by Tom Scott
Even the name—Central Institute of Technology—sounded like one of those asylums the former Soviet Union maintained high in the Arctic Circle exclusively for dissidents. There were times when it felt like it. But the students, all female, not much younger than me, were sweet and lovely. There were some awkward moments. When a very pretty girl asked, ‘Please, sir, what’s an orgasm?’ I blushed crimson, which I hadn’t done for ages, and told her to see me after class. Much to my relief when the bell sounded she was the first person out the door, which suggested she knew the answer and was winding me up. The staff were also lovely. Mostly spinsters of a certain age, they made a huge fuss of me, the only male on the staff. The head of the school had a leg so withered by polio it had to be encased in a plaster sarcophagus painted in flesh tones. Quite literally a drag, she had to heave it along as she walked. It struck things and was cratered and scratched. Tall and pretty, she lived with her mum and her cats. When her mum died she killed the cats and took her own life.
I knew how she felt. Sitting in my small office overlooking the playing field, watching seagulls wheel overhead, trying to plan lessons with a mountain of essays at my elbow waiting to be marked, I couldn’t escape the feeling that life was passing me by. We lived in Eastbourne. On the bus home the words from the big hit of that year, ‘A Horse with No Name’ by America, kept repeating themselves in my head, about how good it felt to be out of the rain.
Except it was still raining, the Morris Eight had died and we didn’t know a soul. Our small downstairs flat had been built into a bank at the rear of a house by our landlord, who lived upstairs. There was hardly any natural light. The only view was of concrete-block retaining walls. We had no television set and precious little furniture. It was worse for Christine—she had a brain the size of Africa, was stuck in the house all day and was heavily pregnant.
SHAUN WAS BORN ON THE seventh day of the seventh month of 1972. He was beautiful. I floated more than walked back to CIT in Petone in the soft morning light for my first lesson of the day, vowing that I would be the best father ever for him. I fell short all too often and in middle age tearfully confessed this to my mother, fully expecting her to take issue with this harsh assessment, or at the very least say something neutral yet vaguely consoling, like ‘You were very young, darling, and you did the best you could.’ Instead she swooped like a bird of prey spotting a lost lamb. ‘Dat’s right, ye were! Ye were a piss-poor father to dat poor boy!’
Most lunchtimes I took sandwiches or bought a pie and walked from the CIT campus to the windswept Petone foreshore, where seagulls huddled together for warmth, and stared longingly at the glittering capital city across the water. I felt like Nelson Mandela staring across at Cape Town from the prison rock of Robben Island. Apart from him being locked up at night in a small, damp concrete cell, sleeping on a straw mattress. Apart from him breaking rocks in a lime quarry by day without sunglasses and suffering permanent eye damage as a result. Apart from being allowed only a handful of visitors and denied access to newspapers. Apart from being denied permission to attend the funeral of his mother or his first-born son. Apart from being subjected to verbal and physical abuse from some Afrikaner guards—apart from all that—our experiences were identical.
One of the biggest thrills of my life was giving the after-dinner speech at the one-hundredth anniversary celebration of the Parliamentary Press Gallery in Wellington’s old Town Hall, at which Nelson Mandela was the guest of honour. Earlier in the evening a high-school choir sang South Africa’s new national anthem ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ beautifully and Mandela thanked each girl in turn, shaking their hands warmly as tears streamed down their faces. I got to present him with framed originals of two of my cartoons—one I drew on his release from Robben Island, the other I drew the day he became South Africa’s first post-apartheid president.
The dinner was a great coup for my mate, chairman of the Press Gallery organising committee and private-radio titan, the gravel-voiced Barry Soper. Barry’s contacts are so good he is able to report accurately what some politicians mumble in their sleep. When he heard whisper of a possible Mandela state visit to New Zealand, faster than the speed of light Barry dispatched a dinner invite via the ANC in Pretoria long before the apparatchiks who arrange such state visits at this end had even thought about their first gin and bitters for the day. Mandela consented partly as a thank you to the role the New Zealand news media had played in the struggle against apartheid. Foreign Affairs, Internal Affairs and the Prime Minister’s Department grizzled into their riesling at being gazumped.
After their regular Wednesday interview in his ninth-floor office, a peeved Jim Bolger asked Barry to travel down in his private lift with him. (Prime Ministers have one for their exclusive use.)
‘Look, Barry, I really think someone of my stature should introduce Mandela.’ Barry said he’d get back to him. He did. The answer was no.
To be fair to Jim, he did lead the fight against the 1981 Springbok tour inside cabinet, persuading almost every minister, bar Prime Minister Rob Muldoon and maybe one other, that the rugby equivalent of coitus interruptus needed to be practised. Being outnumbered twenty to one was tantamount to a draw in Muldoon’s book so, using his casting vote, the tour carried on. To their collective shame his cabinet colleagues maintained a sullen silence in public.
When Mandela died it was galling watching assorted dignitaries and luminaries scrambling for a seat on the RNZAF flight taking Prime Minister John Key to South Africa for the state funeral—none of whom I remember being part of the handful of protesters outside the Hutt Recreation Ground when a white South African team participated in the World Softball Champs in 1976. Ever so politely, the cops requested we move away. A dashing, romantic figure leaped on to the deck of a truck with a loud-hailer and in a fiery speech condemned jack-booted Gauleiters and the creeping fascism of the police state—it was the fledgling poet Gary McCormick, barely out of primary school. Nor were they in the bedraggled huddle outside Athletic Park, mumbling ‘Amandla! Awetho!’ while thousands of Pākehā males streamed into the ground to watch the trials for the 1976 All Black tour to the Republic, some of them yelling out to me in passing, ‘Why are you with those commies and homos, Tom?’
It was a fair question. I asked the eternally reasonable Halt All Racist Tours (HART) leader, Trevor Richards, who was standing near me, if he ever felt like chucking it in. He shook his head and smiled benignly under his bushy walrus moustache. He replied that the massive crowd pouring past us were ill informed, on the wrong side of history, but essentially decent. They would see the light one day. That’s how he spoke, and he was right.
When John Key was asked what his stance on the 1981 Springbok tour was in a televised leaders’ debate with Helen Clark during the 2008 election—which he went on to win handsomely—he could only manage an uncomfortable, sickly smile and the feeble claim that he couldn’t remember, which is about as plausible as being a sentient adult on 20 July 1969 and later claiming you couldn’t remember the moon landing. No one would have held it against Key if he had admitted to being a young snot-head in favour of the tour. He would have earned even more points still had he invited Trevor Richards and John Minto to travel with him to Mandela’s funeral, up the front in the VIP section of the Air Force plane.
WHEN CHRISTINE WAS OFFERED A good job with the University Students’ Association in Wellington I quit my job at the CIT and became a full-time househusband and child-minder. With or without ovaries, no one knows how demanding and lonely a task this can be until they have done it for eight hours a day, five days a week, for months and months on end. How my mother coped with my sister Sue and me in London on her own I’ll never know.
At times, I zoned out playing with Shaun and would break out of a daze to find him staring at me curiously. How long had I been silent, I wondered. And was this why he was slow to talk? He said ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ and a few other simple words but was essentially monosyllabic. We were worried sick. It turned out he was
biding his time. One lunchtime, I was offering him something or other, and in a surprisingly deep voice for his age, he said slowly and deliberately, ‘Actually, I would prefer …’ ‘Actually’ was actually his first word in his first actual sentence. He started calling me ‘Tom’ shortly after this. When I asked why this was the case he looked at me as if I was stupid. ‘Everyone else does!’ I had to accept that.
When he had his afternoon naps I raced to the dining-room table and drew cartoons for HART News, for no fee of course, wondering when a real cartooning job would come along. Bounding up the stairs to the HART offices one day I heard music that I had never heard before, yet I recognised immediately. One of the few joys of the CIT was having the library on the same corridor as my office. I ducked in to read copies of Newsweek all the time. One issue raved about a sensual, hallucinatory, mystical, jazz/blues/rock album by an Irishman who sang with a singular intensity and urgency. I burst into the room. A singer was howling about venturing in the slipstream between the viaducts of someone else’s dream and being born again. It was Celtic mumbo jumbo. It made no sense and it made perfect sense.
‘This is Astral Weeks by Van Morrison!’ I shouted excitedly. They couldn’t confirm it. It was on the turntable when they arrived and they had just pressed repeat. I reached for an album cover I had never seen before. It was Astral Weeks. This song was a sign.
I was about to be born again.
The capital enjoyed two daily papers back then. The Evening Post cartoonist was the legendary Nevile Lodge. He had been there so long he qualified under the act as a living fossil. His Sports Post covers of All Black test matches were rightly famous. Astonishingly, they came out on the same day as the game. You could listen to the test match on the radio in the afternoon, go to the flicks at the Regent in the evening, head for the pie-cart in Feilding’s square close to midnight and be intercepted by a paper boy yelling ‘Sports Post! Sports Post!’ and there would be Nevile’s cartoon on the cover of a kiwi and a springbok locked in titanic battle.
I have kept up his tradition, but I was never a big fan of his drawing style or stolid view of the world. He was a testy curmudgeon long past his best when he finally retired and I replaced him on the Evening Post. Come to think of it—I am close to that age now and must make more of an effort to wear revolving bow-ties and break into song-and-dance routines when I enter the controlled anarchy of the newsroom … Come to think of it—they don’t have newsrooms any longer, just hushed workstations and the low pinging of computer keyboards. (I only ever heard the fabled cry of ‘Stop the press!’ once. It was the morning of the stock-market crash of 1987. I was dropping off one of my first cartoons to the now departed Evening Post when the editor, Rick Neville, came running out of his office and yelled it out across the stunned newsroom, then, snatching an old manual typewriter, began pounding out the front-page lead himself. It was very impressive.)
Nevile Lodge can be excused some of his gloom—he spent the best years of his life behind wire in a concentration camp, as did Sid Scales, the much-loved, long-serving cartoonist on the Otago Daily Times, and the great British cartoonist/illustrator Ronald Searle. The wonderfully whimsical Carl Giles and the celebrated, hard-nosed American editorial cartoonist Herblock (Herbert Lawrence Block) both began their illustrious careers as war artists. Pulling on rectal gloves and inserting your hand up a cow’s bum at vet school hardly counts.
Eric Heath, the cartoonist for the Dominion, was a kind man of sunny disposition so it’s hardly surprising his cartoons lacked edge. He was a terrific painter of marine life but I was not a fan of his cartoon drawing style or his choice of subject matter. It was too domestic—trolley buses, cats trapped in trees and impish politicians. N.A. Nash would have loved him. To my haughty gaze, neither Eric nor Nevile could caricature politicians very well. I get disproportionately irritated by cartoonists identifying people they are drawing by using names on clothing, briefcases, desktops or doors—it’s a device we all employ from time to time when a person is not well known. When I resort to it I end up irritating myself.
I grew up adoring the economy of line of the great Mort Drucker, who captured faces perfectly in Mad magazine’s movie parodies. I also loved the spidery line and the assured crosshatching depictions of writers, artists and politicians of David Levine in The New York Review of Books. Our very own Dunedin-based Murray Webb is one of the few cartoonists in the world to approach Levine’s genius. I also admired the savage, jagged strokes and splattered ink of Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman, who distorted politicians’ faces to grotesque proportions while keeping them recognisable. And I have long been a fan of Bob Brockie’s wry, eccentric doodles in The National Business Review. His drawings in Victoria University capping magazines in the 1960s were a huge inspiration to me.
When Labour won the 1972 election and Norm Kirk became prime minister, none of the nation’s cartoonists could draw him properly. There was something elusive about him. Like an explorer in a pith helmet searching for the source of the Nile, I went looking for the essence of Norm Kirk. I spent days, then weeks at my drawing board, growing weaker and weaker from hunger and thirst. I know memory is an unreliable thing but I’m pretty sure I came down with full-blown malaria and had a touch of dengue fever at one point (the same phenomenon occurred when my deadline loomed for Listener columns, then magically disappeared the next day). I began wondering if I should abandon this foolhardy, nightmare quest, when voilà! Norm appeared on the paper before me. Even now I am proud of this drawing, though the poor lettering in the speech bubble displeases me still. It was streets ahead of what everyone else was doing at the time and too good to waste on HART News—assuming they’d want it. Then I remembered that the Post and the Dom were not the only game in town—there was also the Sunday Star. Should I pay them a call?
CHAPTER TEN
DRAWING THE LINE
TUCKING MY KIRK CARTOON CAREFULLY in a folder and dropping Shaun off at day-care, I headed off with some trepidation for the Dominion building in downtown Wellington. It was a brooding neo-Gothic edifice. You could imagine gargoyles and a hunchback on the roof. The foyer was dark and echoing. I stood by the lifts for ages trying to summon up the courage to head for the offices of the Sunday Star three flights up. My nerve failed me and I returned to the pavement. It was a pathetic repeat of heading into a Massey University lecture theatre full of pretty girls then chickening out. I forced myself back to the lifts. ‘Going up?’ said a stranger, and I stepped in with him.
I told a receptionist on the third floor that I had something to show the editor. She told me to follow the bellowing. It came from a bear of a man who looked like a mob enforcer—the late, great Frank Haden. He was genuinely scary. He took my drawing in a huge paw, glared at it through heavy horn-rimmed spectacles, nodded approval, demanded another one next week and waved me away. The audience was over. The rapture I felt at that moment was repeated four days later when I opened up the Sunday Star and saw my cartoon in pride of place. I was a published cartoonist in a national publication!
Years later, Frank and I were part of a press junket to Eastern Europe just as the Iron Curtain was coming down and countries released from 40 years of brutal Soviet subjugation were frenziedly changing the drapes. In a bar in Budapest we met a local musician who didn’t speak a word of English but sang ‘St. James Infirmary’ beautifully, accompanying himself on harmonica between verses. To my surprise, Frank, now a jovial, cuddly bear of a man, joined in on the chorus. You think you know a guy!
Frank accepted another half-dozen cartoons and I settled joyfully into my new role, not realising that I was about to be reincarnated again. Across town in the offices of the Listener which, thanks to its monopoly on television-programme schedules, enjoyed a per capita circulation matched only by Pravda (more than a few people used to swear that in the right light you couldn’t tell them apart), the social historian, trade unionist and contributor of blackly comic pieces to this publishing juggernaut Tony Simpson was informing the new
editor, the towering, handsome-in-an-aging-film-star way, Ian Cross, that due to commitments in Stockholm these contributions would cease for a period. In desperation Ian asked him if he knew of anyone who could possibly fill in for him.
Tony and I had never met. I was illustrating articles for the New Zealand edition of Rolling Stone, edited by Alister Taylor, which Tony also wrote for (he was everywhere!). One day I told Alister I would dearly love to do a parody of Tony’s idiosyncratic comic prose. This was duly passed on. Tony was flattered that some neophyte scribe wanted to mock his writing. When Ian Cross needed someone to come off the subs bench, Tony unhesitatingly selected me, for which I will be forever grateful and indebted.
Tony has just published an erudite, witty and wise memoir of his own, Along for the Ride, in which he recounts his slightly different version of the role he played in my becoming a Listener writer. He also adds a footnote to this story from his time working for Jim Anderton, in the deputy prime minister’s capacity as a member of the honours and appointments cabinet committee. Tony was asked to check with me whether I wanted to be put up for an honour. Tony phoned and I consented, cautioning that it had also been proposed under the previous Lange government but had been turned down on the grounds that I made fun of them. Nevertheless, writes Tony, Jim’s nomination went ahead and when the list was published my name was there. Tony commented on this to Jim, who grinned and said that mention of my name had triggered much the same response as earlier—‘He keeps laughing at us’—to which he had retorted, ‘Of course he does, that’s why we are giving it to him.’ Everyone looked sheepishly at the table and my name went through.
John Key didn’t ask for this cartoon.
I should declare here that Jim has purchased more originals of mine than any other politician—both the unflattering and the flattering ones. He only stopped when he ran out of wall space. Michael Laws, both as an MP and as mayor of Whanganui, kept my children in shoes with his purchases. John Key couldn’t resist owning an original if it included President Obama in the drawing. He paid me in bottles of his own ‘JK’ pinot noir, which dazzled some guests at dinner parties and disgusted others. If Bill English starts collecting originals I guess I can look forward to pizza topped with Wattie’s spaghetti from a can.