by Tom Scott
It meant girlfriends were out of the question. There were other factors that made this prohibition easier for me than it would have been for other boys (apart from Wes, obviously). I had mousy curls bordering on ginger. I wore heavy glasses that refused to sit straight on my head. I was badly knock-kneed, with a scythe-like sweep of my right leg—even today I can be crossing a street and see a ridiculous reflection in a shop window, start to giggle, then realise with horror that it is my own.
BUT I WASN’T GOING TO let venereal disease completely destroy my life. I went to the first high-school dance because I still had long pants that fitted (only just—they stopped just below my shins). Dad drove us there in his newly purchased secondhand Vauxhall Velox, with his old Air Force chum, Jock Laidlaw, in the front passenger seat, both of them giggling drunk. Sue and I sat nervously in the back.
Fatty’s imposing house was attached to the boarding school and had a circular drive that Dad thought we should drive around, tooting the horn. In the middle of the circuit he decided to park at the front door, still tooting furiously. Jock was in hysterics. Sue and I were horrified. Fatty’s unmistakable silhouette approached down a corridor towards the glass door then, like an eclipse of the sun, blocked all the light apart from a thin corona. The door opened. Fatty stepped out. My father fumbled with the keys. Fatty waddled towards us. The car stalled. Fatty gathered speed—no mean feat in itself. The Velox kicked into life and we lurched off with Fatty shaking his fist at our departing tail-lights. Jock was paralytic with laughter and Dad was slumped over the steering wheel, gasping for breath. They had had such a good time they decided to do it again, tooting the horn continuously but not stopping this time. Sue and I asked to be let out down the road so we could not be linked to this incident, and slunk into the school hall.
I was having a great time until I couldn’t find my dance partner. The hall was partitioned with planters filled with shrubbery. Soaked to the skin in sweat, I was rehydrating with soft drink when I heard her voice coming from the other side of the greenery. ‘Don’t dance with Tommy Scott. He’s a terrible dancer!’ It was a knife to the heart. I sat out high-school dances after this, and have avoided dancing to this day.
Sue had a great night though, and was keen to go the following year. Mum helped her make a new frock specially, which took weeks. Sue kept asking our father, ‘You will take me, won’t you, Dad? You won’t forget?’ He got irritated.
‘How many times do I have to say yes, for shit’s sake?’
On the night, Sue was ready with her hair beautifully done by six. At seven there was no sign of our father. At eight we feared the worst. At nine Sue took off her frock, folded it away neatly, went to bed and cried herself to sleep. The next day I told our father he owed Sue an apology and he hurled a plate of food against the wall—which brought this particular topic of discussion to a close.
IN THE FOURTH AND FIFTH forms, my school clothes were pretty much the only clothes I owned. On mufti day, when you could wear what you liked, the only kids turning up in school uniform were Māori kids and me. To break this trend in the fifth form, on mufti day, after my father had left for work, I borrowed his tweed jacket, corduroy pants and brown brogues. It was before my growth spurt, so nothing fitted properly. Everything was outsized and baggy like a clown’s outfit.
No one said a thing all day. I thought I had pulled it off until the very last period, when Christine Wilson suddenly blurted out, ‘Tommy’s wearing his father’s clothes!’ Every head swivelled. She was a lovely girl incapable of cruelty. It must have been shock that triggered her announcement. She later wrote the screenplay of one of the great Australian films, Rabbit-Proof Fence, under her married name, Christine Olsen.
I didn’t socialise with anyone in my class. Not making the cut to Russell’s parties still stung, so I made sure I rejected the other kids before they had a chance to reject me. After school I cycled straight home, dawdling for hours if necessary if other kids on bikes were with me because I didn’t want anyone seeing where we lived.
My father had spent much of the previous winter soldering up and assembling a kitset transistor radio the size of a sewing machine, which had pride of place in the master bedroom, home now to brand-new twin beds with blonde-oak headrests with shelving, the candlewick bedspreads always immaculately made up. The local radio station started playing pop-chart songs late in the afternoons. At the appointed hour I crept in. To leave no trace of my intrusion, I lay on the floor between the beds and switched on the transistor. It was from this prone position that I heard something that made me sit bolt upright with a feeling approaching pure joy coursing through my body.
It was instantly familiar yet stunningly different. It had a shuffle beat, raw, urgent harmonica and glorious harmonies infused with yearning. It was Love Me Do by a group I’d never heard of—The Beatles.
Their sudden global ascension was the one shaft of sunlight in a year made dark by the assassination of President Kennedy, which was also Fatty’s finest hour. He told sobbing girls in assembly that a terrible thing had happened but America would survive this tragedy and the world wasn’t coming to an end. It made up for the time he told assembly that there had been too much thieving from lockers, that he knew who was responsible, he was going to stamp it out—and could all the Māori pupils stay behind please.
In the wake of the assassination I fantasised that I was a brilliant brain surgeon, able to piece Kennedy’s cerebral cortex back together and make the whole world happy again. It was my own cerebral cortex that needed fixing. I was swimming laps in a pool of my own sorrow. Photos exist of me smiling happily with baby brother Rob on my knee, then a few years later, baby Sal, yet such was my self-absorption in the Makino Road years I barely remember my siblings at all.
Michael was cheerful and robust. He fell in love with The Beatles as well and somehow acquired an acoustic guitar and devoted most of his time to learning that. Together we built a two-storey tree hut in a spreading macrocarpa and beautiful little Jane was allowed to play with us in that. She came with us on raiding parties over the hill to Feilding’s lawn cemetery to loot marble angels that we brought home in triumph—which had Mum frantically crossing herself and wailing that we would all burn in hell.
Robbie was approaching school age and I read him stories before he went to sleep. I thought he was a gifted child because he would take the book off me and read it back word for word. In fact, he was profoundly dyslexic and just had a prodigious memory.
My memory is not prodigious at all when it comes to my sister Sally Anne at that time. She is a kind, funny, pretty, supremely well-adjusted woman today so I’m picking she can’t remember her Makino Road days either.
Sue, who was always far lovelier than she ever allowed herself to feel, attracted the attention of a slick young man who owned a Jag, which both thrilled and alarmed Mum. Sue wouldn’t let him anywhere near the house. He had to park on the road, toot his horn and wait there while she tottered up the gravel drive in her high heels to meet him. It was the same after the movies or a dance. Regardless of the hour or the weather, he had to drop her off at the top of the drive. One night Mum, who was a Neighbourhood Watch group of one, decided they had been parked up far too long, so the spoilsport, the virgin with VD, was dispatched into the dead of night to tap on the fogged-up windows.
Sue left high school within a nanosecond of turning fifteen to work as a nurse aide in Feilding Maternity Hospital and board in the nurses’ home. I always thought it was because she couldn’t wait to escape but only recently she told me that Mum encouraged her to quit school and earn money.
She had barely settled in when she got a distraught phone call from Mum. Out of the blue, relatives from Ireland had contacted her to say they were on their way to see us. They had just landed in Auckland and were staying with friends for a few days before hiring a rental car and driving down in the weekend. In tears, Mum begged Sue to head them off. Barely fifteen, she cycled to Feilding railway station, caught the Limited at
ten o’clock, spent a nervous, chilly night wide awake in a click-clacking carriage, arrived in Auckland before dawn, caught a bus to the suburb of Westmere, walked for miles alongside tidal flats to a stranger’s address, knocked on the door and told cousins she didn’t know that her mother and father had gone away, she wasn’t sure where or when they would be returning, so they couldn’t come to Feilding. And they didn’t.
SUE CAME HOME SOME WEEKENDS lugging one of her very first purchases—a portable, battery-operated gramophone and two long-playing records: Johnny Tillotson of ‘Talk Back Trembling Lips’ fame, and The Beatles’ first album. I listened to one song on side two over and over until the batteries went flat: ‘There’s A Place’. Attributed to Lennon and McCartney, it was written by John. No matter what was happening or how bad he felt there was always somewhere he could go, it was his mind, and no time was he alone …
That song spoke to me more than any other song had ever done before. My classmates went around humming ‘Four Strong Winds’ and ‘Tom Dooley’, which was another good reason for hanging out with coarser types in the woodwork and metalcraft streams who were into The Animals, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones and Manfred Mann. Walking across the quad some lunchtimes there could be up to ten scruffy boys, socks around the ankles, singing ‘Doo Wah Diddy Diddy’ in joyous, ragged unison.
Metalcraft came in really handy. The Beatles had Vox speakers so these guys spent a lot of time in class working furtively and feverishly with hacksaws and sheets of metal to fashion impressively realistic Vox insignias to screw on the front of their crappy old amps and rubbish speakers.
The late, great American comedian Rodney Dangerfield once described going into a gay bar as follows: ‘It was amazing! There were two guys for every guy.’ Almost overnight in Feilding there were two bands for every band member. A sweet, shy, retiring, bespectacled boy called Len Sithebottom, arriving from Liverpool with a trunk full of War Picture Library comics, was dragooned into playing drums in a band while still jet-lagged, purely on the basis of his Scouse accent. Only dead people and I had poorer timing than Len. I was tone deaf as well. I make Leonard Cohen sound like Pavarotti. With the wisdom of vet-school-acquired hindsight I now blame the bone density of the hammer, anvil and stirrup in my middle ears. This limited my contribution to the rock-music revolution sweeping the world to carrying amps and painting the names of bands on the drum kits. This kept me busy, as they were always changing. My favourites were Rommel’s Lake and Atomic Porridge.
The Atomic Porridge story is a darkly comic, absurdist saga worthy of another book at another time, but it would be remiss of me not to pay homage to Ray Fiddler, one of the lead singers. Ray sounded like a cross between Paul McCartney and John Lennon. He had such stage presence that when the drummer vanished from the stage, which he did frequently to deflower schoolgirls behind the back curtains, Ray, armed only with a tambourine or maracas, kept the band driving forward, winking knowingly at me, the wistful, envious virgin with VD, taking money at the door.
Ray’s parents were hip and sophisticated. They had Esquire and Life magazines placed casually on a coffee table. They had a drinks cabinet. After school, if his mother was out, Ray poured his mates hefty tumblers of Bacardi and Coke. There were occasions when some of them reeled outside and chundered on the Fiddlers’ immaculate back lawn. They had a radiogram with jazz albums stacked neatly against the wall. I first heard Dave Brubeck’s cool classic ‘Take Five’ in their living room. I was able to listen over and over again to Bridge on the River Wye starring my comic heroes Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers—doing a genius impersonation of Alec Guinness. Mrs Fiddler kindly insisted I stay for meals and I cycled back to Makino Road in the dark, no light, no helmet, guided by starlight on fence wire, shouting out in character my favourite Milligan lines, startling sleeping cattle who stampeded in the dark, crashing with a spronging sound into distant wire fencing, with me laughing my head off. I did a near perfect Major Dennis Bloodnok, Ind. Arm. Rtd., coward and bar.
The laughter stopped at home. The clothing situation was getting grim. I began roaming surrounding farms in search of dead sheep to pluck. If they weren’t ripe, I dragged them into thickets of gorse or stands of bush, coming back a few days later when they had bloated, their bellies blue and stinking to high heaven. I had to battle nausea, but the wool came off much easier. I sold numerous sackfuls to a wool merchant in Feilding and bought my first pair of black jeans, a sports coat and a shirt with a button-down collar like Michael Caine’s in Alfie.
School Certificate was looming. I took it very seriously. On the morning of the English exam, Mum fed me fish because it was good for the brain. I hated her fish because she favoured the rolling-boil method—you throw the fish into a bubbling pot, jam on the lid, come back in an hour’s time and strain the flakes. Rather than cycle to high school, I chose this morning to take the bus to do some extra swat. The bus was late and I was very nearly locked out. Damp with anxiety, I sat down and began answering the comprehension question. To my horror, I couldn’t remember how to spell the three-letter word used to join two parts of a sentence together. I scribbled the three options in the margin of my exam paper, now sodden with perspiration and cobwebbed with spreading ink:
nad
dan
and
They all looked correct. I picked one at random and soldiered on, close to tears.
LATE IN JANUARY THE FOLLOWING year word went out that the exam results were due any moment. I was still in bed when my father collected the mail from the letterbox at the gate. There was a terrible, theatrical wail from the kitchen.
‘Oh no! Oh dear! Woe is us! Someone fetch the sackcloth and ashes!’ shouted my father, loud enough for the whole house to hear. ‘EGGHEAD HAS FAILED!’
I went numb and couldn’t move for an hour. Mum eventually crept into my bedroom with a cup of tea and a piece of toast. What was I going to do? Would I repeat the fifth-form year? My life expectations had already shrunk to sub-atomic proportions at this point. We couldn’t afford that. I would accept my fate and settle for a life on the chain or in lamb-cuts in Borthwicks’ Feilding freezing works. I knew lots of good people who worked there. Some of them owned their own homes and speedboats before they were 30. It would be OK. ‘Don’t worry, Mum, I’ll be fine …’ I sniffed.
It was after one in the afternoon when I eventually shuffled like a zombie into the kitchen and reached for the opened envelope resting on the mantel above the coal range. I had passed, thanks to good marks in Biology, Chemistry and Mathematics. I got only 47 in School Certificate English—which meant I could never be a journalist, screenwriter or author. Those are the breaks.
IT WAS A HUGE RELIEF being a sixth-former. The ranks had thinned and there were only enough pupils left for two professional classes. Mum was very proud of me and decided to attend a parent-teacher evening in a fierce thunderstorm. I put the other kids to bed, listened to some National Radio, probably Manuel and his Music of the Mountains, for a couple of hours, looking out our curtain-less windows for some sign of her pushbike light bobbing in the downpour. She got home close to ten, completely saturated, reporting indignantly that my English teacher thought that I was a complete idiot who would never amount to anything. I sighed and handed her a cup of tea.
‘Don’t you worry, Junior! I got back at the bastard quick as a flash!’ She beamed proudly—which worried me. ‘I said to him straight, don’t think yer shit doesn’t stink, Sonny Jim!’
Later that year we moved out of Makino Road to a nice house in the borough of Feilding itself. We had the freezing works over the river, the wool scourer across the railway lines and the largest saleyards in New Zealand down the road—an olfactory Bermuda Triangle where fresh air vanished without trace.
I got a job in the school holidays working as a labourer on the cooling floor in Borthwicks. Mum saw an ad in the Feilding Herald—Farrell’s shirt factory wanted trained machinists or women willing to learn. To the collective horror of her children, she applied
. This was well before the feminist revolution. We were in no position to be snobs but we implored her to reconsider and spare us the shame and humiliation of having a mother who worked. I don’t know where this objection came from. Doing the washing in a wood-fired copper and wringing the sheets through a hand-cranked mangle meant she was already a manual labourer. Our shame and humiliation vanished magically with the arrival of the television set that she managed to scrape together a down-payment for.
In the high-school library there was always a queue of boys waiting to look up the meaning of ‘vagina’ in a heavy, leather-bound dictionary. It sprang open automatically to this greasy, well-thumbed page in the gentlest of breezes. While waiting my turn, I rifled through the shelves and came across Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, which made me laugh out loud from the very first paragraph. It was a revelation discovering just how amusing the printed word could be. In the 1950s and ’60s, publicly at least, New Zealand was probably the most humourless country on the planet. I’d put money on Holland being funnier. We gave the impression of being gloomier than Vladivostok in winter.
Frank S. Anthony’s Me and Gus stories, written in the 1920s about likeable losers trying to establish dairy farms in harsh inhospitable swamp-land at the base of Mount Taranaki after coming back from the Great War, have a bleak charm and were once very popular but have long since fallen from view. In the 1950s there was a limp, patronising and racist column in Truth called ‘Half-Gallon Jar’, written by a Pākehā taxi driver who used the pen-name ‘Hori’. On radio there was the Howard Morrison Quartet singing ‘My Old Man’s an All Black’—a lame play on Lonnie Donegan’s already lame ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’. A song called ‘Taumarunui on the Main Trunk Line’ by Peter Cape was demanded by a comedy-starved populace at every single request session and never failed to depress me. This doesn’t mean that Kiwis weren’t funny. When you read World War Two biographies there is a plenty of evidence of a wry, ironic and understated New Zealand sensibility—we made each other laugh out loud. There just wasn’t much public expression of it.