MY FAVOURITE JOURNEY IN THE whole world is driving out to Island Bay and taking the long and winding coast road around the Miramar Peninsula back into the city—past plunging hillsides, wild rocky shores, fierce seas with huge swells, crashing breakers, lacy foam and drifting phosphorescent spray. The first glimpse of the rugged Orongorongo Ranges across the harbour heads never fails to make me think of King Solomon’s Mines, a book I loved as a child. Regardless of the weather, I force all houseguests to take this journey with me. If none are available I go on my own at least once a month. Its hold on me never diminishes. It is my turangawaewae—my spiritual home. It doesn’t belong to me—I belong to it, which is vastly more special. I dream about it when I am overseas, which is why an artist’s loft in New York, a mews house in London or a maisonette in Paris hold no particular appeal for me.
I can say this with some confidence. When I was reconfiguring my Hillary documentary View from the Top for Channel 4 in the UK, I stayed in a grand, five-storey Regency house just off Berkeley Square in London as a guest of Don McKinnon and Clare de Lore (now Sir Don and Lady Clare). Don was Secretary-General of the Commonwealth at the time. They were hugely entertaining and absurdly generous hosts. It was a splendid house that shared fabulous park-like private gardens with surrounding mansions. From my bedroom I had Dickensian views across gabled rooftops and extraordinarily elaborate chimney-stacks with gleaming spires in the distance, but I ached for the first rays of the morning sun creeping over dark blue hills and turning Evans Bay a liquid silver.
On one of my very first pilgrimages shortly after settling in Wellington in 1972, I rattled around a bend in Evans Bay in my old Ford Cortina and spied an intriguing colonial home nested all by itself in the town belt high above Kilbirnie. It was so alluring I went in search of a closer look and was hugely frustrated when I couldn’t get anywhere near the place. Maddeningly, no roads led to it. For years when I drove around the bays it remained ever beckoning and tantalisingly out of reach, until one day I got a phone call from a dear friend, Chris Hampson, who produced and directed the voice performances for Footrot Flats. Chris can do just about every job in moviemaking except play the female lead, but I reckon with the right make-up, the right wardrobe and dim lighting the bastard could probably pull that off as well. Chris told me on the phone that he was contemplating buying an old house up in the trees above Kilbirnie. ‘I know it! I know the house!’ I shouted excitedly. After that he had little choice but to invite me to come with him and have a look.
We approached from another suburb, on the opposite side of the ridge, through a dark forest of geriatric pines up a half-hidden track of pitted clay and gravel. My heart was beating fast. The house, when it loomed up through the trees, even in a state of considerable disrepair, was magnificent. The verandah was rotting, the stairs leading up to it were lopsided, finials and bargeboards had fallen off, paint was peeling and windowpanes were cracked. Inside rooms had been divided into cubicles with olive-green hardboard and Pinex partitions, yet it was still beautiful. It was originally a farmhouse then, according to local legend, a secret hideaway for pregnant nuns waiting to give birth, and for a time was a hippie crash pad.
I urged Chris to buy it. He is a Renaissance Man when it comes to renovating homes as well. He is pretty much his own architect, draughtsman, quantity surveyor, chippie, joiner, glazier, plumber, plasterer, electrician, tiler, painter and interior decorator. Then at his house-warming parties he pulls out a guitar and entertains his guests. He is a charming and gracious host into the bargain. It is any wonder none of his friends can stand him? In just a few years Chris and his then wife, the equally dynamic and vivacious Ruth Jefferies, utterly transformed the place.
It was to this house, through a dark corridor of brooding conifers, that I drove in my Corolla with my share of the marital spoils bouncing around in the back. I seem to remember a gathering darkness and rain falling as I unloaded the car, but this might be a figment of my imagination and my tendency to embellish every story. It was certainly raining in my heart.
Chris and Ruth had been going through a painful separation of their own. Chris moved out. Then Ruth moved out. Then Chris moved back in. For two years we were middle-aged bachelors together on the hill, me rising at dawn to draw a cartoon and, if Chris was awake, making him a cup of tea while he checked my spelling. More often than not he emerged from his bedroom closer to noon, then sat at his desk for hours in his dressing gown playing Leisure Suit Larry on his computer, one of which I was years away from owning. He also had one of the first cell phones. It was the same size and weight as a brick. And he introduced me to lattes at Caffé L’affare. These truly were days of miracles and wonders. We were a remake of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. Mostly I was the uptight, fastidious Felix Unger and Chris the more relaxed, slovenly Oscar Madison, but to be fair we occasionally swapped roles.
Big Shaun came to live with me permanently. He was now producing testosterone in industrial quantities, which meant his socks breached the Geneva Convention on chemical weapons and had to be transferred to the washing machine with tongs. There were now three bachelors on the hill, two of them playing Oscar.
When Shaun was in London flatting with my brother Michael’s first-born, the effervescent and gorgeous Milly, she came home from shopping one sunny Saturday afternoon to find him in the curtains-drawn lounge watching a soccer match on television. He hadn’t shaved in three days. His long, lank locks were a stranger to hair products. He wore a stained T-shirt covered in pork scratchings and potato-chip crumbs. His shorts were baggy and frayed. His socks didn’t match. He was sipping beer. Barely looking up, he said one or more of her beautiful friends had to come across soon as he was getting very little action in the sack. Milly adored Shaun, and in exasperation said he needed to tidy up his act.
‘Take a good look at yourself, Shaun,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘You need to get in touch with your feminine side!’
Shaun took another sip of beer.
‘Trust me on this, Milly,’ he drawled. ‘If I had a feminine side, I’d be touching it all the time.’
Rosie and Sam came to visit every second weekend. Often I collected them midweek from Wadestown School, took them out for afternoon tea, a play in a park or early dinner at my place, then dropped them back at Helen’s house. It wasn’t ideal but it was the best I could do.
Chris threw great parties, but finding myself a single man again I reverted to my Massey University single-man mode—mania alternating with bouts of wretched melancholia. As those wise philosophers the Brothers Gibb asked so presciently, how can you mend a broken heart? How can you stop the sun from shining? What makes the world go round? I had no answers. My self-pity gauge was still reading full.
TVNZ approached me about being in the pilot of a proposed show called On the Couch, where prominent people would be interviewed about their childhoods by a psychiatrist—a dumb idea, so of course I agreed to take part. I had a strict proviso: it was never to be broadcast. Shielded by this and blinded by self-pity I told raw stories about my father’s drinking and our grim upbringing. TVNZ was delighted and immediately commissioned a series, but wisely none of the other guests were blabbermouths, or at least not in my stellar class. TVNZ said my episode was easily the best and begged for my permission to broadcast it. Vanity got the better of me and I consented. I shouldn’t have. I was so hard on my father some of Mum’s friends assumed he must have died and rang her offering their condolences.
He was alive all right. He never rang me. Not once in the twenty years I had been gone from Owen Street, Feilding, nor I him, for that matter. But shortly after it went to air I got a phone call that was quite impressive. It was icy cold, calm and composed, with no traces of a stammer.
‘Is that you, Egghead? It’s your father here. I see you’re quite the man these days. You’ll be in a lot of demand, driving back and forth to Auckland. It’s a long trip. You’ll need to break your journey. If you’re thinking of calling into Feilding for a refreshing cup of tea, don’t fucking bother!’
Three years earlier I had dedicated Ten Years Inside to him.
To my father, from whom I inherited my sense of humour and bad table manners.
Much like him, I suppose, I had to add a dash of vinegar in with the oil. He didn’t attend the Beehive launch—he didn’t attend his children’s weddings so he was hardly likely to attend a book launch. Plus his health wasn’t the best, so I posted him a copy, adding a hand-written inscription—again adding a splash of vinegar.
To Tom Scott Senior
Who I love but can’t remember why.
Cheers
Tom Scott Junior
He must have been following proceedings closely. He cut a story about the launch out of the Dominion and stapled it to the page facing the inscription. The press clipping included a photo of me standing with the Prime Minister David Lange and Mum. All three of us are beaming.
Within days of On the Couch going to air, the book was posted back to me. In the photo Lange has ‘FATSO’ scrawled in capital letters on him. Mum is labelled ‘DINGBAT’. An arrow points to my mouth: ‘NOTE BIG GOB’. In giant letters he has scrawled ‘HORSESHIT’ over my inscription and smeared the bottom of the page with something that looked and smelled like excrement.
I was taken aback but I still didn’t get it. I was hanging out with Carol Hirschfeld that summer and one evening I proudly slipped a VHS copy of the programme into the player and sat down to watch it again with her. Three minutes in she rose from the couch. ‘I can’t watch this! It’s too cruel!’ I drove her back to her place in uncomfortable silence. I still didn’t get it.
Murray Bramwell, my comrade-in-arms from Masskerade and Chaff ‘Long March’ days, now a professor lecturing on theatre and film at Flinders University in Adelaide, happened to be holidaying in New Zealand and we spoke on the phone.
‘Did you see the show?’ I asked expectantly.
‘I read your father’s hurt response in the papers,’ he replied cautiously. ‘Everything you said was undoubtedly true, but that’s not the point—you punished a powerless old man in a public forum with disproportionate force. Not everything that can be said needs to be said. Sorry …’
I wasn’t sorry. Expecting fulsome commendation for my candour I was instead all wounded indignation. Murray is the sweetest man, who would rather detour a thousand miles if he thought a direct route might cause hurt or offence, but this time with uncharacteristic force and bluntness he had said what I needed to hear, even if I wasn’t listening.
Despite living in Adelaide for nearly half a century, and despite not driving, he makes annual pilgrimages home laden with books, CDs and DVDs of television shows and distributes them like John the Baptist to his old chums across the land, keeping us all connected with each other. In 1970 he introduced me to Miles Davis’s masterpiece Bitches Brew and is still introducing me to new sounds to this day. I don’t block my ears to them.
A few years later, when Averil arrived in my life like a shaft of pure sunlight, I showed it to her. Averil is beautiful within and without. She didn’t want to watch it all. She didn’t need to. She didn’t chide me, she just said quietly that it was unnecessary and unfortunate, but it was done now and I should put it behind me.
I finally got it.
Had my father been still alive I would have driven to Feilding and apologised to him in person, but it was too late for that. It sounds easy to say after the fact, but apologising in person is one of my strengths. I’ve had to do a lot of it over the years.