The Autobiography of My Father

by Martin Edmond

  That Methodist rigour your old man worked so hard to instil in you was temporarily in abeyance and the side of your nature that I like to think came from your mother was in ascendancy. The side that was, in a very deep sense, poetic. The best part of you accepted whatever was and loved it for what it was. It was generous towards creation and knew things – whether children or gardens – grow best when left to their own devices.

  All that you gave to those you taught. All that you gave to me. All that I hold in trust now for the unimaginable future.

  The Acheron

  The boat that brought us back from Stewart Island was called the Acheron. Strange name! I had to look it up.

  The Acheron is a river in Greece which, because it flows underground for part of its course, was said to be a tributary of the Styx. It is the river of sadness. Across the Acheron, the miser Charon rows the souls of the dead in his boat of darkness – so long as relatives or friends have remembered to place a coin, an obolus, on the tongue of the corpse. Otherwise the shade is condemned to wait forever on the further shore, unable to go to judgement.

  Is this what I am doing? Placing a coin on your tongue, giving you leave to go?

  In some versions of the story Acheron is said to have been a son of Gaea, the earth. Because he let the Titans drink from his water during their battle with the gods of Olympus, he was made one of the rivers of hell.

  By Nyx, or night, he is father of the Eumenides, the Furies, who seek out men who have transgressed in certain quite specific ways – the young who offend the old, children who dishonour their parents, hosts who insult guests, householders who reject suppliants. These they punish by hunting them, without rest, from city to city and country to country.

  The Furies, daughters of Sadness and Night, are crones, with snakes for hair, dogs’ heads, coal-black bodies, bats’ wings and bloodshot eyes. They carry brass-studded scourges and their victims die in torment.

  That ancient Greek legend has more resonance now. Whatever your transgression was – you called it ambition – once you had overleapt yourself and fallen on the other side, you were indeed like one pursued by the Furies. No rest was allowed you, no escape from the consequences of your fall was possible. Even your happy times, few as they were, were merely moments of respite from the prevailing misery and anxiety.

  Frances told me when she took you to Ashburn Hall that second time, you said no farewell but just edged away from her down a long, brightly lit corridor, your back to the wall, wordless, a look of terror on your face.

  I recall, later, after you came out again, being with you crossing a busy road. You hunched down, darting looks over your shoulder, then, with your arms held rigid at your sides, broke into a strange, sideways, scuttling walk that wasn’t quite a run – the very image of a man pursued by nameless fears.

  And I still do not know why this should have been. There is still another journey I must make.

  THE MOUNTAIN

  Ohakune

  I left Auckland at about nine o’clock in the morning but driving past Mt Eden Prison, I realised I’d left the dope behind and went back to get it. Leon was grinding coffee in the kitchen and even though I called out, he didn’t hear me. When I appeared beside him he got such a fright he cried aloud and leapt into the air. It probably took a few years off his life.

  So it was a false start to the journey. I was in a fairly fragile state anyway. This was Thursday. On Tuesday we had finished The Footstep Man. I mean, there would be more work to do on it, but the whole story was there now. It was only a question of making minor adjustments, mostly taking things out, from now on. We had a celebratory dinner with The Movie Partners that night and then I smoked a joint. It was very strong Coromandel sensimilla mixed with Hawkes Bay heads. Along with the coffee, it kept me awake all night. I felt all right, though. I felt good. When I thought of the moment when Sam finally gets through to his daughter in Dublin and she yells ‘Daddy!’ 12,000 miles down the wire, I wept. And I wept for Sam and Vida, two lonely people who find, not love, but comfort in each other’s arms. Comfort and a simple connection to another person. Without which we cannot live.

  The next evening, Wednesday, I had a meeting with the director, the production designer, the cinematographer, the editor, proposed for Ghosts of Empire. The producer(s) were unable to attend. Ghosts of Empire is a fiction based on incidents from the life and death of George Grey. You had read the treatment and the idea fascinated you. You came with me when I visited Kawau Island looking for intimations of Grey’s presence and you always asked after the progress of the script. Not surprising, really – the central character is based as much on you as on Grey. He drinks – laudanum, not alcohol – he attempts a foredoomed reconciliation with his estranged wife, he is mired in regrets for the failures of his life and haunted by ghosts from the past. The drama, essentially, is about how to die with dignity, how to make a proper end of things.

  I was expecting it to be a social occasion. We were, after all, meeting in a restaurant up on Karangahape Road. When the production designer and the cinematographer expressed some acute criticisms of the script as written, I got upset. Not that the criticisms were not valid – they were. Both of them felt that the rhythm of the intercutting of the two stories – the past, the present – was awkward and predictable. I felt the problems were such that the director and I should have solved them already, if we’d had the time together. At one point I turned to her and said that. That’s when she got upset.

  Things disintegrated from there. We were talking business before the food was even ordered, which is a bad mistake. We were drinking, too. I’d had no sleep. I was on such a high from finishing the other script that I felt cruelly treated by the less than enthusiastic response I was getting.

  Anyway, we finally ordered and somehow struggled through the dinner without spilling any actual blood on the table. The editor joined us as we were finishing and then we all went into the city for coffee. Rain was coming down in white sheets. The place we chose was trying to close. It wasn’t a comfortable situation. I talked to the director, while the others chatted amongst themselves. She was crying. But I didn’t regret what I’d said, it was something I’d wanted to say for a long time. Now I was able to amplify on it.

  Eventually the party broke up. The editor dropped me off in Mt Eden. And I had another sleepless night. This time it was because I was worrying about Ghosts of Empire and how the hell I was going to fix it. And if I’d. blown it with the director. And why the producer(s) are never there when we need them. And was the game worth the candle anyway.

  So I was in a fairly fragile state as I headed down the motorway south next morning. I was worried that I might fall asleep at the wheel, among other things. I even wished I still smoked cigarettes, because then I could have used them to stay awake. But it was only a six-hour drive at most, the rental car was soothingly quiet and efficient, it had a deck and I had some tapes. I decided to take it easy and make a few stops along the way.

  The first place was Rangiriri. The angry sky. I was interested in learning the geography of the battle fought here in November 1863. The road cuts straight through the pa site. There’s a side road that doubles back to the right if you’re heading south, up a hill past a graveyard with headstones going back to colonial days. The remains of the fighting pa are on the left of the side road, just where it leaves the main highway.

  A misty rain began to fall as I walked up the path and climbed over a stile into a green field. The bastion is now a hilltop pitted with the remains of earthworks. You can’t see the river because of a stand of willow trees, but it’s close. The other way, to the east, a white stretch of water, is Lake Waikare.

  What the Maori defenders tried to do was guard the entrance to the Waikato plains to the south by fortifying the whole narrow isthmus between the river and the lake. A major undertaking in any terms. About a thousand yards of earthworks. The British came up the river with two gunboats and shelled the pa. Were these the guns your grandpare
nts heard resounding in Auckland? Imperial and Colonial troops were positioned to the south and north. They made eight attempts to take the redoubt by assault but, even though they outnumbered the Maori about three to one, all failed. There was some bloody fighting before darkness stopped the battle.

  The next morning, early, the British chose to misinterpret a Maori flag of truce as a surrender and took the pa with a characteristic act of duplicity. A hundred and eighty-three of the garrison were made prisoner and held, first on a hulk in Auckland Harbour, then at Grey’s private fief on Kawau. I think he may have felt vaguely guilty about it all, because later they were allowed to escape. They found refuge amongst the tribes around Mahurangi and there was talk of another uprising for a while.

  I didn’t feel much, standing there. I looked at the farmer’s house behind a hedge right next to the site and wondered what it might be like to live on this blood-soaked earth. Then I thought, well, if they were sensitive to that, they wouldn’t be here. It occurred to me that the Maori didn’t have a chance, really. Even though, strategically, their choice of a battle site was impeccable. It was a brave attempt but it was doomed.

  Once you pass Rangiriri, there isn’t really another defensible place until Taupiri. They chose not to make a stand there – perhaps because Taupiri is the sacred mountain of the Waikato tribe? What they did was unbury their dead from the mountain and, taking the bones with them, retreated south down the Waipa River into what then became known as the King Country. The British took the whole of the lower Waikato after Rangiriri. They set up camp at Ngaruawahia and made plans to move against the next line of fortifications around Paterangi, near where Cambridge now is.

  There followed one of the more underhand actions of the war. The British, under General Cameron, declined to assault the fighting pas. Instead they went by stealth, with an informer as guide, down an undefended path near Te Awamutu, outflanking the Maori defences. Early on a Sunday morning, they descended on the town of Rangiaowhia and destroyed it. Bishop Selwyn was with the troops as they slaughtered men, women and children. The survivors all ended up in one house, which suffered such intense fire it literally burst into flames, incinerating those within.

  There was one more brief encounter, at Hairini, before the act of defiance and despair at Orakau.

  I went there too. Would you believe the road goes through it also? Right through the middle of the site. It isn’t like Rangiriri, Orakau was a relatively small pa, hastily and only partially fortified. It was a peach orchard on a low rise in the rolling country south of Te Awamutu. You turn off at Kihikihi, where Rewi Maniapoto is buried – with a photo of George Grey on his monument! If that isn’t adding insult to injury, I don’t know what is. But, yes, they became friends once the fighting stopped.

  At Orakau in April 1864 about three hundred defenders were besieged by the British. They included women and children. It was a few hotheads from Tuhoe and Ngati Raukawa who persuaded Rewi to make a stand there. Having come all that way, they wanted to fight. The pa had no water and was easily surrounded. It withstood five assaults, but they ran out of everything – food, water, bullets – except courage. They were loading their guns with peach stones. Still they would not surrender. Ka whawhai tonu ake, ake, ake! echoes down the years. We will fight on forever and ever and ever. It must have been quite a moment when the British line of soldiers saw, walking silently and quickly towards them, the entire garrison of Orakau in one solid phalanx.

  From the site it was possible to understand only fragments of the event. I could pick the direction they must have marched in, heading south-east towards the river. But the swamp through which Rewi and his bodyguard escaped has been drained. They grow corn on this land now. The pursuit by the British resulted in the deaths of about eighty Maori. Women and children were among the dead, as at Rangiriri and Rangiaowhia.

  The radio was playing ‘Dirty Creature’ by local Pakeha lads, Split Enz. There were big orange dahlias under the macrocarpas on the other side of the road from the monument. Again I wondered about the house behind the trees. How they could live there. I guess not everyone believes in ghosts.

  I made one more stop at an historic place. It was where the Maniapoto tribal elders confirmed Te Whero Whero as Potatau, the first Maori king. In 1859. When the Waikato was a kind of paradise and the wheat, the potatoes, the vegetables and fruit grown by the Maori here kept the infant city of Auckland alive. It has yet to be admitted that the envy of the settlers for this achievement was a major motivation for the war.

  And I stopped at Madonna Falls to drink of the ‘holy’ water. Not because I am Catholic or even a believer, simply because I like the idea of drinking from a spring where others leave flowers and devotions. And all this time I was trying to work out what to do about Ghosts of Empire. As I continued on through the familiar towns – Otorohanga, Te Kuiti, Taumarunui – it was going round and round in my head.

  I love the lift up onto the volanic plateau that happens after Taumarunui. Back into my own country, the heartland. It was still raining off and on and, as the red lava earth began to show through on either side of the road, I knew I wouldn’t get a clear sight of the mountain. Only the snow-gashed flanks of Ruapehu showed vastly under black cloud on my left. I caught a brief glimpse of the whole cone of Hauhungatahi, the one we called Browntop. I used to imagine it as a pile of sawdust. Today it looked purple and soft like a breast. It seemed strewn with flowers. The yellow-green of the rimu forest by Waikune Prison, past National Park, was as fresh as the south wind. Toetoe were flowering, bending their graceful creamy grassheads on both sides of the highway. I noticed some of the single-headed mountain cabbage tree, wide-leaved, like a flax bush on a trunk, which Leon had told me grows only here.

  I did stop, to pee, to taste the cold air, to investigate a pile of stones by the railway line just after the big viaduct over the Manganui-a-te-Ao. Great granite boulders shot out of the volcano aeons ago and then hauled from the earth when the railway was put through, they must have lain by the road for eighty years or so. They were covered with a red-orange lichen. I hefted a couple of the smaller stones and thought there was one I might have been able to get into the boot; but in the end thought better of it.

  I took the turn-off left past Horopito onto the Tohunga Road. I was feeling too much now to be able to describe it all. That tangle of emotion that rises up when you traverse the country of your earliest memories. The view across the Waimarino plains to the olive-green eroding hills south of the town. The enormous presence of the mountain, hidden behind cloud this day but somehow looming even larger for that. The road down which Barry Wallace lived where I used to go to stay on their farm. The black, burnt stumps of the first forest still lying out in the green fields.

  I didn’t even go into town at first. I drove straight to the house in Burns Street. It’s still there, all spick and span from a new paint job. It doesn’t seem to have been altered. The section however has been subdivided into six or seven lots and the house now sits, rather primly, behind a brand-new white picket fence. Mrs Aubrey’s grey weatherboard shack is gone, long gone. There were some little black piglets playing on the road past where the stonecrusher used to be. I turned the car round and went back to the bridge.

  Here I parked just opposite Thelma’s house – it looked exactly the same – and started walking down the track that leads through the bush to the war memorial and the baths. When I got to the bend where we used to swim until the day a big fat human turd floated past, I saw a rock sitting in the river. And it felt I had come all that way just to find it. I waded into the river to check that I could move it. And I could. Then I left it and walked on.

  I was looking for another one. For some reason I didn’t want to take the first one I saw. I walked almost as far as the swing bridge, but there wasn’t a place where there was even access to the river. It was a nice walk though. There were fantails, piwakawaka. The wet muddy smell of rotting leaves. A ground cover of ferns. Beech forest, mountain beech forest. Th
e way we used to walk to the baths in summer, unchanged in thirty years.

  Back at the swimming hole, the rock was still there in the water. I took off my shoes and socks again, rolled up my trousers and waded in to get it. It turned out to have a flat, slightly concave bottom. The basic shape is round, but with this flat bottom. And the merest hint of a vertical ridge down one side, the front, giving it a beaked profile and an unmistakable resemblance to a human head. No sculptor in the world would touch that rock. It is perfect like it is. I heaved it up into my arms, carried it back to the car and thumped it down in the boot.

  After I’d checked into a motel – the Mountain View in Moore Street, opposite the camping ground – I sat in the window and smoked a joint. Ruapehu was still shrouded in cloud. Shafts of yellow light fell on the greeny-black hills behind Old Station Road. It wasn’t cold and the rain had stopped. I decided to walk back down Burns Street.

  At the corner of Bracken and Burns Streets – Thomas Bracken, Robbie Burns – I suddenly realised: two rivers. There are two rivers. The town was built in a clearing at the junction of two rivers. The Mangateitei, the Mangawhero. They join just below the marae, just above our old place. The headstone had come from the Mangateitei, but it was the Mangawhero that ran behind the house. I must have known this before. I’d forgotten.

  I walked over to the bridge that crosses the Mangawhero and goes into Maungarongo Marae and leaned on the rail, looking into the water. Elegant, creamy toetoe heads bent over the swiftly running water. There were big grey boulders sitting in the stream bed. It looked undisturbed for a thousand years. That was when I felt a slight qualm about taking the rock from the river. As if I had done something I was not meant to do.