by Adam Dudding
While Ngaire and Ian clashed a bit, Ngaire and Robin clashed even more, especially whenever Mother and Father went off to baking conferences and left Ngaire in charge. But the greatest tension in the house was between Robin and Ernest. From the time Robin was 10, they were butting heads. Where Ian would respond to Ernest’s bullying simply by doing what he was told, or by pretending to agree and then quietly doing his own thing, for Robin it was always a matter of principle. He’d argue the toss and there’d be shouting on both sides and sometimes Robin would get a hiding.
In his early teens Robin courted trouble by coming home late from his after-school job at the chemist shop. Later, he hung out in the snooker parlours, or drank with his rugby friends – a red rag to teetotal Ernest. The one time Ian saw Robin come home properly drunk, Winifred searched his bag and found a bottle of whisky. She took the bottle into the garden and smashed it with a shovel before burying it and dancing on its grave. Curiously, though, Winifred wouldn’t let Ernest lay a finger on Robin that time.
At 16 Robin was a cadet at the Herald-Tribune and taking some extramural university papers (which he failed) but still living at home. He caught up with Anne when she was home from training college in Wellington, but by now they were just friends.
At the Tribune he covered the usual reporter’s gamut – Hawke’s Bay’s acute cement shortage, the trial of a man charged for drinking a bottle of beer in the street, a local Rotarian calling for a purge of the Hastings Library of filth by the likes of Somerset Maugham, a swan called Gertie that liked to ride on a tractor – but he also manoeuvred himself onto the arts beat, and reviewed theatre and music.
There are gaps in Ian’s knowledge of Robin’s last few years in Hastings, not least because as they got older the brothers increasingly ignored each other. At 18 Robin went to Auckland for three months’ compulsory military training. There, he learnt how to be a light anti-aircraft gunner, and how to have fun. He and another trainee befriended twin sisters Anna and Toni Rutherfurd, Takapuna Grammar schoolgirls who had a car, a frequently parentless house in Milford and lots of friends. Auckland, he was discovering, was a place of warmth and surf and freedom. He returned to Plassey Street and the Tribune, but not for long.
I grew up believing the legend that Dad left home straight after a full-blown fist fight with his father that ended with him knocking Ernest to the ground.
One version – perhaps told to me directly by Dad, seeing I can’t find anyone else in the family who’s heard it – has it that the row began after Ernest found dirty books under Robin’s mattress: D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, maybe Henry Miller. My sister Natasha heard a version where the fist fight started because Dad came home one night drunk.
Ian doesn’t recall any fist fight at all, but that doesn’t mean the story is completely untrue. In Dad’s final year at Plassey Street, Ian was away doing his own military training, and when he returned relations between Ernest and Robin were very tense. Two months later, Robin left home for good.
He was 20 years old. He was returning to Auckland, and from there he planned to save some money and head abroad to see the world, following in the footsteps of a school friend who had crewed fertiliser ships for the free travel.
He made it to Auckland, but then his plans changed. It would be almost half a century before he got his first passport.
6. At the bach
IT’S A WEDNESDAY, three days before Anzac Day, and I’m alone in a friend’s deafeningly quiet bach – actually a large house on a farmland hill near a beautiful empty beach north of Whangarei. I’m writing at the huge dining table. When the kitchen fridge falls quiet all I can hear is the ticking of a clock and the occasional bird conversation from outside, then the short volleys of laptop key clacks whenever I think of something more to write.
I’ve just had breakfast: two fried eggs on buttered Vogel’s toast with some strawberry jam smeared on the half-piece left after the egg was all gone, plus a cup of strong coffee, and I’m enjoying the familiar brief euphoria that follows the perfect breakfast – something to do with blood sugar and caffeine and dopamine receptors, I suppose.
My mind chitters and chirps. I’m enchanted by things I normally don’t care about. I’ve found this can be a good time to get to a keyboard and write, because along with the euphoria and wonder comes a temporary change of heart in the editor who’s usually sitting on my shoulder making unhelpful observations – ‘Clunky sentence!’ or ‘Implausible dialogue’ and ‘Give up now, you’re shit’. Instead, the editor seems to have just got back from a boozy lunch. ‘You’re a genius,’ he slurs. ‘That linking paragraph is beautifully subtle!’ With that kind of encouragement the sentences spew out, and I don’t even mind that I’m going to have to read them later in a saner cast of mind and delete most of them.
The truth remains, though, that I don’t really know how to write this book. In my day job I’ve written hundreds of newspaper features, a task which generally consists of agonising over the introductory paragraph then racing against a deadline to write down everything you know about a subject of which you were entirely ignorant two days earlier. But those stories have seldom exceeded 3000 words. I’m not sure I know how to keep things coherent across the longer span of a book, with chapters and everything.
I decided early on that simply telling Dad’s story chronologically wasn’t the right approach, and was relieved to read an article by a celebrated young English memoirist who said putting real events in the order they’d happened was a recipe for tedium because life ‘is not much of a storyteller’. (His own memoir, which leaps about in time like a Terminator movie, is pretty good, but it includes the horrible and premature deaths of his entire family, which gives him an unfair head start in terms of drama and pathos.)
Ditch chronology, though, and you need to find some other organising principle for the incoherent mass of data that accumulates over a lifetime. When pitching the book to my publisher I sketched out a logical chapter outline, with tidy themes and segues and signposts, but as soon as I started writing it was obvious that my roadmap was hopeless: I needed to wander off into the jungle and see where I fetched up. So here I am, in a small clearing, machete in hand, catching my breath and wondering if I’d be better off navigating by the stars.
In the previous chapter, which ends with Dad heading off for Auckland, I skimmed through his first 20 years in a couple of thousand words. But what about the next 20? I’m simultaneously worried that there’s not enough to say – the young man gets married, goes into publishing, has kids, smokes too much, carves out a big reputation in the small world of New Zealand letters, loses his mojo, alienates people, gets older, dies – but also far too much: so far I’ve managed to revisit only a fraction of the letters I photographed in haste in the Katherine Mansfield Reading Room. Two days ago the Hocken Library at Otago University posted me another 350 pages photocopied from their archives of letters between Dad and Charles Brasch from the mid-60s to early 70s. Meanwhile, my sisters and I have found 20 more boxes of Dad’s literary stuff – letters, story manuscripts, receipts, Christmas cards, God knows what – stored in our garages and basements and attics. All up, I figure that’s about two million words waiting for at least a cursory glance.
I’ve brought a couple of those boxes up to the bach, including a handful of love letters written by Ernest to Winifred in the 1920s, which my sister Anna brought me a week ago. They seem off-topic for my purposes, yet, last night, right after typing a paragraph that characterised Ernest as a narrow-minded bully, I leafed through these swoony, gentle letters from his youth, addressed to ‘My Dear Sweetheart’ and ‘Dear Breath of Heaven’, and noted once again how hopeless it is to try to distil a real person into a few sentences.
Something else, though, has happened since I started writing this.
I was interviewing a writer who’d known Dad. As my final question I asked if they had any gossip, rumours or anecdotes that I might find interesting.
‘Well . . .’ said the writer.
They paused for quite a while.
‘There were matters to do with Robin’s private life that were fairly common knowledge, and you don’t need to particularly hear my version of those. I mean he had affairs, but he wasn’t the only person in that era, so it’s kind of not interesting. I don’t think they were of much importance.’
Actually, hearing for the first time that my father had had affairs and that it was ‘fairly common knowledge’, seemed thoroughly interesting to me, but the writer had erected a small barrier by saying I didn’t need to hear their version and that it was unimportant, and I hadn’t prepared myself for a combative kind of interview, so I just said ‘Uhuh’ and the conversation drifted on to the subject of whether Dad had engaged in the personality feuds that bedevil literary sets (short answer: not often). But the word ‘affair’ persisted.
A few days later I was at my mother’s house, eating supermarket soup at her kitchen table, and I asked her: did Dad have any affairs that she knew of?
Oh yes, said Mum, as if I’d asked her if she’d like a cup of tea. There had been an affair.
Oh.
This felt different from when the writer said it was ‘common knowledge’. If Mum said it, it must be true. I felt two things at once: the familiar greedy tingle you get as a journalist when you realise your interviewee has just given you the fact or quote that’s going to make your intro; but also a small internal lurch at the idea of my father sleeping with someone other than my mother after they’d married. I didn’t feel disgusted or horrified or betrayed or angry, not even surprised, really – affairs happen, and I’d idly wondered about the possibility – but to hear it confirmed still caused a tiny realignment of the planets.
Who was it with, I asked, taking out my phone, turning on the voice recorder and sliding it across the table.
I can’t really go into it, she said. You’d put it in the book.
Well, I said, I can’t promise that I won’t, but I’ll show you the chapter before it’s published. Go on.
She told me the name. She told me when the affair was (late 1960s), where (Christchurch), how long it went on (not very), how she reacted to it (mostly calmly), and how it had affected the marriage (barely at all, she said). She said the woman had been a friend of theirs, and she had been ‘very attractive, very clever, very nice’. I asked if the woman was still alive. I asked Mum if she’d mind if I tracked the woman down. I asked some other impertinent questions about her own sex life and then I had to rinse the soup bowls and get home.
The next day I googled the woman’s name, and felt relieved when nothing came up. Then I felt guilty because I knew there were lots of other ways to find people and I wasn’t really trying hard enough. Then I felt queasy about the idea of naming the woman when Mum had asked me not to, and about the prospect of chasing down someone in their 70s and asking them about a possible affair of half a century ago. I wondered if my desire to follow this up was just prurience and decided it might well be, but what’s the point of a memoir unless you include at least a few warts? And then I thought, Sod it. All this agonising can wait – I’ve got plenty else to get on with. So many cardboard boxes.
So far, I’ve written up to the bit where Dad is 20 years old and about to move to Auckland. Mum says the affair happened in his early 30s. That means I have more than a decade to research and write about before I need to summon the courage and cheek to blunder around asking people about sex. In any case, once that’s done, once I’ve learnt all I need to know – it’s only then that I’ll have to decide how much of it to put into the book.
For now, I’m heading to Auckland, to some time in the late 1950s, when Robin Dudding worked in a biscuit factory and slept in a cemetery. This cowardly decision to delay the inevitable is a huge relief.
7. A freakish notion
ON SUNDAY NIGHT (writes newly arrived Aucklander Robin Dudding, aged 20 and a bit, to his mother Winifred in May 1956) he was so broke he went around phone boxes pressing the coin-refund ‘Button B’ in search of spare pennies, and made a profit of 2d. The next day he pawned his typewriter for £8 and in the evening he had a ‘good sleep’ on a bench outside the railway station, and woke up to find another bum keeping him company. ‘Didn’t even get a squeeze out of it amazingly enough. Quite fun – but I don’t think I’ll do it again.’
He’s been working some shifts at the Aulsebrooke’s biscuit factory, he says, going half-deaf banging dents out of biscuit tins. He’s been down on the docks unloading bananas and beer, chewing gum and fridges. He stole a few bananas, but was too scared of the skits to eat his fill. The other day, he was riding pillion when his mate skidded his motorbike into the back of a taxi (‘taxi’s fault’), and the next day he was nudged by a slow-moving bus while crossing Customs Street in a dream (‘I woke up in time to run away from it’). No big deal. Stop worrying, Mother.
He signs off: ‘Please send my dressing gown and Oxford dictionary down – I need them both. R.’
In the two years from January 1956 to late 1957, my father was busy inventing himself, laying the foundations upon which he would build the rest of his life. He was experimenting – with his career, his politics, his friendships, even his name (in Auckland everyone called him ‘Bob’) – and he seemed aware of the extreme fluidity of the future, of the great weight that might attach to small decisions and chance events. All year, in a stream of letters home, he kept his mother posted.
Auckland is only a springboard – he’s saving to be out of the country by next June at the latest. He’s seen an interesting job advertised in Taranaki and might apply. He’s going to cash in his life insurance and invest in some North Shore land that will double in value once the Harbour Bridge is complete. Then again, he’s feeling ‘very blue at the present moment – nothing going right’ and might move home to Hastings. (None of these things happens.)
He’s writing something. ‘About September watch for a novel published by RN Dudding.’ He’s taking some university papers, though he and his lecturer, the poet Allen Curnow, ‘had a little tiff, so my chances are getting dimmer & dimmer’. He’s just back from a three-week compulsory military training refresher at Hobsonville Air Base, and it rained so heavily they woke in their tents at 4 o’clock in the morning with water lapping around their ears. He’s thinking about going back to journalism, even though he had a gutsful of it at the Herald-Tribune. He’s thinking of auditioning for a play at the Grafton Theatre. He sends his love to Sox the cat.
He’s growing a moustache. He’s been to see Blackboard Jungle, Rear Window and The Dam Busters, a jazz concert and a Ralph Richardson play, the Henry Moore exhibition that mayor J. H. Luxford has described as ‘a nauseating sight’, and pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch at the Town Hall. He’s got a cold, he’s hurt his back and he’s got a crook leg. He’s so broke he hasn’t eaten for three days. His false tooth has fallen out and needs replacing. ‘Everybody is having appendicitis – it’s about my turn.’ He’s taking a girl to the Arts Ball (he as a toreador, she as Carmen). He’s definitely going to fail his exams, not least because he can’t afford the syllabus texts. He’s applied for a job at the Auckland Star. He’s got the job, and the pay’s terrible. He’s shaved off the moustache.
He’s sleeping in various levels of luxury in Penrose, Mt Eden, Remuera, Henderson, Parnell and Milford, and on a railway station bench. He’s drinking coffee at the Mocambo; he’s stuffing himself for 2 shillings at a chink restaurant; he’s had a girl round and made her a lovely salad.
He’s almost given up grog apart from a few beers with the other reporters, and he’s had no whisky for six months, ‘so you will not have to hit a bottle on the head with a shovel again’. He’s almost certainly not going to bother sitting his exams – ‘I don’t feel like pandering to the examiners’. He’s reviewing theatre and writing about rugby league for the Star. He’s moonlighting as editor of the Parnell Post, a local freebie that runs front-page exposés about unsanitary public toilets and unreliable buses. He’s got ha
y-fever.
He’s bought some new clothes – the coat is red and purple, the trousers white and grey and the shoes light tan. ‘I am the best dressed man in the office if not in town now.’
‘PS: Passed Eng.’
What I like most about this lovely, funny time capsule from the middle of the 20th century is that it shows my father trying on new voices as well as new clothes. With the unpredictable squeak/roar of an adolescent boy whose voice is breaking, his letters lurch between a doting son’s fond chit-chat and the ironic nihilism of a hard-boiled noir detective. It’s hard to tell whether he’s trying to shock his mother or make her laugh, though probably both.
Of sleeping at the railway station, he writes:
Now I know as well as you do that sleeping on park benches is not a very wise or desirable thing to do but in the circumstances it was just the only thing to do. And it was all good experience. I can’t write about bums and depression days in N.Z. unless I sleep on a park bench at least once. And as you know or mightn’t know, depression days are the only things New Zealanders write about. That’s not my fault.
The point is – if I’m going to write at all I prefer to write honestly more or less. I needn’t have told you that I slept on a park bench or my room was damp and my landlady was a drunkard or that I had an accident on a motor-bike or I worked as a wharfie or if in the future I assault a cop and spend a week in Mt Eden or get married to a slut or break my neck on a banana skin, or anything else. But as a reporter more or less I see that as all news [. . .]
Your upbringing has left me with a certain amount of honesty anyhow even if it isn’t directed in altogether the right directions [but] you’ll never stop worrying anyhow – so what’s the use.