In recent years, I’ve speculated about my rather curious relationship with my family. I am now only slightly older than my father was when I was born. What would my children have thought if I’d remarried and brought home a very young bride? How would they react if the bride gave birth to a boy who was younger than her husband’s grandsons? Yet, in those early years I never felt any animosity or hostility from my sister and brothers in spite of standing awkwardly between generations. In fact, it was quite the reverse. I was terribly spoiled by my mother. It was as if she was trying to compensate for my peculiar position in the family. Later, the name we shared and the difference in our ages caused some confusion. I remember speaking at a dinner for the Taranaki Rugby Union in the early nineties. After my speech an elderly man approached me and asked if I was related to the ‘Rugby McPhails’. I replied I was Alec McPhail’s son. He looked startled. ‘No, you’re not,’ he said.
‘Yes, I am,’ I said.
He shook his head in disbelief and stared at me as if I was trying deliberately to be argumentative. He pointed a finger at me. ‘Well, I’m telling you mate, you’re not.’ Later in the evening, I saw him talking to a group of his friends. He turned and pointed at me again and they all laughed.
My mother decided I would be baptised into the Anglican Church and Alec, despite his reservations about churches of any kind, agreed. I never considered him an unbeliever. I simply felt he saw no use for religion. My father was largely self-taught and, despite his preoccupations with business and Rugby, he was a passionate reader. In Manchester Street, there was a large collection of books called Everyman’s. The titles ranged from The Histories of Herodotus to The Confessions of an Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincy. Of course, I couldn’t read the titles but the books were useful for building forts on rainy days. However, it was this constant presence of books that probably ignited my delight in reading.
I was duly baptised at St Luke’s Church in Manchester Street. I don’t remember if my father attended but I do recall six months later the arrival at our front door of a new vicar. St Luke’s was High Anglican and the new vicar styled himself ‘Father’. From several blustering breakfast conversations I gathered my father didn’t like the vicar visiting.
One morning my mother spied the vicar approaching and rushed to the front door but, unfortunately, Alec got there first. The two men’s conversation ended somewhat abruptly. From my bedroom window I watched in disbelief as my father grabbed the new vicar by his collar and the seat of his trousers and frog-marched him to the front gate. The vicar ran away down the footpath while my mother stood in the driveway, her hands to her mouth. My father walked back and as he passed I heard him say, ‘You can go to his place, but tell him to stay away from mine.’
Another day, my father was sitting under the cherry tree in the back garden. He wore his waistcoat, a tie and a large Panama hat. I was about to jump off the roof of the garage assisted, I was convinced, by a parachute I’d made from an old sheet. Alec had told me twice to get off the roof before I broke my neck. I replied that my parachute would save me. He put down the book he’d been reading and carefully placed a cigarette in his holder. He struck a wax match and lit the cigarette. Then, he calmly told me a third time that my parachute wouldn’t work and if I jumped I would have to clean up the mess. He went back to his book. I jumped off the roof and sprained my ankle. My wailing brought my mother running from the kitchen. She demanded to know what had happened. My father looked up from his book and blew out a long stream of cigarette smoke into the air. ‘The boy jumped off the roof,’ he replied. ‘He won’t do it again.’
When I turned five I was enrolled at Victory Memorial School in St Albans. The school uniform included a cherry red cap to which was attached a large metal V. In a fight you could draw blood with your cap. I settled uncomfortably into the school. This was mainly because I was required to have lunch, or, as it was then called, dinner, at my maternal grandmother’s flat. She was a squat, stiff-necked woman named Ada Wellsford. She disapproved of her daughter’s marriage and she irritated my father so there were frequent arguments. But, being in somewhat straitened financial circumstances, she was forced to accept his generosity and lived rent-free in a block of flats Alec had built. Unfortunately for me, the flats were near Victory Memorial School and so the grim ritual of lunch started. I was required to eat her food. Ada’s chosen speciality was grey mutton stew into which she scattered the sharp bones of dead animals. She’d tried to cook all her life and misguidedly decided this was her great gift to the cuisines of the world.
I begged my mother for cheese sandwiches, even lamb’s tongue which often made me gag. But she firmly refused, saying Nana enjoyed my visits and looked forward to sharing her midday meal. I could hardly contradict my mother but this was nonsense. Nana never ate her wretched stews and she hardly spoke. She simply sat sipping a cup of tea and staring at me as I picked my way miserably around the bones. Ada Wellsford died while I was still young, but she left me an inheritance — 57 years on, I still hate mutton stew.
At the age of eight I was selected to audition for the Christchurch Cathedral Choir. I was completely unaware that my voice was different from the other children at school. I simply bellowed out the hymns with everyone else. I knew I could sing higher than the other boys but I was hoping this didn’t make me different. Then, I sensed something significant was taking place because my mother fussed around me more frenetically than usual. I passed the audition and in 1954 my mother told me in reverential, hushed and rather hurried tones that I was to become a pupil at the Cathedral Grammar School and a treble chorister in the choir. I didn’t know what this meant. Nor did I know I would meet two men who were to have a major influence on my life: the organist and Master of choristers, Dr C Foster Browne, and the Precentor of the Cathedral, Canon William Orange.
But, before entering the choir, I accompanied my mother on a visit to Australia where her aunt lived. It was uncommon for a small boy to travel overseas and even rarer to do so in a flying boat. In 1954, the forerunner of Air New Zealand, Tasman Empire Airline, or TEAL, operated Solent flyboats between New Zealand and Australia. These rather blunt aircraft had four engines and could carry 45 passengers. The flight to Sydney Harbour took seven hours. It was in April, just after my birthday, that my mother and I arrived in Wellington and took a taxi to Evans Bay. I had only been on an aircraft once before, a trusty DC3, so I became even more fearful when I saw the flying boat rocking wildly on choppy waves. Passengers usually embarked from a wharf, but when the wind was up you crowded on board a lighter and were ferried to the aircraft.
You were then presented with an alarming difficulty — getting from the lighter into the aircraft when both were bucking like startled stallions. My mother would get one foot through the cabin door then the lighter would suddenly drop a metre leaving her stranded with her leg in the water. Finally all the passengers, in various degrees of dampness, were on board. There were two levels of seating on a Solent flyboat and an odd table configuration. Two pairs of seats faced each other and between them, bolted firmly to the floor, was a small, Formica-topped table. This meant that for seven hours you were staring directly into the faces of the two passengers opposite. Fortunately, on the journey to Sydney, the two seats were empty. It was only on the return flight that I discovered how awkward this arrangement could be.
The visit to my great-aunt was so uneventful that I can’t remember anything about it and before I had time to decide whether I liked Sydney or not — I had after all only seen the suburb of Lane Cove — we were climbing back on the flying boat again. But the world had changed during the previous two weeks. A diplomatic upheaval had occurred in Canberra. The third secretary of the Soviet Embassy, Vladimir Petrov, had defected. He was a colonel in the KGB and as a result of his defection Russian agents descended on the South Pacific.
Two of them were sitting opposite my mother and me as the Solent heaved itself out of Sydney harbour and turned towards New Zealand. Neither of us k
new at the time they were KGB agents. It was later that reports surfaced of commotions in the Soviet diplomatic service and that embassy staff in Canberra and Wellington had been interrogated. The two men didn’t speak, ate very little, wore hats for the entire flight and stared at me for seven hours. That’s not strictly true. I had been given a tin, clock-work elephant by my great-aunt. It was slightly smaller than a shoe box and brightly coloured. When you wound the key the elephant’s legs would move and if you placed it on a flat surface it would walk. That is what I did the moment we were in the air and the elephant walked straight at the Russians. There were no smiles. They simply stared at the advancing elephant as if it was carrying an infectious disease.
When it came close to falling off the table, one would abruptly pick the elephant up, swing it around and return it to me. I thought this was a great game. After perhaps ten minutes, my mother became slightly hysterical, grabbed the elephant and stuffed it in her handbag. The faces of the Russians were impassive.
I think we ate shrimp cocktail and Beef Wellington as the Russians watched. I asked my mother for the elephant many times but she fussed me away with her hand. After seven hours facing the solid, silent Russians, we dropped into Evans Bay. I had fallen asleep. My mother nudged me as the Solent lowered over Wellington.
We and the Russians were on the lower passenger deck. The flying boat descended into the bay and plumes of spray engulfed the windows. This was perfectly normal — as the flying boat landed it sank into the water before regaining its buoyancy. But I thought we were drowning and started screaming. The Russians watched impassively. We clambered out of the aircraft. At that moment, I felt a rough hand on my shoulder. I turned and saw one of the Russians. He was smiling and his mouth was full of gold. ‘Eleepharnt,’ he said and ruffled my hair.
Chapter 3
SONGS
I joined a group of 23 boys and, for the next four years, the members of the Christchurch Cathedral Choir would be my constant companions. We rehearsed every morning — we were sometimes excused on Saturday mornings if our singing had pleased Foster Browne — in an almost vertical room under the Cathedral’s spire. As the spire went up, the room got taller and smaller. Then, we would cycle to school in a long procession that was called the Croc. (An old chorister decided that the swirling line of bicycles resembled a crocodile.)
Following a day of lessons and sport, the choir would return to the Cathedral to sing the choral Evensong. On Tuesdays, we rehearsed by ourselves before donning the cassocks, surplices and ruffs — frilly collars you wore around your neck — and singing the Evensong. We had a brief respite on those Tuesdays. We were allowed to wait in a room above the north door of the Cathedral. There were comics in the room but they were very old comics and the speech balloons contained words I didn’t recognise. So, I would ignore them, sing with duty and devotion and usually arrive home about 6.15 pm. Every Sunday there was Matins or Holy Communion in the morning and Evensong at night. This may seem an overly rigorous routine for young boys, but I can never remember feeling overused or being denied the fun that other children might be having.
There was a close bond between the choristers and constant exhilaration about the glorious music we were singing as well as distinct pride in the sounds Foster Browne managed to coax from our young mouths. He was a master musician and a fine organist with a great and patient skill. That is not to say he could not sometimes be frightening and, while he employed it only infrequently, his dexterity with the strap was highly respected, particularly among the younger boys. Foster Browne had a solemn, thoughtful manner and a low, mellifluous voice. He also cared deeply for every choirboy and, as the years passed, this subdued but profound affection was to carry me through a dark time in my life. Oddly, for a man immersed in voices, Foster Browne smoked heavily. But, such was the world of the fifties, none of us ever thought this unusual or even peculiar. In fact, I welcomed the rich waft of tobacco smoke that reminded me of home.
Canon William Orange was a short, clearly defined man who wore a frock coat and sometimes traditional Anglican gaiters. He looked as if he was a character from a Jane Austen novel. He had a small face, enthroned by a prominent nose, remarkable for red veins that resembled a road map of central Europe. I am not suggesting William Orange’s nose was related, in any way, to a surfeit of sherry. He was a man of incalculable probity, humility, learning and faith. I have one very distinct memory of him.
Our choir was always singing hymns and anthems to the risen Christ and the sublime mystery of the Trinity. At one point, the magic of the words I was chanting did not make much sense to me. I was brooding in the room above the north door of the Cathedral when Canon Orange came in. He asked why I was not running around outside. I explained my dilemma.
He nodded. ‘You’ve been thinking deeply,’ he said.
I was pleased to have gained his attention and pressed on with my fragile logic. ‘Mathematically, it’s not possible,’ I continued.
Canon Orange looked at me calmly. ‘The Trinity has nothing to do with logic or maths. It is about faith.’ At that one moment Canon Orange had gone to the heart of my beliefs and raised for the first time the tiny possibility of doubt. But I was never unhappy that he had made me examine my religious faith rather than ritually follow the rites. The good Canon had, in one sense, opened my mind.
I was inspired by the music I was singing even if sometimes puzzled by the words. Yet, there was another more mundane reason I loved being in the choir. You do not stutter when you sing and I had a complicated and tongue-numbing stammer. I don’t know when it started, but I cannot remember a time when I didn’t stammer. A psychologist would say that it was directly linked to the death of my father. It’s an attractive proposition: father dies, small boy has cathartic reaction and starts sounding like an exploding tape recorder. This ignores the fact that I was stuttering well before my father died. It was not immediately noticeable because I didn’t say much. My discussions with my father were usually succinct and to the point, and because my mother talked often and very quickly, there were few chances for me to contribute to our conversations.
I became fully aware of this shadowy fault in myself when I began experiencing difficulty saying that most private and personal of words, ‘Mother’. I had been taught emphatically that my parents’ names were Mother and Father. We, on my mother’s ‘side of the tracks’, did not use ‘Mum’ or ‘Dad’. The ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’ that some of my fellow choristers employed were forbidden in our house. Those words represented a culture of noisy girls and languid boys from St Margaret’s or Christ’s College.
There were two distinct stammering phases that, in later life, I identified as the murmuring hum and muted monkey. The first appeared when I attempted to say morning, mountain or mother. I would press my lips together to form the first letter and then proceed to hum. The more I tried to force the word out, the louder the hum became. I never thought to stop and start again. When I embarked on a statement such as, ‘What a lovely morning,’ there was an obsessive panic to finish it. My listeners would smile wanly, nod their heads encouragingly and begin looking for a spot in the air just to the right of my head. The muted monkey was a different beast altogether. It would spring on me when I launched into something like, ‘That’s a good argument.’ I’d get the first three words out, but when I reached the fourth a rigid rictus transformed my face. The only sound that came out was a not unimpressive impersonation of a great ape. ‘Arga, arga, arga …’ My listeners were now looking at each other in considerable distress.
Of course, there was always one considerate person who thought they could help by trying to guess the word I was attempting to say. This invariably led to a rather gruesome game of charades. They would shout hopeful options while I would shake my head in desperation and grimly continue the monkey impression. I don’t remember any speech therapy in my youth. I think my impediment was considered to be a fact of nature that had to be accepted with quiet resignation like measles or mumps.
There was an occasion when a solution was suggested by a fellow stutterer. He found it useful to put a sound he could utter in front of a troublesome word. In his case, he was confident with any word that began with ‘n’. So, he would place the sound ‘nuh’ before anything that was likely to trip him. This gave his conversation a rather surreal quality. ‘I nuh went to the nuh shops and nuh bought some sweets and a nuh ice cream.’ I agreed there were no embarrassing gaps, but it was a little too unruly for me.
The disheartening thing for someone who stammers is that you recognise in advance the wearisome word that’s coming up. However, over the years, I discovered this increased my vocabulary considerably. In conversation, I was forever searching for similes and constantly restructuring my speech to find alternative words or sentences. And, as I mentioned before, you never stammer when you are singing. This is because you are in control of your breathing. Later, I developed another trick that I would certainly not recommend to anyone even if they have difficulty saying their own name. I started to smoke cigarettes. If I wanted to say, ‘You’re looking beautiful tonight,’ and realised I would destroy my chances by stumbling over ‘beautiful’, I would begin the sentence and between ‘looking’ and ‘beautiful’ would inhale on my cigarette. This introduced a perfectly acceptable pause while giving me the chance to take a breath. However, this technique should be ignored. It is better to stutter and stay alive than speak fluently and die. It remains a puzzle to me that, with such a glaring deficiency, I decided on a career that required me to speak publicly.
My early years in the choir passed happily and uneventfully. I made good friends, the Ellis twins, John Dalziel and Mike Rudd. My singing was becoming more confident and the spiritual guidance of Canon Orange and the firm but benign leadership of Foster Browne was both reassuring and comforting. I was no longer frightened of cycling home in the dark after Evensong. My fellow choristers accepted my stammer as a harmless eccentricity and, while I was fat, I’d discovered that by laughing at my size and making the other boys snigger I could diffuse the threat of being bullied.
The Years Before My Death Page 3