Autobiography - A (relatively) brief history of my life
Birth to 1971
Dad was a suave sailor from Sunderland. He paid the insurance on his South Otago farm to Mum. After the Second World War they got married
I was conceived in a caravan between the Flemings Rolled Oats Factory's The Laughing Cavalier in Royal Canadian Mounted Police uniform, brandishing the Smith and Wesson revolver logo, and the railroad tracks of Gore, Country music's Australasian capital.
Born in a neo-Georgian brick maternity hospital in Owaka, South Otago in 1948, I have daddy's sardonic dark sense of humour and mum's sturdy Presbyterian legs. When Mum and Dad escape from the Rolled Oat Factory, Dad set to work to Improve Himself. I was totally fascinated by his drab cardboard envelopes arriving, and their nifty strings and disc to close them. He was doing the surveying course he's always wanted to do, but couldn't afford in England, through the mail.
Then he went to where the Job was, and Mother made epic journeys to go see her man, the most epic of all being the trip to Omakau with short blond pre-school me. In the early 50's it was it was a ten hour journey starting with a train ride to Balclutha, another to Dunedin, or Palmerston, then a cross country bus, or train. I learned from the way she describes the trip that Central Otago was a harshly beckoning place, only people Fired by Love could discover ... From Dad, I learned on Friday nights when he was home, helping him unload coal from Mataura, that night is supremely pictorial - black V roof silhouette, steam hiss, felt lagged piping, Milky Way, Southern Cross explodes above the spindlewood tree top, and whine engine turn-table over the road...
At three I was smashed up/deafened by an adult cousin. He didn't think dad should have remarried after his first wife died.
Charming!
I stopped being able to hear my beloved steam train arrive. I couldn't hear what the men on the stockyards next door were saying at Thursday auctions.
"Then there was the strangest line of all, the Catlins River Branch running from Balclutha to nowhere, but which on market days in Balclutha boasted a passenger train. The main station, for what it was worth on this branch, was Owaka and I have a vivid memory as late as 1956 of the station yard containing no less than two Model T Fords and a collection of Model A's used by the local Maoris to get their produce into the Balclutha market on the train.In view of the state of the road and the grades out of Owaka they were as well to leave the cars and take the train for even No 141 on three coaches and a van had its work cut out over the saddle . . . Model T's I fear would also have ran . . . for a short distance" Excerpt from "Rails 1978" article called "Outsider" by Derrick Cross.
Dad's Model T truck is utterly gone to lunch in our back shed. I love playing in it, its real leather adult smells, with canvas hood, and yellowing plastic side window accents...
Two years after British train buff Derek Cross' "outsider" sum up of Owaka, Bob Hepburn chased Otago and Southland trains with his camera. Our house hides behind the bright red roofed home of the Donovan's place. Between the two far away macrocarpa clumps above is Bessie Stevenson's house. One of several locals stumbling around on crutches, dreadfully crippled by the 1954 polio epidemic.
Above her house, Barr's Fall's bush beckons. A challenging boy's virgin forest paradise crammed with red blazing massive rata. There are no tracks. I wiggle up, along frosty bluffs, to find where the creek I built dams in starts. Find waterfalls nobody else has ever seen. All heartbreakingly gone, gone now the novel thrills of making my own maps with destruction bulldozed ... but Catlins wildness still starts through the hill in Houipapa (I think, I hope)
Dad wore tweedy fedoras just like this, but he'd never have slouched with his hands in his pockets. The two men face away from Miss Forsyth's garden paradise welcoming the Caitlins Greyhound's passengers to the gentlemen's conveniences. What are they talking about? New Year is too late for whitebait. Probably trying to smuggle Sleights beer into a "dry" area, about outwitting the lone policeman.
If Mum and I are on the train, we're finding window seats. Her back gives her a hard time, so we set off to Dunedin to see her chiropractor frequently. I'm her little Sherpa porter. At Balclutha the South Island Limited slides in. You glimpse jaded glamorous people wearing sunglasses in the 1st class carriages, away to Christchurch, or onto Wellington on the connecting North and South Island Steamer Express overnight ferry. Then to Auckland or Australia the day after.
North Islanders don't have nice mountains like we do here, wee Fergus, Mum tells me. I don't ever want to go there.
When we get home, happiness is turning our engine around - I adore its black grubby shape shifting in steamy billows, the fat big reclining rude noises it makes being swivelled around in the after dark frosting of stars.
Dads laborious efforts to teach himself to be a surveyor through the mail made it seem rational to do this with me from the age of eight.
At eleven, we moved to Riverton, Southland, but I still couldn't hear what the teacher was saying. I loved the edge of the sea, and riding the school bus, and it was a wrench moving back to Owaka.
Any Minute I could have been a victim. On top of being a messy wee pariah with endless colds, I was spoiled doing my schoolwork through the mail. Here's Aunt Barbara summing up locals hostility to Mum and Dad's avant garde education ideas. Loudly enough for me to hear. "Fergus not LEARNING????? Rubbish - I put my kids on the school bus, and let them cry their wee lungs out. School is to toughen kids up."It took a week and a half to get a reply about problems back from the Correspondence School. Eventually both our chemist Alan, and our headmaster Bruiser Burke, tried helping me with impossible algebra and terrifying geometry, occasional evenings after they finished working, but the lack of sound definition in those first hip flask sized hearing aids meant I struggled to just hear the words they said.
Dad would have liked to help, but his Ministry of Works job took him away from home, and when he did turn up, usually every second weekend - a poem I wrote which I call Friday Night wrote itself about Mum and Dad and me.
Dad and I are making
a coal stockade
together
by starlight while
Washington
my pet possum
scratches
in the Spindlewood
Then Mum calls
and we wash
Mataura
coal dust
off our hands and
go inside to eat
brown bread with
mutton chops
Butter
runs down our
fingers
beside the fire
Dad smiles
She smiles back
I want this moment to be
forever...
Before Dad's "nothing is right"
rages
that last all
Saturday
As I grew up, the scenario of Friday Night didn't change, stayed stuck, but what I like in detailing this is - you don't have to be the perfect parent of junior adults with disability.
I am aghast at today's systematic demolition of special needs units at schools, the trashing going on everywhere of parents efforts to do the best they can for their junior adults. On top of being deaf, we eventually found I have a latent glaucoma problem, and am dyslexic with figures.
You should be an architect, dad would say picking up my endless efforts to design the perfect house. But it was impossibly difficult trying to do the math for it ...
After my friend Selwyn went to Timaru, there was no way of meeting other kids, of making friends. Meanwhile... as being thirteen races towards me, Mum has figured out I'm going to keep missing out on life if I didn't invite our Lord Jesus Christ in. That day after she challenged me from that morning's Devotional Program, I admitted this is what I need to do. I changed. I started to enjoy reading my Bible, I started to talk to Jesus. Four months later, at a church Christian Endeavour camp, I met my two teenage best friends. Their names were Trevor and Alistair. Trevor was twenty. He worked in Owaka on Tuesday and Thursday, when the Bank of NZ was open. We could have lunch together. Alistair's Dad was an alcoholic - both were wildly funny, and I was one of the lads. Weekends, they'd jump into Alistair's bright yellow Mini, and we'd go go go to get away from our unresolvable families, on the weekend Dad didn't come home.
Trevor's family went to Auckland. Alistair jumped on the Brisbane plane when his Dad threw him out of the house at 3am on a winter morning. Neither "do" letters, but because I was starting to re-enter Owaka teenage life (cautiously, then with increasing confidence) via the church youth group, losing their friendship could have been far more tragic.
The people I liked the mostest were the musicians in church. What they did had to be fitted in behind the church organist. Away from the church I loved sitting in on their practices for local dances. I remember Ten Guitars, New Zealand's pop national anthem, all the yearning ballads of the Australian group The Seekers.
There was nothing rough — The Beatles, Rolling Stones, the Vietnam war protest songs were underground, on factory radios, in second class smoker carriages on the weekend trains...
After endless months in 1967 doing a day or two's work each week at the joinery factory down the road (I was terrified of heights and all the 7 metre timber stacks I made leaned!) our Baptist minister, John Roberts-Thomson whizzed of to Dunedin with me to job-hunt. Nees Furniture foreman, Les Jackson, had a brother who was deaf and I started an 8,000 hour cabinet-making apprenticeship... I loved it until Peter Nees took over. He speeded everything up, and there was never time to fix mistakes. It's all shut up now.How misleading memory is ... when I started looking for my favourite photo in David Leitch's Steam, Steel & Splendour, I thought you could see the bedroom, the dining, the lounge suites, the office concepts in the four curving Moderne floors of Nees, above the three carriages and van 5.15 to Mosgiel humbly hissing away. Economic restructuring has obliterated the big raucous bark of the 510 flyer and its jaded The evening Star readers. The seven hundred and twenty high school boys and girls. Pinky Agnew, Mrs Shipley's monumental Circa Theatre Hen's Teeth revue, summarizes Dunedin's disapproving moral code - very confidentially.
Train girls smoked, and ...
Here's half of our vast 1970 flat-full, caught by Rosalie Foote, on Murdering Beach - Ray Scarlet, Ken Foote, Ian, me modelling Dunedin's first beach baggies, Graham Woolford. In our Mr. Dunedin line-up.
With chests like that, you should be doing the Berlei Bra ads, Beth told us when she married Ray. Ahh Beth, Bette Midler stole your laugh!