He was talking to me
My second year in Wellington hadn’t started any better than the first.
My diary had filled up with interesting characters, sunshine and fresh air over the summer, but then reverted to talking about my Christian faith, morality and personal inadequacies.
I stopped studying, stopped showing up for lectures, started reading, and of course wrote it all up in my diary. The last thing I want to do is bore you with it all, but just because it’s embarrassing now doesn’t mean I was always wrong — just an annoying teenager making the occasional point it’s hard to argue with.
I was certainly reading a grab bag of stuff. John O’Hara’s Hope of Heaven, Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (a “scrambled egghead”, someone wrote), Fielding’s Tom Jones, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, some remarkably even-handed horror stories from Vietnam in Time, and so on.
The book that eventually “grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me” was one I’d completely forgotten about called What It Means to Grow Up, written by a German psychotherapist, Fritz Kunkel, in 1930.
There’s really no excuse, he said, for bad memory or poor mathematics.
Everyone has a good memory for the things that truly interest him.
The genius is the man who works as the child plays.
[The “dreamer”] does not dare to come to terms with reality, but prefers to escape into the realm of ideas, where fewer bitter experiences are to be met with than in the outer everyday world.
He was talking to me.
§
But this time I won
Gerald was an interesting character who visited Kevin and Ruth occasionally. We were always up for a good debate, and he’d press his case with a slightly amused expression — looking calmly at me through his glasses, secure like Kevin in the knowledge that he was a man of the world and I was anything but.
“I had another argument with him today,” I wrote in my diary one day, “and he won.”
But then on the 13th of June he bailed me up about Vietnam. If I was a pacifist, he said, and if pacifism behind bars wasn’t enough, even cowardly — what was I going to do with myself?
Gerald thought he’d won again, but this time I had an answer.
I’d left university a week previously and was going to spend my life doing good. More specifically, I was going back to my original idea of agricultural science, but going out into the world, not back to the farm.
Actually I was a little wordier than that, but either way I was now officially a dropout. Friends and family know how that turned out — not much “doing good”, just trying to be a good guy most of the time, as Hemingway said.
Still, I’d bested Gerald
I wonder what he and Kevin thought.
§
The hospital
A couple of weeks later I came across an ad. in the paper and left Ruth and Kevin’s to take up a live-in job as a Medical Orderly in a geriatric hospital. It was harder to escape reality there, and at least a nod towards the better life “doing good” that I’d announced to Kevin and Gerald.
While I was there I kept — surprise! — another diary. I’m not recommending that you read this either, not because it’s tedious — I don’t think it is — but because it’s such a long read.
The hospital was a truly rewarding experience — the only time I’ve been on the giving rather than receiving end of the transaction. I’ve edited out most of the teenage angst and insecurity, but there’s enough left to judge me by. I worked at the hospital from late July until early December 1965, when I headed back home again.
Summer again
The following summer was magic — energetic and exuberant, and of course I kept a diary. After opening it for the first time in sixty years I thought it might be amusing to record this old man — older man! — reading his nineteen year-old’s words aloud.
I was amazed by how much we did over the Summer of ’65. By our youthful exuberance and the sheer energy we expended. By my certainties, insecurities and arrogance. And by my friends and their generosity. I only recorded it once, wanting to keep my response to it as fresh as possible — amused, condescending, affectionate. Admiring at times, embarrassed at others.
§
You’re welcome
There you go, I’ve distilled a couple of hours of teenage readin’ and writin’, life lessons in a geriatric hospital and a magical summer into a five minute précis.
And you thought I was long winded!