At the End of Darwin Road

by Fiona Kidman

  The writers who felt threatened by the work put my way need not have worried about Bill Austin’s role in the matter. He dropped dead of a heart attack in the street, a few minutes after leaving a doctor’s surgery where he had been told that he was in his best health for years. I rang Arthur that morning around about eleven with a query. ‘Austin signed off that contract of yours first thing this morning,’ he said, in his best, clipped BBC accent. ‘Died since then.’

  Arthur began to fade almost as soon as Bill had gone; his heart didn’t seem to be in the work any more. He asked me to take over a WEA (Workers’ Educational Association) writing class that he ran. This seemed absurd, given that I considered myself still a beginner writer. My knees knocked the first night I faced the group, but they seemed to like what I had to say, and some of them remain friends to this day. It was Frances Cherry’s first night at a creative writing class too, on the other side of the desk. She continues to publish books and teach. For me, this was the beginning of nearly twenty-seven years of teaching writing.

  Arthur asked me then if I could write a serial based on an aspect of New Zealand history, which people seemed ‘pretty interested in’ these days. I knew very little about our past and couldn’t think where to begin. Then it came to me. I suggested the story of Norman McLeod and Waipu to Arthur, who was delighted and promptly presented me with another six-part series contract. Apart from the fleeting trip for Jen’s wedding, I hadn’t been back to Waipu for eighteen years. I decided to go back there and talk to people about the migrations. Ian had come to accept that I needed to travel from time to time to do research, which proved fairly arduous in several respects because I didn’t have real skills, although the years of writing feature articles had taught me how to ask questions. I took these trips during school holidays so that someone was home for the children. I think they enjoyed having their father to themselves. And I had developed a passion for travelling through the countryside, staying in small town cheap block wall motels with rooms smelling of antiseptic to mask old tobacco and people smells. I liked the anonymity, the sense of being an outsider looking and listening in.

  I went up north by bus in August:

  One stark cabbage tree, fifteen hundred

  above sea level, black

  mists and driving rain, then

  the long run down from the top of Brynderwyn

  to the flat plains of the Braigh.

  I rode into town on a Road Services bus,

  Like the heroine of some Western movie,

  The unknown stranger, who yet knew all.

  It was deep winter, and the rain stayed with me for most of the trip. On the first morning, during a break between the showers, I took the long white road to the cemetery beside the sea. I felt that if I could get close to ‘the Man’ I might find out how to begin my task. The local gravedigger, who helped me to find the grave, had been there since I was a girl. We called him ‘Clark Gable’; he lived in a shack surrounded by a collection of bottles and rags that he traded in. Nothing had changed. McLeod’s headstone and the rusty iron palings were almost covered by rough scrub and paspalum, the moss-encrusted letters nearly indecipherable.

  As I wandered around the headstones, looking at inscriptions that included details of the journeys, I was overwhelmed by a sense of what it must feel like to cross the world, knowing that you would never return. Like my great-great-grandmother at Brora. And, for the first time, I had an inkling of what grieved my father, and why ‘home’ seemed so far away.

  I stayed for a week in the local hotel, and even there, I felt much like a stranger. Time spent at the excellent museum in the main street was profitable; in the evenings I read what literature there was available about the migrations, and fielded calls in my room from the gumboot tribe, who thought I might like to join them for a drink in the bar. Among the women I met in the village were girls I had gone to school with. They lived mostly on farms and had different lives from mine. They couldn’t understand what I was doing there, living in the hotel and prowling about, and I was beginning to wonder too. Then I was rescued by Jen’s father, Jim Gates, such a friend of my youth, who took me to meet Misses Myra and Hilda Lang, the last surviving Gaelic speakers in the community. They lived at Lang’s Beach, in a weathered house overlooking the sea, delightful, sharp-witted old women, eager to tell me as many stories as they could, often with laughter and tears, over many cups of tea.

  I returned also to the house of Kitty Slick, more dilapidated and tumbledown than when I left. The front door swung open, hanging by a single hinge. Inside were signs that animals had taken shelter downstairs. But upstairs, little had changed. This time, I collected some fragments of the newspapers covering the walls. I have them still. I stood at a window and looked out across the paddocks. The dark macrocarpa tree outside brushed against the wall. In my head I was asking myself questions, the old ‘what if’ ones that overtake writers now and then.

  What if I had been the woman who lived here?

  What would it be like to be absolutely alone at night, with nothing but the sound of that tree rubbing against the wall?

  Would I have known that some people in the valley called me ‘the witch’? Would I have looked up and seen me passing in the school bus when I was a girl?

  I remember how cold it was, on that dull foggy afternoon. Perhaps, I found myself thinking, it is not madness or wickedness to be on your own, to be an independent thinker. The atmosphere of the place had taken hold of me. I knew I could write the play now, but I also knew that whatever I wrote, it would not be enough, that I had only touched one stage of the journeys from Nova Scotia. I wanted to know what the other places looked like, how the food tasted, the feel of old fabrics under my fingertips, what scents would be delivered on a spring breeze. When I wrote Fire of the North, the series Arthur had commissioned, I understood that it was only the beginning, that I would, if I could, go to the other side of the world and find out more.

  By the time I delivered the series, Arthur was very ill, and on the point of retirement. The serial was produced by a new young talent, John O’Leary, who loved the serial and gave it a beautiful quality sound, full of bagpipes and laments. Listeners loved it and it went on to play another three times.

  I did end up with a television contract for Pukemanu, an episode called ‘Who Needs Enemies’. Straight away the script came in for criticism from the editors for not being ‘tough enough’ and I finished up co-writing with Michael Noonan. Despite these rumblings, it seemed a great time to be in the thick of making television. We were filming in the old Waring Taylor studios in downtown Wellington; they were tiny, cramped and makeshift. The pub was the only static set, with barely room to turn around in. The rest of the sets were built and pulled down as fast as scenes were shot.

  In my episode a couple was quarrelling in the pub. The wife, played by Glenis Levestam, had to say the line, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Maurice.’ The actors couldn’t get this scene right, and because the set had to be changed first thing in the morning, it was filmed over and over again, throughout the night. Around about three in the morning, Glenis screamed, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Maurice.’ Take, shouted the director, it’s in the can. ‘For Christ’s sake’ was one of the forbidden expressions on air. When the show screened, I had the dubious distinction of being credited with introducing the term into broadcasting. There were howls of moral outrage, and I received a quantity of hate mail, the kind that comes unsigned in red and green ink.

  It was in the green room during filming of Pukemanu that I came across a job advertisement in the newspaper: a group calling itself the New Zealand Book Council wanted a paid part-time secretary, for twenty hours a week. I looked at it, and wondered. I found the reviews, my only regular work, hard going: I didn’t seem to have the stamina of the long distance columnist. And I had had hints that Ian Cross was beginning to feel I was compromised by continuing to work in radio and television; to an extent he was right. A regular half-time income would allow me to work
on media projects I cared about, like Fire of the North, and let the columns go.

  Around that time, several problems in my extended family were beginning to raise their head. In Rotorua, my parents’ health was failing. You could say that my father had always enjoyed ill-health. As the years went by, he became increasingly absorbed by his ailments, real or imagined. Unless you had ten minutes to hear the answer, it was dangerous to ask him how he was. Now some of the illnesses were real and he had several trips to hospital. My mother was also sick with the acute rheumatoid arthritis that would dog her for the rest of her life. She, too, had long spells in Queen Elizabeth, the lakefront hospital that specialised in rheumatology. My father became helpless during the weeks when she was away.

  As if that wasn’t enough, the aunts and uncles had begun to die over the space of three years. I visited Margaret, the oldest one, with the quick tongue and acerbic manner, at her home south of Auckland when she was dying of lung cancer. She stood at the gate, a crumpled little figure, and said, ‘I don’t want to die, Fiona.’ I didn’t believe she would, I thought her indestructible. But she did.

  Stewart would be the next. I didn’t know this uncle as well as the rest of the family. He and his wife and my cousin Catherine lived on another family property that had survived the Depression in better shape than my grandfather’s farm up the East Coast. At his funeral in Marton, I discovered the family cemetery where my mother’s forebears lie, all the way back to my great-great-grandparents who came out on the Oriental. They lie together in this quiet cemetery that we reached after the cortège had wound through hills and valleys to the farm gate. Over the years since, I have gone there when I could, always meaning to take flowers but usually ending up plucking some rusty hydrangeas from the roadside to lay on my grandmothers’ graves.

  Then my beloved oddball Aunt Roberta died. She left me everything she possessed in the world: about eighty dollars, some silver vases, a gold bracelet she had had made out of strands of my grandmother’s watch chain, other odds and ends purloined from family houses she had stayed in over the years, plus a sealed trunk that turned out to contain dozens of pairs of spectacles and many half-filled syringes of morphine. They must have come from hospitals where she worked. Jean and I stamped on them on her concrete driveway, before disposing of the evidence. Roberta had also left me all her diaries, only Jean had burnt them by the time I arrived to collect them — ‘I didn’t think you’d want that old rubbish.’ I had no reply to that.

  I drove backwards and forwards to my family in all weathers, including snow and black ice across the Desert Road, when I was needed. Sometimes I took the children; often I went alone.

  The experience with the Max Harris tour was in my mind when I went for my interview for the Book Council job. I was sure if I could do that, I could do this job, and I was hungry for it. I was interviewed by one of the prime movers in the new organisation, the bookseller Roy Parsons. He was a shrewd little man with a pointed goatee beard, his head constantly wreathed in cigarette smoke, an Englishman who had emigrated some years earlier and founded a left-wing bookshop off Lambton Quay. The New Zealand Book Council had been set up by the New Zealand Booksellers Association as a response to the UNESCO-inspired International Book Year in 1972. Its purpose was to link booksellers, publishers, writers, educators and librarians, to discuss and act upon book-related issues of common interest. The council also planned to reach disadvantaged readers through its activities, as well as pursuing the more commercial strategy of increasing interest in books and attracting higher sales. I have never had a problem with this concept: New Zealand needs a self-sustaining book sector if its literature is to survive.

  At the interview, I was asked to comment on matters like this and I surprised myself with some of the suggestions I came up with. The practical side of me enjoys problem solving. The board had already committed itself to follow a research project called Operation Book Flood, which the appointed person would manage, to see how children in low-decile schools would respond to a large injection of books into the school; an academic study had been commissioned to analyse the results. I proposed that it might also be worth starting a Writers in Schools programme and that, to encourage adult interest in books, we could have more events where writers and readers met each other.

  Roy nodded his head with increasing enthusiasm. He decided I would do for the job, although he was right to be anxious about my very rudimentary knowledge of bookkeeping, acquired in my teens in tractor garages. In this respect, he turned out to be a wise and patient counsellor.

  In order to highlight its activities, the council invited one of the country’s most distinguished historians to head it. This was Professor (later Sir) Keith Sinclair from Auckland University. Others on the board included Beeb, Patrick Macaskill, John Watson and David Wylie.

  Keith swept into my life and changed the way I looked at the world. He was a short man, always seeming as if he were balancing on the balls of his feet, with a nervous twitchy energy that he could barely contain. His hair was a bushy grey mane, he had prominent intensely brown eyes that turned liquid over a bottle of red wine — and there were a great many of those — a swarthy complexion, a gold filling gleaming in one of his front teeth. Keith, a poet as well as an historian, was the first academic to sit down and talk seriously about my writing. My qualifications were never an issue; he’d read my work and treated me like a real writer from the start. We talked and talked — about writing, about how to run the Book Council — and he told me endless stories about himself, his family and New Zealand history, for he was nothing if not a raconteur. These conversations usually took place over lunch before the council’s board meetings, at the old Woolshed restaurant on Plimmer’s Steps, below Book House where the council met and I had my office. The Woolshed was a big pretentious barn of a place, the haunt of politicians, journalists and people who liked to be seen. In our case it was simply handy to work, but we were soon regulars there. By the time we headed to the office at two o’clock, we would both have drunk a fair bit of rough red and the meetings were often raucous affairs.

  A number of eminent women, around my age, have told me similar stories about their friendships with Keith. If you were part of his charmed circle it was hard not to be half in love with him. He was a man who enjoyed the company of women, and liked to impress them. But he was also generous in the way he mentored them. In my case, he offered serious education in how to make sense of research material. When we first met he was writing a biography of Walter Nash, a former Labour prime minister. Nash had been an inveterate hoarder of papers, right down to bus tickets, and his vast collection was stored in an old warehouse in Vivian Street. Sometimes I would go down there with Keith, and he would show me the material he was working on.

  Why would you study a bus ticket? I might ask. He would look at me sternly. A bus ticket, he declared, could tell you a great deal about a prime minister. Look at the date, the destination. Why was the Prime Minister of New Zealand going there, at that time, on that day? These were clues and fragments of history that I must learn to read if I wanted to unlock the secrets of lives, both public and private. These were the details that mattered. The technique served me well when I came to write historical fiction. Don’t invent, until the truth is exhausted.

  Ian and Keith seemed to enjoy each other’s company, and sometimes, when Keith’s new wife, Raewyn Dalziel, was in town, the four of us would head off for dinner or in search of company, which Keith loved. Other times, he and I would set out together, looking for a party, disaster always at our elbow. He had a poor sense of direction and was afraid of the dark. We would go searching for parties in Wellington’s hillside suburbs, Keith assuring me that he knew the way to the address, though he hardly ever did. These situations often ended in panic and finding a taxi, when it turned out the destination was only half a block away.

  Another hazard of friendship with Keith was that he was frequently followed by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Even though Labo
ur was in power and Norman Kirk the prime minister, instructions lodged by the former National government weren’t expunged by a change in power. A ‘pinko’ historian doing research on Nash, down Vivian Street, a trade union haunt and place of ill-repute in more ways than one, was definitely considered a threat to national security. The spies were particularly concerned because they had learnt that among the papers Keith had stored in the warehouse were some files about Dr William Sutch, a senior civil servant who, in 1975, was prosecuted, and subsequently acquitted, for allegedly passing official information to a Soviet diplomat. Nash had kept information that was supposed to be returned to the SIS. It was a particularly sensitive period and there was almost invariably someone on our tail. You could tell the ‘spooks’ easily: they were almost laughably stereotyped in their black suits, with briefcases and rolled newspapers in hand. Keith knew who they were anyway, but just sometimes they seemed a bit close for comfort. One afternoon, at the airport, Keith’s bag fell open, spilling papers all over the place. You could almost feel the collective surge of the men in black.

  Keith’s Walter Nash was published by Oxford University Press in November 1976, and launched at Parliament. Keith signed the book ‘With love to Fiona and Ian Kidman’ and then Bill Rowling (briefly a Labour prime minister) and John (Jack) Marshall (prime minister for a short time for National), who were standing alongside, offered to sign it too. Rob Muldoon, by then the incumbent prime minister, stood glowering in a corner. We didn’t offer the book to him. We should have, perhaps, but you had the feeling he wanted to be the only prime minister in the room.