by Adam Dudding
Hours were spent playing and building things on the banks of the Styx, with its old trees and leaf litter and a hollow tree stump that was just the right size and shape to be a long-drop toilet, so was used as such. The Barnes Road property itself was full of exciting trees – the huge elm at the bottom of the garden with a hut halfway up it, the psoriatic lacebark that could be used to climb the garage roof, the fruit trees, the yews lining the driveway. When the council put in a footpath for the first time, they wanted to chop down a cabbage tree out the front but Dad persuaded them not to, then wrote a note thanking them for their part in creating ‘the crookedest and most attractive footpath in the county’. He and Mum spent weeks lobbying a next-door neighbour not to cut down their giant walnut, but failed. Mum went out to argue with the axemen on the day of execution then came home and wept piteously – a rare and distressing thing.
Child-minding was often delegated to the older girls, who used it as an opportunity to conduct experiments. Rachel and Ruth (numbers one and two) led weekend walks along the nearby railway, placing ear to metal to check for trains. They blindfolded Melissa (number three) and guided her across the bridge over the Styx with their voices alone, and she only fell off once. It was Melissa, too, who got a nasty bite on the chest from one of the semi-wild Shetland ponies on the field backing onto ours.
Natasha (number four) and Anna (number five) persuaded me (number six) to dial 111 and use all my swearwords; the police rang back and instructed Mum to tell the children off, but it’s not clear if she did. I’m told Natasha also persuaded me, aged two, to ask Mum what a ‘wanker’ was. Boringly for Natasha and Anna, watching from around the corner, Mum just told me. The most disgusting piece of inter-sibling betrayal was the time one child extruded a tiny raisin-sized poo on the front porch, and a second told a third it was in fact a raisin and popped it in her mouth.
When I arrived in November 1970, first boy after five girls, the scope for experimentation only broadened. The girls vied for the right to dandle their fat baby brother, or to wheel him around in the pram wearing their old dresses so they could trick school friends into believing they had another baby sister. They also discovered that if they wiggled the baby’s penis with a teddy bear it would, most exotically, stand up.
Sibling terrorism aside, it felt special to be one of the Dudding girls. There was no TV, but that was by choice and you could always watch Sonny and Cher or The Carol Burnett Show at a friend’s house. There wasn’t a lot of money, but that felt like a minor virtue rather than something to be embarrassed about, and there always seemed to be enough for music lessons and sports trips and second-hand pushbikes. For a long while there was a large hole in the kitchen floor that didn’t get repaired, but that was kind of funny, and the girls would proudly tell the story of how one day Mum lost her temper with someone – perhaps her husband, but more likely a child – and threw a frying pan at the kitchen wall, leaving an interesting hole you could still see.
Dad seemed to be always working – away at Caxton, or in his office at home, or sweating in the vegetable garden with a hoe or a spade while wearing only underpants – yet somehow he was always available too. He led backyard games of softball and cricket, and of minigolf using hockey sticks as putters and buried tin cans for holes. He created a table-tennis handicapping system that family members and visitors were obliged to join, with paper nametags that moved up and down a cardboard ladder of his own devising (this was still running by the time I left home in 1991). And though Mum was the principal day-to-day child-wrangler, Dad made a point of taking trips alone with each daughter – a roadtrip to Dunedin to visit the Manhires, to Hawke’s Bay to visit his folks, or a simple outing to a movie or ice skating or the greyhounds.
For Rose Beauchamp, the friend who talked at Dad’s funeral about arriving at Barnes Road to find Mum reading up a tree, the Christchurch Duddings of the early 1970s seemed to demonstrate it was possible to interweave ‘serious’ creative goals – being a writer or artist or musician or a literary editor, say – with more basic, biological forms of creativity: growing vegetables, planting trees, breastfeeding naked in the sunshine, keeping chooks, raising children who were encouraged to talk at the dinner table and allowed to draw on the wallpaper. It was a template she and her husband Ian Wedde wanted to follow.
Before then it had seemed to Rose that you had to choose; that the creative life necessarily involved hard drinking and drug-taking and, probably, being male; that if you were a woman and wanted to be an artist you should probably abandon your children and certainly not consider mothering itself as a creative act. Yes, says Rose, there was a division of labour down traditional lines at Barnes Road – Robin in his office with books, Lois the kitchen queen – but there was a mutual exchange of influence and respect.
The initial connection between Duddings and Weddes was that Dad was publishing Ian’s writing, but after the Weddes moved to Port Chalmers in Dunedin, where Ian was the Robert Burns fellow, the two families fell rather in love with each other, remaining so even after respective migrations to Auckland and Wellington. With all those births behind her, Lois was a fount of baby-related wisdom when Rose started having children of her own (‘eat like a navvy’ when breastfeeding, and so on). For Ian, the house in Christchurch became ‘a kind of haven – and that’s where I learnt to grow tomatoes, and learnt to like a chook, and came to love a dog’. When Emma had pups, Dad bundled two of them into shipping crates and put them on a train to Port Chalmers, and informed the Weddes that they were now dog-owners, ready or not.
I’ve been talking to my mother about Dad in one way or another all my life, but with a book in mind I try to get a bit more professional about it – preparing questions in advance, setting a recorder on the table, talking less and listening to her more.
It’s slow work. Tongue-tied by her stroke, Mum can take a long time to say little. Once, though, she tells me she chose Dad over other suitors not so much because of any physical appeal, but because ‘I thought he’d make a good father’. Another time, when we’re discussing how she and Dad never hit us children (well, almost never), she says she always thought of Dad’s own father Ernest as a cruel man who bullied his children and, like just about everyone else of that time, hit them. When Dad was old enough and big enough, Mum says, he went against his father in every way he possibly could, and that included a gentler approach to children.
I never much liked Grandad when Dad dragged us to Hastings to visit his folks. Ernest’s main mode for connecting with his grandchildren was a repertoire of practical jokes that ended with him hitting you on the nose after inviting you to ‘smell the cheese’ on his outstretched palm or pointing out the ‘gravy on your shirt’. He’d offer you a ‘dry shave’, where he’d drag his cheek against yours, scraping your face raw with his stubble. He was also a master of the finger-lock, where you couldn’t pull away your little finger without causing yourself excruciating pain. I hate that stuff.
Then again, a few days after I’ve written those last few sentences, my sister Ruth emails to ask me if I remember how when slicing bread at the table Ernest would ask us who wanted the baker’s kiss – the best, softest slice, formed when you tear apart a loaf made from two pieces of dough risen in a single tin – and whoever said yes would get an actual kiss from him, because he was a baker, see! I quite like the sound of that one, but no, I don’t remember it.
I’ll learn more about Ernest, though, when I fly to New Plymouth to talk to Dad’s younger brother, Ian.
5. Tripe on Friday
SUNDAY WAS roast, Monday cold meat with salad. Tuesday was sausage, Wednesday chopped steak. Thursday was stew – so Ernest could eat it with a spoon in bed as he rested up before his all-night shift at the bakery – and Friday was fish, or something exotic like tripe or pigs’ trotters. Saturday was bacon and eggs. And every day there was pudding – a steamed pudding or fruit with custard, or on Sundays something cooked in the oven with the roast, like rice pudding or sago.
My un
cle Ian is sitting in an armchair in his kitchen, dredging up what he can of his childhood and Dad’s. He wasn’t sure he liked the idea at first, but he’s warming to it.
Ian has never resembled his older brother. He’s got the deep eyesockets, broad jaw and sloping forehead of their father Ernest (who always reminded me of Hugh Lofting’s illustrations of Dr Dolittle). Robin was taller, darker, slim-faced, narrow-jawed. Ian is 77, born a year-and-a-half after Dad, and he’s lovely: a gentle, self-deprecating guy with a scratchy giggle. He has recently retired as town planner with the New Plymouth council, and is far smarter than he claims to be.
I’m at the kitchen table typing as he talks. My aunt Gail is on the edge of the conversation, filling in gaps and offering alternative interpretations. Over a long afternoon and then the following morning, they tell me stories, as brilliant sun and heavy rain take turns beating at the window.
Ian and Gail are the family genealogists, so they can talk about the Lincolnshire Duddings and the Birmingham Hintons (upper and lower middle-class respectively), about the Doggetts and Wealleans of London (both thoroughly working class) and Elizabeth Jackson of Macclesfield (background and social status unclear). They can trace the various arrivals from the 1870s on, and the planting of shallow roots in small-town New Zealand – Tirau, Midhurst, Kawhia, Otorohanga, Hunterville, Bulls, Rangitikei, Oxford, Kaiapoi, Waimakariri – where the ancestors ran a store, managed a boarding house, drove a stagecoach, operated a river punt, reared Lincolnshire sheep, raised children.
Charles Henry Dudding (my great-great-grandfather) was an alcoholic who fell in a river drunk and drowned. His son Horatio was an alcoholic too. In Bulls, the Wealleans family lost mother, father and eldest daughter from separate causes in a single month, so 14-year-old Liz raised the two oldest boys while the other six siblings, including my great-great-grandmother May Emily, were sent on the Stormbird to Burnham Industrial School in the South Island. One boy died. When some of the others returned north as adults they erased the orphanage years, claiming they’d been born in Wales.
The stories eventually converge on schoolteacher Winifred Jessie Hinton and baker’s son Ernest Charles Dudding, who grew up in Stratford below the eastern slopes of Mount Taranaki, or Mount Egmont as they knew it. They met through Bible class and married years later, when Ernest was 23 and Winifred 29 (though on the marriage certificate they gave their ages as 24 and 26). What I’m really interested in, though, is what happened next, after Winifred and Ernest moved east to Hastings, where Ernest went into partnership with another baker and where Winifred bore three children – Ngaire in 1932, Robin in 1935, Ian in 1937.
When the Hawke’s Bay earthquake struck in 1931, the mezzanine floor of Ernest’s bakehouse, where the flour was stored, collapsed. At the house he and Winifred were renting in Plassey Street, all the jars of sauce and preserves fell from the cupboards and smashed. But New Zealand’s biggest natural disaster of the 20th century left them otherwise unscathed. A year or two later they bought a large section in the same street and built the family home that lasted them a lifetime.
The Duddings were comfortable – they had a fridge before most families in the street – but careful. Veggies and fruit and eggs came from the garden and substantial fowl-run, and day-old bread and pastries from the bakery, though it irked young Robin that they were never allowed anything fresh. The only alcohol ever in the house was a bottle of something for the Christmas cake; after watching his father and grandfather drink and gamble their families into poverty, Ernest was teetotal all his life. When he had a bottle forced on him at a Volunteer Fire Brigade party after the war, he quietly emptied his beer into a pot plant.
Plassey Street was built on routine. Ernest’s bakery shifts, dinners and puddings you could predict by the day of the week, school rugby and chores on Saturday (boys outside with Father, Ngaire inside with Mother) and the seventh day for Sunday School and a long walk with Mother, or perhaps a game of tennis on the family’s grass court.
Ngaire was off to university before Ian started high school, and the boys were often thrown together. When hostilities broke out, Ian – younger, a weakling, unconfident – usually came off worse. Robin shot him in the eye with a homemade bow and arrow; a shard of glass lodged in Ian’s leg when they were playing catch with glass bulbs from the kitchen oven; a furious Ian had to be hauled away from a laughing Robin after a scrap escalated from fists to pieces of firewood.
But they got on well enough. When Ian started school he inherited Robin’s rhyming nickname, Spud. They both helped Ernest build a garden shed. For a while they went out running together.
Raising the girl was Mother’s job and raising the boys was Father’s. Winifred wanted Ngaire, who was brainy and dux of her school, to go to university, and she did. But Ernest, who’d left school at 12 to work in his drunk father’s bakery, wanted his sons to take trade rather than academic classes at high school. Ian and Robin each protested when the time came, and with some intervention from Winifred they eventually got their way. It was the only time Ian ever stood up to his father. Ian claims he was too dumb for university, though, so took a surveying cadetship. Robin was smarter but still started work straight from Sixth Form, as a cadet with the Hawke’s Bay Herald-Tribune.
Ian agrees with my mother’s impression of Ernest as a bully. He was pleasant enough if you went his way but swift to anger if you didn’t. Sometimes, for no reason, he’d tease you until you were so upset you’d say something disrespectful, then he’d properly lose his temper and give you a hiding. He could hold a grudge, too. Before leaving Stratford he’d had a falling-out over money with his brother Ray, himself something of a drinker, at the bakehouse they ran together, and they never spoke again. In Hastings, Ernest blanked Winifred’s brother Herb for several years after Herb allegedly swindled him out of the earnings from a vanload of cakes.
Although Ernest could be mean, it was Winifred who was the more enthusiastic whacker of children. If you didn’t come in when you were asked, or hadn’t done something you should have, or were caught fibbing, or were in trouble at school, she’d reach for her old schoolteacher’s leather strap, which she kept in the kitchen for inside use; or one of her switches – branches of willow or similar stored above the wood-box, for easy access out of doors.
Winifred was academically bright, independent, deter-mined – a conqueror of hills and a pioneering lady driver. The car she bought herself from her teaching salary in the 1920s was Stratford’s first Baby Austin. But her single-mindedness could look like heartlessness. Ian remembers one of Winifred’s hill-walks where Robin climbed a steep slope despite being warned not to and got stuck halfway up. Robin was 9 or 10 and screaming for help, but he’d been warned, so Winifred led the rest of the family on and Robin was still there when they returned the same way two hours later.
Winifred exerted rigid control over the family’s social world. School friends weren’t welcome at Plassey Street, and the children were to hurry back home after school without playing. She didn’t much like the idea of Maoris, nor foreigners, including the Italians (and their food) she endured during the European holiday she and Ernest took in 1967. She wasn’t terribly fond even of her Dudding in-laws. Her enthusiasm for other families was reserved almost exclusively for those of her six siblings, and with them you were allowed to have fun – play cards and tennis and go for walks, tell gently off-colour jokes and pull each other’s leg, or pop around to Uncle Herb’s place on election night to listen to the radio broadcast and cheer on the National Party.
The Duddings of Plassey Street also tuned in for Dad and Dave and other radio serials. Winifred liked dance music and the light classics; Ernest liked Mario Lanza and the other tenors but loathed the Andrews Sisters. Each year they went to the local operatic society production, and even though he was terrible at holding a tune, Robin had a part in his school production of The Mikado. Apparently the title role was taken by Raymond Hawthorne, future patriarch of the Hawthorne acting dynasty.
Robin was encouraged to write by three of his Hastings High teachers: Miss Miller, Mr Alexander and Mr Mathison. He was discovering Shakespeare, poetry, modernism and girls. Near the end of the Fifth Form he wrote a poem for the school magazine, piquing the interest of a bookish and usually shy girl called Anne Croucher, who sought him out and suggested they start doing their Shakespeare homework together. By the following year they were a couple. They read all the avant-garde writers. He gave her a leather-bound Complete Shakespeare for one birthday, a poetry volume for another.
The Duddings were all readers, even if Robin was the only one tackling James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Ngaire read aloud while Winifred did the dishes. The English sailing adventures of Swallows and Amazons were favourites, though Winifred objected to Arthur Ransome calling one of his main characters ‘Titty’, so Ngaire had to replace it with another name.
Winifred liked light historical drama – Nelle Scanlan’s Pencarrow family sagas about a pioneering Wellington family, the Billabong books by Australian Mary Grant Bruce – and always read past midnight. Ernest liked Westerns. He read the Auckland Weekly News cover to cover, as did the children. He also took the Truth, but given its salaciousness the children were allowed to read only the cartoon pages in the middle.
They didn’t own all that many books – a small bookshelf contained Arthur Mee’s children’s encyclopaedias, a book of Robert Burns’s verse, a copy of Lorna Doone and Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth and a few others – but Winifred brought home a pile for everybody from the library each week. She let the children read her books, but Ernest’s Westerns were off-limits. There was a solitary Western, Rustlers’ Roost, in the permanent collection, which Ian spent his childhood yearning to read, but each time he snuck it away Ngaire would ‘pimp’ him to the adults – ‘He’s reading that book again!’ – and it would be taken off him. Seventy years on, it’s now in Ian’s own bookshelf, though he never got round to reading it to the end.