My Father's Island

by Adam Dudding

  The editing went terribly, but otherwise, I’m told, it was a hell of a trip. It seems a shame that the only part I remember is freaking out on that krill-covered beach in Nelson.

  * Yes, that Wahine. The Scottish-built ferry had been running the Wellingon–Lyttelton route for three weeks. In April 1968 she foundered and capsized in Wellington Harbour, killing 53 people.

  * The Charlotte Jane was one of the ‘first four ships’ of English settlers colonising Canterbury, and is seen by some Cantabrians as little short of the Mayflower.

  † Thanks to the compendious knowledge of printer and book-maker Brendan O’Brien, I now know the printer’s block of the double bed is the same one used in Caxton’s 1967 pamphlet of James K. Baxter’s ‘A Small Ode on Mixed Flatting’, his brilliant response to Otago University’s attempt to ban the immoral practice.

  12. Three very short stories about Sealy Road

  Chickens

  DAD BREEDS the chickens and feeds the chickens, powders the chickens for lice and grooms the chickens for shows, and when it’s time to eat one he cuts off its head with an axe and hangs it from the washing line on a piece of string tied around its feet.

  The gutting, plucking and cooking are Mum’s jobs. She hacks off the feet and hauls out the metallic-smelling viscera by the handful, working on a table in the garden to keep the flies out of the house.

  She calls Anna and me over for an autopsy. We inspect the slimy coils of intestine, the cute little heart that isn’t actually heart-shaped after all, the spongy pieces of lung that cling to the insides of the ribcage and have to be scraped out with your fingers.

  ‘Look at this,’ Mum says, bisecting the hard, rubbery gizzard with a sharp knife and showing us the gritty mess inside. ‘She’s been eating little stones to grind her corn.’

  We take a chicken foot each and use our fingernails to grasp the slippery ends of the tendons, and pull them to make each claw clench and release, a final sign of life from the old bird.

  Cigarettes

  DAD BUYS his cigarettes in the smaller pack, 10 Pall Mall plain, because he’s quitting tomorrow and anyway he’s short of cash this week. Occasionally he gives me the money and I walk to the Torbay dairy to buy them and pick up a few milk bottles or pink smokers with the change, but usually he just stops the van and ducks in on the way back from a swim at Long Bay.

  When I’m four, Dad and Rachel are proofreading galleys at the dining table (. . . new line-quote-grandpa-question-unquote-new line-quote-not-him-comma-don’t be stupid-stop . . .) and he doesn’t have an ashtray. He doesn’t want to interrupt the flow, so he gives me the still-glowing butt to take to the compost bucket in the kitchen. I carry it off like a jewel, but once out of sight I test it. The bitter tang of the soggy strands of tobacco on my tongue is disgusting and the tiny suck of smoke is even worse. I drop it quickly into the compost bucket, where it hisses out in the soup of tea leaves and orange peel and feijoa skins.

  He is forever complaining about not being able to quit smoking. Once, when he’s taking his afternoon nap, I take a near-new pack of cigarettes from his office to the bathroom. With the water running I tear each cigarette to pieces into the sink and swill it around until every shred of tobacco and paper has gone down the plughole. When he wakes up I tell him what I’ve done, and am offended when he doesn’t thank me.

  Flying

  I’M STANDING in the small concrete courtyard by the front door at 4 Sealy Road, Torbay, Auckland 10, New Zealand, Earth, the Milky Way, with my arms extended, slowly turning round and round.

  After a while I start tilting off-centre as I spin, like a spinning top just after it loses its balance, with my upper body describing ever-wider circles. Then I realise my feet have lifted slightly off the ground and I’m very slowly rising, spiralling up until I’m high enough to look down on the roof. I then waste much of the flight arguing with myself about whether this is a dream or not – I’m sure flying is impossible, and yet here I am, flying.

  I have this dream all the time when I’m little, but as I get older years pass between recurrences. Every time I find myself flying above Sealy Road I know I’ve done this before, but then I struggle to work out whether that’s because I can actually fly, or because I’ve dreamt about it before. After I wake up I lie there for ages, still not quite sure.

  13. Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire

  WITH HELP from my sisters I’ve compiled a list of the music that filled our house at Sealy Road when we were kids. I’ve turned it into a playlist to stream through my computer as I write the next few chapters.

  . . . Rubber Soul, Abbey Road and Sgt. Peppers. Simon and Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. Schubert’s tinkling Trout Quintet, which Mum would turn up really loud when she did the housework . . .

  It’s a suggestion I heard in a memoir-writing workshop: look at photos, listen to the soundtrack of a particular time, trick your brain into unlocking some old memories.

  . . . Harry Belafonte at Carnegie Hall with Miriam Makeba and Odetta, Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, the Easy Rider soundtrack, Breakfast in America . . .

  Even before I hit play, the album names alone get me halfway there. I can vividly see the big square booklet of lyrics and trippy artwork that came with the multi-disc Tommy box set, and the lyrics on the back of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band sleeve, with mysterious stories about holes in Blackburn, Lancashire printed in black type on red. I can hear Dad’s rich tenor voice, not so much out of tune as using entirely different notes, singing along to Belafonte and Odetta’s epic, hilarious version of ‘A Hole in the Bucket’.

  . . . The Gondoliers, the Animals, Great Opera Choruses including the one where everyone bashes on anvils in time, Jesus Christ Superstar, the West Side Story soundtrack . . .

  I line up 20 or so albums and hit play. It’s like getting in a time machine. I’m sucked back to the living room in Sealy Road, to the scratchy red-and-brown woollen throw on the couch, to the big chipboard record-player cabinet with its built-in speaker behind a cloth grille, and space for records inside. I listen to the Hair soundtrack from start to finish, enthralled, unsure why my eyes keep filling. Tommy, though, is much more dreadful than I remember it.

  I twiddle the time machine dial – forwards to Supertramp’s Breakfast in America (bought by a sister in 1979); backwards to a Simon and Garfunkel album that was being belted out long before I was born. Forward again to, say, 7 o’clock on a Saturday morning in the mid-70s, at the precise moment that Dad drops the stylus onto the edge of a spinning LP, and there are a few seconds of loud crackle then the three soft opening chords of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture; 12 minutes later the cannons start firing, rattling the windows and bringing half a dozen children complaining from their beds.

  We left the beer bottles in Christchurch but not the wooden planks, and once he’d collected enough new DB empties, Dad rebuilt his bookshelves in Torbay. Eventually, inevitably, a visiting toddler climbed a shelf and brought planks, bottles and books tumbling down, so Dad built pine shelves onto three of the living-room walls, floor to ceiling, apart from a space for the piano and another for a sofa. One light switch ended up inside a shelf, so a wooden spoon was left nearby where you could use it to prod the switch without having to remove half a dozen books.

  Children’s books were within arm’s reach above the sofa. Big art books were at floor level. Along a topmost shelf was a really old edition of the complete Charles Dickens, with faded red covers and gold lettering. Penguin, Puffin and Pelican paperbacks had an aviary of their own. Poetry was here, New Zealand non-fiction there, a long row of Landfalls and Islands over there.

  The books shared the shelves with dust, fly spray cans, dead flies, apple cores, coffee mugs and a number of miniature plastic, china and wooden chickens, which was all anyone could ever think of as a Christmas present for Dad.

  I’d often lie in a state of foggy-headed sloth on the sofa, rereading picture books I’d read hundreds of times before, main
ly because that’s what I could reach without having to stand up. But most of the thousands of books lining the wall were just background, a wallpaper that I’d scan idly while pushing my lamb’s fry, mashed potato and silverbeet around my dinner plate: the complete Walter de la Mare, the collected Auden, The Pocket Mirror by Janet Frame, an edition of Joyce’s Ulysses with an archer’s bow drawn on its spine.

  I was especially intrigued by a book on the top shelf: Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth, which had a black shiny spine and a red, eyeless goat-devil mask printed above the title. It never occurred to me to actually take the book down and read it.

  Some days it seemed reading was the only thing happening at Sealy Road. Older sisters in the garden sunbathing with a fat book or studying for exams. Mum sitting on the front doorstep with a cup of tea and a Maigret mystery. Dad reading contributors’ bad poetry in Woodspring Cottage. (His garden-shed study had inherited the plaque pilfered from Barnes Road.) Anna reading something terrible like Flowers in the Attic. Me reading or rereading James and the Giant Peach, Enid Blyton, Narnia, the continuing adventures of Professor Branestawm, or a James Thurber collection Dad had just finished reading, even though the adult point of the cartoons went over my head.

  Later I’d work my way, keen but bogged down by the dense sentences, through Sherlock Holmes and H. G. Wells, Jane Austen and Edgar Allen Poe. Occasionally I’d set myself a school-holiday goal of reading a top-shelf Dickens, butter-knife at hand to slice open the uncut pages. There was pleasure in the snicking slice itself, and in the knowledge that these pages had never before been read, but I didn’t always make it to the end.

  I was six when my sister Ruth read out the bit in Gulliver’s Travels where Gulliver, untied by the Lilliputians, empties his bladder in a torrent of piss that astonishes the little people with its noise and violence. Impressed by the author’s naughtiness, I struggled through the whole thing, pulled in deep by the exciting or funny bits, but bobbing back up to the surface each time I hit a stretch of baffling words or concepts. The word wasn’t pronounced ‘dome sticks’, Mum explained, looking over my shoulder. The accent was on the middle syllable, and it was an old-fashioned word for servants, spelt with an extra K.

  Dad took us to the library, bought us new books on birthdays, and sometimes pulled out something from our own shelves, such as Alastair Airey’s 1960 book The Boys of Puhawai, set in a fictionalised North Island community and featuring actual Maori characters, which Dad figured would add a bit of roughage to our mostly British reading diet.

  When I was five and Anna was eight Dad asked us to help him with something. Did we want to be a test audience for the manuscript of a children’s story by his friend Maurice Gee?

  Night after night we squashed into an armchair with Dad as he read us the next chapter of ‘The Smiths and the Joneses’, a brilliant, terrifying story about giant shapeshifting slug creatures who arrived in Auckland and planned to turn the planet into a grey sludge unless redhead twins called Rachel and Theo and an old man called Mr Jones could stop them.

  We were gripped, and the older sisters often listened in too. I can still see the images the story evoked and remember the queasiness of imagining slime-filled tunnels beneath our feet linking the city’s volcanos. Anna told Dad she was pleased to have finally found a story in which characters went to the toilet, something whose absence bothered her in other fiction. By the time the book was published in early 1979, Gee had changed the baddies’ names from the Smiths to the Wilberforces and the book’s title to Under the Mountain.

  What I didn’t realise until I was reading letters in the Turnbull Library was that, despite Anna’s and my endorsement and his own huge admiration of Gee’s writing, Dad hated the book. He wrote to Gee, quoting something Carson McCullers’ editor had once written to her: ‘I must insist that a story should have a reason for being. Must rise, make a point, that is inside the tale itself, and at the same time outside in the world.’

  ‘The Smiths and the Joneses’, said Dad, for all its storytelling competence, didn’t have that reason for being. It was ‘grey, slimy, nasty [. . .] Excrescence rather than inspiration; effective local colour but attached to nought.

  ‘Obviously, Moss, I don’t need to write this as you need not take any notice, but I’d feel a little culpable if I didn’t say what I think. Every good writer has to write a bummer [. . .] I think this is your bummer – I think you should sweep it under the bed. Sorry.’

  Luckily for Moss he didn’t sweep it under the bed. Under the Mountain became one of his most successful books, and was adapted for TV and then a feature film. When I got my own hardback copy the year it came out I read it another half-dozen times. Anna and I were still obsessed with the story a year later. In another letter to Gee, Dad said he’d taken us for walk on Mt Eden’s volcanic cone and we had ‘recited Jones-type incantations before galloping down the crater’.

  When I went to interview Maurice Gee, I told him how I’d been boasting to friends for decades that I had heard Under the Mountain before just about anyone else in the country. Maurice was glad I liked it, but said he didn’t even remember having sent Dad the manuscript.

  I was on holiday with Mum at her parents’ place in Pukekohe one summer when I found a copy of John Irving’s The World According to Garp for $1 in a second-hand bookshop. I knew Dad had read it and had laughed out loud several times, which seemed a good recommendation. He might even have read out a few pages.

  By the time we got home I was a third of the way through it and hooked, but Dad made me hand it over, confiscated. I was 11 – far too young to read it.

  Even now, I’m not quite sure why. Certainly Garp has some adult moments – it opens with a dying man being milked of his sperm by a nurse who wants a fatherless child, and later features a horrifying blowjob-plus-car crash scene, as well as a band of psychotic feminists who cut out their tongues in solidarity with a rape victim who’d suffered the same.

  Yet Dad hadn’t censored my reading before this. It seemed particularly unfair because despite Garp’s preoccupation with sex, it was actually Irving’s big characters and romping storylines I was loving – the rude bits were just a bonus. And anyway, books far worse than Garp were on our own bookshelves if you could be bothered looking, and I’d reached the age where I could be bothered. I’d become adept at skimming Harold Robbins and Jackie Collins novels for the best bits, or in the case of books borrowed from likeminded friends, lightly cradling a book in my hands to see which pages it fell open at.

  Unlike some of my friends’ houses, Sealy Road had no paternal cache of Playboy or Penthouse, but on the bottom shelf in the living room, alongside the huge hardback of the art of Leonardo Da Vinci, you could find Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex, whose explicit drawings were fine as long as you averted your eyes from the bearded man. On the shelf near the fireplace were hundreds of tatty fiction paperbacks, and there was some gold in there: John Cleland’s outrageous 1748 novel Fanny Hill, which didn’t even require skimming as every page was pure filth; Lolita (though this had a disproportionate amount of boring literature around the brief rude bits); Roald Dahl’s mildly kinky adult books Kiss Kiss and Switch Bitch. On the shelf above the piano, next to a set of Anaïs Nin’s diaries, was a copy of Nin’s Delta of Venus, a series of elegantly sordid erotic vignettes produced on demand for a pervy Parisian businessman in the 1940s. Apparently he was always complaining to Nin that the stories contained too much poetry and not enough action.

  Long before my furtive prowling of the shelves for the perversions of Nin or Nabokov I had learnt the un-titillating facts of life from a big coffee-table book that I presume Mum or Dad had bought for just that purpose, called Birth, Conception and Contraception. It had a drawing of an upside-down baby in utero on the cover and inside were big beautiful drawings of a foetus progressing from a ball of cells to a strange seahorse creature to a ready-to-be-born baby. The pictures of penises and vaginas were more scientific than erotic, especially the mystifying cutaway diagrams; the
one showing the position of the ovaries and fallopian tubes in a woman’s belly looked like the woman had eaten the handlebars of a Raleigh Chopper.

  In any case, I knew what naked people looked like. Both my parents seemed to consider clothes as useful things for keeping warm but not much else, so if the weather was clement and there weren’t any visitors to shock they wore little or nothing around the house. Dad liked to be naked in the sun especially, though when gardening he’d usually make concessions to safety and sunburn and put on some underpants and a hat.

  The shock of the Duddings’ return to Auckland was softened by our discovery of a band of new soulmates living just around the corner. The Delaneys – Carol and Mick and their four daughters – had arrived from England a few months earlier. Their girls were classmates of ours, and when our families met en masse we became a single tribe that happened to have two houses, four parents and 10 children. Whichever house you found yourself in at mealtimes or bedtimes, that’s where you’d eat or sleep, possibly on a mattress on the floor. As recent escapees from Christchurch and Leicester respectively, the Duddings and Delaneys couldn’t get enough of Auckland beaches. We spent a lot of time at Long Bay.

  It was a brief, almost euphoric, family love affair, but within a year the Delaneys realised the move to New Zealand had been a financial disaster and they fled back to the UK (though they returned for good some years later).

  Even without them, there was a steady stream of visitors at Sealy Road: young writers like Michael Morrissey paying court at the editor’s house, or longstanding literary friends like the Manhires or the Weddes or the Stoneses visiting for lunch and a beach walk. School friends and neighbouring kids wandered in and out. John Murray from next door would pop over after dinner for a game of crib or ping-pong. The talk might be of books and art and politics, but more important was the latest ping-pong score, or the fluffy newly hatched chicks Dad would bring up from the fowl-run to show off.