At the End of Darwin Road

by Fiona Kidman

  Chapter 9

  In Morrinsville, I worked in the local Massey Ferguson tractor dealer’s office, starting at £4 a week. My employer, Laurie Maber, was a debonair, good-natured man. He and Miss Betty Whitley, the tall big-boned office manager with a soft spot for young people who were ‘triers’, taught me office routine and how to calculate figures. Young farmers came to town on Fridays, and Maber Motors was their meeting place. Soon I learned to sympathise over broken crankshafts. In the evenings, I was to learn typing and shorthand at the local night school. My father was convinced that if I could acquire these skills my career prospects would be fine. In a sense he was right. Typing has stood me in good stead, though my skills remain basic: the first two knuckles of each hand are overdeveloped and misshapen from forty-five years of daily two-fingered typing. I never learned shorthand. Instead of attending class, I absconded to have a cigarette behind the bike sheds with new-found classmates.

  It was a year in limbo. I learned a great deal about rugby football from my aunt and uncle, passionate followers of the game. Saturday afternoons were spent either watching polo with my aunts and uncles, or glued to the radio, cheering on the All Blacks. I heard Peter Jones, the North land number eight forward, make broadcasting history when he said on radio, ‘I’m buggered’, at the end of a gruelling match. It shook the nation.

  My Uncle Fred gave me sound instruction about the qualities to seek in a prospective husband. ‘Don’t look at him unless he can put a hundred pounds down for your engagement ring,’ he told me. He showed me his bank balance and we talked about how a young man should aim for money like that. My Uncle Robert, on the other hand, offered me a set of dentures for my sixteenth birthday, because he felt it a great saving for the future if I didn’t have teeth to worry about. I was less willing to listen to this, and kept my teeth.

  I was happy enough in a day-to-day kind of way, but I was also missing my parents. It wasn’t long before they moved to Rotorua to live. They planned to settle in Tauranga, after a brief holiday in Rotorua, but once they arrived in the Bay of Plenty they thought it would be easier to find work in the volcanic city, where mud pools bubbled and geysers erupted from the bowels of the earth. Most of the money they had when they bought the farm had gone in improvements that would have taken many more years to bring a return. They were back to being hard up. My mother took a job first in a factory sewing garments, and then in a bookstore, while my father became a clerk at the Forest Research Institute. They bought a small house at Hannah’s Bay, on Lake Rotorua, five miles out of town with an infrequent bus service. This was a worry because my father still wouldn’t drive a car, and transport was always a problem — it was beyond contemplation that my mother or I would drive. Nevertheless, I soon joined my parents at Hannah’s Bay, and started work as a clerk in the Justice Department.

  The tourist ethos hung heavily over Rotorua. The town was filled with hotels: the immense, pale grey old Grand, the shocking pink Palace and Prince’s Gate, genteel and faded, at the entrance to the Government Gardens. On New Year’s Eve barmaids ran a race through town from hotel to hotel carrying trays of beer. A non-stop carnival and float parade closed the town until the evening, followed by a lakeside party that went on until dawn. For its time, Rotorua was more cosmopolitan than most New Zealand towns, and I took to it. Later, I would meet some of the artists who lived there then: Theo Schoon, Jan Nigro, the Scholes family at Whakarewarewa.

  But I lasted only two months in the new job. I might have heard Jones say that he was buggered, but I didn’t have a clue what it meant in the literal sense. I learned suddenly one morning when the court registrar decided to take me to a private court sitting. Two pathetic, scruffy-looking men apprehended in a public toilet were brought before the magistrate. I took a crash course on homosexuality, without the benefit of modern sympathies or understanding. I was shocked and there was nobody I could talk to about what I had discovered. I still wasn’t sure about the mechanics of heterosexual sex, let along any other sort.

  I was almost as upset when a wedding took place in the office. In order to reach the registrar’s room, couples had to pass between the desks of the other staff. The bride, on this occasion, was an older, highly made-up and heavily pregnant woman. The groom appeared little more than a child — I found out later he was sixteen. He sobbed noisily as he was chased through the office to the ceremony by angry relatives, cutting off his retreat.

  I decided I didn’t have the stomach for Justice Department work, and shut that door firmly behind me. My next port of call was the Rotorua Massey Ferguson tractor company where, in the light of my experience in Morrinsville, and a good reference from Laurie Maber, I was immediately taken on. Percy, the owner, turned out to be a weasel words man, whose speciality was dipping into the petty cash without leaving IOUs, then blaming the office junior. I was becoming bored with office routine and it was difficult to see a way forward. I was moved into the spare parts department, where I worked alongside the men counting out nuts and bolts, and keeping stock sheets. I was seventeen, and at times I wondered if it would be possible to return to school. But young people didn’t do that then, and I had no idea how I would support myself, even if the local school would have me. Besides, during that year I started an adult social life and it was difficult to contemplate a schoolgirl’s life again. An only child comes to understand that brothers and sisters are impossible but a mate, a husband, is not. Unconsciously, I had begun to seek mine.

  I had dispensed with my virginity, or rather someone had helped himself to it. The event was painful, unasked for and conducted in such ignorance that afterwards I went to the public library to see if I could find a book that would confirm that what I thought had happened really had. None of my reading, my search for descriptions of the act, had prepared me for this painful penetration. Finding no advice there, I turned a dress ring back to front on my ring finger and went to a bookstore for Catholics — only the hoarding had spelled it wrong so that it appeared as ‘Cahtolic Supplies’. My aunts loved it, when they visited Rotorua. The Carrrtholics, they would purr, in imitation of what they believed to be an Irish accent. I found a book called Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique by Theodor Hendrik van der Velde, published in 1928. It was full of advice on positions in which to have sex, providing you were married. What I supposed had happened was true, only it was supposed to have taken place in such a state of exaltation, purity and lifelong commitment that I was still unsure that we were on about the same thing. All the same, I accepted this dismal deflowering for what it was, grieved for what was irretrievable and went out with some more young men. Girls in those days were divided into those who ‘did it’ and those who didn’t, and most people knew which were which, if only because the boys they slept with told others they had scored. Because I had ‘done it’ in another town, I hoped that it was a secret. I wondered if people could tell just from looking at you.

  I went out with a farmer who belonged to the Young Nationals and wanted to marry me. I turned him down, much to my relatives’ disgust. There was a big fair Dutchman, who said if we made love I was not to worry: he would marry me if we ‘made a baby’. That’s what he told everyone he went out with and I didn’t take the chance. There was an up and coming businessman who owned a pink and green-topped Chevvy and dated me when his girlfriend was out of town. Another told me he had bought a condom; I could choose between going to hear Billy Graham relayed into a Landliner bus or sex, and I’d probably get it either way. I managed to avoid it, and Billy Graham too.

  Sex, sex and more offers of sex. If it was on their minds, it was on mine too, but these offers were not exactly tempting, and by now I knew that it was not necessarily all that was promised.

  In ‘At the Lake So Blue’, a semi-fiction in which I unashamedly drew on myself as a central ‘character’, a young woman is invited to be a candidate for a beauty competition, in which she will be required to parade in a bathing suit and ride on a float in the New Year’s Eve parade. I had been
running with a crowd from the Blue Lake water ski club. All the girls in the club had had their turn as ‘queen’, so they insisted that now it was mine. I decided against it. For a start I couldn’t stand up on water skis.

  My life was beginning to seem out of control. Rotorua had two dance halls. On Saturday nights I ran from one to another:

  The Ritz had a vast glossy floor: the hall doubled for the A & P machinery show in winter. The band sat above the floor on a stage. The Master of Ceremonies (we called him the Emcee) announced the dances: Gentlemen, take your partners for a foxtrot. A valeta. The supper waltz (keep the supper waltz for me; it meant you got to sit with a boy for the interval). Ballin’ the Jack. A maxina. All the way through to the last waltz (keep the last dance for me).

  The Ritz. It was also the place where nice girls told their mothers they were going, and left to go down to Tama.

  Tama was Tamatekapua, a meeting house that stood opposite St Faith’s Maori Anglican Church at the lakefront in Ohinemutu, surrounded by steaming vent holes and mud bubbling away in the night:

  We took off our shoes to enter the meeting house. Outside, the air was thick with sulphur fumes, inside the smoke was so thick you could hardly see the other end from the door. The lights were always low in Tama. Sometimes they jerked and died altogether. Bodies flew beside the tukutuku panels, feet stamped out a rhythm, the blind saxophone player Tai Paul’s music rippled up and down at the front of the small platform where the band played. To one side of Tai Paul, a young man with his hair slicked back was singing his heart out; his name was Howard Morrison.

  Heavenly shades of night are falling …

  Those dance halls. They appear not just in ‘At the Lake So Blue’, but in my novel, Songs from the Violet Café, where Hester Hagley and her fiancé haunt the Ritz, in formal evening dress. Bethany Dixon, in The House Within, has holidays in Rotorua, when she meets her future first husband at Tama. And, in fact, I didn’t feel like being a ‘bad girl’ going to Tama; it felt more honest and free, more committed to dancing itself than the Ritz, which seemed dedicated to courting rituals. I danced and danced and my heart was ruled by Elvis.

  One evening many years later I sat by Sir Peter Tapsell at a dinner party, when he was a Minister of the Crown, and before he became Speaker of the House. An ostensibly serious man, he had grown up in Rotorua. Testing the waters, when we had talked a little, I said, ‘I used to go to Tama sometimes.’ His face lit up. ‘So did I,’ he said, ‘so did I,’ and we talked on, about the huge feasts at suppertime, the way our lives felt electric when we danced.

  The distance we lived from town meant I had to catch a bus and meet a friend before setting off to dances later in the evening. I struck up a friendship with a girl called Maureen Townley, older than me by three years. Maureen was a sturdy no-nonsense Irish Catholic, and her company steadied my life down. Her family provided a constant base in town. The deal between Maureen and me was that we would always make sure the other one got home safely. If the worst came to the worst I could stay at her house, although that created problems at home because my father now refused to get a telephone, hoping that he would keep boys at bay.

  It was at Tamatekapua, when I was still working at the garage, that I met R. I remember him still as an important turning point, a person for whom I had to make real and adult decisions. I was exploring uncharted territories of love. There aren’t any maps of course, it’s different for everyone, but I was finding out that it’s possible to take charge of one’s choices.

  R’s whanau was at Moerewa in the Bay of Islands, not far from where I grew up. He came from a large family and helped to support them from an early age. He was a butcher and I remember his hands among blood and flesh. When he finished work, flecks of fat and flying bone clung to his skin and hair like small white crystals. He hated what he did; when I met him, his dream was to teach.

  Like most of the young men I knew in Rotorua, he played a great game of rugby. His club was Rotorua Pirates. With a group of team mates, he shared a house, or the ‘flat’, as Maureen and I knew it. Maureen was keeping occasional company with another Pirate. The flat was not unlike my aunt’s house in Morrinsville: dark panelled and varnished, with beamed ceilings, and a rosy leadlight in the entrance way. You had to go there in daytime to appreciate its finer points — at night the lights were stark and the air filled with smoke. Cigarettes fizzled in puddles of beer. We sang such edifying songs as ‘they put me on my wee wee pot/didn’t care if I wee’d or not/so they put me back in my wee wee cot …’

  Most of the men had big forearms and necks, and nipples standing up under their cotton Aertex shirts. R was different. I can see him, dark and lithe, almost delicate, among the rugged bodies on the rugby field. And in the evenings I could see the eyes of the other young men looking at us together, considering. Was it possible? Does she do that with him?

  From the outset, my parents were uneasy about my relationship with R. We were ‘different’, they thought, too, but for other reasons. He was Maori and I was not.

  He fell ill, and developed pneumonia. Worried, I went to see him one day in my lunch hour. His lips were dark and plummy with the heat of his illness. I lay down in my clothes on the bed beside him.

  ‘We’re playing with fire,’ he said.

  When he was better, R decided to go away to Australia with a journalist, Dick Rutledge, who lived in the flat. There was a mournful farewell at the bus station, and R gave me a gold music box with blue velvet lining that played ‘The Blue Danube Waltz’ to remember him by. I think the strain of it all was beginning to tell, because when he left I remember feeling relieved. Years later, I saw Dick Rutledge on an American television programme about the shooting of JFK where he had been an eyewitness. He had become an anchorman on a regular news programme.

  But R didn’t get far. He returned to Rotorua, and me, the following week. I was not as pleased to see him as he hoped. I didn’t care less about him, but I suspect my parents were right about us not being suited, although I didn’t agree with their reasons. There was some feminine, febrile quality about him that I didn’t understand. I just knew that this wasn’t really love. Although I did continue to see him for some time, we seemed to have less and less in common. Some days we mooched down to a coffee bar near the lakefront in the lunch hours and he would put the jukebox on, playing Bing Crosby singing Cole Porter’s ‘True Love’ over and over again. I can never hear that song without seeing his longing eyes. He was a constant, caring person and I felt I was heartless, that he deserved better than my on again, off again behaviour.

  He dropped out of sight for nearly a year, then reappeared to tell me that he had bought a section and was in the process of building a house for me during the weekends. He had given up rugby to make the time. Sadly, I said goodbye once and for all. By then, several major changes had taken place in my life.

  My employment with Percy had ended after a particularly nasty scene over the petty cash box, although I hadn’t been in the office for months. My parents were devastated by having an out-of-work daughter on their hands, which was unheard of in those 1950s days of full employment.

  Ashamed of the situation I found myself in, I determined to look for something that would provide a challenge. I turned first to the local radio station. Radio meant so much in those days and I had often thought about working in broadcasting. But it seemed a daring idea, almost as presumptuous as being a writer. Now there seemed nothing to lose by making an inquiry. I was granted an interview but it turned out badly.

  ‘What do you think you can offer broadcasting?’ asked the station manager.

  I hadn’t thought about that. I took a voice test and failed, as I would many times in the future. I didn’t know then about the high roof to my mouth. Not that that was what the station manager seemed to notice. ‘Very thick accent, I’m afraid.’

  This was a blow, given that my father had been so conscientious about trying to iron out my New Zealand vowels.

  ‘Maybe I could wri
te the bits in between?’ I hazarded.

  ‘Scripting?’ He shook his head and sighed. ‘I don’t think there’s a future in broadcasting for you. I do suggest you look for a nice office job somewhere.’

  So much for broadcasting.

  Desperately, I began to make myself over, taking up fencing lessons and heading for the local Little Theatre, which was housed in a building known as the Shambles. I auditioned for a role as Colombine, as does a character called Marianne in Songs from the Violet Café, and was passed over in favour of an ample blonde called Faith. I was still unemployed and beginning to think I could get nothing right when a job in the local library was advertised. After some persuasion from my father, I applied. On a whim, while I was at Tractor Services, I had bought a plain grey tailored suit, perhaps to offset the racier side of my life. The suit did the trick. My neat appearance and School Certificate English marks impressed the librarian. The job was mine, and suddenly a door opened.

  Kit Spencer, my new employer, was a woman I think of as a feminist before her time, though she might have been horrified to hear me say this. But it was true. In mid-life, she had an exquisite prettiness and a core of steel. Her eyes were the colour of violets, her prematurely white hair, worn in a French roll from which small tendrils were always escaping, was palely rinsed with blue, giving it a freshly laundered look. Kit had been divorced and raised a daughter alone. Fifty years later, I met a son of hers whose existence I had never guessed, as circumstances had forced her to part with him as an infant. He is the only person I have met with eyes as blue as hers. Her love life was scandalous in the town; she appeared not to care what people thought. Although she had worked her way up through the library system without formal qualifications, her reputation as a public librarian in professional circles was of the highest order. She was the only woman fellow of the Library Association at that time. Her beliefs were straightforward. Readers, she declared, should have the best possible access to the books they wanted to read. Libraries should be welcoming places where people could have good conversations about books and receive well-informed advice about what was available. She expected her staff to be courteous, friendly, punctual and totally at her command. In many ways she was a hard woman, but I learned much from her, including self-discipline and a sense of responsibility.