by Adam Dudding
When I was seven I brought home an entry form for a colouring competition run by the local supermarket – a cartoonish outline of a clown with giant shoes, curly wig and oversized overalls. On Saturday after lunch, as a gaggle of visitors mopped up the last of their soup with a slice of Mum’s bread, I found my felt-tip pens and started planning a prize-winning colouring-in effort. I was finding it a struggle, perhaps because of a lack of experience – Mum followed the Playcentre mantra that colouring between the lines of a pre-drawn picture corroded a child’s natural artistic expression and probably verged on child abuse.
I asked for help, and seeing one of the visitors was Ralph Hotere, Dad suggested he help me – Ralph was a real artist, after all. Hotere’s advice, predictably enough, was that I should set aside the obvious pink, red, yellow and orange and see what I could achieve with the black felt-tip alone. How about lots of black dots all over the clown’s overalls?
I did as he suggested, but even before I’d started dabbing away at the clown I knew in my heart that a giant mess of black blotches wasn’t what the lady at the supermarket would be looking for when she judged the competition. By the time I’d finished it looked terrible and I was in despair. After Ralph left, I screwed it up, threw it in the bin and raged and stamped a little.
After seven years away from Auckland, my parents were appalled by the changes they saw when we returned. Motorways were pushing ever further north and developers were subdividing the North Shore to death, bulldozing monstrous yellow scars into the hills then carpeting them with gigantic $60,000 houses, whose owners had to buy topsoil to cover the clay and work night and day to pay their huge mortgages.
Still, Dad told Kevin in a 1974 letter, he was enjoying the city’s hills after Christchurch’s flatness, and there were things that made the return more than worthwhile: ‘Peace at night from traffic silent, quiet changing beaches, warmth of the shorts & barefoot variety, drumming rain.’
He planted plum, peach, apple and lemon, but Auckland’s swelter could also support Ecuadorian babaco, Chinese loquat, South American tamarillo, passionfruit, banana passionfruit, grape, banana. His garden was a seed bank and a history lesson – capsicums from a strain bred by Frank Sargeson; flower bulbs and tomato seeds from his parents’ garden in Hawke’s Bay; a kauri sapling, planted as a kind of successor to my ill-fated Barnes Road weeping gum, which I had to stand in front of on every birthday, so Dad could take a photo showing which was winning the skyward race, tree or boy.
No geese in Auckland, but many chooks, occasionally ducks and, once, pheasants. Just the one dog, Emma, but a succession of cats. Briefly, piteously, a lamb called Tess, whom we’d feed warm formula from a beer bottle with a rubbery nipple on its end, as her tail whipped like a helicopter blade. Dad named her after Thomas Hardy’s tragic heroine, which may have sealed her fate: when she was a year old, Tess was dropped back at her birth-farm to give Dad a week to fence off the fruit trees she’d been hungrily ringbarking, but at the farm she chewed a freshly tanalised fencepost and died horribly of arsenic poisoning.
There were two beaches we considered our own. Waiake we walked to, towels around necks, a Frisbee or softball passing between us. The beach was small, sheltered and often waveless, a place to get sunburnt, swim out to the raft, prod rock-pool anemones to watch them snap close, climb the pohutukawa, stand in the shallows throwing something around. In 1975 friends who’d moved to Iowa sent us a taste of the American consumer dream – a real Frisbee-brand ‘Moonlighter’ that not only flew further and flatter than anything you could get in New Zealand, but also glowed in the dark. As dusk fell we’d keep throwing the Moonlighter around as a matter of principle, even after it had become impossible to judge the distance to the ghostly greenish-white disc as it loomed suddenly out of the darkness and hit you in the face.
Long Bay we drove to, Dad at the wheel, Mum in the passenger seat, the rest of us and the dog rolling around on the fold-down bed in the back of the Transit, along with the polystyrene surfboards that left a rash on your stomach. Long Bay was the place for long walks with kids running rings around the conversing adults, for beach cricket, for serious bodysurfing if the wind had been blowing in the right direction, for collecting pipi and tuatua that you could take home and make into sand-gritty fritters or steam open on a beach barbecue in some beer and butter.
For several years Dad invited the 30-odd families in our street to a Long Bay January barbecue. One year, he decided to use a bottle of methylated spirits to encourage a reluctant barbecue. I was five metres away, but a gust of wind caught the stream of meths and a line of flame shot across the grass between us, and suddenly my feet were engulfed in flickering blue flames and everyone was screaming. The flames burnt so coolly that I was unharmed, but Dad never really got the hang of flammable liquids. A couple of decades later he burnt off an eyebrow and two-thirds of his beard after using petrol to restart a rubbish fire in the garden.
The motorways and developers kept pushing north. New hills were scraped back to clay and existing sections were sliced into halves and quarters to squeeze in ever-bigger houses, leaving no room for a garden you could feed a family from, or a respectable fowl-run. Dad despaired of it all. But just because he hated motorways didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy them.
In 1979, when the northern motorway was stretched an extra 3km north to reach Sunset Road, Dad loaded everyone into the Transit and led us on a semi-legal stroll along the virgin tarmac a few days before it was opened to vehicles. We booted a soccer ball along the median strip, turned cartwheels in the passing lane and had competitions to see who could throw a Frisbee over the overbridges. When Dad spotted a mountain of roading gravel on the roadside he dared us to run up it, and we ended up rolling around, our pockets filling with stones. When we got back to the van he couldn’t find his keys. We went back to the gravel mountain to look for them but it was hopeless, and it was getting dark. We finally got home in two taxis Dad couldn’t really afford.
Eventually the motorway went all the way to Torbay and far beyond. When he was driving home from the city, Dad would come off it a few exits early and head east to the winding coast road, so that when he reached the crest of the hill between Browns Bay and Torbay he could once again catch that first sight of the waters of Waiake, with Whangaparaoa Peninsula far in the distance, and say in a voice of wonderment, ‘Ah the sea, the sea . . .’
Mum has dug out a box of her old letters for me to have a look at. They are sorted by correspondent into a couple of dozen large brown envelopes. One envelope, though, is different. It’s labelled ‘UNSENT’, and contains half a dozen letters Mum wrote but never got round to posting.
Their dates range from 1975 to 1982. Some, I suspect, were just mislaid after writing, and by the time they turned up again they were too old to bother sending. A couple date from the time when money was so horribly tight that she quite possibly couldn’t afford a stamp. But there is one, an elegantly stroppy letter to the deputy principal of my primary school, which I think she wrote as an act of catharsis then didn’t dare post.
One of reasons I’ve decided to write a book about Dad is that he was unusual. Yet, the more I look back at their lives, the more I realise it’s actually Mum who was the more deeply unconventional of the pair.
The two pages of this unsent letter contain so much of Mum’s character – the way she used to burble on and take forever to make a point, her disapproval of authority and systems, her gentle yet serious unusualness – that I asked her if I could reproduce it, and she said, ‘Sure. Why not?’
4 Sealy Road
Torbay
1st July ’76
Dear Mrs. Baird,
This is to acknowledge receipt of your cyclostyled letter telling me that Anna and Adam were late on June 28th (Monday of this week.)
You were probably quite right to bring it to my doorstep, so to speak, as indeed I am the one responsible for getting up and shaking the children awake on dark wintry mornings and hustling them out the door whe
ther it’s sunny or rainy or snowy; and what’s more I admit that quite apart from winter’s deterrent to leaping out early, I am a chronic latecomer – no matter how soon I start getting ready. In that sense responsibility is fairly and squarely mine. On the other hand I’m not much use, for I’ve been aware of this problem for 36 years and no amount of detention, lines, embarrassment or abuse have helped me be on time. I’ve noticed that one of my children, now adult, is like me here. We’re good spellers, have a flair for language but we always run for buses. Another daughter shines at mathematics and music – she’s never late. A third – a good half-miler – is always early. But then one day she completely missed her ride because she stayed back helping along a friend with a twisted ankle. And so on. Personalities vary – circumstances change things. Then again from the point of view of stages:– at some time all of my children have shown great reluctance to go to school and I have tried every means of persuasion and coercion to get them there. It seems to be usually in the first couple of years of starting. I find they eventually get over their antipathy (or do they resign themselves to the unchangeable?) and get on with it. Homes are not perfect and of course schools aren’t and if we fussed over every factor we would despair. As an example – Adam has had 4 new teachers and 3 new classrooms in 5 months this year (5 teachers since starting 8 months ago.) I think you will agree that coping with so many changes in so short a time is a lot to expect of any 5 year old. We’re very lucky that he likes school as much as he undoubtedly does.
Since, as far as I know, these two children are not giving you problems in academic, social or classroom-behaviour spheres, I can only guess that their lateness is looked at from a school tidiness and disciplinary point of view. I’m pretty confident that they will be responsible, caring and law-abiding adults despite their tardiness. No less than Will Shakespeare noted the picture of the schoolboy “creeping like snail unwillingly to school”. That stage led, before you knew it, to the learned judge, staid and boring no doubt.
Still, I sympathise with you standing out there at the gate on that bleak, windy Glamorgan Drive and I don’t want the kids getting anxious about this matter so I’ll try to shuffle them along a little sooner.
Thank you for the letter – it set me thinking, but don’t waste postage for I’ll probably be up at the school each week at sports time.
Yours faithfully
Lois Dudding.
Mum’s anti-establishment views weren’t always filed away unsent. A few years later, when my sister’s high school was on the brink of introducing a new uniform, both parents went to the public meeting to express their concern, but Mum decided that the best way to demonstrate that all school uniforms – old or new – were demeaning, unflattering and depressingly conformist was to turn up to the meeting squeezed into a schoolgirl’s uniform herself. I imagine it had an impact, but probably not the one she had in mind.
If you’d asked me before I was 10 what I thought of my Dad I’d have said he was the best dad around. He was a bit like how you might imagine God: strong, potentially scary when wrathful but usually kind and gentle, there when you needed him, patient, wise, omniscient, big beard. I guess a lot of boys think much the same before they’re 10.
Mum was more obviously brainy than him. She was the one who knew facts and used big words and who would read for fun a book about lateral thinking or the evolution of invertebrates, but we knew it was Dad who set the rules, made all the big decisions, drove the van, controlled the money, bought the Christmas presents, planned the outings, made the final call on what time you had to be home.
If Mum asked me to do the dishes or sweep the floor I’d ignore her, figuring if she seriously wanted it done she’d ask me three more times and then lose her temper, at which point I’d do it grudgingly and badly. If Dad told me to collect the eggs or mow the lawn I did it right away, because disobeying didn’t seem an option, even though I couldn’t have said what the consequence might be. When a friend told me his parents hit him with a wooden spoon if he was bad I thought he was pulling my leg. I thought corporal punishment was something that only happened in books by Roald Dahl.
Less godlike were Dad’s habits of popping out his upper false teeth during dinner when I had school friends over, and of walking into a room, lifting his leg 20 degrees sideways and unleashing a lengthy, theatrically noisy fart followed by a smug grin. I was embarrassed when he got me to help him trawl nearby streets in his van during the annual inorganic rubbish collections, in search of chicken-wire, timber or roof iron for his never-ending project of building and repairing fowl-houses.
We did a lot together. Morning swims at Waiake. Evening runs at Long Bay. I’d help him in the garden (boring and arduous), cleaning out the fowl-houses (boring and smelly), and proofreading Islands – which could have been boring except that by the time I was eight he was paying me $4 an hour to do so and I was getting good enough to pick up on the deliberate mistakes he’d make to test me, like replacing the word ‘sheep’ with ‘goat’. As I got older and started seeing girls differently, I noticed that if we drove past a pretty girl on a bus stop Dad would be distracted in the same way as I was, which I found both embarrassing and revolting. Some things aren’t meant to be shared.
He sometimes called me ‘Addie’, and also ‘love’ or ‘luvvie’, which was fine as long as we weren’t in public. He used to drive me nuts by sometimes saying ‘good girl’ instead of ‘good boy’ when praising me, presumably because that’s what he’d been saying to his five daughters for two decades. Mum married him in 1958 because she thought he’d make a good father, and she was right.
The letters I’ve been reading show Dad’s professional life during this period was built, as ever, on a foundation of anxiety and near-panic, but even he was able to see that things were actually going pretty well. Islands was a success, even if the miraculous day when it covered its own costs hadn’t quite arrived, and even though the slow slippage between intended and actual publication dates had already begun. He never stopped complaining to friends like Kevin Ireland about the guilt of failing to balance fatherhood with his work, his garden, his chooks, his leaking roof, yet in reality he spent more time with his kids than many fathers. His balancing act was actually pretty good – as long as he didn’t look down.
There’s a series of letters he wrote to Mum in early 1975, when she was in Wellington on her own for a week and he was managing the movements of six children aged 4 to 16 while trying, and mainly failing, to get out to his shed to work. His letters recount, day by day, the busy, messy, joyous shambles of 4 Sealy Road.
He tries to drop Adam at Playcentre, but has to cadge a ride from our neighbour Wendy because the van has a flat tyre. He gets a letter from a Listener reporter who wants to interview him about literary magazines. He sends Natasha, 10, up to the shops to buy a pack of fags, watches a tui sitting on the lancewood in the garden, buys Rachel, 16, a bra, and pops over to Wendy’s with Melissa, 12, for half an hour of cards with Wendy’s husband Roger. He enforces the older girls’ meal-cooking roster, reads the kids Watership Down and Nurse Matilda at bedtime, and sleeps badly because the full moon is shining through the window. The next morning he has another flat tyre so Wendy gives him another lift.
There are visitors: Dot from next door seeking respite from her kids, followed minutes later by her kids; the husband of Ruth’s violin teacher, who wants to talk about a violin; Michael Morrissey wants to talk about a story he’s written; a school mum pops in in search of her child and is so impressed by the huge photo on the mantelpiece of naked Lois breastfeeding that she gets her own breasts out to show Dad how they’re not as good as Lois’s (she’s as ‘mad as a two-bob watch’, as Dad observes).
He takes Adam and Jeremy (Wendy’s four-year-old son) to the city on the Devonport ferry and they take the lift to the 19th floor of the Air New Zealand skyscraper. He oversees a Sunday night party organised by Rachel, 16, and Ruth, 14. Rachel says he’s welcome to stay around for the party, because he’s bee
n ‘neat’. The girls’ drama teacher Mr Stevens turns up with his young family, so at 9 o’clock his three kids are asleep in Dad’s bed, Anna and Adam are in their own beds and Natasha and Melissa have decamped with sleeping bags to Wendy’s. At 1 in the morning Dad is trying to fix a departing partygoer’s flat battery and at 2 he gives up and drops them home.
There are more visitors: Mrs Flynn from round the corner looking for a Dudding girl to babysit her kids that evening; school friends of Ruth’s looking for her; Tony Stones looking for a chat; Wendy again, at dinner time, with a casserole and baked potatoes for the whole family. In the afternoon an intense young woman Dad has never met before knocks on the door. She is from Hawke’s Bay and they knew some families in common. More importantly, though, she had long admired Islands and is willing to work for him for nothing. She doesn’t seem to want to leave but eventually he gets her out the door. ‘These women,’ Dad tells Mum, ‘are driving me up the wall.’
14. The women
APRIL 2015. Mum and Carol and Mick Delaney are having lunch. Carol has served us each a vast slice of homemade quiche, my recorder is running in the middle of the table, and we’re talking about the past: about how the Duddings and Delaneys and all their children hit it off so well back in 1974 when we’d just returned from Christchurch and they’d just arrived from Leicester. About the wonders of Long Bay Beach and the Waiwera hot pools. About how sad everyone was when the Delaneys disappeared back to England for half a decade when we’d only just got to know them. About Dad and Carol.