The regular drinking didn’t begin until you became a headmaster. Before that, you used always to go to the Club on a Friday night, but that was it. I never recall your coming home drunk in those days. You didn’t even keep alcohol in the house – only the bottles left after parties. When we moved to Huntly, both you and my mother started having a sherry before dinner. Gradually one sherry became two or three and at some point the drinking began to continue into the evening. And then she would drop out and you’d go on alone.
Your father’s father, whom you never knew, ‘died from booze’. Your own father was a fanatical teetotaller whose obsession with not drinking went so far that he attempted, with others of like mind, to prevent the entire country from indulging. I mean he was in the Alliance, the Temperance Union. You were a moderate drinker for the first part of your life, a classic alcoholic for the last twenty years or so. Alcohol destroyed you physically and in the end it probably killed you too. Several times in those last years you were diagnosed as having malnutrition; and people who drink a lot suffer a thinning of the walls of the blood vessels and thus become susceptible to strokes.
I’m still not sure if there is anything terribly wrong about this. Most of us drink, and we all die of something. Or is it, precisely, the wrongness, the sense of sin, that turns a common indulgence into a disease? The line between sociability and pathology is hard to trace and you, like many people, zig-zagged erratically back and forth across it. Initially, it was the pressure of work and your disintegrating marriage that made you drink. Later on, a major factor that kept you drinking was, simply, loneliness. Drink was your companion and most of your companions were drinkers. At Arbour House, where they insisted you abstain completely, you gave it up without a murmur. You had company there. There, you were never alone.
The drugs are a completely different story. Although you distrusted doctors, there wasn’t a pill invented you wouldn’t take if you were prescribed it. Among your notes I found the names of two of them: Mellaril and Tegretol.
Mellaril is an antipsychotic, one of the phenothiazines, a group that includes Thorazine and Largactil. They are used in the treatment of schizophrenia and manic depressive psychosis. The way they work has to do with their ability to inhibit or partially block dopamine receptors in the brain. This is also the reason for their ‘Parkinsonian’ side effects.
Mellaril is known colloquially among psychiatric patients as ‘Cock’s Kill’. Other side-effects include: mental depression (!), tremor, general rigidity, shuffling gait and slowness of movement, protrusion of the tongue, an inability to sit still and an inner restlessness. The side-effects do not necessarily end once the medication stops being taken; they may become permanent.
Tegretol is a sedative/hypnotic, one of the benzodiazepine group. It is used to control anxiety, overactivity and destructive behaviour in children and the symptoms of alcoholic withdrawal. It also has anticonvulsant properties.
You may have been given Tegretol to offset the side-effects of Mellaril. However it has side-effects of its own, including unsteadiness of gait, drowsiness, syncope, slurred speech, confusion and faulty memory.
I have listed only those effects I believe you may have suffered from. These two lists read like a description of your behaviour in later years. You exhibited all of these symptoms at one time or another.
The other psychiatric ‘treatments’ you were given – analysis, psychotherapy, ECT – you might perhaps have survived, had you not continued to take the drugs. But if you ever tried to stop, you became susceptible to panic attacks. Withdrawal, in other words. I don’t actually know how long you took those particular ones for. The last time I looked at your pills, those were not the names on the labels. You had moved on to antidepressants.
It was only in the last few months of your life that you were relatively drug-and aleohol-free. The twenty-year binge was over. The doctors finally ceased prescribing ever more and different weirdly named pills with incalculable main and side-effects. At the same time, you stopped drinking. I think this is why your mind seemed clearer towards the end. You came back just long enough to say goodbye.
What had not changed either, was the love you inspired in others. The respect that others gave you. Not very many of my friends, in those last years, met you. Without exception, those who did, remember you. Sometimes they only saw you for an afternoon, or at a party, or for a few minutes before a movie. But you always left an impression and it was always positive.
Similarly, the ordinary people in Greytown.
Dot, who came in to do your housework, with a heart as big as the world, loved you.
The nurses at Arbour House loved you. I remember them, very distressed, around your coffin, trying to get your hair to fall over your forehead the way it did when you were alive. But at least, at last, and forever, you had your teeth in.
Billy who did your garden, wordless, his mouth working, his eyes full of tears, outside the church (he got up from his sickbed to be there, but would not come inside), loved you.
Pat and Judy Ward, each taking one of my hands at the door as I went into the church, wordless too, loved you.
Pip Moran, red-faced Irish farmer, who used to come and see you every Friday in your last months, as he had twenty-five years before, in the pew beside me trying not to cry, loved you.
Your brother Brian, who said a boy could not have had a gentler older brother, loved you.
And many, many more.
This is a paradox unforeseen by Fromm: the man who did not love himself, loved by those who knew him.
It was your lack of guile, perhaps. Your truthfulness. Your kindness. Your good humour.
Most of all, I think it was your innate respect for other people that won their hearts. You were genuinely interested in others, you allowed them the room to declare themselves, you listened to what they said, you wanted what was best for them to happen.
You were a good man.
Going
When I left Wellington early Monday morning I had with me my inheritance, such as it is.
Gina and I sorted through your books. Works on the theory and practice of education, on socialism and communism, on psychology, history and literature. The Iliad and the Odyssey. A whole range of texts on medieval English history, which you had begun to study extramurally from Massey University a few years before. Several editions of Samuel Pepys’s Diary plus a three-volume biography by Arthur Bryant. Most of the plays of Bernard Shaw in old Penguin paperbacks. All the poetry of T. S. Eliot except Four Quartets. Your father’s copy of a biography of Peter Fraser. Your mother’s copy of A Golden Treasury of English Verse. The Poems of Tennyson with an inscription in the front from your older brother.
We gave the plays and Winston Churchill’s six-volume History of the Second World War to Frances. To Stephanie went the Pears Cyclopedia. Kathy has the Complete Works of Shakespeare. I took your thesis, your dictionary, the books on Tonga and Ohakune, and most of the poetry, but Gina kept the T. S. Eliot and the psychology books.
There were some real treasures amongst the things that had been left for me. Your walking stick, which belonged to your father before you, with a round knob of inlaid native woods, slightly worn where your thumb had worried at it. When I run my hand over it I think of your habitual gestures. You used to chew your thumb, the nail against the teeth of your lower jaw, your upper incisors pressing down on the fleshy pad. You also, like your father before you, chewed your tongue. Like him too, you would sometimes, completely unexpectedly, deliver someone a kick up the backside and then pretend it hadn’t happened.
There was your watch. Gina had had it cleaned and valued, because she was going to give it to Jamil, your eldest male grandchild. It turned out to be worth about $600 and she decided he was too young to be trusted with it. It’s self-winding, Swiss, from the sixties, presented to you when you left Greytown to take up the position at Huntly College. There’s an inscription on the back: ‘T.C. Edmond/From the pupils/Kuranui College’. You always had it
on a dirty old striped nylon strap but Gina bought a nice, slim, soft black leather one for it. It runs a little slow, which seems appropriate, even amusing. I haven’t worn a watch since I was a teenager, but I wear this one. It ticked at your wrist for twenty-five years and now it ticks at mine. If I take it off, it stops. I like that about it too.
Some clothes. Six or seven white cotton singlets. They’re very soft, they fit me perfectly now that I’ve finally begun to fill out a bit and I wear them all the time. They had your smell on them still. There was a moment when I took the last one out of the drawer to wear for the first time. Other items – a sleeveless pullover, a flannel shirt, one of the khaki army shirts you always wore when you gardened. You must have hung on to it since the war.
A few other things – the picture of Traff Nichol with the poem in your own hand underneath. I’ve rebuilt the frame and I’m having the glass replaced. Your coin collection, including a penny from 1868, worn so smooth you can hardly see Britannia on the front, Victoria on the back. Perhaps it came from the Trevarthens. A round pewter box with a flag and the name SS Port Denison on the lid – is that the ship Charlie and Ada went to England on in 1939? I think it may have been. It had in it all the buttons that had fallen off your shirts over the years, carefully kept for the day when someone would come to sew them back on. Your mother, perhaps, or one of the women who wanted to marry you once you were living alone again.
And there are the cuff-links you gave me when I brought Colleen to meet you. They are the most mysterious of all. They are small, round, each a raised half-sphere of inlaid coloured enamel. The mosaic makes a daisy-like flower. They are very old and very elegant and I never asked you where they came from. They, more than anything else, recall to me the man you might have been but never did become. A man who was handsome, debonair, stylish, confident and gay. A man of wit, intelligence and charm, who wanted the world to be a better place, and so set off into the heartland to help make it so.
These were the gifts of your youth, but the gifts of your age are your tragic example and the bitter wisdom of truth to be distilled from it.
I drove very fast that day, up the straight road north past Waikanae, Otaki, Foxton, Bulls. At Wanganui I turned off over the bridge and then again onto the River Road. I wanted to go up through Atene, Ranana, Hiruharama (Athens, London, Jerusalem), to Pipiriki. There was a vague thought in my mind that I might stop at the grave of James K. Baxter. Partly because I had never been there and partly because Jerusalem was a place you had remembered going to at a crucial stage in your life.
I didn’t enjoy the drive. The road is narrow and needs care. It’s sealed for about half its length, then turns to dust and metal. It was the landscape that depressed me. I thought it would be bush, not willow and scrub and eroding hill country pasture. In the upper reaches, when I did get into bush, it was afflicted with old man’s beard and looked blighted and sick. All the marae seem to be in good shape however, and there was a lot of building, painting, renovating going on along the way.
I did stop at Jerusalem, but only briefly. The road up to the church had a sign on it saying Keep Out. There are two graveyards, one on a hill overlooking the road, the other through a paddock just below the church. I wasn’t sure which one to go to first. I didn’t want to ask anyone either. It felt as if that small, closed, isolated, Catholic community probably didn’t welcome casual passers-by. In a way, I simply couldn’t be bothered. I’d had enough of graves.
I just sat there in the car and in the silence heard the twittering of a fantail, piwakawaka. The bird that laughed to see Maui jammed up between the legs of Hine-nui-te-po, so waking her and causing death to come into the world.
Kati, enough.
I just kept going after that, all the way to Raetihi, where I had lunch in a tearooms across from the Royal Picture Theatre. They made the tea with real tea-leaves. The cinema is still open. The first film I ever saw, The African Lion, I saw at the Majestic in Ohakune and then again the next week at the Royal.
Ruapehu was shrouded in cloud as I hummed past up the highway to National Park. I’ll have to wait till next time to see him in all his glory again. I cut across the back of Ngauruhoe and Tongariro, past Roto-a-ira. The lake lay calm and silver-grey beneath the snow-covered cones of the volcanoes. The bush is grand through there.
At Tokaanu I turned off again and went up the western side of Taupo. I like that road, with its rocky outcrops. Once I reached Whakarnaru Dam the boredom of the Waikato began. I had a hamburger in Hamilton and was back in Auckland by 6.30 that night.
THE SEA
I do not think I ever saw you cry. If any man had a reason to shed tears, it was you, but I suspect you had lost the ability. You could not let go. Had you ever in all your adult life sobbed your heart out, perhaps things would have changed for you. Who knows? I do not even really know that you didn’t. It’s just what I think.
I’ve had two dreams about you since you died. One of them was complex, full of people and incidents and rooms. Gradually I became aware of your presence. You were quite cheerful, in your quiet, unboisterous way. I turned to you and said: ‘But don’t you realise, you’re dead?’ And you looked just a little exasperated, characteristically misunderstood, as you replied: ‘I know!’ We embraced then and I could feel through the material of the bathrobe you had on, your half-erect penis. I pulled back from the embrace and we looked at each other in full and complete knowledge of what had passed between us, but without further words.
The second dream was just a few nights ago. I recall nothing about it except that I cried and cried and cried and it was all for you. When I awoke, my eyes were dry.
I remember the day we left Ohakune. It was the summer holidays, a fine morning, everything sparkling in the clear mountain air. We were all in the car and we were driving up Burns Street ‘for the last time’. I looked out the window and saw Martin Miller walking past under the veranda of the double-fronted two-storey wooden building that stood on the corner of Clyde and Burns Streets. I used to think it was a survivor of the great fire of 1917. Richard Morton, another boy in my class at school, lived there. It looked like a set for a film of one of the gothic tales of Ronald Hugh Morrieson.
Anyway, I looked out the window of the car and there was Martin, my namesake, walking along minding his own business, heading off into an afternoon all of his own. He didn’t notice us. And I said to myself: I’ll never be happy again. What a melancholy thought for a ten-year-old! And it wasn’t true, either. I’ve been happy many times since then.
What I was silently lamenting was the rupture of the singularity of my life – our life – thus far. Thus far, it had been all of a piece. Now things were going to change. In a way, the memory relates to your earliest memory – it was the upset of moving, to use your phrase, that made me say those words to myself. This is another part of my inheritance from you, a fear of the future which I still sometimes feel. An inability to let go of what might not be perfect but is at least known.
I’m feeling it now. I don’t want to let go of this writing. I don’t want to finish, because that means you die again, or die a little more. This has been a long goodbye and now it is ending I do not want it to. It has been a wonderful indulgence to sit here and talk to you as if you were still able to hear me, to write as if you were still able to read me, to say the things I did not find words for while you lived. It has occupied the space in my head and the time of my life for some months now. And suddenly there is no more to say.
I had meant to call up who you were both for those who knew you and those who did not. Now it seems that you have entirely escaped the net of words I set to catch you. Every attempt describes, not yourself, but someone who resembles you exactly without partaking of your essence. Is there any one image I can find that is different? Then perhaps I could end.
If I could recall in language the exact timbre of your voice, for instance? Or the inimitable expressions that were only yours? You always called me, simply, ‘Boy’ No wonder �
�� with all those daughters, I suppose it made sense just to use the simple descriptive noun. You kept calling me that until the end. I was thirty-eight when you died.
I know you would have liked more sons. I used to think the extension of the family to six children was an attempt to get another boy. You and my mother practised family planning. Beginning in the late forties and continuing through the fifties, babies kept arriving. 1947, 1950, 1952, 1954, 1957, 1959. The first four of us came at regular two-year intervals, right on time, in the summer holidays, just as you had planned. And then something changed, because the two youngest were born in June and September. They were daughters too. There were five girls, and me. I suppose the fact I was the ‘only boy’ made the bond between us even stronger. We were on our own, you and I, in a world of women.
When I took you to see Illustrious Energy – my first screen credit – in Wellington, we ran into Judy Rymer. I introduced you and she began to praise my contribution to the film, but you cut her short. The credit was yours, you explained. You’d fathered me. I was a chip off the old block.
Told straight, the story isn’t that funny. But it was funny at the time. It was the habitual understatement you used, your way of suggesting that what you said was true and at the same time utterly absurd. Perhaps you were also trying to save me the embarrassment of praise by taking it on yourself. Public praise always discomforted you and you probably thought I was like you in that way.
The Autobiography of My Father Page 13