by Adam Dudding
A few months ago, I was at a writing workshop where Peter Wells talked about a history he was working on, based initially around five family letters written over the course of a century. I’m starting to think that five letters might be the right amount of material. Perhaps, like the cartographers in the Borges story who make a 1:1-scale map of their empire, I could spend the next 40 years publishing this archive online, each day posting the documents from one day in the past.
Eventually I get a grip, and realise that ingesting so much material in a single gulp has an advantage: it helps me see the bigger patterns. I imagine laying out all the letters in chronological order and assigning each an emotional colour – anxious red, cheerful orange, serious blue, gloomy grey – then watching the palette shift and change over the decades: from the gangle-limbed vigour of the late 1950s, to the bright, brassy excitement and busyness of the 1960s with new jobs and a new family, to the vivid yet spiky 1970s when his career was soaring, and to the 1980s, which started out overcast and only got darker.
I already know first-hand about the anxieties of the 1980s, but what I’m surprised to discover is that even when his career and family life and his physical and mental health were at their peak, Dad was always running hard to stand still, always on the brink of calamity. There was never enough time or money or energy. He was always behind with the gardening, with his bills, with house repairs, with the latest magazine deadline. The surprising thing isn’t that he eventually ran out of puff; it’s that he didn’t do so much earlier.
Yet there were always moments of grace. In July 1974 Dad wrote to the academic and writer James Bertram about his ambitions and fears for Islands, then in its third year. Subscriptions were up and the next edition might sell a healthy 1700 copies, but as usual it was a struggle to do the job as well as he wanted. He was glad, though, to be living back in Auckland:
We’re feeling a bit squeezed here but I have moments of quite intense happiness based on warmth, and beach and hills and green--it’s quite odd and only underlines, for me, the purgatory that Chch amounted to for so much of the time. More time --to work to read, to visit, to think--is all I crave. Some hope.
I don’t quite know why – something to do with those ‘moments of quite intense happiness’ – but as I read this letter in the library my eyes fill with tears, and I have to stop and sit for quite a while.
There’s one folder, a miscellany of correspondence of 1988–90, from when Islands was folding for the second time. His family were barely talking to him, and he was skint and miserable.
This folder is all incoming (and I suspect unanswered) mail: cheques from Islands subscribers never banked because there wasn’t a magazine to send in return; polite letters from libraries requesting information on the status of their subscription; even politer letters from writers wondering if they might have their submissions back (‘If circumstances have forced you to lay Islands to rest permanently I wonder if you could let me know so that I might offer the Soap sequence elsewhere,’ writes poet James Norcliffe).
All this is sitting tidily in front of me, pieces of paper collected in a clean beige foolscap folder with a computer-printed label – ‘MS-Papers-8988-199’ – but it’s actually a portrait of a man falling over.
In the Katherine Mansfield Reading Room times passes quickly and, for the most part, very quietly, apart from the shlunk of my camera shutter and the riffle of pages. One morning a librarian gives a piercing scream after finding an earwig in her hair. She flings it to the floor, stamps on it four times and has an intense discussion with her colleague about whether they should report the incident to Conservation, a decision which turns largely on whether it came to work with her from her garden or originated somewhere in the library. Another day an elderly couple – the husband deaf and the wife shouting – keep the whole room entertained as they try to track down the right edition of The Grey River Argus.
I meet a friendly freelance researcher who knows a lot about lighthouses. I exchange pleasantries with an anarchist, slightly notorious since police covertly filmed her allegedly training in the use of Molotov cocktails, who is researching an anti-war project and has a piece of tape covering the webcam of her laptop. I compare notes with the historian Rachel Barrowman, who is nearing completion of the biography of Maurice Gee that she started a decade ago. Moss and Dad were friends, so we’ve been reading some of the same letters between them, but it’s pretty obvious that Rachel is doing a drastically more thorough job than I’m planning.
I learn that Dad’s stuff takes up about seven linear metres of shelving in the Turnbull’s vault. The full unpublished manuscripts collection stretches to 10km. There must be a lot of powerful secrets lurking in there. I ask a librarian if people ever freak out in the reading room – burst into tears or shout in anger as they come across a love letter, or a bequest that was never honoured.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Not really.’
After two weeks of cramming, I’m waiting for my flight at Wellington airport. During a big push in the last couple of days, I’ve sighted all but a handful of Dad’s folders, and those were only page proofs and typescripts, so hopefully I’ve missed nothing important. I’ve got 4500 photos on my computer and screeds of notes to help me navigate them when I return and read them properly. I’m knackered.
After checking in for my flight I open my laptop to rattle off brief thank-you emails to Jocelyn and her colleagues, and to the friends who’ve put me up. Then I stop, and shut the lid.
Whitcoulls has just one postcard design on sale – a wretchedly ugly Photoshopped montage of Auckland beaches, including one photo I’m pretty sure is Waiake, the beach nearest our house in Torbay, where Dad found some of those moments of intense happiness. I buy four cards for 50 cents.
My handwriting is so atrophied by a lifetime of computers that it’s barely legible, but I scrawl something friendly and inane on each, and drop them into the postbox. Someone’s got to keep on writing letters.
4. Woodspring Cottage
ONE DAY you notice that it’s been forever since you last rode on your father’s shoulders, or chewed on your mother’s thumb because you liked the feel of the strong, spongy flesh between your teeth, or squeezed into the warm-bed nook between the two of them. The firm knowledge that you own your parents’ bodies as much as your own is fading – but it never quite passes. You never forget their smell and taste, their skin and the bones and muscles just beneath. You know the backs of their hands.
My father was an adventure playground. His front, from shin to collarbone, was a wall to climb as you leant back into the belay of his arms. You could climb halfway then flip backwards to the ground with your arms turned inside out, or go all the way up, clambering around on his head and shoulders before settling into the saddle of his neck and grasping handfuls of black hair for reins, pausing only to reassure yourself of the egg-sized lump just above his left ear, from the time he was knocked unconscious by the head of a sledgehammer that flew off its handle. Equally, you could steer the horse by tugging at his jug ears, the only convincing aspect of his alleged resemblance to Prince Charles.
When he was driving his baby-blue Ford Transit van, those ears were mysteriously connected to the windscreen: if you crept up from behind (no seatbelts in the back) and twisted the left one, water would spray across the screen; twist the right and the wipers would sweep across and back. Even after I’d located the foot-operated pump in the driver’s footwell – a small black rubber hemisphere which reminded me of the diaphragm Mum kept in a plastic box in the cupboard under the bathroom sink – Dad managed to convince me that he wasn’t cheating.
He also had a magic cardigan which, if you turned away for a moment to allow him to put it on, made him invisible. My faith in these mystical abilities is as close as I ever got to religion.
His clenched fist was a safe to unlock, but even if I could get one finger unfurled it would snap back as I tried the next. When we wrestled on the couch I’d abandon myself to the joy of tot
al violence, confident that however hard I tried I couldn’t bend or break or bruise him.
In the sea, he was a diving platform and inflatable toy. He was extraordinarily buoyant – I wonder if his mild pigeon chest gave him a greater than average lung capacity, though I’m not sure that’s medically plausible – and he would lie back with arms folded behind his head then pretend to be annoyed when, inevitably, one of his children leapt aboard and sank him.
He was seldom happier than when in water. The Transit smelt of dog and salt and sometimes of the iodine seaweed we’d collect for the garden from Long Bay Beach after a big storm. When the surf was up he’d lead me into the waves with one of our iceblock-shaped surfboards and we’d catch the wave, stacked up like a liquorice allsort – a layer of polystyrene, a layer of Dad, a layer of me – scudding all the way in till we juddered to a halt on the wet sand.
Most evenings he’d have a long bath, run so hot that if you planned to get in with him you had to start by sitting on the edge, scalding socks of scarlet onto your feet and calves until the water had cooled or your body had acclimatised. Even after we were too old to be sharing, his baths remained sociable – he’d lie bright red and sweating under the rising steam, chest hair wafting like seagrass, a draped facecloth modestly floating in the vicinity of his balls and intriguingly circumcised penis, reading a hardback crime novel from the library as the rest of the family shuttled in to wash hands and brush teeth.
When I was still small enough I’d join him in the shower to wash off the salt and sand after a swim, and he’d lift me all the way up to the nozzle, where I’d be amazed at how hot the water was up there and how great the pressure.
My second-earliest memory is of being on an infinitely wide beach at low tide. I start to cross the sand to the distant water before noticing the ground is covered in millions of little red insect things. I can’t move without standing on one. I start to scream. Dad is suddenly there, sweeping me up in his arms before carrying me across the carpet of stranded lobster krill and into the sea.
This was in Nelson in early 1974, a few months after my third birthday. The Dudding family was in the middle of a six-week sightseeing migration from Christchurch to Auckland, travelling and sleeping in the Transit, which was then near-new. My sisters remember the krill, too, and how they used our Frisbee to scoop the beasts off the sand in their hundreds and throw them at each other.
My very first memory is from a few weeks earlier again. Dad and I went to collect the van from a vehicle workshop in Christchurch, where it had been fitted with a bed, cooker and awning. I remember the sound of power tools, the smell of sawdust, a feeling of adventure.
For anything earlier, for all the Christchurch years, I have to turn to the memories of my sisters and family friends.
First though, an explanation: what were we doing in Christchurch anyway?
By the mid-1960s Robin Dudding, his wife Lois and their four daughters Rachel, Ruth, Melissa and Natasha were living in Torbay on Auckland’s then-remote North Shore. Robin was nominally a fulltime schoolteacher, but much of his time and energy was spent editing the occasional literary journal Mate, a younger, brasher, cooler alternative to the highly regarded but relentlessly highbrow literary quarterly Landfall, which was published by Christchurch’s Caxton Press and edited by its co-founder Charles Brasch.
When Brasch quit as editor in 1966, he recommended that Mate’s ambitious young editor be offered the job. So in August that year the Duddings moved to Christchurch, where Dad took up the dual position of editor of Landfall and of Caxton Press. Children kept arriving – Anna in 1967, me in 1970 – then in 1972 Robin was fired from Caxton (more on that excitement later) so he launched his own magazine, Islands, taking with him most of Landfall’s writers, mana and support (including that of Brasch).
He stayed in Christchurch for the next year and a half, producing Islands from our home, but both he and Mum were pining for the relative warmth, literal and figurative, of Auckland where their little house in Torbay was waiting for them, albeit slightly worse for wear after seven-and-half-years of tenants. In January 1974 they packed the van, including a typewriter so that Dad could work on the next edition of Islands en route, and we said goodbye to 15 Barnes Road, Redwood.
Just as we were about to leave, Dad trotted back to the house. To the right of the front door was a wooden plaque that said ‘Woodspring Cottage’ in a fancy font. He prised it off and carried it back to the van. We all posed for a final photo – Mum and Dad and six kids and an Alsatian-Labrador cross called Lady Emma Hamilton Dudding, plus a handful of neighbours and friends there to wave us off – then we all climbed in, Dad started the engine and we started driving north.
It’s pure suburbia now, but in the late 1960s Redwood, five miles north of central Christchurch, was still on the edge of the city. At Barnes Road, where the burbs merged into farmland and orchards, close to the near-dry Styx River, the Duddings created some sort of pastoral utopian fantasy.
At least that’s how it seemed to Bill Manhire, a poet 10 years Dad’s junior who came to talk literature but ended up a good friend. Manhire remembers our home as a place where things happened outdoors rather than indoors, where there were dogs and cats and chickens and geese, and the garden was abundant even if money was very tight. It seemed an enviable set-up, a stand against suburban New Zealand, a tiny, single-family commune with a literary guru as benign patriarch, a fecund earth-mother keeping everyone fed, and a tribe of unruly girls. On one of his visits Manhire, who had a repertoire of minor magic tricks, demonstrated how he could apparently bend a spoon without damaging it, leaving such a devastating impression on the Dudding daughters that they set about mutilating every spoon in the cutlery drawer.
Come up the drive at Barnes Road, says writer Patrick Evans, and all these girls of six and eight and ten would appear and jump on you like monkeys, and demand to be taken places.
For Evans, raised in ‘fantastically conservative’ Christ-church by snobbish English parents, the place was bucolic and countercultural, with its ping-pong table which served as dining table and its bookshelves made from wooden planks and empty DB beer bottles.
Evans came to the fortnightly Friday evening soirées at Barnes Road, where Mum made big pots of curry and brown rice with toasted coconut and sliced banana and raisins as condiments, and the girls would wander around with bowls of roasted peanuts, topping up glasses from the bottles that would later become bookshelves, and Dad would be in the large front room that he used as an office, surrounded by writers and poets and artists – the established ones, the coming ones, the would-bes – somehow holding court even though he spoke softly and didn’t actually say much. There’d be some drunkenness but these weren’t wild saturnalia, just big gatherings with music and lots of good feeling and plenty of literary talk without it being stuffy.
Evans says 1970 was the year dope came to Christchurch, mostly via the Americans stationed at the international airport for the long-running Antarctic mission Operation Deep Freeze. If you wanted to buy good, cheap drugs you’d just head to the airbase – and some of them found their way to the Barnes Road gatherings. The dope-smokers would end up down the side of the house, wedged in like passengers in a bus at rush hour, handing around pieces of wet paper with dazed faces.
Dad’s papers from those years show that both before and after being fired from Caxton he was working long hours, worrying about money, struggling to meet deadlines, and fretting about work keeping him from his family and vice versa. Yet my sisters don’t recall such stresses inside the Barnes Road bubble.
They remember the Friday parties: a day of Mum vacuuming and cleaning and cooking, then loud music on the record player – Beatles, Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, the Animals – as the guests arrived carrying their bottles of beer. Anna, youngest of the five girls, remembers playing under the table among the feet of the adults talking above.
Another big event was Wednesday craft night. When Mum went to her night class, still chipping awa
y at the arts degree she’d started before marriage, Dad would run the household for the evening. With a magician’s flourish he’d reach up to one of the high cupboards in the living room and bring down treasures: modelling clay, pens and paper and glue, cotton wool, eggshells that had been crushed and coloured pink and blue for sprinkling over a glue drawing, and uncrushed eggshells that could be made into miniature igloos. On these nights, Mum’s sternly wholesome food rules were overturned. Instead of mince and boiled cabbage, dinner might be tinned spaghetti or mashed potatoes and chops, with stewed apple topped with a square of baked puff pastry for pudding, perhaps even ice cream.
When Mum was off having another baby or visiting relatives, Dad would again run the ship and break the rules. Instead of Mum’s awful homemade wholemeal bread (so dense and sour the round loaves often ended up being used as Frisbees), he’d make school sandwiches using proper shop bread – one side brown and the other wonderfully, joyously white. He’d also sneak in little packets of chips and raisins.
Compared to the two-bedroomed Torbay home that came before and after, Barnes Road seemed huge – half an acre of land, four or five bedrooms, a porch, a large living room and a vast kitchen with its own fire, where the girls would cluster around as Dad read aloud in the evening. Natasha remembers the night Dad was reading from The Hobbit and she climbed onto a wooden soapbox balanced on its end to get closer. When the box collapsed a nail tore a gash across her knee. A sticking plaster was found and The Hobbit continued, but she’s still got the scar.
Woodspring Cottage was always cold – there were numerous fireplaces, but even with your feet brushing the flames the rest of you would be freezing. Once, the two youngest girls stuffed the sitting-room woodburner so full of paper it fell back out, setting fire to the carpet and a couch. That was the woodburner that Natasha and Melissa would leap from, arms aflutter, whenever ‘If You Want to Be a Bird’ played on our LP of the Easy Rider soundtrack.