My Father's Island

by Adam Dudding

  In the 1980s, a time when Dad was frequently ill-tempered with his immediate family, the poet Beth Nannestad was one of the handful of literary visitors still coming to Sealy Road. There were beach walks with Robin, intense conversations about literature, a smiling Lois bringing the coffee and toast – all the usual stuff.

  I really liked Beth, but I’d observe with a gimlet eye Dad’s courtly attentiveness and bitch about it later with my sisters: how come he’s such a miserable, vile-tempered jerk to everyone else but sweetness and light with her? Does she mind his blinking doe-eyes? Why doesn’t she find it gross like we do?

  I ask Beth if she was aware of how taken Dad was with her back then, and she seems totally startled by the idea. He was just really interested in what I was doing with my poetry, she says.

  Carol and Mick Delaney and their kids returned from the UK in 1981 and once again lived around the corner from us. For the most part we picked up where they’d left off, with days at Long Bay and dinner at each other’s houses. The Delaneys had a big TV and we still had none, so we’d make family pilgrimages on Sunday evenings to watch the Brideshead Revisited mini-series with them.

  Carol and Robin were still friendly, even if there wasn’t the intense connection of seven years earlier. Then one night, says Carol – she thinks it was probably a New Year’s Eve party, when everyone had had a bit to drink – Dad suddenly turned on her. He had an ugly look on his face. He seemed angry. He spat out his words, and said something like: ‘What are you doing? You don’t know the effect you have on people.’

  Carol didn’t have a clue what he meant, but she recognised the tone. It was the same snarl she’d heard from Mick when he was in one of his depressive troughs. She thought: Stuff this, I’ve already got one of those, thank you, and she backed off.

  From that day, the lines were redrawn. If Carol rang Sealy Road and Dad answered, he’d grunt ‘I’ll get Lois’ and put the receiver down. If Dad rang the Delaneys and Carol answered, he’d say in a monotone ‘Is Mick there?’ and wait, saying nothing more.

  She and Robin were never friends again. It was quite a feat, considering Robin and Mick remained close mates for decades after that. They jogged and cycled and played badminton, went to films and the pub, talked about books and music and art.

  Thirty-five years on, Carol, Mick and Mum say they still don’t know exactly what triggered Dad to cut Carol off. But for Carol, it’s all there in that Lawrence poem – the one they’d talked about on the sands of Long Bay. Robin had become ‘sun-extinct’, and was now ‘busy putting out the sun / in other people’.

  * Actually it isn’t, but it’ll do for our purposes.

  15. The boy with the long hair

  Good husbands make unhappy wives

  so do bad husbands, just as often;

  but the unhappiness of a wife with a good husband

  is much more devastating

  than the unhappiness of a wife with a bad husband.

  – D. H. Lawrence, ‘Pansies’, 1929

  WHEN MY sister Anna was 14 and I was 11, she developed a game with her two best friends, Belinda and Natasja, where they would make up outrageous lies about each other and then compete to convince the rest of their class of its truth.

  The hands-down winner was Belinda (or perhaps it was Natasja) with her widely accepted claim that the Dudding family were followers of a creepy religious sect which barred them from cutting their hair or their lawns, and in which all the girls were obliged to marry as soon as they turned 16.

  As lies go it was hardly a stretch. Anna’s classmates had seen her getting dropped at school by her strangely dressed father with his rusty old van and his huge beard, and the notion of an alternative community in the middle of the burbs wasn’t that strange. Centrepoint, a bona fide tree-hugging free-love commune, was thriving in nearby Albany (and this was before it became clear that Centrepoint was harbouring a nest of predatory paedophiles who were giving drugs to and having sex with young children). If you walked past the Dudding house at 4 Sealy Road with its rusting Ford Transit parked out front, you could see glimpses, through a vast bamboo hedge, of a front yard utterly lost to shoulder-high weeds and grass. And, sure enough, the countless Dudding children all had really long hair, even the youngest one. The boy who looked like a girl. Me.

  I never made a conscious decision to grow my hair long. I’m told that when I was about two Mum asked if I wanted a haircut and I said no, and that was that. Ours was not a compulsory crew cut kind of family, and perhaps I was taking my long-haired sisters as role models. Every few years Mum would politely check if I wanted to cut it yet and I’d always say no, though in her wisdom Mum did hack a wide, crooked fringe for me to see through, which made the style even more emphatically girlish. On my first day at Glamorgan Primary my future best friend Philip clocked the white-blond hair down my back and politely explained that this was actually the boys’ toilet – the girls’ was across the corridor.

  I didn’t especially like having long hair. It ended up in my mouth when eating; it blew in my face when riding a bike or walking in the wind; I grew bored of being asked ‘Are you a girl or a boy?’; and I didn’t much like it when a few months after I started school a large Standard One boy ambushed me on my way home and ordered me to drop my pants to clear up his confusion. It was a drag having to fend off minor and not-so-minor bullying for the first few weeks whenever I started a new school. It also really didn’t help that the one sport I turned out to be quite good at was a girly one – gymnastics, where I had to tie my hair in a ponytail to avoid strangling myself on the parallel bars.

  Yet by some kind of follicular Stockholm Syndrome the more grief I encountered because of my hair the more determined I became not to lose this mark of distinction. If I capitulated and became a boring, conventional short-hair, all my suffering to that point would have been in vain (something I’ve since learnt logicians call the sunk-cost fallacy).

  I suspect there was one other reason I stuck with my long hair so long, but it was something I couldn’t have articulated if I hadn’t been interviewing my sisters for this book.

  We all knew our family was a bit unusual, and that no one else had an outdoor toilet or a parents’ double bed in the living room. We knew other people didn’t have holes in their floors and ceilings, or a shower that worked only if you bunged up the bath tap with a whittled-down wine-bottle cork then retightened the loop of baling twine that kept the shower pipe firmly attached to the taps, because if you didn’t you were liable to be scalded by horizontal jets of hot water shooting out at knee-level.

  Yet although we felt duly embarrassed by those things, by some quirk of confidence we also knew these things made us superior. From our tumbledown shack behind a mad bamboo hedge we sat in judgement of the rest of the world and found it slightly wanting. Looking back, I suspect this misplaced confidence, this feeling that other people were not quite up to snuff, was something we’d learnt from Dad.

  He had a knack for reading people, no question. In the same way that he could spot a typo in a sentence or a false note in a poem, he had a knack for noticing people’s weak spots – their hypocrisies, their intellectual failings, their physical imperfections. He’d quietly clock them and then, if you were on his team, he might, with the smallest of comments or eyebrow lifts, let you see what he’d just spotted.

  Then you’d see it too and without wanting to you’d find yourself thinking a little less of the friend who’d come over after school, or the parents who’d picked them up later. Perhaps that person really was a bit boring, or thoughtless, or bourgeois, or had a sway back, or sandy eyebrows, or was either pregnant or eating too much.

  Everyone bitches, but the curious thing about Dad’s sledging was that it always seemed so reasonable. He wasn’t being critical; he just couldn’t help noticing, ha ha, that this woman was always asking nosey questions, that guy seemed a bit racist, this girl had a face like the back of a bus.

  Yeah, you’d think. I hadn’t thought of that
before, but yeah, that’s a good point actually.

  He had a way, Melissa says to me, of ‘putting people down in a joking way that you knew wasn’t really joking’.

  ‘I didn’t bring home the first few boyfriends I was interested in,’ says Ruth, ‘because I knew Dad would see their flaws, and that anything he said would influence me strongly.’

  Anna puts it this way: ‘I used to think that ours was the only normal family on the planet, because he talked about every other family as being odd, or weird, or off. He’d criticise school friends who were going off to be doctors. He’d imply we were superior to other families for having just the one car and having no money.’

  It was only in her teens that Anna started to notice the incongruity: ‘I thought, hey, how come everyone is weird but we’re not? How come our lawn is so long people think we are a commune – how come that’s not weird, yet other people are?’

  Having gleaming blond hair down to my bum definitely made me weird, but maybe part of the reason I could shrug off the suggestions from friends and well-meaning adults that my life would be easier if I chopped it off was that I’d decided that being unusual wasn’t only OK, it was further proof that I, like my family, was a little bit better than everyone else.

  Most summers we visited Dad’s parents, Winifred and Ernest, in Hastings, though the only bit I really looked forward to was the inevitable trip to Fantasyland, a theme park with a miniature train and a giant Old Woman’s Shoe which you could climb inside, with its own window and thatched roof.

  My grandparents’ house was chaotic in a similar way to ours – piles of papers and clothes and stuff all over the place – but where our mess was inviting and cosy, to me theirs felt colder, alien.

  Grandma was a hoarder. You’d open the fridge to find nine blocks of butter with expiry dates from years before. She’d preserved enough fruit to outlast a nuclear winter, and most meals included a moreish, salty serving of the runner beans that she’d fed through a hand-cranked slicer and preserved in enormous jars of brine at some point in the past half-century. Dad said it was partly a hangover from Depression-era parenting. She was thin and nervy, birdlike, with the same piercing eyes as Dad. She probably cuddled us children, but I don’t remember it.

  Grandad was usually out in the garden or down in the fowl-run. If inside, he’d be having a nap you weren’t allowed to disturb, or he’d be wandering about, recently arisen, in greying singlet and baggy Y-fronts, dispensing nose-flicks, finger-locks and dry-shaves.

  My memories of those 1970s visits are a haze of heat and boredom, of blinding sun outside and cool gloom inside, of playing cards and reading till your head felt like cotton-wool, and the stinking hot day when I used my big toes to dig holes in the ponds of half-molten tar that had appeared in the road and Mum perched me on the side of the cement tub in Grandma’s outdoor wash-house and tried to scrape off the tar under the hot water.

  This was the home where, according to my uncle Ian, my grandmother had sheltered her children against the outside world, taught them to distrust strangers, blocked their contact with all but the small, trusted circle of her immediate relatives.

  I can’t help wondering if despite his best efforts Dad sometimes got caught in the echoes of Winifred’s domestic xenophobia. He’d shrugged off his upbringing to become the warm, generous guy who set up a Friday evening literary salon in his own house, who organised picnics for his entire street, whose door was always open. But some part of him couldn’t help feeling, when strangers came to the door, that there was something slightly wrong with most of them.

  On the morning of Tuesday 13 November 1980 Dad handed me a small package. Like all birthday and Christmas presents from him it was wrapped in the utilitarian brown paper, shiny one side, matte the other, in which he wrapped bundles of Islands for shipment to booksellers. Inside, typed on a slip of tightly folded paper, was a riddle, the first clue in a treasure hunt that led me into the kitchen cutlery drawer, under the piano lid, down to the outside toilet, back inside to the fridge, out to the letterbox and down the sloping garden to the fowl- houses, where one last clue was hiding among the eggs in a straw-filled laying box.

  The answer was ‘bed’. I carried the slip of paper (and the eggs) back up to the house and there, balanced on its stand on my top bunk with its handlebars scraping the ceiling, was the treasure – a brand new Raleigh 20 for my 10th birthday.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell Dad that a Raleigh 20, with its skirt-friendly low crossbar and upright handlebars, was dangerously close to being a girl’s bike, especially when, like this one, it had a baby-blue frame and white tyres. Still, it was in vastly superior condition to the rusting, broken-chained hand-me-downs that came before it, and when you flicked the pedals backwards it would switch flawlessly between its two gears. I was pretty happy with it.

  Over the summer break Mum took me shopping for the uniform for my new school – grey shorts, grey shirts, grey jumper, Roman sandals for the summer months, clompy leather shoes for winter. The sandals came in blue or brown and after some agonising we chose blue, an error whose terrible magnitude became apparent only on my first day at Northcross Intermediate, when I learnt the unwritten code stating brown sandals could be worn by anyone, but blue sandals were strictly for girls. At lunchtime I watched as a small lynch mob gathered to encircle and jeer at a weeping boy who was wearing blue sandals like a total sissy. I stood on the edge of the crowd, guiltily aware that someone ought to stick up for this loser, but also anxious that no one discover the pair of blue sandals just like his in my schoolbag, where they’d been safely hidden since before the 9 o’clock bell. I had girl’s hair. I had a girl’s bike. I’d spent the day telling a new cohort of classmates that the reason I was wearing a boy’s uniform was that I was indeed a boy. I was buggered if I was going to get caught wearing girl’s sandals as well.

  A few weeks into my first term at Northcross, Dad suddenly announced we were all going to Hastings to see his father. A smoker who’d also spent a lifetime inhaling flour at the bakery, Ernest had begun to suffer from asthma in his 70s. Dad told us he’d just had a particularly bad attack and was in hospital. It looked like it might be serious.

  The two oldest Dudding girls were no longer living at home, but by the Saturday afternoon the rest of us were in the blue Transit, heading south on State Highway 1. We broke the journey with an overnight stay with friends in Taupo – a big mistake, as it turned out. When we pulled up outside Grandad’s place on Sunday morning Dad’s brother-in-law Ray, Ngaire’s husband, was waiting for us at the gate.

  ‘You’re too late,’ he said. Grandad had had another asthma attack in hospital. He had died five hours earlier. Out in the back garden Ngaire was already burning Grandad’s old clothes in the 40-gallon-drum incinerator.

  Dad had always disliked his brother-in-law Ray, but from that day he loathed him – for appointing himself the messenger even though he wasn’t immediate family, for waiting at the gate and telling us before we’d even got out of the van, for being so puffed up with self-importance as he swaggered over to give us the news. Ray himself died a few months later of a heart attack.

  We got back into the Transit and drove to the hospital. Ernest lay grey on a gurney, a sheet covering him from chest down. Dad put his hand on his dead father’s shoulder and spoke. I remember he said something about getting there too late, but not much else. Perhaps he said something about the ridiculous fight they’d had about a stupid mail-order coat the last time they saw each other.

  It was the first dead body I’d seen, and the first time I’d seen Dad cry.

  Whenever my sisters and I talked about what went wrong for Dad in the 1980s, we usually agreed that the day Grandad died was a turning point – day one of the descent – even if we couldn’t quite understand why it had had such a profound effect. (After Dad himself died, I warily waited for a couple of years to see if history would repeat. Maybe every son is meant to go a little mad after the death of his father.)

 
Now, with the benefit of a hard-drive full of letters and a recorder full of interviews, I’m still certain something snapped the day Ernest died. But now I see it wasn’t so much a sudden change as a final straw. After decades of surviving on anxiety and cigarettes, of turning a blind eye to financial realities, of setting himself impossible deadlines and missing them, of castigating himself for working when he should have been with his family and for being with his family when he should have been working, of fretting about unmown lawns and the leaking roof, Dad was at last derailed by the death of his father.

  Professionally, the 1970s had been a great decade. He’d placed himself at the centre of the country’s literature with Landfall then Islands and published some award-winning books on the side (including Kevin Ireland’s Literary Cartoons). He’d earned the respect of the kind of people whose opinion he respected. He’d won a brief fellowship at Auckland University and been gifted a lovely big IBM electric typewriter as part of a Literary Fund grant.

  And despite the holes in shoes and roof, he’d been incredibly lucky with money, from Charles Brasch’s deep backing of Islands, to the profitable sale of the Christchurch house that meant the house in Torbay was all but mortgage-free.

  The real financial miracle, though, had been in 1974, when Dad won $15,000 from the Bonus Bonds account where he banked Islands subscribers’ cheques. This was a vast sum, the equivalent of three or four years of a mid-range salary, and it sustained for several more years Dad’s impossible dream: that he could produce Islands more or less fulltime and still keep us fed. There was even enough money to build an extension to the house in 1978 – a sun-deck, an extra bedroom and an indoor study for himself – though naturally the budget was wildly optimistic and the money ran out, leaving gib-board walls unplastered and unpainted, doors and windows without handles or latches and the floors unvarnished, which is how they all remained for the next 25 years.