by Adam Dudding
Nice story, says Mum when I talk to her later that week, but largely untrue.
For a start, the fiancé was an excellent artist – definitely not a phony. Yes, she did call off the engagement (for reasons she tells me only after extracting a firm promise I really won’t put it in the book), but there was no ‘Rescue me’ phone conversation with Robin. There was no mercy dash from Auckland by a knight on a white charger.
In that case, I ask her, what did happen? I’d like to understand the sequence of events, but I’m also keen to know what made her realise that she was interested, after all, in the thin-faced, quiet young man I’ve seen in the photos, with his crooked teeth and a crooked smile that could easily be mistaken for a smirk, with his heavily Brylcreemed side-parted dark hair and his perpetual cigarette. Can she describe her and Dad’s sudden lurch from friends to affianced lovers?
My mother is an unusually difficult interview subject. Even when she isn’t evading a question, the neurological scrambling from her stroke can turn any conversation into a semantic adventure. She knows what’s going on and at times can speak utterly fluently. But sometimes you need to find a comfortable position as she haltingly constructs a sentence in which some, perhaps all, of the words have been replaced with surreal alternates. You then repeat back a paraphrase of what you presume she meant, and she confirms or denies or, worse still, attempts to clarify, in which case you’re down a whole new rabbit hole.
What happened? I ask. How did he win you over?
‘Well,’ says Mum. ‘He was keen I suppose. Yeah.’
Yes of course. But what happened? I presume you were keen too?
‘Well, no.’
(I briefly wonder if by ‘no’ she actually means ‘yes’, but dismiss the possibility. She seldom mixes those two up.)
Look, I say. A minute ago you said you had loads of boyfriends, so you obviously weren’t so short of options that you had to accept Robin by default, were you?
‘No. But I thought he would make a good father.’
Ah! This is progress. But – is that enough on its own to decide to marry? This is courtship in the era of beat poetry, early rock ’n’ roll and Oswald Mazengarb’s scandalised inquiry into teen promiscuity in New Zealand. She must have found other things about Robin appealing as well.
Did you like his twinkling eyes? I ask. Or his deep voice? His bony feet? His thrusting manhood?
‘Oh, all of those things,’ says Mum, and she cackles for a while without giving any more detail.
I explain that understanding your parents’ courtship is an important existential matter for any child. It’s the historical moment where one’s future is on a knife edge, vulnerable to the outcome of a particular conversation, a well-timed offer of a cup of coffee, a pheromonal zephyr.
Mum identifies this as horseshit, and laughs at me.
I point out that we’ve been bickering for 45 minutes and in that time she’s not even answered the first of what I’d hoped would be 20 or so questions that would take us into the late 1960s, and we’re still only up to 1957, and she cackles even louder.
Eventually I get a little closer to the truth. A few weeks after my failed interrogation of Mum I find a letter from Robin to his mother.
He’s writing from Cambridge. The letter’s handwritten and undated, but it must be around September 1957. He’s taken a fortnight’s hitch-hiking holiday from the Auckland Star with the intention of visiting Rotoiti, Whakatane, Mt Maunganui, Wellington, Hastings, Taranaki – heck, maybe Ninety Mile Beach. However, ‘six days later and I haven’t got past Cambridge having called in to see Lois for 1/2 an hour. I am staying with her parents . . .’
He continues the letter a couple of days later. He’s finally dragged himself away from the Millers’ place, but the rest of the grand tour has been truncated to a brief visit to Whakatane, and he’s going to Cambridge once more before hitching back to Auckland.
Surely this is the mercy dash by Dad that Kevin was describing, even if he was hitching rather than riding a white charger, and even if Lois didn’t actually follow him back to Auckland for a few more months. Something happened between the two of them in Cambridge. He hasn’t actually proposed yet but the sign-off to his letter suggests marriage is on his mind, even if it’s disguised as daft leg-pulling.
Sorry this is so short and sweet but there just really isn’t anything to tell you except that I’m getting married in the first week of February, that I’ve joined the Roman Catholic Church and that I’ve got a charge of manslaughter against me.
Love Robin
P.S: My wife to be is a Maori–Japanese cross and she is 47 years of age.
To be precise, his wife-to-be is a 22-year-old Pakeha woman. By February 1958 she’s back in Auckland and he has properly proposed. In early March he hires a small car in Auckland, and he and Lois, and their friends Cushla and Tony Stones who married just a week earlier, squeeze in for the drive to Hastings, where there’ll be a wedding on the 8th. Robin is at the wheel as they hurtle down the spine of the North Island, and every so often he yells, at the top of his voice: ‘Isn’t it marvellous to be young and alive in the middle of the 20th century!’
8. Men of Achievement 1974
LATE 1997. Comet Hale-Bopp’s Earth flyby has come and gone. President Clinton has been having sexual relations with that woman Monica Lewinsky but no one else knows about it yet. Mike Tyson has bitten a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear off, and a Scottish woman has published her first book about a boy wizard. Ellen DeGeneres has declared herself a lesbian, there’s a new film out about the Titanic and James Bond is played by Pierce Brosnan. Princess Diana is recently dead. So is Mother Teresa.
In New Zealand a former schoolteacher called Jenny Shipley is about to overthrow her colleague Jim Bolger to become New Zealand’s first woman prime minister. A striking singer-songwriter called Bic Runga has released her debut album Drive, and the fiction winner at the national book awards is Alan Duff’s sequel to Once Were Warriors. In Auckland a 328m-tall observation tower has just had its official opening, and the city’s mayor is a homophobic gym owner called Les Mills.
Robin Dudding, 61, of Torbay, hasn’t edited a literary magazine of his own for quite a while. After a late-career return to the queasy comforts of a fulltime job as a sub-editor for the Listener he’s recently retired, mainly because his cigarette-poisoned lungs have left him so short of breath and energy that getting up and down the stairs at the Listener offices in Dominion Road was getting too hard. He hasn’t smoked a cigarette for years now, but he still misses the taste. One of his hips is buggered too, though he’s on a waiting list for a replacement early in the new year.
And me? I’m living in Newcastle in the north of England, and wishing I wasn’t.
In my 27 years I’d learnt to walk and talk and read and count, I’d finished school, done a science degree, been flatting, played in some bands, learnt how to drink and smoke a joint, toured New Zealand for six weeks as the pianist for a monstrous drag queen called Diamond Lil, and done a few shifts proofreading television listings for the Listener.
I’d shouldered a blue Macpac backpack and travelled on self-defeatingly tiny budgets around Europe and the Middle East, eating boiled rice and sleeping in parks. In London I pulled pints and temped in an office where I spent six months drawing computer diagrams of the railway line between Tilbury and Southend-on-Sea before an engineer changed the route and everything I’d drawn was discarded. In Cambridge I frothed cappuccinos and failed to sell double-glazing over the phone. I swabbed the decks on an Egyptian dive boat and busked with a tambourine and a guitar-strumming friend in front of the unfortunate customers of Barcelona’s street cafés. I spent three years, in other words, being one of those mid-20s antipodean moochers on their OE who feels like they’re vaguely counter-cultural and forging their own unique history, but is actually selecting from a standardised menu of procrastinatory options.
Despite an idiot shyness that kept me virgin much older than seemed reasonable
I had a few girlfriends, before chancing upon an especially nice one at a party in Finsbury Park, north London, and hitching my fate to hers. She was Scottish. It had been a couple of years since I persuaded her to come and live with me in New Zealand, but after the sudden death of her father a year ago, we were back in England to be near to her mum for a bit.
So. Back in miserable England with its squatting grey skies and stupid front-loading washing machines and annoying banks and morose shop assistants and squashed-together houses. Back in wonderful England with its amazing newspapers and unabashedly intelligent TV presenters, its smooth domesticated countryside in a range of bright deciduous greens that I found myself traitorously preferring to New Zealand’s darker primeval shades. England, with all those streets and placenames that immediately felt like home even if I only knew them from the Monopoly board or Sherlock Holmes. England, with its accents and cynicism and class hatred and post-colonial malaise and ceaseless drinking and clever conversation, and its clever writers – the ones I met aged five as well as the ones I’d only recently found: Richmal Crompton, Enid Blyton and whoever wrote Rupert the Bear; Christianna Brand, E. Nesbit and E. L. Travers (even if she was really Australian); J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, Richard Adams and Joan Aiken, Alan Garner and Roald Dahl; the old fascist H. G. Wells (from a compendium of his sci-fi that Dad gave me when I was 10, which I ploughed through only quarter-enjoying); P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie and Kenneth Grahame; Orwell and his fustier fellow writing-style advisers Fowler and Gower; Amis the Younger, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan; Jeanette Winterson, A. S. Byatt and Kazuo Ishiguro.
I loved and hated the place, and though I was happy enough to be there when it was just a base for adventures, I’d not planned to be back again this soon.
We were in Newcastle because that’s the nearest city to my mother-in-law’s dot-on-the-map village in the Scottish borders. Newcastle, I decided swiftly, was the worst place in the world. Whenever I got in a cab the driver would notice an accent and ask where I was from, and when I said New Zealand he’d look at me in horror and confusion and ask why I was here when I could be there. One driver seemed near tears as he told me how just a year earlier he’d tried to migrate to New Zealand and had all the papers in order and the flights booked but then his wife got cold feet at the last minute.
To minimise homesickness, I wanted to live near the sea. We found a cheap, grotty place in Whitley Bay, a faded resort on the North Sea coast that fell out of fashion once tourists realised the sea in Spain was 10 degrees warmer and the beer cheaper. Now it was home to the near-derelict Spanish City funfair that Mark Knopfler once sang about, as well as all-hours nightclubs, sticky-floored pubs selling dangerously cheap spirits, and the occasional baby seal that came ashore from the frigid ocean to rest on the sand, freaking out our Labrador, Judy, who possibly saw a family resemblance in the sleek head and long whiskers.
We were told that the week before we moved into our unheatably cold flat above a wedding-dress shop, someone was stabbed a few yards from our door while queueing to get into a club. But generally the crowds milling in the street every evening – women in Geordie night-time uniform of microskirt, boob tube and no coat despite the snow flurries; men in regulation chinos and bright shirt – are extraordinarily friendly, even (in fact especially) the women crouching in doorways for a piss, the men slumped half-conscious against fences, and the occasional couple down on the sand fucking against the old stone seawall.
I needed a job, so I sent my suspiciously patchy CV to every organisation in a 50-mile radius that might need someone good with a semicolon and a split infinitive. The only interview I got was with the Shields Gazette, an evening tabloid that for 30 pence or so provided its community of unemployed former miners and shipbuilders with a parochial yet gamely sensationalist news agenda; shortly after I started there as a sub-editor the screaming front-page lead was an interview with a South Shields man whose rubbish bins had been knocked over and who was incensed because the council refused to come round and set them upright again. In the photo accompanying the story the man looked very angry.
When I left home at 6 o’clock it was still three hours till sunrise. I would shuffle through slushy snow, catch a train, shuffle through more slush, take a ferry south across the Tyne and descend below street level into a bunker of an office. By the time I re-emerged at 3 o’clock and headed for the ferry home the sun would be down already.
I got to know a few of the ferry regulars.
‘New Zealand!’ marvelled a short, bearded, middle-aged man who worked for the council. He told me he planned to move there one day, where he would retrain and work as a midwife. I nodded encouragingly.
The happiest moment of my three months at the Gazette was the day my colleague Noreen shoved me in the ribs and showed me the headline she’d just written for a story about a minor house fire caused by a towel left on a heater. The headline had to be squeezed a little to fit the space, but it was still perfect: ‘Towelling inferno.’
I laughed and laughed and found it difficult to stop.
Just before I left for a job at a regional Sunday tabloid based in central Newcastle, the travel editor handed me a freebie – a weekend in Mayrhofen, Austria, including some skiing lessons, free Glühwein and a visit to the village hermit, an old bearded man who lived in a tiny hut halfway up a mountain, where he distilled his own rocket-fuel schnapps.
As my train hissed to a halt in a chocolate-box village tucked between snowy Tyrolean mountains I figured life was looking up, but by evening I thought I was getting a cold and by the next morning I had a blinding headache and noticed my back was coming up in watery blisters that popped when I reached round to touch them. The internet was still rudimentary, and I barely knew any German, and I was embarrassed, so I made an expensive phonebox call to Newcastle for medical advice. My wife checked my symptoms in our Pears Cyclopaedia and told me I had either syphilis or chicken pox.
I survived both the chicken pox and the skiing lessons, relying on nips of Glühwein and the hermit’s moonshine to mask my heavy-boned fever, then limped back to England trying not to scratch the blisters that now covered my entire body.
I survived my year in Newcastle too, relying on pints of Stella Artois and bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale to mask my desperate urge to be anywhere else – much the same method that seemed to keep the locals going.
My new job was still pretty terrible but also perversely enjoyable. Like most I’ve encountered, the subs’ desk at the Sunday Sun was a collection of highly articulate, near-alcoholic misfits unleashing their perfectionism on something they knew would still be shit even once all the spelling mistakes were fixed. We raged against the insanity of the editor, the ignorance of the reporters and the stupidity of the readers, and spent the lulls between deadlines in near-hysterical efforts to antagonise and amuse each other. I almost managed to get the headline ‘Clogs popped’ above a story about an especially tragic suicide in the Netherlands, before the chief sub-editor vetoed it. Near the end of each week we wrote fake letters to the editor, because we never got any from real readers. At lunchtime we drank.
At home the music from the club next door shook the walls, and the music from the pair of would-be club DJs who moved in upstairs and practised their craft daily shook the ceiling. One day our stupid front-loading washing machine flooded, destroying the ceiling of the wedding-dress shop below us, as well as a number of expensive dresses.
Eventually we moved to London, where I would, mercifully, find more rewarding employment, but in early 1998 we went back to Newcastle for the weekend for a wedding.
The night before the wedding, I was at a friend of a friend’s place drinking a pre-pub beer. There was a small TV in the corner tuned to BBC Two, and Richard Herring and Stewart Lee’s mildly surreal comedy sketch show This Morning with Richard Not Judy was playing. My back was to the screen, but then I heard a familiar string of syllables: ‘Robin Nelson Dudding’.
For a second I assumed I’d imag
ined it, that it was the auditory version of the patriotic reflex all New Zealanders abroad know, where you spot a ‘Z’ somewhere in a page of text and your eye leaps to it in expectation of the ‘-ealand’ that must follow but usually doesn’t.
But no. I’d heard it right. I turned to see the camera zooming in on a black-and-white headshot of a scowling face encircled by dark hair. It was Dad – in his full early-70s glory: crooked self-cut fringe, shaggy shoulder-length bob merging into a full Karl Marx beard, a glimpse of lower lip below the overhanging moustache.
The camera shakily settled on the photo and its surrounding text, and a portentous voice-over continued: ‘Robin is an editor from Hastings in New Zealand and is married to Lois Yvonne Miller. They have one son and five daughters. If you are interested in knowing more about Robin Nelson Dudding, he is also listed in Who’s Who in New Zealand.’
The camera pulled back out as the book was closed, revealing a red cover with a gold embossed title, which the voice read out: ‘MEN OF ACHIEVEMENT 1974’.
Well, this was thoroughly weird.
I pointed, incredulous, at the screen, and turned to my friend – ‘Did you see that? That was my dad!’ – but by the time I got his attention the picture had already cross-faded back to Herring and Lee on the sofas of their faux breakfast TV set, cheerfully complaining that no one ever seemed to find the ‘Men of Achievement 1974’ segment funny.
Which was an explanation of sorts. It seemed that during every episode they would pluck out some unfortunate ‘man of achievement’ and his silly 1970s mugshot from this pointless old book, for a few moments of deadpan mockery.
It was strangely unsettling to stumble across this artefact of Dad’s existence so far from home and so out of context. I rang Dad as soon as time zones allowed to let him know that the BBC had taken the time to take the piss out of him on British national TV. He said he had a hazy memory of receiving a letter inviting him to be in some sort of international directory, where you paid nothing but had the opportunity to buy a ridiculously overpriced edition in embossed goatskin or some such. He’d sent the form off, but didn’t waste his money buying a copy.