The Autobiography of My Father

by Martin Edmond

  I remember you saying ‘Love to Colleen’, your voice high and a bit reedy, before ringing off. And the silence down the phone line which is forever now.

  About ten days later, on a Friday night, I was alone in the house, sitting up trying to watch something on TV. I couldn’t concentrate and then, suddenly, a wave of tiredness went over me. I felt so totally exhausted that it was all I could do to get up from my chair, turn the light off and stumble through into the bedroom, where I collapsed into bed. That was after midnight. Six hours later I was woken from a dead sleep by the phone ringing. It was Stephanie, calling to say you’d suffered a massive stroke in the night and were not expected to recover.

  The night nurse always used to bring you a cup of tea about 2.30 or 3 a.m. and you’d drink it and chat with her for a few minutes. This time when she came you were distressed because you couldn’t move your arm. She told you not to worry, it would be all right in the morning, and soothed you back to sleep. It was while you slept that the major stroke came, the one which I think I felt, two hours behind and 1500 miles away as I was. The intimation of the severing of a lifelong connection.

  Twenty-four hours later the friends who came to keep me company – Leon, Lud and Lexie, Jan – had left, the beer was mostly all drunk and Col and I were alone together. That was when I broke down and sobbed my heart out in her arms. Great, gasping, gut-wrenching spasms of tears. She just held me. That was the actual severing, that was when you died, having held on, unconscious but still breathing, for twenty-four hours. I didn’t know it at the time, not until Stephie rang again at six the next morning. But I knew. And there is still a kind of comfort in knowing that I went through it with you, emotionally anyway.

  Leon was over from Auckland to work on the screenplay of The Footstep Man, so there was some tidying up to do before I could come back, but it was good having him there. Though he’s only four or five years older than I am, I’ve always felt his presence to be in some sense paternal. I mean, all those years when you were sick and we were scarcely in touch I looked around for substitute fathers and was lucky in the ones I found. Leon was the latest, perhaps the last, because then I found you again. He has been important to me, for he really has given me my career, my work. And he was careful and kind, while making sure, as always, that we got the script to an acceptable stage before breaking. And I, in a blur, worked on through Sunday and Monday and then on Tuesday I left.

  It was a song from Frank’s Wild Years that looped round and round in my head for all of that journey back. I remember taking you to hear Tom Waits at the Capitol in Sydney in 1982, thinking how he was another drunk and you might relate. Well, you always said you enjoyed the concert, but what I recall is your snores after half time, mingling with Tom’s growling voice as he writhed across the stage in clouds of blue tobacco smoke. Now he was in my head all the way across the Tasman singing –

  And it’s such a sad old feeling

  The hills are soft and green

  It’s memories that I’m stealing

  But you’re innocent when you dream

  When you dream

  You’re innocent when you dream …

  – to one of those old-time melodies I swear I’ve known since I was little though I could not say just where it was I heard it before. Like ‘Ole Black Joe’, the negro spiritual I used to sing over and over to myself, looking out the car window on journeys away when I was a kid. My mind was just a blur of emotion, really, although I do remember instructing myself that I had to be strong, it was a life crisis and I had to be equal to it. I remember that.

  I’d decided, when I got to Auckland, that I’d walk from the international to the domestic terminal, get my ticket, go to the bar, get some change and then ring Murray, my cousin, your older brother’s second son and the nearest person I’ve ever had to a brother. This was my plan. My sole worry was that I only had a hundred-dollar bill and I wasn’t sure if they would change it in the bar.

  Well, I walked in and the bar was nearly empty and there, over by the window, was Murray. And Marion, too. My cousins. They were catching the same flight to Wellington as I was and were on the lookout for me because they’d worked out there was another M. Edmond booked on the flight. That made three. It was good to see them. Just so good to see people who knew and loved you, who felt as I felt about the fact that you’d gone. We hugged and wept and Marion bought drinks and then we went out and caught the plane. And I wasn’t alone with my grief any longer.

  It was going to be a long day, because I’d arranged already with Gina to pick up a car from her and Victor’s place in Miramar and drive over the Rimutakas to Greytown, where your body was laid out in your house. We didn’t get to Wellington until after nine. Murray and Marion were staying over and coming through in the morning and they tried, not very hard, to talk me out of driving that night. Marion particularly wanted to be sure I wouldn’t fall asleep at the wheel. I told her I knew where Victor kept his dope and, if worst came to worst, I could smoke some of that, which would be bound to keep me awake. As it happened I couldn’t find it, but it didn’t matter. I just got the car and left.

  The night was very dark and cold and it was raining. I listened to the radio for a while on the Hutt Motorway. It was all election babble. Eventually I turned it off and drove to the accompaniment of the wheels on the road, the engine noise and the faint whistle of wind outside. It was Tuesday night and there was nobody much around.

  I only stopped once, at the top of the Rimutakas. I switched the motor off and got out of the car. The silence was immense. A few faint stars shone briefly behind ragged, black, coal-sack clouds. I was still telling myself to be strong, taking big gasping breaths of the cold, clean air. Kia kaha.’ I said. Kia kaha! Kia toa! Kia manawanui! Be strong, be brave, be big-hearted. I can’t say that I thought about much else really. I had no sense of your soul winging away in the night. At that stage my thoughts were almost all for myself. Would I be able to deal with what was coming up?

  When I got to your house everyone except Gina was already in bed. They were all bedded down in the sitting room of the little stucco cottage you bought when the big house at 129 Main Street became too much for you. A little old lady’s house with white imitation-lace curtains framing the windows and polyanthas in the front garden. In which you always looked completely incongruous.

  Once I’d said hello to everyone it was clear that the next thing was to go in to see the body. It was in the open coffin in the corner of what had been your bedroom. Your bed, which I’d slept in the last time I saw you, was gone. Gina had put lighted candles around already and there were flowers. As I walked over to look in the coffin, I had the strangest feeling. Just for a moment I thought you were not dead at all. And then a second later I knew you were. For all time. I guess it was the recognition factor. I mean, I’d only ever seen you alive before.

  Something about your face, in repose, the hair brushed straight back over the high forehead, the way you never wore it, that I can’t forget. You looked like some old Spanish Don. Don Trevor. I remember saying it to Murray the next day and he said he saw many faces in your face. But I saw this old Spaniard I never saw while you were alive. Recently Anne was telling me that those among the Irish with black hair and brown eyes have the blood of the Spanish in them, from the old voyaging days up the Atlantic coast of Europe. Well, you weren’t Irish but if the Spanish got up to Ireland they might have stopped off in Cornwall on the way. You were Cornish on your mother’s side. And you had the black hair, the brown eyes, the olive skin.

  There wasn’t a bed for me in the house, hardly a patch of floor even. I didn’t want to sleep anyway. I was concerned about what I was going to say at the funeral service next day, since I wanted to speak. I sat a long time at your desk just outside the open bedroom door trying to write something. I had a stack of paper with the letterhead of the Cobblestone Trust before me, my camouflage pen and not an idea in my head. I must have sat there for hours, drinking neat brandy, trying to write, ever
y now and then glancing across at your body lying there. I was wound up. I was doing what you should never do, trying to force myself. Things started jumping in the corners of my vision. At one stage I even thought I saw your body move. I thought you might be going to sit up in your coffin!

  I got to a point of frustration where I was speaking out loud to you, asking what the hell I was going to say. After that, in the wee small hours, a kind of peace finally descended on me. I decided to let it go. Clearly I was not going to be able to script a speech for myself, so I would have to ad lib. I noted down the points I wanted to make in the order they seemed to belong in, folded up the bit of paper and put it away. Then I lay down to sleep.

  The next few hours I spent curled up on the floor under your old quilt at the foot of the coffin where your body lay. I felt like some little animal, some creature, some child, wanting to get closer to the warmth that had always been but was no longer there. It wasn’t heavy or bad or neurotic. It was a grieving feeling and it was an image of something real, too. We were like that. There was that trust between us. I knew it was only your body there, the carriage of a soul that had gone, but how else could I keep you company? I felt you would have understood and that you would have liked me to be there like that.

  Candlelight flickered and danced around the walls. Just by lifting my head I could see you. The house was full of sleeping bodies. It was very peaceful, with the silence of the night outside. Eventually I went to sleep too.

  The next day is another blur, this time of people coming and going, and I won’t try to untangle it all now. I’ll just mention a couple of them. Strange to say, I don’t know either of their names. All I know is that one was a friend and the other a relation.

  The first rang early in the morning to ask if it was all right if he came and we said yes. He turned up about mid morning, a Maori guy in his forties with a little round pot belly and bloodshot eyes. He had a couple of wild-looking mates outside in the car. He was a bit drunk, and he asked for my mother. She hadn’t arrived, so then he asked for the eldest daughter. He told Gina he was the boy who used to deliver the milk for us when we lived in Arawa Street, Ohakune, back in the early fifties. He used to make a point of bringing a half-or was it a quarter-pint bottle for her when she was a little girl. She remembered. She used to wait out by the gate for him. I’ll come back to him.

  The other was an older man I met just before I went into the church. I stopped to say hello to my uncle Clive and there were these two other men with him. One of them was a very suave and sleek-looking man in his sixties perhaps. He asked Clive who I was and Clive told him. He didn’t introduce himself, but I knew he had to be one of my mother’s relations, a Price or a Scott. And he looked at me in the strangest way. It was as if he were interrogating me, silently, about the nature of my allegiances. Were my loyalties with his side of the family or yours? Nothing was said and after a moment I moved on. I suppose I could be wrong, but I seemed to feel a kind of malice from him towards ‘your’ side. And towards me if that was the way I went. It had never occurred to me before that there might be that sort of generative hostility in ‘our’ family.

  As for the speech, it went really well. I spoke the best I’ve ever done in a public situation. You would have been proud of me. And I did it without notes. The bit of paper stayed folded up in my pocket. They recorded the funeral service and I have the tape. That’s how I’m able to transcribe what I said:

  The last time I spent time with Trevor was a couple of months ago. It was his seventieth birthday. And I remember saying to him, ‘Well, Dad, you’ve had your three score and ten, anything else now is going to be a bonus.’ And he laughed at that. But I don’t think either of us thought the extra time was only going to be two months. Nevertheless I think he was in a better state of mind and more composed for death than at any time probably … certainly in the last twenty years.

  Until he was about fifty, Trevor probably achieved or looked like achieving, all of his worldly ambitions, as various as they were. But from a time of… about the late sixties until the early seventies, things started to go wrong for him. And that decade, from 1970 to 1980, was extremely difficult for him and for everybody else that was involved with him. And probably the low point of it was the death of his third daughter, Rachel, by her own hand, in 1975. The winter of 1975. And I think Trevor mourned for her, particularly, the rest of his life. He once said to me that not a day passed when he didn’t think of Rachel.

  That was the major crisis probably, but a lot of other things went wrong too. I don’t want to dwell on any of these things, the only reason I bring them up is because the last ten years of his life, I feel that he, very remarkably, put himself back together. Like we all watched him fall seriously apart, but then he did restore himself to what he was before. And a large part of that is his return to this community which opened, you all did open your arms to him and accepted him for what he was then and allowed him in some sense to return to what he had been before and had promised to become.

  And what was that? Well, I’m not really going to talk much more, except there’s a couple of things that I think it’s worth remembering about how he was. He was very … he had a sort of native shrewdness, I think it was one of the things that made him a good teacher, because he always saw people for what they were, but never in a really critical sense. He always managed to address himself to the better part of whoever he came across. And if he didn’t like somebody he tended just not to have anything to do with them. So he had this positive way of dealing with people which … certainly children in the classroom always trusted him and some of them have never forgotten him and probably … well, they always used to come and see him because they wanted that reassurance he could give them.

  He had a really good sense of humour. A quite unexpected way of pointing out to you where you were being a bit pompous or a bit over-serious. And that was a lovely quality. And he was a very kind man. He was always generous and kind in his relations with people. And he had a really sweet smile. You probably all remember the way he used to smile. A very sweet smile. You could see right back to the child when Trevor smiled.

  But as I said he also didn’t like high-flown sentiments and pomposity and I can sort of hear him now saying, well, you know, boy, don’t make such a fuss about it. I was just who I was.

  It doesn’t seem like much now I write it out here, but it felt good then and I stand by it in the sense that I still think those things are true and were worth saying.

  After that Frances read some verses from the Bible and there was more singing. Then the service was over and we were bearing the coffin out of the church. I was on the front at the right, with my right hand hanging free when, about half way down the aisle, it was grasped in a grip so like your own I nearly cried out. The same warm, square, strong hand I’d been missing since you died was once again there. Because you expressed yourself mostly with your hands. When you wanted to say how much you loved me, you did it with your hands. That warm, strong grip. And here it was again, just for a moment, really, then my hand was released and I kept on walking. It was the Maori guy, whose name I do not know. The guy who turned up earlier. He was sitting in an aisle seat. But it was like it was you. That grip was like your acknowledgement and I’ll never forget it.

  Afterwards, I found the Maori guy and took him over and introduced him to my mother. He was drunker than he had been before the service and he took her hands in his and began to kiss her, over and over again, on the lips. She didn’t know what to do. She just stood there helplessly, being kissed by this wild-looking Maori guy. I didn’t see Mr Suave again.

  Then we took the coffin down to the graveyard to put it in the ground. There was a beautiful image I recall – your grandchildren playing over the mound of flower-strewn earth at the edge of the hole in the clay. The casket bore wonderful purple irises and there was a smell of lilac in the air. At one point Carlos, Kathy’s eldest, accidently set off. the automatic mechanism which lowers the coffin into
the ground. The machinery whirred so discreetly, so softly, it was a moment before anyone noticed, and you were nearly tipped untimely into your grave.

  The minister spoke, and a man from the RSA said those words by Kipling they say every Anzac Day and last of all another Maori man whose name I do not know either but whom I met at Rotary the time you took me there, Sandy, is it? from Papawai. He stepped forward and said a poroporoaki, a farewell, to you and then began to sing. And that was lovely, because his deep male voice was joined from the back of the crowd by a rich female voice singing the same waiata. It was one of the Blackburn sisters, from Ohakune. And she gradually moved forward until they were standing either side of the grave, singing.

  And then we buried you.

  All That Charm Of Face And Voice

  It’s not true to say I thought through all this that night up on the Black Range. But the events and emotions were on the way to becoming part of my consciousness. I was already inside an awareness of them. Which is why I rehearse them here.

  Mostly I thought about how you were when you were young. I thought of the man who appears, here and there, in the letters of condolence that poured in after your death. Random phrases drifted through my head … a kind of liberating figure … his alertness, sharp mind and friendly nature … warm and human – except when you said the wrong thing politically – then he was a tiger … a grand person and great company … such fun … a kindness and a generosity which gave him a special gift for relating to people … his very real humanistic qualities … such a vital person… in his hat, ready to go and encourage his school’s football team.