Glenn was born in May 1947, three years and three months after me. With his arrival our first bout of communal living ended when we shifted into a state house in Corstorphine, a new government subdivision. From 5 Clermiston Avenue we looked southwest over Concord towards Saddle Hill and, further off, the bulky Maungatua Range – commonly called the Maungatuas. Beyond were the flat-topped Lammermoor and Lammerlaw Ranges, and in between country where, as the poet Bill Sewell put it in ‘Above Outram’, ‘evening crinkles the land / into folds of the brain’. Sheets of snow lay there for weeks some winters, its lustre both thrilling and eerie. It wasn’t long before the sight of distant snowfields beckoned me, giving hints of adventure. Years later such views were to cede the prospect of the kind of camaraderie that close friends experience when wandering outdoors. Could it have been that already I had inklings of a kind that linked snowfields with grand, yet-to-be-discovered places? Gazing west from Clermiston Avenue, I felt the first pangs of a longing to experience what it was like to venture high into the hills.
We lived in a small two-bedroomed wooden bungalow surrounded on the hillside by little boxes, as folk singer Pete Seeger and others put it in the 1960s. They weren’t made out of ticky-tacky but they sure all looked just the same. Whoever designed state houses was concerned mainly with economics not aesthetics. Aesthetics was to 1940s and ’50s New Zealand what social democracy is to the New Right. Every house was painted in flat pastelly colours – blue, green or cream predominated. Their very inoffensiveness was mildly offensive, but, as I was often to hear, ‘beggars can’t be choosers’. Just about every adult I knew told me that.
The state houses weren’t spacious: two bedrooms, a kitchen, living room, bathroom, toilet, and a scullery or wash house with tubs. Mum soaked and scrubbed clothes before hanging them on the revolving clothesline at the back of the house. Our place copped the full force of the blustery sou’westerly – a cruel wind, especially in winter, always unrelenting. It blew right off the snows of the uplands between the Maungatua and the Rock and Pillar Ranges. Gusts shook the windows and tangled washing on the line. The sou’wester seemed to blow for a third of the year at least. Children wanted to be outside playing; parents wanted to keep them inside out of the worst of the cold; and, as every household seemed to have young children, it was a continual battle. So all kids had woolly hats and mittens – muddy and wet within minutes – and some had balaclavas. My father said it was no place for a cry-baby.
I was enrolled at Corstorphine School, about ten minutes walk away on the corner of Middleton Road and Lockerbie Street. It opened a week or two before I turned five, in March 1949. I was petrified, screamed and clutched Mum and didn’t want her to leave me. The site was windswept, the grounds were muddy and puddled, and the classrooms unheated. We sat and shivered; wet feet were the norm that first winter. The best thing was hot cocoa at lunchtime, a penny a cup.
Alf had been working in the bike shop, but the money was poor – £8 10 shillings a week – so in 1948 he got a job driving night shift for Dunedin Taxis. Six nights on and one off, for £15 a week. We didn’t see much of him as his day off was usually Monday.
He often drove a Dodge for the taxi company, an impressive vehicle. All American cars were impressive, in the sense of ostentatious. Both Alf and Deed thought American cars were unnecessarily large – they may have felt differently if they’d been wealthy. He and my father spoke of ‘a surprising amount of leg room’; of driving positions and shockies. Deed worked the clutch and went through the gears, his hand over the top of the knob on the gear lever, his fingers bent around it like claws. Alf did it differently. He held his hand on edge, the way you do when about to rabbit chop, and palmed the lever through ‘the gates’. So he changed gears with a bit of a flourish, lifting his hand off the lever with a gesture like a musical conductor.
Corstorphine – or Corsty as we knew it – was reputed to be a rough area. Further up the hill, on the corner of Corstorphine and Middleton Roads, was a two-storeyed house occupied by people called Savage. The spot was known as Savage’s Corner. As a taxi driver, my father knew it well. There was talk of fights on the lawn, all-night parties, women of ill repute arriving in scores, coal kept in the bath, and so on. It was even said that someone living there had cut holes in the walls so that model trains could run from room to room. My father said he’d seen stupefied bodies lying on the lawn, bottles beside them glinting like discarded weaponry. There must have been some truth in it all because, for years afterwards, whenever we drove past the place, my father laughed and relished the chance to say, ‘Savage’s Corner’.
We passed Savage’s every time we drove towards Blackhead, the headland at the northern end of the beach that stretched south as far as Ocean View and Brighton about five miles down the coast. In between home and Blackhead were paddocks where, from February through until April we gathered bags and baskets of mushrooms. Sometimes we went in the mornings, the sunlight sharp on dewy grass, moist dung smearing our gumboots. You could hear the Pacific Ocean, see the startling white surf and the equally white sand on the southward-curving beach – and across the Kaikorai Estuary the land rose in crimply folds towards the top of Saddle Hill.
Mushrooms were mysterious, emerged in the dark and glistened. The best paddocks were those without long, lank grass, paddocks that were lightly stocked with sheep not cattle. So while mornings were exciting – would we get in before others arrived? – just as often we went in the evenings when the light was softer, the air milder. Mushrooming was doing our own thing together as a family, a happy paradox; it was fun to gather food that grew naturally and tasted flavoursome.
I liked the country smells, sights and sounds. Hawthorn, broom, elderberry, gorse, grass, and the pungent smell of farm animals. The mooing of cattle and the bemused bleating of sheep were pleasing, comforting. It was a time before blanket antipathy towards introduced species, before the onset of the moral fervour behind most references to anyone or anything termed indigenous.
In the evenings I marvelled at the range of colours displayed above the ranges in the west; pewter, gold, crimson, green, yellow, cerise, egg-shell blue and sombre indigo. Once the sun had sunk below the Maungatuas, the colours faded quickly and the softening light seemed reassuring and benign. The long twilight is one of the attractions of living in the south, and my love of it goes back to mushrooming on the downland between Corstorphine and Blackhead.
We scurried from ring to ring, quickly picking the mushies. (‘They might look small and insignificant,’ said Alf, ‘but once they decide it’s time to appear above ground, they’ll lift a cattle beast out of the way.’) When one of us shouted, ‘There’s dozens over here,’ the others hurried over. We never picked the giant ‘horse’ mushrooms, preferring small to medium-sized ones. When we got home from mushrooming we all helped peel the booty, which Mum then cooked in a pan, frying them in a little butter. Mushrooms on toast were delicious.
Nowadays there are fewer field mushrooms, and far fewer places where one can wander without first finding an amiable farmer and gaining permission to pick a perky crop. We are now required to cultivate landowners, mainly because the numbers of people seeking access to the countryside for all manner of activities – some hitherto unheard of – have swelled greatly.
Although Glenn would eat mushrooms, he already showed signs of becoming a serious contender for the title of the world’s most finicky person. He would not eat fruit of any kind, and he had other dislikes as well. (He has never eaten fruit, never.) In exasperation, one day my father said to him, ‘Well, what the bloody hell will you eat, then?’
Little snowy-polled – was a word my father used meaning head – Glenn sat back, looked up at his father and in a plaintive voice said, ‘I eat cuthard.’ He sure did; he loved custard. My parents laughed and shook their heads. Glenn survived for years on custard and ice cream. Well, not quite: he did eat meat and veges and potatoes. And bread and milk and steamed pudding. And lollies.
The Blackhead road was narrow, a mix of yellow clay and gravel. It ran between gorse hedges, and the final mile descended steeply south, straight down to the beach. It was the northern end of the beach about which James K. Baxter wrote, in ‘Winter Sea’, of his grandmother carrying ‘a sack of oatmeal on her back / Twelve miles, walking beside the breakers / From the town to her own gate.’ And of how the sea stood ‘Upright like the walls of an empty grave.’ I shouldn’t have liked to have trudged the beach from Blackhead to Brighton with a sack of anything on my back, especially if the tide were in. Baxter spent his most formative years at Brighton, and his poems are full of references to, and images drawn from, the sea and places along the coast both north and south of the town. If borders are places where tensions most often arise, as I think they are, then coastlines are the most dramatic examples in nature. And that collision between land and sea clearly reverberated in and stimulated Baxter’s poetic consciousness.
Brighton was a place to go for a Sunday drive and has always been both a mini-seaside resort and a town in which people live and commute to Green Island, Mosgiel or Dunedin to work. It had – still has – a surf club, rugby grounds on the Domain, bathing sheds, a camping ground, a boat-hire service on the brackish little tidal river, and a general store cum milk bar. In good conditions fishers launch boats near the mouth of the river in the lee of the small island, which Baxter described as being ‘like an old cleft skull / With tussock and bone needles on its forehead’, and head north and south to reefs off the coast.
But on our trips to the beach in the shadow of Blackhead, I was more interested in an extensive area of fine white sand a few hundred yards inland, behind the first line of dunes. The sand was constantly shifting and being sculpted into remarkable shapes by the southerly winds. I went there twice with a friend a few months before we moved away from Corstorphine. Little more than knee-high to grasshoppers, we got there on mini-bikes in what were major expeditions for ones so small. We called the dunescape The Desert, imagining camels and Bedouins, and searching for oases in the waterless wastes. Little Thesigers and Lawrences, we tied handkerchiefs round our necks to protect them from the burning sun and we shaded our eyes with our hands to gain relief from the savage glare.
On grey days, especially with a wind off the sea, the beach at the foot of the hill was an uninviting place. The dark basalt rocks and stepped, fluted columns of the cliffs of Blackhead were known as the Roman Baths. They had a forbidding look. Subsequently they were partially destroyed by quarrying in a then typically traditional act of unthinking commercial vandalism. Fortunately, in the 1980s the quarry’s owners and the Department of Conservation, responding to public concerns and pressure, reached an agreement whereby the quarries agreed to leave a significant portion of the Roman Baths formation intact.
The beach at Blackhead felt the full force of southerly storms when heavy seas pounded the sand: a daunting, sobering sight. Yet on fine, calm days, with sunshine on the coast curving first southwest and then south to Taieri Mouth and beyond, the air seemed like thin glass that might shatter at any moment. After a southerly, the clarity of the crisp air along the Otago coast is unforgettable.
Southwest, across the Kaikorai Estuary, Saddle Hill rises above dappled farmlands, while a mile or so south and a short distance offshore sits the whale-shaped wildlife sanctuary of Green Island. On days when the surf booms, the wind batters, waves start breaking hundreds of yards off Blackhead Beach and spray seems to fly right over the island.
… In the Otago storms
Carrying spray to salt the landward farms
The wind is a drunkard. Whoever can listen
Long enough will write again.
As time passed, I grew to understand why Baxter had been mesmerised and haunted by the Otago coast, especially that stretch from Cape Saunders to Akatore. He wrote of ‘wolf-white waves’, of ‘the surf’s voice like a stumbling language’, of ‘waves of bright lead’, their ‘high bending wall’, and, in the sequence ‘Pig Island Letters’, in words I have never forgotten, of how Baxter’s poems that have their origins in those formative years at Brighton, remain among his best. In them his roots and his reading are fused with a vivid and fresh sense of the impact a dramatic and rigorous environment has on an agile young mind. To me, his Otago poems – especially those with a flavour of the coast – are the most authentic, the purest things he wrote. This is not to say that Baxter’s later work is unimpressive; far from it. The Jerusalem poems, especially, have moments of wonderfully affecting illumination and purity, an affecting innocence that transcends and overcomes the tendency to succumb to political and religious moralising that afflicts some poets – not always inappropriately, and often productively – as they grow older. I’m sure Baxter would have agreed with Flannery O’Connor’s assertion that if you want to be a writer ‘then you’d better come from somewhere’. Baxter, as much if not more than any other New Zealand writer, confirmed my belief that I came from somewhere remarkable.
It’s likely, to me, that Baxter would have agreed, too, with Eudora Welty’s belief that ‘the home tie is the blood tie’, and that without it ‘we would carry no compass inside ourselves to find home ever, anywhere at all’. And, reflecting down the years, I readily apprehend what Welty was saying when she asked if our ties to place might be because it ‘has a more lasting identity than we have, and we unswervingly tend to attach ourselves to identity? Might the magic lie partly, too,’ she asked, ‘in the name of the place – since that is what we gave it?’ The result, she contended, was ‘a kind of poetic claim on its existence’ that ‘may work forever sight unseen’.
Baxter was always very big on foreboding. Impending doom stalked him from an early age and he never impressed as one who thought he’d make old bones. I have to admit that there’s a fair bit of the glum stuff in my own work, but Baxter was in a league of his own there. I’ve often wondered where I got my own sense of such from: the land or seascapes that attracted me? the nature of the society I grew up in as it struck me? or simply a poet’s natural nemesis? Call it what you will, it’s there in ‘The Rocks Below’, a poem I wrote in the late 1980s, which refers to ‘those twin demons / outrage and despair’, the ‘cantankerous coast from Blackhead / to Taieri Mouth and beyond’, and in which I recall watching from ‘the headland Baxter frequented’ … ‘the seas lift translucently / in the autumn sun’.
Demons, demons and the despair that gnaws one’s bones. That’s where a lot of the best poetry comes from. It can’t be bottled for long; sooner or later the top will blow.
From Somebodies and Nobodies.