Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

How my father fell completely out of society remains much of a mystery to this day. After his departure from Tokomaru Bay in what must have been very early ‘72 he appears to have returned to Auckland and continued to seek help with his illness, but in a society completely unprepared for the type of rehabilitation he required.

New Zealand in the early ’70s was, like many of its contemporaries, still uncertain whether drug addiction was a health or criminal issue, and from what records I’ve been able to secure it was to the attention of both these types of authority that my father was brought. You can imagine then the shame of his parents, your stereotypical hard-working suburban family, who found itself in possession of a son unable to pull himself together.

My earliest inquiry into the period between the East Coast and his death resulted in an interesting titbit of information that has taken a number of years to slot into meaning. Some time in mid-to-late ‘72 the mother of a friend of Howard’s came home to find him sitting on the couch in her lounge. Surprised to find him there, she did not give him a particularly warm welcome (as you would expect), and he left, in what I myself see as another incident of running away.

I always interpreted this encounter as a plea for help, and more recent discoveries in official documents have confirmed this for me. Howard apparently got on well with his friend’s mum, and it was probably to her that he was attempting to turn, in an effort to find some sort of comfort the rebellion against my grandparents precluded.

It is a pattern I have seen several times among personal contacts with heavy drug dependence, a spiral downwards into increasingly anti-social behaviour while also clinging desperately to the normality and safety of society itself. For many this hypocrisy strikes very deeply, and is key to their inability to ‘pull themself together’; a counter-veiling force acting to distance them from the ones they love, while simultaneously increasing the yearning for succour. And so their psyche sheers, often irreparably.

For this reason I now know what he must have been experiencing when taken off a train in Putaruru in May 1972. He is wandering the North Island, seeking who knows what, perhaps Jerusalem and Baxter who has helped others, perhaps nothing more than comfort in the distance from home. He is drunk and in a ritalin stupour, so the guards remove him and hand him to the police. The police in turn hand him to Tokanui Mental Hospital, and it is there than another chapter of his rehabilitation begins, in a place many now speak of with hushed tones. He is sick, covered in tracks, emaciated, alone, lost. A specimen under a benevolent gaze.

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Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

It has occurred to me that my step-father is now little more then a thirty-year old memory, and that those things I can recall are vague. I remember that he dropped me off at my first day of school, though that memory competes with the discovery that I was able to order fish and chips for lunch (at the time a miraculous finding). I also remember he and my mother standing in a kitchen of the flat in which we lived, holding one another, and kissing very gently.

Other than this, Johnny is a ghost in my past, his presence continual for a time but now faded, long erased from the corners of the self-centred viewpoint of a child. I can see the places we lived while he and my mother were together, and I can remember some of my own actions, but he himself is little more than an object transferred to pictures that reference those places, as though he were added independently of me.

This takes me again to the strangeness of my own past, where a figure so fundamental to my childhood should be transient within it. Johnny passed through our lives in as little as 6 years, but his effect on my mother and her own future was profound. She loved him very, very deeply, and her attempt to secure him a return to New Zealand after our failed emigration to Greece was to to underlay all her actions for a number of years.

And to this day I wonder who the man really was. I will admit that my younger self never trusted him. He was Greek, and had been working on the ships, and somehow met my mother in Tauranga. How has never really been clarified, but must have begun living together in 1975 or very early 76, and married shortly before my youngest brother was born in 1978. Other than this lack of trust I have no real feeling for him, which is, as I say, an admission, and I am shocked to hear myself confess it to you. But with this length of time having passed, and myself having outlived him, I think I am entitled.

I will also admit that there is only really one association I strongly bear with Johnny. Drugs. Johnny’s main income after settling in New Zealand was their import and sale . Exactly what type I do not know, having only a series of second-hand stories, but have a fair idea. What I do know is that, once again, the idealism of the late 60s had settled into the naive consumption and good times of the 70s, and Johnny was well-involved with what my mother must have seen as the glamorous world of conspiracy and danger the drug trade represented.

My childhood memory from this time is full of anecdotes about types of drugs, drug use, and drug abuse. And in a further confession, it angers me. But, as the older me is bound to do, I excuse this with the thought that alcoholism could well have been worse. Johnny did not mistreat us. I do not ever remember being beaten (wooden spoon administered by mum being the exception), nor do I remember my mother being ‘mishandled’, two types of memory common to peoples whose parents were drunks. The anger is reserved for the sequence of events, and the knowledge that all too many people are drawn into the same world of shame and tragedy we were.

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Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

Well my boy, I’ve been writing this history, your history, since before I knew you. Actually, since just slightly before I knew of you, and I’ve kept in mind that there will come a day when you will read these many dreamed pages yourself, and wonder.

For me you’ve become something of a lodestone within this tale, it’s unravelling, and my understanding of the many whys it has helped me understand. And pivotal to that understanding is the question, why did he leave?

I know for certain now that discovering the fact of my Father’s demise in the years I first thought I needed to return to his family would have been a mistake, and too much information for my young mind to assimilate. While the plasticity of youth is a boon, it also offers opportunity for partial knowing to deeply gouge rows into which future misunderstanding is sown, the crop of adulthood become a weed.

Sitting here experiencing the gentle frustration of the adult with a child who will not sleep, I have wondered many times how I would cope had I a monkey on my back, and it is that single thought that has many times explained to me the why.

To find yourself sick, but tied to a family you did not expect, with a woman you would barely have known, would be impossible. Knowing that fact makes it easy to not blame him for leaving, and more importantly, to not blame myself. But the teenager? It is a very different knowing.

But my aunt with whom he lived, and my mother herself, were teenagers, the effect of his departure into the unknown and what became the very last time either of them saw him, was profound. My aunt laid the finger of blame on my mother I know, but in the confusion who can be certain.

My mother’s last memory of my father is his making his way along the road away from the house, abandoning them all. My aunt stands on the street, yelling, telling him to never return if he makes the choice to leave. My mother moved away from her too shortly thereafter, herself making a fateful decision.

I see this time now as the harrowing of paradise. The last glimmer in the illusion of peace my Boomers held onto, and it is an important part of our history. Their falling away from each other after the discovery that nothing was easy, and that they themselves were the greatest enemies of peace, must have been profound.

Thinking all this does not make the burden of knowledge any less my boy, but the gift you have given me, unwittingly, is the experience to see with clarity, and is something you should know I will long be grateful for.

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Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

Having only approached my Father’s family in my early twenties, I have found myself lightly equipped with small amounts of information about his full tale. Not wanting to further disturb an uneasily resting memory, and finding myself having a considerable degree of difficultly assimilating the details I did have, the bandage has been slowly removed over the last (near-) twenty years.

In large part the long duration of this tale and it’s unfolding, layer by layer, has been a ploy to enable the exposure to air of each small part of the greater wound to heal, or at least dry, before the next small cut can be revealed. But such is the way with writing histories of many living persons. There are many tales I would recall but for my conscience of the ripples the telling would cause. As I say, such is the way.

As a consequence, the discovery of details pertaining to the last few months of my Father’s life have been difficult. My understanding is that he found himself in a slipping downward, and was seeking a way off the heights upon which he found himself, a problem to which anyone who has experienced the noose of addiction will relate.

It was a time when surveillance of youth, and drug users in particular, had become a concern to Auckland Police, and early efforts were being made to ‘combat’ what was understood as the seamier side of the counter-culture (although, truth be told, to comfortable middle-class New Zealand the entire culture was pretty seamy).  And with surveillance comes intervention, and to 70s New Zealand intervention meant institutionalisation.

My impression then is, that in an effort to escape Auckland and his life there, my Father followed his younger sister to the East Coast, a place these days far from everything, but then a complete world away. And so it was that when my Mother returned from Australia my paternal Grandfather was enlisted to drive her from the airport, to collect me, and we joined him in early 1972, Tokomaru Bay.

In a confession made many years ago my Grandfather admitted that he was dubious about the likelihood that I was his grandson, but being the man of his generation he is, he did the right thing and drove back to the Coast, itself something like a return journey for him – his family having farmed the country before the Depression. I imagine he must have driven from Auckland, to Te Aroha to collect me, and from there to Tokomaru Bay, a drive of perhaps 10 hours on some of the worst roads in New Zealand, with a complete stranger.

I’ve often wondered what they spoke about, my Mother and he, assuming they spoke at all. My own recollection of what it was to be a young adult leaves no doubt that the gulf between them would have been enormous, the generational difference likely insurmountable. And in turn, he would have arrived in Tokomaru Bay to find the same gulf between himself and two of his children, themselves living the idealised life of the flower-powered, turned on, and tuned in, long since dropped out.

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Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

Back when I thought I might try to string this story together, an effort to understand a history and unravel my own subconscious both, I approached my mother and asked her permission. Whether she knew the depths of our joint past to which I would plumb is questionable, but she must have had an inkling, because she gave me a story of which I was completely unaware, and was a considerable surprise to me. A shot across the bow, as it were.

When we returned from Greece I remember living in another now long-demolished bach in what is today ‘downtown’ Mount Maunganui. It was a couple of street across from my grandparents, and it was one of those halcyon summers you remember as a child. Apparently this story started there.

For some reason we had moved from that place, which was ‘close to the action’ as it were, to Arataki – the suburb I would spend the remainder of my childhood. Arataki was the edge of the world in Mount Maunganui, with lots of state housing, and the general appearance of what they call these days ‘nappy valley’. The skies had circled to the near-perpetual grey of a New Zealand winter, and we were sharing a place with some other people. To this day I don’t remember who they are. But I do remember it being the place that my youngest brother took his first steps.

One of my most keen memories of that house is many adults turning up one day, and everybody disappearing into a back room. The lesson I took away being that children see far more than you might realise, and are more keenly aware of adult behaviour that you might expect. I knew then, as I knew as early as age five, the something specific involved in their secrecy.

From that place, we moved to what became our home until the late 1990s, a state house on the very edge of town, although these days it is buried in wealthy suburbia.

So why all this moving, I hear you ask. Well, it seems that my mother had become involved in some sort of Police investigation into the explicable adult behaviour I had mentioned. Her role has long been something to which she has admitted limited liability, but her tale to me (the one indicated at the start of this wee ramble), made something very clear to me. She was playing an extremely dangerous game.

Discovering the exact ins and outs of what happened is likely to never happen. This was an event of 30 years ago, and is likely buried deep in people’s memory. What I do know is what she told me, which was simple, and which I’ve come to regard as a moment of particularly lucid truthfulness in her retelling to me of the past.

Some local guys became convinced she was assisting the Police, and decided they would put a stop to it. They’d been making threats for a fair while, and must have decided to act.  They came to the house while my brother and I were at school (though where my youngest brother was, I do not know). They took her to a house in the country, and there, with her petrified at what they might do, they took out a kit, and began cooking up a dose. By now she’d figured out what they were doing. She had initially thought they were either going to scare her, rape her, or kill her, in ascending order of awfulness. But watching the guy with the spoon and the lighter, and wondering where the other guy was, she intervened. He must have been dithering with the spike, because she claims she looked him in the eye, pulled up her sleeve, dumping it on the kitchen table and just stated, “For Christs’ sake [Jimmy], just fucking do it. I can’t live like this anymore, and you can’t live like this anymore. Just fucking do it.”

He let her live.

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Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

I think if you had the impression that this story was mine and mine alone, you would be mistaken. While I have become the narrator, in truth this story is the tale of all my family. My thinking is, while we have become so very used to seeing ourselves as individuals, we cannot truly see ourselves in isolation. All the things that make up this fabric of individual lives are woven out of the threads of the lives of our forebears. Nothing is new or magical, though many may attempt to convince themselves otherwise.

My mother finds herself then, parent to a child she had not expected to have, a mirror of her own mother, except in the comfort of her situation. She tells a story of bringing me home from the hospital. She had received the customary baby-shower from her workmates (she worked until she was perhaps 8 months pregnant), but was too ashamed to admit that she would be adopting me out, and so secretly gave away my baby clothes and the things she had received. As a consequence I was brought home in clothes from the hospital, several sizes too small, a big 10-pound lad in a 6-pound bonnet.

We made do for another 18 years, she and I. Never bereft or missing the things we needed, but never completely fitting or comfortable.

I cannot say that it was an easy childhood, but it was far far from the hell some children are put through. I learned many things; such as thrift, the emotional value of objects as treasures, the value of a true friendship, not to want too much (for it only leads to dissatisfaction and anxiety, a lesson I had to re-learn many many times), to accept difference with calm, to see the world from the bottom looking up, and finally, to accept that everything is a veneer – true colours lie beneath the appearance.

It’s appropriate that my very first memory is from my return to New Zealand, in what must have been November of 1971. Strangely, it is a view of me being taken from a Sydney to Auckland plane. I am being brought out of the doorway of the plane, and carried down the gantry to my Grandparents, who will look after me until my mother can afford the airfare home. The perspective of the memory is external to me, meaning that I see myself swaddled in blankets being carried ‘towards myself’.

But this memory is so old that it has become genuine, a tale told to me when I was very very young, impressed for so long that I cannot shake it, and see it as how the event unfolded. In a way, I remember what someone else saw, imagined and etched into the mind of a pre-schooler. This means that my first memory is not my own, but is collectivised, a shared past and a reference point imparted to me by someone who had an entirely different picture in their own mind. And which is the more true?

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Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

It was in Balmain that my uncle and mother met again. He must must have been preparing to go to India and was a disciple in Sydney, now bearing the name Achurya Das. I have a photo of him holding me, his head shaved, the paint on his forehead, in the characteristic Krishna robes.

My mother tells the story of him returning from the temple. He carries in his hand dust, gathered carefully from the shoes of Prabhupada himself. She bent in for a closer look, and sneezed into it.

On another occasion he was waded out into a deep pond to gather a lily flower or lotus which he somehow does not touch with his hands, he returns to show it to her, a perfect flower, unaffected by man. She had a good poke around with her finger.

I would imagine that while Achurya Das had finally found the guru for whom he had been seeking, my mother was still without substitute for the Catholicism of her youth. Worse, her scepticism for religions other than Christianity appears to have been normal for a woman of her generation – deep despite the pretension to open-mindedness the Hippies represented. But for this I can hardly blame her, the her then hardly differs from many attitudes towards mysticism prevalent in my own contemporary society. In that regard, she was merely ahead of the game, yet again.

The most interesting upshot of her being in Sydney in 1970, apart from the obvious want to be near her older brother, was of course, me. Australia was then as it is now, more socially advanced than New Zealand. In particular, it accommodated young women in ‘the family way’ with a tolerance New Zealand did not. And so it was that my mother, like generations of young women before her, found herself there on the edge of that great desert, making the choice. Because while unwed pregnancy, and residence with our nearest neighbour until the shameful act is less evident, is a fine old tradition – safe and clinical termination of unwanted children was very new.

It often confuses liberal friends when I profess to being anti-abortion, but pro-choice, because the two are often characterised as mutually exclusive. But, trying to imagine the feelings of a young woman, largely alone in an unforgiving and partially alien city, finding herself with the choice to terminate my life, or not, the larger political argument is trivial. How would I consider her to have made any choice but the correct one? And so I often think of the potential lives destroyed by termination when reflecting upon my own, and reflect upon the manner in which my birth permanently and irrevocably altered the trajectory of my mother’s life, and I see there an act of great love, selflessness.

For not only did she decide not to end me, she further chose to keep me from a pre-arranged adoption favoured by the authorities of the day. And so while my uncle may have immersed himself in the mysticism of the exotic East, my mother surrendered herself to a fate much more complex, a path more difficult, that a great many women decline.

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Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

The Grafton I first encountered in the early 90s was hardly the most savoury place in Central Auckland, but was by all accounts a substantially different from the neighbourhood that had seen punks throwing themselves off the iconic bridge, and Baxter entering the commune in Boyle Street. It still smelled of history though.

Today the past of the neighbourhood is erased under the weight of SUVs, apartments and expensive ‘restored’ houses, but then I could still feel the impress of my parent’s footprints in the grass of the Auckland Domain. I could still make the walk to Albert Park, the centre of New Zealand’s modest student revolution, and laze beneath the trees and palms. I was a long, long way from the 1970s, but I was 21 and living in my father’s skin, just for a time, to see what and how he might have felt.

Lonely was my impression. Auckland has never been a forgiving place, and the winters, while not as bitter as my experiences of heavily concreted Wellington, were damp and brooding. But still I saw the ongoing hardship of the street peoples there, and knew all too well what it was to be hungry and addled. And that is what I thought life then must have been. From reading of Baxter I know that he lived there a relatively short time before my father did, and the experiences of the young addicts in the Boyle Street commune must have also been his. The increasing police surveillance. The final ostracisation from a bewildered mainstream Auckland. The political foment as ideas were thrown up every day to challenge the status quo.

It was into all this my mother followed my uncle to the big smoke, and it on Carlton-Gore Street she must have met my father, she the liberated woman, he the liberated son. Pretentions about their affair I have not. Having been the young man I know all too well how confusing the flatting and student scene can be, how transient the friendships and living arrangements. I do wonder of the romance of it all though, from time to time. My examination of their pasts does lead to wonder – had things been different? Only to dismiss the idea as a child’s idealisation.

The fact is that my father was becoming increasingly sick, his dislocation from society almost irreconcilable, his entry to that subculture usually attracting the attention of the Law, permanent.

But, from this melange of history, this dare I say it, crucible of the changes that made New Zealand what it was in the 80s and 90s, I emerged – doubtless wailing (as appropriate). Although, there was something of an interlude that in itself became deeply formative to me. Because while my father descended more deeply into what became an all-encompassing lifestyle, my mother once again followed my uncle, this time away to Balmain, Sydney, another centre of the revolution, and it was there, in 1971, that I was born.

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Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

My paternal grandfather was, contrary to his current self, an authoritarian in his younger days. Like many conservative men of his generation his word was final within family boundaries, and it was his guidance that steered the family through the shoals of early 60s life. They were comfortable but not affluent. They were working to pay off their home. They had five healthy children. A typical post-War scene mirrored throughout the nation.

My father though, my father was not cut from the same cloth. Where his older brother was very much typical of Baby Boomer men, concerned with beer, rugby and work, Howard seems to have been ‘odd’ from a young age. Unsurprisingly he was gawky and awkward (as am I), and I’m told his intellect separated him from his peers. Fitness was not a concern to Howard, and in sport-obsessed New Zealand, where one was measured by their ability with the ball, he was at odds with the common man.

I’ve never been able to glean the nature of the relationship between these two. And while I’m of the impression that the years since Howard’s death have softened my grandfather, I can see that he still wonders how things might have worked differently, had he been able to save his son from the fate overtaking him. But this is the mystery of life, isn’t it? If I have settled on one thing in these many pages, it is that while we each make choices from within the resources we are given, there are unknowable weights bearing us forward, history an unseen burden upon our shoulders.

This was the way with the two of them. Different from those around him, my father sought out like minds and drifted into the counter-culture while my grandfather sought to fetch him back to what he himself knew best, the normality of the nuclear family. These two forces, one seeking the end of conformity, the other seeking certainty and reliability, sheered, the resultant friction burning both men, killing one, almost destroying the life of the other.

But what is a revolution without fatalities, no?

I can sit now and see the photos, my father a boy, a teen, a young man, and see with the years of hindsight since I was that same boy what it must have been for my grandfather. For a man to see his child so distant, so at odds with everyday life must have been heart-rending. But, this generation of men were not permitted to express angst or anguish, so the loss must have merely sat, an actual darkness, one I was to find he and his family still sharing quietly between themselves, some 20 years after my fathers’ death.

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Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

For reasons unknown to me for many years I had always considered my grandmother, and my mother in turn, a witch. I should immediately qualify that by stating that I in no way mean the modern, inherently negative meaning of the word, in fact, it is quite the contrary. By witch I mean the woman who is made other by her weirdness, again in the pre-modern sense of the word, by her isolation from immediate social surrounds, and by her hard-won wisdom.

I’m sure I’ve stated before that the concept I most associate with Ngaire is ‘alone’, because while surrounded by her family it was on rare occasions that I saw her immersed in the simple act of being with other people. Always a little haughty and distant, she was always the square peg. And yet, looking back, she possessed, in my experience at least, the ability to make statements that could cut to the quick – but not out of spite, instead because they saw through the layering and social buffers with which small-town people (and perhaps New Zealanders in general) protect themselves.

And though, like her mother, she has never really known best how to wield the power, I see my own mother inheriting the mantle. Much of my childhood I remember my mother being alone in one way or another, and I remember that we were in many ways very odd within the social environ we found ourselves. While for the better part of my youth I wrote this difference off to her baby-boomer hippy past, yet in retrospect the hippy ethos was for many little more than a self-adhered veneer to allow one to slake off the negative aspects of sterile, ‘modern’ mid-C20th life.

It is that weirdness, the difference from the mainstream that I’ve come to regard as the true marker of the hippy of the baby-boomer generation. Those unpossessing of that otherness are, in my humble opinion, those most likely to have been on the hippie bandwagon, not genuinely interested in the revolution, but only in riding out its benefits.

I also emphasise the weirdness because it is that which defined the outcome for so many boomers. When the dust had started to settle, and the revolution had degraded into disco and velcro, the good-timers exited for the ‘next big thing’, while the true hippies retreated to the metaphorical hills.

That is, those who survived. Because no revolution is without a cost, and those who rebelled against the straight-jacket of conformity and authority New Zealand and the West represented paid many a price in poverty, in addiction, in mental illness, in family break-ups and in dependency, a wealth of costs they may or may not have seen coming. And so it was that my mother came through the revolution in isolation, the one inheritance from her mother she may not have desired or anticipated coming to the fore, and defining the remainder of her life.

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