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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

I still haven’t got over telling you that Mookie Johnson saw me crying, so I’m going to skate quickly over the three years following school, which were almost as embarrassing.

I spent 1964 at VUW studying for that BA-LLB and feeling sorry for myself. I remember almost nothing about it — vague memories of the Canterbury Tales; an American lecturer talking about trusting in God and keeping your powder dry — that’s about it. But I did really well in the law papers — well enough, apparently, for the lecturer to ask the class about me when I dropped out the following year. I liked the logical, analytical aspect of the law but I hated the adversarial and performative side. That bright idea in conversation with Mr Overend went nowhere. Why was I studying for a career I didn’t like the sound of?

But mainly I was socially marooned. I’d spent my life to that point powered along by general approbation, I suppose, and the defined roles and relationships that we’d all enjoyed, most of us anyway, at school. There were the kids in your dormitory, in your class, in your team, at your dining table. There were plays to perform, and musicals. You got to perform in Gilbert and Sullivan and kiss a girl in the broom cupboard — I still recall the taste of hot breath and cold cream. All of which reminds me powerfully, and weirdly, of Dad’s experience in military training.

And then it was all gone. I was living in a strange city — I’d never lived in a city. Everyone a stranger. Anonymous, knowing no one, no status, no role to play, no purpose, huge Stage 1 classes…

§

There’s a clue right there as to why the wheels fell off. I was talking to an old friend recently who ended his career as a highly respected KC. I’d always assumed he went to University eyes front and set on the law. No, he said, like me he had no plans — although he was certainly driven to Succeed. He’d simply gotten impatient queuing to register for a B.A., and noticed that they were processing the law school line much faster — so he moved. Maybe like me he isn’t letting the truth get in the way of a good story, but in any case he spent his whole life in Auckland, lived at home while he studied, and joined a practice there. Socially grounded, not cut loose. Like the cream on Mum’s milk he rose to the top.

§

Palmerston North was cold. My flatmates and I would sit around working on our chillblains in front of a little fan heater, smelling our French landlady’s interminable boiled cabbage and obsessing about the Vietnam War.

I obsessed the most. Those were the final days of conscription in New Zealand. Not everybody was called up, just those whose birthdays were drawn in the lottery. Mine wasn’t called, but I’d decided to get in first, and already enrolled as a Conscientious Objector.

There was a song by Donovan called Universal Soldier that summed it up for me:

He’s the Universal Soldier
and he really is to blame.
His orders come from far away no more.
They come from here and there and you and me,
and brothers, can’t you see
this is not the way to put an end to war.

When I told my horrified parents, Mum wrote to say that back in the day I’d have had a letter with a white feather in it. When I replied to justify myself they were supportive and understanding, as usual.

But on a bad day they must have wondered why they’d gone to so much trouble to have me.

§

The highlight of my year at Massey was hearing Buffy Sainte-Marie on the radio one afternoon. As soon as the programme was over I left the house to buy her LP Little Wheel Spin and Spin. The track that resonated most was Men of the Fields. It followed a denunciation of what Europeans have done to the American Indian that I’ve never forgotten, but this one was gentle.

Men of the fields, men of the valleys
Men of the seasons and the soil
Strong hearts and hands moulding the lands
All over earth, they toil.

That’s where I wanted to be. I decided to stop pretending, get a farm job and a tan, and start putting myself back together.

I didn’t know it then but it was Buffy who wrote Universal Soldier. Forget the politics of Vietnam, that was my conscientious objection in a nutshell.

§

Long after I’d finished writing this I was digging through a box of stuff that Mum and Dad had saved: Souvenir WW2 Field Dressings. Black-and-white wartime postcards of Cairo, Alexandria, Firenze, Rimini. Sympathy cards from when my grandfather died — with a handwritten note from Heather’s mother Joyce. Laboriously written aerograms from Dad’s Aunt Ada back in Lancashire. And a piece of old note paper with a penciled explanation of how to convert the size of logs into “super-feet” — the measurement they were priced by — with “H.S. McCarroll wrote this” added at the bottom by my father. Hugh Shields McCarroll, Mum’s father, was a Kauri bushman.

That box took up most of the afternoon, and then came two surprises. The first was Mum’s newsprint pad detailing the bills she’d paid over the mid 1990s. In June 1994 she wrote that on July 12th she’d be able to “pay Ian $3000”. I couldn’t recall how we’d paid for the Cassino trip.

Then, at the bottom of the box, a forgotten foolscap envelope from Mum and Dad’s accountants, with their address scribbled out and Ian’s Open Letter to a Parent added in ball-point. The title was theirs but the contents were mine. Dad was on the Whangarei Boys High School Board of Governors at the time — the very school I’d rejected as a twelve year-old. He’d taken the Secretary a long letter from me in which I’d told my parents that I’d dropped out, and asked her to type it. I think he distributed it to the entire Board, and I’ll bet he tried to get the Advocate to publish it. Eight double-spaced pages of self-indulgent, self-flagellating worthiness.

I’d dropped out for two reasons, I said. I no longer wanted the career I was being trained for, and, with so much going through my mind about the state of the world, I couldn’t focus on Varsity at all.

That much was true. The Outsider and Notes From Underground, Teilhard de Chardin, Albert Schweitzer, Franz Fanon — all the squalor, amorality and mendacity of the world. What else was new? Well, Vietnam.

In ‘64 I’d flirted with the Student Christian Movement and gone to St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church on The Terrace a few times.

In ‘66 I barely went to lectures. All I remember is flatting with three High School friends, our kerosene heater, our French landlady, my bedroom and the kitchen (vaguely), discovering Screw Driver and a lifelong revulsion for dark rum, and having a bit part in the student revue. I can’t remember much about that either, except that the writer-director may have gone on to a fairly successful career — and bussing to Whanganui for a performance in which I staggered around the Town Hall stage with rather less than my normal sensory acuity.

I had a third reason for dropping out. I said it was an act of commitment to a better life of (unspecified) good works — which I never undertook. And, in almost the same breath, I told my parents I was dropping out. I told them that as a fait accompli — instead of having it out with them, as they were surely entitled. Hardly courageous. Also, I rather glossed over the fact that this was the second time I’d dropped out.

But Dad was proud of my efforts, or taken in, and it was quite well-written for a self-absorbed, long-winded nineteen year old. Well, some things don’t change.

Fortunately I’d had that one moment of self-awareness and realised that the first step on this path to a better life was to stop pretending, get that farm job and tan, and start putting myself back together. First things first.

§

My first farm job was working for Ross Blong and his wife near Ruawai. Ross was brother-in-law to one of my Massey flatmates. There were cows to milk, Romney ewes to assist with lambing — that was the worst part — and kumara fields to till. Also paddocks to bring into production with a tractor-mounted rotary mower. This was on another property Ross owned, out past Titoki I think. The tractor was the best part.

I don’t know whether I was a good employee or not, but they were great employers. That was 1966.

§

A year later I was working on a dairy farm out near Auckland Airport. My boss and his wife were managing it for wealthy owners who lived in a big house on the property. The farm is long gone now, but it was lovely then, rolling land that sloped down to a Manukau estuary, beautiful in the mornings.

That’s where I met Heather. Ken introduced us, the best of many things I owe him as a friend — I suspect I was a project he was working on back then.

Anyway, once lost, I now was found, as the hymn says.

And a year after that — 1968 — we were married and living on the family farm back in Hikurangi. That was our personal Men of the Fields period — tilling the soil, milking cows and making babies. I was fit, I had that tan, and I was living with the love of my life.

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