At the End of Darwin Road

by Fiona Kidman

  Despite the change, she and Trevor were constantly in despair with each other. Their marriage was in its last crumbling stages, although it would totter on, presenting an agonised face to the world, for some years. In fact, although they separated, they never divorced. Much has been written about their relationship, both by Lauris herself, and by their son Martin. None of it seems very conclusive. My own view is that, although Lauris appeared to move away from the marriage, and wrote about the relationship in the past tense, Trevor and she were the real loves of each other’s lives. There is a poem of hers called ‘The Mountain’, which begins:

  Oh love let us learn our love

  Now there is no more laughing in it –

  Let us remember the mountain

  When we woke to the frost

  And ran with our clothes to the kitchen …

  The mountain was Ruapehu and the kitchen was at Ohakune, where Trevor and Lauris had lived when the children were small. That mountain, and what it represented, seems so central to what she would write in the following years, so crucial to her emotional life, that I can only conclude that she could no more put the marriage completely behind her than Trevor could. He moved out and went to live in Greytown, soon after Lauris returned from Menton in 1981. They continued to see each other, Lauris frequently visiting Trevor until he died. It seemed to me that, although she had a number of relationships, she never found anyone who measured up to her and Trevor’s youthful romantic selves. Perhaps she half wilfully drove the others away, because none of them endured, although she did have a long deep friendship with Beeb, to whom she became close in our years in PEN. But at the end of ‘The Mountain’, she recalls how she and Trevor had stood on the tiny porch at the Ohakune house and shook and gasped ‘in the mazarine dark’ before going indoors and shutting the door on the cold ‘and the mountain’s terrible closeness’. This seemed to echo the way their lives, once so close and wonderful, had become ‘dark’ and ‘terrible’, overwhelming them as the mountain had done.

  The ‘terrible closeness’ of almost anyone was apparent at this stage in her life. There were fractured times with her family, and with some of her friends too. As one of the closest, I came in for frequent criticism, and before long Lauris declared the friendship over. She summoned me one afternoon in the summer and some hard words were spoken. In her opinion, I was unduly influenced by some of my other friends, or that’s what she told me. In particular, she and Leigh, whom she encountered often in the workplace, didn’t get on. Nor did she like the way I was conducting my professional life. Of course there were things I didn’t know about, the day we quarrelled, but I was aware that some kind of rivalry was involved. I did understand that she had leapfrogged ahead of me, immersed now in her lifelong commitment to poetry, while I moved restlessly from one form of writing to another. Perhaps, if such disaster hadn’t befallen Lauris in the shape of Rachel’s death, we would have sorted it out more easily. That summer afternoon, I remember walking home awash with tears and a feeling of utter rejection.

  Nearly five years passed before we behaved as more than civil acquaintances. It was here, from this room at Villa Isola Bella in Menton, that she started to write to me again, began to stitch our abandoned friendship back together. We would be the closest of friends until she died in January 2000, only it became friendship of a different kind, as we shared work ideas, took pleasure in each other’s successes and commiserated when things didn’t go well. At Grass Street, we would regularly put the world to rights, with a phone call most days, and frequent visits.

  Chapter 17

  All that, and still 1975 had not run its course. My time at the Book Council was close to an end. Joanna fell ill with suspected tuberculosis. This turned out to be an easily treatable infection, but rest was ordered. Ian and I were beside ourselves with worry. Ian had had tuberculosis as a child, and the spectre of the disease in his family hovered over us. Not only had his father spent so many years in the sanatorium, but Ian’s aunt had died in her twenties of the same illness. I took leave from my job to be at home with Joanna. It was a beautiful spring and early summer that year. Joanna, quiet and reflective by nature, had grown into a tall slender girl with dark hair falling nearly to her waist. I was grateful that we had a garden filled with sunlight and shade, where she could spend her days in a deckchair. She passed the time writing stories and poems of her own.

  This hiatus provided me with more time to be with both the children than I had had for some years. Giles wasn’t happy at school, and often spent his days riding the buses with a Maori driver called Bunny. The school didn’t seem to care, and when we met Bunny we decided that he was a positive influence on our son. Some weekends, he and his family would take Giles on spear-fishing expeditions around the coast. It seems odd now that we let this happen, but Giles was a popular quick-witted boy with many friends. Although he didn’t enjoy school, he didn’t want to leave his mates behind and shift school either. I realised he enjoyed having me at home, and he was more settled when I was there. This time couldn’t last, but it was good for all of us.

  Our existence was still very hand to mouth. Old Wellington houses can suck money up remorselessly. There was rewiring and all manner of repairs to be done, and now I was saving for a new roof. My work at the Book Council was twenty hours a week, although I often put in forty, and the wages were modest. I loved the job and was proud of the programmes I initiated. The Writers in Schools programme was under way: the first writer to talk to students was Noel Hilliard, who visited a group of Rotorua high schools. Margaret Mahy and Joy Cowley were enthusiastic, and plans were made for them to begin touring. Meet the Author was mainly dependent on overseas writers who, like Michael Frayn, were on their way to Australian festivals. I found it uphill work attracting audiences to hear New Zealand writers, despite the flourishing poetry gigs the Poetry Society was already running.

  These Book Council initiatives were big concepts and if they were to grow, they needed total commitment from whoever was running them. When Roy Parsons employed me I had said in my interview that I wanted to write, ‘although I never expected to write a great New Zealand novel’. Putting myself down. A part of me believed it, but I wanted the job badly at the time. I had put aside serious consistent writing for a long time, but the hope of writing a novel still lurked.

  Then Michael Noonan and Tony Isaacs came to discuss a proposal with me for New Zealand’s first television soap. The crux of their idea was a serial based on the daily lives of a family who lived in the upstairs flat over a grocery shop in Hataitai. They asked if I would like to be in on the action. We tossed around some ideas, and suggestions for the name of the serial. I think it was Tony who said, ‘It should be something that feels really close to home for viewers.’ And Michael said, ‘That’s it, close to home.’ This was how Close to Home, the long-running serial, was born. It employed scores of writers, editors and actors. I would work spasmodically on it over the next few years and Joanna acted in several episodes while she was still in high school.

  So that was an option, but even before the serial was up and running, I could see it being hijacked by the same powerful group who had moved in earlier. A proposed staff contract didn’t eventuate, so it wasn’t a real job prospect. Meanwhile, two of my early stories had been selected by Phoebe Meikle, now editing at Longman Paul, for a collection called Ten modern New Zealand story writers. It would include Witi, Patricia Grace and me, as well as Maurice Duggan, Maurice Gee and C.K. Stead. This was a more important collection than any I had been included in so far. Phoebe was a hard taskmaster. Although she had chosen my stories from the many available, she thought they could be better. She behaved like a schoolmistress, reminding me frequently of the principles of grammar, punctuation and clear narrative story telling that I had lost sight of when I left school. My report card from her always read ‘could do better’. It was one of the best things that could have happened to me. I began to look at all the work I had done, and think about how it could be impro
ved.

  I started incorporating Phoebe’s ‘lectures’ into my teaching. I had moved on from the WEA and taken over weekend courses for Victoria’s University Extension classes. These had been started by Christine Cole Catley, then carried on by Michael King. Michael was moving north to be near his children, after the break-up of his marriage, and the job fell to me. I was surprised at how well the teaching was going. More and more students came flocking to the classes, held in an old Wellington house that had been converted into a lecture facility in Fairlie Terrace. Some began travelling from other parts of the country to participate. I tried to create a friendly constructive environment, and to equip the students with skills to criticise each other’s work in an honest but not threatening way. By then, I had had several instructors of my own whose advice seemed worth passing on. I also began to receive letters from people who wanted advice. For the most part, I had to let them down gently.

  There just wasn’t enough time to answer all these letters, although I did begin a correspondence with a young man in Mount Crawford prison. One Saturday afternoon I took myself off to visit him. The visit wasn’t a great idea. I was horrified when I was searched: it had never occurred to me that I would be seen as anything other than a friendly visitor. I was so ignorant of prison life and the loneliness of criminals that I hadn’t realised how reliant this man might become on my correspondence, or that his feelings for me might develop into a romantic fantasy. I stopped writing to him after a while and felt badly about it. I did think that he had ability. Meanwhile, as I worked alongside my students, I found myself thinking more and more about how I could return to the writing I had set out to do when I was in my twenties.

  Something else was bothering me too, which I was keeping to myself. The rumour mill in Auckland was busy and, although I never met Frank Sargeson, I had heard that he was a gossip. I was told that he was linking my name too closely with Keith Sinclair’s. Then, one evening I went to a poetry reading at the Settlement with Keith, where there was a gathering of poets, all young men, who had been students at Auckland University and had been published in the student magazine, Freed. Perhaps they had felt slighted by Keith in some way, and wanted to extract revenge, or just thought it funny, but the next issue of Freed carried a gossip column that linked us as a couple. So the rumour was in print, and I was devastated. This was unfair and untrue.

  I did talk about it with Keith. He thought that the matter should be ignored, given that our friendship had been misconstrued. But it was clear to me that it could not continue in the same uninhibited way, if it was not to pull the Book Council down with it. Keith and Ian were good friends; we all enjoyed being together when Raewyn was in Wellington. There seemed room for unfortunate misunderstandings. One morning I woke up totally clear about what should happen next. I rang Keith and told him I was resigning. He tried to talk me into changing my decision, but I had made up my mind. By the end of the conversation, my job at the Book Council was over. Happily, the friendship was not. Keith continued to support my work for a long time afterwards.

  Earlier in the year I had written a radio play called Angel, commissioned for International Women’s Year, taking the abuse of women as its central theme. The central character was based on Carole and her difficult journey of self-discovery and survival, although the events in the play were not her story. It was just that Carole was always up against things, often overwhelmed by the hardships associated with raising three boys by herself, including one with a disability. For a time she worked at one of the embassies, where she met a group of journalists who liked her wild energetic humour, and determination to overcome obstacles. But although she was bent upon improving her situation, something usually got in the way. Since the death of the man she had been seeing, she seemed to fall in and out of liaisons that went nowhere. She was always looking after people who, it seemed to me, took advantage of her generosity. When I visited in the weekends there were frequently oddballs there of one kind or another, addicts and misfits and dropouts who took hospitality from her, giving little in return. I would take small food parcels when I could and leave them in the fridge, and she and the boys would come to us for Christmas. If we were hard up, they were much worse off.

  Sometimes when I visited her, she would pick up her car keys and say, ‘Let’s get out of this. Let’s have a picnic.’ Once we were in the car, there was no stopping her, as we tore round the bays at dizzying speeds. Eventually she would pull into a lay-by and order me to open the boot of the car. ‘’Ello sailor, look what we’ve got here,’ she’d shout, and I’d find the cask of wine. It only took me a couple of these trips to realise that she was on a different plane. I didn’t do drugs, never had, and these road trips frightened me. In her company, there was a real sense of things spinning out of control. I felt, too, that Carole was tired, as if somehow the struggle was wearing her out.

  When I wrote Angel I was thinking about the two sides to her nature: the loving person who would do anything for anyone, and the wild child. I loved Nina Simone singing ‘Angel of the Morning’, and threaded it through my play. This was my first radio drama for a while, and there was a new producer, Fergus Dick. He didn’t like the play much, seeing it as too issues-driven. I think he was right to an extent, although I felt the character had integrity. Fergus is a flirty funny man, full of wry self-mockery. He and Lauris got on well together, and later, in the 1980s, when Lauris and I had been reconciled, the three of us would meet for rowdy afternoons filled with laughter and gossip, that most infectious Wellington pastime. (There is, I should say, gossip and gossip. The first sort is the cold-hearted rumour that destroys people; the second, humorous takes on conversations and who said what to whom, is not seriously unkind. Fergus has always practised the second kind as an art form, with a flair for mimicry.)

  For better or worse, the play did draw me back into the radio circle. And I had some moving letters from women who had suffered abuse in their lives, saying that the play had ‘spoken’ to them, and they felt as if somebody understood. Tony Groser, also an actor, and John O’Leary were now running radio drama. I found myself with two work offers: one a small part-time job to produce a new programme about books on the Concert Programme, and a half-time job as script editor in the National Radio drama department. Tony had devised the idea of offering work in six-month blocks, hoping to find fresh ideas and an extra pair of hands, as well as mentoring to provide a regular income for selected writers. I’d already accepted the Concert Programme job when the second offer came up. I was persuaded to take them both.

  I started the drama department work in a broom cupboard at Aurora House on The Terrace. The room, with a slanting ceiling and no windows, had been the storeroom for the big building’s cleaning equipment. There was a dank smell of stale polish. Now it was cleared to make space for the three script editors: our desks touched each other. I shared this tiny space with two young men, Chris Hampson and Simon Carr. Chris dated back to my library days in Rotorua when, as a child, he used to come in with his mother to change his books. I remembered his library card number as soon as I saw him, and we fell quickly into an easy bantering relationship. Simon had come to New Zealand with the Oxford Union debating team a year or so earlier, with Simon Walker, and both men liked New Zealand so much that they stayed on. Simon (Carr) was sandy-complexioned, thin and so tall that I had to step over his legs to get past his desk. His immaculately tailored hacking jackets had been made in England, and he tilted a tweed hat over one eye while he read scripts, or simply while he feigned sleep if he was bored, which was quite often after I arrived. He and Chris had sharp funny tongues, and a rapid flow of running black gags, but I could tell Simon wasn’t happy at having a third person in such a confined space. Because I was a woman, and older than him, he clearly felt the need to curb his language now and then, and, although I never commented, I could tell he felt inhibited.

  On my second Monday morning, I brought flowers in to brighten the place up. The next morning they had turned blue —
the old osmosis trick of ink in the water that kids do when they are about ten. I said as much, and that we could either get on or not, it was over to him. I was feeling reasonably confident when I looked at the work put in front of me — I knew at least as much as Chris about what constituted a good radio play, and a lot more than Simon, although he was a good reader. Things improved after that. I wooed the pair of them with sandwiches and cakes for morning tea, and it worked, although Simon left after a couple of months. By that time we had moved to a proper office, and in the meantime I had written the radio play Mandarin Summer, which Simon liked very much.

  Throughout the early 1970s, I had managed to make a number of trips back north, since my return to Waipu. The year after that journey, I had gone up to Kerikeri for a week, staying in the old Homestead Hotel. I went on the pretext of work, but also because I couldn’t get the North out of my head. If Waipu had exerted such a profound influence over me, how much more did my imagination owe to Kerikeri? When I went back that year, one beautiful day followed another. I didn’t make myself known to people, except to catch up with Michael Gross. There was the same dizzying breathless humid perfume I remembered from my childhood, the banana passion fruit hanging heavily from the hakea hedges, the air full of butterflies, and dragonflies skimming the rivers. The blue gum trees had grown taller and denser. I went back to the waterfall and it was just as I remembered it.

  Finally, I went back up Darwin Road to where our house had stood. In its place was a smart new bungalow, oozing prosperity. I knocked on the door and introduced myself, asking if I might have a look around the place. I soon discovered the old army hut, moved further back along the paddock, under a hedge. My old lean-to bedroom had been moved with it. I sat on the step and wept. All the old memories of sitting on the outside looking in overwhelmed me.