The Boys Are Back

by Simon Carr

  ‘They do, as a matter of fact,’ I said. ‘There’s a cardinal called Basil Hume. I think “Basil” is the head of the Catholic Church in England.’

  He would have heard her laughter pealing down the public health corridor around him, the only true gaiety in the whole building.

  Susie was an engine producing health and beauty; she was courageous, accustomed to drought and falling stock prices; she always assumed the best would happen. She may have been sick but she was strong: she went through two intestinal operations within three weeks. Not everyone makes it through that ordeal. When eighteen-month-old Alexander saw her being wheeled down a corridor in a hospital bed, tubes coming out of her nose and ghastly pale, he fell to the floor very slowly, sobbing in horror. In the depths of exhaustion and postoperative shock she still found the resources to think God, do I look that awful?

  Friends – Alexander and his wife (also called Susie) – visited every day. He was marvellously practical, for an old Etonian. He organised a mobile phone from the office so Susie could call from her bed. He brought in a television, which he wired up to a VCR at the end of her bed; he got her a boxful of cheerful videos of old-time musical comedies and Susie brought a pretty little saucepan to make soup in.

  In this period of two operations she hardly ate anything for a month, she lost nearly all her flesh. ‘My bum’s gone!’ she said one day, in surprise, when it started to hurt sitting in the bath. Her veins had collapsed in shock. A junior doctor spent forty minutes probing for a way in. He needed the practice.

  Elizabeth Kubler Ross writes about the process of dying. How patients go through discrete emotional states: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Susie liked the first two, they were the states that suited her best. She could bargain a bit too, when she had to, but she was no good at depression, she had no talent for that, and acceptance was out of the question.

  Little Alexander wasn’t two years old. The relationship was the closest and most loving of all her relationships. This was unbearable. Clearly death was unthinkable. Because what would happen to her little boy? So she settled on a strategy of defiance mixed with indignation. She had been given a two per cent chance of survival; she decided she had a two per cent chance of dying. Until her last week, her last days, she held this line. Her willpower was implacable.

  As she recovered from the operations we made preparations to leave for her home on the other side of the world. Whatever her surgeons’ manner, they were proper surgeons. She had a shunt installed into her hepatic artery to deliver chemotherapy direct to her liver. It was a brilliant surgical procedure. When one put his hand on her arm and said, ‘You’ll be all right,’ she said, ‘Will I? Really?’ And as he smiled evasively, she wiped everything else he had said on the subject and assured herself that she would be all right.

  The house in Leamore Street was eventually sold at thirty per cent under the valuation – that real estate recession began to bite in the first quarter of 1991 (she never reconciled herself to the price I got). We booked with Cathay Pacific and when they were told about our circumstances they upgraded our tickets to business class. I dropped my career with the Independent and they, in a saintly way, maintained my salary for nearly two years. Her friends in New Zealand raised a collection for her and sent over a cheque for ten thousand dollars.

  Apart from the fact that Susie was dying of cancer everything was going our way. ‘And Alexander will be brought up in the best country in the world for children,’ she said. ‘In the country, by the beach. Proper food. Proper sunshine. Proper summers.’

  She had come, remember, from the most favoured square mile in the world.

  The coves, and bays and beaches, and the rising uplands of New Zealand look oddly familiar from the air as you fly in over the Pacific. You’ve just been through the longest flight there is, you’ve been through a twelve-hour night and you really can’t be sure you’ve ever had a life off the aircraft. You’ve got lost in some time slip, you’ve been ghosted by travel, as the writer has it. But then suddenly the waiting is over. In the dawn you look down to this enchanted, crinkle-cut coastline rising out of the Pacific Ocean. Tracks lead up the cliffs to smooth green grazing lands. Pathways zigzag up and down the gulleys; there are uplands and copses, and everything’s shining underneath an ultramarine sky. And why does it look oddly familiar? It’s exactly like the Darlings’ first sight of Never Never Land as they fly in fairy class from Westminster. No wonder children like it there, it’s magic from the first moment you see it.

  You’re on the edge of the world, two thousand miles from any other city. There’s the Antarctic down there and over the horizon there’s Sydney. But down in Hawke’s Bay you can look eastwards, towards the rising sun, and there’s nothing except the world’s biggest, bluest ocean all the way until you hit Chile.

  Hawke’s Bay is the garden of the southern hemisphere. You come over the brow of the hill and see the valley floor laid out with broad blue rivers winding through the shingle beds. Poplars have been planted, willows line the banks. In the meadows and hillsides there are stands of pine and eucalypts.

  It’s like Brigadoon. Time has opened up a crack and you are looking through into an old-fashioned world where there are still neighbours, a sense of community and an upturned Zephyr rusting in the river. It’s a sort of heaven for Londoners; your senses expand. Instead of closing sounds out, instead of excluding faces, your ears strain across two hillsides to hear dogs barking. It’s so relaxed that the pitch of your voice suddenly drops two full tones and you stop trying to be the first to say things.

  The river. The hills. The dogs and hens. Copses, crags, winding dusty roads. The big rambling houses, their enormous lawns and mysterious shrubberies; trampolines and tennis courts; rivers with canoes and swimming holes; winter days where you get a light tan through the hole in the ozone layer. Horses, dogs and motorbikes.

  As you drive through the back-country roads you come across names you’ve seen in smart London shops: Oyster Bay, Stoneleigh, Te Mata. And, amazingly, the wine is no cheaper here than in London.

  It must be said that Alexander’s standard of living soared. Hammersmith had offered a restricted life compared with this. One of the local amenities at the back of the KFC in King Street allowed us to play football among the wheely bins. People thought that was a bit desperate for a child but it wasn’t that bad for inner London. I defended it. The outpatients from the mental hospitals never shouted at us. And we never even saw a rat.

  On the other hand, when Alexander moved in for a header, at just over a year old, the ball left a horrid slap of street slime on his perfect quattrocento cheek. God knows what was in it. We definitely had to get that off before his mother saw it.

  So, rising two, Alexander and his mother both preferred it the way it was turning out down those shingled country roads. We were living in a shambling clapboard beach house one back from the five-mile-long beach below Cape Kidnappers. The New Zealand grandparents were up the hill. Susie’s sparkling friend from England, Muff, had married Selby from up the road. And we went between their house and ours, living like one extended family, enjoying the astonishingly inventive cooking of the region.

  Susie’s mother, Val, cooked, as it were, for Africa. Here’s a summary of the dishes on her sideboard one evening, waiting for dinner to finish: lemon sponge pudding, fijoas in orange juice, fresh raspberries, rice pudding, berry crumble, apple pie, whipped cream.

  Down the road at the Palmers’, the evening sun moved through the trees surrounding their tennis court; small sun-bleached blondes ran pointlessly across the lawns and through the shrubberies. The little ones played endless ecstatic running games with no rules but great energy. The grown-ups sat with great tumblers of gin getting progressively less grown-up; the easy jokes, the glamorous women, the long evenings.

  And below, on the dusty country road, the blokes in their trucks came down from the farms, their big huntaways loping either side of the vehicles, like secret agents in a p
residential motorcade. And everything – practically everything – was perfect.

  Now, farms are said to be heaven for children and, as long as there are farmers to show them round, that’s probably true. On the good side, they are extremely dangerous, violent institutions abounding in casual slaughter. Boys like farms for the same reason they like computer games. You go into farmers’ implement sheds and see hanging up the tools of their trade – slashers, slicers, shredders, perforators, rippers, burners, piercers, cutters, drillers, shredders and tearers. And farmers bear the marks of their business. They’ve all got scars, limps and something less than the average number of body parts. This makes them tough. The gender roles are more sharply defined in New Zealand out there in the back country. Men are more obviously men, with their smashed hips and seven fingers, and their extraordinary ability to withstand pain.

  Selby was attacked by a bull he was selling. The auctioneer’s hammer had fallen and the bull displayed his real temper. It brushed past the sawn-off polo stick Selby was using as a pointer and took him round the pelvis. It tossed him up under the pen’s overhang and crushed him against the steel bars. Once, twice it shoved him. The third time Selby managed to get out from under the bars, and when the bull tossed him he was thrown clear of the pen and slammed down flat on his back from a height of eight feet. ‘Selby, Selby, are you all right?’ Muff called, not quite managing to keep the quaver out of her voice.

  ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ he said faintly, he’s such a gent. ‘I’m just a bit winded. You couldn’t get me a whisky, could you?’

  Another neighbour, Angus, two hills away, once rolled his four-wheeler down a gulley. Unlike two-wheelers, these buggies, these mini-tractors, keep on rolling and take their riders with them. Angus woke up eventually, under the machine at the bottom of the hill. He had six broken ribs, a broken collarbone and a lung punctured in two places. He was quietly dying, five miles from the road. But he wasn’t paralysed so he got the machine upright as a farmer would and somehow started it. He drove up the gulley, across his farm and made it to the road where he was found face down, unconscious on the blacktop. When they retraced his steps they found he’d driven through five gates. At each one he’d got off his bike, opened the gate, driven through – and then got off again, each time, to close the gate behind him.

  ‘Why, if you don’t mind my asking, did you do that, Angus?’

  ‘Well, if you don’t,’ he explained, ‘the stock wander, and someone has to come around after you and clear up.’

  ‘Of course, of course, and it didn’t make any difference that you were actually coughing up blood?’

  ‘Well, it’s a habit, isn’t it? Closing gates? You do it without thinking.’ That certainly wasn’t true where I’d come from, in my part of Hammersmith.

  And then there was Chris, Susie’s father, lying in his hospital bed after a six-hour heart attack. He’d suffered chest pains, heart pains all night up at the top of the Marae Totara, but hadn’t wanted to disturb the household. The hospital managed to catch him before it became terminal and he was lying there in an oxygen mask, grey in the face. ‘How are you feeling, Chris?’ we asked.

  ‘The best I can say is … ordinary. I feel a bit ordinary,’ he said softly.

  It is said that New Zealand men are more masculine than Englishmen. That’s not hard. New Zealand women are more masculine than Englishmen; our piping voices, our frail metropolitan fingers. When you ask a New Zealand farmer for three fingers of gin you get a third of a pint.

  And the effete way the educated English talk: ‘Dear boy,’ a London editor said, cancelling lunch later in the week, ‘a cloud no larger than a man’s hand hangs over Thursday.’ What was that about?

  It all seemed a very long way away. Which, of course, it was.

  New Zealand is well known for a rather soupy liberalism. Earlier this century it had had a reputation for practising ‘socialism without doctrine’, a socialism described by a Labour prime minister as ‘lending a neighbour your lawnmower on Saturday morning’.

  But offsetting this is another reckless strand in the national psyche, an unreflecting exuberance, a physical vitality, a sense of fun which is equally obvious in the women as the men.

  For instance, one sport for young men well before bungy jumping, was tree diving. In the longueurs between woolshed parties you might climb up a certain sort of fir tree with undulant branches and, when you got to the top, you dived down it head first. The theory was that the branches would break your fall; and very often they did. But it’s not something you’d find out unless there was very little else to do.

  This combination of energy and isolation may be why New Zealand has three times the road deaths per head of population as England; also why fatal air accidents are sky high. They say that the country produces extraordinary weather systems – and while this is true, it also produces the pilots who are prepared to fly in them.

  Digby, a deer farmer, flew a light plane when farming was good. On summer evenings he’d hop fifty miles up the coast to land in his friends’ front paddocks for drinks before dinner. Once, with a white-haired scion of a retailing empire in the passenger seat, he took off looking for Selby. To do this he circled the house at three hundred feet until the family came out. He shouted questions down to them but they couldn’t hear him over the noise of the engine. So he turned the engine off. Then he made his enquiries. It seemed that Selby had gone down to Waimarama to see the McKenzies about their holiday arrangements; there was some overlap at Taupo with Koo from Gisborne (who hadn’t left John, no, that was just a rumour, but it wouldn’t be surprising after what they’d been through with the fire and so forth). When the conversation ended they were no more than eighty feet above Selby’s roof and Hugh’s hair was a finer shade of silver than before.

  This exalted male behaviour sets a powerful example to the young.

  Eddie was driving Selby’s four-wheeler at speed; we heard him coming up the other side of the hill. As the engine crescendoed, Eddie and the bike appeared over the bank. The wheels were off the ground, Eddie was off the seat; his only contact with the bike was a fierce grip on the handlebars, as in a cartoon. He was nine at the time.

  Looking at the photographs of that year, you can see why New Zealand is said to be the place to bring up children. Here’s Alexander running along the river bank with Regan, a little Maori boy, hot on his heels. Here we are, digging a sand maze on the beach. Here he is, driving the tractor with his grandfather. Here he is, with Selby and Muff on the winter holiday they took us on to Fiji. (‘Look,’ they said one evening, ‘you might not want to do this, in which case there’s no problem, but we’ve bought these tickets and we’d love you to come with us on holiday because you’d make it for us.’) Alexander’s won a sandcastle-building competition and Susie is hugging him with pride, and he’s beaming in the endless summer of the under-fives.

  You think you’re going to remember every moment but children’s conversation is so odd, so unlike anything we do later, so original – we just don’t have a frame of reference to hold memories in place. It’s like talking to a lunatic – you have to record it to remember it.

  He sat in his bath while I sat with my diary, writing down his babble. Whenever I made to leave the room he’d stop and say, ‘You sit there and wait for me.’ So that’s the reason why I’ve got it written here in my big diary: ‘Doing some working, Daddy? Your pen all right, Daddy? Daddy? Do other tap. Too hot for me. Daddy. Daddy? Is it too hot? Here’s a saussi. I’ll get my oven. Too hot for me.’

  I said: ‘Would you like to get out of the bath and sit in front of the fire?’

  He splashed the water with both hands and indicated with his chin. ‘Sit there and wait for me. Here’s a potato, Daddy. ‘Ere y’are.’

  ‘No thanks, I’ve had enough potato.’

  ‘Eat it! Here’s some potato and saussi. Like saussi, Daddy? Last time. ‘Ave some saussi. ‘Ere y’are. Here’s spoon. Here’s fork. ‘Ere y’are. Dinner. Here’s some
big plate. Don’t want potato? Just saussi. Too hot for me. Look, Daddy! Ow! Ow!’

  And then, after he’d agreed to get out of his bath, he sat in front of the fire in his towel and drew on a piece of paper. ‘It’s a shark,’ he whispered and put a finger to his comically pursed lips. ‘Sh.’ Then he turned the page over, face down, and whispered again, ‘Shark hiding. Sh!’

  That’s quite a good joke for a three-year-old.

  And as the firelight played about him, as in a commercial for gas heating, his whole arm moved as he drew, holding the pencil between his thumb and three fingers. He looks over and says, ‘Are you working in your book, Daddy?’

  I was indeed, that’s exactly what I was doing, writing in my book. And these stray fragments are all that’s left of the time before he was five.

  That and the phrase he repeated all day, announcing the start of an ancient television rerun: ‘Thunderbirds can’t go!’

  ‘God I love boys,’ I said more than once.

  ‘Don’t say that, darling,’ Susie admonished, ‘people will get the wrong idea.’

  His first day at school

  I wrote an ad for Kleenex for their tissue handipacks.

  ‘Two mothers are taking their four-year-olds for their first day at their pre-school. The little ones are sturdily dressed for this new world, buttoned up with their new school bags and packed snack. Both mothers are quietly urging their little ones to be brave and not to be homesick, because the day won’t be long and they’ll be picked up after lunch. After a brave hug, the children run off without a backward glance and the mothers turn to each other with tears flowing down their faces.’

  Well, that’s how it was for Susie, at any rate, taking Alexander to his first day at Te Mata kindergarten.

  And the days went by, one by one.

  And up on the farm