2

Newspapers were allowed only one reporter at an execution and they were under strict instructions to report nothing more than such details as time of death and how many people were present. Jack Young of Truth defied the rules and wrote exactly what he saw in language that moved his audience. A wave of revulsion for the death penalty followed.

It was this account, and public debate and protest, that strengthened Ralph Hanan’s arm when abolition was put to the test in Parliament. By that time, he was the justice minister in the National government, elected in 1960, led by Keith Holyoake. Hanan was a man with a good instinct for public sympathies. In 1957, during the last months of the Holland administration, one more person had been hanged. His name was Walter Bolton, and even now, there are some doubts as to whether he did poison his wife. Between Albert’s death, and abolition in 1961, there had been a second three-year Labour government, which again suspended the death penalty. Hanan saw an opportunity to reform the situation and remove this hit and miss political approach to executions once and for all. As justice minister, it was his responsibility to introduce the bill ratifying the penalty, but when he did so, he made his disagreement with it known. He convinced nine of his party colleagues, including Rob Muldoon, to cross the floor and vote with the Opposition, thus abolishing the death penalty.

If Hanan emerges as something of a hero in this saga, I am aware that other of his views were more conservative. Some contemporary historians see him as no great friend to Māori, believing that some of his legislation was detrimental to their welfare. It’s hard to fathom how people balance out their priorities, or how, when in power, they determine the fate of others. Hanan remains an enigma to me. He died when he was sixty from complications of a lung condition contracted during his war service.

Writing This Mortal Boy involved years of research. There is a moment of troubling realisation that comes in a writer’s life, or it does for me anyway, when a book presents itself and you know, somehow, that you have to do it, you can’t brush it off. In a way the research is a kind of procrastination, a delaying of the moment when the book must be started, the transformative act must begin. But I’ve always heeded the words of John Steinbeck who once said that it was best to get the research done first so that the process of writing would not be constantly paused while the hunting for background and ‘facts’ took place. I think he was right. For the act of researching takes you closer and closer to the characters, to the long months in which you must inhabit them. There were many days when I found myself inside the head of Kathleen Black and her desperate pleas for clemency for her son. I became that mother, a part of me living her anguish. And I didn’t have to look far for Albert. I’d seen him for so many years of my life – the father who never went home, who mourned an Ireland from which he came but to which he never really belonged, as he didn’t belong in New Zealand either.

I interviewed dozens of people, including Albert’s friend Richard, whom I visited with my publisher and enduring friend, Harriet Allan. I have worked with Harriet for over thirty years. She is part of this story. Although we quizzed him about what he had witnessed at the milk bar, the police did not, deeming him and his companions unreliable.

Richard is in his eighties now, becoming frail but as clear headed as any youth. He lives alone in an immaculate Waikato apartment, home to his precise and detailed model ships.

I talked endlessly to the historian Redmer Yska, who had already written about Albert in his book, All Shook Up, and who provided me with transcripts of the trial and swathes of other material – not least Jack Young’s account of the hanging.

I travelled to Belfast, where I’d talked my way into an invitation to the city’s writers’ festival, via my London publisher, and got put up in a historic high-end hotel for a week. I walked the streets where the Black family lived, stood in the cathedral where Kathleen and Albert senior were married, spent hours ensconced in the Linen Hall Library and was made welcome by the staff at births, deaths and marriages, who treated my search as if it were their own. A cousin of mine, an architect who had designed prisons, had access to the closed section of Mount Eden. I stood on the spot where Albert was pitched into space by the hangman, and I wept.

If this sounds vaguely like an acknowledgements section that should come at the end of a book (and did when I wrote the novel), it’s actually about the lengths you go to, to find a way into a story. And to get it as right as you can.

The person I talked to the most was Ian. He knew Auckland in the 1940s and 1950s like the back of his hand. As a child during the Second World War, he had lived with his grandparents in a run-down building in Parnell called Paddy’s Puzzle, the subject of another early novel. Young women who lived there entertained American servicemen, so Ian knew how the ‘Yanks’ or ‘the American invasion’, so called, had divided opinion and changed the face of youth culture. Ian often got to eat candy when there was too much of it for the recipients. He remembered the nylon stockings the Americans brought, their ice-cream sodas and their flowers, and the venereal diseases the girls in the building suffered. And during the 1950s, he had been a student in Auckland and seen it with different eyes again. How long would it take to walk from here to there? I would ask him over breakfast. Or tell me about the dance halls – what dances did you go to? He could recite the names of streets, ones I would often walk along during trips to Auckland, trying to soak up the feel of them, even though so many of the buildings that were there have gone.

As on some earlier books, Ian had become my collaborator. When I told him a day or two after I had written the end that I didn’t feel the story was over, his eyes lit up. ‘Another cause,’ he said. He was glad, however, that I had ‘come back’. He felt that I’d been away for a long time. I knew what he meant, though I didn’t like to admit it then. I’d been consumed by that book and returning from it was hard.

I didn’t find Albert’s family when I was in Belfast. I had wanted to, especially for the sake of his daughter, whose birth was still an active secret. Since the book emerged, all the Belfast family that is left or known to exist have come forward. There is a cousin twice removed, and a very elderly aunt, but no sign of Daniel. I learned that Katheen and Albert’s marriage did not survive Albert’s death. I imagine their grief driving them apart, laying bare their differences, as so often happens when a young person has died a sudden or violent death. The family story of who did what, in order to save Albert, has varied over the years. Would I have written my book in any other way had I this access when I started? Perhaps in the detail, but not in the broad outline. Their fictional lives are still, for me, a passionate preoccupation, and a burden.

A postscript. One day not long ago I flew to Auckland and met Harriet. She was dressed in a quilted green jacket and sturdy boots, well prepared for walking.

We set off for Waikumete Cemetery, where Albert is buried. Armed with plot and row numbers in the Roman Catholic area of the huge cemetery, we thought it shouldn’t be too difficult to find him. I had seen a photo of Pooch Quintal beside his grave, taken not long before his death. Pooch is bald and sad, wearing a fleecy-lined jacket and holding a black hat. In the accompanying article he is quoted as saying that he wanted to take Albert’s remains home to Ireland to bury them beside his mother. Time, the item said, had washed away the name on the white cross that was shown.

The entrance to the cemetery was planted in fragrant purple stocks. The women at reception were dressed in black, though one had immaculate fingernails all painted white, except one that was bright red. They were kind and solicitous and interested in our search. In their burial records, Albert is shown as having been buried in Catholic E Row 8, Plot 70 on 6 December 1955, the day after his death. That doesn’t match up with information that he was buried first in the courtyard; perhaps that was a holding point while a grave was prepared. Or perhaps the record is simply skewed and he really was taken straight to the cemetery. As we would discover, he is something of a mirage.

The sky was wide and pale grey above the natural basin in which the cemetery lies. The rows of graves are named like streets, and all the names are those of flowers or trees. We made our way along Amber Crescent, appropriately named on that wintry day, for a vast plane tree was shedding its foliage in soft drifts, bright scarlet on one side, turning gold on the other. Further on, we were showered by the pale lemon leaves of a gingko.

Soon we had left the bright trees behind, as we ploughed down a bank and found ourselves in a small gully squelching with swamp beneath our feet. None of the graves quite matched the numbers we had been given and there were many white crosses washed clean of any name. Harriet, who is a better map reader than I am, decided on one that lay beside the headstone for a small child. The graves are in order of date of death. In that row, according to the list of graves we had been given, lie two Williams, a Daniel and a John, all with unmarked graves. The one Harriet spotted had a cross sunken almost to its horizontal bar in the swamp, covered with rushes and a plant that could have been wild marsh iris but would be revealed only in spring. We made our way back to the office, where it was confirmed that we had identified the right place.

We went back and took photographs. I wished I had taken flowers; instead, I plucked a head of paspalum grass and dropped it among the rushes.

After that, we went in search of Alan Jacques, or Johnny McBride as he liked to be known. He was said to be in the Protestant Division A, Row 5, plot number 62. It was barely round the corner from Albert. On our way there, we came across a tidy headstone for Frederick Foster, the young Englishman who had shot his girlfriend in another café further along Queen Street, and was hanged a few months before Albert. Locating Alan Keith Jacques was harder. It took two trips to reception and another printout to find him – or where he might be.

A huge pine tree spreads its roots over Row 5. Alongside the remains of a tilting headstone for a man called Tom Strange, we believe, lies all that is left of Alan Jacques. Somewhere in the swamps and pine trees of Waikumete Cemetery these migrant youths have vanished.

The story of Albert Black, of either of them, is not over. As Ian had predicted, Albert was another cause in the making. This Mortal Boy has been read by interested judges and lawyers who have, with careful restraint, volunteered their view that justice was not entirely served in this case. Even though Albert came from Northern Ireland, the Irish Embassy has expressed its concern, as have supporters at Otago University’s Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies. At the time of writing, a group of lawyers is examining the case to see whether it might be brought back to the Court of Appeal, notwithstanding that any exoneration, or a downgrading of the case from murder to manslaughter, would be brought posthumously. Richard, the witness unheard until now, has made a sworn affidavit, detailing at length what he saw and heard on the night Albert stabbed Alan Jacques in Ye Olde Barn Café.

That is a story still in the making.