The Personal is Political

Part 1

Paths and Tracks:

On my drive to school the other morning I was thinking how cool it would be if I could retrace all the pathways and tracks I helped create, and have used over my life. I mean the real ones right back to my earliest days. I would like to be able to visit the places, the sites, the towns and cities where they were and retrace them thinking about the adventures we had. Given most of this happened fifty or fifty-five years ago this could be difficult.

The first paths I remember are in Upper Hutt, actually they’re not but I have trouble deciding if the first ones are real or just part of my memories from way back. I sort of remember as a three year old running to my Auntie and Uncles place somewhere around McLeod Street and picking flowers on the way, then I remember running home from school along Pine Ave in Upper Hutt, from St Joseph’s Primary. I think this was the first sign of rebellion regarding the education system that’s become something of an obsession.

Next there’s a whole bunch of lovely memories, real now, of places we played and the people we played with around Victoria Street in Upper Hutt. By now I must have been 5 or 6 and most of these memories involve me and Mike and the Morgan kids, who knows how many, and Moira Girvan? Ruth O’Flaherty and Janie Dodd, all Catholics I guess as we all went to the same school, or did we? The Morgan’s lived across the road and Moira lived a few houses along from our second house in Victoria Street and Ruth and Janie lived within easy child walking distance from our house.

The first and most important path during this period led to the hut at the back of our place that we had as our gang base. This place features in my memory as a sort of landmark, but only for the select few. I recall it was under trees and there was a garden you passed on the way to it. We had a housekeeper, unbelievably, she lived in a cottage at the back of garden and later this became ours too, after she left. I also remember having a cat that we used to take down to the hut and one we found. Around the same time we had a place we all went to, called the jumping patch. This was a huge elaeagnus hedge bordering empty sections and a paddock I think somewhere near the convent. I’ve looked for this area in the last few years but it’s long gone into the maze of streets and footpaths and suburban houses. We used to climb up and into the hedge and leap around on it. God knows why we didn’t have asthma attacks and get terrible itchiness, it was so dusty and dirty and generally disgusting. Even now writing this I can smell it and feel the way the branches and smaller twigs stuck into you and scratched your skin as you climbed around in it. The amazing thing is I’m sure it was a long way from home and there must have been about ten of us and we were there for hours. My parents were pretty self absorbed but obviously no more than anyone else’s or was it just so much more relaxed and people so much more trusting. I think I was pretty naïve but I don’t ever remember being frightened of anyone during this period. Anyone outside my family that is.

During this same time we also played on the roof of the old maternity hospital next door to us that closed down while we lived there. It can’t have been closed for very long when we moved to 18 Victoria Street because Bob and Matt were both Born there when we lived at 2 Victoria Street. It was called Braeburn and was painted light green. Lizzie Morgan and I started playing there early on and had our horses, Silver Wave and Silver Waves (mine was Silver Waves as I was younger and Waves wasn’t as good as Wave but being younger I didn’t get first pick) kept in the garage at the front, on Victoria street. The building was one long affair running back from the front of the section with a number of lean-to and add-ons; a continuous roofline. I’m unsure when we discovered we could get on the roof and who first did but I do remember we spent a lot of time up there, running around and hiding from each other and incorporating it into our other places and into our games, in particular games that involved horses and cowboys and Indians. It’s incredible now when I think about this. I loved this. In my mind, the sense of adventure, the way being on the roof and being over at Braeburn, as I suspect we weren’t even supposed to be in the section let alone on the roof, must have given us all a way of making the games we played exclusive and dangerous. The danger, although I don’t think we would have been concerned about physical danger, was just doing something we probably weren’t allowed to do which was thrilling and perhaps scary and created a sense of being part of a real adventure.

We also played for a while on the building site along the road from our house. There was a concrete foundation with those metal stakes coming out of the concrete, reinforcing steel I think. We would jump around from one level to another chasing each other as always until Moira fell and impaled her leg on one of the stakes. I remember Mike I think running to get someone while we stayed with Moira. I remember the blood and screaming and then the ambulance. Then Moira in a wheelchair with a cast on her leg and later on crutches. I suppose we weren’t allowed to go there after that but I don’t remember anyone telling us not to.

It’s funny this because my parents feature strongly in my memories. They were both pretty amazing. My mother was beautiful. Everyone knew she was. I remember knowing this. She wore better clothes than anyone else’s mother and her hair looked better. It was always up in a sort of beehive and in photos was black and thick, I remember her brushing it in front of her mirror at Aubrey Street in Whangarei a few years after this. She looked as though she could have been famous. Because my father was a lawyer he was better too. Having a lawyer for a father was something to skite about. Together they were like celebrities.

At home they were difficult parents, my father was inconsistent as a parent. Sometimes he was angry and full of uncontrollable rage, shouting at all of us so that we were intimidated and fearful and sometimes he would be the person who took us on adventures in the car or played with us outside or took us swimming or out in the boat. It’s funny I remember Mum during this period as being gentle and sweet and kind. It's interesting how all of Dad's shouting and blustering is part of this memory but this is overshadowed by her strength and resolve. She was also very self sufficient, I think she needed to be, she had her music and us and although I do recall Dad being with her at times especially on our many car trips, I also recall the way she was always busy and caught up doing things. I think now this was survival, shutting herself off from Dad's extreme behaviour and even then when we did have money a way of keeping hold of another life that was very important to her. 
As a child you don’t know, well we didn’t the problems brought on by alcohol and a crazy mixed up childhood. Dad's life was dysfunctional, he was bi-polar, an alcoholic, and perhaps he was gay; he later told us he was. He was the most irrational person I’ve ever met and the least reflective, always looking at someone to blame for the mess he was in. But, as a child you just go with whatever is there, if your Dad is hard to deal with you take it, forget the hard bits and keep as low a profile as you can so that you don’t show up on the radar the next time he’s looking and not feeling too good. This was my strategy from pretty early on, the hard part about this is that if someone is looking to pick on the world because they just generally feel bad about the mess they’ve created they will find someone to hurt. 

After Victoria Street my life got more complicated. Dad left for a while with Joyce and Mum moved from house to house over the next year or so trying to piece her life together I think. We lived in Pinehaven and then in a house in Waiwhetu, in the South Pacific Motels by the Hutt Road and then with her brother in Te Puke before Dad asked her to go back to him and we went up to Whangarei where he had moved.