by Adam Dudding
‘Stop!’ said one of my sisters. ‘We get the picture.’
Mum’s brain chose to remain inside her skull, but when she woke the next day she couldn’t walk or talk and her right hand was already starting to curl into itself, like she was holding a handful of grain for scattering to the chooks.
She spent the next four months in a hospital rehab unit, progressing from bed to chair to walker to stick. There was physio for her dead right leg and arm, vocab lists for her mangled speech. Another woman in her ward couldn’t speak either, though the pair of them still chatted, yabbering away without words, just hmmn-hmm-homm-hmm back and forth between the beds. Nothing, not even the absence of words, was going to stop Mum talking.
Some words returned within days, but they were slippery, untrustworthy things. One afternoon I dropped in just after an earlier visitor had left.
‘Who was it?’ I asked.
Mum couldn’t remember the name. After much stammer-ing, she finally located the part of her brain where she had once stored names of sisters and other important people, and returned with a word.
‘Omelette,’ she told me confidently. ‘Omelette.’
I later figured out it had been her younger sister Corinne.
Eventually she returned home to a house full of new handrails, to be nursed by the husband with failing lungs who, with every passing year, had been depending on her more and more to be his nurse, to fetch and carry and cook, and to feed the chooks because he couldn’t make it back up the hill from the fowl-run.
Shortly before she arrived, a contingent of volunteers led by the Waiake Beach regulars, average age 70ish, arrived at Sealy Road with spades and a concrete mixer, and laid a wheelchair-friendly concrete path from front gate to front door.
Recently I wrote a newspaper article about a choir Mum has joined for people with Parkinson’s, strokes and other neurological problems. The article opened with my account of her flinging the snails over the fence and heading to bed, but I left out one detail, which is that at the moment her stroke actually struck she and Dad were having sex. A national newspaper somehow felt too indiscreet a place to mention this impressive, appalling detail.
Once home, Mum was Dad’s new project, another baby from through the hedge who needed soothing and fattening up.
Shocked by her brush with death and conscious of the likely nearness of his own, Dad became soppier than ever. ‘She’s the most intelligent woman I’ve ever known,’ he said. He watched admiringly as she struggled to get a trouser-leg over her orthotic ankle-brace. ‘Look at those legs!’
After a few weeks, though, he became overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the task and fell into a proper can’t-get-out-bed depression. His GP gave him some pills, and a few weeks later he got up again. A breathing specialist gave him lessons in managing the panic caused by his perpetual breathlessness, and how to make better use of reduced lung function. He and Mum moved in with Ruth for a few weeks. He told Ruth that perhaps clinical depression was what had been wrong with him back in the 1980s, and it was a shame he hadn’t been offered happy pills like these back then. Ruth said, ‘No shit, Sherlock’, or words to that effect.
They returned once more to Sealy Road with its leaky roof and outdoor loo. They muddled along. From time to time my sisters and I would conclude They Really Can’t Go On Like This and repair something without Dad’s permission, or offer solutions involving a granny flat or a cottage at the bottom of someone’s garden, or even, heaven forfend, a retirement village. Tenacity and bloody-mindedness, and a desire by both of them to keep sitting on the porch and looking out over the small forest of rimu and kowhai and totara Dad had planted over four decades kept them there. When he finally got rid of the chooks, it was ‘temporary’.
He emailed us great lists of chores: there were plums to pick, tomatoes to stake, feijoas rotting on the ground if someone didn’t hurry over, the computer mouse was sticking, could you come and fit the oxygen cylinder so I can keep using it while driving, and I need a lift to the hospital on Wednesday.
Being feeble doesn’t mean you can’t still be a control freak. His invitation to a weekend working bee contained dozens of demands, including bagging up the chicken shit from the disused fowl-houses and separating out rusty chicken-wire from the ‘sound stuff’ he would then sell. (How!? To whom!?) The overgrowth around the creek needed cutting and some junk from the front garden could go, but only ‘with my guidance’.
In the event, he moved so slowly that he couldn’t keep an eye on both front and back gardens at the same time, and I recklessly threw away some pieces of rotten wood without asking him.
Mum slowly got better. Dad slowly got worse. It became impossible to tell who was nurse, who was invalid. He read books to her, brought her food, goaded her into ever-longer walks with her stick. She tip-tap-shuffled about the house, figured out how to make a cup of tea and burn beans on the stove one-handed, and it wasn’t long before she could walk further than him, if not faster.
He could still drive, though, and 20 months after Mum’s stroke, shortly before high tide on a high-summer Saturday, they drove to Waiake Beach for a new kind of adventure.
Dad was quietly hopeful there’d be someone there they knew and sure enough, as he parked on the yellow lines next to the boat ramp, their old friend Dave Tate was just coming out of the sea.
Dave carried Mum’s chair down to the waterline and offered to carry her too, but she turned him down. Instead she inched her way through the soft sand with Dave sweeping the path in front of her, like Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth. She sat in the chair for 20 minutes as the last of the incoming tide wet her ankles for the first time since her stroke. A beach-walker said something funny about mermaids, and a passing physiotherapist who worked with stroke victims introduced herself to say she was impressed by Mum’s sea-walk.
Once Mum was safely ashore Dad went for his own swim – not all the way out to the boats seeing it was high tide, but still 450 strokes on his back, his longest swim of the summer yet. Then they drove to Browns Bay in their togs for a café breakfast, and once home Dad fired off a euphoric email to his children about their incredible morning and his joy at bringing home ‘one well-fed, happy woman. Love to you all, R’.
There’s a photo Anna took of the two of them at Waiake about a year after that. They’re sitting in folding chairs on the sand near the boat ramp, shaded by a beach umbrella from the blinding midday sun. Mum is looking at the camera with a half-smile. Dad is looking at Mum.
He’s wearing black speedos and a wristwatch. His beard is white and so is most of the rug of spiralling hair on his chest. He’s squinting a bit but mostly he looks happy. He’s in the sun. He’s near-naked. He’s got sand under his feet and he can see the sea. He’s with her.
Look at it and you know what’s coming: 12 final months during which we all discover that whenever you think life with emphysema can’t get any worse it actually can. His haggard face at the 50th wedding anniversary meal where he’s too breathless to eat. The new bed from the children, the thank-you email, the barked shin, the day in Accident and Emergency. The heart attack and the skittering heartbeat in a hospital bed and the final rattle. The honorary doctorate ceremony he missed. The funeral, the speeches.
So I’ll stop here, leave him sitting under the umbrella, soaking up the summer heat on a beach on the North Shore. Because that’s the other slow-growing circle: the story of my old man and the sea.
There was once a boy who grew up in the middle of the North Island in the middle of the 20th century, who one teenage summer came north for his military service and discovered an isthmus city of coves and peninsulas, of sub-tropical heat and humidity, of people who saw the world a little differently.
A few years later he came back and married and bought a house, not far from the water, which he filled with children and cats and dogs and chooks and books. He moved to the South Island for a time, but the place and its people were cold and flat, and he gladly loaded up a van for the drive back to
the warm, hilly north, stopping for swims all the way, including one on a beach so carpeted with krill that he had to carry his crying young son across a crunching red desert to the sea.
He swam, and taught his children how to catch a wave with or without a board. He barbecued pipis in beer and butter and set fire to his son’s feet with meths. He drove to the beach in a baby-blue Transit van filled with rust and on the way home he stopped for fish and chips. He walked the beaches and cliffs talking about D. H. Lawrence and post-colonial fiction and his troubles. Once, a poet he’d published in one of his magazines wrote a lovely poem called ‘Summer’, about seeing him at the beach.
He worried too much. He smoked like a back-garden bonfire and made himself ill, yet even as he ran out of puff the seawater kept him afloat longer than anyone expected. He windmilled between boats, counting strokes – not waving, and not drowning. And when he wasn’t swimming he could sit next to the forgiving woman whose poem he’d published in his first-ever magazine, and look out at the waves, a white-haired Neptune surveying his domain, Canute in Speedos refusing to give up the fight. In this humid town, as he’d told a friend half a lifetime ago, he still sometimes felt moments of quite intense happiness based on warmth, and beach and hills and green.
Spend a couple of years unearthing your dead father and he starts haunting you. I try to leave him at Waiake Beach but he follows me around.
I’ve looked at so many photos I can shut my eyes and see him: the quizzical two-fingered scratch of the back of his cocked head when listening carefully, the deliberate eyelash flutter which means he’s pulling your leg but isn’t going to give you the pleasure of hearing him admit it, the crooked simper for attractive waitresses, the satirically furrowed brow if he’s noticed the camera, the authentic scowl if he hasn’t.
I’ll spot a clever newspaper headline or have a proud parental moment, or finish a new Ian McEwan novel, and the thought flickers then dies: Dad will like that – must tell him about it . . .
He’s been talking to me from within his letters and emails, but I find it difficult to summon the actual sound of his voice, apart from a general memory of a low, warm timbre and an accent that was definitely, but not strongly, Kiwi.
I have one short recording from a couple of months before he died, salvaged from our answerphone. He had rung to say happy sixth birthday to Noah and missed us, so he just said hi and asked us to call back. His voice was thin and scratchy and he paused every few words for a little more air, but he sounded cheerful, stretching out Noah’s name in a sort of ironic sing-song.
By then he hadn’t the strength to pick either of our children up, but he’d still read to them whenever he was around, and he had a talent for making Noah laugh. He’d make a huge performance of putting together his nebuliser, like a busker unpacking his juggling pins, before puffing a mist of steroids into the big plastic tube and puffing on it with crossed eyes as Noah giggled till he could barely stand.
In the hot sticky weeks after our picnic at Waiake, I take the kids swimming most evenings at our nearest beach, Mairangi Bay.
It’s not a great picnic beach but after a summer cyclone the waves get pretty good. I’ve abandoned my wave-catching lectures, but one evening I realise Noah is getting the hang of it anyway. He’s arching his arms right back and putting his head right down. He’s almost timing the dive right – late enough that the wave had shown its power but not so late it’s already broken.
A large, smoothly curving wave approaches but he dives too early, realises it’s no good and quickly curls up in the water to abort the attempt.
The wave just behind is even better. I’m about to catch it myself when I decide to stop and watch. He waits, looks, turns, dives, and disappears under the foam, but five metres later he’s still moving with the wave. He curls to end the ride then stands and turns, pushing water and hair off his face. He looks back at me in triumph, and he’s laughing.
Tailfeather
Thanks first of all to the Victoria University Press team – Fergus Barrowman, Ashleigh Young, Kirsten McDougall, Craig Gamble, Kyleigh Hodgson and Holly Hunter – for their warm support and advice from start to finish. Thanks especially to Fergus for agreeing to publish this book in the first place, and to Ashleigh for her punctilious attention to every shonky sentence, missing macron and contestable parenthesis once I’d finally delivered a draft.
I’m grateful to Creative New Zealand for a generous arts grant that made it possible to take time off work to research and write, and to my employers at Fairfax Media, and especially the Sunday Star-Times, for their support. A grant from Copyright Licensing New Zealand enabled my research at the Alexander Turnbull Library, where my hand was held by the estimable Jocelyn Chalmers and others. Thanks also to archivist David Murray at the Hocken Library for digging through the collections of Charles Brasch and others.
Much of the book couldn’t have been written at all if it weren’t for the people who gave their time to talk about my father, and were such good company it never felt like work. Thanks to Rose Beauchamp, Mike Beveridge, Jenny Bornholdt, Chris Bourke, Carol and Mick Delaney, Ian and Gail Dudding, Patrick Evans, Ian Fraser, Wendy Galvin, Maurice Gee, Witi Ihimaera, Kevin Ireland, Kate, Fiona Kidman, Bill Manhire, Tom McWilliams, Beth Nannestad, Gregory O’Brien, Anne Peart, C. K. Stead, Tony Stones and Ian Wedde.
For places to write, encouragement, advice, random facts, assorted favours and early feedback, thanks to Bill and Euphymya Lavelle, Daisy McGlashan and Nicki Pettigrew, Brendan O’Brien, Peter Simpson, Jenny Hellen, Alex Sinclair, Jon O’Malley, Metro magazine, and Max and Lucy. Thanks also to Steve Kilgallon, mostly because he wanted to be on the Acknowledgements page, but also because it was a conversation with him that helped get this started.
An early version of Chapter 1 was published in Landfall 229, some chunks of Chapter 22 were purloined from a feature written for the Sunday Star-Times magazine, Sunday, and fragments of Chapter 8 were first written during a workshop run by Deborah Shepard at the Michael King Writers’ Centre. Thanks to all concerned.
For kind permission to quote from unpublished correspondence, thanks to James Norcliffe, Maurice Gee, Jack Lasenby, James K. Baxter Trust trustee John Baxter, Janet Frame’s literary executor Pamela Gordon, and Martin Crump, son of the late Barry. Harry Watson kindly gave me permission to quote from his mother Jean’s novel Stand in the Rain. Thanks to Jenny Bornholdt (again) for permission to reproduce her poem ‘Summer’. Thanks and apologies to Anne Kennedy for my misremembering of her story ‘Damascus’. Glenn Jowitt’s mad portrait of my father’s head amid a bookshelf of Islands appears with permission of the Glenn Jowitt Trust. Paul Buckley’s magnificent photo of a Sealy Road backyard ping-pong game is reproduced with Paul’s permission.
Much love and many thanks must go, of course, to my family. My mother Lois let me rummage through her letters and photos and life, tolerated all my interrogations, and didn’t veto a word when I showed her the draft. She’s an amazing woman. My sisters Rachel, Ruth, Melissa, Natasha and Anna have enthusiastically joined me in digging through family photos and memories, and between us we unearthed all sorts of surprises.
The entire exercise, though, would have been impossible without the endless support, encouragement and sharp-eyed first reads of the wonderful Catriona Ferguson. I’m hugely grateful to her and to our children Eliza and Noah, for being so tolerant over the many months when I kept slipping away to read boxes of musty letters and read proofs instead of being a good husband and father. Thanks guys. As for my own father? The things I have to thank him for would fill a book.
Robin Dudding, around 1938.
Bohemia in Auckland. From left: poet Kevin Ireland, artist Tony Stones and would-be editor Robin Dudding on Queen Street, sometime in the mid-1950s. (Note the ever-present cigarette.)
Robin, centre, with parents Ernest and Winifred, sister Ngaire and brother Ian. The photo was taken the day of Robin and Lois’s wedding in March 1958, hence the cat-that-got-the-cream expression,
and the ladies’ hats.
Robin Dudding and Lois Miller at a party in Auckland, mid-1950s. Robin was instantly drawn to this young woman who reminded him of Ingrid Bergman. She took a while to reciprocate. (Note the ever-present cigarette.)
Mate 2, Robin’s first magazine, co-edited with Dave Walsh and with contributors including Barry Crump, Maurice Gee, Frank Sargeson, Kevin Ireland and Lois Miller. The cover drawing by Tony Stones is of George, whom he met while seagulling on the Auckland wharves.
Landfall 84, the fourth Dudding edition of the literary journal founded by Charles Brasch in 1947. The cover design is by Ralph Hotere, and contributors included Michael Gifkins, Ruth Dallas, Frank Sargeson, K. O. Arvidson and Ian Wedde, with paintings by Gretchen Albrecht.
Ralph Hotere’s cover design, complete with bilingual dirty joke, for the launch edition of Islands, which was founded in the white heat of outrage that followed Robin’s dismissal from editorship of Landfall and the Caxton Press.
A party to celebrate the 1970 arrival of the sixth Dudding child. The double-bed image had previously decorated James K. Baxter’s subversive ‘A Small Ode on Mixed Flatting’, which was printed at Caxton Press in 1967.