My Life at Otauma
by
Christopher Duval Smith
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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My Life at Otauma
Copyright © 2010 by Christopher Duval Smith
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pakehas - white New Zealanders of European descent
marae – meeting place
urupa – burial place
I live in a small place somewhere near Auckland, New Zealand, where there are Maoris and pakehas in about equal numbers. That appears to have been so for the past sixty years; it’s 2010. There is no industry that might have boomed and bust in the meantime; there are farms, mostly in pakeha hands, and a mussel farm, and men mostly Maori have sometimes fished for a living, for a few years only. A marae has been established in the last thirty years. An urupa near my place has been going much longer than that, and I know of six smaller burial grounds that sometimes admit new residents or are referred to by local people. And one administered by the District Council.
After doing social work for fifteen years in several agencies I was glad to retire from that profession. I had paid off an acre at Otauma with a two bedroomed house which was not expensive. I grew plants such as hellebores and Japanese anemones in black plastic bags and took them to garden centres in Remuera and Takapuna, for about fifteen years again. But I drew unemployment benefit for rather long spells, declaring the income from plants and having trouble with tax returns.
What I particularly want to write about is boarders and friends, mostly Maori. I began to write about the first boarder, Paki, and my relations with him, in 1991 when he had been in the house for several months and things between us were about to run down and seemed somewhat comical. He was four years older than me, had spent years in gaol apparently, and was fond of cooking. He dozed on his bed for long hours or he read stories, the folk tales collected by the brothers Grimm and Myths and Legends of Maoriland by A W Reed, for example, and westerns by Louis Lamour. The first two of these were in my living room in one of my bookshelves.
I was fifty. The others were younger than me and one was rather backward as well. I wrote about them and myself in the following thirty five chapters which covered about four years, with a break after Chapter 25.That seemed to be the end of it, but this year I’ve written fourteen more, which had better be all.
I came across nails that must be a trace of Paki, three days ago. They were strewn on the ground with bits of a dinner plate that I remember having. Blackberry had hidden them these eighteen years. They had been in a fire. They are three-inch flathead nails, very rusty. I picked up a third of a bucketful and will put them on the roadside on rubbish day, in fact, in a Kleensak.
Nearby lived Gloria and her partner, an elderly man who had had his own band and performed in pubs and so on. They had a number of dead cars and I think there was a stack of wooden pallets beside the cars. Paki was keen to be known in the neighbourhood, which he was new to. He said he was a trained mechanic, A Grade even, and Gloria was glad to give him unpaid jobs. One of the cars would be his if he could get some of them going. He watched TV there too, which my house does not include.
I said living room, but Paki did not choose to live there and could say succinctly that what happened in that room was not for him. I’m fond of fires in cool weather and that’s where the fire is. It was autumn. Paki lit a fire outside and sat by it silently. Two fires, when firewood did not grow on the property and we had no decent chainsaw. The pile of pallets must have served a purpose. He burned them whole, to judge by the area that was covered with nails.
Perhaps Gloria allowed him to have them. Her partner was diabetic and had poor eyesight. She certainly gave him clothes, not the elderly partner’s, but a nephew’s clothes when the nephew went back to prison. There was a denim jacket with lambswool inside the denim that Paki and I both wore. And an attractive hand-knitted grey jersey, no longer modish but congenial to me, even now. When Paki left my place owing money for toll calls and petrol and leaving his clothes in the meantime, I transferred the jersey from the spare room to my chest of drawers. The jacket it happened was in my room already.
Aotearoa – has 3 diphthongs
hangi – meal for a large group cooked in covered pit by heat from stones out of a fire (umu in other Polynesian places)
Early in the week I often go to the pub by myself, for an hour or so late in the afternoon. Paki is often broke; he drinks and gambles heavily on Thursdays or shortly afterwards. Yesterday Robert was at the pub, with several others, all much younger than me. Robert is light-fingered for sure and a keen ingester of drugs and alcohol, but he also has an interest in Bibles that grips my curiosity. He borrowed my copy of the King James version about four months ago, saying that he wanted to compare it with his own Good News translation. Some time ago I lent him an old sleeping-bag and an oilskin cover to go with it; it has proved impossible to get them back, and the matter can only be allowed to fade away. It seems unlikely that a Bible would become so tattered as not to be returnable, and I let him take it. Robert is an attractive fellow I acknowledge. Other things being equal I would rather say yes than no to him.
Yesterday afternoon I asked him for the Bible. He said, rather firmly, that he wanted to keep it for an indefinite time, to read the whole book; he was up to Kings so far.
Our friends were in a good mood round the table. Someone on my right had scurrilous things to tell about the private longings of an earlier publican, a woman, for a well-known member of the rugby team. Apply pressure to Robert? It seemed pointless to try, but for the sake of putting some small request upon him, I asked him to look out in the Bible for the exact words of ‘Come unto me, all ye who do travail and are heavy laden’ (I’m not sure that that’s it) ‘and I will give you rest.’ I’ve had it on my mind for some time. The fellow on my right put in, “have some of this good weed and I will give you rest.”
And so things became light for a while, with a ride to the foreshore to be out of sight of the licensee. I think Robert was in a babbling state, a mixture of allegorical interpretations of the Bible, reflections on his own brilliance and requests to borrow my lawnmower. There is an olive-green tincture to his colouring; trying to parry his requests and look but not gaze at his face, hands or neck is like struggling to escape drowning in a viscous green waterhole.
Now the pub is not often like this. Most afternoons at this time of year I sit by the pot-bellied stove to stop shivering, on the far side of the room from the tables where such things happen. Some pakeha neighbours are often there. I crossed the room now, being suddenly cold in the back and soon came home for tea.
Robert has just dropped in for the first time in several months. I was interested in his parents who have died within the last few years, hardly older than I am. I suppose his mother, who had some Indian blood, was younger than me. She couldn’t be got to talk, at least by me. They had come from Hokianga like a number of people here, and they lived in a home-made cottage on a hill a few miles south, with a windbreak of large old macrocarpas on one side and palisades of roofing-iron beneath the trees. You could enter at a certain point in this fortification or by a driveway patrolled by dogs and there were those motor parts that Robert’s father did not want to lose (others lay outside the macrocarpas), and hangi-pits, old tubs and basins, vegetables, pig-pens. A stack of beer crates ten feet high formed part of the narrow twisting passage en route from the outside: sheer walls of beer crates and roofing-iron with dark trunks above. A lawn edged with fruit trees and flowers is on the far side of the house, facing north towards Otauma. Two of Robert’s sisters still live there. Not to risk gilding the lily, this is one of the parts of Aotearoa where peacocks have gone wild. You can see them as you drive on uphill, before the road skirts two hilltops and winds down through bush (foxgloves on the roadside in season) with a pub called The Happy Huntsman not far off. I believe there are rooks in a tall tree near Robert’s sisters; he used to shoot them for fun, he told me.
He was here this morning with Phillip who I have known about twenty years. When I first came here from Auckland, Phillip was conspicuous as a tall teenager, also toting an air-rifle, sauntering through toi-tois and wattles. Later he became George in a story call Brown Men which has had a few readers. He is not so glamorous now. As we sat in the backyard and drank coffee he peeled the dressings off a large boil and said where some others were on several parts of his body. I suggested that lack of vitamins might be the trouble, as other people may well have responded. At the moment, he’s not drinking.
We talked in a placid way about a sick friend or two. Paki sat on the edge of the group. If it seemed likely that Phillip would stay here for a while, in order to eat well and be cured of boils, I don’t think Paki would like it at all. He is fond of his situation.
Paki has gone up north for a few days with young Brent and Gloria and her elderly protector. They are going to pull down two shacks that the local body objects to, on someone’s land. They expect to be back in two or three days’ time.
It’s a Wednesday. Supposing that Paki is not back by tomorrow afternoon we are in for another upset related to money. If he stays away till Friday or later he will come back with nothing. Money slips from his hands into poker machines very soon after leaving the bank. Or Gloria’s man-friend will claim it. I have not said before that the money he gives me is a necessary part of our economy. It’s not seven days that he owes me for: say half a week.
Saturday now. No-one has come back. I was not too put out when Brent’s girlfriend or wife rang to ask me, in a pleasant way, to run her to Cambridge on Thursday. She wanted to visit her mother. In the car besides Jude and her four year old were plants for a place in Hamilton, not many but they’ll pay for the petrol. I bought food in Cambridge. Not much food; without having really looked for some time I supposed that the fridge held two bacon hocks, which I cooked before Paki left. They would have provided me with a change from his mutton. Their loss has angered me, but the business of writing has had a cooling effect.
For a day, yesterday, while it poured with rain, I applied myself grimly to fire brigade business. I’m secretary and treasurer of our local brigade, and the Annual General Meeting is next week. I do that stuff with a painful slow head, I mean writing up payments and adding and subtracting figures. I have trouble deciding which figures should be added and which subtracted in the course of searching for mistakes of my own making. There’s a desk-model calculator, which went missing from someone’s last job in town, but the problem of course is inside me.
Monday. Paki has awoken from twelve hours’ sleep, in a good mood. There was no real snag up north, nothing it would seem to obstruct their return. There are pigs, dope-plots and wood-pigeons in the bush behind Mitimiti; kiwis even. Gloria and her partner spent all day arguing but Paki and Brent went fishing. Paki met people he liked and found his way to a pub-like milieu at Panguru, a marae that sells beer. He has come back with money for me, I don’t know quite how. When I brought up the bacon hocks he apologized and said he’d replace them. He can screw up one side of his face in a certain way, Humphrey Bogart perhaps, with a pause in his Maori English.
This talking took place in the living-room; he reclined in an armchair for some time. He has also suggested something that I used to fend off but now, well, I think I’d enjoy it: a trip to Porirua to see his sister. The cost of petrol? I worked it out roughly with Paki watching. He agrees to go halves. We’ll wait for an improvement in the weather; the Desert Road is blocked with snow.
I’ve ceased to be treasurer of the fire brigade, I’m glad to report. I’m still secretary, but I don’t know how long I will continue to hold office.
Otauma Rural Fire Party, or Fire Force as some members would rather call it, was set up sixteen months ago. I was glad to be asked to participate, by someone who knew me at the pub. It was time to become better known at Otauma.
The founders were Colin who is elderly, a retired mechanic of English birth; and a heavily tattooed fellow who painted some cars for payment and no doubt accepted dole. They had both been firemen for a time in the past. A few months after the public meeting at which the fire brigade was instituted, the latter of these two decamped with his wife and children and equipment and uniforms belonging to our organisation, and cash belonging to the firemen’s beer fund. It was the first of a number of rip-offs. Or was it the second or third… I think we had already seen fire engine petrol diverted into someone’s car, and the same committee member selling tickets at $10 for each for a private purpose, not saying it was not for the Fire Party. She remained a committee member; among her ticket buyers were the chairman and his wife. She is invaluable, I must add at once, when it comes to collecting prizes for raffles and so on from department stores, butchers and chicken producers. She approaches that work with the utmost energy.
Beer is supremely important at Otauma. The fire brigade has followed the rugby club and a boating club in offering drinks more cheaply than the pub; it takes place on Friday nights. If you add to that the appeal of uniforms, of all that they represent, of occasional dramatic duties in the public eye, you have something attractive indeed to young men mostly jobless … it would almost pull pigs from the bush. But relations with Colin have not been easy, either for them or for us, the committee. There was one other fireman on the old committee (I am not myself a fireman); he was not very keen on committee procedure, and the gulf between Fire Boys and management was dangerously wide. I should record that we have one female fireperson, not that that word is in use here.
The AGM was yesterday. Fifteen people were present. Colin had not let me know he was standing down. He was replaced at once by a man perhaps thirty-five years old, built like Hercules, dressed in his uniform for this occasion, a Maori, very handsome. He is the member of the rugby team who was referred to a few pages back, in another connection. Let’s call him Boyd.
“Shall we separate the jobs of treasurer and secretary?” someone suggested. I assured the meeting that I saw no harm in it.
“Are there any nominations for secretary?” asked Boyd. I said I was prepared to continue. “Are there any nominations for secretary?” Boyd repeated more than once. But no-one was there who expected the job, apart from me. A new treasurer was found, the subdued wife of a heavy-drinking fireman. Among the rank-and-file committee members are more firemen than before.
Boyd took the floor and paid tribute to Colin in a speech not less imposing for a lack of smoothness. He now closed the meeting. He avoided my eye while others shook hands with him; but before long I did the same. I asked new members for their telephone numbers and Boyd for his. He was not on the phone, he said; was thinking of getting one soon but was not going to have it for long … I would have to go to his place to talk to him. He is self-employed as a drainlayer, or perhaps an installer of large concrete tanks, with work outside Otauma. We began to drink a dozen beer, Boyd’s shout, in the part of the fire station where the fire truck usually sleeps.
I stayed four days with Paki’s sister in Porirua. Paki was staying with his nephew not far away, not that there was any particular trouble between us, but he’d seemed upset for a while as we drove south, after giving me money. He may have hoped I would give some back to him as I have usually done, but of course it was needed for petrol.
In fact he did not come back with me, and is still there most likely. Five weeks have passed since then. I’m feeling older.
I brought back from Paki’s sister’s place an immense cold that enfeebled me for some time, inducing at first a warm sense of wellbeing, depression following. It was caught I suppose from the sister’s grandchildren. Phillip whom I mentioned before has been in and out of my place, choosing the August school holidays for one of his returns to Otauma. His ten-year-old son was here too, with a new strain of dreadful ‘flu; I’ve had that too, straight after the previous germ. There was work to be done at the same time, delivering plants to eight places in Auckland and Hamilton. Phillip was helpful. He came on the trip to Hamilton, and the business of loading and unloading was not so slow that day.
About Paki now: if he books to come back here by bus one Friday, and rings to say when he’s arriving, which in fact was the last thing we said on the subject, under a street light in Wellington: I’ve decided to say no. Too much lack of trust, too little in common between us. I’ve said nothing, of course I’ve suppressed it from this narrative, about money that went missing from my kitchen last Christmas. It’s said now that Gloria’s partner lost money at Mitimiti and suspects Paki. The very reason why he has not stayed with Johnboy, his brother at Otauma: theft, theft of money.
His sister is older than Paki. After not having seen him for forty years, she told me, she found him at the time of a brother’s death by asking the police to help; she knew them through her son’s lawbreaking. I wonder how much trust there is between the sister and Paki. She told me these things very freely, as if with some vengefulness, sitting on a bed in her State house. It was still half dark, on the morning of my return home.
Paki had been committed to State care at the age of ten (he is 54 in fact now) after running away with a circus. I suppose he’d been staying with relatives or welfare foster-parents. Tuberculosis has afflicted the family, and the mother, whom Paki remembers while he is cooking, may have been in a sanatorium, or dead. She had had eighteen children. The sister told me that Child Welfare sent Paki to Oamaru: Campbell Park, Otekaieke, I should think. By the time I worked in the Probation Service I think they had stopped sending North Island kids to Otekaik, as the name was said. It was too far off for contact with families, and perhaps the troubles of escorting their charges on trains and ferries were too gruelling for staff.
I have been glimpsing Paki, as it were, in the institution at the age of ten, a long way from home or the circus.
If it seems that Phillip has been quick to replace Paki, I would remind you that I have known him for many years; nor could loyalty in these friendships have much meaning, I mean at Otauma. ‘Our heraldry is hands not hearts’, as I think someone says in Othello.
It is possible still to be very impressed with Phillip, when his mood is good and he wants me to drink with him. He takes his shirt off: do you see, a mantle of rich epidermis across his shoulders and upper chest, though his face and abdomen are coarse now through constant drinking. Tall, he inclines his head sideways to talk at the pub in a group standing up. The scars of those boils look silky. He smells rich this afternoon. His girlfriend has been extracting glass from his forehead; they ran off the road because Robert was drunk. What is he talking about? The accident perhaps, but Robert is ashamed of what happened and the subject will lapse when Robert comes in soon; or shellfish, or the number of kegs and wine-casks at someone’s birthday.
There is not much to do at Otauma for the man who depends on gifts and favours to support himself. His relations don’t trust this Phillip. He has no transport, but nearly always there is someone who will run him to town, an hour’s travelling: some youth who looks up to him. He’s disgusted with town a few days later; someone will run him back. He fights, he can surely pack power; he may need to lie low afterwards.
My Bible has come back from Robert. When he called here to borrow my trailer I asked for the Good Book and added some sharp words. He directed his wife who had stayed in the car to remove their bankcards from where they kept them, within my Bible, before he gave that to me. There was no request now for the trailer.
Phillip again: he appears to choose strong women. Some have put up with him for years. In his few words about those wives, respect can be heard. Since I have mentioned fighting, towards women he is not violent. Do you know the lines that Shakespeare gives Antony in the first act, when news of his wife’s death is brought by a messenger? We have been watching him with Cleopatra, not long before. It’s not clear what Fulvia has died of, but sickness is mentioned.
‘She’s good, being gone:
The hand could pluck her back that shov’d her on.’
Gumdigger – lived by digging up resin of a tall conifer called kauri, once used in making varnishes etc.
The weather has been almost constantly poor for about three months. Today was a day of short clear intervals, five to ten minutes each, and longer periods of rain, with some hail. It blew hard all day. There’s no lack of reading and writing to fill days like this, but in fact I can’t do that for more than an hour or two: weak eyes. I made soup to last six days, or two or three if Phillip will be back soon; he has gone to town, with the girlfriend. It occurred to me to make Maori bread like Paki, but half a transparent bag of the commercial product is waiting to be eaten up.
There was no mail. Someone knocked on the door. It was the wife of Boyd of the fire brigade, with a cheque that required signing. A new bird turned up on the lawn, a kind of quail. It was there for some time, feeding.
Write to Paki, to offer to send his clothes in exchange for money for his toll-calls plus money for the packing and posting of the clothes? Write to my sister-in-law in Dunedin, who is pregnant for the first time and is by herself while Tim is away on a fishing boat? I can’t think of anything she would find diverting. Type some of Book? I did that, one page of this narrative, eight pages back from this point. By this means I work up interest in the composing of new chapters.
I walked round the house, more than once. I vacuum-cleaned the floors before lunch. There’s a plant I’ve been waiting to see in flower, whose seed I can sell in the autumn. With my knees on the spare bed I look at it now, through that window: the first bud has opened blue with a tinge of lavender, a six-pointed flower of the iris family on a tall shiny stem.
It was not an aristea, as the person who gave or sold it to me had believed it was; perhaps an orthrosanthus I thought, on closer inspection in the wet wind. I want that genus, but I’ll need the full name for the autumn list, both genus and species. For a large sum of money I have just bought a tome of 405 pages, with some beautiful photos, purporting to describe the whole family, the Iridaceae.
Perhaps it does. In any case, Christopher, you had nothing to do while this wind and rain goes on …No likely photograph. Will the text be any help?
‘ORTHROSANTHUS LAXUS (Endl.)
Benth. Var. laxus A small thicket of other names.
Inflorescence with 1 – 4 spikes on peduncles. Bracts subtending spikes, these becoming whitish, scarious … ORTHROSANTHUS MONADELPHUS … It might well prove that the synonym Morea acorifolia HBK is sufficiently distinctive to merit specific title … Style erect with subulate stigmatic branches. Ovary clavate.’ And so on.
I lay down for a while, to recover, and went to the Tin Shed at about three thirty. It was not quite as desolate, I must confess, as it was last week and the week before. The pot-bellied stove was burning. Someone said, “Old Pam’s going to shift to Helensville.”
“That’s a pity,” I put in, “she used to mend clothes for me.”
Bella yelled “Some one COME AND TALK TO CHRIS SMITH. HE WANTS YOU TO DO SOME …” And over she came, from the poker machines to the pot-belly.
Talking of Antony, Bella’s surname, the name of her father which she has gone back to, is Antonovich. They are Maoris from Northland, I should think they were gumdiggers once. It’s Sonny, Bella’s brother, who glows into my acquaintance with his darker sister: he’s fair, and a beauty, quiet-spoken. He’s not here just now. I slept through his visit when he came home with Paki and lay here all night, on that sofa.
Yes, Bella will turn my jeans into shorts when she’s not so busy. Can I also take her my abominable blankets, fraying at the top and bottom? They reek of tobacco. I forget to wash them each summer, and the clothes-line is so short and shadowed by branches … The jeans would suffice, for a smoke and a coffee at her place.
These matters are rather unwholesome, surely. A friend in the inner city has told me something that will make for variety, at least briefly. Belinda, for that is her name, had passed through a crisis that almost required her to leave her family; she had stayed put, with husband and children. Her son had brought tadpoles home some time before but had ceased to look after them. She fed them with wheatgerm, they grew legs, their tails shrank, they began to climb out of their jam jar. If, herself, she had chosen to stay put, she would not withhold from the froglets their chance to go free: she had looked for a pond and had found one. She took them in her car to the Auckland Domain one morning, to the lily pond close to the Wintergarden which is not the duck pond. They swam into green-brown depths fringed with lily pads; there is a fountain, and midges they would soon learn to catch with their tongues.
Someone was watching her: a young woman. She approached Belinda, she said with an accent from America, “They are going to do well there, they will love this place”; she crouched beside Belinda who was on her knees, with a bare knee close to Belinda and eyes shining. Fear seized Belinda. She got up, turned stumbling towards her car and drove home. The woman she had recently parted from was younger than herself and was American.
Boyd was applying for a phone, you may remember him saying at the end of the fire brigade meeting. The following day his wife turned up at my place. She was on her way to town to present the application forms to Telecom; could I support the application with a Fire Party letter? I dropped what I was doing in the garden, washed my hands, and composed and typed a few lines in a style, if you had looked at it coldly, a bit on the rich side. Boyd’s phone was installed within twenty-eight days of this act; which disposed him towards me kindly. No doubt it was Telecom’s monthly or fortnightly day for attending to jobs at Otauma.
Perhaps I did less than justice to the firemen in that earlier chapter. In Boyd they have chosen a good man as chairman. He does not drink heavily. He knows how to take things slowly at meetings, allowing for diversity of views. He will tell you to do things, but if it emerges that he has not done something himself, he will let that be recognised. He is rather unpunctual. He is not in fact head of the firemen (their female member has left the district, by the way); that position is held by Biscuit with the title of Senior Station Officer. Under Biscuit come three more Officers, First, Second and Third, the First being Boyd, while the Second is Johnboy, Paki’s brother.