Telling Tales

by William Taylor

  Shallow and callow, and exceptionally inexperienced to a degree unusual even back then, I think I married Delia for her glamour, style and general air of sophistication. She sure looked good, and dressed to match. Blonde, blue-eyed and beautiful. I was incredulous that someone who looked as good as this could possibly see anything in me. In later years at parties or social gatherings she would now and then put an arm around me and, smiling, say to whoever it might be she was impressing, ‘I always vowed and declared I would never marry a good-looking man.’ Bless her heart, she thought she was paying me a compliment.

  Hugh, just twenty years old, a student, but a thrifty one, lent me some of the money I needed for Delia’s engagement ring. I think it cost £50. Dear old Hugh; I never got around to paying him back. Many years later, and after Delia had remarried in England and been divorced for a second time, she returned to New Zealand and lived in what by then was my house—the little old ex-State house in Burcham Street. There, the ring was stolen in a burglary—oh, what a pity Dorothea hadn’t been there with her walking-stick! The ring, a solitaire diamond, had increased in value enormously. I tried, in vain, to have Delia give me the balance over and above what it had cost. The mean woman refused! Most unfair given that for the two or three years she occupied the property she refused to pay more than $20 per week in rent!

  We married in 1965 at St James, Lower Hutt, where I had been christened, and where in turn our elder son would be christened. It was reputed to be the hottest day in a century. It was a lovely wedding. The bride was a dream in cream silk, and the groom was well-dressed and his hair so lacquered that, if you tapped on it, you heard a knocking sound. Eventually we drove off in my 1956 Humber 80 for the first night of our honeymoon at a posh motel in Whanganui. The posh motel had lost all evidence of our booking. Seeing our enormous distress and great plight, the proprietors took pity on us and shouted us a couple of nights at their expense at the Rutland Hotel, the royal suite where recently the Queen had stayed.

  We had a pleasant-enough flat in Petone. Bloody old Walter, Delia’s father, lived with us. It was sheer hell. He had decided to come out from England to share the joy of our nuptials, and clearly thought his daughter and her poor new husband would welcome him as a permanent guest. God alone knew why. Sadly, now retired, he had decided to stay on! Eventually, and with great difficulty, we got rid of him. It was not a pleasant parting. He found a place of his own, and we continued to see him periodically.

  Some six or seven months after we married, Delia miscarried at about the halfway stage of her pregnancy. It was a ghastly time, and her recovery was very slow. We took a break away in Christchurch—with Mrs Arnold in Tancred Street.

  It was time to move on. Not an easy decision for any number of valid reasons: my mother’s health, our friendships and interests, and a way of life that was by now well and truly city-oriented. In the light of all that, our move in August 1965 was somewhat extreme.

  Waiwhare School on the Napier–Taihape road, just short of the Gentle Annie on the Hawke’s Bay side, is now no more. Like many of the nation’s sole- and two-teacher schools it was closed in the 1980s, and whatever children are still produced in the area are bussed further afield.

  Waiwhare, a sheep-farming district, was some fifty kilometres from Napier or Hastings. For the five years we lived there, the road was unsealed for half the distance. Not much more than a tortuous track, but we got used to it. Mail was delivered twice a week on the mail truck that also brought out your weekly grocery order and anything else you needed from town. The school, with a roll of around forty kids, was the only public building in the district. The nearest community hall was a good fifteen kilometres distant. It was a delightful little school serving a pleasant community. It wasn’t hard to live there. Even the school house, recently built, was a good one. It had been to Waiwhare that teacher and mountaineer George Lowe had returned to teach after the 1953 Everest expedition.

  I had been told by all and sundry that it was an act of complete and utter lunacy to cart Delia—who had only ever lived in London, Wellington, and very briefly in Sydney—to such an isolated corner of a provincial backwater. How wrong they were. She loved the place, virtually from the moment of our arrival. She made friends there who have lasted her lifetime. She conned the poor guy from the Hawke’s Bay Education Board who was responsible for the maintenance of school houses into completely redecorating the place in a manner to her liking, exceeding his budget to such an extent that it was surprising he kept his job. She even convinced him of the necessity to provide fly-screens for all the windows, despite his mewling protestations that he had never done this before and he didn’t know what his boss would say. Putty in madam’s hands.

  Delia loved the place. I quite liked it. Truth to tell, it was somewhat boring. For all that, I would probably not be a writer today if we had not lived there. There was little or nothing for me to do apart from running a small, easily-run, two-teacher school. I would have loved to have got out my rifle and been able to plug away at rabbits, possums, deer, whatever. However, I was married to a violently anti-blood-sports fanatic, so that would have been an unwise choice of activity. I probably started writing as a substitute for being forbidden to knock off defenceless animals. The only use my rifle got at Waiwhare was finishing off trapped possums, that even Delia could see required extreme treatment, particularly after one of the buggers shredded a couple of her precious fly-screens.

  Robin Alexander David was born in September 1966 in Hastings Memorial Hospital.

  The perfect baby. Six pound-something and with a full head of curls. I didn’t get to see him born, because this was back in the olden days when fathers were not permitted anywhere near the delivery room, and preferably not even in the hospital itself. While Robin’s birth itself had been no piece of cake for Delia, rearing him in infancy was so trouble-free as to be almost ludicrous. We drove him home from the hospital—and not a peep out of him, even on the worst corners. The only wails came from his mother bemoaning the fact that she seemed to have lost no weight at all and was likely the only new mother, ever, who still had to wear her old maternity clothes. We popped our son in his bassinet in his newly decorated nursery—I think the Education Board had paid for its redecoration in duck-egg blue—looked at each other and said, ‘What do we do now?’

  Well, of course there was stuff to do and things to be worried about, real or imagined. But, all in all, from then on and all the way through his babyhood, boyhood and adolescence, there was never much to worry about. It seems to have been much the same with my grandchild Isla, Robin’s daughter. The same sort of little tigger who simply gets on with life, smiling, laughing, singing, growing.

  Robin would be joined, eleven months later, by his brother, Julian Alexander Patrick. A precipitate addition to the family, and certainly not to the liking of his almost one-year-old brother. We adopted Julian some five or six weeks after he was born, also at Hastings Memorial.

  Much has been written about the vagaries of adoption. Much has been written and said, and continues to be said, about the iniquities in the social systems of the time—a time not too long ago. These were the days when young single-mothers could not rely on at least a minimal benefit from the State in order to have a go at single-handedly rearing their babies. These were the days when, frequently, baby got whisked away from mother, virtually sight unseen. These were times of shame for young women who found themselves pregnant, very often shunned by family and too-frequently deserted by the sire of their child. When Delia and I adopted Julian, there were reportedly some four or five thousand children available for adoption, and a dearth of those wishing to adopt. Not much wonder given those numbers! Baby boys of mixed-race, Maori–Pakeha, were the hardest to place. We could have had more children of our own flesh and blood—Delia would later miscarry a further time—but decided, I think for the right reasons, that we could provide a loving home, and so decided to adopt from the numbers of those most difficult to place. Our son, Julian, is pa
rt-Maori.

  We had no intention of adding to our family quite so quickly. We were mistaken in our belief that adoption, particularly approval to adopt, would be a lengthy process. It wasn’t for us; we were almost immediately deemed to be the absolute ideal adoptive parents! The screening process was negligible. Mind you, we did say we would take the first available little fellow in the category we chose. We did say, ‘No, we don’t want to see him first to see if he’s suitable.’ Let’s face it, you don’t get to see those of your own making before they pop out.

  Poor little skinny spider-like Julian had already been evicted from the maternity ward and was a ‘patient’ in a general ward at the hospital. He didn’t look Maori at all—a bit disappointing, really! He was white-tinged-blue. Bald, with a vestige of black down on his head. And he clung tightly to each of us as we held him, this dear little chap. He always clung (yes, Julian, you still do). We didn’t need the passage of time in order to bond with him. We loved him from the start. Dear God, we sure had to, because he wasn’t an easy baby. Oh, how stupid we were to even suspect that behaviourally he might be a carbon copy of his brother.

  It was these two fellows who started my writing career with me. It was these two who would ensure I would never be a temperamental writer as they crawled in and around and over me, stealing my pens, tearing chunks from whatever paper I was using, demanding both time and attention. As I write these words, Robin, now in his early forties, is due here along with his wife, Carmen, and daughter, Isla, and eight-ninths of their next production. Still distracting me! (By the time of publication, the eight-ninths, Leon William Taylor, is now fully part of the family and almost one year old.)

  Our marriage lasted a little over ten years. After five years in the country, we moved to Palmerston North for my brief teaching stint there, and afterwards to Feilding. We capitalized the Family Benefit, bought a section of land in Milson, near the airport, and had our first home built. The section cost $1,100. The home cost $8,000. We borrowed the lot, less the benefit capitalization, from State Advances, the Housing Corporation as once it was. It was a great scheme. Nothing like it in evidence today! It was a cute little house. An immaculate little house—Delia was an almost-lunatic housekeeper. Not too hot on the cooking, even though she thought otherwise, but an absolute demon on the vaccum cleaner and floor polisher. That little house sure shone. We had clearly struck the housing market at the right time, because we more than doubled our money, even after repaying the Family Benefit, when we sold it a couple of years later and moved to far more gracious surroundings in old Albert Street. The boys went to playcentre and later to school.

  Rosa Dorothea died in 1971. She had been in further decline, after more strokes, for two or three years. She managed to make one visit to us in Waiwhare, and also saw our Milson home. For all the years we were away from the Hutt Valley we had managed to get down to see her every few weeks. Delia came to love my parents as if they were her own and grieved with me. I remember two things about my mother’s funeral. The minister forgot whose funeral service he was supposed to be delivering—I don’t even think it was the same old dude she had ejected with her walking-stick! And I have never forgotten my father, on the way home from his wife’s funeral. ‘We’re out of spuds at home. Better stop and get some,’ he said. We did just that.

  Robin and Julian loved both of their grandparents. They loved going to Burcham Street, both to visit Grandma and Grandad, but equally to play with Dorothea’s dog, a yappy little Corgi called Beau. Julian only needed rushing to the Hutt Hospital for stomach pumping twice during our visits to Grandma—once when he gobbled up a whole bottle of her prescription tablets, and later when he drank copious quantities of a particularly strong toilet cleanser.

  The picture-perfect family? On the surface, sure. But appearances certainly can be deceptive. In all honesty I can’t say that I regret our marriage. Without it, I would not have my family. Of course I have regrets. I have a very real regret for the hurt and bewilderment I must have caused my wife. I must bear sole responsibility for our marriage break-up. The confusion I had in respect of my sexuality had existed long before I met and married Delia. If one thinks of sexuality in terms of a pendulum, with one extreme being absolutely hetero- and the other extreme being absolutely homo-, well I am at some point in between. Pendulums, by their very nature, swing. However, I have indulged in very little swinging! My ten-year marriage represents, by far, by many years, the longest of any relationship I have been able to maintain with another. Of course there have been regrets, but it’s a bit late to worry about them now. I am a loner, but funnily enough I have never been lonely.

  Delia remains one of my closest friends.

  Delia was one of tens of thousands of migrants to New Zealand in the 1950s and 1960s, many of whom were ‘£10 Immigrants’. Most assimilated into our society, have lived full and productive lives, their offspring obviously Kiwi by birth and outlook. Delia had been an eighteen-year-old. Very many others were around this age. Just like my own forebears, they were in search of better lives. And most found just that. A handful of years earlier, another group of migrants came to our shores, fully assisted in their passages to the country, but with futures that have not, in the main, been quite so rosy. These were the child migrants sent out in several tens of thousands from the ‘Mother Country’, not only to New Zealand, but to Australia, Canada and what was then Rhodesia in the years immediately after World War II. Around 750 of these children, aged between four and fifteen or sixteen years were deposited on these shores.

  ‘British War Orphans’ they were called, conveniently ignoring the fact that many had not been orphaned at all. Some came from homes where the economic stresses and strains in the aftermath of war were such that one less mouth to feed in a family would mean a positive improvement in the standard of living of those left behind. These were the kids whose folks back home genuinely thought they were sending their son or daughter to a better life in a better place. Others were the offspring of unwed mothers. Many came from children’s homes, orphanages run by various religious denominations or by charities such as Barnardos. One way or another, all were considered the detritus of a society struggling to get back on its feet. The organizations that shipped these kids off-shore were, in the main, well-intentioned. To be honest, the standard of childcare, particularly for the unwanted, unloved, and the genuinely orphaned, was pretty parlous, not only in the Old Country but in every other corner of the Empire—and other places besides!

  The iniquities of the child-migrant schemes were not only in the harshness of the existence to which many of the children were doomed in their new homes. After all, life could be very harsh anywhere for the poverty-stricken. Probably the very worst facet of this exercise in populating the further reaches of the Empire was the robbing of these children of any sense of identity. The younger they were, the worse the loss of identity was. Those little children who left behind a mother, a father, or both—and generally a few siblings—were virtually brainwashed into believing they were orphans. The older ones, of say twelve or more years, lost out in even more ghastly fashion.

  There is no way in which it is possible to gild this lily. The 1997 report of the United Kingdom House of Commons inquiry into the child-migrant scheme of post-1947 makes horrific reading. Evidence was taken from the ‘victims’ in Australia, Canada, Southern Africa and New Zealand. While New Zealand doesn’t quite come out smelling of roses—abuse did exist here—the New Zealand experience pales into insignificance compared with what these poor children endured in our nearest and dearest neighbour, Australia. The abuse in Australia was primarily, but certainly not entirely, at the hands of church-run institutions—mainly various orders of the Roman Catholic Church. It seems that the gulags of Stalinist Soviet Russia or of Hitler’s Reich were not the only places where slave labour was the order of the day.

  ‘You’ll have your food in the wash-house. There’s a bench out there. Never had the worker eat with us, not ever. It wouldn’t be ni
ce and it’s just not done,’ Mrs Pearson had ordered. ‘Rinse your plate under the tap when you’ve finished, leave it on the bench and bring it back in next time. Understand?’

  He understood. He was to understand the lay of this land very quickly. The farm belonged to the woman, not her husband. She was the boss. Not that she did anything, either outside or inside the home. The old man ran the place.

  That first night would be the only occasion during his time with the Pearsons that Jake would be inside the house proper for longer than it took to get his food. He stood. The Pearsons sat around the kitchen table. Six hard eyes measured him up.

  ‘We’ve been good enough to give a home to a poor war orphan…’

  ‘I’m not an orphan,’ said Jake.

  ‘Speak when you’re spoken to, lad,’ said Mrs Pearson.

  ‘My father is alive,’ he said, ‘I am not an orphan.’

  ‘As far as we’re concerned, you’re an orphan. That’s what we told the authorities we wanted, out of the goodness of our hearts. Whatever it is you’ve left behind in the old country you’ll soon forget, and a good thing, too.’

  ‘Yeah, Pommie, you’ll be too busy to be thinking of anything but work,’ Darcy Pearson grinned. ‘That’s all you’re here for.’

  ‘He knows that,’ Mrs Pearson glared at her son. Mr Pearson, tired after a hard day’s work, leaned back in his chair and snored slightly. ‘Wake up, Clarrie. We’re talking to the boy,’ she said loudly and her husband snorted himself awake.

  ‘What about me going to school?’ asked Jake.

  ‘School? What d’you mean, school?’