by Fiona Kidman
The publisher he found me just a week or two later was Brian Wilder at Harper & Row in Sydney. Brian was a powerful man on the Australian publishing scene, an English immigrant who, nonetheless, looked a lot like Rolf Harris, with a similar gung-ho jovial approach to life. I liked him and his wife Helen straight away when they came over to visit for Brian to eye up his new talent. He was a smart businessman with a great marketing sense. It would be nearly two years and a good bit of rewriting before the novel appeared in 1979.
Chapter 19
In all, I spent six years working in radio broadcasting. That was never my intention, but some things happened between my finishing A Breed of Women and its publication that changed everything.
The health of both my parents continued to spiral downwards. On a trip north I called to see the Morrinsville relatives. Robert, not well himself, took me aside and had a word. He was worried about my mother and felt he should do something for her. It weighed on his conscience, he said, that he might die without having offered help. I pointed out that the worth of the tiny Hannah’s Bay house up north was very different from what it would cost to buy a house in Wellington. He assured me that, if I could get my parents to Wellington, he would provide financial help. Then Jean wanted to chip in too. She had looked after my grandmother without complaint, seeing herself as chosen for the task. In my case, as there was nobody else, she took it for granted that I would take this role upon myself too.
Shortly afterwards, I found a house in the next street down from us in Hataitai. The rooms were large and well proportioned, and sunshine flooded the dining room, while the back door opened onto a pleasant sheltered courtyard. I could see its roof from the bay window at the front of our house. There was a lot of work needed to tidy it up but it was sound and Ian and I agreed we would do as much as we could ourselves. One way and another, however, there was still a big financial shortfall. Nevertheless, with Ian’s agreement, I borrowed the money and went ahead. Almost on cue, David Delaney offered me full-time contract work in the Concert Programme. As I had to find regular work again, I decided it might as well be that. I didn’t tell my parents what I had done, and they moved without knowing. My father never knew. Given his past relationship with my mother’s family, I understood that it would have humiliated him. But I had run out of ideas.
So, near the end of the most active decade of change in women’s lives, I had become a dutiful daughter. During the day, I went to work to pay my silent debt. Each evening, I went to check that all was well with my parents and attend to their daily needs.
Did I regret it? At the time, not really. I am at the end of that generation of women who were expected to look after their parents as a matter of course. And I loved mine, in spite of my odd, incomplete relationship with my father.
What would I tell women now, faced with this dilemma, of choosing between independence and the care of their parents? Or rather, what would I say to their mothers? Deep down, I would have to say, prepare to be alone. This is not why we bore daughters. It was hard, and I fell back into unhappiness, my old difficult ways that can have been little consolation to my parents after the upheaval of their move. All the same, my mother loved the house I had bought, and her illness eventually went into remission for some years after my father’s death. I am glad that she had the pleasure of a house she truly liked. No, I don’t regret what I did. But I wouldn’t want anyone to do it for me.
The contract I had with radio extracted the maximum of work for the minimum of pay. I was now required to produce the Writing programme on a fortnightly basis, and a weekly talks programme of my own devising. At first I worked with a producer called Lynne Alexander, but she left soon afterwards. I considered the men I worked with lazy and inept. One of them had a cruel tongue; he took months to produce programmes of his own, but often verbally sliced mine to pieces. The other was no better. He held strong misogynist views and had unpleasant personal habits that included taking his Roman sandals and long socks off in the summer, and using the office scissors to cut his toenails, foot up on the desk while he performed this unsavoury task. Both of these men were on regular staff, and senior to me, so there wasn’t much I could do. Not all the men on our floor were unkind, although they worked in different departments: men like Peter Downes and Haydn In a Mellow Tone Sherley were gentlemen broadcasters who gave me friendly professional advice when they could, but there was nothing they could do about the situation in our office.
I was saved from sheer desperation by three remarkable women. One of them of course, was Sharon next door, who could make me laugh on even the worst days. Then there was Helen Young, manager of the Concert Programme, who had a formidable background in music. She had the most immaculate appearance, never a blonde hair out of place, make-up flawless every day, elegantly cut clothes. Of more importance, she had a generous spirit and stood up for me when things were difficult in the office. Her father had delivered me in Hawera, which was neither here nor there, although there was a sense of family in Concert from Helen’s point of view, and she and I were not the only Hawera-born people on our floor. There was also a young woman called Anne McCarten, who had come from the country, a calm sweet-natured person who did the typing and administration in our office and managed to instil sanity into our dysfunctional environment.
If I didn’t produce the programmes I was contracted for, I didn’t get paid. This prompted me to devise a number of programmes in series. I never failed to deliver and I am still proud of some of the work that I did. When I first joined the Concert Programme, a few inquiries revealed that the entire national archival system was in poor shape and that tapes were regularly recycled. There were, for instance, only four recorded minutes of James K. Baxter, and very little Glover. I set about recording every living poet I could and playing them on alternate weeks to the Writing programme. Through this, I met several poets whose friendship I would value far beyond that initial recording session, people like Elizabeth Smither and Michael Harlow.
Elizabeth is a New Plymouth poet whose work has attained an international reputation. Although I had arranged for her to record some poems, when the day came I was away for some reason or other, and production was done by one of the senior producers. I think he unnerved her because, not long afterwards, Elizabeth rang to say that the recording session had gone badly. Then the producer told me the tape was unacceptable for broadcast. I listened to it and thought that some hesitations in the reading could be easily rectified by tight editing, and music run beneath would make the flow of the words sound more relaxed. As I recall, I chose some Schumann, and the recording sounded delightful. Not long after the broadcast, the artist Michael Smither, Elizabeth’s husband at the time, sent me a card with a small drawing of his to thank me. I launched Elizabeth’s book, The Sarah Train, a few months later and we continued to see each other for many years.
Like me, she also became a close friend of poet Michael Harlow, who is another of the writers to have occupied this room here in Menton. Originally Michael Haralambópoulos, and known to his friends simply as Harlow, he is an American-born Greek Ukrainian who has lived in New Zealand for close to forty years. He is one of the few people I know who still prefers letters to emails, so I look forward to cards and envelopes from Harlow dropping into the letter box at Palais Lutetia.
Because Harlow has lived in various parts of the South Island for as long as I’ve known him, and Elizabeth in New Plymouth, the three of us would often meet for weekends in Wellington. The first time we all got together was for lunch on a sunny day at a café on Oriental Parade, where we spent the whole afternoon discussing D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel with wild enthusiasm, a conversation that carried on until evening. About halfway through the afternoon, I decided to buy a dress at Memsahib’s, then a fashionable boutique next door to the café, and the talk was interrupted long enough for everyone to troop in and view the garment while I tried it on. A soft silky black dress splattered with rusty gold and dull red flowers, it appears in one of my
Bethany Dixon stories. I gave the dress to Bethany as well as to myself.
I devised a major series called Looking Back, recording the memories of older New Zealanders who had made significant contributions to art and education — always, of course, with the help of guest interviewers, because of my voice. I organised the recording of educators, like Beeb and Max Riske, and the last interview with the artist Olivia Spencer Bower, and a whole host of others, on tape. Elizabeth Alley went down to Christchurch and recorded the last interview with Dame Ngaio Marsh, who forgot Elizabeth was coming and went upstairs to take a nap at the appointed hour. As Elizabeth told it, she stood forlornly on the doorstep, ringing the bell. Eventually she managed to rouse the sleeping crime writer, and the result was a great interview. She and I also recorded several hours of Denis reading his work, and talking about his life. We brought some vodka into the studio to help him sit still for the required length of time, and I took in a glass every hour or so. What I hadn’t realised was that Lyn had sent him off with a hip flask of his own. In his moments of clarity, he was a great subject and raconteur. I found myself wishing I had known him before he became such an addled reprobate.
The archival system didn’t improve during my time in broadcasting, although change was afoot round the time I was leaving. I was afraid these precious recordings would be wiped. You only had to leave a tape on a windowsill and someone would collect and recycle it. I wasn’t the only one to take them home. I stored dozens in my wardrobe. They would later find their way to the Alexander Turnbull Library, along with my hoarded cartons of correspondence.
Ian and I were working incredibly hard. His school commitments had expanded still further and, as well, he got the children up and took them to college with him every day. We had decided that Naenae was the best co-educational school available. They were usually all out of the house by seven. Up until then, I had been able to fit freelancing comfortably into my life, but now housework was a struggle. The washing machine went on every morning as soon as I got up, coloured one day, whites the next. Weekends were taken up with shopping and preparing meals in advance. I looked in awe at the rapid demolition of Sunday roasts I’d spent hours over. I had the new responsibilities of my parents in the neighbourhood, and all the people who lived in our house to feed at the end of each day. I was still teaching for University Extension one weekend a month. That was Ian’s weekend to take over the household.
At the same time, I had tentatively begun to write Mandarin Summer, a novel based on the earlier play, at the weekends and in my lunch breaks. I was trying to follow the routines I had learnt from reading Valian’s essay, about making the best use of even small amounts of time.
Since the success of the play on air, I knew Mandarin Summer was a story I wanted to hold onto. Much as I loved the medium of radio, I regretted the way the best stories would melt away in time. Besides, I couldn’t leave the North alone. Now that my parents lived close, we often talked about the past and our time in Darwin Road. They were still divided over their view of Kerikeri. For my father it was a place where things might have gone well but for a little more luck here and there. For my mother it was a nightmare of servility and poverty. And for me, it remained a place where the exotic was mingled with solitariness and a fractured family life. A place where I had felt damaged. Some nights, when I lay awake, I would see sunlight, sticky summer paspalum grass, ripe pendulous fruits hanging in the hedgerows in the heat. And oranges, glimmering among their jade-green castles of leaves. I often slept restlessly or not much at all. A dark corner would turn over at the edge of the picture. I could never quite lift it. Nor, in this fragmented way that I was writing, could I see how to shape the book. I struggled this way and that trying to work out points of view and who would tell the story.
When Albion Wright published a second collection of my poems, On the Tightrope in 1978, there was no launch party, but I decided to cheer myself up by organising a party at the house anyway. Everyone was there. Except Lauris, who had quietly brought out the elegiac and haunting collection, The Pear Tree, a month or so earlier, poems that reflected considerably on the death of Rachel. But there were film producers, editors, publishers and writers all crammed into our small house, the rooms overflowing. Chris Hampson and his then wife were there, as were Sam and Kristen. Chris and Sam had been collaborating on the publication of some beautifully designed books for their own private press, Hampson Hunt. This press didn’t last long, but the books they did produce, such as the 1977 Drunkard’s Garden, are collectors’ items. Beeb was there, as usual, demanding to see our resident Botticelli Venus, as he called Joanna. Alison Littlefair, now on her own and saddened by the end of her marriage, Alistair and Meg Campbell, Noel Hilliard and his wife Kiriwai.
There was something in the air. Ian’s friend, a Greek psychologist, went through our pile of records and came across Ian’s beloved collection of Gregorian chants. ‘Gregorian chants anyone?’ he yelled. ‘How about a bit of Gregorian?’ What started out well enough quickly assumed a troubling edge. People drank too much too fast. Men began dancing together in ways that were unusual at the time. A poet mooned, inviting women to paint faces in lipstick on his buttocks. At some point, writer and bookseller Chris Else and publisher Bob Ross got involved in a good-natured but riotous farewell on our steps. Ian suggested they leave more quietly because he was getting worried that the party might attract the police. Michael Noonan came back inside and announced that Ian Kidman had thrown Chris and Bob down the steps. It never happened, as all three men would say, but it was a rumour that persisted for years. Then, in another quite separate incident, a man left the party and was involved in an incident that required Ian and me to spend the rest of the night at the police station. You could say it had all turned to shit.
In the morning, Ian was grey-faced as we surveyed the damage. He looked at me and said, ‘I can’t do any more of this. No more parties.’
I had to agree. What happened hadn’t been fun. In the early days of Wellington, Ian had enjoyed the sparkle and novelty of being in the swim with well-known people. But he didn’t drink and, lately, he had begun to see these nights from a different perspective, as messy affairs leaving clean-ups and regrets in their wake. Our children were used to writers streaming through the house, but they no longer wanted to perform for them. We were approaching middle age; it was time for their parents to grow up.
So that was it. I still loved to socialise but the parties at our house were over. There have been many gatherings of friends and family at the house, but that was the last time we ever allowed chaos to rule.
We turned our energies back to work, and also confronted the fact that Russell Bernstone was dying. We visited him every night at the hospital for many weeks, until the end. He wasn’t even forty.
Neither was Carole when she died.
As we were getting ready for work one morning, we heard on the seven o’clock news the report of a car crash on Wellington’s southern coast. Carole was named among the dead.
I hadn’t seen much of Carole the previous year, as she had bought a house further away from us, the first she had owned since the break-up of her marriage nearly a decade before. But on International Women’s Day, the previous year, Lynne Alexander had made a special programme of women telling their life stories, and I had suggested Carole. The recording was strong and poignant. She spoke of failures in her life, and about the unpredictability of the future, the way she took things a day at a time, and what gave her strength — small things like milestones in her children’s lives, her belief in friendship, and giving what you had to others, even if it was just the time to listen.
On the recent occasions I had spoken to her, she seemed happier, although I knew that some of her old hangers-on were still around. After she died, a friend who had been in jail produced a letter Carole had written a few weeks earlier, in which she predicted her own early death. Yet she had had no part in the accident that claimed her life. A friend had called with his son to show off a new c
ar, and invited her and her second son for a ride around the coast. It was a black night with high winds and rain, but the friend let his son drive, and the two sixteen-year-olds occupied the front seats, while Carole and the friend sat in the back.
The car leapt out of control over the cliff beneath the Pines Cabaret. The two boys were injured, although not critically, but both the back seat passengers were killed. Before she died, Carole crawled on her hands and knees across the rocks to say goodbye to her son and leave messages for the others.
Carole friend
named in fact after that silvery cataclysmic blonde
who took such an unruly unexpected plunge
into a warring sea
so you too taking
to the indecipherable dark.
The symmetry seemed too unlikely to be true, but it was. Carole’s mother asked me to help arrange the funeral service at the local Anglican church. The vicar was a man with a cold manner. I told him that there was a tape of Carole speaking about her life and that I thought it might help the family if they heard her voice at the funeral.
‘I don’t want any funeral service I conduct turned into a 2ZM road show,’ he said.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘that may be so, but I think she’s still got something to say.’
So, after the last letter had been read aloud by one of the friends, the packed and hushed church was filled with Carole’s voice on a crackling speaker, explaining that life had been hard, bits of it gone astray, but how, knowing where she had come from, she understood better how to face the future.
Carole’s mother asked if the mourners could gather at our place after the funeral. There were sad little farewells, not just to Carole but to the family. The son who had been in the accident was in hospital, where he stayed for several months; his older brother was going off to live with relatives; and the third boy was collected by his father and placed in institutional care.
