Telling Tales

by William Taylor

  Haere mai. Haere mai. Welcome Room 13, Mr Taylor and distinguished guests. My name is David Gibson as you all should know, and my occupation, which I greatly enjoy and have dedicated my life to, is the writing of books for people like you.

  As you know, only forty-eight hours ago I was speaking to the President of the U.S.A. and Mr Kissinger. I was there on a very special occasion, ordered there by the President himself, to show him this book, this superb book that I hold in my hands. One hundred and twenty-eight pages of it.

  It’s only made of paper but that collection of paper that we writers call a book is a story. From the beginning to the end it fills you with suspense, thrills and excitement.

  I see some of you admiring the cover. Good on you, admire it, but remember it is not the cover that makes a book, it is what is inside the cover.

  And now for the book itself. It is of four men and the interaction between them. And the rest? Well, that’s for you to find out when you read this superb book…

  The ‘superb book’ was a tatty and tattered copy of a tale that recounted how a band of four intrepid Aussies had recaptured Singapore from the Japanese in 1945.

  They were the most highly competitive class I would ever teach. Funnily enough, this was not so much with each other—they were mutually supportive to a remarkable degree—but with anything, anyone, indeed everything outside the doors of bashed and battered Room 13. In anything involving inter-class competition, they simply had to come in first, and generally they did. By fair means or foul! The school was not a well-off establishment, and money had to be raised to cover the cost of anything beyond bare essentials. Sometimes it even needed raising for the bare essentials themselves. The kids sold plastic bags, bags full of clothes-pegs, chocolate and raffle tickets…Whatever it was, Room 13 always came out on top—and I was frequently called upon to defend the tactics my kids seemed doomed to employ. I was amazed to discover much later on that very few, if any, had ended up as dodgy used-car salespersons, confidence tricksters or were in jail for fraud. Mind you, today several are lawyers.

  It was in their writing that they truly excelled. They were as enthusiastic writers as they were readers. Rosemary writes:

  End of Summer

  Quieter and quieter it gets.

  Dullness appears.

  We move slower,

  Sing softer songs.

  The world is drenched in

  Quiet denseness.

  It is also Rosemary who writes a fairy story and comes up with what may be the best line I have ever had in a piece of writing from a twelve-or thirteen-year-old. It is a little fable of a man called Mr Watchamacallit in search of a wife. He visits a princess who lives in the depths of the forest, pours forth his woes to her and expects her to solve his problem for him:

  ‘Mr Watchamacallit, I don’t see how you can be so ready to do nothing for something you really want,’ cried the Princess.

  Writing was not always dramatic. When we visited a forest and looked on as pines were felled, Dicey wrote:

  Confidently

  He started easing the saw

  As it sang Mummy, Mummy

  I want wood in my tummy.

  The tree,

  Realising it had been killed,

  Decided to drop dead.

  Parting from a class such as this is an enormous wrench. Well, a wrench and a relief! God knows, I needed a break from them and a good, long holiday. I still treasure the cufflinks they gave me as a farewell gift. ‘Rubies set in gold’ I was told. Rubies they may not be, but they are certainly jewels beyond price. I loved this class of kids. All of them. If you are going to teach successfully, you’ve got to love the kids you teach. It’s too mild to say you have to ‘like’ them. You’ve got to love them, accept them for what they are—warts and all—listen to them, learn from them, learn with them, and do your best for them. Teaching is not for the faint-hearted or the half-hearted. Not then and not now.

  I really did not expect to see this pack of reprobates again, so it was a delight and a joy that the Dunmores had been able to ferret out so many of them. But after that I really didn’t expect to see any of them ever again. I was completely and utterly wrong.

  Twenty-three years further on, the phone rang.

  ‘You won’t remember me, but I was in your Burnt Carrots Don’t Have Legs class at Feilding Intermediate.’

  ‘Yes, I remember you, Gillian,’ I said. ‘Gillian Burney.’ Her distinctive voice had barely changed.

  A stunned silence at what was little more than a lucky guess. ‘It’s Jills now,’ she said.

  ‘Is that so?’ I think I said. ‘You’ll always be Gillian to me.’ Typical bloody teacher! You can’t change a leopard’s spots.

  ‘There are three or four of us from our class here at my place and we thought we’d give you a call.’

  ‘How nice,’ I said. ‘And here I was thinking that you’d probably all be dead from drug overdoses or else in jail or otherwise restrained.’

  I was indeed wrong. They were accountants, lawyers (of course!), teachers, involved in working for women’s rights and safety and for the rights of workers, bankers, business people, mothers of families, farmers…No more than one or two had fallen by the wayside.

  Burnt Carrots had certainly possessed qualities of adhesion. It had kept some of them together as a sort of group.

  ‘We thought it would be a good idea if we had a class reunion. You’ll come, of course.’

  What option did I have! ‘I would be honoured, Gillian. Jills,’ I said.

  Jills Angus Burney, world champion shearer of sheep, graduate in women’s studies and then in law, now a union lawyer, and most recently a Labour Party candidate for Parliament. A very good organizer.

  Our reunion was held not in Feilding, but in Hamilton at Waikato University over a weekend in 1997. About half the class made it there, and there were greetings and apologies from many of the others. It didn’t need a reunion twenty-three years on to make my original year with them worthwhile, but it was certainly wonderful icing on what had been a pretty good cake. I had kept all the original writing and artwork that I had purloined from them for the writing of the book. They were, all of them, somewhat amazed at how good they had been! Typical of the buggers, they’re still holding on to it and I’ll probably never get it back. I guess it doesn’t matter any more.

  They signed my copy of the book:

  A door was opened…

  Something was shaped and moulded…

  Like breath to the flame

  24 years on…I grow and glow

  Te mata pitau

  Te mura o te ahi.

  Ka puawai—Ka puawai

  Yesterday Today + Tomorrow

  Kiri

  I say in the book that I thought Kiri didn’t like me. She disabuses me of that thought. Mind you, I think she is probably still a tough customer.

  Kia Ora Bill,

  24 years on and I smile still…having had your touch has helped me fly and give creative caution to the wind!

  With respect and admiration for you. Thank you.

  Arohanui, Dicey

  What a fine boy he had been, and now a fine man. He won a scholarship to Scots’ College in Wellington. I am sure he did them proud, too. He is a teacher now. This certainly pleases me.

  The book has been out of print for many years. I still spot it occasionally in school staffroom bookshelves. I have only two copies of it myself. I paid $30 for a second-hand copy a year or so back. For a while it was used as a text for a Massey University ‘Teacher of English’ paper. Whatever, funny little book that it is, it remains close to my heart as do the characters it exploits. Several of them turned up to help celebrate my seventieth birthday in 2008, another tribute in itself.

  VII

  If it’s true we can only play the hand life deals us, then Ivan and Dorothea were dealt a lousy hand. The end result of a lousy hand may be modified by skilful play, but I guess my parents were not very good card players. Materially th
e odds always seemed stacked against them, and they never hedged their bets particularly well. At times things would seem to get better for them, and then the proverbial rug would be pulled out from under them yet again.

  They moved from their old rented house in Petone into a brand-new State unit in Taita Drive, Lower Hutt—just down the road from where Avalon television studios would soon be built. Quite a nice place and quite a pleasant area, opposite the Hutt River. Ivan had a factory job down in the Gracefield industrial area. It seemed to satisfy him, and he would work for the firm for many years until he was well into his seventies. Dorothea had two jobs—she was a clerk in a government department in Wellington, and she tutored in floristry and floral art at the old Petone Tech. In mid-1959, Grandad Taylor died. With not much of a family to call her own, my mother had loved the old man very dearly. She had always regarded him much more as a father than a father-in-law. I have always felt that this was a contributing factor to her own disaster just four months later.

  On the train going to work, Dorothea suffered a massive series of strokes and her life changed in that one fell blow. We were told she would die. She lay unconscious for days, but she survived. She survived, virtually speechless, completely crippled down her right-hand side. Part of me thought that it would have been better had she died. Part of me has since grown to believe that such a thought is complete bloody rot! An indomitable spirit, she would live a further dozen years. Some powers of speech were restored in time. She taught herself to write with her left hand, and could still manage to write a damn good sentence, albeit slowly. She managed to cook and bake a little bit. Once a voracious reader, she managed to restore her reading to the level of skimming a newspaper and browsing magazines. She enjoyed listening to the radio and viewing television. Above all, she still had the love and affection of her husband and her children. She took joy in the presence of her first grandchildren. Her right arm remained completely useless, and she wore a caliper on her right leg for the rest of her life, able to slowly move around with some assistance. When words failed her, which was frequently, she would fling her walking-stick in disgust and anger—generally in the direction of my poor little sister, Janette. Jan was frequently the target of Mother’s walking-stick! So was a clergyman who was unwise enough to visit her at home one day. So, too, were a couple of juvenile house-breakers whom she surprised in the middle of their burgling expedition when she was home alone. That time, sadly, she did collapse and remained comatose on the floor until one of us got home. It wasn’t an easy life for Dorothea, but it was a life.

  ‘In sickness and in health’; these words would have been spoken in their marriage vows back in 1937. A vow that my father must have taken to heart. A vow that he assuredly kept for the last dozen years of his wife’s life. Ivan worked full-time. He had to. When he wasn’t at work, he looked after his wife. My father’s devotion to my mother was absolute. There was no such thing as ‘respite care’ back in the early ’sixties. In effect, Ivan had two full-time jobs.

  I was back living at home from 1959. So were Hugh and Jan. Hugh was at high school in Petone, Jan still at primary school. Margaret took off to London in the early ’sixties where she would later marry and raise a family.

  We now lived in Burcham Street, Taita. A State house. Not a big one, either. However, unlike the unit, it had the advantage of being on one floor. I think ours was the smallest State house in Burcham Street. There were some enormous ones, purpose-built for very large families. Nice families, too. I think all of the big families were Roman Catholic. Jan, a gregarious creature, made many friends among them, and most of the sporting and social clubs she joined were Catholic. She played hockey and softball, eventually at provincial level, and on at least one occasion at national level.

  It was as well that we all had a wide range of domestic skills. I did most of the cooking, other than Sunday dinner which Ivan always produced. I also kept an eye on Jan’s erratic progress through several schools. Jan did the shopping. Hugh mowed the lawns…sometimes mowed the lawns! Hugh never did the vacuum cleaning, but he kept a close eye on Jan. Looking back I believe we managed as well as we could. Ivan could be a bit grumpy at times, but, dear God, who could blame him. I know I am more understanding of my late father today than I was back then.

  It was around 1961 that I met Delia, my future wife. It was not love at first sight. Without a word of a lie, we loathed the sight of each other.

  I arrived home from Christchurch in 1959. I had friends all over the country, particularly the South Island, but none in Wellington or the Hutt. There were only one or two others of my age on the staff at Trentham, and while we were certainly friendly we were not close. I put my theatrical experiences in The Madwoman of Chaillot and The Man Who Wouldn’t Go to Heaven to good use. Spotting that one of the two Lower Hutt repertory societies was advertising auditions for an upcoming production, I bowled along, won a part of respectable size in The Desperate Hours, and in my ‘spare’ time spent most of the next five years treading the boards of Lower Hutt’s Little Theatre. These were the days prior to any professional theatre in Wellington, and competition was quite fierce for what was on offer in the amateur field. Quite a number of those with whom I acted moved into professional work as theatre ‘proper’ took root. I was never really tempted. In all truth, no offers were forthcoming! Besides, I had no desire to change career.

  I was adequate in serious roles. Our company, Valley Players, staged half a dozen productions a year. Comedies brought in the audiences, and were the company’s staple commodity, and it was in comedy that I found my theatrical forte. British comedies, of course! The old Brian Rix staples. Those, and pantomime. I was a brilliant, some would say typecast, Ugly Sister in Cinderella. I did Ali Baba. If memory serves, I think I was Ali Baba. The best part I ever had was in a Christmas production of Barrie’s Peter Pan in which I played an insane Smee, the off-sider pirate to Captain Hook. It was just too easy to nastily upstage anyone else on the stage whom I didn’t like by frantically sewing away at the side of the stage on my old Singer treadle sewing-machine.

  My father brought my mother to see every production in which I played. An exit door near the front of the auditorium would be opened in order that she had some ease of access. There was always someone to help her and, when well enough, she loved going out.

  It was while doing Peter Pan that I got to know Delia. She played the part of Wendy’s mother, Mrs Darling; not quite such a show-stopping role as that of Smee!

  Delia brought herself to New Zealand, a ‘£10 Immigrant’ from England, in 1957 at the age of eighteen. Bonded to the Government for two years, she served as secretary to the commandant of the Police Training College, which was then based at the old Trentham military camp. When free of this servitude, she moved into the business world in Wellington. She was outstanding at her job. She had a world-class typing speed. At some later stage in her secretarial/PA career, IBM, I think, filmed her at work on an electronic keyboard. The speed of her fingers was such that the end result was just a blur. She took justifiable pride in her skill. Pride, however, comes before a fall—it was a skill that would eventually permanently disable her.

  Delia’s family history was, to say the least, rather peculiar. Her mother, another Dorothea, was born into an aristocratic Scottish family. Thea herself was born in South Africa, where her father, a young Guards’ officer and a relative of the Governor-General, was serving in the army of occupation in the years immediately following the Boer War. Delia’s father, Walter, was a senior civil servant in Whitehall, and a right bastard. An embittered bastard, to boot! He was the son of a part-Jewish London tailor. His embitterment, which would last a long lifetime, found its genesis when young Walter applied to join the Royal Navy as an officer cadet. Pre-World War I this proved impossible on account of his relatively humble birth. Walter joined the civil service after a compensatory year or so in the merchant navy, had then married and fathered a daughter. He left his wife to take up with Thea. It is impossible to i
magine it was with the approval of her family. They produced Delia. This union lasted until Delia was three or four, when Thea, exhausted by a violently abusive partner, walked out, sadly without her little daughter. Walter kept Delia, for a dozen years using every legal means available to prevent mother and child seeing each other again. Her father returned to his lawful wife with Delia in tow. Eventually Delia grew to love her stepmother, Bertha. It took some years. Delia, exceptionally bright, was yanked out of a girls’ grammar school in Dulwich at age fifteen and forced to earn her own living. She did. She would not meet her mother again until she was sixteen. Thea had married a Cambridge don and they lived for most of the year in Cornwall. Mother and daughter had a pleasant, if somewhat tenuous, relationship for the rest of Thea’s very long life. Thea died at her home in Spain, aged ninety-seven.

  I remember Delia at my farewell party before I went to England. I must have invited her, but I don’t know why! I remember I did invite her to the party I gave when I got home at the end of 1963. Funny, really, this time around we seemed to get on very well. We certainly mixed within the same circle of friends, and we began to go out occasionally. A film, maybe dinner at one of the few dining-out places then in existence in Wellington or the Hutt. In return for her offering to knit me a jersey—her very best domestic skill—I took her to hear German soprano, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, on a brief recital tour of the main centres. We had the most expensive seats in the old Wellington Town Hall.