Drawn Out

by Tom Scott

  Pat gave us extensive notes on pacing and structure and we toiled away for the best part of another year completing a storyline to everyone’s satisfaction. I remember the exciting moment in my attic when I finally wound a sheet of A4 paper into my small portable typewriter and typed in the magic words:

  RAIDERS OF THE LOST DOG KENNEL

  A dog’s life, 1st draft

  Murray and I were just kidding with the title, but it can’t have been too far off the mark. As I was going I would read it out loud to the kids. Cute little Ned listened enthralled and squealed, ‘This is more exciting than Raiders of the Lost Ark!’

  I still have that manuscript. It’s huge. Including Murray’s attached cartoons to clarify the action and copious quantities of my white-out, it is bulky enough to derail a train. I am particularly fond of one scene that Murray, for all his brilliance, could never have written. With his superb aerobic capacity it would just never have occurred to him. It needed to come from me. It required someone with negative buoyancy:

  EXTERIOR, DAY. RUGBY GROUND.

  It is half-time and the two teams are huddled at either end of the muddy paddock. The grandstand crowd is stretching and standing up. The scoreboard still reads 12 to 0. At one end Irish Murphy is berating the Mill team.

  MURPHY: Geezzz what are ya? Playing with the wind and only twelve points up against that pack of girls! You should be murdering the sods. I wanna see some effort this half. I wanna see some driving! I wanna see some sweat! I wanna see some blood! I wanna see some guts! I wanna see a priest being called onto the field to administer the last rites. Is that clear? Yeah and do that Footrot joker, he’s getting on my nerves!

  At the other end it is Wal’s turn.

  WAL: The trouble … (choke) with you lot … (gasp) is … (gasp) … you’re … not (gasp) fit.

  When the project stalled at the lights, Pat brought Wellington film producer John Barnett on board and together they got it funded and made—never easy with an animated film. Dave Dobbyn backed by Herbs launched the film with the magical song ‘Slice of Heaven’ and the movie was a box-office triumph on both sides of the Tasman.

  John was to come to my rescue on two more of my dramas: the television mini-series Fallout that I wrote with Greg McGee, which John rescued when he became head of South Pacific Pictures, and Separation City, which only got New Zealand Film Commission funding after his gutsy intervention on our behalf after what he considered unfair treatment.

  John let slip once that his dad won the Military Medal for bravery at Ruweisat Ridge in North Africa in World War Two. There is no question in my mind that John inherited all of his father’s chromosomes for courage. He is an articulate, relentless campaigner for causes he believes in. It is wonderful having him in your corner in a fight. It is much less fun being on the receiving end of a scolding, which I have been from time to time. He is a good mate. I owe him a lot. And Pat Cox is a wise and trusted confidante.

  I owe Murray even more. Being invited to co-write Footrot Flats was an honour in itself and to have it succeed beyond all expectation gave me the courage to write feature screenplays and stage plays of my own. I’m proud to have known him. Through all weathers, in all seasons and over time, in ‘Footrot Flats’ Murray created a world every bit as delicate and true as a Katherine Mansfield short story, every bit as visceral and unsentimental as a Ronald Hugh Morrieson or Barry Crump novel, every bit as whimsical and nonsensical as a John Clarke or Billy T. James comedy routine (both of whom appeared in his film), and visually every bit as arresting and instantly recognisable as a Rita Angus or Toss Woollaston painting. To borrow from Dave Dobbyn, Murray gave us a slice of heaven.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  A THOUSAND MILES BEHIND

  FOR SOME MONTHS, MIKE ROBSON from INL had been continually wooing me to join the Evening Post as an eventual replacement for the venerable Nevile Lodge, who wasn’t in good health. In mid 1987 Mike took me to lunch to formally ask for my hand in cartooning matrimony. It was at the Museum Hotel in its former location before they shifted it to make way for Te Papa. Rod Deane had advised me beforehand to ask for an inducement payment and nominated an eye-watering sum. ‘If they really want you, they will pay’ was his mantra. I waited nervously for the right time to drop it into the conversation, but it never came, so I just blurted it out like a burp. Mike went apoplectic with shock and outrage, turning white then purple without making a sound. He was vibrating like a tuning fork at one point. I think the shock waves shifted the Museum Hotel a few centimetres well before the big move. He eventually said yes in a low, strangled croak.

  WHEN THE EVENING POST CELEBRATED its one hundred and thirtieth birthday in 1995, the paper’s publishers and senior editors made a fuss, probably because they knew full well that if they waited until it turned 150 it would have been dead for thirteen years. For the big birthday I was asked to write what I especially liked about New Zealand’s largest evening newspaper:

  I like the obvious things about the Evening Post—the look and the feel. By rights, being an evening paper, we should be a downmarket tabloid but instead the layout, the graphics, the use of colour and the quality of the writing make it consistently one of the most stylish papers in Australasia.

  I like the less obvious things even more. One morning I was at my desk in the illustrations department when one of the photographers arrived breathlessly with colour shots of a body being fished out of Wellington Harbour. Several days earlier, after leaving a nightclub, a young man had gone missing and here he was now, face darkened and belly distended by decomposition, bobbing like a cork just out of reach of a policeman’s gaff. One shot had two attractive young women in a rowing skiff approaching to take a closer look. The angle of the boat, the light on the water and the grim smudge in the bottom corner made it a great composition. And we were short of a good front-page pic that day.

  Acting editor Karl du Fresne shook his head. ‘That body has parents who must be fearing the worst by now. I wouldn’t want to see my child as a piece of meat.’

  We published a picture of a body wrapped in a sheet on a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance.

  The Evening Post is thoughtful without being unctuous, intelligent without being highbrow, careful without being anal retentive, and lively without being gormless.

  In 2002 the Dominion—the paper you would have an affair with—and the Evening Post—the paper you would marry—merged to become the imaginatively named Dominion Post. I am still there. It is my intention to be carried out feet first in a simple pine casket. The editors assure me there is no hurry, though they have taken to running a tape measure over me once every three months rather than annually, which used to be the case.

  ALMOST INSTANTLY, CARTOONING WAS VASTLY more fun and much easier than writing. For starters, everyone can write but far fewer people can draw. Right away you are a one-eyed man in the land of the blind. But you have to settle for a different relationship with your readers. They spend seconds on a cartoon, while they have to commit five to ten minutes on an article. Cartoons are casual sex, articles are marriage. Woody Allen once wrote that sex without love was a hollow experience, but as hollow experiences went it was one of the best. Cartooning is a hollow experience that is hard to beat.

  Every night I would set the alarm for six o’clock, leap out of bed at the first bring-bring, creep downstairs to my office, shut the door quietly and listen to Geoff Robinson on Morning Report, sipping coffee, with a brand-new day all to myself. When I had settled on an idea I left my desk to help Helen make breakfast for the kids and concentrate on my specialist subject: school lunches. (Over the years I have received numerous heartfelt requests from my kids for less elaborate sandwiches and for a week or so, sulking badly, I would oblige with white bread and peanut butter before falling back into my bacon and avocado bad habits.) Back at my desk doing the cartoon, I delighted in the sight of towering Shaun, willowy Jacob and Ned in their Kapiti College uniforms striding down the meadow through waddling ducks and whi
te geese, heading for the school bus at MacKays Crossing with baby brother Sam half-running to keep up with them, their happy laughter floating in the onshore breeze from the Tasman Sea glittering in the distance.

  Drawing a daily cartoon is only slightly more onerous than shaving with a dull razor. Part of its charm is that it is so disposable. You can’t luxuriate on your triumphs or brood over your disasters, as they both vanish within 24 hours. Some Monday mornings, standing under a drumming shower, I would think of a week’s worth of drawings in a matter of moments, and if my hand was working well I could dash them off in less than an hour each, which editors over the years suspected and understandably deeply resented. It meant I had more time to work with Helen restoring the house, which Barry and his missus had badly buggered. In the kitchen they had glued red vinyl panelling over beautiful tongue-and-groove timber. In the upstairs bathroom eight different kinds of tiles in eight different sizes and in eight different colours competed for attention. On the landing of the magnificent kauri staircase they had glued hideous mirror squares to the wall—creating a cheap bordello look. They couldn’t be peeled off. I had to destroy several dozen of them with a hammer. Standing precariously on the top of a stepladder, I did the sums. I would have to live seven lifetimes to use all the bad luck I was generating for myself. And it felt like that at times.

  IT WASN’T ALL GRIM—the first summer was glorious. We invited all of our friends and their children to a picnic in the grounds. It was like the scene after the grain harvest from one of my favourite films, the Russian masterpiece Burnt by the Sun. And Footrot Flats premiered to great acclaim. When John Barnett rang me somewhat ruefully to say they couldn’t justify the expense of flying me to the Australian premiere because no one had heard of me over there I immediately got on the phone to Bill Darcy and Dennis Grant, who was working in the Canberra Press Gallery, and between them they arranged sufficient radio and press interviews for me to tag along. Murray Ball was relieved. Naturally shy, he was more relaxed when he had me around to joke with and tease unmercifully.

  Together we went on Channel 9’s show Midday with Ray Martin. Ray loved the film and commented that New Zealand farm fences had five strands of wire while Australian farm fences had only three—why was this? ‘Our sheep are smarter than your sheep,’ was my response. The audience roared. It was my biggest single contribution to the Anzac spirit since Muldoon borrowed my line about Kiwis migrating to Australia.

  Another television crew interviewed us at our hotel on William Street just off Hyde Park. The reporter was blunt, cheerful and matter-of-fact, as only Australians can be. ‘Jesus Christ, mate. What the fuck happened to all your hair? You’ve got shitloads in the publicity stills!’ It was true. Just a few years earlier the photographer Paul Roy was commissioned by Pat Cox to take press stills for the upcoming film. In these I am sporting an afro, albeit thinning at the temples. My hair was going to fall out anyway, but instead of abandoning ship gradually over ten years it walked the plank in eighteen months, accelerated by stress. I was also in one of my fat Elvis periods. Given my unkempt beard and remaining hair it would probably be more accurate to say I was in one of my fat Charles Darwin periods.

  One of the consequences of feeling unloved is you become unlovable. Helen and I had been going to relationship counselling in Wellington, which more often than not made for long, frosty drives back to the farm. As Bob Dylan would say, Helen was right from her side, I was right from mine, but we were both just one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind.

  Helen began spending more and more time in Wellington, taking sweet little Rosie with her. One day the van wouldn’t start for her. It refused to crash start when I pushed it down the long, sloping driveway. I had to push it some more along Emerald Glen Road. It wasn’t light. It took several more Herculean efforts for me to finally get it up to enough speed to roar into life when Helen slipped it into gear. Gasping for air, I leaned against the driver’s window while she revved the engine.

  ‘I can’t do this much longer,’ I croaked.

  ‘Neither can I,’ responded Helen crisply, and drove off. I was speaking metaphorically. She was speaking literally. Not long after that she took the children and moved back into town for good.

  I remained at Emerald Glen on my own and prepared it for sale. We had made many improvements to the house, including replacing weatherboards and painting it. It looked a treat. I walked every day to the top of the property where the creek babbled down from the ranges. I sat and looked at the sea in the distance. Through spreading oaks, sinewy gums, slender poplars and gnarly macrocarpa I watched smoke curling up lazily from brick chimneys and knew I would miss it despite being desperately unhappy there at times.

  An elegant transplanted English stockbroker zoomed up the drive one day in a Bentley, Audi or BMW (or quite possibly all three), expressing keen interest in purchasing the house. We sold it privately for a considerable capital gain. We were incredibly lucky with the timing. Like every other stockbroker in the world he never saw Black Monday coming—the 19 October 1987 fall of the Dow, when the New York Stock Exchange lost $500 billion in a single day—the biggest fall in its history. A few months later and he would have tramped up the drive with all his worldly possessions in a sugar bag and asked if he could sleep in the barn for free.

  Helen bought a large, nicely appointed house in Wilton. Dividing the chattels was easy. Out of guilt I had given Christine everything. Out of exhaustion I did the same with Helen. I was the last of the Mohicans when the moving firm arrived at Emerald Glen with a huge furniture truck to take everything to Helen’s place. They packed it expertly to full capacity and the Māori foreman asked me cautiously where my stuff was. I pointed into my office where books, records, a typewriter, an anglepoise lamp, pens and pencils, original cartoons and clothes were stacked in a modest pile. I said I could handle it and not to worry. He whistled softly and patted my shoulder gently. ‘Geez, tough, bro …’

  I followed his truck into Wilton and assembled Rosie’s and Sam’s beds for them as an endless stream of Helen’s friends arrived bearing gifts of maidenhair ferns, quiche and wine. The kids seemed settled and Helen and her friends looked to be having a good time when I walked out to my car and drove off. I was 41 years old, a second-eleven celebrity and everything I owned fitted into the back of my Toyota Corolla. Not for the first time the needle on my self-pity gauge was jammed on full.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  KOTINGA STREET

  MY FAVOURITE JOURNEY IN THE whole world is driving out to Island Bay and taking the long and winding coast road around the Miramar Peninsula back into the city—past plunging hillsides, wild rocky shores, fierce seas with huge swells, crashing breakers, lacy foam and drifting phosphorescent spray. The first glimpse of the rugged Orongorongo Ranges across the harbour heads never fails to make me think of King Solomon’s Mines, a book I loved as a child. Regardless of the weather, I force all houseguests to take this journey with me. If none are available I go on my own at least once a month. Its hold on me never diminishes. It is my turangawaewae—my spiritual home. It doesn’t belong to me—I belong to it, which is vastly more special. I dream about it when I am overseas, which is why an artist’s loft in New York, a mews house in London or a maisonette in Paris hold no particular appeal for me.

  I can say this with some confidence. When I was reconfiguring my Hillary documentary View from the Top for Channel 4 in the UK, I stayed in a grand, five-storey Regency house just off Berkeley Square in London as a guest of Don McKinnon and Clare de Lore (now Sir Don and Lady Clare). Don was Secretary-General of the Commonwealth at the time. They were hugely entertaining and absurdly generous hosts. It was a splendid house that shared fabulous park-like private gardens with surrounding mansions. From my bedroom I had Dickensian views across gabled rooftops and extraordinarily elaborate chimney-stacks with gleaming spires in the distance, but I ached for the first rays of the morning sun creeping over dark blue hills and turning Evans Bay a liquid silver.
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  On one of my very first pilgrimages shortly after settling in Wellington in 1972, I rattled around a bend in Evans Bay in my old Ford Cortina and spied an intriguing colonial home nested all by itself in the town belt high above Kilbirnie. It was so alluring I went in search of a closer look and was hugely frustrated when I couldn’t get anywhere near the place. Maddeningly, no roads led to it. For years when I drove around the bays it remained ever beckoning and tantalisingly out of reach, until one day I got a phone call from a dear friend, Chris Hampson, who produced and directed the voice performances for Footrot Flats. Chris can do just about every job in moviemaking except play the female lead, but I reckon with the right make-up, the right wardrobe and dim lighting the bastard could probably pull that off as well. Chris told me on the phone that he was contemplating buying an old house up in the trees above Kilbirnie. ‘I know it! I know the house!’ I shouted excitedly. After that he had little choice but to invite me to come with him and have a look.

  We approached from another suburb, on the opposite side of the ridge, through a dark forest of geriatric pines up a half-hidden track of pitted clay and gravel. My heart was beating fast. The house, when it loomed up through the trees, even in a state of considerable disrepair, was magnificent. The verandah was rotting, the stairs leading up to it were lopsided, finials and bargeboards had fallen off, paint was peeling and windowpanes were cracked. Inside rooms had been divided into cubicles with olive-green hardboard and Pinex partitions, yet it was still beautiful. It was originally a farmhouse then, according to local legend, a secret hideaway for pregnant nuns waiting to give birth, and for a time was a hippie crash pad.

  I urged Chris to buy it. He is a Renaissance Man when it comes to renovating homes as well. He is pretty much his own architect, draughtsman, quantity surveyor, chippie, joiner, glazier, plumber, plasterer, electrician, tiler, painter and interior decorator. Then at his house-warming parties he pulls out a guitar and entertains his guests. He is a charming and gracious host into the bargain. It is any wonder none of his friends can stand him? In just a few years Chris and his then wife, the equally dynamic and vivacious Ruth Jefferies, utterly transformed the place.