At primary school we Campbells were the only pupils to have Polynesian blood, although a family of Maori children were to arrive a little later. They were also ‘homies’ and were to achieve academic success, one of them being the first girl from the orphanage to pass Matriculation. At high school I was alone. It’s incredible to think that in my four years there I was the only coloured boy. I used to wonder about two Jewish boys, refugees from Nazi Germany, with whom I felt some kinship – but I never got to know them.
In those days racism was more blatant than it is now. I remember coming home one day and running into a contemporary who was walking along with a girl, laughing and talking intimately. He was one of those flashy types, with vapid good looks, whom I normally disdained.
‘Good-day,’ I greeted him.
He grinned at me vacantly, his mind still on the girl he was trying to impress.
‘Oh, good-day, nigger.’ He turned back to the girl who looked at me and laughed.
I had become accustomed to being addressed as ‘snow’, ‘darky’ and even ‘Hori’, often by adults who would have been surprised had they known they were giving offence. And at high school Stuart was known as Sam (short for Sambo). But ‘nigger’ was the ultimate, the unforgivable epithet.
Still enraged I rang the boy that evening.
‘Yes?’ Wary and a little nervous.
‘Listen, you bastard. Call me that again –’
‘Look – who are you?’
‘Quit it. You know well enough. Call me that again – and I’ll bloody well kill you.’
To be honest, there was a deeper reason for my fury which I never admitted, even to myself. I was passing myself off as a white person – as I was to do for many years – and this boy had contemptuously exposed me.
Stuart and Margaret preceded me to high school, Stuart going to Otago Boys’ and Margaret to Otago Girls’, but neither could settle down to serious study. On completing the third form year, Stuart left to become an apprentice panel-beater and Margaret to work in a cake shop, much to the disappointment of friends and teachers, who deplored what they considered to be a waste of talent. What they forgot was that they’d started school late, as I had, and that Stuart was 16 in form 3, and Margaret a year younger. Being proud and sensitive, they must have found it intolerable to have classmates so much more childish than themselves. I was also 15 in form 3, but thanks to my birth certificate, which happened to be wrong, I thought I was 14. That one year’s difference may well have been decisive in determining my future.
My memories of Otago Boys’ High School are closely interwoven with memories of World War 2, for I was at high school during the critical years, 1940–43. The billboards at the Dunedin Exchange, which I read each morning and evening on my way to and from school, kept me posted with the latest news – Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the mounting ‘cricket’ scores of German versus British aircraft losses (67 for 11, 180 for 34, 185 for 26), the Battle of the Coral Sea …
Even so, the war was never as real as passing ‘Matric’, beating King’s High in rugby, or plucking up the nerve to speak to that pretty girl who travelled to school each day on the same train as I. (I never did pluck up the nerve.)
It may have been this air of unreality that made it difficult for us to take the Home Guard seriously. All those grown-up men in ill-fitting uniforms, solemnly playing at soldiers in their spare time. What would they do with their wooden rifles when the Japanese came? Beat them over the head? Trip them up? Poke them in the ribs until they died laughing?
Then came the astonishing news that the Rector himself had joined the Home Guard. How could he lower himself? Had he gone soft in the head? Well, we thought, they’ll have to make him colonel, or at the very least a major. Picture our surprise when we learned that he was only a private. We began to see him in a different light, as if he might be human.
Small of stature, with a high, bulging forehead and a long, slightly puffy, upper lip that he drew back over his teeth when he was angry, H. P. Kidson was a formidable headmaster of the old school, who had the power to intimidate pupils long after they had left his charge. I remember him in retirement at Wanaka, not long before his death, and the sight of that brooding face and sternly puckered mouth made my heart quail, and I was back again in the lower sixth, enduring the lash of his tongue for failing to answer correctly a simple problem in logic.
‘A man is an animal. A donkey is an animal. Therefore a man is a donkey. True or false, Campbell?’ I was confused and said nothing. ‘We are talking about the fallacy of the undistributed middle’ No reply from me. ‘Tell me, Campbell, is it possible I’m addressing a donkey?’ Still no reply. His face darkened with anger. ‘Oh, sit down, boy – and pay attention in future.’
It had been a rough session for all of us, and in our haste to get out of the room there was some jostling in the doorway. Into the midst of this strode the Rector and dealt a blow at the chief offender and sent him reeling. We were appalled, terrified, exhilarated. What could have caused that Olympian self-control to crack? Looking back, I suspect it had something to do with the humiliation that he’d inflicted on me.
That Kidson loved the arts was evident from his weekly art and literary appreciation classes with the sixth forms, and from the recordings of classical music that the whole school was often obliged to listen to. We used to file into assembly to the sombre strains of Finlandia – stirring stuff for those dark days of the war. What was less evident was that he himself was an artist in prose.
Was the author of that article in Landfall, ‘Annus Mirabilis’, a lovingly detailed account of a year at Wanaka, really the same H. P. Kidson? I remember Charles Brasch, poet and editor of that literary journal, smiling at my utter disbelief. ‘The very same.’
‘But how –?’
‘He’s a highly cultured man – and before you go any further perhaps you should know what he said about your “Elegy” when it first appeared. He was much taken by the poem, and said you were a master of language …’
At Wanaka, on the occasion mentioned earlier, Kidson was to repeat his flattering judgement, almost as if he’d been waiting all these years to say it to me personally.
We were sitting outside his lovely stone cottage among alpine flowers and plants in their natural setting, with a view of the mountains across an arm of the lake, while Mrs Kidson brought us tea and biscuits.
‘I knew you were miserable as an orphan boy,’ he was saying, ‘with no choice but to pursue a lonely course. We discussed your problem more than once at staff meetings …’
I was touched by his words, but I wondered at a system that kept producing masters who were unable or reluctant to show pupils their concern. It seemed to me a pity that I came to appreciate H. P. Kidson when it was almost too late.
As I write, my masters of those days pass before my eyes, and I remember them with affection – Grub Garden, Pussy Bridgman, Dreamy Watt, Nigger Martyn, Creeper Bailey, Blobs Anderson … Their nicknames are testimony to the schoolboy’s unusual flair for affixing the apt appellation. Take Creeper Bailey, who taught us maths, and who owed his nickname to the way he seemed to glide along a few inches from the ground, or Pussy Bridgman, who taught us English, and whose nose seemed to twitch in a cat-like way above his thin moustache when he was amused. Bridgman was the first poet I knew, and I remember being impressed when the Rector announced one morning in assembly that he’d won some poetry prize.
Blobs Anderson, who taught us chemistry, was one of the characters of the school, with his baggy pants, crew-cut hair, slightly popping eyes and mildly risqué jokes delivered in a plummy accent. There was one preposterous story, long in the telling, about how he once tried to cure a lady’s nose bleed by placing his key on the back of her neck – but the dashed thing slipped from his fingers, and the problem was how to retrieve it, by George! ‘I had to feel inside her dress – a most delicate operation, you understand – and I felt a perfect oss.’
He had been ordained in England and was known to preach the occasional sermon. His favourite expression, which naturally we adopted, was ‘Correct me if I’m wrong’, and it was told with relish how he would sometimes surprise his congregation by using it in his sermons.
Then there was the legendary Nigger Martyn, so called, not because of his colour, but because of his sallow features, deep-sunken eyes, craggy brow and heavy, sagging eyebrows. When he spoke, his voice rumbled in his throat like the wind in an unswept chimney. His smile, which was rare but which I sometimes provoked by my mathematical ineptitudes, was bleak and fleeting.
Generations of boys had stood in awe of his mathematical genius, but it was his droll wit that I relished and his precision in the use of terminology. Few things irked him more than to hear us say ‘nothing’ when we meant ‘nought’ or ‘zero’. ‘Nothing,’ he would rumble, ‘is the complete absence of something.’ He must have been well past retiring age, but the war, which had caused a general shortage of teachers, had brought him back into service.
It was at high school that I first tried my hand at verse – ponderous lampoons on masters, to begin with, lush exercises in imitation of the worst excesses of Keats, piteous war poems in imitation of Wilfred Owen (the first modern poet I discovered), and, capping them all, a frothy sonnet sequence, full of ‘oh’ and ‘thees’ and ‘thines’, which I composed at St Kilda beach one afternoon, after I’d skipped military drill. I wrote it to impress a girl and succeeded only too well, because she flatly refused to believe it was mine.
Lists of athletic successes are generally boring, so I’ll mention in passing that I was a better than average sprinter and a more than useful back, experienced in every position from halfback to wing. I admit I enjoyed being in the first fifteen, partly for the status it conferred – we were, after all, la crème de la crème – and partly for the close fellowship that developed among us over weeks of practising, travelling and playing together in many parts of the South Island.
Of my contemporaries, the first that comes to mind is R. D. Fraser, whose friendship meant much to me at a time when I was trying to establish my identity. I remember his mother’s kindness to me the first time I was ever drunk. She took me in, put me to bed and placed a bowl by my head in case I was sick. Genial and popular, Bob Fraser was to be head boy and dux of the school, and later a doctor.
Another contemporary was E. J. Carr, who had an aristocratic approach to sports, which was then new in my experience. A natural athlete – a fine swimmer and a swift runner – he refused to train. In spite of that, he often excelled, but took his achievements lightly. Intriguing, too, was the rumour that he composed avant-garde music and was particularly influenced by Stravinsky. Edwin Carr, who is now a distinguished composer, is one of the few classmates that I still see from time to time.
Throughout my years at the orphanage, I saw much of my Uncle Tom (my father’s elder brother), my Aunt Flo and my cousins Allan, Graham and Tom. Uncle Tom used to fascinate me as a small boy by his trick of putting his thumb to his mouth and blowing his biceps up. A Saturday at Uncle Tom’s was never complete without a visit to the Captain Cook Hotel not far away, where Aunt Flo’s brother was the licensee, and where I could always be sure of a solid meal in the kitchen, a raspberry drink in the bar and always, before I left, a dozen pennies still in their paper roll.
I was to see a little more of our great-aunts during this period. They were Em, Torie and Bean, who had recently joined them, and they lived in a poky little house at 4 Douglas Street, one of the more depressing streets in St Kilda. They kept the place in darkness, even on the finest days – blinds down, curtains drawn.
Margaret told me that she called to see them once, when she was working in a cake shop just around the corner. She knocked repeatedly, and, although she could hear them moving round inside, no one came to the door. She was so cross she wrote them a note in lipstick and called out, ‘I know you’re in, and I’m not coming back – so there!’
My experiences were different from hers – perhaps because they preferred boys. They used to fuss over me in their dark little kitchen and bring me wine biscuits, or seedcake, and a cup of tea, and they would hover over me, their dry hands fluttering, until they were sure I had all that I needed. Em and Torie, from what I remember, were frail like Grandma, and Aunt Bean, who’d been so round and jolly, had become a ghost like them.
Grandma died on 2 January 1942, in Onehunga, and her body was sent to Dunedin to be buried in a grave beside her husband in Anderson’s Bay Cemetery. It may have been in the semi-darkness of the great-aunts’ living room that I saw her coffin. I can’t be sure – but I do remember an occasion when Aunt Peg came into a darkened room and saw me and nearly had a fit. ‘My God – Jock!’ she said. For a moment she’d thought her brother had returned from the dead. I was 17 at the time.
I used to ride a push-bike 3 miles to High School – quite a distance in hilly Dunedin. I gave it up after I’d come a cropper at the bottom of Silverstone Street, where it turns quite sharply into Musselburgh Rise, and could have been killed if a car had been coming towards me.
Sometimes at high school I felt I didn’t belong, not only because of my colour, but also because I was poor. I’d take it hard to have to leave my friends after football practice, when they went to the tuckshop for a milkshake. I was never given pocket-money – except sometimes by Margaret and Stuart, who were both working then – and I couldn’t join them.
These were restless years for Stuart. After working for a while as a panel-beater he joined the Otago Mounted Rifles – our father’s old regiment. But after his accident, he left the Army and drifted north, where he was directed by the Manpower Board to work in a dairy factory at Kopuarahi. From there, he joined the Air Force as AC2 in the Central Camp near Hamilton. He loathed the life, and in 1944 he joined the Maori Battalion, where at last he felt at home. He wrote to me, ‘We’ve got a great crowd here – they’re rough as guts, but they can drill.’ Later in the year he left for the war.
I still spent my Christmas holidays at Robertson’s orchard in the Cromwell Gorge, picking fruit, and it was there that I received a telegram from Margaret in Dunedin, announcing that I’d passed Matric. I remember bounding with joy through the orchard, shouting, ‘I’ve passed Matric! I’ve passed Matric!’ It was a big day in my life.
One year two senior boys from King’s High School came to work on the farm, one of whom I remember clearly, because of a fight we once had, using broom handles for quarterstaffs. It was friendly enough to start with, but it soon became serious because of my will to win. Being some years older than me and strongly built, he easily parried my strokes, smiling all the while, which made me madder than ever. In the end, exhausted and humiliated – I wasn’t used to being bested – I burst into tears. His reaction, totally unexpected, was to show such concern that I cried more bitterly than before. How dare he beat me and be so decent! His name was Ron Keller and he was to join the Air Force soon afterwards as a navigator, and was killed in the Battle of Britain.
Evening was the best time of the day, when the warm air was scented with thyme and horehound, and I would take my gun and wander over the hills in search of rabbits. I usually went alone, but when a girl accompanied me we would sometimes end up by the river on a patch of sand still warm from the day’s heat. I remember one such occasion because the smell of my feet in sandshoes came between us just as we were about to kiss. I was embarrassed and found some excuse to go back to the house. I was never to have a second chance because next day she went home to Dunedin.
A swaggie had a regular beat up the Cromwell Gorge and was a familiar sight, with his torn felt hat, tattered long overcoat, and his sack over his shoulder containing all his worldly goods. He never hurried or varied his stride, and was always courteous, touching his hat to Mrs Robertson as he asked her if she had some little job that he might do. She would set him chopping firewood and, when he’d finished, would give him a little money and feed him.
He had a gift of water-divining. We used to watch in wonderment as the forked willow stick he was gripping, a prong in either hand, twisted and dipped towards the ground, as if with a life of its own. ‘Dig here,’ he’d say, turning to Mr Robertson, ‘and you’ll find your water. About 15 feet down is my guess.’ But Mr Robertson never took his advice. The performance was what he enjoyed, and he wanted to share it with us.
Those were good days, with ice-cold dips in the green swirling Clutha; cricket matches with other orchard crews played on pitches so bumpy and hazardous – the ball would pop up, shoot along the ground, or disappear down a rabbit hole – that victory was determined less by skill than recklessness; Mrs Robertson’s cooking for which we could find no adequate superlatives; and, above all, the irresistible combination of fruit in abundance and lightly clad nubile girls smelling of apricots. The horn of plenty indeed!
From Island to Island.