19. In London, In Love

Photograph by Trevor Watson, Portfolio Gallery

Note:

The italicised text below is taken from a tape recording made by Mary on our trip to the USA and Europe in 1981-82.

The normal text records some of my memories of London triggered by listening recently to Mary's tape of our journey on a number six bus.

“It’s Monday December the seventh nineteen eighty one and we’re in London, riding on the top of a red double-decker bus, a number six, up at the front. Great view. John’s favourite route, he tells me, all the way to… Where was it?"

“West Kilburn, Queen’s Park.”

“We’re not going that far though. Only to the West End… We arrived last night. I was so tired. John’s sister Ruth and her husband Trevor met us at Heathrow. Driving through Piccadilly Circus and St. Paul’s was like riding through Universal Studios for me. It looked unreal, as though it was all a façade. We’re staying at Hackney Wick with John’s brother Stuart and his wife Jutka. It’s very coh-oh-old, and very grey, and everything is, first impression is, very very old.

We’ve stopped. The driver and conductor have just changed. I can see an inspector out here. Looks like a character from On The Buses. Trees are as bare as bare, very wintry.

Going past Petticoat Lane now. There’s a market thing going on, and the city’s changed, more lively, the shops are all working here. We’ve just come through an area where everything was closed and broken down. A lot of manufacture-and-sell-on-site places, tailors and shoe manufacturers and coat makers and cabinetmakers and things like that.

Going past St. Paul’s. Had to stop there on the way from the airport while I found the toilet, had my first English crap. Gosh, St. Paul’s looks great. There’s something on at St. Paul’s. Carol service. Not on a Monday surely?”

“Probably would be. Perhaps we can go to one. I once took Stuart to the Lord Mayor’s Show and stood just over there.”

In Paternoster Square. Stuart’s on my shoulders so he can see. Pat and I live at Finsbury Park. Stuart is three. I have a vague recollection of being taken to the Lord Mayor’s Show by Dad and Uncle Geoff when I’m tiny. Before they built the dreadful Paternoster House. At Churchill’s funeral Pat and I stand near the top of Ludgate Hill. See the gun carriage with Churchill’s coffin on it coming round St. Paul’s and setting off down to Ludgate Circus. Must be the January after we marry. Before Stuart is born. We rent in Wood Green at Mrs. Tanczos’ place. She’s Anglo-Indian. I can walk to White Hart Lane to watch Spurs. Still have the commemorative Churchill coin somewhere.

“Well, it’s certainly hotting up now. Lots of bustle around on the streets.”

“That’s Fleet Street straight ahead. Look, Reuters. Coming up on the left. I went there about a job after I left school. Thought I’d be a journalist. Met a friend of my Dad’s, there. Told me to go away and learn shorthand and typing.”

Marco. Helps Boris Pasternak smuggle the manuscript of Dr. Zhivago out of Russia. It’s published in Italy. Sounds wonderfully exotic to me. More than reason enough to want to be a journalist. How did Dad know Marco? I have no idea. Must have been a parishioner.

“I didn’t know you could do shorthand.”

“I can’t.”

“Piccadilly Railway, Strand – an underground station, all locked up. Why’s that?”

“Don’t know love. Can’t be used any more, I suppose.”

Spooky. Just last month I dreamt of the dead Mary in an abandoned underground station. Happily supervising a ghostly crew of make-up artists. Preparing souls for the after life.

"Now where are we?”

“Charing Cross.”

“Charing Cross. What’s that monument down there?”

“That’s the Charing Cross.”

“Oh, that is the Charing Cross.”

“Monument for Queen Eleanor of somewhere or other, Aquitaine I think, Henry the Second’s wife. When she died her body was brought down from up north and he had a cross erected at all the places where it rested overnight – they’re all known as Eleanor Crosses.”

“Oh, how sweet, would you do that for me, darling?”

“And the brass band too? You’ll be lucky!”

I sound so authoritative behind the casual façade of my speculation. I am wrong. Wrong Eleanor. Wrong King. I just checked the internet. Habits of a lifetime as a researcher and analyst are hard to break. The queen is Eleanor of Castile. Died 1290. The king is Edward I. She bore him sixteen children, poor thing. Twelve crosses erected at the stops along the route from Lincoln, where Eleanor died, to Westminster Abbey where she’s buried. A few survive. One at Waltham Cross. Just up the road from St. George’s on the Enfield Highway where Dad’s the vicar for many years. Charing Cross one’s a nineteenth century replica. Still, as Mary always said to her staff and apprentices: “When in doubt, Fake It”!

“Admiralty Arch. Where they came through for Princess Di’s Wedding, wasn’t it?”

“Right, only they opened the gates in the centre arch… Look! Back down there, down Whitehall.”

“Oh, there it is, Big Ben – have to go and get the chimes on the tape. Oh, and Nelson sitting on the top. And pigeons everywhere. It’s absolutely gorgeous, fountains going. Although it’s cold and grey outside it’s not raining. There’s a man with birds all over him. Look at that lion. It’s enormous isn’t it, Nelson’s column, I don’t know how big I thought it was going to be. 

Two Bank of New Zealands we’ve passed, making me feel happy, not so far from home. We’re coming up to Piccadilly Circus. What’s that? Crimea War Memorial.

Here we are, Piccadilly Circus, with Eros in the middle, a big Coca-Cola sign and the streets and the old lamps, looks like old gas lamps. We’re turning into Regent Street, oohhh and all the Christmas decorations are across the street, aren’t they beautiful? About seven big Christmas trees with big loops of tinsel, bunting linking them all up and they’re hanging across the street for, oh, a mile? Easily a mile right down the street.

We’re going past all the shops in Regent Street, it looks very exciting out there, lots of people around. Even a sale on before Christmas. There’s verandas on the shop fronts which seems strange - they haven’t got a sunshine problem.

A clown in the window of Hamley’s toy shop and across the top there’s fairies and animals. And Christmas pageanty sort of stuff, and a big By Appointment, and red lights on the front all the way up. The Christmas trees on the front of this shop called Jaeger – oh, and there’s Carnaby Street! – are all tiny little lights and they’re really effective. Liberty’s, all black and glitter. Ohh! Fur Coats! Coloured tinsely sort of dresses, bright colours, covered in lurex. Oh, Dickens and Jones. Clothing store. I think I wrote away for material once to Dickens and Jones.

Oxford Circus and we’re turning down

Oxford Street. Oh, there’s a lot of people here. Is that the underground they’re going down or just the way they’re crossing the street?”

“It’s both.”

“All the big stores are down here. John Lewis and Selfridges, full of lurexy clothes and those little tiny Christmas lights.”

“It’s buses and taxis only up and down here.”

“No cars. Buses and taxis only. D.H. Evans store, oh it’s covered in Christmas trees and lights and the trees on the pavement outside have got lights flickering on and off, isn’t that pretty!

Debenhams.

We’ve just stopped outside Denise’s fur shop. I can see a fur coat in there. Two hundred and eighty five pounds. What a lot of people. And it’s Monday morning. Oh, it’s actually after lunch on Monday, we slept in until half past ten after our long flight.

Matty’s, natty little trousers and gear. Lilley Skinner. No, Lilley and Skinner, shoes by the million.”

I can recount them all, all the big stores from one end of Oxford Street to the other. This is Kilburn work territory. Half my friends in St. John’s Youth Club work here as shop assistants and warehousemen. I gravitate to Knightsbridge when I leave school and work in Harrods for a spell. Brenda breaks the mould too by working in a bank in Pall Mall. Meets Jimmy there. But most of the girls don’t have the requisite accent for the Regent Street or Knightsbridge stores. Or can’t be bothered to fake one. Dark haired Jean is a shop assistant at John Lewis, all tight black hobble skirt and white blouse, neat and trim and just the trace of a Welsh accent. Even at sixteen she has a sadness, a brittleness about her. Her childhood sweetheart electrocutes himself showing off to her and her friends on a power pylon. I kiss her on a Sunday evening after church. Very sweet sixteen it is too. I board the weekly coach to the Billy Graham crusade at Haringey the following Thursday, thinking I will sit next to her. She ignores me completely. I’m totally perplexed.

Dad finds Freddy Mayes a job as a pageboy at The Cumberland, Marble Arch, after he catches him stealing lead off the church roof and signs him up for the youth club. You can see mischievous Freddy from the bus. So handsome standing there with the doorman in his green and gold-braided uniform, his peaked hat covering his golden hair. He has a terrible temper and kills his girlfriend. While I’m in Italy, I think. Around the time Khrushchev is banging his shoe up and down at the United Nations over the U2 spy plane incident and Princess Margaret is marrying Tony Armstrong Jones.

For years Dad visits Freddy in prisons around the country. Freddy does get released occasionally but never for long and he becomes progressively institutionalised. He's been in and out for over fifty years now. After Dad dies Elizabeth, bless her heart, takes over the visiting. You have to give it to these compassionate Christians who care for every little sparrow that falls in the wayside.

Dawn’s dad – Dawn lives next door to us at Queen’s Park - is a store walker at Peter Robinsons, Oxford Circus. Dawn works there in the school holidays. Her brother Cedric breeds tortoises in their back garden. He’s featured in the local paper. When Dawn reaches ten she becomes self-conscious, flat-chested though she is, about being in the garden in just her underpants. If she sees me through the wire fence, she covers her nipples with her index fingers and runs inside. Later, as a well-endowed bobbysoxer and newly branded ‘teenager’, she screams herself hoarse at Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock performance at the Gaumont State in Kilburn High Road. I think that’s totally crass, but I still ask her to go with me to see West Side Story. She says no. I go with Jill, one of the trainee teachers who lodges with us in Kingswood Avenue.

A lot of the older folk in the parish have never been to the West End. It’s only half a dozen stops or so down the Bakerloo Line or a twenty-minute bus ride. But then, after more than thirty years in New Zealand, I had never been to Dunedin until a few years ago. When Elizabeth and Ruth visited I finally came full circle and visited the city that, in name at least, is the antipodean image of my birthplace.

“Time to get off.”

“Bob wants to go to the toilet. That’s a nice change; it’s usually me that has to go. You should see Selfridges’ windows, full of Christmas scenes and ladies in bright pink gowns. I think window dressing must be an art form here.”

From the other direction, travelling to the West End from Kingswood Avenue, I often take a number six, usually one terminating at Aldwych. The underground would be quicker. I board the bus just south of the bridge at Queen’s Park Station, where N.W.6 changes to W.9 and clerical and artisan avenues give way to unskilled working roads. All my Kilburn teenage friends live within walking distance of that bus route. In a triangle between Carlton Vale, the High Road and the railway line. Brenda lives in Ashmore Road with her mum, her dad, her kid sister Norma. Her dad dies. Hardly a surprise really. He’s an ashen-faced chain smoker. Runs a newspaper and cigarette kiosk on a spot outside Victoria Station. I find excuses to go and see Brenda in the evenings. Her dad sits with his cup of tea in the corner of the living room, beneath the plastic ducks, hacking away as only Londoners can hack.

On the train from Bath, going home for the school holidays, I meet another girl who lives in Ashmore Road. I’m sitting at the window seat with my back to the engine. Opposite me is this stunning West Indian girl. About my age. I can stare at her reflection as I gaze casually out the window at the passing landscape. Somewhere along the way, perhaps as early as the Box Hill Tunnel, our stretched out legs touch. Neither of us pull away to break the contact. I must eventually have spoken with her, though I can’t believe it would have been me who broke the ice. She’s a student nurse. Lives in Ashmore Road, a predominately white neighbourhood then. We travel on the underground from Paddington to Queens Park. When we part at the top of the station bridge I’m too shy to ask for her address. I never see her again.

Mind, it might have been frowned upon if I had dated her, judging by Dad’s reaction when Ruth had a West Indian boyfriend, Winston I think his name was. Notwithstanding all his missionary work in Nigeria and the Sudan, or perhaps because of it, Dad takes the view - he says it’s Albert Schweitzer’s - that black men are our brothers, but younger brothers. Needing guidance and leadership. There’s the social divide too to consider. The divisions of railway lines and high street shops. North of us, on the other side of the North London line, is Brondesbury, rich Jewish territory. South of the old London, Midland, Scottish line at Queens Park is white unskilled working class. Further towards the southwest, beyond the tracks laid down by the Great Western Railway, is Westbourne Grove. Post-war immigrant black territory, noisy and poor. Dad takes me there with him to visit a parishioner. I’m shocked at the decay and poverty, the peeling paint, flaking plaster, numbers hanging precariously from apartment doors, the smell of urine and cats in the corridors. This gritty reality removes the gloss from my romantic images of working class life. And from my enjoyment of the representations of it then so fashionable in the West End theatre’s kitchen sink dramas.

My friends Matthew, Bob and John, who in memory of their state primary school like to refer to themselves mockingly as The Granville Road Old Boys, all live in side streets off Shirland Road. John plays the saxophone. Escapes by joining an Army Music Corps. Bob, who is a Teddy Boy before my Dad rounds him up for the youth club and sets him on the road towards righteousness, joins an army of a different kind, The Church Army. In his smart uniform, he wows all the girls, especially our teacher trainee lodgers from Tunbridge Wells. Matthew is the sombre intellectual of the group. Always in black. He and I share deep angst ridden discussions about Sartre, Camus and existentialism. We cultivate an image as radical outsiders. After years of evening study, financed by his struggling war widow mother, Matthew makes it to university. Ends up a professor of psychology in one of those new universities up north. We are both in love with Brenda. She looks so virginal in her choir uniform - frilly white blouse buttoned to the neck, black robes and cap, black court shoes. All the boys in the youth club are in love with Brenda.

"In Debenhams now, having afternoon tea. I’ve just seen a brilliant fur coat I adore and I’m deciding whether or not to go and buy it. It’s a steal in a furshop – reduced. All the mink coats in the store are reduced, the twelve hundred pound coats to six ninety five, that’s for a ranch mink jacket. But I’m not really considering one of those…

Well, we bought my coat and I look scruummy in my cream and tweed fur and I feel very much more London than I did before. It’s ten to five and getting dark already. We’re going down Oxford Street and all the Christmas lights are glittering away in front of the stores. We’re going to see the decorations in Regent Street.”

The rush hour is upon us. In the dark the Christmas decorations look even more spectacular than before, so, like children who, having enjoyed a ride at the fairground, immediately clamour for another, we climb back on a bus (I don’t remember the number), staying downstairs with our shopping bags this time, and retrace our journey back round Oxford Circus, down Regent Street, and into the Haymarket where we push our way off through the commuter crowd scrabbling to alight. A brief walk into Panton Street and we are in the warmth of The Stock Pot, a budget favourite of mine from student days, snugly ensconced arm-in-arm in an upstairs cubicle. We order the minestrone soup and share a carafe of the house red to take away the winter chill, and then I have the spaghetti carbonara and Mary the escalope of veal.

As we’re drinking hot chocolate and chattering away about our purchases and the Christmas presents we are yet to buy, a tall saturnine gentleman in a black vicuna overcoat approaches our cubicle with his coffee and sits down opposite us. He has silver hair, a lugubrious face and elegant, if skinny, hands. Beneath the open overcoat, he’s wearing a tailor-made pinstripe suit that has seen better days, a crumpled white business shirt and a black tie. He sits and looks piercingly at us. We are silent now.

After what seems a long time in this impasse, he fishes into a pocket of his overcoat and pulls out a small piece of paper. He smoothes it out on the table and considers it intently. Then he puts a bony manicured forefinger on top of the piece of paper, fixes his gaze on us again, and wordlessly pushes it across, slowly and deliberately. It has writing on it, which we both stare at, nonplussed. The words, handwritten in spidery capitals with pen and ink, make no sense. He looks at us for some response and when, after a further pause, this isn’t forthcoming, he digs into his pockets again and repeats the process. The message this time, if that is what it is, is in some runic, middle earth or hieroglyphic language. We look at him, not knowing what to say.

This ritual is repeated five or six times, none of the silent messages, no matter what the script, being intelligible to us. If he had burst into song I don’t think we could have been more surprised. He finishes his coffee without taking his eyes from us, stands up, buttons up his overcoat, bows his head slightly in our direction, crosses the room, walking with a slow measured gait, as though his shoes pinch or he has an artificial hip, collects his black trilby from the coat stand in the corner and, with a final backward glance at us, disappears silently down the stairs. Mary and I look at each other.

“Wouldn’t want him at your wedding, would you?” I say.

We collapse into laughter.

Having agreed that the poor man is off the planet, we finish our drinks, and set off for Cambridge Circus to catch our show. It’s raining now so, laden with shopping bags, we skitter along the back alleys and side streets between Leicester Square and Shaftesbury Avenue, hugging close to the buildings in an effort to keep as dry as we can and avoid the perils of wet and icy pavements. With time to kill before the show, we find a cosy pub, buy some drinks and tell jokes.

“What do you get if you work your fingers to the bone?”

“Bony fingers!” we chorus together:

“The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on!”

“It’s the fickle finger of fate and it’s pointing at…?”

“You!”

And I put on my best nasal Brummie accent and mimic Jasper Carrot’s The Nutter on the Bus sketch.

“When the nutter gets on the bus, does the nutter sit next to you?”

“I’m in my first English pub. It’s called The Cambridge. We got drenched in the rain. Got my new fur coat all wet, my feet are killing me, we’ve been walking around all day and I’m absolutely stuffed. We had an Italian dinner and next we are off to the Phoenix Theatre to see a show called One Mo’ Time.”

It’s still raining when we come out of the theatre. Fortunately, it being a Monday night, taxis are plentiful and I don’t need to risk life and limb rushing out into Charing Cross Road to hail one to take us back to Hackney. We’re both tired so it’s nice to slump in the back of the cab and reflect on a good day, a magic day in many ways. I always loved London, especially at Christmas, but seeing it entrance Mary, and listening to her prattle on excitedly and happily, makes me mellow and content. I realise how deeply rooted London is in the New Zealand psyche, even for someone of German ancestry, and how important it is to Mary to have finally arrived in a place she has heard so much about back home and visited so often in the coffee table clutter of her fashion and hairdressing magazines. She has even made shopping an enjoyable experience for me, an avid anti-shopper.

“Well, that was excerpts from One Mo’ Time. It was this wonderful show. We had a lovely day yesterday and such a fun evening, I thought I’d die laughing! I’d let the show run on to the end of the tape and I was going to post this off today, but I’ve just woken up, it’s Tuesday, what, the seventh? …eighth of December, and it’s snowing! All the rooftops out of the window are covered with snow, and the cars outside in the street. It’s fluttering down just like the snow machine in Universal Studios. I couldn’t believe it, it’s the first time it has snowed before Christmas as long as Stuart and Jutka can remember, since they’ve been living in this house in, in Hackney. So I don’t know quite how we’re going to cope with snow, it’s almost, oh, it looks about three or four inches deep out on the pavement already. There’s some people have been trotting through it, but it’s so beautiful, absolutely wonderful...

It’s strange to be back in the East End after so many years. Pat and I meet in Bethnal Green in January of my final year at Cambridge. We are both at the Institute of Community Studies as part of our university programmes. Well, it’s a Cambridge University programme actually, run by Michael Young who teaches social survey methods and arranges for the class to stay at the Institute for a week to develop our interviewing skills and do some fieldwork on kinship ties in the East End. If I recall correctly, we survey the influence of mother-daughter relationships on brand preferences and purchases, particularly soap powders and washing machines. We visit old folk marooned on the thirteenth floor of tower blocks, who optimistically embraced their pristine new apartments, the demolition of the terraced streets of their childhoods and the relocation of their offspring to the new towns of Essex, but are now fearful of muggers in the stairwells and petrol-sniffing teenagers crapping in the lifts. Three or four students from other universities are along, including Pat and a friend of hers from Birmingham.

Pat lives in Southall, but her mum’s family are from the East End, from Hoxton. (I’m amazed to find, when I spend a year in London in 1998-1999, that Hoxton is now a trendy place for the arty set to live and that property values there are skyrocketing; back in the sixties you could hardly give the place away.) I don’t know where Pat’s dad’s family are from, or how they ended up in Southall for most of their married life, ultimately becoming the only non-Asian family in Endsleigh Road.

Pat and I go to a number of family celebrations in Hoxton, real knees-up occasions. Her mum drinks Advocaat snowballs, her aunts stoke up on the gin and her dad, a quiet cautious barely literate man who drives his own truck for a living, has a quiet beer or two. I love it. It’s such a change from crustless salmon and cucumber sandwiches and cups of tea delicately poised, little pinkies crooked in line with Grandma Deeks’ directives, desperately minding our Ps and Qs, and Grandma only a publican’s daughter for all that. It’s not as though we’re exactly classy on Grandad Deeks’ side either, he the son of a cashier in a mining company and grandson of a Mayfair hairdresser.

Pat's folk are initially a bit bemused by my Cambridge tag. When I meet her mum for the first time, she greets me with: “We’re just ordinary folk here, you’ll have to take us as you find us.” Which I’m more than happy to do. Later, when working in John Dale’s engineering factory at Southgate, I go with Mickey, our chief shop steward, to a number of social functions in Hackney Wick or join him and his Labour Party friends at an East End pub for a drink. Mickey is instrumental in Pat and I joining the Labour Party and campaigning in the Wood Green electorate in 1964. For Dorothy Butler I think her name was. (No, not Dorothy. Dorothy Butler published children’s books and had premises on the corner of Sunnybrae and Archers Roads. It was Joyce Butler.) Once, when out canvassing, I bang on a door, which is opened by an unshaven shirt-sleeved man of about forty in yellow braces. Seeing my red rosette, he spits “Harold Wilson, Shit!” and slams the door in my face - so much for the party intellectuals masquerading as the white hot heat of the technological revolution.

Those rosettes amuse me since I associate them, other than during election campaigns, with the prizewinners in agricultural or dog shows (1^st Prize, Rhubarb; or Best Old English Sheepdog), or with Thewell cartoons of little girls on shaggy ponies competing in local gymkhana. By the time I’m out campaigning with Mickey I’ve acquired a passable East End accent and can hang out as some sort of Cockney manqué, a fashionable affectation in those days. During the course at the Institute, in the evenings after dinner, we invariably take off in a posse to a local pub to enjoy the crush, the singing, the joking, the talent night entertainment, long before Eastenders popularised such middle class slumming. Mostly it’s The Rising Sun just down the road – I’m sure that’s the pub’s name but memories of Eric Burden and The Animals’ famous hit may be confusing me here. A couple of times we take the bus to The Duragon in Hackney Road where Ray Martine is resident comedian.

On the last evening at the Institute, there’s a social. Pat and I dance together most of the evening, kiss goodnight, and agree on a first date. After we’re married, renting at Wood Green or living in our first flat in Finsbury Park, if Spurs aren’t playing at home, and Arsenal not playing a visiting team that have a good chance of beating them, I go to Upton Park to watch West Ham and sing “We are forever blowing bubbles.”

Working in the furniture industry in the late sixties, I make frequent forays to the East End, visiting little businesses along the mean streets or tucked away in back alleys, most of them Jewish family firms, the descendants of immigrant entrepreneurs who fled the wave of pogroms in Russia after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Their foothold is still precarious, sustained by a mixture of commercial acumen, family commitment and community networks. The tales they tell me, only half in jest, of ‘Jewish lightning’ – small factories torched for the insurance – and owners running into the street to wave away the fire engines (“Not today! Tomorrow, you fools!”) – speak to the insecurities of a dying way of life. Most of these furniture businesses in Hoxton and Islington are set up as domestic workshops, often trading on the street. As they grow, if they grow, manufacturing invades the whole house, then the garden, then neighbouring houses, and then the owners start looking to migrate to larger purpose-made premises further afield. John Betjeman Esquire, who Mum and Dad are so thrilled to meet after he presents me with the Grant Memorial Prize for English at the 1957 School Speech Day, comes from such a family firm, established in Clerkenwell and later moving to Pentonville Road. Successful firms move away from their roots. The less so struggle for a generation or two and die. Contrary to entrepreneurial mythology, few of the acorns become oaks.

Uncharitably, I cannot for the life of me remember what Pat and I do on our first date – probably meet up in the West End and go for a meal and a movie. I do remember that’s exactly what we’re doing the night that Kennedy is assassinated because we’re on a Circle Line train around midnight and read the headlines on another passenger’s late night edition of the Evening Standard. And it’s not as though I can’t remember some of our other dates, very romantic ones too. Walking along the backs in Cambridge after a curry dinner at an Indian restaurant, the silently falling snow glistening in the riverside lights, Pat in her white fur hat and thigh length boots looking like Julie Christie’s Lara in Dr Zhivago. Dancing in the moonlight at the Selwyn College May Ball, Pat bright eyed and edible in a strapless turquoise ballgown. So I don’t think I am particularly shutting out memories of the good times that Pat and I share all those years ago.

I do vividly remember, in contrast, the first time that Mary and I, having made the critical transition from having an affair to being ‘an item’, go together to a function. Ironically it’s to Pureora Cemetery in Remuera for the funeral of a friend of hers – also the patient of an incompetent GP - who has died of cervical cancer, and, New Zealand being the small place it is, my old neighbours from the top of our drive at Sunnybrae Road are there. Sad in retrospect that our first ‘outing’ should be to the cemetery. One day, I thought, that will be our last outing too, bringing us full circle. But I wasn’t to know then that we were travelling all too rapidly towards that particular stop. And now here we are mercifully out from the underground for a spell, enjoying London life, I loving Mary and her company and the many pasts the city and I share. Mary’s wonder and excitement refresh London for me, let me see it with renewed pleasure, and still give me the happiest of memories to add to my recollection of the good times we spend together.

[For sequel to this blog see 93. 'A Wedding in Luxembourg', 19th February 2014.]

18. Christmas Greetings and Reflections

Pohutukawa, the New Zealand Christmas Tree, in full flower

Thank you for reading entries in my blog. I hope you have found something of interest to enjoy.

Readers to date are spread across eleven countries. These are, in order of pagereads, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Russia, the USA, Australia, Germany, France, Chile, Ireland, Switzerland and Thailand.

Christmas Greetings to you all.

Pohutukawa and Norfolk Pine, Orewa Beach

And a poem to reflect upon.

REFLECTIONS

                              At Christmas we rummage through the family photos

                              Tunnelling back to laugh at images of ourselves in earlier times

                              (“Mum, how could you make me wear that dress?”)

                              To retell our pasts

                              Each with different memories, stories, perceptions

                              Of the past as we think it was

                              Or would like it to have been.

                             

                              Turning the weathered leaves of old albums,

                              We watch ourselves grow, age, mature

                              Reflecting on who we were, who we are, and who we will become.

17. Top of the Last Stairway

In one of my first blogs (2. Transitions, October 23rd) I promised that when I had made it to our new apartment at the top of the Streamside building I would post some photographs. Yesterday Sharon and I were given a walk through by John, the Project Manager, and Janine from the Kensington Park Development Office. The lift is not in yet so it was a long slow climb for me with my portable oxygen, assisted by Janine carrying the trolley. Gib stopping is complete ready for painting and all the wiring in place. Pretty hopeless to photograph with the scaffolding still up but great view of the bush to the north and the brief peek we were promised of the sea to the east. The puhutukawas are all in full flower and looking very Christmassy.

16. Mum and Dad's Golden Wedding





Hawaii, 25th March 1985

Mum writes that it’s snowing over there so I’m glad to still be in Hawaii. Big family reunion planned in Malvern on June 29th, three days after Mum and Dad’s Golden Wedding Anniversary. Elizabeth will be over from Nigeria – she's+ decided to do one more three-year tour at least. Also my cousin Moira is coming down from Edinburgh. Haven’t seen her since I was in my late teens – we used to play golf together! And the big surprise is that my mother’s older sister, Aunty Lena, is coming over from South Africa. I haven’t seen her since Granny Henderson died when I was about eight or nine. I expect my father’s two surviving brothers will be there and some of my cousins on my father’s side, folk I haven’t seen since Grandma Deeks' funeral.



It’s strange how when you are growing up you are so conscious of differences between yourself and your parents and then gradually, as you age, you start seeing all the similarities and accept the reality of their impact on your behaviour, attitudes and personality. My late teens were devoted intellectually to rejecting most of what my father believed in, and yet all that childhood religious indoctrination leaves its mark. Selfishness was the number one sin in my father’s catechism. Self-denial was in and self-indulgence, any indulgence, was out. Dad’s still like that. Never buys himself anything. I can’t think of a time when he went out and bought something for himself simply because he wanted it. He’s a marketer’s nightmare. Mind you we never had any money so I don’t suppose the opportunity would have arisen much. And when I was a child there wasn’t much to buy anyway what with post-war rationing so I was easily discouraged from clamouring for “things”. Even now I am a reluctant shopper although I do like to indulge those I love rather than give every spare penny to War on Want or the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or some other deserving cause. I am trying to psych myself up to buying an expensive camera in the duty free on the way to England!

 



Malvern, Sunday 21st April 1985

Church. Yes, well, church. The things I put myself through out of love for my parents. What a lot of dreadful mumbo-jumbo it all is and how totally my mind rejects it. How can intelligent people believe that stuff? Each time I go to church merely confirms my atheism. But so many echoes from my past. I remembered this morning how as a kid I liked to put the hymn numbers up on the boards before the service. And I remembered how, as a teenager, I liked going to church in Kilburn because of some of the choirgirls, especially Brenda Scroggins who I had a crush on. Now there seem to be only choirboys (don’t fancy them) and old spinsters and widows.

This trip is full of echoes of the past, noticing all the old habits, familiar things, Mum-Dad behaviours and tensions. Mum and Dad rarely buy new things so everything in the house here is familiar – the carved oak dining-room furniture, the arm chairs and leather pouf in the lounge, the Scottish landscape pictures, the silver napkin ring engraved with ‘J’ that dates back to my christening, the carving knife and fork with the bone handles, the yellow and blue oven dish I bought my mother when I was at school in Wells (Denbyware, still in perfect condition). Even the meals my mother cooks are familiar. Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding to welcome me last Tuesday (the cabbage boiled to translucent), followed by my favourite childhood dessert, apple dunfillin. Flapjacks for ‘elevenses’, and homemade scones and fruit cake with afternoon tea. I even ate the rice pudding yesterday, something I steadfastly refused to do as a child, redolent as it was of boarding school meals.

Malvern, Tuesday 25th June 1985

Arrived here yesterday lunchtime and spent most of the rest of the day listening to my Mum and her sister gossip about the old days. It is twenty-five years since they have seen each other so they have plenty to catch up on. Lena and her late husband my Uncle Bert, a South African doctor, were medical missionaries in Nigeria, the Southern Sudan and Zululand back in the 1930s so Aunty Lena has lots of amazing stories about pioneering days, starting a hospital in a sweet potato patch, stitching up people bitten by crocodiles. And of course my mother likes to try and match, if not top, Lena’s stories with some of her own African tales – bit of sibling rivalry there after all these years! Lena is the older sister, over eighty now, and a tough old bird, still with a broad Edinburgh accent – talks about gurrles (girls).

Malvern, Tuesday July 2nd 1985

Am writing this in Mum's garden shed. A sacred place.

Wednesday the 26th was the anniversary day although the big get together wasn’t until Saturday. Most people arrived in time for a mid-day service at St. Mathias. My part was a reading, 1 Corinthians 13 - Faith, Hope, Charity, but the greatest of these is Charity - and Elizabeth did a little talk. A very emotional occasion, sweet, touching, and the priest gave Mum and Dad a special blessing.

Reading from 1 Corinthians 13 reminded me that my first love of the English language came from hearing the authorised version of the bible in church, although, in line with common practice now, ‘love’ has been substituted for ‘charity’. I still think the language is grand. I found I could read that passage about love without any particularly Christian connotations, and read it with conviction. That worries me in a way. Do apostate children of the manse search for a spiritual commitment to something equally radical and all-consuming – to Marxism or Communism or Environmentalism? Having deliberately abandoned my religious faith as a teenager, have I merely transferred all my spiritual inclinations into sentimentalising romantic love, substituting ‘Love is God’ for ‘God is Love’, and then expected, as the corollary, to find or create some ineffable perfectibility in myself. A recipe for disaster, I think. Likely to create hopelessly unrealistic expectations in any relationship. How complex it is to try and unravel ‘love’, embedded as ideas of love are in one’s upbringing and education, in religion, literature and art, in the romantic and the erotic, to say nothing of the ubiquitous media and commercial images of love and sexuality.

 

It was a lovely service. After the service we had organised wine at the back of the church and the golden wedding cake was cut up. Everyone said how 'nice' the service was (that dreadful word) and complimented me on my reading and Elizabeth on her excellent address. Elizabeth's a very good speaker. I think if she ever comes back here she ought to go into the church as a preacher or something. We should have taped the service but didn’t think of it.
 

After that we came back to the house, about fifty people in all. Fortunately it was a fine day so we had tables set out in the garden. There was a fair showing of uncles, aunts and cousins. There were various friends, some from a long time back including Brenda Scroggins and her mother. It's twenty-seven years since I saw Brenda. That was at her wedding. She was eighteen then, the same age as me, and married before I’d even left school. Still looks great, really good, well-presented; she always looked after herself. It’s funny – I was talking to Ruth about it later – how you revert to the behaviour at the time you knew a person. I knew Brenda from the age of twelve when we moved to London. At sixteen she left school and went to work in a bank in the West End and met and married Jimmy, a Scotsman from the Pentland Hills, who also worked there. After all these years, she and I hit it off so well as we chatted about the subsequent trajectories of our lives. It was touching that, after such a long time, we could rekindle the closeness that had once existed between us. I never went out with Brenda as a girlfriend, although she did go with Elizabeth and I to a youth camp in North Devon one summer. I remember, snob that I was, suddenly being aware how working-class London her accent was (not any more – like Twiggy she has developed a more classless voice now). I spent all my time at the camp ignoring her so that I could play cricket with the other boys. Stupid me! When I was away at school Brenda and I used to write to each other. I had a big crush on her; she was a delicate and pretty girl with a touching innocence about her. I’ve no idea what sort of intellectual capacity she has but she was the first person I ever became aware of as ‘a girl’ - a feminine girl rather than just a girl girl. It was nice to establish some continuity with such a long time ago. Moving around as I have, there’s no continuity in lots of the pieces of my life, other than through family. So it was good to be with someone who knew what a sensitive scruffy little intellectual brat I was at thirteen and fourteen. A sweet time. I’ll probably go and meet up with her in Birmingham. We can talk more about old times and I can catch up on what’s going on in her emotional life.
 

Brenda and her Mum with Elizabeth

It was a great day and we were pleased for Mum and Dad that it went off so well. Now everyone’s dispersing. Elizabeth leaves tonight, Aunty Lena is off with cousin Moira to Scotland tomorrow and I go back to London. I did offer to stay on a bit with Dad if Mum wanted to go up to Scotland with her big sister and favourite niece, but she and Lena don’t seem to get on too well. They are always trying to score points off each other as to who remembers things correctly. I’ve never seen my mother bossed around and put in her place the way her big sister does. Amusing. But they have had good times together, even if they squabble like kids occasionally. They went into the centre of Worcester yesterday, toured the Royal Worcester porcelain works, treated themselves to big ice creams and then went for afternoon tea in a café by the Cathedral.

So that’s family, strange if lovable creature that it is. In 1846 Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in a love letter to Robert Browning that she doubted that family know us best:

'they know us on the side we offer to them... a bare profile... or the head turned round to the ear - yes! - they do not, except by the merest chance, look into our eyes. They know us in a conventional way... so partial a knowledge.

... if I sought to have a man or a woman revealed to me in his or her innermost nature, I would not go to the family of the person in question - though I should learn there best, of course, about personal habits, and the social bearing of him and her. George Sand delights me in one of her late works, where she says that the souls of blood relations seldom touch except at one or two points. Perfectly true...'

15. Mr Oliphant's Tears : A Love Story (2004)

Mr Oliphant loves the carousel. He loves the beautifully crafted, carved, painted, lacquered, enamelled wooden animals in their bold electric fairground hues – orange, red, vermillion, pink, turquoise, blue, silver, gold. He loves the exotic wild animals – the giraffe, the zebra, the tiger, the reindeer, the polar bear, the llama, the camel, the ostrich. He loves the mythical creatures – the dragon, the griffin, the centaur, the unicorn with the golden horn and golden hooves, snow-white mane and snow-white tail. Mythical creatures like himself.

Mr Oliphant is delighted to be the newest of the new on the outer ring of the carousel, the theme park’s star attraction and he the star within the star. All the children of the world want to ride on Mr Oliphant; his back is broad and his heart is oak and he can carry all the children of the world. Even the little wild pony with the chocolate eyes and dancing toes that loves to gallop over the sugar mountain above the sunlit sea, beyond the field with the red windmill, sees the excitement created by the proud new creature on the carousel.

Mr Oliphant loves all the children of the world and Mr Oliphant loves all the animals on the carousel. But of all the animals on the carousel Mr Oliphant most loves the painted horses, and of all the painted horses Mr Oliphant loves Jenny the best, the lovely Jenny who rides on the inside ring of the carousel. Jenny is the last of her kind for the God of Big Things laid off the horse maker after Jenny was crafted and tore up the design, for the God of Big Things is a jealous god, jealous of wooden horse idols, jealous that the horse maker could make anything so beautiful, inside and out, as the beautiful Jenny.

Soon Mr Oliphant is always next to Jenny on the carousel. And as Mr Oliphant and Jenny swing round joyously side-by-side on the carousel, Mr Oliphant feels a wisp from the long hair of Jenny’s golden mane brush his cheek. And Mr Oliphant’s heart leaps and he is happy. And Mr Oliphant waves his trunk rapturously at the little wild pony with the chocolate eyes and dancing toes galloping by on the lavender sugar mountain beyond the fresh green field with the red windmill turning briskly in the sea breeze.

But the God of Big Things, who holds the master franchise for all the carousels in the whole wide world, sends a wicked weevil to worm its way into Jenny’s wooden flesh. And the wicked weevil enters Jenny through one of her hooves for the God of Big Things, in his infinite wisdom, has left an unpainted unlacquered unvarnished spot on the hooves of all the animals of the carousel, a spot through which he can test their mettle to destruction if his fancy takes him. For the God of Big Things is the Almighty God among the animals of the carousel, and the God of Big Things is a Mysterious God and the ways of the God of Big Things are not to be understood or questioned by the animals of the carousel, not even big animals with broad backs and hearts of oak like Mr Oliphant.

Gradually the sheen fades from Jenny’s golden mane, the sparkle from her topaz blue eyes, and the bounce goes out of Jenny’s stride. Her varnish begins to lose its lustre and gilt flakes from her beautiful hair. And Jenny’s happy smile takes on a tinge of sadness as the pain eats away at the marrow of her wooden legs.

“Hold on to me,” says Mr Oliphant. “I am strong. I can carry all the children of the world. Hold on and ride with me. I am the sunshine of your life. Hang tight by me.”

And Mr Oliphant waves his trunk gaily at the little wild pony with the chocolate eyes and dancing toes galloping by on the golden sugar mountain beyond the yellow field with the red windmill turning languorously in the hot air.

And Jenny feels calmer and relaxed, secure in Mr Oliphant’s love, and waits fearlessly for the weevil’s next onslaught on her wooden flesh.

But now sickness in the stomach grips Jenny and the rolling of the carousel, the constant rise and fall of all the animals of the carousel, the blur of the passing faces, makes her vomit and she loses her breath and finds it harder and harder to keep up with the pace of all the animals of the carousel.

“You can ride on me,” says Mr Oliphant. “I am strong. I can carry you. I can carry all the children of the world. Ride on me.”

And Mr Oliphant leans over with his big forklift truck tusks and lifts the tiring frail Jenny onto his broad back, and Jenny smiles at him as she rides there, happy now that she doesn’t have to run all day to keep up with all the other animals on the carousel. And Mr Oliphant waves his trunk at the little wild pony with the chocolate eyes and dancing toes galloping by on the orange sugar mountain beyond the crimson field with the red windmill turning rapidly in the strong southerly gale.

But now the wicked weevil finds other weevils to help him in his wicked task and the wicked weevils spread rapidly through Jenny’s ailing wooden flesh, weakening her fibres and rotting her guts and playing havoc in the delicate working organs so lovingly crafted by the redundant horse maker. And Jenny finds it harder and harder to hold up her head and, every time the carousel swings into the wind, the biting cold wind begins to tear out more and more of her beautiful golden mane.

“I’ll provide you a shelter,” says Mr Oliphant. “I am strong. I can carry you. I can carry all the children of the world. And I can carry a shelter for you on my back.”

And he leans from the carousel and grabs the ticket kiosk in his tusks and he puts the ticket kiosk on his back and Jenny stands in the ticket kiosk out of the wind and feels a little better. And Mr Oliphant looks longingly at the little wild pony with the chocolate eyes and the dancing toes galloping by on the brown sugar mountain beyond the purple field with the red windmill turning stiffly in the icy wind.

But now the wicked weevils, their work nearly done, are laying waste to Jenny’s spine and Jenny finds the noise of the Wurlitzer sends pains through her head and she closes the doors and windows of the kiosk to keep out the wind and the noise, and she lies down in her straw and she sleeps and cannot eat.

“I don’t know what else to do,’ says Mr Oliphant. “This is a heavy burden that I carry. You, your shelter and all the children of the world. I don’t know what else to do.”

“Just love me. That is enough,” says Jenny. “That is more than enough.”

And Mr Oliphant looks desperately at the little wild pony with the chocolate eyes and the dancing toes galloping by on the frosted sugar mountain beyond the grey field with the red windmill scarcely turning in the dead air.

And Jenny lies and sleeps and calls to the God of Big Things to let her down from the carousel. And the God of Big Things, in his infinite wisdom, is bored with the endless whining of all the animals of the carousel, many of them, like the redundant horse maker, obsolescent beasts past their use-by dates and no longer worth the cost of maintenance. And the God of Big Things, who is all-seeing and all-knowing, has been diversifying his investment portfolio and changing his product mix; he wants to dump his childish theme park dog and concentrate on cornering the market with his new cash cows, his branded religious wars. So the God of Big Things decides to offload his carousels and invest the proceeds in computer games with boring X-box names, decides to destroy all the carousels of the world with a big bang and flog the debris off to the God of Small Things for her wicked weevils to pick through and devour at their leisure.

And the wicked weevils bore into the soft tissue of Jenny’s wooden brain.

And Jenny looks at Mr Oliphant with her topaz blue eyes and says, “I am dying, Mr Oliphant, I am dying. Hold my head, hold my heart, hold me tight.”

And Mr Oliphant holds Jenny tight and strokes her golden mane.

And Jenny’s spirit is weary and her heart grows heavy.

And Jenny looks at Mr Oliphant with her topaz blue eyes and says, “I love you Mr Oliphant.”

And Jenny dies.

Mr Oliphant’s broken heart is heavy and his tears are heavy. The hearts of all the children of the world are heavy and their tears are heavy. And Jenny’s dead heart, heavier than Mr Oliphant’s broken heart, heavier even than all the hearts of all the children of the world, is the straw that breaks Mr Oliphant’s broad back.

And the little wild pony with the chocolate eyes and dancing toes stops galloping by on the sugarless mountain beyond the black fields with the red windmill that stands motionless in the dark.

And the little wild pony watches in dismay as the carousel, all its weight on Mr Oliphant’s breaking broad back, becomes unstable and starts pitching and rolling, giving all the animals a terrifying roller-coaster ride while the hurdy gurdy screeches out tuneless songs and the whole sad caboodle, in a state of collapse, spins frantically faster and faster out of control and disintegrates with a gigantic boom and the centrifugal forces of the careening mad merry-go-round fling all the animals into the sky and out over the field, the mountain, the sea, into the void.

Except for the exhausted Mr Oliphant who is so heavy with all the weight of all the hearts of all the children of the world, and of Jenny’s dead heart and his broken one, and of all the tears shed by all the children of the world and his tears, that he is not flung far. And Mr Oliphant lies stranded on his back across the broken fence at the edge of the field with the red windmill.

And the little wild pony with the chocolate eyes and dancing toes comes down from the mountain and kneels by Mr Oliphant and licks the tears running down Mr Oliphant’s face.

And all the children of the world come to comfort Mr Oliphant and all the children of the world say, “Don’t cry Mr Oliphant, don’t cry. We love you Mr Oliphant, please don’t cry.”

But the little wild pony jumps up excitedly and laughs and laughs in delight and says, “You are crying, Mr Oliphant, you are crying. Where did you learn to cry? Only real animals cry.”

“I learned how to love,” says Mr Oliphant through his tears. “To learn how to cry, first I had to learn how to love.”

“Ride with me, Mr Oliphant. I’m a real pony with a heart of gold and I can carry you on my back for a while. Just until you’re better, Mr Oliphant, ride with me,” says the little wild pony.

And Mr Oliphant leans on the little wild pony with the chocolate eyes and dancing toes and the heart of gold and slowly, painfully, with the help of all the children of the world, Mr Oliphant eases himself gently onto the back of the little wild pony.

And the little wild pony carries Mr Oliphant away from the wreck of the carousel and Mr Oliphant carries Jenny with him in his broken heart. Together they cross the field where the snowdrops push up through the frozen earth, past the red windmill turning gently in the freshening breeze, and climb to the top of the mountain as the sugar crystals fall from the deep blue sky above the moonlit sea.

14. Sophie's Fan

In my last blog My Mum and Other Huts, I mentioned Sophie's Fan.

Sophie was a Chinese graduate student in my department in my final years at the University of Auckland and I helped her with her thesis. She had made major sacrifices to study overseas, living away from her husband and young daughter in China for much of the year. Like many Chinese studying or working in New Zealand Sophie had adopted a Western name. Anxious to be a PC sensitive new age sort of guy I would ask those I knew what their Chinese name was and offer to use it, mangle it as I might. We had a secretary in our department some years back, for example, who called herself Doris. I don't remember what her Chinese name was but to my way of thinking anything was better than being called Doris. Doris however would have none of it, so Doris she remained.

Sophie adopted her Western name because it sounded most like her Chinese one. She is one of three daughters in her family and explained to me that her Chinese name means something along the lines of ‘the third not wanted, but not as unwanted as the previous two’. I could understand why she might like the name Sophie better.

On her return to New Zealand after Chinese New Year in 2001 or 2002, I don't exactly remember which, Sophie brought me a gift - a fan with paintings on one side and text on the other. I asked Sophie to translate the text for me and, with a lot of poetic licence on my part, this was the result: 

         SOPHIE’S FAN

What brought us together across the dramas of our lives

Remains random and mysterious

Lost in the mist of past journeyings.

Now, as companions in age,

Though our frailties make us tetchy,

We must cherish each other the more,

Set aside tantrums over trivia, childish irritabilities

That drain our emotions, exhaust our spirits,

For in such displays we hurt only ourselves

And if one is sick we are both the losers.

So cast off the anger and bitterness

They can but consume us both,

Forgo competitive striving against relatives, friends,

Set the children free to manage their own destinies.

As we face together, with equal composure,

Life’s sweet seductions and bitter grimaces,

Even the gods will envy our ageless harmony.