I was if you wanted me to be.
There are two stories about the war I like that didn’t get onto the tapes. You left from the Auckland docks, sailing at midnight on a Friday. On the evening of your embarkation, you and some others went to see a film at the Civic in Queen Street. It was Casablanca, with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. The year was 1943, so it must have just been released. When you told me about it, you sang a snatch of the famous song: ‘You must remember this/A kiss is but a kiss/A smile is still a smile/As time goes by …’
Some time after your arrival at your destination, Fiji, you heard your name had been posted in a list of deserters. You went to look. Sure enough, there it was, up on the board with the others. The Army had called you up, but, having already enlisted with the Air Force, you ignored the conscription notice. So they treated you as a deserter. You never said what happened about it, but I remember how it amused you. To have escaped, successfully, for once, the tedium of their authority.
Among the things I learned from you – a love of history, how to garden, to tell the truth ‘if you can’ – one thing stands out. At the Blue Baths in Rotorua when we were on holiday there, you spent hours down the shallow end of the pool, teaching me to swim. Your patience was exceptional. You never even looked like losing your temper. When you did finally coax me into splashing a few strokes on my own, I don’t know who was the more thrilled. Probably me, because not only had I done it but I had pleased you as well.
I still occasionally meet people who ask when we are introduced: ‘Are you Trevor Edmond’s son?’ It’s the way they say it. As if your name were an absolute guarantee of rare quality.
A last confession: there were times I sat with you when I wanted you to die, when it seemed the misery of your existence was so great, the physical and mental pain you suffered so overwhelming, that you would be better off dead. I know you didn’t feel like that yourself. Your tenacity to live was tremendous, unremitting. Even after that massive stroke, your body lived on twenty-four hours, unwilling to give up the ghost. So it must have been for my own sake that I wanted your life to end – so that I would not feel any more the pain of your existence.
The day after your seventieth birthday I took you for a drive to Lake Ferry. It was cold, blustery weather with ragged grey clouds hanging over the hills, intermittent rain and a cutting wind from the south. Often I had to talk you into coming out to the coast with me, but this time you were quite keen.
When we got to where Lake Wairarapa flows out to the ocean, I parked outside the hotel, just before the dirt road leading down to the beach began. We could see the drinkers in the upstairs bar, their silhouettes in front of the big windows.
You stayed in the car. It was too cold for you to get out and you were too frail to go walking on the beach anyway. I followed the road until I reached the bridge over the stream and then struck out across black sand towards the sea. The water was a dirty brown close in, a greenish grey further out, capped with white. The horizon was close, yellow, hazed.
I walked along, in the roar and spray of a dumping surf, to where the lake debouches. It was a narrow channel between sandbanks, only about ten yards wide. The tide was going out. Whitebaiters perched along the nearer side, some wearing waders out in the swift flowing water, others hugging the bank. They looked resigned – to the cold, the rain, their fate. I watched for a little while as one or other of them decanted a meagre catch into plastic buckets, then dipped their traps in the current again. A dog circled around, wanting me to throw the stick it had in its mouth.
I was thinking of you, sitting in the car. I hoped you were watching me. I wanted you to keep an eye on me while I was down there. It was an old feeling, like at the Iron Pot in Napier years ago when you waited a whole afternoon while I, about eight, puddled and pored in the mud, looking for living things amongst the rusted, barnacled relics of the whaling days.
What were you thinking about for those twenty minutes or so? Did you, in fact, see me disappear round the bend of the road then reappear, a small dark figure trudging seaward over the sand? Did you see me go down over the ridge of the high-tide mark to the seaside and then come back up again where the whitebait fishermen were?
Or were you thinking of your own life, the times you went down to the sea, or out onto the water? In your early years at Lyall Bay and then, later, at Seatoun, the sound of the surf must have been constantly in your ears. Was it that you wanted to hear again, distantly, through the car window? And to watch the leap of white water above the black line of the sand as a bigger wave broke?
You were different that last time. You were composed. The structure of your thought had not changed, so much as your acceptance of it. You’d recall the tragedies and triumphs of your life in the same measured tone. Even the anger you felt towards those who had betrayed you was muted. ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ you’d say.
When I finally did meander back to the car, you said you weren’t too cold. Neither of us mentioned the possibility of a drink, although we both probably would have liked one.
I just turned the car around and, leaving the grey-green, heaving, white-capped sea behind, we made our way back home again.
Copyright
First published 1992
This ebook edition 2012
Auckland University Press
University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland
© Martin Edmond 1992
This book is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism, or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the prior permission of Auckland University Press.
eISBN 978 1 86940 508 3
The cover illustration, Cross (1959) by Colin McCahon, is reproduced with the permission of the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust.
The Tom Waits song on page 15 is reproduced by permission of Warner Chappell Music Australia.
Distributed outside New Zealand by
Oxford University Press
The Autobiography of My Father Page 14