The Autobiography of My Father

by Martin Edmond

  One friend ventured a little deeper: ‘Something within the inner person prevented his acknowledging fully the love and respect others had for him …’, he wrote. This is rare – most of your contemporaries seem to have shied away from confronting who you were and what happened to you, probably out of a desire for self-preservation. That fear, like the fear of infection, which psychiatric illness causes people to feel.

  But you couldn’t really expect anyone to take on the full tragedy of your life in letters such as these. That seems to be my task.

  There is no doubt that you were seen as special, with a special destiny ahead of you. It is clear even from the fragments that survive that you were one of the golden youths of your generation. You had all the gifts: beauty, charm, intelligence, a physical grace, a kind heart and a brave soul. No shadow is detectable, falling across those early years. Nothing you could not shrug off and move easily away from, into the eager world that awaited your coming. As when you side-stepped your father’s intention that you become a lawyer and went instead to train as a teacher.

  The idealism of that choice was the key to the rest of your life. With all your talents and the best will in the world, you were convinced it was possible to make a difference. To make this a better place. And it seems as if you lived in the fulfilment of that splendid dream until you were about the age that I am now. And then you hit a wall with such an impact you never recovered from the shock.

  Where was that agonising vulnerability in your early years? How did your friends deal with it? Who even knew it was there? Not you – you lacked an analytical cast to your mind, were disinclined to look inwards unless forced to do so.

  What do I really know anyway? That pre-war and wartime world of your youth is irrecoverable now. There are only the photographs, in which everyone seems to possess a lovely glossy sheen of skin, a velvet softness in the eyes, an other-worldly beauty. They are surfaces behind which anything could have been happening.

  Early in the war your best friend was killed. There is a framed photograph of him in his Air Force uniform with a poem in your own hand underneath. For some reason you always kept it in the shed with your gardening things, where, like you, over the years it gradually disintegrated:

  Trafford McRae Nichol

  In Memoriam

  A smile that captured every heart

  A love that gave and asked for no reward

  A spirit fine as tempered steel

  A courage boundless as the sea.

  He saw the light that shone and called

  He gave his all, and questioned not.

  He rose above the petty spites

  Of lesser men than he.

  He trod the heights – Life filled his cup

  Death dashed it from his lips

  And yet he triumphs over Death –

  He lives in hearts that know him still.

  And in the silent years to come

  Long years for us so soon bereft

  Of all that charm of face and voice

  We can but say – I knew him well

  The truest friend I ever had

  T. C. Edmond

  April, 1942.

  This could just as well be read as an elegy for your own younger self. The other odd thing about it is that in the picture your friend looks uncannily like a contemporary photo of my mother, whom you must have started seeing about the time he died.

  Among your colleagues at Teachers’ Training College in those days you had a reputation as a charmer who would never commit himself, who had never yet committed himself to any one woman. Because you were such a heart-breaker, several mutual friends warned my mother against getting involved with you.

  You told me yourself that you were pathologically shy, terrified of women. Growing up in a family of three boys, in what was no doubt a fairly repressed household, you had had very little to do with girls when you were young. You said you went to dances as a teenager in an agony of wordlessness.

  Is there a hidden clue here? The surface charm, the inner anxiety? Or were you just like so many men, getting a little bit involved and then shying away when things started becoming serious?

  With your dazzling good looks, your intelligence and your charm, you could have had anyone you wanted. There were four women waiting for you when you came back from the war. You could have married any one of them. I know it’s true – you told me all their names and later I found a hopeful desiring telegram from one of them among your papers, sent from New Plymouth to Wellington and timed so that you would get it on your arrival home.

  Why you chose my mother you never quite said. You were so very different. Her character is convoluted and driven and interior. And you were by nature simple, upright and straightforward. You didn’t have that commitment to what is called ‘the inner life’ that she has spent her time exploring. Rather, you expressed yourself directly, in action, in your involvement with the practicalities of life in small communities.

  This is how you appear in the family photographs of the fifties: in nearly every one you wear a particular smile. It’s quite self-conscious, it’s very proud and suggests no cloud on the horizon, no blot on the record, no possibility of an interruption to the idyll. It is as if you have become, in your own words of highest praise, a hell of a good joker. You were such a handsome man then, with your soft brown eyes, black hair, olive skin and trim athletic figure. Nothing like the bow-backed, pot-bellied, bandy-legged, wheezing, coughing, rheumy-eyed, sad old man you became.

  In the loneliness and sickness and alcoholism of your later years, I used to wonder what had happened to that brown-eyed handsome man. I used to ask myself if things might have been different had you married someone else, someone ‘conventional’, someone without ambitions of her own. Someone who would have loved you and brought up your children and kept your home warm and safe and comfortable for you to come back to after work. If such a person ever existed. It was more or less what you wanted. What you missed so badly later on. Useless speculation, of course. Nothing so useless as ‘what if?’

  Then there was your faithfulness to the choice you had made, belying your youthful reputation. After all that happened between you, you still said you loved my mother. Though you were often angry about things she did and said, and sometimes threatened to divorce her, you never did. Maybe there was a kind of emotional dependency. Maybe it was mutual. You used to tell me how she would ring you up and cry down the telephone. It would be about family matters. This was in the last few years of your life, when there was so much water under the bridge you’d think the river would have run dry. But not her tears. And you still had time for them.

  You both seem so young to me now. Such a pair of holy innocents. She with her adolescent view of the world, her constant need of reassurance, her attempts to incorporate everything into her own ego. You with your bewilderment in the face of the failure of the most honest, simple-minded and hopelessly naive expectation of professional achievement married to domestic bliss. Because you wanted it. Because it was your right. Because that’s what people did. You used to explain your loneliness by saying that other jokers had wives and wives looked after the social life. Breathtaking.

  It is as if the war somehow froze you both into a youthful pose that it took half your lives to discover was just that, a surface, a pose. Shocking her into desperate action to recover the lost years, and you into a kind of stunned disbelief, like a child who has climbed too high and does not know how to get down again except by letting go.

  That is what I thought about up on the Black Range. The wind sighed in the trees, the stars in the sky wheeled above, there were animal noises far off in the night and next to me Colleen made little sounds in her sleep. Eventually I must have dropped off too, because I turned over and it was dawn. We got up then, struck camp and headed down towards the Caves.

  Underground

  Far down in those dark passages, the dead whisper on a cool dry wind that blows endlessly through the caverns. It is their buried lives th
ey talk about, in words no one now can understand. All that could not be told, all there was not time to say, all that inchoate frenzy of thought, lingers there and is not forgotten.

  In the utter darkness, you cannot see your hand in front of your face. Despite the weight of rock above and below, it is like walking on air. You float, and see nothing. You smell the ammonia of bat-shit, you hear the distant fall of water droplets, you feel the glow of your own body heat reflected off the rock. And then that dry susurrus of voices comes on a breath of wind travelling from beyond the ends of the earth.

  When you do begin to see again, in the floating darkness you cannot tell if the images are in your mind or of the world. There is no distinction any more. It is as if the membrane that held you and the world distinct has dissolved and you have mingled your essence with the earth itself.

  Then the vast processes of geological time declare themselves. That ancient seabed, laid down aeons ago, with its prodigious cargo of seashells, still hisses around the curl of your ear. In the tiny fragments of lime suspended in a water drop, there are memories of the lives of trilobites. All of the dead who have gone into the earth speak in the language of darkness, of wind, of stone, of water.

  Far below, as deep as anyone has gone, at the bottom of River Cave lie the bones of a man calcified into the limestone floor. The door through which he entered the labyrinth has closed behind him since he came. Perhaps he missed his footing and fell from the world of light through the darkness of the void until a slab of rock rushed up to meet him. His bones have turned to stone, but his soul remains in free-fall through the caverns.

  You have to go down there to learn that these passages go on forever. No one knows what happens after the light flickers out in the subterranean wind and the crevices become too small to squeeze a body through, twist and turn as you might. Far off in that direction is the sea. In the other direction, far off, is another sea. In every direction there is a sea. And there are also pathways under the sea into other lands, with their own dead, their own histories of obscure lives, their own cries and whispers.

  You could come up anywhere. Now you are dissolved into earth and darkness and time, you can go wherever you want. On the cool dry wind that blows where it lists, with all its freight of weightless voices, you travel endlessly until, in some unknown vortex beyond comprehension, you suddenly see lights above you. Many lights, pricked red-gold, or silver, or blue into the velvet of the night.

  And then you disappear forever into the black spaces between the stars.

  THE ISLAND

  Rakiura

  From up on top of Garden Mound, the grey gauzes of the rain drift down the valley below, drawing a curtain across the bush, turning the misty antipodean hills into a Chinese landscape.

  The miro trees are fruiting and the wood pigeons, kereru, feast upon them. They flap clumsily from branch to branch if disturbed. Rain birds sing in the tea-tree. Riro riro, the grey warbler. Sometimes a pair of red-fronted parakeet, kakariki, zip past, with their distant, lost cry. Hidden deep in the canopy of the rimu forest, a tui lets fall liquid notes.

  There is the murmur of the sea, breaking on Maori Beach below. The hushed breath of the rain shower. Otherwise it is completely quiet, completely still.

  It is something about the way the bush in the valley whites out. The ineffable beauty and remoteness of it. The incomprehensibility of its grandeur. The way all meaning seems to inhere in the sight, the way there is nothing, really, to say about it.

  A description does not suffice.

  Maori Beach is a wild place, where bodies of birds and fish, shells of molluscs and crustaceans, rot among great piles of kelp. A creek at one end, a river at the other. A long straight sweep of sand between. Banks of sea grass grow over the flat dunes. Then the bush begins.

  The river runs the colour of strong tea. It is a dye washing out of the bracken. Looking back up from the swing bridge, there is the wide, stony bed, a crescent of sand at the bend, dark shaggy trees standing beside brown water.

  Then the misty rain clouds sweep down and white everything out again. Again that feeling of something so remote as to be antithetical to a human presence. A feeling so strong it is palpable and yet … what is to be said about it? What does it mean? It just is.

  In the creek bed behind the dunes many curious old bottles lie tumbled. There are planks that could have come from houses or from boats. Obscure pieces of rusty iron are buried in the sand.

  Mixed up in the debris is the skeleton of a whale. A baleen whale of some kind, it came ashore about five years ago with an ancient harpoon buried in its body. It must have carried it for over forty years.

  The great beaked head has vanished. There are only scattered vertebrae, spongy and covered with a greenish slime. And the flat, white, curving ribs like the ribs of a ship lying here and there, the flesh long gone from the bones.

  The mystery of identity, of personality, is like the mystery of landscape. Each declares itself so obviously, so characteristically, that every detail is an expression of its essence. But that essence can only be experienced directly. If you are not in the landscape, it is unlocatable. If you are not with the person, they are unknowable.

  When you are there – with the person, in the place – something else is going on, an interaction, an exchange which has perhaps nothing to do with the memories you will take away with you. Death leaves only the memories and at the same time disembodies them, invalidates them, makes of them something provisional, intangible.

  I knew this would happen. Often when I was with you I contemplated the death you were going to die. We talked about it sometimes. You always said you thought you had another ten years – ‘if I’m lucky’. You said that for the last ten years of your life.

  I think this is why I made the tapes – to steal something back from death. One summer’s day about five years ago we sat in your kitchen and I asked the questions and you did the talking. Because memory is frail and uncertain and one day you would die, I asked mostly about things I already knew.

  A transcription cannot give the intonation, the character of your voice. It is there on the tapes, but in the bare naked words on the page I cannot now tell what of you survives.

  Like those remote, nameless hills, your features appear and disappear as if behind soft grey curtains of drifting rain.

  Like the sound of a remembered sea, your words hiss and murmur in my ears, once loud and clear, now distant, low and fading.

  A Conversation

  What is the earliest thing that you remember?

  I remember our family moving from Marama … from Adelaide Road to Lyall Bay. I was three. That’s the earliest memory I’ve got of anything that happened in my life.

  What do you remember specifically?

  The upset of moving.

  That’s Adelaide Road …?

  To Lyall Bay. Puriri Crescent, Lyall Bay, where we spent many years. I remember … there’s nothing before that. My mother’s told me things I did but I don’t remember them.

  What were those things?

  Oh, throwing … we lived in Marama Crescent when I was a baby, Marama Crescent, Wadestown, and I used to climb on the balcony and throw tins and things [LAUGHS] down on the passers-by. They used to come and complain bitterly. I must have been, I don’t know, one or something like that. And I don’t remember it myself. The first memory I have is that – shifting. Not the shifting, but arriving.

  How long did you live there?

  Until I was … [LONG PAUSE] I was in Standard 3, Standard 4, when we shifted. Must have been about ten. We shifted to Seatoun. And I was in the third term of the school year and they left me in Lyall Bay school to finish the year. Went by tram, to Lyall Bay school every day. For one term. Then I went to Rongotai College. Fifth standard. It was an intermediate school.

  And that would have been by tram as well?

  Yeah. Tram. No, but later on I biked. It wasn’t far, from Seatoun to Rongotai.

  What do you remember of Ly
all Bay?

  Oh, a lot of things. We had a maid. Believe it or not. A live-in maid. She used to do some of the housework and some of the cooking.

  And what was Charlie doing in those days?

  Well … when the Depression came, he was Secretary of the YMCA for New Zealand. Oh, the Depression came and there was no money, no voluntary money to give anymore, people were too hard up. And old Charlie Todd who’d founded Todd Motors offered him a job. He was a Temperance man himself … you know what the Alliance was? It was an anti-drink organisation. Old Charlie Todd was a strong member of it and he offered my father a job as Sales Manager at Todd Motors. Which he took on in 1931. And made a big success of. It was hard work.

  So there was no alcohol in your house …

  Never.

  … when you were young?

  No, except my mother, when she got to be about fifty, began to be, liked to have a drink each day and my father allowed it. To my surprise. She used to keep a bottle in the kitchen.

  What did she drink?

  Sherry.

  What about your grandparents, their parents, do you remember much of them?

  I never saw them. Well, my mother tells me I saw her father but I don’t remember. They lived in Ponsonby, my mother’s parents lived in Ponsonby in Auckland.

  Was that Ardmore Road, was it?

  No, that was Auntie Maggie. This was Herne Bay Road. She’s told me about it. Her father and her mother came out on a boat. In 1862. They met and fell in love on the boat.