7 July, 2011
SOLO
Curtains open on a small flat. To stage right is a door leading to outside. To stage left is a door leading to a bedroom. Between the two runs a kitchenette with stove and oven, a sink, small cupboards. A fridge stands next to the bedroom door. Above the kitchenette is a double window with net curtains. In stage front is a couch facing towards audience. A small coffee table is positioned in front of couch.
Scene One: (more…)
3 June, 2011
I’m nine and we’re sitting at the living room table she made a year or so back. It was a full dining room table but she cut down the legs, sanded it back. I remember gouging it with a fork handle in a fit of pique, a childish anger vented at some one thing she must have been proud of.
I’m looking at the empty grooves now, and asking,
“Is this tea?”
“Be quiet and eat.”
“But it’s just weetbix.”
“The benefit isn’t till tomorrow, so eat up.”
“But it’s breakfast isn’t it?”
“Just eat up.”
It’s a story I tell for years, of the superimposition of hunger by ‘our situation’. In retrospect it’s the one thing I associate with benefit dependency, the constant hunger, not only for basic nutrition, but for the many small things others take for granted you lack. The small luxuries and the simple things you cannot afford. A hunger for invaluables like comfort, security, certainty.
You see these things among people you consider rich, and you crave them. You hoard small objects, the cast offs of the better offs, and you think yourself lucky to have snatched such prizes.
I remember being perhaps 10, or 11, and sitting on the floor of the dining room reading Australian Womens Weekly Cookbook, a glossy A4 softcover filled with large pictures of simple foods. Brandy snaps. Yorkshire pudding. The pages were something I would treasure, the details of the recipes something I would pore over, a series of simple how-to pictures I must have subconsciously replicated here on this very blog. I would look at these foods and yearn for the ingredients, the know-how. But to practice we would need more than what we had. And what we had wasn’t enough.
So where are the choices in that? We were making the right life choices. We were frugal as our station demanded. We made the most of what we had. But still we ate cereal for dinner while our neighbours’ cat ate gravy beef.
What is it about dependency that means you must suffer in silence the ire of those who consider themselves your betters?
I sit now in comfort, folded in the bounty of the middle classes, and I look back to those days as a hazy memory, and I’m thankful to be free of then. I can sit now and listen to people run down the poor to someone the feel is a social equal, and while I no longer feel myself an interloper, I sometimes feel I have abandoned my past, that I have turned my back on what it was to be both hungry and undeserving.
Until I see the ire acted out again, as if by rote, an endless script of hate and condescension.
3 June, 2011
The story wasn’t over really. That boy is still in the field, and he still has explaining to do.
Although the death of my father is a significant event, it was something I was unaware of until my early 20s. Before then was another tale of sorrow, one which was of course intimately tied to the events following that death, but which must be properly considered another chapter.
However, since completing that first chapter a great many things have come to preoccupy my time, concurrent to which has been a vastly greater ease of sleeping. I am not, it seems, compelled to sit late at night and summon forth the ghosts of the past.
Searching within for the reason for the departure of that complusion I remembered writing Solo, a work I wanted to put together as a play in the time before Chef Du Plunge. I had been living by myself in a basement flat in Mt Cook, and had made the most of the isolation to tell a tale you will of course see woven into the first chapter of this work.
I’ve extracted the play from a folder within a folder on a drive I use to store those old things, and will tidy it up over the weekend.
Perhaps we can finally give that child the piece he deserves.
28 February, 2011
So it’s 1982 and I’m standing on the porch watching Mum move a sack of spuds out of the shed and towards the car. I can see it like it’s yesterday, her with her shoulders slanted, a fag hanging out her mouth, high elbow pointed upwards and she grunts and hauls the rough fabric.
“Whatchadoin?”
“Taking these round to Marion and Barry.”
“Can I come?”
“Get in.”
I’ve grown accustomed to not talking much in the car, so we sit silently while she drives out and up to Papamoa Beach Road and along the long empty stretch of lupins and grasses out to their place. There’s old pines and that half-round hay shed that’s been there forever. There’s graying fences and the occasional car parked up at the roadside, occupants over the at the nudey beach.
She flicks ash out the window.
When we stop the scene’s reversed, with her popping fag between lips again and hauling the spuds out of the boot. She carries them across the driveway and into the house, not pausing to knock, and heads up the stairs. I follow diligently, my head popping up past the guard rail just as she’s putting the spuds down in the kitchen. The first thing I see is Barry sitting there at the table.
His shoulders are square and he’s sitting bolt upright, his narrow face weather-beaten and slightly strained. His forearms are resting on the table and his hands are fists. His hair has been combed to one side with his fingers. Tears roll down his cheeks.
“Ya didn’t have to.” He murmurs.
I look across as Marion speaks. “Liz, you can’t afford those either. Take them home, we’ll be alright.”
She looks at me and says, “We’re leaving before they make us take them.”
And just like that, we walk out, and climb into the car.
So why you say? Well, ’82 was the time when the government took away all the fishing rights and Barry has a boat parked up at the wharves in Tauranga that can’t work. It’s been months and they have three kids to feed. A mortgage to pay. And they have nothing.
But us? We have a Widow’s Benefit keeping us going. The money is barely enough to keep us in clothes and shoes, but Liz takes the food out of our mouths and takes it over to their place, leaving them enough to see them through.
And we don’t talk about it on the way home. I just sit and look out the window and wonder about a better time. A time when I’ll understand what just happened. A time when a gift of charity like that will be more than a moral lesson for me, and more like a something I’ll need do myself. A time when I’m a man who’ll have an inkling of what it must be like to not have any way to feed your kids. A time when I’ll remember that what I saw was the real New Zealanders, the ones who give a fuck about the pöhara because, they are the pöhara.
****************
Of course, I wrote this before Christchurch, where everyone, rich and poor is pulling together.
I’ll bring you all back to this when the disaster ends, and we again start talking about what we do with the poor.
8 October, 2010
You. Yeah, yooou.
Ah FFS… Not You (you muppet). YOU.
Finally… what the hell does it take to make you people listen?
Right. All you people over there take a look at his guy.
Looking?
Right. He, this slightly oily looking bloke, is not a New Zealander.
Right right, yell all the heck you want you’re just making dicks of yourselves and proving my point.
Real New Zealanders don’t make a fuss.
Yes Yes I know that’s “a little bit controversial” but if you can’t face facts then you’re also not a real New Zealander.
“If we’re not New Zealanders what are we!” you say?
Easy question.
You’re hired help.
Weeeelll you can whinge all you bloody like about me saying that, it’s a free country after all, and if don’t like it you can bloody piss off back to Kraplackystan or wherever the hell it is all you people come from.
Racist? Me? What? Look people I’m not saying that I don’t like you, just that you’re… you’re… well… not one of us.
Yes yes, enough of the bloody yelling, didn’t I already say that real New Zealanders don’t make a fuss? You’re just proving my point.
And! To prove it, look at that bloke.
No, him. Yes, him, the white bloke.
Jesus… bloody hard to get you excitable types to focus, ain’t it?
He’s not a New Zealander either.
Well, he speaks with a funny accent.
Maybe French or something.
And no I don’t know how the hell he got in here.
There’s still that boat incident, and don’t think we’ve forgotten the World Cup…
The commonsense fact of the matter is that if you speak funny you’re not really welcome here and you certainly are not, in point of fact, a New Zealander.
What about that white bird you say?
South African.
Doesn’t count.
No that isn’t a double standard and don’t start with all this bloody waving of the arms and demanding ‘something be done’, or ‘I can say things like that’ because I just did.
Hmmm… how in the hell did you get into my neighbourhood anyway?
No, no, nothing, never mind.
Look, if you aren’t really ready to accept the rules then maybe you shouldn’t have bothered coming here in the first place.
Well, we make the rules.
Me and everyone who’s like me.
Well, it doesn’t matter if we’re not a majority because we’re the ones who’re making the rules, and you’re some powerless hired help.
(At least until we deport you…)
Nothing! I said nothing.
Look, the simple fact of the matter is that New Zealander means what we want it to mean, and all you slightly yelly people fall outside the meaning.
OK, OK, maybe if one of your kids actually plays for the All Blacks or storms Monte Cassino or something we’ll reconsider…
Until then, well, quiet in the cheap seats.
11 September, 2010
In large part I felt compelled to review this book because it seems to have been written about my childhood. Pearson is of an age similar to mine, and experienced many of the same loves and hates in the world of toys. He writes for example of playing with that boy-doll ‘Action Man’, and loving Airfix toy soldiers.
Achtung Schweinhund is the tale of the boys own adventure, all written in a light, funny, and accessible style. Pearson has a wry sense of humour he deploys to full effect describing the characters he failed to grow up with in 1960s and 1970s England.
Of particular interest though, and the main reason I wanted to put up a review, is his description of the sorts of comics read by British boys in during his childhood. Where in the US comics were (and are ) populated with fantasy heroes and unobtainable women, Pearson states quite rightly that British comics were not. Where the US were colour and seemed obsessed with muscles, but the difference was more fundemental. In particular:
the nature of the heroes differed wildly. The American kids had Spiderman, Daredevil, Batman and Thor. British kids had the Second World War… The men who saved our world didn’t have extraordinary powers, fancy gadgets or bizarre costumes (though Keith’s dad sometimes wore his old jungle hat when he pruned the roses and Mr Maynard who helped sink the Tirpitz owned a colour telly). Our superheroes were our dads, uncles, and grandfathers, and there’s something rather touching in that.
Personally, never a more true word has been written about my own childhood.
A great read if you are of an age, and have hobbies you’d prefer not to share with the world at large.
13 June, 2010
We took Chef Du Plunge out to Te Papa after the vege markets today, and what a day for it. With Matariki on there was a concert party on and a great many kuia and koro out there, for want of a better description, raising hell. Naturally it was in the genteel manner appropriate to the older among us.
The move to the suburbs has been an interesting one, mostly due to the broadened age range we now find ourselves exposed to. The other week I was in line at the supermarket and an old chap in front of me was trying to pay for his bread and milk with his house-keys. Bewildered, and suffering a form of dementia I couldn’t label, he was gruffly and generously helped by the staff. Poor old bloke… just seeing him reminded me of my old kin, their aging, and the losses they suffer as the years advance.
It’s a strange thing the onion skins of age. Because it was through them I could see the childhood of those old women up on stage, the light of their youth shining outward, the fullness of age shattered and fallen as they played out songs they have sung all their lives, their mischievous smiles and movements reflected in an audience who shared the burden of days, the trail of footsteps fallen, innumerable, each laying another measure of mortality, the fecundity of death, to blossom as the joys of a day long since buried, and remembered in this shaking hand, that nod of the head, a familiar tone, a harmony long sustained.
6 April, 2010
They say that to end a tale you need start from the beginning, but it was never going to be like that with me. And so it is that we’ve wandered to and fro, meandering through the many years of lives that have flowed together to make up the foundations of mine. But they say to know a man you must walk a mile in his shoes, no?
That said, this story was never truly about me, only mine for the retelling. Many many nights spent sitting up embracing the past, unpicking its fibrous strands and laying them open to the sunlight, waiting for the new growth to fill out and refresh a torrid history. In truth this tale was always hers, and needing explication it has sat festering indoors for all too long.
It’s just a pity that I couldn’t have explained it in detail, from start to finish. Or perhaps that I was just a better writer…
And so we have a woman alone with three children. One partner is deceased, another too violent and long since fled to Australia where he will hide in the desert for 40 years, and a third trapped in his home country.
That is the final chapter of this long winding stream of thought. My stepfather didn’t return with us from Greece after we had travelled there to settle in ’78, and so it was that we were in effect stranded between two places, my mother wanting to be there but unable to return. The specific details of this are stranded behind 30 years of retelling and hence difficult to know exactly. But, as I should have said many times before, this tale belongs to others, but is intermediated by its effect on a small boy.
In essence, we had taken a family friend with us to Greece. A friend who was, to all intents and purposes, a thief. I remember clearly my middle brother encouraged by him and to climb into the trees of a local peasant and steal her citrus. He stood by the roadside behind a stone fence and kept watch, while my brother and I scampered up into the branches to take oranges. I remember the arid landscape and the deepest blue of the Aegean skies. The white chalk cliffs and whitewashed buildings.
It was this friend who was the reason we left Greece and had to leave Yannis behind. Jeff, the thief, had been returning (wasted) from somewhere one evening and attempted to steal the donation box from the front of the local orthodox church. This was of course in plain sight of the local taverna, the patrons of which were sitting outside eating and drinking, and who promptly had him arrested and thrown in jail. You should know of course that “Greek jail” in the 1970s was of course a byword for squalor, the kind of place a country boy from New Zealand shouldn’t really find himself.
And that, as they say, was that. We were despatched home to New Zealand, our brief hiatus in the idyll ended, and Yannis stayed in Greece to help Jeff out of jail. The fool.
9 March, 2010
Setting out on this journey I was not intending to uncover half of the information I have. The intent was always instead to provide an exploration of how and why people arrive where they are, an examination of the depth of history that lie within the events people judge one another for. And to a degree I think I have succeeded.
But that is not to say that this tale is ended! Not yet. There is still our small boy in a field, lost, holding the horseshoe nail of history, a small thing upon which great events turn.
It is the end of the line for my father though. I’ve stated many times that he was sick, his body wracked and ruined. He has withdrawn from society, and rants at his carers about ‘the system’, ‘parental authority’, and other symbols of control. He is within the counter-culture, but not of it, for the cynic in me sees the counter-culture as yet another aspect of the status-quo, a mere playground for the leaders of my own adulthood, an exercise in rhetoric for a nascent baby boomer political front. And so he becomes a foot soldier, expendable.
I wonder if he turned back to his Catholicism in those last few days? For his mother his death was a object upon which she hung a renewed faith, and a reason to seek solace in the church. Though being much like his mother, what Howard felt in those last few days is a mystery.
We know that he took to travelling by rail, and that he spent several stints either at the attention of the police and in Oakley Hospital, but that is all. Records from this time are extremely limited, and the only letter I have read is Howard making a request to come and stay with my aunt on the East Coast, which I have mentioned.
And so it is that he is discovered in September of 1972, long deceased, beneath a tree in the Auckland domain. A passer by finds the body, and reports it to those same authorities, who collect it and begin an investigation. It seems that he had spent his last night in a doss house somewhere downtown, and it was there that he passed. He must have had companions, because they removed his body from the city, alive or dead, and in some ritual, laid him to rest at the base of a tree.
Again, I often wonder about his Catholicism in those last moments. I wonder if He at last called for you Old Boy? Did he at last lift you from the arms of Magdalene, to embrace you, to comfort you? To wash away the sins of a petty rebellion, the wounds you made to smother pain? Did he lift you from the speckled shadows, and raise you at last into the light? Did he lay you upon his lap as Mary laid the Christ upon hers, prostrate? Did he call for you at last, Allehlujah, my child come home?
I hope you too saw beyond the veil Old Boy, and found that world of peace.
17 January, 2010
We can each of us look backward to a snapshot of who we were at a moment of our own personal history. We can see what it was that made us who we were by looking at the tangled skein that wove us into the tapestry of which I’ve spoken. But at the time, while we each pull together the strands of daily life it is impossible to know the patterns we weave.
So naturally this was the way of it for my mother. My father having abandoned her after 3 days of trying to make happy family, his own daemons continuing to harry him, she moved out of the house she had been sharing with my aunt, and began to seek her own way. I was the cute appendage to her new life.
It was then that she took up with my middle brother’s father, Eddie, and following closely in her own mother’s footsteps was quickly pregnant to a man who could care for her.
She speaks of him being a delivery driver, which implies he took her on the road, and suggests his mischievousness was a key part of her attraction to him.
How their relationship formed I’ve never known. Eddie was also absent from my life from about age 4, Liz having escaped the East Coast and travelled to the Bay of Plenty to stay with my uncle. But like all the men in her life prior to our settling in Mount Maunganui he left a strong impression and child before their paths parted permanently.
It is again strange in retrospect how quickly all this took place. In what I now consider the blink of an eye my mother has left home, borne two children, experienced untold difficulties, and travelled across the breadth of the North Island. A whirlwind is all you could call it, with Eddie being just one more vortex into which she fell.
I’ve only met the man twice in my memory. Once at my brother’s wedding in 2004, and once after he came back to New Zealand briefly. Consequently there is no strong association between us. Had we stayed with him for longer in my childhood he may have made an impression, but the flight to the Bay of Plenty ended the possibility of that.
And why? Alcohol and alcoholism runs strongly in his family. What I’m uncertain of is whether he took to the drink before or after the death of his own mother, tragically taken in a car accident around the time of my brother’s birth, and with the drink came a violence, and an apparent meanness.
I learned that he beat her long after I had become an adult. She tells of holding my brother, an infant, while he laid into her, she thinking that the presence of the child would prevent what befell her.
How badly she was beaten I don’t know, and likely never will. What I do know is that she took a step not many women in the 1970s, or the 1980s for that matter, did and left him. And for that I can only commend her. Growing up with an alcoholic is one of those contributing factors you hear people speak of when making excuses for their present, and it is one I and my brother was best well away from.
And so it was that it was her and I, alone again, my little brother a joy to us both.
