was nothing compared with what followed. Those staff who didn’t obey Hamill’s edicts became the targets of his merciless tongue. The teachers were free of him for a year when he was contracted to an outside job in education, and for a while Ian saw the possibilities of life under a less brutal regime. On his return, Hamill was worse than ever, and Ian, who taught without caning unless ordered to, fell foul of him. He had had enough, and told me he was ready to leave Rotorua.

  Nearly a year passed before a job came up that was worth the move, and it turned out to be a v
ery full year. My spirits were sustained by Niyaz’s exuberant companionship. When I was down she persuaded me that the answer wasn’t to act more ‘normally’, it was to be myself. We decided that we really didn’t want to conform and set out to show the world. We bought gorgeous hats and wore them to town in the mornings to have coffee. I had one, made of swirling peacock-coloured fabric, with a high crown and a brim that turned up at the front, which made heads turn. Gone were the staid morning coffee sessions in the suburbs. I had also met the radio playwright Julian Dickon, an English writer, living in Atiamuri. We met through another seminar at the Shambles, after a recommendation from University Extension to use someone close at hand. He was the most prolific radio playwright of the time, and his plays had a smart polish to them that much local broadcast drama lacked. I liked the universality of his themes; he had served in the Korean War, spent several years as a seaman and came from a strong literary background in England. He knew a lot about the world.

  Julian turned out to be a generous friend, and put me in touch with Bill Austin, the head of radio drama in the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation. As it turned out, Bill had already heard about me from Bruce Mason, and was very receptive to the idea of a meeting. I sent him a radio play called Martha, inspired by the Maori woman in the maternity hospital who was being pressured by welfare to give up her new baby. I got a contract for it the next week.

  Shortly after I signed, a letter arrived from Bill containing an invitation to see him in Wellington, so that I could learn more about the art of radio drama; the invitation was accompanied by an open return air ticket. I had been burnt by my last expedition to Wellington, but this seemed more promising. Radio drama would be more lucrative work than the odd bits of journalism I was doing. Martha hadn’t taken me long to write, and had earned me more than six months’ income from these jobs. I was ready for something new. My twenty-eighth birthday had passed: the deadline I had set myself to become a published novelist had been and gone. I had finished a draft of Club Litany and sent it away to Whitcombe & Tombs, where it had been assessed and returned with a long list of suggestions, although not a downright refusal. The suggestions forced me to look at the material more closely. I decided that this was not really the book I wanted to publish after all. Radio drama seemed a promising alternative for the time being.

  Besides, although man had landed on the moon, I hadn’t yet been on a plane and I thought it was time I did. Rotorua dropped away beneath me, and the next challenge beckoned. The following day, I met Bill and his script editor, Arthur Jones. Bill had a big leonine head, a shock of blond wavy hair and piercing blue eyes. He was gorgeous to look at but appeared almost paralysed by shyness. I soon learned that he was an alcoholic, who binge drank till he was legless, then stayed sober until the next bout. In between times, he produced and acted with brilliance. But when I met him, he had so little to say I wondered why he had sent for me.

  Very soon I found myself in the office of his offsider, Arthur Jones, and it was here that the trip began to take on meaning. Behind a perpetual pall of smoke, Arthur’s face was the colour of grey suede. He had been a script editor for the BBC, and when he wasn’t working in radio he wrote detective novels under a pseudonym. We talked for hours and then he took me along The Terrace to the broadcasting studios so I could see a drama in production. He was, he said, very impressed with my ear for dialogue and hoped we would work together in the future. I think dialogue was one of the strengths I brought to radio dramas. It was not until I wrote radio plays that I began to realise that I had a quick instinctive ear for the way people spoke. I was a good listener, thanks to years of childhood eavesdropping — on telephone lines, and in the way only children often do in the company of adults. I have always been interested, too, in what people are not saying — the sub-text, as they say in television.

  Arthur and I became great friends almost straight away. When I got home, I wrote another play, and that was accepted too. Life rolled on at a steady pace, some of it, like Woodstock, via the television screen, but mostly, in real life. Tom and Doll came to stay, but then they often did. I liked my father-in-law, despite his odd insistence that his meat always shad to be on the right side of the vegetables on his plate, but there was usually friction when Doll was around. Never an easy woman, she had had no children besides Ian, and her tongue was sharp when it came to telling me how to raise mine. When she and Tom came to stay, Doll always made a secret of how long they would be with us. It was like a game to her, having us ask questions designed to elicit a date from her. ‘When you throw us out,’ was her standard, challenging reply.

  Then Clyde contacted us and asked us if we could provide a bed for a friend of his called Carole and her son, while the little boy underwent tests for autism in Rotorua. Carole hijacked her way into our lives. A latter-day blonde bombshell, she was born the night Carole Lombard was killed in an air crash over the Atlantic, so her mother named her after the silvery-haired film star. Lombard had been one of Hollywood’s most popular blondes, rather like Jean Harlow, only more freewheeling, playing roles from sensitive drama to screwball comedy. Our Carole liked to live her role as a zany blonde to the full, with a stack of energy to burn. She did ‘’Ello Sailor’ routines in our living room and made us laugh. In spite of that, I suspected she wasn’t very happy, and that it went beyond the difficulties her third and youngest son was experiencing. There was the hint of a marriage that wasn’t standing up well to the strain of the situation.

  Then Kit Spencer, by then Kit Wright, got in touch with me, and asked me to run Rotorua Book Week, as part of a national library promotion, and I did that too. Since I had last worked for her, Kit had married the town clerk, Len Wright, with whom she had had a long and tempestuous affair. When marriage was finally possible for them, they enjoyed a brief time together before Len was killed in a car crash. She was alone again, and devastated. The Book Week was supposed to have been her job, but she couldn’t face it.

  The national organisers were touring some overseas writers and the one designated for Rotorua was the Australian Max Harris, a key player in the infamous Ern Malley affair, considered one of the greatest literary hoaxes of all time and fictionalised in Peter Carey’s novel, My Life as a Fake. Max, considered a young poetic genius at nineteen, was a founder of the Angry Penguins literary periodical in the 1940s. He thought of himself as an anarchist and published collections that ran contrary to the established poetry traditions of the time. Using the pseudonym ‘Ern Malley’, two conservative poets penned some work that was intended to send up the modernist principles espoused by Harris and his various friends, including the artist Sidney Nolan, to see if Harris would recognise them as a spoof. Max Harris took the bait and the poems were published to acclaim before the hoax was unveiled. Harris was not only reviled, but landed in court and was convicted for publishing obscenity. Yet the Ern Malley poems stood the test of time, Harris defending them as inadvertent works of art, a view that has been widely upheld since then.

  Although Max’s own poetry had declined in output after the affair, he had become a respected columnist and editor by the time of our meeting in Rotorua, nearly a quarter of a century later. Again, I made an unexpected friend. Max was an advocate of women’s rights, declaring himself a feminist, and also believed in people being ‘self-made’, the way he was. We spent several days in each other’s company, his wild mood swings and gaiety perhaps fuelled by the freedom to be himself in New Zealand, without the eye of the Australian establishment upon him. We finished up a spectacularly successful week with a party at our house. All manner of people turned up, including some television folk from down south. Max finished the night sitting in the branches of our nectarine tree throwing green fruit at us and shouting poetry at the top of his voice.

  The following week, Ian got a call from Derek Wood, principal of Naenae College in the Hutt Valley, to offer him a job as head of the school’s newly established Special Services Department. We were on our way, out of Rotorua.

>   Almost. In what were to have been our last weeks in the town, I threw caution to the winds and wrote a long piece called ‘I, the Suburban Housewife’ for Eve magazine, billed as a periodical for ‘thinking women’, which had carried work of mine for a year or so. My essay was intended as an exposé of women’s existence in the suburbs, and drew heavily on the lives of those around me. When I submitted it, I reasoned I would be gone by the time it was published.

  But I wasn’t. Ian was invited by the Taiwanese government to set up a special education programme based at the East-West Center, University of Hawaii. So we decided to put off the move until his return. I was left to face the music of publishing a piece that caused a small scandal of its own.

  Over the summer, I went to work for Kit at the library again. My parents, now both retired, helped with the children. It was a strange time, living on my own with the children, and now considered something of a scarlet woman, in thought if not in fact. I was perceived as frank to the point of raciness, and caused considerable interest at work. Kit joked that she had never had so many people in the library at one time. It was a good place to take refuge from a none too happy neighbourhood, as well as a chance to say goodbye to some of the library borrowers I had known for so long. There were some I would miss very much. One man who liked talking about books and art with me said wistfully that he would never get past the ‘green apples and a jug’ stage, but I had the chance to do something more. But on the whole, I was glad to be leaving Rotorua, and Lynmore. I think the suburb was pleased to be seeing the back of me too.

  Ian arrived back from Hawaii, bearing leis made from fresh orchids. I wore them garlanded around me at a party friends gave for us that night, and a lot of people turned up to see us off. In the morning, we loaded the Mini with the children, our bulldog and the last of our possessions, and headed south.