by Adam Dudding
That’s life isn’t it. And that is what we are all here for – to live. So what’s the odds.
Only occasionally does he address his father directly, and his tone is sour by comparison.
I sleep on a park bench and get soaking wet and don’t get even a sniffle. Not a sniffle after sleeping in mud in camp and in a wet room in Wynyard Street and walking to work in the rain because I couldn’t afford the bus fare.
Then lo and behold I get a job that I have to think in. A job that is worrying me because I don’t think I’m good enough. At the same time I move in to a warm, dry room with a soft, dry bed and a return to three good meals a day. And lo and behold I get the Flu’. [. . .] I think that is extra significant on top of the fact that they reckon all colds are a psychological phenomenon.
Another sign of gutlessness I guess. I should be able to recognise it, after you, Pa, have beaten the fact of that unusual weakness into me since I was knee high to a grasshopper.
Given the letter’s unrelenting ironic tone, I’ve no idea if he’s kicking his father’s shins for the fun of it, or expressing genuine angst. Again, probably both. I suspect there’s also a covert ‘fuck you’ to his National-voting Dad in a December 1956 letter where he mentions, apropos of nothing much, that ‘it’s pounds to peanuts that the security police have got me tabbed as a subversive character with communistic tendencies because of my associates’. During the nationwide 1951 waterfront dispute, Ernest the baker had happily undermined the locked-out unionists by unloading his own flour at Napier Wharf with Robin’s help, something Robin kept very quiet once he was in Auckland and learnt the meaning of the word ‘scab’. Ernest can’t have been happy at the thought of his son fraternising with the wrong crowd.
Even if this talk of security police is a wind-up, it isn’t an entirely paranoid notion. 1956 was the year the Security Intelligence Service was founded, mainly to sniff out Soviet sympathisers in the wake of Australia’s thrilling Petrov Affair of 1954, when a Russian diplomat defected. New Zealand authorities admitted (but only in 2009) that they had spied on the writer, feminist and one-time communist Elsie Locke, who was corresponding with Dad by the early 1960s if not earlier. Poet Hone Tuwhare, whom Dad would first publish in 1960, was also a member of the Communist Party until the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Frank Sargeson had once been in the Young Communist League – maybe the spooks were snooping on him and his Takapuna shack.
Dad was overstating the case, though. In early 2015 I received a polite letter from the head of the Security Intelligence Service to say she could find no trace of Robin Dudding in their files. ‘It would appear neither your father, nor the magazines he edited, was ever considered to be of security significance.’ I can’t help finding this a bit disappointing.
There’s another story in this 23-letter sequence spanning two years – a three-act romantic comedy in glimpses. Robin makes passing, mildly strutting reference to various women, but one figure stands out. First she’s ‘a girl who goes to the same lectures as me’. Later, she’s ‘a passing girl-friend named Lois Miller’ whom he’s taken to a reporter’s social and invited home for that lovely salad. Next though, he writes that Lois has ‘gone home to her regular boy’, and ‘I’ve lost interest there’.
I know how this ends, but that doesn’t reduce the suspense of turning to the next letter, looking for evidence of the rom-com’s final act.
At the Auckland Star Dad chased at least one hard-news story. He told his mother he was on the trail of a ‘tough crowd’ of drug-dealers selling to kids, ‘but for God’s sake don’t repeat that in any form or I will find myself coshed’. He wasn’t sure if he would be able to get the full story and hoped ‘I don’t have to dope myself to get to them’.
In a scrapbook of Dad’s Star clippings I can’t find any big scoop about a drugs ring, so I guess he never did crack that case wide open. He did, however, file reports on milk production in Northland and the future of the crockery industry. He wrote rugby league match reports for the sports desk. And as in Hastings he found himself drawn towards the Star’s arts desk (or Queers’ Corner, as the rest of the typewriter-bashing, chain-smoking journos called it). He reviewed as many plays and concerts and exhibitions as he could get away with, but the most exciting cultural activity was happening somewhere else entirely.
He found the door to Auckland’s literary scene down on the docks, while working as a ‘seagull’ soon after he arrived. Each day at 8am, crowds of men – itinerants, immigrants, university students, underemployed labourers – would congregate at the ‘bureau’, a shed on a wharf at the bottom of Queen Street, where they’d put their name down for a day’s work, then wait to be called. The seagulls supplemented the wharf’s union labour, or handled cargoes so noxious the wharfies wouldn’t touch them: lugging bulk phosphate or sulphur was the closest thing to a day in hell.
While you waited for your name to be called you’d sit around yakking, and if there was no work at all you’d head to the pub, or to the Parnell Baths a mile and a half along the waterfront.
The best result, though, was if you got signed up by the bureau clerk just before a heavy downpour, in which case you’d have to stop work and play cards on full pay. The new kid told his mother he’d never seen so many different nationalities together at the same time.
In our game of cards there were 8 playing and they included a Dutchy, a pole, a Samoan, a pom, a Maori, another Maori and I think two New Zealanders – me and another bloke. No only me the other I remember was a red-blooded Irishman. You could hardly understand what was going on.
He especially hit it off with a young English-born artist, Anthony Stones, known as Tony, who’d emigrated to New Zealand as a teenager four years earlier. On a day when the work was thin, Tony led Robin back up Queen Street and they turned left into Vulcan Lane then left again through the door of the Queen’s Ferry. This was the unofficial headquarters of Auckland’s literary set, and there Robin discovered a society of people who talked in ways he’d not heard before. He stayed, and listened, and eventually started to talk a little himself.
In 1988, Dad was asked by Metro magazine to write a piece remembering a favourite Auckland place. He wrote it, even though in his covering note he invited the editor to file it in her wastepaper basket: ‘I had always sworn not to indulge in autobiography, and this turns out to be a précised bit of just that: who could possibly be interested.’
Rather than one place he named dozens, drifting sideways into a sketch of his 1950s social and literary life – ‘a potpourri with its associated risk of a slop-bucket of dropped names’. It’s a warm, elegant piece, yet typically of what little he wrote for a public audience, its language is so efficient, the facts so neatly packed and any sentimentality so controlled, that to me it’s not half as fun as the gawky, squawking letters he fired off to his mum. He also straightened out some embarrassing kinks: there’s no reference to ‘chink’ restaurants, no lists of ethnicities where a Maori is seen as someone other than a New Zealander.
The Queen’s Ferry, he wrote, was:
Haunt of Kevin Ireland, Tony Stones, John Graham, Don Terris, Mike Illingworth, Peter Milligan, Keith Patterson, Moss Gee, Dave Walsh, Rod (Machiavelli) Smith, Ted and Ian Middleton, Dick Scott, Bill Moller, Frank Knipe, Uncle Tom Cobley and all . . . and eventually Crump, out of the bush and soon determined to show that while the rest of us just talked about it, he would write. And did.
To that list I’ll add Maurice Shadbolt, Maurice Duggan, John Yelash, A. R. D. Fairburn, Nigel Cook . . . Clearly this was a man’s world, though it doesn’t help that women were barred from the Ferry’s public bar – they were allowed in the upstairs room only.
This loose association of artists, authors, poets, playwrights, students, political thinkers, publishers, academics, historians and bullshit artists had other stomping grounds too: the Occidental next door; the Globe round the corner where you might have found the legendary printer Bob Lowry; the milk bars and tearooms of Queen Street; the handful
of restaurants that comprised the city’s embryonic dining scene.
There were literary outposts beyond the city centre. At Esmonde Road, Takapuna – still a mangrove-swamp dead-end rather than an on-ramp to the Harbour Bridge motorway – Frank Sargeson, an elder statesman of NZ Lit at 53 or so, held court behind his famous hedge. Sargeson’s visitors included Kay and Karl Stead. The army hut in his garden had only recently been vacated by Janet Frame, who had written her first novel Owls Do Cry there before leaving for Europe.
Nearby in Birkenhead, playwright and author John Graham hatched a mad scheme to get rich growing a vast crop of ‘Moneymaker’ tomatoes on 13 heavily mortgaged acres of market garden. The plan was to spend the profits on converting a packing shed into a theatre, where Graham and Sargeson and others would then produce their plays. At weekends the now-tight trio of Robin Dudding and Tony Stones and Kevin Ireland, and perhaps some others from the Queen’s Ferry gang, took the ferry to the Shore to slave at the vines alongside Sargeson and John Graham, as well as John’s wife Betty and their children.
‘It’s more or less a literary community led by Frank Sargeson where we work in the garden all day and talk all night,’ Robin informed his mother, but she didn’t know the half of it. The weekend volunteers subsisted on cups of tea, toast topped with sliced tomato and grated cheese, and half-gallon containers of real, unfortified wine from Maté Brajkovich’s Kumeu vineyards – a rare treat in an era when the average New Zealander drank 80 litres of beer a year and only a litre-and-a-half of wine.
In the Metro piece Dad describes ‘red wine soaked hours pruning, picking, polishing and packing’, and invites the reader to picture:
Frank washing off the kauri clay-dust at end of day while practising his Joy of the Worm-type handstands in the sea. Ireland, dancing bollocky among the tomato plants at midday to the roar of Beethoven’s Ninth from the open window. Or, midnight 40-gallon drum music from the hayshed to keep the neighbours (quite distant) alert.
In February 1957 Dad wrote home instructing his parents to withdraw ‘500 smackers’ from his insurance policy so he could invest it in the market garden for 12 months. In her first reply his mother asked what a ‘smacker’ was, and in her next she said the policy wasn’t worth a tenth of that. So Robin didn’t invest, which was just as well – a month later an unseasonal heavy frost destroyed the entire crop. The mortgage folded. John Graham was bankrupted. Dad bought John’s 1930 Pontiac for £35 at the auction then returned it ‘to its rightful owner after a hair-raising ride or two’.
Then there were the parties – especially the ones at Jocelyn and Odo Strewe’s in Titirangi, or at Irene and Bob Lowry’s at One Tree Hill. It was heady pleasure, Dad recalls in Metro:
for someone from silent Hawke’s Bay to eavesdrop. All this talk, endless talk – even if it was only as basic as some admired poet putting the hard word on some beauteous female, with lots of Yeatsian and Dylan Thomas quotes thrown in for good measure.
(In an earlier draft he’s less discreet. Instead of ‘some admired poet’, it reads ‘Allen Curnow’.)
One day, after one of the Lowry parties, something important happened. This is a story Kevin Ireland has told before, even turned into a poem, and I’d thought it had a suspiciously burnished feel – too tidy, too cute. But as he tells it again in the sitting room of his home in Devonport, the North Shore suburb where he’s a local celebrity complete with OBE and a huge portrait in the public library, he swears it’s the unvarnished truth.
After leaving the party the two of them stumbled back to Robin’s current digs – a twin-bed bach in a Parnell back garden. They had drunk way too much – each had a spew on the way home. They crawled into their cots and the next morning they lay there self-pityingly, occasionally groaning into consciousness. Eventually Robin made a cup of tea, which they managed to keep down. They each sucked back a roll-your-own and got talking the kind of talk you can have only when you’re properly hungover.
Robin was in a black depression. ‘It’s all right for you, Kev,’ he said. ‘You know you’re going to write poetry all your life and that’s it.’
Robin wanted to write but he had nothing to write about; it was just a vague ambition without any proper focus. And what he had already written he didn’t like. (Kevin had seen some of Robin’s scribblings, short stories and so on, ‘and though mine were terrible his were worse, and he was very self-critical’.)
‘Anyway,’ Kevin tells me, ‘I said to him – and it was inspired, one of the few moments of inspiration I’ve ever suffered from as far as friends are concerned – I said, “You know, Charlie Brasch can’t keep going on forever. We all need a bloody editor. That’s one of the most marvellous and vital literary jobs there is. A good editor is one of the hardest things to find in literature. Why don’t you do that?” And he said, “Jesus, that’s a bloody good idea.”
‘That’s,’ says Kevin in capital letters, ‘How. It. Went! From that time on, I’d sowed it in Bob’s mind.
‘Bob had a couple of bottles of beer, and after we’d had a little bit of toast and another cigarette we opened the beer and we drank to success. We did all the right things, and the gods looked on it with great favour because we followed the ritual. All the protocols were boxed and ticked.’
Or, as Kevin put it in the poem he wrote after Dad died: ‘At twenty you have no idea of how / a freakish notion can freeze / on the wind and shape you forever.’
Not long after that, Kevin and a couple of friends (not including Dad) put together a little magazine called Mate and paid Bob Lowry £20 to print it. It looked good but Kevin couldn’t carry it on – he was itching to travel.
Before he left, Kevin approached Robin. ‘“Y’know, every-one thinks this is another one-issue magazine, but I reckon there’s a second issue in it – would you like to do it?” And Bob did. And it was so much better than the first one.’
Dad’s first-ever literary magazine, Mate 2, published in November 1958, was co-edited with David Walsh, but from issue 3 he ran the show, with Tony Stones as ‘assistant editor’. The cover illustration by Tony harks back to his and Robin’s seagulling days – it’s a line drawing of George, a Maori chap who, while waiting for the bureau clerk to call out his name, would sit on a bollard, pull out his chess set and take anyone on.
Here’s the contributor list on the contents page of Mate 2:
Odo Strewe
Peter Fairbrother
Maurice Gee
Alan Roddick
Lois Miller
Barry Crump
Gordon Challis
Frank Sargeson
Kevin Ireland
John Graham
Charles Doyle
Barry Crump’s story was his first published work: a rollicking yarn about hard-case deer-hunters called ‘A Good Keen Man’ that would later grow into a book that sold in astounding quantities, turning Crump into a celebrity and earning him a genuine fortune, something the Queen’s Ferry set would watch with admiration and envy.
The solitary female name on the list is familiar too, of course.
Sometime in 1956, in an Auckland coffee shop, Jean Watson (a university student, an unpublished writer and one of the many future partners of Barry Crump) introduced her friend Robin Dudding to a girl she knew: Lois Miller. It turned out that Robin and Lois were taking some of the same English papers, though she usually sat at the back and he near the front – she’d spotted him up there in his military training uniform. Funnily enough they shared birthdays – 7 December – though Lois was one year older.
Robin was intrigued by this very self-possessed woman with big eyes and strong cheekbones, who reminded him a little of Casablanca-era Ingrid Bergman. The skinny boy from Hawke’s Bay made no particular impression on Lois. He was interesting enough to talk to, but then quite a lot of blokes were. She had plenty of boyfriends.
They ran into each other a bit and went to a few things together, but Lois was rather more interested in Robin’s best mate Tony Stones. In fact L
ois and Tony were an item for a while, until Tony dropped her in favour of a dramatic woman named Cushla, who already had a couple of children. And later Lois took up with a slightly older man – a painter on the fringes of the Queen’s Ferry crowd whom she already knew from her hometown of Cambridge in the Waikato. She returned with him to Cambridge in late 1956 and they got engaged.
If this was Back to the Future, this is the part where my sisters and I start turning semi-transparent in the family photo.
In Cambridge, Lois was technically living with her parents, but as the engagement stretched into months, and then a year, the overnight stays with her fiancé were becoming an affront to small-town sensibilities. I’ve heard divergent accounts of what happened next.
According to Kevin Ireland, Robin – and just about everyone else in the overwhelmingly male circles they moved in – took close note of Lois from the moment she walked into the café that day with Jean Watson. But when sifting through her suitors Lois made a dreadful choice. Her Cambridge fellow was a ‘total poser’, someone who was glamorous but ‘impotent in every sense of the word’, ‘an appalling person’, ‘an absolute phony’, and so on. Kevin’s splenetic loyalty to his temporarily-passed-over friend, 60 years after the fact, is fearsome to behold.
Anyway, says Kevin, once Lois discovered the guy was useless she was much chastened, so now she was looking for the real thing. Robin moved in like Speedy Gonzales – there was a flash of light and there was Robin. To be more specific, when Robin got hold of Lois’s number and rang her in Cambridge, she told him she was done with the phony and wanted out.
‘That was the moment Bob had been waiting for, because he was desperately in love with her,’ says Kevin, in his rumbling, half-chuckling, professional yarn-spinning voice. ‘Bob was the knight on a white charger, and he went racing down and collected her and whisked her up to Auckland and the next thing is they’re married.’