Five years later. I’m in the vegetable section of the supermarket with our little boy, Benedict, who is 18 months old. As we go along the aisles, he’s naming things. Lettuce, he says. Good boy! I say. Beans. Carrots. Bananas. Good boy!
Coming towards me is Shirley, who shows no sign whatsoever that she has ever seen me before. Sitting in her trolley is a little boy about the same age as mine. He too is blond. He too is naming things. Apple he says. Potato!
‘Aw shut up,’ says Shirley.
I take my two babies round to see Miss Paterson, now retired, who lives two minutes’ walk from Robert’s parents. I say, ‘Thank you for being so nice to me when I was teaching.’ She laughs and says one of the kindest things anyone has ever said to me. She says, ‘Linda, you were so easy to be nice to.’
I wish I didn’t know. I wish I didn’t know that years later Miss Paterson goes to her letterbox, down the side of her house, perhaps to get the Evening Standard, and slips. She lies there. She’s there for hours, outside in the cold night, lying there on the concrete path. In her eighties, having given her life to the girls of Palmerston North Girls’ High, having retired on a decent enough pension, she lies on her path, her hip broken, waiting for someone to find her. Finally, the postman does. She dies. This is a life. This is her life. The end of her life.
But—15 years after I’ve first started teaching, I’m at Awatapu College and a parent comes in. I recognise her as a girl from 3M. Robyn. A nice girl who’d got a job in a shoe shop when she left school at 15. She’s now a parent, her son a little younger than mine. I’m teaching her son. He’s bright. He’s keen on reading. I ask her what happened to some of the others. Maureen? Diane? … Shirley?
Shirley still lives locally. ‘Her husband’s still in prison,’ says Robyn in a matter-of-fact way.
‘Prison?’ I say. ‘What for?’
‘Murder,’ says Robyn.
8.
THIS IS
YOUR
LIFE
In which we briefly learn how it feels to be famous
We fly in very low over Beirut. From high up it looks like a modern city, but as we approach the airport we’re almost on top of a vast shanty town. People are living under pieces of corrugated iron and strips of canvas. Next to me, my new friend is nearly home. She’s been a missionary in Beirut for decades.
We’re allowed off this time. In Perth they’d said, you can stay on, or you can get off. But once you’re off, you’re not allowed back on until the boarding call. It’s January 1972, and I’m dressed in a Donegal tweed midi skirt and knee-high boots, because I’m going to London, where it’s winter. A warm jumper and a leather jacket. My going-away outfit, in fact. I get off; I’ve finished the three books I brought with me and need to buy more. The air conditioning in the terminal has broken down and it’s as hot inside as out: unbearable. After 15 minutes, with three new paperbacks, I walk back towards the plane and I’m stopped.
‘If you don’t let me back on,’ I say, ‘I’ll die.’ It’s not hard to be convincing when it’s true. They hesitate and decide it’s easier to break the rules this once than be in the news for parboiling a young passenger.
In Frankfurt they say, just refuelling, so stay on the plane. It’s minus-something out there, they say, and I look out at the first piece of Europe that I’ve ever seen. On the ground below stands a warmly wrapped man, huge earmuffs, clapping his hands together to keep his blood from freezing. He’s organising the luggage off the plane. His head is surrounded by the cloud he makes in breathing.
Less than a week earlier, on the Tuesday, just two weeks till school starts again, I’m sitting in the sun next door having coffee with Lorraine, and Robert wanders over. He indicates we should go home, and as we walk back he says he’s had a phone call. From England. From ITV. They want him to go to London. To be on This Is Your Life. Barry John. The Lions fly-half who Robert has defended in his first test series. Barry plays rugby like a soccer player: all flair and skill and surprise. The Welsh say of their favourite son that he can run through a field of daffodils without crushing a petal. New Zealand crowds never know whether to love him or lynch him.
‘When?’ I say, and he says, ‘Well, they’re filming it this weekend. I told them I wanted to talk to you about it.’
‘God,’ I say. ‘Go!’
They ring back. By now it’s quite late on Tuesday and I hear him saying okay, he’ll come, but can my wife come too? He says we’ve just got married—a little stretch of the truth: it’s been nine months. They hesitate. They say, they don’t usually … His story warms up: we never had a honeymoon. He doesn’t admit to the two days in Whanganui. He says we didn’t have a honeymoon because he had to be in Palmerston North for the first of the All Black trials. They know a story they can use when they hear one. They say they’ll have to check it’s okay. They’ll call back.
On Wednesday, they call back. They say it’s fine, I can come.
Robert tells them that actually I don’t have a passport.
They say, leave it with them. They’ll call the New Zealand passport office.
They ring back. It’s fine. I’ll have to leave later than him, though, and they’ve arranged for me to get my passport issued in Auckland. I’ll need photos, birth certificate and marriage certificate.
On Thursday morning they ring again and they ask can we grab a flight to Auckland? In an hour or so? We say, actually, it’s not that simple. In 1972 flights from Palmerston North to Auckland don’t happen that often.
They go home to bed.
Late on Thursday, our time, they phone to say Robert’s flight leaves from Auckland early the next morning. He’s to arrive in London in time for the match between England and Wales. My tickets for a flight two days after are to be collected from a travel agent in Queen Street. They suggest, as time is running out, that we get a taxi to Auckland.
We ring the taxi company. They say, ‘A taxi to Auckland? Pull the other one,’ and hang up. With me hissing, ‘Tell them you’re an All Black!’ Robert rings again.
ITV rings again. Robert says, ‘We’re having a bit of trouble convincing the taxi company.’
‘We’ll give them a ring,’ they say, but it turns out the taxi company has decided to believe us and a cab is pulling up in our drive. As we clamber in, over the taxi’s intercom we hear the incredulous squeaking of the woman from the taxi office. ‘We’ve just had a call from London. It’s okay! They’ll pay!’
We drive through the night. I’m awake all the way, and at some time after 4 a.m., in pre-daylight saving days, I watch the sun rise. The taxi drops Robert at the airport. I watch him go, feeling fairly sure that this could be the last I’ll see of him. As he gets out of the taxi he says, ‘Oh shit, I’ve got an exam next week.’ Then I’m taken to Bayswater to my parents’ house. Conveniently, they’ve retired there from Levin only weeks earlier. The taxi driver agrees to wait for his fare—the equivalent of a couple of months’ rent—till we’re back.
Mum and Dad, in a well-managed state of continuous excitement, are my chauffeurs for the day. They take me to get photos taken. They take me to the passport office. They take me to a travel agent to pick up my tickets. They take me to the bank to turn our savings into traveller’s cheques. We have a few hundred dollars, thanks to earning one and a half salaries but still living like students. On Saturday afternoon, they take me to the airport. Everything, in a pre-internet world, where phones and telegrams are the only means of international communication, where even a national long-distance call is viewed as a luxury to be used sparingly, has gone unbelievably smoothly.
I arrive in London on Sunday, their time. At the airport Robert, still wearing the clothes he flew to London in, is standing beside a man in chauffeur’s uniform who holds a sign saying Mrs Robert Burgess. We are driven through streets that are out of the books I’ve been reading all my life. I am transfixed. Black taxis. Red double-decker buses. Red postboxes. Bobbies. I tentatively deal with a feeling that overwhelms me. I’m home
.
We draw up to the Clive Hotel in Primrose Hill and someone whisks away my red cardboard suitcase with Union Jack sticker on it. Now it’d look like it belongs to a Brexiteer; then people painted them on the roofs of Minis. ‘Oh sir,’ they say to Robert. ‘Your luggage arrived when you were out.’
Robert’s had more than four days in his current clothes. Unfortunately, his suitcase didn’t arrive when he did. He’d been told in advance there’s an aftermatch dinner, so he’d packed the suit he was married in, a Winston Peters-esque arrangement that he had made especially for him somewhere in Asia when on tour with the New Zealand Universities rugby team. His suitcase has been in Beirut or Frankfurt, patiently awaiting reconciliation.
It’s Barry John’s last season: at 27 he’s decided the best time to retire is when you’re a national hero. The cameras from This Is Your Life are in the dressing room to greet him. It comes as a total surprise. His wife Jan is clearly better at keeping a secret than I would’ve been. The only thing is, the day before, a cousin—who doesn’t know—says, ‘They’ll be putting you on This Is Your Life soon, boyo!’
The Welsh team, having fortunately just licked the pants off the English team, are delivered to the studio. By now Barry knows what’s happening. What he doesn’t know is that Robert is his surprise guest. So, after his wife, his parents, in-laws, his teacher from the primers (a lovely boy), a childhood mate (I could tackle him back then!), his first rugby coach (I knew even then), various rugby types and a whole Welsh male-voice choir who serenade him, Robert, resplendent in his yellow jumper and blue jeans, is wheeled out. He’s given two minutes to tell a yarn or two. Once, This Is Your Life was broadcast live, but after the unnerving occasion when a subject who had, it turns out, one more current wife than is usual, replied to ‘This is your life!’ with ‘No, it bloody well is not and bugger off,’ they now have a day’s grace.
The story Robert elects to tell involves mentioning that they’re finally finishing sanding Barry’s name off hundreds of desks at Palmerston North Girls’ High. This is somehow too personal, too potentially litigious, so when it plays the next night, they cut it. Sportsman, not sex symbol. They leave the banal fine player fine chap stuff, and Barry leaps up and tearfully shakes his hand, and that is that.
For this brief moment, for a bunch of inane words, ITV have paid thousands of dollars. No wonder Robert’s mother says as we leave, ‘When I think of the starving children …’
After recording the show Robert, still in jeans and jumper, goes to the aftermatch dinner, a black-tie affair hosted by The Rugby Union. ‘Sometimes,’ says Robert, ‘you get away with things when you’re a colonial.’
Back at the hotel he calls Massey’s vice chancellor, known to most people as Stewie, who takes time out from his daily walk picking up rubbish around Massey’s lovely campus to answer the phone, and he says yes, Bob, that’s fine, London, well I never, and he’ll let the prof of botany know.
We’ve got 10 days’ paid accommodation at the hotel but we go to Cardiff to stay with the Johns for a night. We go out for dinner: the other guests in the restaurant give Barry a standing ovation. I’m sort of hoping that this is the beginning of the rest of our lives. We stay the next night at Christ’s Hospital, where Gerald Davies is teaching, a public school which for centuries has been taking bright scholarship boys along with the sons of the gentry. The boys wear full-length gowns, the sort of thing Thomas Cromwell is painted wearing, and yellow socks to scare away the rats. When they go to London, hippies beg to buy their clothes.
Robert beats Gerald at squash. Gerald doesn’t cope terribly well.
Then we go back to London and shop. The most stunning buy is Robert’s shirt made out of kid leather. We both go for velvet trousers, and he goes for suede ones too. I go for a T-shirt with dozens of tiny buttons of different colours down the front, and some black flares done up down the front with five bold-coloured buttons. We both buy clumpy shoes with big toes. I get a cheesecloth smock and a tartan one too, to wear over a jumper. And I get a white broderie anglaise nightie.
It’s nearly 50 years ago, and I remember every single garment. We spent every penny of our savings, racing happily up and down the King’s Road, our summer tans being admired in shops. Once, amazingly, even being recognised by a shop assistant who’s seen Robert being banal on This Is Your Life.
It’s late March 1979. Robert is about to turn 30 and he winces as he walks because our doctor, also a friend, has just given him a vasectomy. Disconcertingly while Jim snips he chats, and he mentions he’s done this op on another All Black and he’s never seen such thick veins. It’s quite a new thing, this operation, but given our propensity to have a baby every 13 months, we think it’s wise. Larry, a friend who works in the Vet Department at Massey, mentions, too late, that he’s noticed the ewes don’t much like the rams that’ve had the operation.
The phone goes early in the morning and Robert, standing in the hall where the phone is, talks for a while before coming back.
‘ITV,’ he says. ‘They want me to go on This Is Your Life.’
‘Who for?’ I ask, stifling a yawn.
‘JPR Williams,’ he says. JPR Williams was the Lions rugby player who, then a med student, pulled out Robert’s tongue on which he was quietly choking. Robert was lying unconscious on Athletic Park at the time. We can see that this time they know Robert’ll have a story both flattering and unique. JPR’s not really a friend though, not like Barry and Gerald.
‘They’re ringing back,’ Robert says. ‘Do you want to come?’ We have passports and all that paraphernalia these days.
‘Will your parents look after the kids?’ I say, and we go around to their house and ask them and I watch them intently: if there’s even a hint of reluctance I won’t go. Ten days is a long time with a four- and a three-year-old. They say, ‘Of course!’ They’re not Christians for nothing.
So Robert answers the phone again and pulls his Can my wife come too routine and they obviously think Oh fuck, he’s that one, tied to her apron strings. And they say oh all right then. It turns out they’ve been turned down several times already by various All Black legends who are too busy on the farm to go halfway across the world for someone they haven’t particularly liked.
This time, we have a day or two to arrange things. Brother Henry, headmaster of St Peter’s College, where I’m teaching part-time, is impressed. He’s happy that I go for a week or so, as I’ve just got the one class and it’s easily covered. The botany prof, unimpressed, grumbles but agrees.
Robert’s parents slip us a generous amount of useful cash: we no longer have an account with any money in it.
King’s Road isn’t as good as it was seven years earlier, and in between we’ve been to the UK a few more times and lived in France for two years. We drag along looking at the shops and there’s nothing as good as suede trousers and shoes with big toes, and anyway trying on trousers isn’t what Robert feels like doing quite yet.
So we go to three places: the Natural History Museum. Hamleys toy shop. And Harrods: the toy department (and the Italian bag department). We buy Benedict, who can name most dinosaurs, a fine set of them from the museum. Solid hard plastic, long-lasting and at times a frightening weapon. We wish, wish that he was with us so he could see the vast skeleton of the diplodocus. Oh how they’d both love the Natural History Museum. From Hamleys we get him a Hornby train set with a wind-up key, because all little boys should have one. We get Gemma a Fisher Price Barn, not yet available in New Zealand, but envied at the homes of friends who’ve lived in America, and three little dolls from the Strawberry Shortcake range. A black London taxi and a red double-decker bus to share. Other than those, we are resolutely sexist in our choices.
We hire a car and drive to Wales. Unused to travelling without children fighting in the back seat, we are relieved to see we can still find pleasure in each other’s company.
The week comes to an end and I’m missing the children with a sharp cruel longing. Robert wants a n
ight in Lyon on the way home and he manages to organise it, seeing several of our friends for dinner at the Chez Rose. The trip home takes forever. We miss our connection and have to bus to Palmerston North from Wellington. Benedict and Gemma meet us at the stop at the corner of Robert’s parents’ street, and Benedict’s fringe is in his eyes now because Robert’s father is afraid of what we’ll say if he cuts it. Benedict grabs our suitcase and drags it manfully down the street. Gemma is aloof. She clearly wasn’t sure if she was ever going to see us again, and has pretty much accepted that she’ll be living at Grandma’s now.
We have dinner. We take them home. We all go to bed.
None of us can sleep. It’s midnight and we’re all awake and they climb into bed with us and dammit, we say. We all get up. We unpack the train set and wind it up, and put the dinosaurs next to the station, and the double-decker bus next to the farmhouse, and the taxi beside the dolls who move between the station and the farmhouse along our wide long hall. It’s the middle of the night but we cuddle and play, cuddle and play, cuddle and play.
9.
LYON
On living on the other side of the world
We get off the plane in Lyon. The man at Customs says, ‘Vous venez de Londres?’ And Robert says, ‘What?’ I’ve had a few years of being barely adequate at French at school and university, but he has managed to be in the A stream all the way through school yet avoid a second language. In his 3rd Form year, someone pushed him in the direction of accounting. Sadly, futilely.
Robert’s going to play for the LOU rugby club. LOU stands for the Lyon Olympique Universitaire, yet strictly speaking it has nothing to do with either the Olympics or any particular university. Marcel Astic, our patron, 50-ish, is at the airport to meet us. We’ve come via Toronto where we stay with my sister Wendy in nearby London, Ontario, then spend a few days with our friend John, who’s doing his PhD in Toronto. John takes us shopping and we manage to dissuade Robert from buying a pair of knee-high fur-lined boots to go with his freshly acquired full-length denim coat lined with cobalt-blue sheepskin.
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