Michael has been away for two years and we’ve followed his progress on the map of the world on the wall by the kitchen table. He can’t spell, but he’s an excellent letter writer. He has done unbearably romantic things, like going behind the Iron Curtain with a friend who has an MG. People plead with them to sell them their jeans. So they do. He has a good eye for clothes, and in Italy he buys me two fine wool cardigans—dark red, bottle green—and, amazingly, coloured tights to match. New Zealand has nothing to compare.
He’s home at last, and Mum is bringing him over to Marton to pick us up from school. I’m feverish with excitement, and am sent to sickbay. The teacher on sickbay duty is the sewing teacher, who makes our costumes for the school play, and she says to me, as if she knows me well, ‘Well you are highly strung.’
I’m in my last year of school, at Rangitikei College, and I’m in the school play. We have rehearsals on Sundays, and Michael, freshly back and frequently home for weekends, drives me over. I’ve loved the opportunities offered by a bigger school. Last year Kitty in Charley’s Aunt. This year, ironically, I’m the sports teacher, Miss Gossage (‘Call me Sausage’), in The Happiest Days of Your Life. A teacher from England who works down the road at Nga Tawa, a friend of Bruce Rennie, the teacher who’s directing the play, lends me her stripey public-school blazer to wear in the play. She says: one condition—I introduce her to my dishy brother. She’s noticed him at play practice.
In Europe he’s hitch-hiked everywhere, and in a reciprocal way Mum and Dad pick up hitch-hikers, many from other countries, and it seems like every second week we have one or two sitting down with us for a meal or even staying the night.
He’s been back just weeks when he comes home for the weekend and sits on the bed and he goes all moist-eyed and tells me he’s met a girl and he can’t believe how much he loves her. I feel terrifyingly grown up, being confided to in in this way. The word love is from pop songs and movies, not from your family. Daphne is English and she’s in New Zealand for a working holiday with her friend and the absolutely amazing thing was that she and Michael lived near each other in London and have even gone to the same pub but they’d never met. And the other amazing thing is that she and her friend Jenny are staying with the Hoggs, because Jenny’s father is someone important in the English Rugby Union, and Mr Hogg is also important in rugby, but in New Zealand, and he’s been in the war with Dad. Almost a friend. There’s someone called Jack Griffiths in the mix. Whenever Dad mentions him, which is often, he chuckles.
‘I’m going to ask Mum,’ Michael says, ‘if I can bring her home for Christmas.’
Mum says to me, ‘Well, I don’t know. Probably not. Christmas is for family.’ What Mum doesn’t say is, I’ve only just got my boy back. And this girl is English. And he’ll marry her and they’ll have babies. And she’ll want to be with her own family. And he loved England and now he’ll move to the other side of the world.
And it turns out she is right.
But now she says to Michael, ‘Of course. Invite her home.’
FIVE
It’s my first Christmas when I guess I’m officially a grown-up, though I don’t feel like one yet. I’ve just finished my second year at university, am turning 20, and my friend Sue and I decide we’ll hitch-hike to New Plymouth to see if we can get live-in waitressing jobs.
So optimistic in such uncertain times. It’s 1968. Though the rest of the world is in chaos—Russia has marched into Prague, French students are pulling up cobblestones and hurling them at the gendarmes—New Zealand still feels oddly innocent. Especially Massey University, with its leafy campus and its students coming mainly from the regions.
We get jobs at a hotel in Devon Street, one of those two-storeyed ones wrapped in verandas at both levels. Subsequently demolished. We do a mix of waitressing and house-maiding, which means we learn valuable skills, like using a used towel to wipe out the bath after cleaning it. We get put off our food when we see what goes on in the kitchen. For a start, the head chef, who trained in the army, has a useful cloth over his shoulder. He can use it to wipe the sweat that irrigates his face and occasionally seasons the sauce, and also to tidy up any gravy that spreads too far beyond the meat. The second cook has a paralysed arm and she lifts it with her good arm and thuds it down on top of the meat, using its fingernails to render the beef immobile and therefore sliceable.
We meet life. We meet death. Not long after we start work, a young man, a musician who we’ve sort of heard of, who has paid for his room in advance, dies in it. We can’t get him to open his door for his early-morning cup of tea, so we go out onto the fire escape and try to look in through the window. The blind is down but through the gap at the side we get a glimpse of an arm, very pale, which flops over the edge of the bed. We get the manager, who tries the locked door, then also looks through the window. ‘Oh Christ,’ he says.
We meet a conman. He’s Canadian and when he strolls in looking for a job he impresses the management with his understanding of the art of cocktail-making. When we get our exam results, and we’ve both passed, he plies us with Fallen Angels and Black Russians. He’s sharing our flat down the road from the hotel, but we see little of him. We leave clean sheets by his door, and there they stay.
He’s a smooth talker. He’s formed a relationship with a sweet-faced girl who works in the department store along the road. She’s a member of the Brethren Church. There’s a flurry of unrest at work and a hint that the till in the bar isn’t balancing and he’s being sacked. So we go down the road to see her at the haberdashery counter and tell her that her boyfriend is about to leave. I’m not sure how, but we know she’s lent him money. She is polite but firm with us: she is unaware that he’s leaving, in fact she doubts if it’s true, because he would have said, and yes she has given him money, but this is because they’re to be married.
By that afternoon, he’s gone.
Christmas approaches. There’s still the visit from the Victoria University cricket team to come. There’s still the Watersiders’ Tournament which so nearly could have also been a #MeToo moment. There’s bullying and there’s kindness, there’s lonely travellers and nice boys staying with their parents who’ve brought their race horses to New Plymouth. There’s friends, and friends of friends from university; there’s sunbathing on Ngāmotu Beach, an Allison Durbin concert at the Bowl of Brooklands, and walking at night to look at the lights in Pukekura Park. There’s a letter from Robert saying he doesn’t want to go out with me anymore because it’s his third year and, what with the time taken up by rugby, he needs to put time into his university studies.
But it is Christmas, and if I stay and work I’ll get double-time. Given the choice, I get on the bus and Mum drives over to Bulls to pick me up.
Deborah’s working in Palmerston North so she’ll be home. Michael and Daphne are in England. Wendy has left for Europe: another big ship, with her waving from high above us. She has spent months in Italy as au pair to someone who is very important at Fiat. Around now, she is hitch-hiking through Spain with other girls. She is not the conscientious letter writer that Michael is, and Mum has only to hear of a disaster anywhere in Europe to assume that Wendy has been involved.
I arrive home on Christmas Eve, and I’m so tired. I wake in the morning but I can’t move my limbs to drag me to the tree to see if there’s a box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray. My throat hurts and my head is heavy and I lie in a darkened bedroom, which looks a bit girlish and pink now that I’m getting older. I sleep all day. Occasionally I wake to the distant murmur of what’s left of my family, celebrating Christmas.
SIX
We’re in England for Christmas. Does this mean snow, and sleighs, and ice skating on the Thames?
No, of course it doesn’t, because it’s London, and the temperature is somewhere under 10 but above zero.
Robert is on tour with the All Blacks and I have gone too. Not to hang around him, but to stay with my brother in Yorkshire and friends in other parts of the country. But we get t
ogether from time to time. On Boxing Day they’re playing the Combined Services. So Christmas will be in London.
I’m staying with Cliff and Nuala Morgan for a few days. Cliff played for Wales and the Lions in the fifties, and came to New Zealand to commentate on the Lions tour in 1971. The first day I’m in London I’m at Robert’s hotel and there’s a tentative knock on the door and it’s Ernie Todd, the team’s manager. The team have been invited to meet the Prime Minister, Ted Heath, for pre-dinner drinks, and most of them are not the slightest bit interested in going. They’ve already met the Queen and Princess Anne, and frankly that’s enough.
Ernie is unsuccessfully pulling rank. He’s fairly sure Robert, brought up to be courteous, will oblige, but just to be certain he looks at me slightly doubtfully and, clearly thinking of bulking out the numbers, says I can go too. If I like.
I’m sorry it’s not someone famous, like Winston Churchill, but I agree to go.
I think we go to the home of an official from the Rugby Football Union. We are driven in the All Blacks’ emptyish bus to a smart block of mansion flats. These do not exist in New Zealand, and we are shown to a lift which has a liftman, and then taken into a room crammed with prosperous middle-aged people. In England, rugby is a public-school game and most of the people here probably went directly from Nanny’s arms to prep school. Half a dozen reluctant All Blacks are being propelled around from one coquettish woman to another. I feel uneasy, repelled. It’s like being in a room overflowing with Mrs Robinsons.
There’s a hush, and a murmur which swells, and Ted Heath, looking exactly as Gerald Scarfe has drawn him, enters the room.
Prime Minister! they say. So lovely to see you, Prime Minister, they say.
He is as uninterested in meeting the All Blacks as those who didn’t come—and indeed those who did—are in meeting him. Shepherded by a fawning female fan, he comes to our group. ‘A wife?’ he says in bored disbelief. ‘I didn’t know you were allowed.’ I start a tediously lame joke about the wives being the English team’s secret weapon but my story is so convoluted that partway through his nostrils tighten with boredom and he moves on.
We have Christmas Day with Cliff and Nuala, and their children Catherine and Nick. Cliff’s a Welsh miner’s son and he could well be the nicest person I’ve ever met. He’s articulate, genial and generous He has an astute fox-like face, enhanced by a Puckish grin.
Since coming to New Zealand in 1971, he has suffered a stroke. At 42 years old, he was in Germany reporting on sport when it happened. He’s now back with the BBC, but for a while after the stroke he found himself with no work and little money. Friends—including Richard Burton—attempted to assist financially, but he didn’t accept it. He has impressive friends. The phone goes when Cliff is out, and when he returns a few minutes later Nuala says, ‘Give Spike a call.’ He’s ringing Cliff to say he wants to meet the All Blacks’ gutsy little winger, Grant Batty. When Grant and Robert are both in ‘the early trial’ in 1971, it’s Grant who says to Robert, ‘We’re not going to get in. Let’s enjoy ourselves.’ Spike Milligan is mad on ruby. He visits the team in their hotel in London and he flies in parallel to the floor, tackling a bemused Alan Sutherland.
Cliff’s a great storyteller. Nuala, Irish, classy, gorgeous, like someone Biba might use as a model, had been living in London with her fierce grandmother and she’s going out with Cliff, and one night she comes home and rings the doorbell and her grandmother looks out of an upstairs window and says … But I don’t remember. A hymn singing? Ball playing? Welsh something something? It is a three-part perfectly formed phrase which I’ve remembered for years, but now, although I have the rhythm, I just can’t recall it. Will Google help me? I find Cliff’s sad obituary: he died in 2013, an awful death with a mouth cancer that takes from him that most perfect gift, his voice. I see that his son Nick is an orthopaedic surgeon, so I look up a Nick Morgan with that job, and find him in Windsor.
I look up Cliff’s funeral, and his pall-bearers, and the photo online of the surgeon and the front pall-bearer looks like the same man. The sweet red-headed 14-year-old, for whom all those years ago we found the perfect Christmas present—a chess set that you make yourself, using plaster of Paris, and rubber moulds just like the ones I used in the 1950s to make Snow White and English country cottages—is now old.
Christmas Day. I remember two things about it: Cliff has arranged with some of his friends to go to the American Embassy on Christmas morning to deliver a letter to the ambassador, protesting America’s involvement in Vietnam. He asks us if we want to go too and of course we do. Robert chooses his dress uniform with the discreet silver fern, and off we go. Afterwards we go to the pub with Cliff and his friends.
We stay at the pub, on and on. They are all fantastic company, but I’m getting more and more uneasy. All I can think about is the Christmas dinner that Nuala is at home cooking. I think of my mother, one Saturday night, when Dad is perhaps an hour or so late home from golf. She’s already in a state of panic. He’s clearly dead. The roast is on the edge of being ruined. In he rolls, beaming. He’s won something. He’s got a hole in something.
‘Did you not think of ringing me?’ she says, though ‘says’ doesn’t really convey her tone. Did you not think of ringing me?? He looks at her as if there is something she doesn’t understand. He explains—with exasperated patience—that at the golf club, if they ring their wife, they have to buy a round of drinks.
We arrive back at the Morgans’ probably round about four. Nuala is either smoking a cigarette or drinking a glass of wine. She doesn’t give a toss. It’s a lesson in nonchalance.
SEVEN
Robert’s back from the All Black tour of the UK and France, and he comes home with a suggestion. In Lyon, the owner of the Chez Rose restaurant, who is also vice-president of the local rugby club, invited him for a meal. Over excellent Beaujolais he suggested that Robert might like to come to France and play for the LOU. Chris Laidlaw has spent a few months playing for them, and he’s recommended Robert. They’re desperate to get into the Premier Division.
We say, Why not? Robert’s nearly finished his Masters and wants a change and we’re keen to live away from New Zealand for a while, and here it is, the perfect opportunity. And France has held a strong attraction for me ever since the years spent attempting to write in French to Pierre. 13, Place de la Liberation, Beaumont-sur-Sarthe.
Marcel Astic, the middle-aged restaurateur who has captured him by employing the irresistible weapon of his restaurant, uses his sons Claude and Gerard, round about our age, both with a reasonable amount of English, to complete his small but bitingly effective army. Then there’s what I know now to be a honey trap: Claude’s wife. Robert muses, clearly without giving it too much thought, that she’s incredibly beautiful.
So. We’re going. They phone—an awkward shouty combination of my inadequate French and Gerard’s job-in-a-Swiss-hotel English—to ask if Robert knows a grand deuxieme ligne that he can bring along. Ron de Cleene, a friend who Robert has played both club and provincial rugby with for years, asks us for dinner one night. ‘You should come,’ we say to them. Ron is a grand-ish flanker. The next day Ron phones to ask if the offer is genuine. Did we mean it? We don’t know if we did or not. But it still seems like a good idea.
And here we all are. It’s Christmas, and the Astics, being the nearest thing we all have to family, have invited us for midday dinner at their restaurant. Although my due date is mid-January, it turns out I’m three days from giving birth.
Gerard’s in charge of the food. The tables have been put together to form a long line because there are 12 of us. Marcel and Madame, then Marcel’s daughter from a first marriage that had ended tragically when his young wife died. Their sons Claude and Gerard, and Claude’s wife Josie, who does indeed fit the description of the most beautiful woman both Robert and I have ever seen. It’s impossible to mind that someone is so beautiful. She is so French, slight and wistful with rich brown eyes that just escape being trag
ic. Every bone has been finely carved by a master sculptor. A young Audrey Hepburn. She has met her equal with Claude, who could pose with sports cars for a living.
Intriguingly for the offspring of two such handsome people, Claude and Josie’s small daughter, Carine, is monobrowed and slightly scary. Just two, she has yet to understand the concept of personal space, and as she comes right into mine I reflect on the fact that though normally I love small children, and am having one of my own any day now, this is the rare time I don’t feel even remotely maternal. She is dressed in a thick covering of feminine clothing, arriving, on that cold winter’s day, in layers of astrakhan and fake fur that ends cruelly at her thighs. There are two freezing-looking, sturdy bare legs going all the way down to tiny lacy socks and patent-leather shoes. No wonder she is baleful.
The de Cleenes are there with their two boys. Sean is eight, and although he’s been in France for only a few weeks, he’s convinced everyone that he’s fluent in French. Success matters to Sean, and he’s admirably determined to look like he’s coping. A few strategically learnt sentences, a perfect accent, and the room is alive with admiring ooh la las! When he doesn’t understand a question he just looks blasé, his shoulders reaching up to his ears in a French-like shrug. He is a master-class in how to look like you know a foreign language. Ben is five, and has just started school, and he’s totally pissed off that his family have taken him from his comfortable house and his kindergarten in Palmerston North and dumped him somewhere where everyone talks in garbled sounds that make no sense to him at all.
We are to eat seven courses. I sit next to Ben, who I’ve known all his life, and for whom I have always had such affection. He’s different. He’s internal in some ways; probably now he’d be found to be on some sort of spectrum. He’s a darling. But he is, our new French friends say, what is known in France as sauvage.
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