by Adam Dudding
My parents loved the narrow streets, the time-weathered architecture and locals. Catriona’s mother, on her first-ever trip to Europe, overcame the language barrier at the village delicatessen by oinking, mooing and clucking at the man behind the counter till she got the ham, milk and eggs she needed. We were hugely entertained when Catriona went to a pharmacy to ask for something for her cystitis and was given an antiseptic drug that you can’t get in the UK called Mictasol Bleu, which turns your wee a shocking blue, and I was so intrigued by it that I took one to see if it would turn my wee blue too.
Never a stoic, Dad complained unceasingly about his hips, lungs, guts, bank balance. Yet he was unstoppable, grunting and grumbling his way across a Himalayan range of pensione steps, aircraft boarding stairs and steep Spanish lanes.
‘However decayed and broken-down I feel,’ he told Bill Manhire, ‘I still think I’m OK . . .’
Mostly true, but not always.
Catriona and I rejoined them in Spain for another week of pretending everything was fine, which it was, until all of us bar Mum came down with a vicious flu. For Catriona and me it meant a couple of days in bed aching all over and coughing, but for Dad it meant a frightening contraction of his world.
In Madrid he walked out of a café thinking the rest of us were just behind him. By the time he realised we weren’t coming he didn’t have enough strength to turn around, reopen the heavy spring-loaded door and fetch us, but nor could he make it back to our nearby hotel alone. When we finally came out a few minutes later he was leaning against a wall gasping, face contorted, skin grey, spitting with anger.
‘Where the fuck were you?’ he hissed between gasps, and though he was hunched over, for a moment he seemed bigger and scarier than he had for years. It was dinnertime in the 1980s all over again, only this time he didn’t have the strength to smash a plate, let alone stalk off. We bit our tongues and apologised, then crawled back to the hotel together, where eventually he stopped shaking with rage and took an extra dose of steroids a few days earlier than he’d really wanted to.
After they’d returned to New Zealand and the much-delayed split was finally enacted, I fell silent for weeks until Dad’s emails demanding a sign of life got the better of me and I confessed our secret. He replied with a rare telling-off, though mainly to say he felt wounded we’d not trusted them enough to say what was going on, and for making him feel stupid for not spotting anything amiss.
He wrote as many emails to Catriona as to me while we were apart, and a year later, when we’d finally untangled most of the knots I’d tied myself in, and we were warily but definitely back together, he was very happy, and happier still when we said we were having a baby, and that we’d be coming back to New Zealand once that was done.
Four months before our planned return to New Zealand, Dad finally reached the top of the queue for his second hip replacement. But rather than being relieved he was terrified. Somehow he’d developed a theory that the state of his lungs meant he’d probably die under anaesthesia. He was fretful and morbid, unable to sleep.
It seemed unlikely to me – surely the surgeons wouldn’t be offering the operation if they expected it to kill him – but over the course of an ambiguous, side-stepping phone call it became obvious that he’d really like me to be there for the operation, so I booked a fortnight’s leave and a flight to New Zealand. If all went well I could draw up a post-op exercise chart for him like last time, and if not, well . . .
Anna emailed me the day after the phone call. After I’d told Dad I was coming, he’d slept through the night for the first time in weeks. He was looking the healthiest he’d been in six months. She and Mum had talked about it, and they reckoned he was still haunted by that trip to Hastings to see his father, when he’d arrived five hours too late. Dad couldn’t bear the idea of that happening to me too. He was, he’d told Anna, very very pleased I was on my way home.
21. Sixteen things my father taught me
Everything will go wrong.
Cars won’t start. Roofs will leak. Tools will be lost and when they’re found they will be broken or blunted or out of petrol. Coffee will spill on important papers. Eggshell will fall into the bowl when you’re making scrambled eggs. Wasps will build nests in your paper archives. There will not be enough money in the bank to cover the bill. There is never enough time. It will always be impossible to find the thing.
Everyone lets you down.
Printers will print the artwork upside down. Typesetters will insert an extra error after you’ve returned the last proof. There will always be more things wrong with your car after it gets back from the garage, and with your teeth after you get home from the dentist. If you lend a son-in-law a gardening implement he will always bring it back broken. Someone has always moved the thing.
Everything is negotiable.
Most services, including dentistry and car repairs, can be exchanged for a tray of fresh eggs.
How to treat a chicken with scaly leg mites.
Fill a jam-jar with 50% kerosene and 50% engine oil. Hold the chook’s body close to calm it, then take one leg and carefully edge it into the jar and leave it there for a few seconds – it stings, so be ready for a bit of wriggling. Repeat with the other leg, then put the chook down carefully so she doesn’t flick kerosene and oil all over the place.
How to make an excellent liquid fertiliser.
Fill a large cloth potato sack with spadefuls of compacted shit and straw scraped from the floor of your fowl-houses. Suspend the sack in a 40-gallon drum of water, cover and leave to steep for a few weeks, by which time all the goodness will now be in the black, pungent liquid.
Don’t make loud noises near Buff Pekin bantams.
They have weak hearts and if they get a scare they could drop dead on the spot.
A book must have generous gutters.
You shouldn’t have to crack the spine just so you can comfortably read all the words on the page.
Baths should always be scalding hot.
Same with showers, though they should always end with a few shocking seconds of 100% cold water to strengthen your heart.
If you wash dishes in hot enough water you don’t need detergent.
Walk away from unpleasant situations.
If you’re not physically present when an argument’s happening, you can’t possibly lose.
Walk away from pleasant situations.
If there are people visiting and everyone’s having a nice time, no one will notice if you slip away for half an hour to feed the chooks or take a quick siesta.
Always take a siesta.
Old things are better, even if they’re broken.
Money is mostly bad.
It’s hard to beat a really good Chinese meal.
Catch the wave just before it breaks.
Any later and it’s all foam. Any earlier and it won’t pick you up.
22. Summer
ON THE LAST Saturday of January 2016 the cicadas are shrieking like tinnitus and it’s too hot to eat dinner at home so I fill a chillybin with food and bottles of iced water and we drive to Waiake. It’s no longer my nearest beach – not even Mum lives in Torbay now – but it’s still only 10 minutes’ drive. I’m back on the Shore and in the summer holiday months, when the central city becomes an empty, boring furnace, the Shore is still the best place to live.
At Waiake the tide’s so low the kids doing bombs off the raft are only up to their chests when they stand back up, gritty mud and cockles sliming between their toes. Once it was four rusty 40-gallon drums lashed together under an algae-slimed wooden platform, but the latest replacement is a prefabricated plastic thing.
There are half a dozen yachts bobbing in the bay, some of them the same ones Dad used to swim past, counting to save his life (‘900 backstrokes at dawn, this season’s record’ he emailed me a few months after his first hip operation), while Mum breast-stroked about the shallows – or, as autumn edged into winter and it got too cold for fair-weather swimmers, while Mu
m promenaded on the shore telling another walker that in fact she knew that person way out by the boats waving his arms in the air as if in distress; actually he’s doing backstroke.
We spread a blanket and some towels near the pohutukawa that crouches on a low seawall at the north end of the beach. For decades the tree shaded a stretch of shore carpeted with kikuyu, and we’d claim the scratchy-grassed hollow for the day, a shifting cohort of parents, sisters, sisters’ boyfriends, school friends and neighbours, there for a quick dip, a day’s indolence or something in between. Violent storms in the early 2000s tore the kikuyu away and now it’s just sand again.
We spray ankles against sandflies, unpack food, throw a ball for the dog, try to identify our children’s heads in the swarm around the raft. They don’t seem to have drowned yet.
Waiake increasingly became Dad’s gym, especially when one hip or the other made walking impossible. He and Mum befriended other beach regulars, but didn’t get all their names. One woman was just The Wife of the Man Who Hides from His Dog. Mr Las Vegas didn’t swim, but he walked to keep his weight down and had an overseas trip most years. Flipper Bob once turned up at Sealy Road with five bags of seaweed, and dug Robin’s veggie garden over, and The Other Bob gave my nieces his old P-Class yacht after Mum told him they were learning to sail.
In the weeks before his second hip op, Dad was so crippled he needed a cane all the way to the water’s edge, where he’d leave it standing in the sand. After his swim Mum would take it to him to save him limping out of the shallows, until one morning The Other Bob turned up with an attachment he’d fashioned so that Dad could take his stick all the way into the sea and leave it floating, anchored by lead weights in a mesh bag, as he swam.
I walk the length of the beach, taking photos, trying to remember what’s changed compared with my earliest memories of Waiake: a missing set of swings, a bus shelter that wasn’t there before, a new playground, missing kikuyu, a pohutukawa that used to be much smaller.
It’s such a low tide. The muddy creek at the north end dribbles into a temporary lagoon that stretches across the beach, attracting toddlers to its urine-temperature shallows.
It’s so low that the rocks are dry between the headland and the Tor – the clay-yellow nubbin of land that must have disconnected from the main cliff centuries ago. In the summer holiday between intermediate and high schools, Desleigh Jameson and I scrambled to the top with unstated yet clear intent but didn’t quite summon the courage to kiss, though I allowed my friends to infer the worst.
I walk into the water and it’s so warm there’s no surprise. It’s too calm for body surfing but that’s usually the case at Waiake. It was at Long Bay, our other beach, that Dad showed me how you timed the flat dive shoreward so your momentum combined with the wave’s and you got a decent ride so far in that you risked grinding your face into the sand. All summer I’ve been trying to teach my own kids with a combination of demonstration and impatient yelling, but they always get bored and duck-dive away as I’m trying to explain the physics of why waves break.
By the turn of the millennium, Editor Dudding was long out of the literary game. Islands had been officially dead for a decade and he hadn’t written a Listener headline in years. Mostly he slowly gardened and swam and sat in the sun, with sidelines in limping, coughing and complaining.
He read a lot – out loud if it was a shareable passage and someone was near enough to hear. He sent a swooning email to Catriona after having taken her advice to read A. S. Byatt’s Possession – it was ‘like having a real adventure’. He asked Bill Manhire to explain, seeing he was the clever academic, just what it was that made Colm Tóibín’s books so mouth-wateringly addictive. He would read each new Philip Roth as soon as it had arrived at the Browns Bay library.
Mostly, though, he read crime fiction, especially stuff with a comic edge – the semi-fictional adventures of Jewish country-singer-turned-P. I. Kinky Friedman, the witty brutality of Elmore Leonard, the Florida capers of Carl Hiaasen. He also reread a lot of P. G. Wodehouse.
A bibliophile in his dotage can read whatever the hell he likes and arguably you’ll find more pleasure, wisdom and craft in a single page of Wodehouse or Friedman than in ten chapters of some well-regarded literary novels. But I always wondered if there was a whiff of sour grapes in his choice of material, a private fuck-you to the world of serious literature, especially New Zealand literature, the tantalising, infuriating thing that had driven him half-mad, all-but-scuttled his marriage and kept him near the breadline all his life.
Or if not sour grapes, perhaps self-preservation: if Kevin Ireland was right and decades of immersion in gloomy, Polish-style NZ Lit had helped push him into depression, why risk it all again when he could be giggling in his armchair with Bertie Wooster, or picking up the phone with a greeting borrowed from Kinky Friedman: ‘Start talking!’
Yet when the literary past called, he didn’t snub it. He was quietly chuffed to get an entry in the 1998 Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, and again when in 2000 Bill Manhire dedicated Doubtful Sounds, a collection of Manhire’s essays and interviews, to him. A few years after that Bill, once Dad’s protégé but now the softly spoken capo dei capi of NZ Lit, made him an offer he wasn’t allowed to refuse: be guest editor of the 2003 edition of Best New Zealand Poems, an online series run by Bill’s International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University.
The email in which Dad explained to Bill why he should ask someone else instead of him was full of the same half-ironic self-flagellation, agonising doubt and unmistakeable excitement that ran through the correspondence of his Mate, Landfall and Islands days. He listed the reasons for his ‘crippling trepidation’ about taking the job, which included an inability to understand or judge poetry, his arthritis, an imaginary stomach ulcer, being very busy with a grandson’s fundraising sausage sizzle, his disconnection from the literary scene of late and his preference in any case for growing tomatoes, leeks and chickens, and, perhaps most insightfully, because: ‘one would like to be famous, notable, useful, contributing . . . but it also seems that temperamentally, I’m a bit unemployable cos I worry myself into a blue funk.’
And yet, he conceded, for all his ignorance of current poetry ‘my ears prick up when I stumble across something I like and it wouldn’t do me any harm to stop reading US crime books . . .’
‘Hi Robin,’ Bill replied. ‘I take it that’s a yes!’
So over the course of 2003 Dad read most of the New Zealand poetry published in print or online that year, exchanged emails with Bill in which he fretted about how awful some of it was, and early the next year pared it down to the 25 he liked best. For all the protestations he was patently thrilled to be flexing his creaky editorial muscles, and it turned out he recognised most of the poets’ names even after his 10 years in the wilderness: here were Jenny Bornholdt and Richard von Sturmer, Bob Orr and Gregory O’Brien, Chris Price and Elizabeth Smither, Peter Bland and Kevin Ireland.
His introductory essay included a warm (if typically backhanded) acknowledgement of Mum’s involvement – ‘my wife Lois has to accept at least 50 percent of the blame or praise for the present selection; I couldn’t have managed without her expert reading’. One of his (her?) selections is a poem by Anne Kennedy, author of the short story ‘Damascus’, entitled ‘I was a feminist in the eighties’, something that tickles me rather, though perhaps I’m looking too hard for patterns and echoes.
In the closing paragraphs of his introduction Dad identifies his own patterns and echoes:
It has been rewarding to greet some old friends in the poetry world – Kevin Ireland, Peter Bland and, particularly, Gordon Challis, whose poem comes from his second collection, published last year, 40 years after his first. So, a personal note here. The first magazine I edited (with one other, David Walsh) was the second issue of Mate, in 1958. The contributors to that issue included Gordon Challis, Kevin Ireland and Lois Miller (aka Lois Dudding). In several ways, then, Best New Zealand Poems
2003 is the last link in a rather slow-growing circle. (As a matter of interest – and some pride – the other contributors to that issue of Mate were: Odo Strewe, Peter Fairbrother, Maurice Gee, Alan Roddick, Barry Crump [first publication], Frank Sargeson, John Graham, Charles Doyle and Anthony Stones.)
I believe that magazine gave some pleasure to quite a few people. I hope the same can be said for Best New Zealand Poems 2003.
It’s an unfamiliar sound, one that hasn’t been heard for decades, but this is Robin Dudding blowing his own trumpet. It’s something else too, with its talk of a last link and a slow-growing circle. He’s not dead yet, won’t be for another four years, but this is the editor’s swansong.
In the middle of that year, Catriona gave birth at home to our second child, a girl. Eliza arrived just after 10pm and Mum and Dad turned up soon after to admire their 15th and final grandchild. Six weeks after that, Mum’s brain blew up.
It was just after midnight. She’d been in the garden picking snails from her flower garden and flinging them over the fence to the neighbours, rather than kill them. She was going to bed when she suddenly felt weak and lost consciousness.
The night was like a practice run for the night of Dad’s death: the same family phone-tree in the middle of the night, the same tearful streetlamp-lit drive from home to the hospital in Takapuna, the same stomach lurch and mental exploration of the possibilities: how do I feel, just hypothetically, if my parent is already dead, or is going to die, or ends up a vegetable? And which would be worse?
At the hospital Mum was behind a curtain on a gurney with an IV drip and an ID wristlet, unconscious through most of it. There were tests and scans, but not much sense of urgency. Treatment appeared to consist mainly of waiting for her to live or to die. As the sky lightened, a doctor showed us the huge ink blot on one side of the CAT scan of Mum’s brain, where the blood from a broken vessel was flooding the cranium and putting huge pressure on the brain tissue, rearranging the soft structures like an egg being whisked. The pressure may still be building, said the doctor, and in the worst cases the pressure gets so great the brain starts to squeeze out the hole at the base of the . . .