The Autobiography of My Father

by Martin Edmond

  When we shifted to Greytown, the section did not have room for the magnificence you were used to cultivating. So you rented land in other parts of town – at Mrs York’s and the other place down West Street, was it? – and continued to grow potatoes, broad beans, runner beans, butter beans, peas, tomatoes, brussels sprouts, cabbages, cauliflowers, silver beet, beetroot, carrots, parsnips, swedes, pumpkins, marrows, cucumbers, rhubarb, asparagus. I remember you in a khaki shirt, squatting to crumble the earth between your flat, square fingers. I used to love it when I was allowed to come and help you. You’d give me a halfpenny for each white butterfly I caught, or let me weed between the rows of peas. I’d eat the sweet young pods whole and listen to the hum of bumble bees among the black and white flowers on the broad beans.

  There was a garden at Huntly too, but something in the shift of consciousness that happened when you became a headmaster meant it was less important or hardly important at all. I don’t remember it. Nor the one in Upper Hutt. But I do remember, after your breakdowns and the loss of your job, your despair at the impossible soil in Oriental Bay. You had a patch of clay terraced with concrete bricks below the gorse of the town belt, but not even your magic touch could coax much to grow there. I think you felt that in this too you had failed where once you had succeeded with such ease.

  So the house at 129 was meant to restore to you your dignity in that area too.

  The wife of the couple before had, with great care and loving attention, made an English country garden. There were bowers and ornamental trees and little leafy walkways and beds full of English flowers, all co-ordinated so that at any time of the year something would be blooming. A magnolia and a camellia grew behind a thick high hedge out the front and in the back were flowering cherries and plum and crab-apple trees and an ancient kowhai. A flourishing kitchen garden of culinary herbs, lemon balm and mint and opium poppies was by the back door. The lawn was made up partly of grass and partly of a soft-leaved, green, creeping plant. There were banks of violets; climbing roses; in spring, hyacinths and narcissi. And much, much more.

  The only thing there wasn’t, was a vegetable plot. But you would fix that.

  What you did was employ a local man as your gardener. Billy was a skinny old Scot from the Gorbals in Glasgow, with a ravaged face, a hacking cough and a thirst that would never be quenched. Children used to burst into tears and run away when they saw his face and heard the incomprehensible syllables squeezed past the hectic Adam’s apple and out between the gnashing teeth. He’d been employed in the Hutt as a coach builder, I think, but had been retrenched and now depended on various odd jobs for his living and his drinking money. You must have met him in the Working Men’s Club.

  Billy knew which side his bread was buttered on. From his point of view, what was important was that there was always something more to be done around the place. Mowing the lawns and clipping the hedge, for instance, wasn’t enough. But putting in a vegetable garden and then a few fruit trees – that was more promising. The consequence was that the two of you presided over the slow destruction of that wonderful garden. It was gradually denuded of most of what made it splendid, all in the name of practicality. Fruit and vegetables, in other words.

  I could never tell how much of this you were aware of. It wasn’t a subject I ever liked to bring up. Did you know what was happening? Did you just prefer to support Billy and his family and allow the garden to go for their sake? Or had he successfully conned you into thinking you were calling the shots? The way he used to come around and say things like: ‘We’ll have to take out that climbing rose next, Trevor.’ And you’d nod and agree.

  The other strange thing about this was, once you had the vegetable plot going, you always referred to it as yours and the work done in it as done by you. But I don’t think you ever actually did anything. Billy did it, and you just took the credit, such as it was. Gina told me that much of the time you didn’t even harvest the crops when they were ready. She’d come by and everything would be going to seed. Her theory was that, in the old days when the family functioned as a unit, you grew and others picked. And here you were, continuing to grow, with nobody to pick. So nothing was picked.

  I did have you on about that. You became quite indignant. You said it sometimes took you six weeks to eat a cabbage and anyway, you didn’t even like them much. But I know you sometimes bought fruit and vegetables at roadside stalls up the other end of town while the same produce rotted in your garden. It was like the deep freeze.

  And the wood pile. Stacked along the dark side of the house you had enough wood to burn through a dozen winters. There was so much there you never got near the bottom of the pile, but only used the top few rows. And every winter, or several times during a winter, you would buy some more and the pile would stack up even higher, to the point where the moisture trapped in its dank depths became a real threat to the weatherboards on the house.

  Wood, like soil, had an irreducible value for you. In Ohakune you used to go out of a weekend to the paddocks where stumps from the burnt-off forests still lay, black and greyish-white, fantastically spired where the branches had been. With a cross-cut saw and a friend on the other end, you would cut your own firewood and take it home to the chopping block. The nature of the wood in question was another matter of absorbing interest, like the varieties of potato. Maire was the prize, with matai a close second. A proper maire log would burn in the fire all night long, it was so hard.

  Sometimes I would be allowed to come with you on those expeditions. I would run in the wet grass, delirious with joy at being allowed along, my breath steaming in the air. It was a happiness as big as I knew. In my mind I rate it with the times I went with you to deliver loaves of hot bread at dawn to the army camp at Waiouru, and saw the cold guns pointing up into a metal sky.

  Or when you took me to Hamilton to get a new car from your father. Just you and me, the car you were trading in and the road. Your mother was a small brown woman huddled in a big chair; your father, a stern man with one glass eye behind his round spectacles, a bald bullet head and a stiff leg he would sometimes stick out to trip you up with. There was always a tin of brightly coloured boiled lollies on the mantelpiece, but he would never open it until the moment we said goodbye and went to go. Then he’d give you one. They were disc-shaped, like a flying saucer, and covered in icing sugar. We drove away south with the sweet making ridges on the roof of my mouth.

  This was how you lived. In the morning you would wake, quite early, and turn on the radio. The National Programme. A sort of smorgasbord of news, current affairs, weather reports and music. I never knew you to lie in bed. What you did was sit on the side of it, hunched over, listening. In the days when you still smoked, you’d have cigarettes. If the drinking was bad, you’d be sipping from a glass. If not, you might have a cup of tea. You could spend hours like this.

  Eventually, you’d get up and get dressed and make your way down the hall and through the passage to the kitchen. You’d turn the radio on there and get the heat happening if it was winter. You might or you might not have something to eat. Again, that depended on how much you were drinking. The newspaper would be at the gate and you’d get that and lay it out on the table, but you hardly read it any more. Mostly, you just sat. If you hadn’t had breakfast, you might have lunch.

  Around one o’clock you would go out and rendezvous at the Working Men’s Club with your mates – Billy, Whisky Mac, a couple of others. You were all old reprobates, emphysemic, alcoholic. Whisky Mac’s emphysema was so bad he could only walk two or three steps at a time and needed over an hour to get to the Club. Once ensconced in a chair he would drink double gins and beer chasers until he could not walk at all. Then his wife would come to drive him home. Billy was a spirits drinker too; he also had a wife to look after him. Perhaps it was their wives who saved them from becoming complete derelicts. What was it that saved you?

  There were some funny moments. I remember the day Pat Ward came into the Club selling poppies for Anzac D
ay. He had, as usual, an air of well-scrubbed Catholic righteousness about him. Billy looked up and through an alcoholic haze observed: ‘Why, Pat! Aren’t you dead yet?’ Pat didn’t know what to say. His confusion was so great he forgot himself long enough to take a drink with us.

  You’d only spend an hour or so in the Club. They’d start expressing their sense of sexual frustration and you would get restless. You never joined in that kind of talk. It embarrassed you. Instead, you’d go back home, get your old string bag, go into town and do some shopping. That was probably the best part of the day, because you’d see lots of people in the street who’d wave and smile and say hello and perhaps stop for a chat.

  In the afternoon you might try to get on top of your paperwork for Cobblestones, Rotary or the Kuranui College Jubilee. You were always behind and your papers were always in a state of complete chaos. I sometimes wondered if you preferred it that way – at least you could maintain a sense of having things to do.

  At four o’clock you fed the cats. There had been a pet tom, later there were kittens, then there was a pack of wild cats living under the house. Every afternoon you gave them quantities of tinned food. They would begin ravening up and down the verandas an hour or so before the clock struck, but you were inflexible. Kathy told me she once asked you why you kept looking after them. You said you liked to see them flying past the windows.

  At five you would go back to the Club for a drink or two and then come home and make dinner. In the early days, when your schedule was full, you’d probably have a meeting to go to if it was a week night. If not, you’d repair to the sitting room and watch TV or try to read or just sit. You weren’t much interested in TV. The advertisements annoyed you. When we watched together you’d point, outraged, at the set when the ads came on. Cars and food, you’d say. That’s what they’re all about. Cars and food. You’d make a point of staying up for the twelve o’clock news and weather report on the radio before going off to sleep.

  This was the base routine and doesn’t take account of the quite incredible amount of relentless socialising that goes on in small towns. For you, I think, there were two kinds of people. Those who genuinely liked you and those whose conscience or peace of mind was troubled by your presence in the town. Fortunately, you were rarely fooled by people’s motivation and, equally fortunately, you had retained the knack of treating everybody on their merits.

  Sometimes family came to stay or old friends passing through stopped by. You loved it most of all when pupils from your teaching days called in and you could catch up on their lives and remember old times. That happened now and then.

  And there was the phone. In many ways it became your lifeline. More so the older and frailer you got. You’d call your children frequently, even long distance or, in my case, international, just for a chat. Your legendary care with money, which bordered on meanness, was finally overtaken by your need to talk. The phone was in the hall, just outside the sitting room and next to the bathroom door. Though there was a chair beside it, you always stood to talk. When we spoke, I used to think of you in that dark hallway with the black cold receiver pressed to your big Edmond ear.

  None of this altered much the tenor of your days. You remained alone and lonely most of the time. Even the amusements that had been yours before had fallen away. After the funeral your brother Don told me that when you were young and the family went on a picnic, you would often stay in the car with a book, completely absorbed. Well, you even lost the capacity to read. In your letters to me you spoke of your concern that you could no longer concentrate. You even set apart a particular time of the day for reading. It did not work. Whether it was the shock treatment or the medication you continued to take or what, I do not know. You retained your fascination for books and continued to acquire them – as gifts, from the library, or on loan from friends – but I don’t think you often finished them. Your concentration had gone.

  In your younger days you had produced Gilbert and Sullivan operas. At Ruapehu College, and then at Kuranui, in collaboration with whoever was music teacher, you mounted a string of riotously successful school productions – The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado, Trial by Jury, The Gondoliers, The Yeomen of the Guard. In retirement, you returned briefly to the stage and produced a couple of plays for the Greytown Little Theatre – An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestley and Somerset Maugham’s The Constant Wife. Yet you remained totally uninterested in music. You had no record player and you never listened to tapes. Although you loved the radio – my sisters found seven radios among your things after you died – it was always talk you listened to. You didn’t ever tune in to a music station. About the only time you ever sang was in church.

  Your passion was sport. In your youth you boxed, went yachting, played soccer, rugby and cricket. Later you coached school rugby teams. One of my earliest memories is of the dressing-room of the Ruapehu College First Fifteen before a match. A forest of hairy calves and thighs, crisp white shorts, blue-and-white-striped jerseys, the smell of linament, the click of sprigs on concrete, and Maori laughter. As the son of the coach I was indeed in a privileged position.

  Later you took me to games, international rugby tests or days of cricket at the Basin Reserve in Wellington. I remember when something exciting started to happen – a try, a wicket, a six – your hand would grip my thigh just above the knee and squeeze it, hard. All your life you remained loyal to Wellington teams when it was a provincial match. It was something we always talked about when we were together and I kept a working knowledge of what was happening just for that reason.

  When the Springbok tour erupted across New Zealand in 1981, however, your love of rugby died. Now, in your letters, it would be only the cricket you discussed – enthusiastically if we were winning, with a kind of rueful resignation if we were not. As with a lot of men, your emotional life was intimately bound up with sporting success or failure. You were directly involved in the fortunes of your team.

  Your lifelong interest in politics continued also, but passively, through the radio, the newspaper and conversations at the Club. Despite a slow, inexorable drift towards conservatism, you remained left. Your commitment to Communism renounced, you became a staunch Labour Party supporter. There was even a time when you considered standing for Parliament, in the seat of Wairarapa. You were the old-fashioned, caring kind of socialist and the Lange Government, Rogernomics and the rest destroyed your faith in the party. As with so many people, it was a betrayal that left you nowhere to go. The day before your stroke, you cast a special vote and I still think it was a blessing that you died a week before the débâcle that finally wrecked the party you worked for all your adult life.

  There was no comfort in religion either. At 129 Main Street and later, at 123 West Street, you were no more than a stone’s throw from St Luke’s Anglican church. You often, if not always, went to church on a Sunday but I never heard you profess any particular faith in a god. You had gone from a strict Methodist upbringing into the atheism of Communism and then, slowly, back into the fold of another church, the Church of England. But I don’t think faith had much to do with it.

  In the days when you were climbing the ladder to success, you were more impressed by the need to be seen to be a respectable member of a church-going community. We all joined the church after the shift from Ohakune to Greytown because it was an Anglican town, not because we felt the lack of God in our lives. When we moved to Huntly, the church-going ceased as suddenly as it had begun.

  Nothing that religion could give you made any difference in that terrible decade, the 1970s. At the very time when others might have reached out for the consolations of faith, you chose to remain resolutely alone with your suffering.

  When you returned to Greytown, you returned to the church, but now you attended it as you attended other community groups – for the companionship and because you had an enduring faith in the ability of groups of people to accomplish good works. About religious belief per se you retained your scepticism. You sometimes
disputed matters with the vicar – you thought she was too doctrinaire – and would often quote a line from Robert Graves: ‘Godwebs grow across their eyes’, you would say, and laugh. People get religion when they fear they are about to die.

  A lot of the time you just sat and thought. You were obsessed by your failure and in your mind went over and over the details of it. Your failure as a husband, a father, a man. You said that to me once. It was futile to try and talk you out of it, though I always tried. It was as if your life had become a maze, without beginning or end, entrance or exit, in which you were condemned to follow the same path to the same barrier, over and over until, exhausted, you gave up the ghost at last.

  However there was a certain grandeur in your decay. I remember particularly the time we recorded the tapes. It was summer and the garden still retained elements of its glory. We sat in the kitchen with the French doors open. There were big black blowflies buzzing in to feed on the scraps of cat food on the hearth. Four kittens tumbled on the step, already half wild but all the more charming for that. The twenty-seven pots of jam mouldered in the safe, and innumerable spiders crouched in ragged webs in the dark corners of the room. It felt as if the climbing rose by the doors was already swinging tendrils into the room, eventually to curl around the architraves and colonise the mantelpiece. Lemon balm rioted across the paved courtyard and poppy petals blew in a warm breeze. Nameless potions rotted beside the drains.

  You sat there, under the oldest roof in the town, like a decrepit buddha. You still had your pot belly then. There was a lovely feeling that all of this was allowed to happen around you. The whole place could all rot back to humus and you would just let it. There was no sense in which you wanted to tidy it up or clean it out or organise it. It pleased you to see everything going to seed around you.