36. "And There the Antic Sits" - Cameron Gunn's Nightmare




William Blake Etching

                   ' - for within the hollow crown
                 That rounds the mortal temples of a king
                 Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,

     Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,

     Allowing him a breath, a little scene,

     To monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with looks;

     Infusing him with self and vain conceit,

     As if this flesh which walls about our life

     Were brass impregnable; and, humour’d thus,

     Comes at the last, and with a little pin

     Bores thorough his castle wall, and farewell king!'     [Richard II, Act 3, scene 2]

Cameron Gunn’s a fighter, determined this is just a minor skirmish to be won. He hasn’t spent a small fortune at Les Mills keeping his body in shape to dissolve in a pathetic puff of smoke at the sign of a little stress. Bad enough having to surrender from work for a spell but hospital is an enemy to be avoided like the plague and it shakes him up to find himself a patient for the first time.

Nights are the worst. In the day he’s busy, in control, the decorations for his prowess in the battle of life visible around him – the best private room, bouquets of flowers on the coffee table, a view over the gulf from his bed, a stream of important people to entertain, staff fussing over him, washing him, feeding him, his secretary visiting with papers to be signed and despatched, constant calls on his cell phone. And there are other daytime distractions: nurses to chat up with a bluff heartiness, titillated by invitations to the pleasures of mounting his Harley Davidson for a ride - at midnight - in the nude; robust globe trotting agency mercenaries, unbowed in the face of sickness and death, who, belying the prim starchiness of their nunlike uniforms, joke with him lewdly about his post operative libido.

“Don’t you fear, Mr Gunn, we’ll get you up,” jests the buxom Katie Koala. “Get you cocked and firing again.”

But in the night he’s alone and sleepless with only his fears to bring to heel. His brain goes into overdrive fighting furiously to combat memories of the past months and defeatist omens of what the next might bring. He curses that strutting faithless Rosalie and vows there’ll be no more leggy air hostesses conquered in exotic places, transmuted into trophy wives to parade their youth in his face and demand, flashing their dark assassins’ eyes, multiple orgasms and bottomless credit. He’s better off alone. Can look after himself. That’s what it all comes down to in the end anyway. Looking after number one, that’s his philosophy. Served him well in the army and served him well in business and he’s buggered if he can see why it won’t serve this campaign too.

Cameron lies on his back thinking of Trevor’s warnings. As doctors go Trevor is fine, even if he is Chinese. Calls a spade a spade and doesn’t lie. But he’s making too big an issue of it all. Growling at his ignoring the symptoms for so long. Worrying about cholesterol and blood pressure and heart rates and stress and PSA counts and telling him he will have to slow down, take things easy, cut back on his work and his drinking and, if the worst scenario plays out, forgo a sex life.

“I’d rather be dead,” Cameron joked.

“That’s an option too,” Trevor laughed.

Not that Cameron is afraid of death. As a tank commander in Vietnam he saw colleagues killed and maimed. Killed and maimed plenty of gooks too in his turn. He witnessed atrocities and slept well at night. In his officer’s uniform, he felt invincible, a master of the universe proudly upholding a family tradition stretching back to the mists of 1854 when one of his ancestors led the dragoons’ suicidal charge on the Russian guns at Balaclava and survived to tell the tale. He loved the rigour of military training and discipline and the sense of physical well-being it gave him. After the army he declared war on his body, joined a regiment of body builders, learned to call his biceps ‘guns’, his shoulders ‘cannonballs’, and vigorously attacked the exercises needed to bomb, blitz, shred, rip, burn, blast, destroy, chisel and torture recalcitrant and undisciplined muscles into shape, his body a battlefield, he the victor. When his business commitments no longer allowed time for body-building he became a gym junkie, a 6am regular rapidly progressing through the ranks of  programmes, from BodyJump’s barbells and weights, squats, presses, lifts and curls, to BodyCombat’s empowering kick-boxing, karate and Tae Kwondo, until he graduated to the explosive energy charged music and moves of BodyAttack’s high intensity aerobics. Then he cycled to work to shower and change in time for the breakfast briefing of his executive troops.

Nor is he afraid of pain, not physical pain at least, though he certainly flinched when blonde svelte Cape Town Kate shoved her little silver cutting tool up his ass and clipped off pieces of his prostate gland for the biopsy. Six times she cut. Six times he flinched.

But mental anguish is as alien to him as the idea that his body fortress is not impregnable and that he might weaken, age and die like lesser mortals. He’s filled with shock and awe that a subversive terrorist the size of a walnut, lurking like some suicide bomber out of sight in the fetid back alleys of his flesh, could secretly and furtively blast him to oblivion. In the dark of the night, scantily clothed in the degrading anonymity of his white hospital smock, the bitter joke of such a defeat seems a cruelly lit obscenity. Cameron feels a tear form in each eye. He brushes the right one away angrily but is too slow to stop the other running down into his ear. His chest heaves with his rapid intake of breath. God, how humiliating, he thinks. What is he? Some self-pitying namby pamby New Age liberal about to cry? For Chrissake, you old bastard, show some backbone, get a grip.

The night nurse, the old blowsy one, shines a torch in his face.

“Are you OK, Mr Gunn?” she whispers.

“Yes. I’m fine,” he snaps.

“Having trouble sleeping? Would you like another pill?"

“Leave it there. I’ll take it later.”

Three months earlier, after Rosalie decamped from their seaside mansion, Trevor, in a pre-emptive strike, prescribed sleeping pills. Cameron didn’t take any but brought them to the hospital in case of just such a catastrophic night time surrender as this. Depressed and war weary, he is systematically adding to his armoury of pills. If it comes to a final blitzkreig, he decides, at least, goddammit, he’ll take back control. Crash and burn to his own command.

And now, in the pitch of night, he stands in terror peering from the edge of the abyss as God’s spirit flees the earth and an evil moonlight floods the sky. He sees great black clouds billowing up over the Western oceans, tanks and guns and steel apocalyptic horses with flaming nostrils rumbling and tossing on their rolling swell, ghostly crows bearing pestilence eclipse the moon and the wolverine sons of blood thunder across the desolate land seeking their nightly flesh as women and children cry for bread. He sees famine, death and all the armies of disease loose in the land, the earth smoking in a cataract of fire and blood, the world in free fall gyrating recklessly helplessly through the cosmos chasing the fading light the dying light the dead light into black holes and sulphurous pits. He sees Lucifer cast down from paradise and the monstrous scaly head of the Great Satan rising over the horizon above the mouldering sea, a swirling red demon spewing thunderbolts from a cavernous mouth. He sees graves and sepulchres give up their gory dead, blazing comets cross the sky scattering ashes through the feverous night, a god of war drunk with blood, a groaning sick heaven vomiting with the stench of death, skeletons in the throat of hell howling for vengeance, and wild men locked in chains crouching naked in fetid swamps shrieking at fiery eagles and screaming lions scavenging on their leprous limbs. He sees the cockroaches inherit the earth as he crawls among the warring oceans the smoking trees the fires of doom and hears the whole of humanity shrilly crying a shrill penetrating cry lacerating in the darkness of his mind ringing ringing in his ears as he claws out in his nakedness and grabs the mindless throatless headless beast and the beast speaks and the words of the beast, drawn torturously from its bowels, reverberate in his head and Cameron hears the voice of the beast and he hears the shrill metallic message of the beast and the beast’s message is for him, his message, the echoing message he wished had come sooner to cut through his consciousness and sever him from the tyranny of the dark, from the terror of the visions of the night, and the beast’s voice, the voice of deliverance, is his voice and the voice says.

“This is your wake up call you old bastard. Have a nice day.”

William Blake etching





35. Pain, Piles and Prostate Surgery

[Note: for the origin of this letter see Blog 30]

4th December 1980

Dear Mum, Dad and family,

Your timely letter arrived yesterday conveying all your love and best wishes for to-day. At the moment I am sitting around waiting for various tests, having just been admitted to the hospital which is in a pleasant part of Auckland called St. Heliers in the Eastern suburbs. It is a beautiful day so it is a pity to be confined. I should have the surgery late this afternoon and then spend a few days here I expect and hopefully I shall be able to convalesce at home after the weekend. I have brought a lot of books to read and have a mountain of correspondence to catch up on but whether I shall feel like doing much we shall have to wait and see.

Last weekend we went down to Taupo to stay with friends, leaving on Friday afternoon and coming back on Monday evening. Saturday was a fine day and I went fishing in the evening on the lake and caught three trout, the largest about four and a half pounds. They make a lovely meal but the cold and potential seasickness on the boat don’t make it too exciting a sport for me. On the Sunday it rained and rained so we sat around and chatted most of the day. It made a break for us, particularly for Mary who is very tired what with the Tech and the demands of the salon at this time of year, but was all too short.

Lewis had a good birthday but since then has broken his wrist – a greenstick fracture – and is all plastered up. He fell, or rolled, down a bank. He had a new bicycle for his birthday so I expect he’s a bit fed up he can’t use it too much for a few weeks. We had a tea party for him on Sugar Mountain followed by a bonfire and fireworks that we had saved from November 5th so that made a bit of a change. I haven’t really made any plans for the summer holidays as I want to be fit again first and see how I feel – and we also want to save our pennies for the big trip next year. Mary has just had a pay rise so that will help although we read gloomy tales about the economic situation in the U.K.

I will leave this open to finish off after the op,
So all my love for now, John. XX

Friday 5^th
I am alive and well if a bit tender in the rear! I didn’t finally go to the operating theatre until after 5pm last evening and woke about 11pm. I was starving! but have since had a good breakfast and been up and about. Thanks for all your prayers – they worked a treat.
Love John.

Have just called in to the hospital 10am Friday and am happily surprised that John is really looking great. I sent him some flowers and a Xmas arrangement with your money yesterday. I felt quite miserable having to leave him in hospital. He would have come home then and there if he could. So don’t worry he is looking fine. Not up to a lot of coughing or laughing yet but then that’s not a huge problem. Keep the prayers going – we will say a few for you as well. Love Mary XX

Just a quick card. Christmas has crept up on us very quickly this year what with one thing and another. I am really fine after the operation and have no pain although I have to take it easy for a couple more weeks. It was great to hear your voices on the telephone and to know that you had been thinking of me. I forgot to thank you for the flowers that you sent, via Mary, whilst I was in hospital. The surgeon reckons I shall be good for at least twenty years and that seems like a bargain in return for only a week’s discomfort. Lots of love from us all here.

John, Mary and the children.

Well, It’s more than thirty years now so the surgeon is right on that score. But no pain? And only some ‘discomfort’? I have a wry smile reading that. I have had a few dramas with hospitals over the years what with one thing and another, and once or twice imagined I might die, but never again the mind-blowing pain of that first week after the operation on my piles. I thought I was pretty stoic and had a high pain threshold. I still think that, having been sorely tested in recent years, ‘bloody but unbowed’ as I am ‘under the bludgeonings of chance.’ I don’t remember any great pain when my eight-year-old tonsils and adenoids are removed. There is some brief if excruciating pain when the medial cartilage in my right knee gives way in the delivery stride as I lose my footing bowling flat out for the M.C.C. on a wet wicket (the club I have all the medallions for, the Middleton Cricket Club!) and again when our idiot of a family doctor at Enfield wrenches my swollen knee and adds badly torn ligaments to my injury. But no pain that I can recall when, after a number of embarrassing run outs when my knee gives way during sharp singles, I finally have the cartilage removed at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge and the next morning, determined to impress the lovely dark eyed Hungarian physiotherapist Maria with the muscle definition in my quadriceps, I grit my teeth to lift my injured leg off the bed a day ahead of her schedule. And when it is my turn for legitis and hip replacements there is only one nasty moment when, second time round, as I am crunched up precariously in a foetal ball on the operating table at the Mater Misericorde, the anaesthetist repeatedly strikes my spinal column in his botched attempt to administer the epidural and the nurse hovering over me kindly wipes away the single silent tear that forms in each eye. That is painful. As is the biopsy when the South African nurse in the Harley Street clinic eases a cutting tool up my rectum, a tool that looks like a miniature set of tree shears designed to snip fruit from out-of-reach upper branches, and clips six little pieces from my prostate gland. That certainly makes me jump. Six times.

But nothing, not laughing with a broken rib, or the horror and humour of acute urinary retention, or peeing blood after surgery, has ever compared with those first few 1980 post-pile rites of passage. My routine is to take two paracetamol and, ten minutes or so later, run as hot a bath as my body can stand, adding a large splash of Dettol to the water, and then take up my position in the toilet next door, keeping the door open ready to run at the earliest opportunity and plunge into the bath. Those, what, ten or twenty seconds once or twice a day for perhaps a week, that is pain. It sends me to Rabelais for relief, sends me exploring the scatological literature, sends me to research and write a mercifully unpublished pastiche of The Hite Report – I still have the Certificate of Registration from the United States Copyright Office in the Library of Congress dated October 5^th 1982 - and to collect and retell strongly flavoured tales and jokes that provide distraction for Mary through the agonies of her recurring cancer. And leaves me with an abiding taste for black comedy, for a robust comic anger in the face of death and disaster, such that the only programme on television I always make time for in recent years is the mordant Six Feet Under.

So, what with John Lennon being shot that week in 1980, it is a shitty and painful time. I also miss out on the Roberta Flack concert we have booked months in advance and Mary goes with her sister Anita instead. [There was one amusing sideline to my haemorrhoidendectomy, however. My proctologist was called Mr Proctor (and I recently had hip surgery with a Mr Walker). I asked Mr Proctor why he had chosen his medical specialism. He explained that as a medical student he liked to have a few drinks and thought it best, during ward rounds, to focus on the end of the patient where his breath wouldn't betray him.]

I still have my Rabelaisian parody and it still gives me a smile. How oddly people behave when under extreme stress. And I see I prefaced my report with a quote from Balzac: ‘As children only do we laugh, and as we travel onward laughter sinks down and dies out. To laugh you must be innocent and pure of heart.’

But it wasn’t an easy time to laugh.

34. Puzzle Pieces: (1) What was Postmodernism?

Note

In 1998-99 I had my last research and study leave from the University of Auckland and spent most of it in London working on a book with the horrendously serious sounding title Contested Terrains: Culture and Commerce in the Market Millennium. The book was to contain a rethinking of the framework of my 1993 book Business and the Culture of an Enterprise Society but was never completed and will never be completed, at least not by me. Working on this book was amongst the most fun I ever had in the research part of my academic career and the incomplete work contains I believe some of my best writing. I have already raided the work in three earlier blog entries, (8) "A Place to Stand, A Place to Sit", (9) "The Adventures of a Banknote" and (11) "In the Name of God and of Profit". These have clearly proved readable so I intend to add to them in this and subsequent blogs. The piece below is from the introduction to the book, which opens with the description of a 1998 exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
________________________________________________________________

Just inside the Victoria and Albert Museum

, between the main Cromwell Road entrance and “The V&A Shop”, are a small number of glass-fronted display cabinets. Set into the walls on each side of the foyer and reception area, these cabinets are used for temporary displays. They contain the only collections of artefacts that can be viewed without paying to go into the main body of the museum, other than during the free access period from 4.30pm to 5.45pm each day. There are eight cabinets in all, each measuring about two feet in depth, five feet across and five and a half feet in height. In the autumn of 1998 a new display is set up, arranged by the Museum’s curator of ceramics.

Some cabinets contain just a single item: in one, an Austrian-designed Italian-made tea and coffee set fabricated in electroplate and metacrylate; in another, “Danae Light” (London 1985), a composition of ‘MDF, paper, mirror, quartz and electrical fittings’. In a third cabinet are two Japanese items: “Candlelight” (1988), made of ‘blown, cast, hot-worked and glued glass’; and a Dish (1994), titled “Disintegration”, made of cast iron, patinated bronze and string. In another cabinet are five pieces of Italian glass and porcelain, each standing alone.

The other four cabinets are busier, more cluttered. One contains a number of clothing items and accessories from the archive of the London-based fashion label, Antoni and Alison. Raised in the foreground of another cabinet is a 1993 carrier bag from the Barcelona store, Vincon, on which is printed a reproduction of a 1987 work by New York graphic artist Barbara Krueger, “I shop therefore I am”. Lining the back of the display is a piece of ‘Aids’ wallpaper, a late eighties colour screenprint from Canada. A further cabinet illustrates the incorporation of neoclassical motifs in furnishing and fashion. Against the backdrop of a classically-inspired 1986 furnishing fabric “Fallen Angel”, is set a detail from a painting by Francois Boucher, a piece of “Boucher Toile” (a 1991 furnishing fabric), and a silk shawl and silk tie designed by Vivienne Westwood in 1991. All reproduce the same Boucher motif.

The ‘last’ cabinet - only in the sense that I choose to describe it last, since the cabinets are not numbered and, as far as I can judge, are in no particular sequence - is devoted to Barbie. It being half-term, the Barbie cabinet is attracting some interest and photographic attention from visiting school-girls and their mums. It displays Barbie, “An Icon of Modernism”, alongside Barbie in India, “An Icon of Postmodernism”. The text records that the Indian Barbies, from a series “Expressions of India”, are collectors’ items; they wear regional costumes and are ‘marketed as the embodiment of traditional values’.

This curious juxtaposition of artefacts, accompanied by texts emphasising the commodity value of art, mark the whole off as a very ‘postmodern’ display. On each glass front, printed in black lettering, is the question

WHAT WAS POSTMODERNISM?

There are many ironies in this little exhibition. If, as the display’s written texts claim, postmodernism is ‘always defined by what it is not’, then how do you choose a set of artefacts to illustrate the nature of postmodernism, or, indeed, not to illustrate the nature of postmodernism? Yet these artefacts, in their eclectic mixture of styles, textures, materials, histories, do give the flavour of the fusion and confusion of categories of things, of boundaries, that was part of the postmodern ethos. Nowhere is this process more evident than in the fusion and confusion between the commercial and the cultural - in shopping as entertainment, stores and malls as tourist attractions, news as commercial product, architecture as advertisement, and sport, leisure and play as business. And, perhaps as the epitome of the commercial/cultural merger, are museums themselves, increasingly funded through commercial sponsorship, marketing and merchandising entrance-fee-payable collections through the sale of reproductions in free-access museum shops, running joint promotions with textile firms and department stores, reconstructing supermarkets and burger bars within their galleries. How ironic then that the “V&A”, ‘the Harrods of the museum world’, that set out to become ‘the Laura Ashley of the 1990s’, that promoted itself as “An ace caff with quite a nice museum attached”, should at the end of the 1990s declare postmodernism passe.

Nevertheless, with what relief and delight do I read that black inscription! What was postmodernism? Does this mean that whatever it was it can now be safely relegated to the trash can of the historical past? Is the not-so-secret society of self-appointed postmodernist intellectuals, literary critics and artists now itself in the process of dissolution and deconstruction? Can I now justify my past laziness in refusing to take seriously sentences that I have to read multiple times before I can elucidate even a glimmer of their meaning?** (Am I thick or are they opaque?) Now that the metanarrative that denied metanarratives has come to its logical conclusion, can I, in guilt-free bliss, contemplate new metanarratives, even millennial ones?

Well, why not? Although calendars are purely artificial constructs, we characteristically seek at the end of a decade, a century, a millennium, to try and make some overall sense of the period that has just closed. As the year 2000 approached, reviews of the twentieth century, and utopian and dystopian predictions for the twenty first, were published with gay abandon. Distrusting labels of all kinds in this age of marketing, nevertheless we like to label times present and times past, decade by decade (“The Sixties”, “The Me Decade”), or generation by generation (“The Baby Boomers”, “The X Generation”), or in terms of some mix of social, economic and technological landmarks - Feudalism, Mercantilism, the Industrial Revolution, the Post-Industrial Society, the Nuclear Age, the Computer Age, the Information Age. And as we individually grow older, we try to make sense of our own lives too, to see the patterns and discontinuities of our individual pasts, and to explore the idiosyncratic alongside the broader contexts of the social, economic, political and cultural changes that we have lived with or through. So at the end of a millennium, we are tempted, I am tempted, foolhardy as it may be, to jettison the overpowering self-consciousness imposed by postmodernism and to try and capture a millennial story line.

My label for the millennium 1000AD to 2000AD is “The Market Millennium”. The millennium starts out with embryonic elements of a Market Economy and a Market Society. It ends in a fully fledged Market Culture. The story of the market is, however, but one story of the second millennium. It must ride alongside, often moving in sequence with, other major narratives of the last thousand years - the stories of science and technology, of religious and political change, of military aggression. I seek merely to peg out the landscape of the market narrative, to explore the historical interplay of commerce and culture, and to illustrate ways in which ideas and values associated with market exchange, have come to permeate everyday life - in the political and public arenas, in the workplace, in the home, and in the ‘interiority’ of our private selves.

** The first prize in the 1998 bad-writing contest run by the journal Philosophy and Literature went to the following extract from an academic article: ‘The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.’ [The sort of sentence that would make you want to Foucault Althusser up your Derrida.]

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33. Of Primary Schools, Pets and Pauper Lunatics

Edinburgh from Queen's Drive, Hollyrood Park 1998

When I was a small boy we moved home multiple times. In this blog I piece together, with a variety of distractions along the way, an account of the places where I receive some primary school education. There are six in total, one a year on average before I go as a boarder to Wells Cathedral Junior School in September 1949 at the age of nine. [Here, in case you lose track in the rambles that follow, is the school route in chronological order: 1. Monkton Combe, near Bath, Somerset; 2. Edinburgh; 3. Itchingfield, Sussex; 4. Cambridge; 5. Bath; 6. Wells.]

I am reaching (have reached would be more truthful) the age where I can't necessarily recall what I did yesterday or why I am standing in the bedroom holding this empty coffee cup I have brought up from the kitchen. Perhaps I should blog a collection of my best senior moments for your amusement but, as Sharon points out, how would I remember what they were. So loss of short term memory does have its upsides it would seem.

My long term memory, however, is reasonably good. And if I remember wrongly (or differently) about my primary schooling I am sure my big sister Elizabeth, who is two and a half years older than me, can set the record straight. In fact both of us rely for precise dates in our early years on my mother's record of our family life. Since my copy of Mum's autobiography is stored away at present Elizabeth has sent me a list of dates of the places we stay in between 1940 and 1952 when we move to the smog-filled winters of Queen's Park in London.

I was born in June 1940. My Dad is in the Sudan and so Elizabeth, my Mum and I live with my Grannie and Grandpa Henderson at 8 Greenbank Crescent in Edinburgh. We move twice from there in 1940, first to a cottage in Gorebridge, Midlothian, and then to friends of my mother's in Dollar, Clackmannanshire. We move again in October 1941, this time to a rented property, Mount Stuart in Glen Devon, and, in May 1943, just down the road at the Yetts 'o Muckart bus stop, I meet my Dad for the first time.

 Mount Stuart, Glen Devon 1998

In September 1943 Elizabeth goes to her first school, the Muckart Village School. I go with her once for a day to the single schoolroom but it hardly counts as my first primary schooling; I am only three or four years old and just play with the toys.

In September 1944 my Dad, having recovered from cerebral malaria contracted in Africa, takes up a teaching post in Monkton Combe, Somerset, and we move from Scotland to rooms nearby. From there I go to my first school, a dame school at Freshford. I can remember little about the school itself, only the trek up the gloomy road between the fir trees with my big sister holding my hand, a mile’s walk to school from the Manor House by the River Avon at Limpley-Stoke where we are lodging and where the railway line with its one train a day at eleven o’clock in the morning runs through the orchard at the bottom of the garden and you can hear the buses and trucks grinding painfully slowly in first gear up the Warminster Hill on the other side of the valley.

On the way to school in the winter, if it has snowed, the older boys roll up snowballs as big as boulders, leave them in the middle of the road and wait to watch the cars coming down from Freshford taking evasive action on the icy surface. But I don’t like school. We are just down from Scotland and the teacher can’t understand a word I say, so I deliberately thicken the Scottish accent I am so proud of. She, in response, puts me to stand in the corner – it seems a bit hard in retrospect, given that I am only five at the time. I am delighted when Mum and Dad take me away and let me stay home and play with a friend, and he and I can watch the train pass each day from a hiding place beneath the apple trees by the railway track.

In 1945 we move again, this time to Shutecroft, a school house in Monkton Combe. But that September Dad starts theological studies at Ridley Hall in Cambridge and Mum, Elizabeth and I go back to Edinburgh for a spell to live with Grannie Henderson at Greenbank Crescent, Grandpa having died the year before. Elizabeth and I go to and fro on the tram to the Rudolph Steiner School in Colinton Road. Grannie thinks Mum is stupid to send us there when there is a perfectly good school a five minute walk away just by the Morningside grocery shop that Uncle Peter has inherited (and now runs, together with the Bruntsfield shop, before adding a third of his own over in Blackhall), but, since there are daily tram rides, I think it’s great and have fun making a lovely mess with paints and crayons and potato cuts and other arty things.

Much to Mum’s dismay, Grannie only makes a fuss of Elizabeth and shows little interest in me. But I don’t notice Grannie's preference so I can’t lay at her doorstep my desperate desire for affection and love, my sense of isolation, my fear of abandonment, my intense competitiveness, and all the other psychological baggage we are supposed to acquire in our formative years, and do acquire of course (or invent later when we have the language of psychobabble to inspire us), but don’t have to burden ourselves with forever unless we so choose. To compensate to me, and to escape Grannie, Mum takes us on tram rides across the city to Joppa or Portobello and, since we board the tram near the Fairmilehead terminus, Elizabeth and I always rush up stairs, me first, to grab the front seats on the top deck. We repeat these journeys in future years when we are packed off to Scotland in the school holidays to stay with Grannie and she gives us thruppence each - a penny fare being enough for a child to ride from one end of a tram route to the other - and a cut lunch to take ourselves off for the day, and occasionally comes with us to the Portobello swimming pool and sits there dozing in the sun, dressed from head to toe in her widow’s black, listening to us scream with delight when the wave machine is turned on, a wonder of the world to us in those days. I go back to Portobello in August 1998 and a run-down and shabby place it is.

In the Spring of 1946 we are on the move again, this time to White Turret in Barn's Green, Sussex. It is the children's home of St. Julian’s, a religious retreat house that later becomes Mum and Dad’s spiritual sanctuary over many years. My Mum is part of the White Turret staff and Dad rents a cottage down by the railway line so that he can study in peace and quiet. 

Occasionally Mum takes Elizabeth and I on the bus from St. Julian’s and I eagerly anticipate seeing, as it comes round our corner from Coolham, that it has Horsham as its destination and not just the local Barns Green. I demand that we sit as near the driver as possible so that I can ‘drive’ the bus myself round through Barns Green and on to Horsham, a journey I repeat endlessly at home with the dining-room chairs in a line, a make-believe driving wheel in my hand, changing gears, accompanied by appropriate engine noises, at all the right places along the way. Even now, in my seventies, I can visualise each bend and gear change in that road. Up the hill to Itchingfield - where Elizabeth and I attend the village school run by the tiny fur-coated Mrs Grabey with the fluffy miniature dog she always carries in her arms as she watches us in through the school door, and where I won’t take my new leather gloves off and just stand in the playground in my smart brown check coat and watch the other children playing, - over the hill and down the other side before changing gear for a ninety degree right hand turn and the accelerating flat run to the stop at Christ’s Hospital where there are all those boys in their funny blue coats, before immediately making another ninety degree turn, to the left this time, and heading off through the gears to join the main road into Horsham. I didn’t know then of course that later I would decline yet another change of school and stay at Wells, where I was happy, and that it will be my younger brother Stuart who becomes a bluecoat boy. Or that years later my confidence in my memory of Sussex roads, and in my driving skills, will be deeply shaken when, on aggressively driving at high speed on the return to London from a visit to Stuart at school, I take a left hand bend far too fast, cross the oncoming lane and almost end in the ditch on the opposite side of the road, mercifully without harm to myself and my young family. And shaken again in 2008 when Sharon and I are briefly lost and confused trying to find that road on a detour back to Sacha's place in Hemel Hempstead from visiting my brother and my friend Anne-Marie in Brighton.

The next year, 1947, we move to join Dad in some digs in the rheumy-eyed Miss Job’s house at 10 New Square, Cambridge. In the large (and in those days largely empty) New Square car park Dad teaches me to ride a two wheeler bicycle, holding on to the saddle and running alongside while I yell “Let go, let go, I can do it, I can do it” until he eventually has the confidence to let me wobble off by myself. After that I spend hours of fun playing bicycle football with my friends in a back alley and, since I am the smallest boy on the smallest bike, I can turn inside the others, like a Spitfire outmanoeuvring a Messchersmitt I pretend. It must be at Miss Job’s that I embarrass Mum and Dad by complaining loudly to a visiting bishop that he has put jam on his first slice of bread and butter, he being blissfully ignorant of our frugal family teatime custom of ‘plain piece first’.

At New Square we are squashed in next to Miss Job, her Springer spaniel Elijah, her cat Elisha, and her two ducks Theo and Cleo, who she feeds in the backyard, shuffling around in her faded blue slippers with her stockings around her ankles and her ample bosom falling out of her half-tied dressing-gown. From there Elizabeth and I trek across Midsummer Common each day to Brunswick Council School, which, in comparison with the Rudolf Steiner, is all grey concrete and monotones. At school it is very organised and very cold, and at home we are constantly nagged to shut the doors when we go out to play because Miss Job, already mentally suspect because she is Pentecostal, is convinced that, if Elisha or Elijah escape, the vivisectionists are just waiting round the corner to nab them.

I continue at Brunswick Council School after Mum and Dad go to Honeywell Road in Wandsworth Common to look after Grandma Deeks, Elizabeth staying with her friend Veronica’s family and me farmed out (though I have no recollection of this) to some young couple with a baby. But I only spend a year at that school too. In September 1948 we move to Odd Down, Bath. Finally, on my circuitous educational journey to the Cathedral Junior School at Wells, I spend a year at St Luke’s Primary School at the back of St. Philip’s Church at Odd Down, the daughter church of St. Luke’s down the hill at Bath Flat, Dad’s first curacy after his ordination.

At home in Odd Down I have my own bedroom above the church institute, and can hear the click of the billiard balls in the evenings and the old-time dancing on Saturday nights. At school there is a tall blond teacher who has a nasty habit of slapping us on the calves when we make mistakes. But there is a grass tennis court at the back of the institute and curacy, abutting the school wall, and I spend endless happy hours bowling tennis balls against the wall to make them land on a penny on the rebound, or hurling the ball at the wall with all my force and trying to hit the rebound with a cricket stump – having read somewhere that is how Don Bradman learnt to bat.

My cricketing practice at Odd Down is the precursor of other games I play after we move to London in 1952. First at Queen's Park where, using a seven iron of Dad's and a plastic golf ball, I hone my chipping skills by trying to hit the golf ball from our tiny back garden through a first floor bedroom window. Later at the vicarage in Enfield, I play a game to sharpen my cricketing reflexes and harden my hands, letting a golf ball rebound onto a grating in the concrete path by the back door from which it shoots off at unpredictable angles, as though from a slip cradle, and I endeavour to catch it, and invariably do because, if I miss, the ball rips into Mum’s carefully nurtured flower garden and she calls my game off. It serves me well later as a gully specialist, a position I love, stopping or catching full-blooded square cuts. I do manage to dream up some extraordinary games in our various back yards, to say nothing of house-bound games in winter kicking balls and balloons along corridors and up stairs. No wonder I am good at sport and soon manage to beat all the family at any game that has a ball in it and put paid to Dad’s dreadful if charitable tendency to let me win.

I have cricketing memories of Sussex too, travelling there on a week’s summer tour with the Selwyn College Cambridge eleven, memories of the soft hands and lyrical jazz piano of Mike D’Abo who is a Sussex Martlet but liable, when faced at mid-on with a hard hit drive, to pull his hands away, much to our disgust, even though his fingers are insured. He wisely drops out of cricket and college but I see him once years later, from the upstairs front seat of a number six bus travelling up Lower Regent Street from The Duke of York Steps, striding along the pavement below with a peacock feathered hat and Old Harrovian panache, enjoying to the full his new role in replacing Paul Jones as lead singer of Manfred Mann.

However, I have detoured. Back to my primary education.

Finally in 1949 it is to school at Wells, initially travelling to and fro at the beginning and end of terms by bus from the Red Lion, Odd Down, later by train from Paddington in London, two other routes locked in my memory. I could describe for you the landscape coming around particular corners on the bus route or the little halt (called Lavington I think) where we change trains for Wells but I won't bore you with further reminiscences along such branch lines. Is this fascination with and precise knowledge of how to get from place to place and recognition of all the stops along the way some psychological compensation for my sense of not knowing where on earth I belong, for frustration with all these childtime re-locations/dislocations? A product of an early life of moving around but never arriving at a settled destination? Of branch lines without termini? More of those night sea swimmings?

A final detour however. One of the last bus stops before Wells is outside the high walls of the Mendip Hospital, which back then was a mental institute or, as I and my schoolboy friends called it in those pre-PC days, the looneybin. As the bus comes down the hill you can see the extensive complex of the hospital below but this gradually disappears behind the high walls that surround it. I watch cautiously and curiously those who alight and embark at the stop beside the gate lodge. What I expect to see I have no idea; they are all probably cooks and cleaners and psychiatric nurses and not a looney among them. Until now, when I have googled Mendip Hospital, I have no idea of the history or scale of the place. It is one of many nineteenth century institutions set up with public funds to house and secure the mentally ill, usually in out of the way countryside places. The earliest is established in 1811.

The Mendip Hospital, built for four hundred patients and staff, opens on March 1st 1848 as the County Asylum for Pauper Lunatics. Its principal architect is George Gilbert Scott the designer of St Pancras Station and the Albert Memorial in London. It has a number of name changes over the years before being taken over by the National Health Service in 1948. In 1991 it is closed and the buildings converted into flats, apartments and homes which now form the core of the village of South Horrington.

If Miss Job, our Cambridge landlady has a strange relationship with her pets, it is nothing compared to that of our very own 'pauper lunatic' in Bath, Miss Hamper,

who claims that her dog Billy has been given to her by the Emperor of Japan and can speak to her in Japanese, which unfortunately she doesn’t understand. Harmless as she seems to me, colourful indeed, even if a bit weird, they take her away and lock her up in the Mendip Hospital. She bequeaths us Billy, a pedigree cocker spaniel, and Mum renames him Blink, in memory of her own childhood spaniel. (What is it with the genteel middle class and their droopy sad-eyed spaniels? At Amberfields we have a border collie. Now there is a real dog. Kate and Harriet name him Kurt, after Kurt Cobain and when Kurt’s eyes fix on a car that he can chase along the fence line you would swear he is on drugs.) Much to my dismay, Blink subsequently displaces me in the family hierarchy since, in trying to recall my name in general conversation or to attract my attention, Mum often first goes through a brief recital of her other ‘children’ – Stuart! Elizabeth! Ruth! Blink! - a long pause… John! Ah well, Mum, I’m sure you loved me really, your firstborn son. But perhaps my ultra competitiveness was driven by a desire to rise above the status of a dog in the household pecking order.

Mary's Dad had a dog too, a disgusting poodle called Nicky that liked to rub himself on the legs of little girls, and her Mum, who first meets me shortly after Mary and I return from Sydney and is ever after convinced, no matter my denials, that I am just visiting from Australia, was brought up with farm dogs. Our first Christmas together Mary and I go round to her sister Anita and brother-in-law Neal's place in Manurewa for a bar-b-cue and I am introduced to Anita’s best friend Lianne. Having randily appraised the new man in Mary’s life, and instructed him in no uncertain terms to pour her a bigger whiskey, and not so many ice cubes, Lianne turns to Mary and observes that I look like a drover’s dog – all ribs and prick! And I thought only poets bore Humboldt's gift of big pricks to parties.

And so to the Junior School at Wells to listen to David Fear, a weekly boarder, sobbing himself to sleep each night as he sucks on his big toe, a contortion we greatly envy. Within a year David is dead of a heart attack, falling down in front of us while we are rushing around in the play ground. We are really upset because he is the best half back we have in the school soccer team. I am happy that I failed to obtain a choral scholarship and so can play sport after school, rather than dress up in a choirboy suit and file off to the Cathedral for evensong. Not that all the switching of schools seems to have done me any great harm educationally. Indeed the Headmaster, Mr Hall, who sells me on the school when we go for the interview by talking to me about cricket and asking me to demonstrate my forward defence shot, comments in my first term’s report – in which I am top in everything – that I have been very well grounded in my previous schools, particularly in English, and by the end of my first year of ‘excellents’ and ‘very goods,’ and lots of stars and almost no stripes, and commendations for taking an interest and working really hard, he reports that I can play cricket quite well (only quite well, what a cheek) and that I must guard against the danger of too much success! What do they want, these teachers? I am even excellent at divinity.

At 8 Greenbank Crescent, Morningside, Edinburgh, August 1998

32. Intrepid Journey - Summit Conquered !!

After climbing forty eight vertical faces* with his trusty icepick in hand, wearing an oxygen pack for altitude, a helmet to protect from ice falls and dark glasses to reduce snow blindness in the Streamside crevasses**, our hero, supported by Sherpa Sharon and her crew, summits at fifty feet above sea level.

Helen, Sharon, John, Janine

We all have our 29,029 feet Everests to climb. And the Hillary Step was only one step - just happened to be a forty foot vertical rock face at 28,840 feet. Ah well, only another 28,783 feet to top that Everest too.

Today we visited our new apartment to measure up for curtains. Very exciting. Unfortunately the lift is not yet operating so I have had to go to the "Top of the Last Stairway" again (see Blog 17). We are on track to move in around the end of March.

  * aka stairs or steps
** of new white paint in the stairwells

Top Ten Blogs to date.

Have been blogging for over four months now so thought it timely to provide a top ten as measured by the one thousand plus pageviews so far. Some pieces attract five times as many viewers as others. To date I haven't worked out why. And I have no way of knowing the relationship between viewing, reading and interest. Anyway I am having fun so will continue.

 (1)   19.  In London, In Love (Dec 27th, 2011)

 (2)   33.  Of Primary Schools, Pets and Pauper Lunatics (Feb 14th 2012)

 (3)     7.  LitCritShit (Nov 13th 2011)

 (4)     4.  My Other Online World (Nov 4th 2011)

 (5)   22.  The Joys and Tears of Love and Passion (1) (Jan 4th 2012)

 (6)     3.  Inspiration and Sources (Nov 1st 2011)

 (7)   18.  Christmas Greetings and Reflections (Dec 21st 2011)

 (8)     8.  A Place to Stand, A Place to Sit (Nov 17th 2011)

 (9=)   2.  Transitions (Oct 23rd 2011)
          21.  "Why Me?" The History and Mystery of My Bronchiectasis (Dec 30th 2011)

31. Trips to National Women's Hospital, Piha and Auckland's West Coast

Lion Rock and North and South Piha from the roadside lookout at the top of the hill

Papatoetoe, 1st March 1977

Dear Mum and Dad,

I had hoped to write earlier to thank you for your letter of 10th February but we have had a very hectic ten days or so and a number of things cropping up all at once.

The main news is of Mary. This morning I took her to the National Women’s Hospital in Auckland where she has been admitted as a patient. She has had a lot of internal bleeding over the last few months and the doctors have been unable to stop it successfully for any prolonged period or to diagnose exactly what the problem is. She has had trouble for over a year but just lately it has become much worse – partly I expect from the pressure of all our personal upheavals and trying to stay on top of her work when she has not been 100% fit. Anyway she will be in hospital for the rest of this week having tests and she will see the consultant, Mr Green, tomorrow morning. The two most canvassed possibilities seem to be that either she needs a hysterectomy or she has some form of cancer in the neck of the womb. She will come home for the weekend and then go back again on Monday next for a biopsy and after that they will decide on treatment. If it is a hysterectomy she will have to wait for six weeks or so before being admitted for the operation. We have been assured that whatever it is it can be treated successfully with no long-term damage and at least she has had to take a rest which she has been very reluctant to do. The National Women’s is a public hospital, mostly for maternity and gynaecological, and the patients have rooms of their own. Visiting hours are from 1pm to 8pm and since Mary has masses of friends and relatives I don’t think she will be too lonely. I shall be in and out as much as I can. The hospital is right beside Cornwall Park and only takes fifteen minutes to reach from Papatoetoe. The ward sister seemed very nice and helpful and willing to explain everything to us and to allay our fears of cancer. I expect you felt much the same when you were waiting for the results of the biopsy on your tumour, Dad.

We were glad you appreciated the poems. A lot of people have been very touched and helped by them. And thank you too for the warmth of your feelings towards Mary. She returns your kisses Dad!

The children are well. Last Saturday I went to their school sports day – Sacha won the three-legged race with a friend of hers – and then to the beach where the weather was warm and the sea delicious. On Sunday Mary and I went to Piha for the afternoon just to spend time away briefly on our own.

Love to you both from all of us in New Zealand.

John

[For origin of this letter see blog 30, "Love, Death and Letters from My Mother's Hut".]

___________________________________________

One of the recurring themes of my blog is the interplay between physical places and emotional states, between my footplace (where I am) and my headspace (where I'm at). I am most acutely aware of this dynamic when I think about re-visiting special places at different times in my life with members of my family, with friends and with different wives - in the UK: Edinburgh, London, Brighton, Wells, the Malvern Hills; in New Zealand: Auckland City, its parks and regional reserves (especially Cornwall Park, Long Bay and Wenderholm), Paihia and Russell in the Bay of Islands, Tairua and the Coromandel peninsula, Queenstown.

I knew that Piha, one of the beaches on the Tasman Sea, west of Auckland, had played a significant part as backdrop to the emotional landscape of my life but had forgotten that it is to Piha that Mary and I go the weekend before the confirmation of her cancer. I think that is the last time I see her run, and only then because the black sand is burning her feet! But I do remember a number of visits there and to other West Coast beaches.

My first trip to Piha is at Labour Weekend 1972, a few weeks after Pat and I and the children arrive in New Zealand. It is our family’s initial foray into the countryside around Auckland and it is a wonderful day – they all are that first month, in retrospect at least. To reach Piha we go along part of the scenic drive in the Waitakere Hills and then turn on to the coast road. Much to our amazement most of the last part of the road is unsealed with a loose surface of dirt and stones, which makes the final descent down the steep hill to Piha quite scary. On the return journey our old Vauxhall Viva Estate, recently delivered from England, has a bit of a struggle making it back up that hill. Not only is the state of the road a revelation but the sand is black - iron sand, some of it used in New Zealand Steel’s works at Glenbrook and much of it shipped to Japan for conversion into steel.

The west coast is wild, dramatic and dangerous, and Piha a lovely and spectacular place. It is a surf beach and, in spite of the presence of surf life-saving patrols and warning signs, has the highest number of drownings each year of any single beach in New Zealand - partly caused by the dangerous rips and partly by the ignorance or stupidity of surf-casting fishermen who perch on the rocks and are liable to be swept away by the notorious ‘sweeper’ waves, as are unwary new immigrants. The west coast is a very emotional passionate landscape and the beaches there quite unlike the calm, romantic and more meditative beaches of the North Shore. If Shakespeare were a kiwi he would have had Lear on a west coast beach howling at a galeforcewind-driven surf rather than a thunderstorm on a British heath.

Gannet colony at Muriwai

Fishing off the rocks at Whatipu

Piha, Karekare, Bethells, Whatipu, Muriwai and its gannet colony, the scenic drive in the Waitakere Hills, all become favourite places for day trips and for showing off to overseas visitors. I take my Mum and sister Elizabeth to Piha in August 1982 when they come to stay with me at Sugar Mountain. Twenty years later in 2002 I go back to the west coast with Anne-Marie, an old friend from the London School of Economics who has come to help me pick up the pieces of my life by sharing a holiday with me (and to walk the Milford Track – that part by herself unfortunately since the track is way beyond my respiratory capability). I take her out to Piha, but first we go down to Karekare because Anne-Marie wants to see the beach where the opening sequence of Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano has been shot, the scene where the party and their luggage and the piano are landed from the surf. The road down to Karekare through the bush, steeper than that to Piha, is mercifully sealed now - fine for visitors but less so for the few residents who preferred the isolation. We walk from the car park through the glade of pohutukawa trees and over the sand dunes to the beach, me with the video-camera the children give me for my sixtieth birthday, taking shots of Anne-Marie dwarfed by the cliffs and sea, the soundtrack punctuated by cicadas, the roar of the surf and my attempts not to cough inopportunely. After wandering about on the edge of the sea, lost in our own thoughts and memories, we walk up the stream and sit on the grass together, and momentarily I am, we both are, at peace with life, content.

It is one of those moments bienheureux so loved by Proust, those magic moments you wish you could freeze-frame, do freeze-frame as, like a squirrell storing nuts for winter, you construct memory banks of good times to help you through the bad.

The Piano (2003) Karekare Beach

There are other such moments in more recent years to add to that memory bank. Sharon and I take my two sisters, Ruth and Elizabeth, to Muriwai in 2006 on their big trip down under and last year we celebrate our wedding anniversary with a luxurious weekend full of magic and much pampered moments at Waitakere Estate.

  

Elizabeth, John and Ruth on Muriwai Beach 2006

Sharon at Whatipu 2006



30. Love, Death and Letters from My Mother's Hut

My mother was a great letter writer and kept up a regular correspondence with Elizabeth and I during the years we were in Nigeria and New Zealand respectively. I never kept my Mum's letters, and I don't believe Elizabeth did either. But Mum, as I indicated in an earlier blog [13. "My Mum and Other Huts"], was one for squirrelling away things in her beloved shed at the bottom of the garden in Malvern Link. When she finally moved to a rest home all the letters that Elizabeth and I had written home over the years were found in her hut, many of them neatly parcelled up in batches.

The letters of mine that Mum had kept stretch back to my boarding school days and even earlier, the very first being dated May 31st 1948 when I was a few weeks short of eight years old. The letter, addressed from Cambridge, appears to be to my mother in Scotland where I presume she was spending time with the Henderson family in Edinburgh.*
[*see blog 43, "We think that the kitten is a lady" - My First Letters (19th May 2012)]

When my son Stuart came over from London in November 2001 for a visit he brought with him all these letters of mine that Mum had so carefully filed away over the years. Some of the letters - three or four hundred of them in total, mostly flimsy airmails - were jumbled up chronologically and it took me some weeks to sort them into their date sequence, a process not helped by Mum's penchant for cutting off the New Zealand postage stamps (presumably to give to a niece or nephew or grandchild or some charitable cause), thereby sometimes eradicating the date stamp on one side and parts of the first few sentences of the letter on the other. However, since the first two sentences were generally very formulaic – thank you for your letter, I hope Dad is better or am glad you are well, the presents arrived safely, the weather has been hot, wet, dry, cold - I could always see the gist of their introductions and reconstruct the actual words with tolerable accuracy.

In other cases the letters had been carefully collected into years, the letters for that year enclosed in a rubber band, and a piece of card with the year’s date on it in Mum's spidery handwriting tucked in front of the pack. Most of the rubber bands were now rotten and stuck to the cards, and they would disintegrate as I opened a pack. But with the 1982 letters the rubber band was quite fresh, suggesting that at some point Mum had re-read those letters, or at least some of them, and then packaged them up again. Perhaps she wanted to remind herself of Mary. Or perhaps she wanted to read again Mary's words about how much Mum's children loved her. I hope so, because Mary was right, and we were never good at telling Mum that. In fact, we were probably all obsessed, as children are, with the question of whether or not our parents love us (and, if they do, why won’t they say so), and give scant attention to the question of whether or not we love our parents (of course, we do, we say) and why won’t we tell them – is it none of their business? I wonder if Mum was remembering how my sister Ruth phoned her one night – Ruth must have been in her forties at the time – and asked if she was a wanted baby. And what Mum made of my brother Stuart's rebirthing dramas as he tried to locate his own adult hang-ups in the womb’s emotional bonding, or a perceived lack of it?

I was a war baby, so I don’t think we had better go down that track; even if there is a track, it has never occurred to me that it might lead anywhere useful. Was Elizabeth the only one to avoid such psychic cul-de-sacs? I certainly never remember her indulging in speculation about whether, or how much, Mum and Dad loved her. Perhaps she has the confidence of the first born in their rightful place in the world, or her faith in God’s love is all that really matters to her, or perhaps her practical no nonsense nature recognises the fruitlessness of such probings? Or perhaps she knows Mum and Dad really did love her best! Perhaps, perhaps.

Back in 2002 when I opened the 1982 pack of letters, I did so with some trepidation. Rightly so. They triggered sad and powerful memories of Mary's death. I had never been so close to someone’s death before or since, other than my own in my later annus horribilis. Some vivid brushes with it, certainly. When an undergraduate student at Cambridge, I saw my landlady’s husband at Rathmore Road blue and choking a few hours before he died of lung failure. And I have always been able to visualise in the wash of a steamer on Loch Fyne when we are returning from a family day trip to Strachur and Inverary, the sight of the body of a man who has committed suicide by jumping overboard, and to hear the screaming from his wife and young daughter, screaming that finally subsides as my father, bless his priestly heart, comforts and prays with them. And I remember Linda’s tearful account of passing an accident scene in Birkenhead in which a van had knocked two old people over as they were trying to cross the road, and she had seen them lying on the kerbside, like a couple of crumpled rubbish bags waiting for the garbage truck, and known they were both dead. But Mary’s death was up close and personal and the screaming was all inside.

Before we moved to Orewa last October I sold my old desk top computer leaving me without a drive for the old style floppy disks. I had 21 of these old floppies with only a vague idea of their contents and TaylorMade computers in Orewa, for a small charge, loaded them onto a CD. I still had much of this material in other files. Not, however, the complete set of letters from my mother's hut that I painstakingly typed up in 2002; I must have been seeking something very boring and mindless to do at the time to have gone to such trouble.

In my case, right from the days of my weekly letters home from boarding school, what I wrote and told my parents about is often merely the shell of my inner life, a shell of primarily routine daily trivia, of family comings and goings, of events and celebrations at home, at school, at work. Much that is personal is censored and hidden and my emotional life, my love life in particular, scarcely touched upon. I am sure they were grateful for that by and large, just as I have no wish to know in detail the ins and outs of my children's relationships. Privacy provides sanctuary. But at times of major change in my life it must have seemed strange to Mum and Dad to have to confront, with little or no warning, all my careful camouflages stripped away and confront someone else beneath my dutiful-son mask.

In typing up all my old letters in 2002 I see that at various points I have inserted commentaries triggered by the content of those letters, such as the remembrance in the present piece of some close encounters with death. And I have, from time to time, put aside the inner censor and drafted "the letter I dared not write", a version of the letter that would give a more honest description and analysis of what was going on in my life at the time. And now, after all these years, I can look at these two versions of myself and decide anew, in revealing some of them to you, what to edit and how much to censor.

And you can puzzle over what to believe.