And it’s good old country comfort in my bones
Just the sweetest sound my ears have ever known…
— Bernie Taupin and Elton John, on Tumbleweed Connection
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Back on the farm
Comeback December I was home from university, and a new man — sort of — “worn out, sunburnt and getting fitter every day.”
My favourite thing was driving the tractor, alone and happy, soaking up the sun in a pair of shorts. That and the dew and quiet cows and sunrise in the early morning.
But I was no less serious.
In Wellington I’d been attending St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church on The Terrace. The Presbyterian Minister back in Kaikohe had been a highly engaging, animated man who took Bible Class with us most weeks, and I’d been confirmed by him.1 But Christian observance was just another of the things we were expected to do at school. In Wellington it became much more than that.
There was so much I wanted to do, I told myself. Study. Read the Bible. Learn to pray with Saint Teresa. Walk through the “murmuring bush”. Talk with this or that memorable character — and with my friends…
“But what have I done all day? Just worked…”
Fortunately there was more than my angst to write about.
§
Museum piece
6.12.64: Last Thursday Dad and I went to Parkers’ Mill to load timber for our new cowshed.
The mill was a museum piece, both men and machines. The mill itself was ancient, trussed together with logs and iron and an old, old engine. Everything was manual except the saws themselves, a winch for the logs and another for the wagon loads of timber. The yards were scattered with mysterious and venerable implements, engine blocks and tools, while the house was gloomy and dark, and crammed with antique furniture and dusty old books — even part of a spinning wheel.
The men were just as interesting. All three were Parkers. Two of them, while hardly ordinary, were not unique, but the third, the eldest was very interesting – he must have been 60 or more, I thought, permanently bent over with work, his hands as tough as leather, his chin unshaven and dribbly where a few teeth had rotted back.
He must have slaved his life away. His muscles were fibrous and fleshless and he talked with a loud shrill voice as if always trying to be heard above the shrieking saw. He made us a cup of billy tea, lifting the billy out of the fire with one bare hand, and pouring the brew into cups with the fingers of the other supporting its smoking hot bottom — and not even feeling it. He was a rather awful sight — he wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t been so bent and crippled.
If they’d wanted to they could have made a fortune with that mill, but they were content as they were – not that they were unintelligent. The oldest one, explaining the money problem, said very clearly, “With the population increasing like it is they’ve got to make more money or pass it round more quick.” I never understood that before, fair go.
§
Deathly quiet
Vietnam was already looming into view.
I was too young to remember the 1960 Kennedy election beyond a vague memory of Nixon’s sweaty lip in the first ever TV debate, and “Ask now what your country…” But 1964 had been different. The Gulf of Tonkin incident had boosted President Johnson’s standing in the election, and I thought American voters were given an unfortunate choice — either competence and dishonesty, or honesty and ignorance. Johnson impressed me as an “extremely able man, but disturbing to say the least … a political colossus, in absolute command — tremendous — but sly, unfeeling, dishonest, immoral, not above any manoeuvre in pursuit of his object … personal power.” Robert Caro would have approved.
On the other hand Senator Goldwater seemed “unflinchingly, even dangerously honest… The danger of his honesty is not that of choosing principle over expediency, but of failing to understand.”
It took me back to President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. I was in the Northland College Boy’s Hostel at the time. “The whole building went deathly quiet. I think it wanted to cry…”
That had been the second time we boys ate in deathly silence. In 1962 it had been the Cuban Missile Crisis. The only sounds in the dining room that day had been the clatter of cutlery and plates, and the scrape of chairs on the wooden floor.
§
Three little pigs
19.12.64: Mum and Lynne took in three little pigs the other day, which were cold and hungry because their mother wasn’t caring for them properly. They were almost lifeless when they came into the house, but after a feed and a couple of hours inside they were quite perky. Joe, our little Dachshund, wanted to climb into the box to keep them warm. He was quite excited, but then one of the piglets bit him and he became most agitated.
During the night they climbed out of the box and messed all over the kitchen floor and the Feltex, and in the bathroom, the toilet and the hall. Then they settled down by the stove to sleep. In the morning they were taken outside again.
§
Norman
19.12.64: He’s got guts and he talks ceaselessly. Evidently he’s also sensitive, as he tried to kill himself once — he shot himself in the chest with a shotgun. The Doctors took out what was left of one lung, moved his heart to give it more protection, and spaced out what remained of the ribs on the left side of his chest. He recovered by sheer guts. They told him he’d have to do sedentary work, but now he’s labouring for us.
Norman’s quite a sight with his shirt off, thin and tanned, his chest badly scarred. He’s as stubborn as a fat porker, and wants friends, and needs them. He’s in love with a married woman who at 31 is six years his senior. She has her husband‘s permission to do whatever she likes with Norman as long as she doesn’t leave home. Her name is Olivia, but Norman calls her Wendy and Poppet. She is, as they say, just a bitch. She tried to dump him once but he cried on her shoulder until she gave in — goodness knows what he would have done if she’d left him because he’s mad for her.
He talks incessantly, and explains things to me as if I’m the poorest dimwit on this dear Earth. During early milking, if I’m tired, he exasperates me, and I soon lose my temper — at which he talks even more, trying to get back in favour, and I soon feel ashamed of my rudeness. Then we’re friends again.
This morning I became truly annoyed and called him either a fool or a liar — and I was still trying to work out which. It distressed both him and me that I should’ve said it, for it’s not true.
I get the impression that, should stress show up in his life, there wouldn’t be much strength in him to stand up to it. He keeps himself going on pep pills, and he sleeps on tranquillisers. His hand shakes.
§
Thursday 31st December:
The singer, not the song, they said,
There is no God, but they were wrong…
… There is half an hour to a new year. May it be better than the last.
§
No such luck
The new year wasn’t any better. I was back with Ruth and Kevin, back at university, going to few if any lectures. Instead I spent the first half of the year reading, writing and feeling miserable.
When you move to the city, I wrote, you can be proud, to begin with, of your country roughness.
You can reminisce on days spent digging, painting, mowing, milking, moving stock. Sun, rain, damp unpleasant drizzle. All these are there in the city, in your memory, and then they fade.
§
Kevin was an enterprising man. Besides working as a sales manager, he ran the bar and wait staff at a downtown cabaret, and I worked there occasionally to earn a bit of cash. As a result I can carry a full tray of food or drink with confidence, which is certainly a useful life skill.
As I’ve said, I didn’t know anything about Kevin’s back story or how he got into this line of work, but he was good at it. I think he may have done something similar at one of the city hotels.
The Cabaret had a house band with a ball-gowned lead singer — good looking, generously bosomed and with a great voice — belting out the favourites. There was a dance floor and table service for food and drinks. We stewards dressed in dark suits, white shirts and bow ties, with the traditional white napkin draped across our forearms. We hosted big functions from time to time, and the low point in my waiting career was unthinkingly brushing the crumbs off Governor General Sir Bernard Fergusson’s place setting with a soiled napkin, leaving a broad smear of cigarette ash in their place.
For some reason I went with Kevin on one of his sales trips to Napier. He took me out to dinner and we drank a bottle of Liebfraumilch. It was about then I learned not to judge all wine by the horrible stuff I’d tasted at my older cousins’ weddings.
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The demon drink
There are a few entries involving the demon drink in my diary.
One night, after the ball was over and our work done, the stewards gathered around a table with a few bottles of beer and a half of Pimms. I had a few glasses and then — as if at the snap of someone’s fingers — I was floating away from myself and the voices around me were a hundred yards away. I was so tired, and I wanted so badly to giggle. Guiding my body by remote, uncertain control I put away the glasses, climbed the stairs and drove off on my scooter. The cold blast of air on the road revived me. I’d felt like that only once before — the previous Christmas at haymaking — equally tired and with a few beers in me.
I detest the way we’ve neutered the word “drunk” by using it to describe how we feel when we’ve gone out with mates for a few drinks. I reserve it for the few times I’ve got absolutely plastered.
Two women, the first dressed in gorgeous blue for the Ball. She’s tall, brunette and crazy-drunk. She pukes on the carpet and wets herself, so they coax her outside, through the kitchen, and she screams, “Leave me alone, please leave me alone!” and wails and laughs hysterically. She’s giggling. When they get her out into the street, she pulls up her dress, squats down on the pavement and pees through her undies onto the ground.
The second is a girl in years. She wears a waitress’s white smock and black lace-up shoes. She’s short, and plain, with bouncy black hair combed to sweep down to her neck, and back up into large bangs. Her face is shadowy and her skin soft. She’s quiet and friendly, and her voice unmusical. She has a plain intensity about her face and hands and body, and she’s a pleasant companion on our station. She was assaulted, so Kevin says, some time ago. A man attacked her on her way home at night.
§
And so it went for a few months, holed up in my room for much of the time reading. Coming out for meals, yarns with Ruth and Kevin, and trips downtown for movies and books.
Footnotes
- This was Duncan Jamieson, who became Moderator of the Presbyterian Church eighteen years later.
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