by Tom Scott
It was the same with the submarine Micky and I built in the house paddock out of a rusting, corrugated-iron water tank that we tipped on its side. The Ogles, Hoggards and Hennigans had rubbish dumps filled with treasure at the bottom of banks at the back of their farms. Rummaging around in the bush and blackberry that lined the meandering Oroua River we came home laden with old radios, lamps, engine parts, broken Douglas chairs—just what you need in a German U-boat. Most highly prized of all was a World War One gas mask, which obviously the captain of the submarine wore in case the rest of the crew were overcome with fumes—always a risk 10,000 leagues beneath the sea. Most of the fuming came from our father: ‘Clean this shit up. It’s like a Māori pa around here!’
Michael, Sally and me.
STORY-TELLING DIDN’T START WITH THE Ogles. In the primers when they called for morning talks, my hand was always the first up. One Monday I was describing how I had been to the planet Mars at the weekend. The teacher sighed and gently suggested that I might be exaggerating. I pointed to the dumbest boy in the class. ‘Gary came with me, didn’t you, Gary?’ Thrilled to be included in this epic voyage into space, even if the details were of necessity somewhat hazy, Gary obligingly said yes. She gave up at this point.
I broke myself of this habit next spring when mother ducks followed by waddling trains of ducklings appeared on the Hennigans’ pond just beyond the woolshed. I got up before dawn, crept into the flax bushes and kidnapped a tiny duckling for my morning talk. I carried it home carefully and tucked it just under the rim of a sack full of potatoes in the washhouse. I would smuggle it to school in my lunchbox later. It would be a triumph. It would make me a star.
Halfway through breakfast I sneaked out to check on it. It is not by accident that the term ‘dead duck’ has entered the lexicon. I rolled back the sacking and there it was—still cute, but stiff as a board with its tiny webbed feet pointing skyward. I disposed of the body in tears and returned to the table weighed down with remorse.
We didn’t have many books at home, but we had a radio that I listened to faithfully every night after dinner right through to bedtime. After that, when a suitable interval had passed, I crept into the hall and lay on the floor next to the living-room door and listened some more to it blaring through the cracks. Often my laughter during The Goon Show gave me away, yet despite clips around the ears from my father, I was always back again the following night.
I loved knowing what was happening in the world. My favourite words were, ‘To end the news, here are the main points again …’ Most afternoons in Standard 3 we had a general knowledge quiz, which I loved. I was devastated when my classmates eventually complained that it wasn’t fair because I knew all the answers. The teacher agreed and I was banned from taking part. It was the same when it came to telling jokes. I sulked badly when I was told I had to let other kids have a turn. My twin sister Sue, normally shy and retiring, was finally able to participate.
Sue is the life and soul of every party now, a terrific painter and a very funny woman, able to tell shocking stories against herself. After her first trip overseas she freely admitted she was staggered to find in France that they didn’t speak English with a French accent. When I had finished laughing I asked her why she had thought that would be the case. ‘That’s how it is in the movies.’ Then she grinned. ‘It gets worse. When I got off the plane in Los Angeles on the way over, I was so proud that New Zealand companies like Coca-Cola, Hertz and Kellogg’s had taken over the world.’
Very few photographs were taken of us together as children. Those that do exist depict me squinting cautiously at the camera, bracing myself for something, and Sue looking dazed, her mouth slightly agape, also expecting the worst. Half in jest, she says her school days were miserable because of me. Teachers kept asking her why she wasn’t as clever as her brother Tommy. You would never tire of hearing it. I wasn’t solely to blame. She was severely traumatised by the actions of a troubled boy I’ll just call Paul, whose colossal, terrifying mother came to fetch him after school in shapeless hillbilly garments, gumboots and an apron made from a fraying sack.
One morning, Paul was shrieking repeatedly that he needed to do a poo. The teacher didn’t believe him, refused to let him go to the toilet and exiled him to the cloakroom instead. Plastic was all the latest rage. Sue was very proud of her new plastic lunchbox, and come the midday bell raced into the cloakroom to find her lunch on the floor and a steaming turd in its place. It could have been worse. It could have been my lunchbox and with my eyesight I may not have noticed the switch until it was too late.
So when one day Sue announced shyly that she had a joke to tell it was an encouraging sign that she was finally coming out of her shell. I parked my frustration to one side and listened to her tell a story about a woman who had a dog called ‘Tits Wobble’. One day, said Sue, Tits Wobble went missing, so this woman went to the police station. The teacher looked alarmed at this point and shot Sue a warning look, but she would not be denied. Not this time. In a surprisingly clear, strong voice, she described how the woman went up to the counter in the police station and asked the policeman if he had seen her Tits Wobble. ‘No,’ said the policeman. ‘But I’d like to.’
That afternoon the school bus had barely slowed to a halt outside our driveway when I was off, streaking indoors to snitch on Sue. She got her own back some months later when Mum was waiting on the roadside in an agitated state to tell us that our father had been seriously hurt in an accident and rushed to hospital. I started blubbing, asking between racking sobs if he was going to die. Mum immediately downgraded the serious accident to a flesh wound. That night at the imitation Formica, Sue turned to our father and said, ‘Guess what, Dad? When Mum told us you were hurt in an accident, Tommy was the only one who cried.’ I felt tears welling up again, but she wasn’t done. ‘And you don’t even like him!’ I started blubbing again. My father looked stricken with guilt before regaining his composure.
‘Would someone fetch the weeping bowl for Egghead, please? The Royal Weeping Bowl with the diamonds and the rubies in the rim! Tis a grand weep he’s having and he deserves only the finest weeping bowl!’
I was banished to my undersea world where, even as I was feeling sorry for myself, I marvelled at the richness of his language. Weeping bowl was brilliant!
THERE WERE MANY NIGHTS LIKE this. After my expulsion there would be a tapping on glass. Mum would have run around the house paddock in the dark, dodging rams and the U-boat to hand my unfinished meals in through a window.
When Woolworths announced a ‘draw your dad’ competition for Father’s Day—first prize was goods to the value of ten shillings from its Feilding store—I just had to draw the man responsible for ‘weeping bowl’. Sitting a discreet distance away, at an angle where he couldn’t see me, I sketched him in pencil while he listened to the radio.
On the day the winners were announced, I cycled to Woollies after school and checked out the two dozen or so badly drawn entries displayed in their front window. Mine was clearly the best by several light years, but to my stinging disappointment a blob barely recognisable as a higher primate, let alone a human face, had won first prize. I wasn’t even highly commended.
Feeling hard done by, I cycled home and complained bitterly to my mother. I felt a fresh stab of horror when Mum said she wasn’t putting up with this, leaped on her bike and started pedalling furiously into town. I could barely keep up.
‘It doesn’t matter Mum, really …’ I yelled as she crouched low over the handlebars like Lance Armstrong leading the peloton through the French Alps. When we arrived she flung her bike to the ground, pedals still spinning, and stomped indoors. I could hear shouting, then Mum emerged, hurling curses back into the interior. In disgust she reported that the manager’s excuse was that no child my age could possibly have drawn that picture, and they didn’t reward cheats.
I learned then that there is such a thing as being too good, or at least making it too obvious. Richard Prebble put it best w
hen he said of a former Labour cabinet colleague, ‘Michael Cullen is too clever by three quarters!’ I learned this lesson again when my father taught me chess. I don’t know why, but I boasted to friends at school that the pieces of our set were carved out of solid white ivory and very rare black ivory. They demanded proof, and I had to lie again, saying that the set was too precious to take out of the house. In fact, they were cheap plastic, and hollow, which was just as well. With increasing frequency, heart in mouth, I started whispering, ‘Checkmate, Dad …’ and he invariably swept the pieces off the table in a fury.
This meant I wasn’t particularly looking forward to driving with him to Wellington for my long-promised eye operation. We didn’t have a car then; our mode of transport was my father’s khaki, ex-army, 4x4 Chev with weed-spraying booms folded over the front. It resembled a metallic insect at prayer.
The whole family came out to the gate to say goodbye. Mum tearfully handed me a ten-shilling note that she couldn’t afford. Twenty seconds later, as we were reversing onto Kimbolton Road, I managed to lose it. I blurted this out to my father. He cuffed me angrily about the head and I began crying softly and didn’t stop for ages. Not a word was exchanged between us the whole trip. The engine was so loud, conversation would have been difficult anyway, even without me whimpering and sniffling.
The Porirua motorway was under construction. Four-wheel-drive engaged, we slithered and slewed through slushy orange clay for what seemed like hours. When we finally arrived at Wellington Hospital my father handed me over monosyllabically to the staff. Clutching my pressed-cardboard school suitcase containing my pyjamas, a toothbrush and a packet of butterscotch hard-boiled sweets, I watched him depart, both of us dry-eyed. Doctors and nurses commended my courage and made a huge fuss of me, but in truth I felt only relief and something close to elation at seeing him go. I was soon busy endearing myself to older patients, soaking up their attention and approval like blotting paper.
Before the ether general anaesthetic I was given a spoonful of strawberry jam that aroused suspicion. It hid a bitter pill, a sedative. I don’t know why, but even today I can be eating a croissant and jam and the same bitter taste will flood my mouth. By the same token, in moments of joy and elation my mouth fills with the taste of butterscotch. I have no explanation for this.
After the operation my eyes were swathed in bandages, rendering me sightless for two weeks, one of which was spent at Calvary Hospital in Wellington. There is no painless way to remove sticking plaster from eyebrows, and I dreaded having my bandages changed by nurses and nuns, who realised it had to be done in one swift yank. I had no visitors. Feilding was too far away. Parents of local children adopted me and I amused them with Sidney stories as well. I was in full pluck mode. I didn’t need to actually see people laughing. All I needed was to hear it.
I STILL NEEDED GLASSES, BUT afterwards my eyesight was good enough to play rugby without them. Half-blind, I tended to run unwittingly into other boys, which delighted teachers and parents on the sideline because they saw it as naked aggression. Working on the topdressing truck in the weekends meant I was stronger than other boys my age, and whenever a rugby ball swum into focus I could pretty much wrench it off anyone or out of any maul. I had no other skills but these two attributes alone marked me as a player of potential.
Mr Sullivan, my teacher in Standard 5, a thoroughly decent, roly-poly man, who sometimes drove the school bus and always smelled as if he hadn’t washed his hands thoroughly after going to the toilet, was determined to get me in the top team, but I would have to go on a strict diet to meet the weight requirements. Two weeks of agonising denial followed. I woke on the morning of the big weigh-in so hungry I could have eaten my own underpants, only to discover they were in the wash. I only had the one pair. It meant secretly borrowing a pair of my father’s voluminous Y-fronts. Their buttery appearance unnerved me, but Mum assured me they were not Sidney’s.
I pulled them on with a heavy heart. There seemed to be yards and yards of surplus cloth, which I tied up in a big knot at the front. They bunched between my legs and almost reached my knees. I looked like Gandhi in his dhoti if you can imagine Gandhi with legs like a Russian shot-putter. It was a struggle pulling my shorts over the top.
At school, Mr Sullivan marched us to the grocery store down the road. In the shed out the back there were Avery platform scales with a side-arm and sliding weights. On these scales sacks of sugar, flour and salt were measured out into smaller brown paper bags. We lined up in bare feet to stand on the tray. I hung back while other boys passed easily.
Finally, it was my turn. As I feared, bone density came into play again. The instant I stepped on the platform, the side-arm jerked skywards. ‘Take off your shirt!’ boomed Sullivan. It made no difference. ‘Take off your singlet!’ It still made no difference. ‘Off with your shorts, lad!’ I was most reluctant. ‘Come on, boy, I haven’t got all day!’ Utterly heartsick, I began tugging and wrestling down my tight shorts.
I’ll always be grateful to Mr Sullivan for what happened next. When previously compressed fabric, relishing its freedom, began billowing from my crotch much like those CGI reenactments of the Big Bang you see on astronomy documentaries, he started screaming, ‘Pull them up! Pull them up!’
It meant that as an eleven-year-old I played rugby against teenagers from local high schools. My voice wouldn’t drop for another three years and then only to the tones of a strangled tenor, yet here I was sharing changing sheds with guys with chests carpeted in Velcro and genitals that thwacked against their thighs. One huge boy used to push into the hottest part of the showers, bellowing, ‘I can stand the shit if you can stand the pain.’ People tended to get out of his way. Coming back on the bus from rep team trials held on vast Ongley Park, not that much smaller than the Serengeti, in Palmerston North, rather than calling for a toilet stop to get rid of the illicit beer he had guzzled, he insisted that we lift him flush against a narrow skylight in the roof so he could pee with the jet-stream. Unfortunately, gravity proved the stronger force and urine sprayed back into the coach.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE ONLY BOY WITH COURAGE
LATER THAT WINTER I SPENT two weekends in hospital with concussion, and a very wise doctor advised that I give rugby away. This gave me more time to devote to my morbid fear that the world was on the edge of nuclear annihilation—Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had just banged his shoe on the table at the UN General Assembly, saying warm and cuddly things like, ‘We will bury you!’ Other kids may have known how babies were made; I certainly didn’t, but in Standard 6 I knew the difference between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion, and I knew that the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, was named after the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets. And I loved Albert Einstein’s grim joke that he didn’t know what weapons would be used in World War Three, but he was pretty sure he knew what would be used in World War Four: sticks and stones. I was discovering that humour could be used to make a serious point. I tucked that trick away.
I answered to Tommy, Junior and Egghead at home, and my nicknames at school included Four Eyes, Professor and Teacher’s Pet. There was some truth in the latter in Mr Goodwin’s class. He took a shine to me, delighting in my endless queries about isotopes of uranium even though he couldn’t answer any of them. I had my own box of coloured chalks under the lift-up lid of my desk. When other teachers came calling on my services to draw Captain Cook’s Endeavour or a fortified Māori pā on their blackboards, Goody waved me off proudly, no doubt relieved to get some respite. He had been in Bomber Command in the war and suffered from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder.
Lots of teachers came back from with the war with injuries. An English teacher at my high school had lost an eye and was called ‘Bung’ Evans. He made us squeeze into one side of the classroom where he could see us all. Our gym teacher, Doug Thorley, like Hitler, had only one ball—the other had been shot off in the Battle of Arnhem. He wa
sn’t called anything because we liked him and he taught boxing. If you gave him any cheek he insisted you glove up, then smacked the snot out of you while pretending to offer coaching tips. Brilliant!
They were both completely sane. Poor old Goody went ‘doolally’ from time to time—slang I learned later derived from an Indian town famous for its military sanatorium. There was no warning. One minute he was at the blackboard, perfectly normal—the next he was under his desk whimpering about Messerschmitts at ten o’clock. Our tall, gaunt headmaster, who walked stiffly like a whooping crane, would gently lead him away like one of his chicks, and return with a relieving teacher.
These changes in routine affected a boy called Mervin, who had one leg withered by polio. Perhaps in unconscious pursuit of healing calcium, he would dazzle us by drinking half a crate of warm school milk on his own. One relief teacher was exceptionally pretty, and in a macho display Merv polished off an entire crate. Staggering back to his desk after the bell, his limp more pronounced than ever, Merv spewed close to half a drum of curds and whey onto the floor. Despite a massive mopping-up operation the classroom stank like a third-world cheese factory in a power outage.
Merv was banished to the storeroom, where there was a hole in the wall just below the blackboard. Grabbing a broom, Merv inserted the handle through the opening and with uncanny timing, considering he was unsighted, pelvic-thrusted it at her when her backside faced the blackboard. I only dimly appreciated the sexual connotations of this act, but I joined in the laughter anyway. I also joined in the chant of, ‘We want Goody! We want Goody!’, accompanied by loud slapping on our desks. It was tremendous fun until she fled in tears and a guilty silence descended.
Our headmaster, bending low, went down the first row of desks asking every child in turn, ‘Did you chant, “We want Goody”?’ All he got was a shaking of heads and whispered denials. This continued when he headed down the second row towards me. He knew all about my box of coloured chalks and paused hopefully before me.