Drawn Out

by Tom Scott

  ON OUR FINAL DAY WE drove through snow to the Austrian border via a Hungarian collective farm, which had entered into a joint venture with Canterbury graziers who were trying to convince them that electric fencing made for much more efficient pasture management, and that sheep in the wild survived winters perfectly well without five-star accommodation in barns. At long, rough-sawn refectory tables in the workers’ cafeteria they served us a hearty goulash washed down with pálinka, a traditional fruit brandy that you have to keep well clear of naked flame. Locals proudly concede that it tastes like a blow across the bridge of the nose with a hammer.

  Barry and I started trading toasts with two massive Hungarians, which morphed into a drinking contest. Six shots in Barry was weepily telling everyone he loved them. Eight shots in he lost the power of speech, as did one of the Hungarians and in a new language, known only to themselves, they communicated through a warm exchange of slurred vowel sounds. Ten shots in the last Hungarian in the race slid from view under the table, making me the winner.

  I have never represented my country in competition before and it was a proud moment. Had I had a black flag with a silver fern emblazoned on it I would have draped it over my shoulders Valerie Adams-fashion and done a victory lap. Instead, after Mike Moore had given a speech, I felt compelled to stand on the table and tell a joke. It was something very silly that somehow I remembered from an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show in the 1960s. Dick Van Dyke’s younger brother sits at a piano and announces that he is going to play the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 by Goulash. Dick protests that goulash is a stew. ‘I don’t care if he did drink, he was a damn fine composer!’

  I don’t know what was said in the translation but not much can have been lost because the Hungarians laughed uproariously and applauded wildly. Moore sat in po-faced silence. This was supposed to be his day in the sun, albeit watery, and I was hogging all the attention. Realising I had overstepped the mark I went in search of water. There was a crank-handle pump and a wooden trough in an adjacent shed. I filled the trough with icy water, bent over, plunged my head into it up to my collar and sucked up water like a camel. I did this until I was waterlogged, and waddled to the bus.

  At the border the watchtowers were unmanned, the wide strip of raked soil there to detect footprints was sprouting weeds, and the barbed-wire fencing sagged from neglect. After discreetly emptying my bladder for what seemed like twenty minutes I set about using my topdressing and freezing worker’s hands to repeatedly fold barbed wire back and forth until it heated at the hinge and snapped. I did this for everyone on the bus. I needed the exercise.

  Back on board I sat with Barry, Pattrick Smellie and others, crowded at the back of the bus. We sang Beatles’ songs very badly as we headed towards Vienna. Mike’s wife, Yvonne, squeezed in beside Barry and me. It was a cross between Twister and Stacks on the Mill, with everyone laughing and singing ‘Yellow Submarine’ with wild, tuneless, gormless abandon.

  The next minute Mike had pushed through the crowd and was shouting that he knew what game I was playing and he was having none of it. Barry assured him everything was above board. Yvonne shrank into the seat looking mortified.

  Mike left as quickly as he came. The singing picked up where it had left off. Mike appeared again, even more enraged—he had worked on a stationary dredge, he could deal to me no trouble. Still half-intoxicated, I rose out of my chair, told Mike I didn’t like being threatened, spun him around until he faced the front of the bus and told him to piss off. This he did.

  Some people whooped and hollered. He had exasperated nearly everyone at some point on the trip, but had done nothing to deserve this. I sat back shamefaced.

  I was still remonstrating with myself in my room in the Vienna Hilton, tapping out another long piece for the Evening Post, when there was a soft knocking on my door. A delegation of scribes led by Barry wanted me to do a cartoon of Mike as a thank-you present, which they could give to him at the final debriefing that evening. I protested that this would be the very last thing Mike wanted. They insisted, and I did my best.

  At the briefing Mike didn’t mince his words—he had poured his heart into this trip, he had sweated blood to make it happen and we were all a bunch of ungrateful, selfish bastards.

  ‘It’s been long journey, Mike. We’re all tired, Mike,’ ventured the deputy leader of the delegation soothingly. ‘It has been a wonderful experience. The opportunity of a lifetime, Mike. And as a token of our appreciation, Mike, we’d like to give you this gift.’

  He bravely handed over my cartoon. Mike looked at it briefly before hurling it away.

  ‘GET FUCKED! YOU CAN ALL GET FUCKED!’ And with that he stormed out.

  We regrouped in a subdued circle in the palatial bar. The consensus was that I had done my best to make amends and that Mike had behaved poorly in response.

  When the expensive cocktails eventually kicked in, a raucous evening ensued. Next door in a vast ballroom, a string quartet played Strauss waltzes to an empty dancefloor and a solitary couple siting by themselves in the far corner—Mike and Yvonne. Barry has a good heart, and went across to join them. Mike was tearful.

  ‘I love Tom. I love Tom. I fucked up. I fucked up!’

  When we met in a back corridor of Parliament a few weeks later he sheepishly invited me to his office for a drink, I sheepishly consented and we were soon laughing our heads off. Years later, when he became head of the World Trade Organization he sent me an affectionate postcard from Geneva. Mike has a good heart too. Left unspoken was the understanding that all relationships are complicated, divine mysteries that don’t bear too much analysis.

  Didn’t I know it! Crouched low over my typewriter at small hotel desks for long stretches at a time and, when there wasn’t a desk, resorting to using the corners of beds and splaying my feet at right angles to get close enough to the keyboard, I popped a disc in my lower back. (‘At the time of the alleged incident, Your Honour, my client was self-medicating on pálinka …’) The long flight home in cramped seats in the noisy, vibrating Boeing 727 was agony.

  We parked at the Defence Forces terminal on the opposite side of Wellington airport, next to the breakers rolling into Lyall Bay. There was no taxi rank. Other wives, husbands, sweethearts and boyfriends were there to pick up their partners. There was no sign of Helen. As they left, people offered me rides. I shook my head. It was all arranged. I was sorted. This was before cell phones, so I asked if I could use a phone in the traffic-control office to call home just to check that nothing had gone wrong. No one answered. I left a message.

  When the compound emptied I sat out on the road beside my suitcase and waited forlornly. A flight sergeant emerged, having switched off the lights and locked the place up. He took pity on me and said I could borrow their phone again.

  This time Helen answered. I asked if she was coming to pick me up. There was no disguising the irritation in her voice. Had an Air Force Skyhawk written it in the sky with white smoke it couldn’t have been more obvious—my relationship with Helen was failing again. It would end for sure. The only question was when.

  We hardly spoke on the drive home. The kids were pleased to see me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  MEETING ED

  LATER THAT YEAR, OUT OF the blue, I received an invitation to be an after-dinner speaker at a black-tie dinner that changed my life forever and for the better—I just didn’t know it yet.

  In 1990 New Zealand celebrated its sesquicentenary. Foreign Affairs dispensed additional largesse to embassies and high commissions around the globe so that our one hundred and fiftieth birthday could be acknowledged in style. When my mate Dennis Grant, at the time a widely admired senior member of the Canberra Press Gallery—and I have this on no lesser authority than Dennis himself—heard that our high commissioner was contemplating some sort of bash with sawdust on the floor where a Kiwi-born NRL player would say a few words, one of which would be ‘Maaaaaate’, Denny felt morally obliged to intervene and suggested a glittering
dinner at the National Press Club instead, with Sir Edmund Hillary to give the main speech. This implied a subsidiary role for another orator, and when that question arose Dennis was ready. He knew just the right man for the job.

  I had no idea of Denny’s involvement when the formal invitation to be Ed’s warm-up act arrived. I thought it was entirely on my own merits, and that Australia was treating me with a respect and deference my own country had cruelly long denied me.

  I had never met Hillary, and this made me giddy with excitement as well. When he strode purposefully into the Koru Lounge at Auckland International Airport he looked so like himself I barely recognised him. He had a physical presence and an aura that made him appear closer to seven foot than his six foot two. We sat next to each other on the plane and hardly exchanged a word. I scribbled speech notes frantically.

  I lost him at the international arrivals hall. We had a connecting flight to Canberra leaving shortly from the domestic terminal on the opposite side of the aerodrome. Ed would just have to fend for himself. Lugging my big suitcase, I had a hell of a time getting there and arrived at the departure gate drenched in sweat just as they were about to close the doors. Ed was waiting for me, as cool as a cucumber. ‘I was getting a bit worried. They’ve been paging you.’

  We talked a bit more on the flight but he didn’t really loosen up until the end of the evening when I bought him his first ever glass of Jameson’s Irish whiskey, which he took to instantly. It had been an enjoyable night.

  In my speech I said that we had crossed the Tasman at 31,000 feet, just a little higher than Everest, and it was minus 50 degrees outside, just a little colder than Everest. Ed asked for a blanket and went outside and sat on the wing. He was as happy as a sand-boy the whole journey. The air hostesses had a hell of a job coaxing him back into the cabin. ‘Please, Sir Edmund. We have to land. We can’t keep circling like this …’

  The audience, a mixture of Ockers and Kiwis, enjoyed my gentle mocking of the great man, and the great man enjoyed it even more.

  ‘I’ll have to lift my game.’ He beamed when I sat down. There was a steely glint in his pale blue-grey eyes. It suddenly struck me that he was deadly serious. He was 71 years old and still fiercely competitive. He disguised his ruthless streak well in his autumn years—he knew that at full force it wasn’t attractive and it had got him into bitter disputes with a number of climbing companions and fellow adventurers over the years. I caught whiffs of it again in later dealings with him. It worked to his advantage this night, though. He wasn’t going to be upstaged by a chubby, waddling, balding cartoonist and gave a tremendous speech, punctuated frequently by laughter, applause—and sharp, gasping intakes of breath when he recounted some of his close calls in the wild. It was a thrill discovering that hard-nosed cynical Australians held Ed in much the same affection and awe as Kiwis do.

  I stayed that night with Dennis Grant and his wickedly droll wife, Robyn. Denny knew I had been working on a television drama about David Lange, who he was very close to when he worked in the Wellington Press Gallery, and he wanted to know what I thought of his idea for a movie. He proceeded to tell me about New Year’s Eve 1978, when he was a member of a television news crew in the SAFE Air Argosy night-time freight delivery run that filmed a close encounter with a UFO off the Kaikōura coast of the South Island. I was stunned when he recounted the extraordinary moment a strange ball of light buzzed their aircraft as they flew north—sweeping around them, under them, over them, drawing alongside them and whizzing away from them at what science-fiction fans would call warp speed.

  ‘I have no idea what it was,’ recalled Dennis dryly, ‘but it wasn’t a fucking squid boat as some experts suggest. Air Traffic Control radar tends not to record fishing boats dragging nets at twelve thousand feet. Nor does cockpit radar. And it wasn’t Venus. Our pilots were reasonably familiar with where Venus is positioned in the sky.’

  When I asked him why he had never told me this before he responded simply that he kept the story to himself because he didn’t want people to think he was mad. His Channel 10 mate, the reporter who broke the story, Quentin Fogarty, was all but broken himself by the event and the media feeding frenzy that followed.

  While Dennis diligently scribbled down copious notes on a yellow legal pad I gave him the full benefit of my vast knowledge of moviemaking, which at that point consisted solely of co-writing an animated feature film about a neurotic sheepdog. As a consequence, making movies was playing on my mind when I flew back to Sydney with Ed the next morning.

  All the way through the international departures terminal he was besieged by autograph-hunters and people who wanted their picture taken with him. They were of every nationality and sometimes sign language bordering on charades was required. He consented without fuss. It looked exhausting.

  ‘How long has this been going on?’ I asked.

  ‘Forty years,’ he replied, flashing the famous grin.

  He insisted on buying me lunch and took me to a discreetly tucked-away white-linen and silver-service restaurant that I never knew existed. We were totally at ease in each other’s company now, laughing and joking with each other. I was curious to know why a film had never been made about his exploits. He told me that he had been approached over the years by some big-name Hollywood types, but the right person hadn’t asked. I blurted out that I would love to do it. He had known me less than 24 hours. He replied evenly, ‘You are the right person.’

  I was staggered, thrilled and terrified all at once. As is my wont in moments like these, I immediately applied the handbrake and provided him with an escape clause. I advised him to discuss it with his wife and family.

  It was mid-December. We would talk again in the New Year, after he had given it more thought, and if he still felt the same way I would do everything in my power to make a movie worthy of his life.

  Back in Wellington I scoured second-hand bookshops for everything I could find on or by Ed. He wrote his first, and in many ways his best, book, High Adventure, in longhand just months after the successful 1953 British expedition to Everest, when every lung-burning step of the ascent was still fresh and vivid. The writing is so visceral and so real, I read it that summer shivering under a blanket, fearful I might lose my fingers and toes to frostbite. It was blindingly obvious that, told well, it would make a stunning movie.

  I had a book of my own out that Christmas, Private Parts. Ed was given a copy as a present and luckily for me he enjoyed it. The Hillarys had been holidaying in the South Island. I caught up with them at a motel on Peka Peka Beach on their road trip back to Auckland, meeting June Mulgrew, Lady Hillary, for the first time. She proved to be a beautiful, elegant, lively, strong-willed force of nature in her own right. Fortunately, we clicked as well. They had talked the movie idea through and they gave the project and my handling of it their full and unconditional blessing. My head reeled with giddy excitement and ached with the weight of responsibility at the same time.

  For research purposes I needed to accompany them on their next trip to the Solukhumbu in Eastern Nepal and see for myself the 30 schools, half-dozen medical clinics, three airstrips, two hospitals and many bridges Sir Edmund’s Himalayan Trust had funded and built along the hill trail to Everest. I told my mate Mark Sainsbury, a reporter on Holmes, that he should come as well. Taking a leaf out of the Dennis Grant playbook, Mark played the age card—how much longer could the hero of Everest keep going? Could this be his last trip to his second home—the land he loved and the people he loved, the Sherpas, who worshipped like a god the man they called Burra Sahib? He laid it on shamelessly. TVNZ bought every wild exaggeration, all of which very nearly came to pass.

  MEANWHILE, BACK IN FEILDING MY father’s heart was failing him again. He was so frail he had to move out of the tribal seat in Owen Street to Wimbledon Villa rest home in Manchester Street. When I heard from sister Sue that he had to be readmitted to Palmerston North Hospital for treatment I rang the cardiac ward several times to talk to him but I could ne
ver get through. He always seemed to be sleeping or was with a doctor or nurse and could not be disturbed.

  One evening my youngest brother, Rob, rang. Rob is a very funny man and just about the nicest person on the planet. I asked him how he was.

  ‘Not very good, actually,’ he replied solemnly, which was unlike him.

  ‘Why, what’s wrong?’

  ‘I’ve just been talking to the old man.’

  I braced myself for bad news. ‘Is he OK? I can’t get through to him on the phone.’

  Rob’s voice cracked. ‘I know. He told me that just now.’

  Rob then quoted what my father said to him next: ‘“Egghead is trying to ring me. I’m refusing to take his calls. I want my death on his conscience!”’

  I sighed. What had I ever done to warrant this? My father returned to Wimbledon Villa. When friends pushed his wheelchair around the block, to give him some fresh air and some sun on his face, he told them in his still-thick Ulster brogue that he was going home. If they could see the Wimbledon Villa looming up they smiled and said, ‘Yes, Tom, we’re nearly there …’ But that’s not what he meant.

  I got on with my preparation for Nepal, going for long walks over the Wellington hills in my new tramping boots with a pack on my back, desperately trying to lose weight and get fit, my lower back still stabbing me intermittently with searing pain. Two physiotherapists giving me treatment said there was nothing more they could do. It was my age. I would have to live with some degree of chronic discomfort for the rest of my days.

  As our mid-April departure day approached, every couple of mornings I woke to find coils of fax paper spilling out of my machine—updates on Sir Edmund’s already immaculate planning, hand-written in his neat copperplate. I started to feel like Ed and George Lowe on the eve of their departure to join the British expedition in 1953—except I would arrive in Nepal in a wide-bodied jet after just two days of travel. Travelling by Sunderland flying boat, passenger liner and steam train, it took them three weeks.