The blind eel swam around the bathtub happily.
The stranded paua french-kissed the air.
(2010)
Elizabeth Smither, ‘Removing the Subsidy on Butter’
An item on the radio: ‘Ten years ago today
we removed the subsidy on butter’
and instantly the very evening:
we were sitting on steps like bleachers
outside a cabin at the beach
and inside someone was frying in butter
our last cooked in butter dish.
We wouldn’t be able to afford it.
We felt as if the sun had sunk.
It just had, leaving a poignant dusk
in which the smell of frying butter
came as a grace note. Should we put in
a couple of eggs for good measure
Fabergé eggs, gold-encrusted?
What would the world be without butter?
It was as though they had changed the currency
no more gold coins, no doubloons.
We looked at our sunburnt knees
felt our sand-encrusted buffed skin
would never fulfil its promise now.
Slowly and tenderly we devoured the fish
as if we were dining at Maxims.
‘The end of an era,’ someone said
collecting the plates like a tired old waiter.
(1999)
Bill Manhire, ‘1950s’
My cricket bat. My football boots.
My fishing rod. My hula hoop.
My cowboy chaps. My scooter.
Draughts. Happy Families. Euchre.
Ludo. Snap. My Davy Crockett hat.
My bicycle. My bow and arrow.
My puncture kit. My cat.
The straight and narrow. Fancy that.
Snakes & Ladders. Alcoholics.
Pick-Up Sticks. My comics.
My periscope. My pirate sword.
The ocean main. The Good Lord.
My fort. My raft. My tunnel.
My flippers. My togs. My snorkel.
The magic wand. My colour-changing silks.
My catapult. My kite. School milk.
My xylophone. My knucklebones.
My boxing gloves. My ukulele.
My bubblegum. My bongo drums.
The Royal Tour. Aunt Daisy.
My flat top. My crew cut.
My pack of cards. My tree hut.
My Hornby train. My autograph book.
My secret code. My sideways look.
The Famous Five. The Secret Seven.
Tarzan of the Apes. My idea of Heaven.
The empty sky. Haere mai.
My View-Master. Sticking plaster.
My Go outside and play. My ANZAC Day.
My tip-up truck. My saying fuck.
My Did you not hear what I said.
My Mr Potato Head. My Go to bed.
My Do you wanna bet.
My chemistry set. My I forget.
My clove hitch. My reef knot.
My I forgot.
Korea. Measles. Mumps. Down in the dumps.
My Just William. Counting to a million.
The Invercargill March. My false moustache.
The King and I. Reach for the Sky.
My stamps from Spain and San Marino.
The Winter Show. The Beano.
Cinerama. Orange fizz.
My toy soldiers. Suez.
My pocket knife. Eternal Life.
My Black Prince. My fingerprints.
My plink-a-plunk. You dirty skunk.
My plunk-a-plink. Invisible ink.
(2010)
Hinemoana Baker, ‘Methods of Assessing the Likely Presence of a Terrorist Threat in a Remote Indigenous Community’
Wake in the dark to the sound of a log
dropping to the ground in a distant timber yard
a train uncoupling in the village
the growl of something old
angry and tethered.
No. It’s just your wife’s gentle snore.
Don’t allow the year to scare
the substance out of you—a woeful
fight between a toddler and a swarm of bees.
A predetermined sonata, but screamed.
Hide your Christmas funds in the empty
World War Two artillery shell.
When it matters most
have someone bend over your bed
to adjust the pillows, lifting and opening.
When she says Please don’t leave me
Say No, it is you who is leaving me.
Choose the avocado and the yellow ballpoint
with the testament This pen was stolen
from Finn McCool’s Irish Pub
712 Great South Road Manukau City.
For your final meal demand
beer and jaffa custard plus those twig-thin
chocolate spirals at two dollars ninety-five a dozen.
A fine writing implement melting between your fingers.
When someone says a pole without a flag
respond a woman in her pyjamas kneeling
on concrete. Post something
to PO Box 47 Taneatua
then wait for the small, brown flowers
to burst open. Listen to the
newspaper-reading in the next room
the crack of the page under your writing hand
something metal, unoiled
turning in the wind.
(2010)
Being the Other
Harry Ricketts, from How to Live Elsewhere
My godmother Margaret is one reason I came to live in New Zealand in 1981. She left England for Auckland in the 1950s to work for Longman Green, the educational publishers, and travelled round the country selling textbooks. One birthday she sent me a ruler and a book with a light blue-green cover called Wonder Tales of Maoriland. I liked the tales, but preferred the ruler. Embedded in the side, marking the inches and centimetres, were tiny rectangles of New Zealand woods with names I’d never heard of: kauri, rimu, matai, totara. It was heavier and thicker than the rulers the other boys had. This made it hard to spin across the classroom off your finger, but the extra weight and thickness made it a good fighting ruler in our constant wars, Cavaliers vs Roundheads,Yankees vs Confederates, boarders vs dayboys.
*
I still had that ruler in the freezing winter of 1962–3 when I was 12 and in my last year at prep school in Kent. The ruler formed an integral part of the marble-slide inside my desk. You put the marble down the round cavity in the top right-hand corner where the ink-well had once fitted. The marble ran down the carefully slanted ruler and through a maze of books, including Kennedy’s Second Latin Primer, before dropping out of another hole into your hand. That at least was the idea; usually the marble got stuck halfway.
We were taught Latin by Mr Maurice. He had a bald head, podgy face, pince-nez and small scrubby moustache. When he took evening prep, he would pad about the dining-hall in green carpet slippers, going ‘Er-hm! Er-hm!’ and making us jump. If he caught anyone mucking about, he would explode: ‘What do you mean by it, you intolerable little mountebank!’ Occasionally he would vary the last word, calling Collard or O’Brien ‘an intolerable little Sassenach’. We had no idea what ‘mountebank’ or ‘Sassenach’ meant, but the words inspired instant fear. In fact, I didn’t often get shouted at. Mr Maurice quite liked me because I was keen on cricket, and cricket was the school’s main sport. (The headmaster, Mr Maurice’s younger brother, had opened the batting for Kent in the 1920s.) If he leaned over you, Mr Maurice’s breath often had a funny smell, a bit like disinfectant, which I later realised was whisky.
One morning he was giving back our Latin exercises. He had set us the opening lines of Ovid’s Tristia 3, 10, in which Ovid describes his exile on the Black Sea among the Sarmatians, the Bessi and the Getae. The extract ended with the couplet:
Saepe sonant moti glacie pendente capilli,
et nitet inducto candida barbu gelu.
Often their hair tinkles with hanging icicles
and their beards gleam white with a coat of frost.
I hadn’t been able to make head or tail of the passage, and my translation, covered in red ink, was handed back without a word. Rogers, however, was asked to read out his translation to the class. He was a dayboy and relatively new to the school: small, hunched, uninterested in sport. The reading was a revelation. Rogers’ translation not only made sense of the passage, it was all in rhyme. After the lesson, various boys, including myself, accused Rogers of swanking, showing off. Rogers didn’t back down. He said that, as the Latin was poetry, he assumed we were supposed to translate it into poetry. Like everyone else, I pretended not to believe him, but secretly I envied him, even admired him. He knew there was an elsewhere beyond cricket, The Shadows and Sherlock Holmes, and wasn’t afraid to say so.
I knew it, too, dimly. But I wasn’t so brave, and hid behind cricket. All the same I knew books could take you to a place where you could forget about Mr Maurice, loneliness, homesickness. During my five years at prep school, I read and re-read favourite authors like Arthur Ransome, Rosemary Sutcliff, C.S. Lewis, and had just discovered J.R.R. Tolkien. Each could transport you to a self-contained world. Of course I didn’t consciously explain it to myself like this, but it was that sense of a whole other world—safe, unchanging, reassuring—which kept drawing me back.
Ransome’s world of boating and camping in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads was attractive because it was described in such detail it was possible to imagine the adventures really happening. (You could imagine being the anxious Titty, dowsing for water with a forked hazel stick in Pigeon Post, or, being Dick, rescuing the cragfast sheep in Winter Holiday.) And the children were allowed to go off unsupervised with hardly any adults to interfere. Sometimes those few adults even misjudged the children and had to apologise to them. This was particularly gratifying.
The appeal of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books was different but complementary. It was the pull of being taken to an impossible medieval world of talking animals, magic and marshwiggles, and temporarily believing it might be true. The spell of Narnia worked again and again until the summer before the Ovid extract when my friend Bowring with the lazy eye explained that the books weren’t magic really, just Christianity in disguise. I could see at once he was right. I felt tricked, and Narnia permanently lost its appeal.
Another friend, Alder, whispered the plot of The Lord of the Rings to me after lights out. It took him a week, and I ended up with a very confused notion of what actually happened. But he managed to convey enough of the strangeness and excitement to make me hunt out the first volume in the school library. After that first overwhelming encounter with Middle Earth, I used to escape there at least once a year throughout my teens. Certain episodes became special landmarks along the way—the first meeting with Aragorn in the inn at Bree, Gandalf’s fight with the Balrog on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, the overthrow of Saruman—and I would always take these as slowly as possible.
It’s the same now with books I regularly re-read. I look forward to the visit to Lyme in Persuasion or the alcoholic Stringham’s hilarious but poignant appearance at his mother’s party in Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant. The trouble, of course, with the elsewhere which books provide is that, however immersed we may feel in the worlds of Jane Austen or Anthony Powell, we know that—as with the past—all we can ever be is ‘down there on a visit’. Margaret Atwood puts it crisply in her collection of lectures Negotiating with the Dead: ‘A book is another country. You enter it, but then you must leave: like the Underworld, you can’t live there.’
*
Back in the winter of 1962–3 I might not have been able to translate Ovid, let alone turn the lines into rhyme. And it certainly never occurred to me to connect the weather in the poem to the weather icing the classroom windows and frosting our breath. But, if I could only have grasped it, my childhood did have something in common with Ovid’s exile.
Boarding school is a kind of exile, particularly if your parents are living overseas. Of course, unlike Ovid, we were allowed to go home for the holidays. (That is, assuming Ovid really was sent to the Black Sea. Some recent scholars have argued that he never left Rome at all, but simply took up the poem of exile as another way of reinventing himself.) From the ages of eight to 18, we spent two-thirds of the year at school. As a result, school became real life, and home became the Lake District Narnia we escaped to in the intermissions between real life. This appeared to suit some boys. They felt reassured by the routine, the rituals, the rules. (It is still sometimes claimed that boarding school helps to make you independent. It is just as likely to institutionalise you, make you too subservient to authority.) Some boys liked the sport, and life at school was certainly easier if you were good at games. Some boys must have had unhappy home lives, and for them it was school which offered the escape. Some even liked the interminable semolina and tapioca puddings, gripfix and frogspawn.
*
I’ve lived in New Zealand now for over 20 years and retain a recognisably English accent. Though this is less pronounced than it used to be, strangers still sometimes ask me: ‘Where are your roots?’ or ‘Where do you come from—originally?’ I usually say, ‘England,’ because it’s simple and accurate enough. But occasionally I try to be more exact and say, ‘The British army.’ My father was a professional soldier in the Worcestershire Regiment, and life in the army was peripatetic. Until I was 10, when my father retired to work for the regiment as a civilian, we moved every two years or so: London, Malaya, Epsom, Worcester, Hong Kong, Worcester. Like most army officers, my father put my name down at birth for a prep school, followed by a public school (Wellington College, Berkshire). It was the done thing, and it made sense: wherever he and my mother might be posted, school would become the stable factor in my life. Which explains how I came to go to boarding school shortly before my eighth birthday. My father was by then in Hong Kong, so it was left to my mother to stay in England till the start of summer term 1958, take me to my new school, say goodbye, and fly to Hong Kong to join my father. The flight, which then took two days with multiple stops, must have been very hard for her.
*
Ovid’s Tristia, my nomadic childhood, living now in New Zealand: these have set me thinking about the difference between exile and immigration. On the face of it, the distinction seems straightforward. Exile (like becoming a refugee) is usually compelled; immigration is usually voluntary. In her memoir, My Invented Country, the Chilean novelist Isabel Allende widens the gap by claiming that exiles live in and for the past, while immigrants live in and for the future. The contrast seems clear enough until you realise that although Allende continually presents herself as a US immigrant, almost all the memoir is a loving recreation, reinvention, of the Chile she left in 1975 when Pinochet took power—hence the title. So, perhaps the distinction between exile and immigration is narrower, more tenuous, than it might seem. Perhaps it is a state of mind rather than anything clear and separate. At some subconscious level, what you learn from a shifting childhood (perhaps also from becoming an immigrant later in life) is that you don’t have a homeland any more, you don’t have roots as such. What you have instead, and it’s not inherently better or worse, is a series of imaginary homelands. One of mine, ironically, is now the very prep school which was once a place of exile.
As for Rogers, I met him again at a dinner party in Wellington in the mid-1980s. He was on a visit to New Zealand as a representative of the British parliamentary Defence Committee. His brief was to try to change the Lange Government’s stand on keeping New Zealand nuclear free. He asked me what I thought about the policy. I told him I agreed with it, and tried to explain that staying nuclear free wasn’t an exclusively Labour Party issue, since over two-thirds of the population supported it. I suggested it was partly a matter of principle, partly that New Zealand, being small but proud, didn’t like being bullied by the U
S or the UK or anybody else. But Rogers knew better. He knew the Lange Government was forcing an unpopular position on an unwilling electorate. Eventually, to change the subject, I reminded him of Mr Maurice’s Latin lessons and told him how much I had secretly admired him for translating Ovid into rhymed verse. He had entirely forgotten the whole incident.
*
The grown-up Rogers sounded not only complacent but plummy. Which suggests that, if nothing else, my ear was starting to adapt to living in New Zealand. Accents matter so much in English; they are such a defining feature. To lose your original accent, or at least to modify it, usually marks some inner change. Two public school friends of mine who experienced similarly mobile army childhoods finished up in Canada and Australia respectively. Charles works on the ferries around Vancouver. His accent now is a wonderful hybrid, neither quite Canadian nor quite English, a highly distinctive amalgam all his own. Andrew works in Canberra. He sounds totally Aussie to me (though apparently Australian friends think he still sounds a bit pommie). In his case, changing his accent was a conscious choice, part of rejecting an older self he no longer wanted to identify with. He left school shortly before he would have been kicked out (for smoking, drinking and other misdemeanours). We then lost touch for 35 years but re-established contact recently, thanks to the Internet. Andrew told me that when he said goodbye to our house-master, as an ironic gesture, he presented him with a carton of 200 Guards, the house-master’s preferred brand of cigarette.
Things can work the other way round. After W.H. Auden went to live in New York in 1939, his accent shifted noticeably. He started using a fronted ‘a’ in words like ‘ranch’ and ‘afternoon’. (In other words, he pronounced ‘a’ as in ‘manse’ not ‘a’ as in ‘dance’.) This made him sound more American. It also made him sound more northern English, which was appropriate since he had been born in York and brought up in Birmingham. So, in his case, going to live elsewhere allowed him to regain part of an earlier self, a self sealed over by years of boarding school and Oxford. Something similar seems to have happened to my friend Matthew. He grew up in England, then went to work in Canada where he acquired a Canadian accent. On coming to live in New Zealand, however, he just naturally reverted to his original English accent.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 129