At the End of Darwin Road

by Fiona Kidman

  As luck would have it, Diane Farmer, the Listener’s radio reviewer, had heard the broadcast. In those days, radio drama was treated with the same respect and critical interest that new stage plays receive nowadays. Her review was totally enthusiastic. Why had nobody warned her that she was about to listen to one of the best plays she had heard in years? I couldn’t have hoped for better.

  But if this was the good news, the bad news was that I was lonelier than I could have imagined. I hadn’t prepared myself for knowing so few people. What I now discovered was another version of suburban life, lived high on a hillside, with nobody around during the day. I had lost the art of being alone. In the first year of living in Wellington, I was so afraid of the silence that some days I went out to the airport when I knew there was a plane from Rotorua coming in, just so I could see familiar people. ‘Hello,’ I would say brightly, and they would say, ‘Hi, what are you doing here?’ and I would pretend to be meeting someone. Silly, crazy stuff.

  Marjorie Brooke-White, and one or two people I had met on my visits south, were helpful, but they were older, and there was only so much they could do. After a time, Rena, from a nearby house, came along and introduced herself. She was several years older than me, but she offered meals during renovations when we didn’t have a kitchen, and conversation at the weekends. Although this was kindness, it was a friendship forged in hell.

  Rena drank copious quantities of flagon sherry, and introduced me to the habit. She always had a new problem on the go and her husband came and went in a miserable state of not knowing whether his wife was going to throw him out or not. As she often told me, she had enjoyed the war years when there were American Marines in town.

  Needless to say, quantities of bad sherry made me sorrier for myself than I should have been. Rena had a tougher constitution than mine. I was up and down and all over the place in my moods. Ian tried to get me to distance myself but I soon became reliant on Rena. Her family babysat for us now and then so that we could have an occasional outing, and it was hard to argue with that. In spite of her ways, Rena held down a job as a receptionist in town, and dressed well. She was an excellent dressmaker and offered to make clothes for me at a modest price.

  About a month after we arrived in Wellington, Tom Kidman died. Ian had been looking forward to seeing more of his father, on his terms, rather than the lengthy visits, now that we were living closer. But that didn’t happen. On the day of his funeral, we travelled up to Levin. By now I had met my sister-in-law Mabel Porter, and, for the first time since I had met Ian more than ten years before, all his family were gathered together. Even his mother.

  We stood at one end of the cemetery, and I saw a couple walking towards us. Immediately, I guessed who it was. At last I was to meet my mother-in-law, Ruby. I said to Ian, ‘I’m going to meet her,’ and ran down the cemetery path before it could be discussed. Ian followed more slowly. I’ve always sworn a stone angel on a tombstone raised its trumpet in salute. It was love at first sight for both of us. In an odd sort of way it was like meeting Ian again, as I saw the things that had drawn me to him, repeated in her. The rift wasn’t healed at once — things like that never are — but it was a beginning, and Ruby and I became close. We have a fast-growing tree in our back yard that we planted in remembrance of her. We call it Ruby’s tree and I never like having it cut back.

  There was plenty of time for my work now. I was determined that the dreadful house would be transformed into something better. I set off to see a lawyer, chosen at random from the phone book, and asked him if he could help me raise a bank loan, as I would be earning money.

  The conversation was startling.

  He asked me what work I did. I said that I was a writer.

  ‘A writer,’ he said, in a tone of contempt. ‘What sort of a thing is that for a mother to be doing?’

  I said that it paid some bills.

  ‘Oh, really,’ he said, ‘and I suppose your poor husband doesn’t get his shirts ironed or a decent meal on the table?’

  I reeled back in a state of shock. He did, I said. I did cook and iron.

  ‘Who looks after your children? Go on, go off and look after your family,’ he said as a parting shot.

  I haven’t forgotten this man. Over the years I saw his photograph in the newspapers, accompanying articles in which he supported civil rights causes. For a time he was a high court judge. I nearly choked when I read his self-righteous words. People wonder why women got angry in the 1970s.

  One evening, we took a drive down to the port. A big passenger liner was about to leave, after spending a day in Wellington. People were holding streamers between ship and shore, just as they had when Jen left Auckland more than a decade before. I watched with some longing, as a band began to play. Alone among the crowd of passengers was a young woman who stood staring at the wharf as the ship pulled away. She was alone, pretty and weeping, and there seemed nobody to see her off. I couldn’t help wondering what had happened to her, whether she had just been visiting for the day, and if so what had made her cry in Wellington, or whether she was leaving home.

  That summer, back in Rotorua at my parents’ house, I began work on a television play. Television had been operating in New Zealand since 1960, but there was very little drama. Bruce Mason had had a play produced called The Evening Paper and Alexander Guyan had written drama for the screen, but there was not much else. Now, the NZBC hoped to present local drama on a more regular basis. Bill Austin was appointed head of the new television drama department, a position he held jointly with his radio drama position. He decided that the best way to attract television screenwriting talent was to run a competition, to which Dame Ngaio Marsh agreed to lend her name. It was launched with a senior section, and one for people under twenty-five. I thought I might as well give it a go and began work on a play based on the girl I had seen on the ship. In the play, she spends the day in Wellington and meets an artist who takes her to his studio and shows her his still life paintings while they talk about life. A kind of Brief Encounter, if you like, though I don’t think that was consciously in my mind as I wrote it. I called the play Green Apples and a Jug.

  I had to wait some time for the result to be announced so, back in Wellington, I decided to fulfil my long-held dream of going to university. This had always been there, in the back of my mind, since Nat Pitcaithly had spelled out my bright prospects at Northland College. There seemed no reason why I shouldn’t go and I felt certain that it would get me out of the black holes that I seemed to fall into more and more. By this time, I was not only writing radio plays and being paid for them, but Robin Dudding, who had succeeded Charles Brasch as editor of Landfall, had begun publishing my short stories. I enrolled for English at Victoria University.

  Hundreds of people milled around me on enrolment day. I found my way to a queue, but when I finally got to the desk I was asked to wait until others had been processed. There was a query about my application. After a long wait, I met someone who conducted an interview of sorts, although I didn’t really understand the drift of the questions. Apparently a professor had raised the matter of my publications. I wasn’t sure, in the end, whether I was being asked whether I needed to start English at level one (on the assumption that I already had some papers), or whether I was being granted entrance to the university on the strength of what I’d written. The latter seemed more likely.

  I was out of my depth from the beginning. It’s easy to blame people for what went wrong but, with hindsight, I could have done things better. I found it hard that there were very few mature students. When I sat in the lecture theatre, I looked round at a sea of young people in jeans with rough hair, long muslin skirts, lots of beads and beards. I appeared too respectable, and old by comparison. In my tutorial group, I felt lost among the eighteen-year-olds, although the tutor was about my age. We all muddled along but I felt stupid every time I opened my mouth. The questions I asked were basic ones — all the young people seemed to know the answers. My first essay on Kath
erine Mansfield got a pass. But Andrew Marvell. Who was he?

  I had been at university for about six weeks when some news arrived. Green Apples and a Jug had won the senior section of the Dame Ngaio Marsh Award for Television Writing. Paul Maunder had won the under twenty-five section, with a week to spare before his birthday. The announcement was made live on the news slot of the country’s only television channel. I wore one of the long hip-skimming dresses that Ian had brought back from Hawaii and had my hair dressed up high, like a cross between Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street and Cilla Black. Rena lent me some long dangling earrings. The prize was presented by Major-General Walter McKinnon, chairman of the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation. I was a celebrity. Everyone I had ever known could see me. I was interviewed, photographed and spoke on radio.

  Then a newspaper reporter phoned when I was at university. My attendance there was something I intended to keep to myself as I was beginning to feel very diffident about my paper. But the children’s minder that day answered the phone and said that I would ring back ‘after I came back from university’. I returned the call and an appointment was made. The reporter turned up, and I was photographed with the children cosily on either side of me. When he enquired about university, I asked that this not be mentioned. I didn’t say it in so many words, but I wanted to be known for my success rather than the failure I suspected I was facing.

  The next day, when the article appeared, the caption under the photograph read: ‘For a hobby Mrs Kidman goes to university’. I think I knew university was over even before I went to my next tutorial group. I was running late. Nobody looked up, except for the tutor who gazed at me for a moment or two, then said, ‘Well, here’s Mrs Kidman who drops into university for her hobby.’ Everyone laughed.

  For a long time I blamed this man. I don’t now. I discovered later that he was a writer too, but his path had not been as easy as mine apparently was. Years later, he told me he was sorry for the pain he caused me that day. I had, by then, worked out that it was not a matter of age or gender, although it was perhaps my first brush with literary Wellington and the rivalry that can exist between writers. But the truth was, I had left school at fifteen. Had I really wanted to succeed at university I needed to have thrown myself into reading, catching up, paying attention. Instead, my mind was on other parts of my life, like worrying about whether Ian could get home to look after the children in my absences, and how Joanna would get to her drama lessons and Giles to his soccer practice, and if they would get their homework done. All that, and anxiety about writing for financial gain. We needed the money, and as far as the children were concerned, it was much easier to be a self-employed writer, setting my own hours of work.

  I walked out of the university and that was that.

  Nor did I involve the children in my publicity again. It may not have been the newspaper’s intention to leave me open to ridicule but somehow the item had been skewed against me, and I didn’t want them to be part of things going wrong like that again. Although we were outwardly a conventional nuclear family, I suspect that both my children would see their upbringing as slightly unusual. I decided that they must have private lives with space to be themselves. They have grown up to become highly individual, interesting and, in my view, successful people with their own stories. We are a family with intense bonds between us, but we are all different.

  After I left university, I felt I was on notice as a writer. I never entirely got over the feeling that I had labelled myself as a ‘commercial’ writer who had failed when it came to the literary test. To this day, I do not feel altogether at ease in Wellington’s university circles.

  While I veered from one extreme to another, from triumph to ignominy, I met someone else who would influence my life. Bill Austin and Arthur Jones organised a weekend seminar for screen and radio writers, and of course I was invited along. So was another of their protégés, Witi Ihimaera. I was very aware of Witi as a writer, not just because Arthur had talked about him so much, but because he was publishing stories, as I was, in the Maori Affairs-sponsored publication, Te Ao Hou. (So was Patricia Grace but it was some years before she and I met.) Witi says he noticed me because of my clothes. I’d gone back to making statements with what I wore. This time it was a large squashy peaked leather hat, a mini and thigh-high white boots. ‘How could I resist you?’ Witi has said more than once.

  We ended the weekend, sitting on the street with our feet in the gutter, talking with Tony Taylor and a number of young writers, including the playwright Robert Lord, all swearing undying allegiance to each other. When Witi has signed my books over all the years since that day, he has written, ‘Darling, we are hitched to the same star.’ In another year or two, he would make literary history by becoming the first Maori writer to publish a book of fiction, the short story collection, Pounamu, Pounamu. I was at the award ceremony when he was presented with third prize in the Wattie Book Awards, sponsored by the tinned fruit company magnate Sir James Wattie. Sir James came from the Gisborne area, as did Witi. ‘Ah,’ said Sir James, ‘a lot of your people work for me, Mister, Mister er …’

  ‘Ihimaera,’ Witi finished for him. ‘It’s not hard, Sir James, it has the same number of syllables as Even Stevens.’ Even Stevens was the name of Sir James’s racehorse.

  A quick wit, and a quietly subversive radical — that was how I knew Witi from the beginning. Before long, we were spending a lot of time with him and his wife Jane. Witi introduced me to another of his friends, Ian Cross, author of the phenomenally successful novel The God Boy, and recently appointed editor of the Listener. Ian was a big bear of a man, with bushy iron-grey hair, an infectious smile and a steely determination. He was used to getting his way. When I met him, he was seeking to put together a group of new talent on the magazine, and had noticed my work. He offered me a job as the magazine’s television reviewer, on alternating weeks with Roger Hall. We started at roughly the same time that Rosemary McLeod began a weekly column and Tom Scott became the regular cartoonist and political commentator.

  If I had quailed at the public exposure resulting from my plays, it was nothing compared with this. My photograph appeared at the top of my column and people in the street began to accost me to tell me how much they disagreed with something I’d said. I invoked a great deal of wrath for not liking a show Julie Andrews appeared in. A woman behind the counter of a department store refused to sell me a pair of stockings on the strength of my remarks. I decided to be nicer, although that was not really what the column needed. Cross by turn nurtured, cajoled and bullied us into doing our best work and, when we didn’t, we would be invited into his office ‘for a chat’.

  One day he invited me in for a chat of a different kind. He had another idea up his sleeve for me. He was also the national president of the writers’ organisation, PEN (NZ Centre), and he needed a secretary. PEN was riding high at the time. A year earlier, the group had persuaded Norman Kirk, Prime Minister of the third Labour government, to introduce an Authors’ Lending Right (known as the Authors’ Fund). This made New Zealand the first country in the English-speaking world to acknowledge that writers should be compensated for the free use of their books in libraries, in lieu of lost royalties on conventional retail sales. Cross, with Neva Clarke McKenna, had been largely instrumental in convincing Kirk.

  PEN was (and still is) an organisation set up as an international voice on behalf of writers imprisoned or denied freedom of speech, but the New Zealand group was more focused on local writers’ issues than most countries. There were not enough writers to make up the number for multiple organisations to defend what might otherwise be considered trade union issues.

  As well as the Authors’ Fund issue, Cross was keen to expand the New Zealand PEN Centre’s role, actively seeking to instigate a separate Writers’ Guild for media writers. There was plenty of work to be done. When he decided I would be ideal as PEN’s secretary I agreed, not exactly with alacrity, but with a good deal of gratitude for my spot in the Listener.
I was eager to please after my recent downfall at university; thus are literary handmaidens born. I’ve been on a lot of committees in my time. I don’t regret most of them, but I think there are times when it’s worth taking stock and asking yourself if you are achieving anything useful. Writing and committees don’t always go together.

  To begin my task, I was handed a cardboard carton of papers containing a large thick minute book, members’ records and piles of their correspondence. When I fished out a pile of letters from Frank Sargeson, Janet Frame and other notable writers, it occurred to me that they should be stored in a safe place, rather than run the risk of being blown down Willis Street in a Wellington gale. I began squirrelling away papers from PEN and later of other organisations. By the 1990s, it would run to forty cartons of paper. The Alexander Turnbull Library eventually took them all away to deposit and store properly.

  The committee met every month in the boardroom of the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) in Willis Street, furnished with a long blond wooden table, blue padded chairs and a blue carpet. Cross, whom we all privately dubbed ‘the godfather’, sat at the head of the table. The composition of the committee came and went, although a core group was there for some years. Among them were the poets Alistair Campbell, Lauris Edmond and Bill Manhire, the latter looking like an angelic child; Anne French, who really was just out of school, with thick plaits wound in ropes around her head; Sam Hunt, briefly, because ‘meetings weren’t really his thing, you know, not my thing’, although he provided memorable venues for some of the annual parties; the educators Dr Clarence Beeby (Beeb, as he was known, a wily silver-tongued old fox) and Jack Shallcrass; historian Michael King; short story writer Rowley Habib; screenwriter Michael Noonan; and the lexicographer Harry Orsman, full of raucous, energetic wit. We felt like the centre of the universe. That was proving to be something of a problem, because writers in other centres, particularly Auckland, thought Wellington had too much say in what was supposed to be a national body. They were probably right — our committee got to choose who the representative was on the State Literary Fund that gave grants to writers, and to nominate judges for various prizes. You could say that the great Auckland-Wellington divide between writers began about that time.