There was a new moon with the old moon in its arms, shining in the sky directly ahead of me as I walked further down Burns Street. And one star, Venus. The clouds had all gone silver and the spaces behind were turning blue now. I cut through an empty section to the river bank and walked along it so as to come out behind our old place. There used to be a macrocarpa hedge, an old wooden gate, then you climbed down an earth bank to the river.
Well, it’s all changed. They’ve bulldozed the river-bank and built a massive, expensive ski-lodge thing where the hedge used to be. It was empty. The other six sections on the subdivided land are unimproved. Just grass and wooden pegs. I didn’t linger.
In my mind I still can see the orchard and the gardens. I can place the greengage tree, the peach and the nectarine, the almond and the quince, the snowball, the lilac and the honeysuckle. I know where the hundred-headed cabbage tree Bill Smith cut down, stood. I know where the tree ferns, the pongas were. The beech tree, tawai, which sheltered the daffodils and the grape hyacinths, was by the front gate, pansies and sweet william grew in the beds beside the veranda room and behind the garage was the flat tray of an old truck which I called a ship and went voyaging on. Then the vegetable garden, the chook run and the long grass tangling down to the river. It was on the overgrown asphalt of the tennis court I stood one night, looked up and saw for the first time in memory the vast stretch of the Milky Way over my head, the stars blazing like coloured stones. Next to that was the sewage tank, where I used to lift the ceramic air-vent cover to smell the fruity, pungent, mysterious odour of ordure rising from the pit below.
It’s not in the world any more, it’s in memory. Like you.
After that I walked back into town. On the way someone stopped and asked me how to get to the Youth Hostel. And I knew where to send them. That felt good. Thirty years away and I could still give directions.
I was on my way to the pub. Across from it, I felt this weird hesitation. I’d been in the lounge bar that afternoon and didn’t want to return there. But I was afraid to go into the public bar. And I nearly didn’t. Then I thought, this is ridiculous, took a breath and entered.
It was packed. I was certainly the only stranger and just about the only Pakeha in a crowd of fifty or so. They didn’t all stop talking when I entered, which has happened to me before. A lot of eyes were logging me though, as I walked to the bar and ordered a glass of Waikato from the barmaid. My voice sounded thick and strange and I stumbled over my words when she asked me was it a pint I wanted? She poured one anyway and gave it to me and I paid and then headed for an unoccupied corner of the bar beside the telephone on the wall.
It took all of that drink and most of the next before I felt OK again. I watched the pool game. Gradually, I sorted out who the kaumatua were. I made eye contact with this crusty old farmer in a Swandri with a big bone carving round his neck. Then I got a nod from the fine, raw-boned Maori man of about fifty who presided at one of the two long tables running the length of the room.
Every now and then a new person would come in and request one of the numbered handles hanging on the wall at the back of the service area. I didn’t know what they were. I thought they might be everyone’s own particular drinking vessel. But then why number them? The barmaid was about to be relieved by the bar manager, when a shambling man with soft velvety eyes and dishevelled clothes came and asked for credit. The bar manager just shook his head.
When it was time for the barmaid to knock off, she took a small plastic bucket out into the crowd. She went to the table where the pool players and the dart players were, shook the bucket so it jingled, then held it out to one of them. He chose a token and laid it on the table. She picked it up and looked at it. ‘Number 6!’ she called. A ripple went through the bar. Laughter. Out of the crowd stepped the shambling man who’d been refused credit. He had handle number 6. The bar manager gave him fifty dollars and he shouted all his mates.
These people know what they’re doing, I thought.
The barmaid was lovely. A woman in her thirties, with light golden skin and freckles, kind brown eyes. She bought herself a drink and leaned on the bar next to me.
‘Where you from?’ she asked.
‘I’m from here,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ she said, quick as thought, ‘don’t you miss it?’
I nearly burst into tears. My eyes were swimming.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do. I had to come back to find out how much I miss it.’
There was a slim young man who’d passed a few comments in my general direction. He’d been using the phone. Now, on his way back to make another call, he brushed against me.
‘It’s OK, brother,’ he said. ‘I won’t bite your eye out.’
I looked sideways at him.
‘I should hope not,’ I said.
The barmaid cracked up. When she could talk again she told him:
‘You picked the wrong Pakeha there!’
He shuffled his feet and grinned at me. He was trying to find a ride back to Mahia, his mates apparently having already left without him. I thought of offering him a lift over to the Bay but decided against it. I saw him later on, sweet-talking his girlfriend as they stumbled up Clyde Street into the night.
Well, after that, I could have stayed until closing time and gone on to the party as well, if there was one. But I needed to eat. I said goodbye to the barmaid, finished off my drink and went across the road to a restaurant. The pork in lemon sauce with baked kumara and the inevitable carrots was really very good. A couple of glasses of the house red. Coffee. It was hard to believe this was Ohakune, once one of the more depressing spots on the globe. There was even a band playing at the pub.
When I got back to the motel I pulled the rock out of the boot of the car and brought it into my room. It sat on the floor like the head of some staunch god from old Polynesia. It was then I realised what a fine one I’d found. And that I was allowed to take it. Because it was for you, and you were a good man. It was a comfort to have it there. I talked to it as if it was you. I was a bit drunk.
Lying in the big, soft bed with the window open and the curtains unpulled, I could hear the music of waters. I could hear both the Mangawhero and the Mangateitei chuckling south from the mountain. I realised that every night for the first ten years of my life, this is what I had gone to sleep to. This is what the barmaid meant when she asked me if I missed it. For the third night in a row, I lay in bed and wept.
Later I woke up and heard in the still night air the sound of a diesel engine toiling round the mountain. The northbound train. About half an hour later, the south express went through, just like it always did. I can remember when they were steam trains, but I don’t mind the sound of a diesel. That distant roar of trains and the music of waters, every night of my life until I was ten. And here they were again. Here I was again. I slept like a baby.
Next morning I went up the mountain. I saw the place where the elephant is buried, on the right after you go under the railway bridge. Just past the entrance to Tongariro National Park, at the beginning of the Mountain Road, I turned off to the left, crossed a small wooden bridge and stopped the car. The river here is the Mangawhero. I waded into the cold, clear, swift waters and pulled out another stone. It was flat, crescent-shaped, with green river weed growing on it. I got it because I thought we might need a surface to engrave on. I dropped it into the boot beside the other one and went on up the mountain with a fair amount of ballast in the back.
It was another cloudy day. Gradually, the beech forest thinned out. The trees became bonsai-ed before they disappeared altogether. The earth was a volcanic red, a deep slate purple, a sandy brown. Soon there was no vegetation at all, just bare rock and the white slash of the foaming river boiling past boulders. Ahead I could see only the enormous side of the mountain, disappearing into the mist. Vivid white drifts of snow lay banked randomly on slopes above the black clefts of crevices. I began to feel afraid.
There were boulders sitting on the road, some of
them big enough to squash a car. They just roll off the mountain. If they had come down a snowy slope, a black path like a stroke of calligraphy was left on the white. But my fear was for more than that. It was a kind of superstition. This is such an awesome landscape, so desolate and bleak and grand, that I didn’t know what I was doing there. I felt a kind of wrath building beneath my feet when I stopped the car and stood on a shale cliff overlooking a waterfall on the Mangawhero. This was my mountain but I didn’t belong there. I didn’t want to climb to the top. I didn’t want to ski down it. I just wanted to come close enough to feel the majesty and terror of it, then come away again.
At the top of the Mountain Road I saw iron huts, machinery and the chair-lift. There was nobody around. It looked like a human outpost on an alien planet. Or pictures I have seen of Antarctica. It looked like nowhere you would ever want to stay. I turned the car round and, very carefully, so as not to skid right off the side of the volcano, drove slowly away.
Then I took the Dreadnought Road to Rangataua and went on through Karioi and Tangiwai to Waiouru, where I stopped for breakfast. I turned off Highway 1 after Hihitahi and before Taihape and followed the Gentle Annie over to the Bay. Somewhere on that empty road the answer came to me. What to do about Ghosts of Empire. I realised we had to pull the script apart into its two constituent elements – the flashback story, the contemporary story – then, without preconceptions, put it back together again. If the stories were true stories, they would make their own arrangements with each other. If the film was worth making, there would be a way. I felt almost happy as I barrelled down the last hill out onto the Heretaunga Plains and headed for Havelock North.
At Bruno and Kathy’s new house we ate corned beef and I slept beneath a wide window full of stars. When I woke in the morning, it was as blue as forever. We drove out over the green hills of the farm to the redwoods and played hide and seek with Carlos and Louis in a hushed cathedral of giant trunks while down by the fenceline a PD gang brewed their morning tea. I showed Kathy the stones and, with a back seat full of apples and pears, was away again before midday.
It was about three o’clock in the afternoon when I finally reached Greytown. I drove straight through town to the graveyard on the wide bare plains of the south Wairarapa. Two old women with huge bunches of flowers wandered from grave to grave, adorning them. I could hear them talking conversationally to each other, to the dead. They laughed often. I put the round stone at the head of your grave and the flat stone at the foot. I strewed freshly mown grass over the bare earth and then I took a photograph of it. I told you where the stones had come from, speaking low under the fitful sun. The only thing I couldn’t work out was what to do with the white-painted wooden cross which identified the plot as yours. In the end I stuck it in the ground at the foot of the grave.
It was impossible not to think, standing there, of the flesh rotting off your bones. Perhaps it needed to be thought about. How else to conquer the fear of death? I contemplated the image of the bones coming through the beloved flesh of your face when it rose up unbidden before me. It has not troubled me since.
It was next morning, in Wellington, at her house in Miramar, that Gina showed me the writing you had done in Ashburn Hall. The draft and the notes of the report you had to make to your psychiatrist before she would discharge you. And the other, more personal fragments you wrote later, once you were in the habit of putting things down on paper.
Gina and I read it together at her kitchen table, laboriously, out loud, each of us helping the other decipher the tiny, almost illegible writing. Your words struck me with the force of a revelation.
It seems so coincidentally strange, then and now, that my discovery of this writing should have followed upon the placing of the stones. As if the act of sealing your grave had released your spirit at last and given it leave to speak. As if you had anticipated the questions I would ask after you had gone and supplied, as best you could, some answer.
You were not accustomed to express yourself in writing. Nothing else has survived. None of the poetry, for instance, that you said you would not show me. There is only a notebook, blank apart from a child’s scribble in the back, half the pages torn out and ‘Confidential’ written on the brown cover.
And the pages which I reproduce here, in an order which seems to make sense, as they were found, without your permission, in the hope they may make some things clearer than they presently are.
The Draft Summary
‘To be responsible for the good progress of one’s own life is terrifying. It is the most insufferable form of loneliness and the heaviest of responsibilities.’
D. H. Lawrence
There is nothing special about me and no one is going to help me just because I am me. I have been over-dependent on other people, specially on my wife for far too long. When my wife emerged from domesticity and began to live her own life, although I helped and encouraged her to do this I was not prepared for the results. Her refusal to be a ‘wife’ in the former (‘old-fashioned’) sense has entirely upset my pattern of living and I have been most resentful about it.
As my wife grew in confidence (interests widened) and her abilities developed she began more and more to become an independent person which, emotionally anyway, I refused to accept. There were long and bitter rows about this and I began to drink heavily and to become most abusive of her when I had been drinking. I also began to withdraw from people, to become very depressed and to develop strong and crippling anxieties. This affected my work at school and my relations with people – in fact I ceased to relate properly. I reached the point where I felt I needed help and asked to come to Ashburn Hall.
Going back into my family history I now realise that my father was a strongly authoritarian figure who protected but dominated my mother. I was expected to be a girl when I was born and was often told I should have been one. I became my mother’s confidant and the one she complained to and discussed with, her many grievances against my father. I think I identified myself with my mother and when I was able I always argued with my father. I disliked his authoritarian and arrogant ways but relied on him (through my mother often) to get what I wanted. I now believe there is a lot of mother identification and dependency in me and during the mourning process this was transferred to my wife. This was perhaps intensified by my refusal to take up the Opunake headmastership in 1963 (the year after my mother’s death) and my wife’s feeling of her strength perhaps for the first time. My mother had quite strong withdrawal patterns and often did things because my father wanted to and not because she wanted to. I have acted in the same way with my wife but have not really asserted myself to say and do what I want – but have blamed her.
I was brought up to believe that a wife was at home and that children (and wives) kept the rules of home made mainly by father. There is no doubt that, although I reject this ‘intellectually’, I wanted it emotionally – to be ministered to and looked after and supported – as I see most of my contemporaries are – they boast of it. Going further, my older children have not conformed to any of the patterns of behaviour I was brought up to accept and again, although I accept the social changes going on ‘intellectually’ my emotional reaction is against them. I have blamed my wife for their ‘behaviour’ which she accepts and condones. (Projection?)
I have finally accepted the fact that I am emotionally very immature and have formed a symbiotic attachment to my wife which is nowhere near ‘love’ in the proper sense or in the sense in which Fromm uses it. I now realise that my relations with other adults are not right because I am a selfish person in Fromm’s sense and have not really emerged from ‘omniscient, omnipotent childish dreams’.
I have always attached great importance to status and yet have been busy in recent months letting it slip away from me. I now think I was ‘getting back’ at my wife whose decisiveness and independence have developed rapidly in this period. I think I really want my wife to be at home to minister to and support me and that I operated and coul
d still operate this way. I see that under this ‘set-up’ I placed everything on my job as the worker and the breadwinner, identified myself in my job as Headmaster and thought this was enough. My wife refused to accept it and I was left adrift because I had placed so much dependency on her (transferred from my parents).
I believe too that my up-bringing was far too authoritarian and I have a deference to authority which is over-developed. I am over-sensitive to criticism and too anxious to please people, too prone not to rely on my own opinions and ideas and to listen and accept those of others too readily. I think I seek authority figures to depend on.
I also believe too much was done for me over the years and too little done by me – because I was ‘special’. This has led to an inner laziness which means I have little to give in adult relationships but expected much to be given to me because I was the special one. I do not believe I am a productive person in Fromm’s sense of the word, I believe I am his kind of ‘selfish’ person and that I have what he calls ‘the authoritarian conscience internalised’. He says ‘authoritarian good conscience springs from the feelings of obedience, dependence, powerlessness, sinfulness’ and continues by saying ‘dependence on irrational authority results in a weakness of will in the dependent person and, at the same time, whatever tends to paralyse the will makes for an increase in dependence: thus a vicious circle is formed’.
I suspect my guilt feelings are tied up with my parents and my religious upbringing and these as Fromm says ‘have proved to be the most effective means of forming and increasing dependency.’
I accept what Fromm says as far as I am concerned – ‘the affirmation of one’s life, happiness, growth, freedom is rooted in one’s capacity to love; in care, respect, responsibility and knowledge. If an individual is able to love productively he loves himself too; if he can love only others, he cannot love at all.’
The Autobiography of My Father Page 10