GOING FORWARD - LOOKING BACK

I am back. Here in New Zealand. At Tumanako. I can hardly believe it. I got as far as La Jolla. After the UK, Europe and the States, the very end of the friends/rellies run before heading off for Guatemala. In La Jolla at Suky’s fathers house I sat up above busy Torrey Pines Rd on the deck where once the swimming pool was and weighed up the alternatives. And the imperative seemed to be to get back. Immediately. So here I am.

Those thoughts that drowned out the traffic were the burnt out result of ten weeks of visiting people following a fairly sociable summer. Content for most of that time to let the future ride, the eventual consequence of being asked so frequently (however friendly) what I was going to do, meant that it had become the overriding preoccupation of my mind. And travelling allows the mind rather a lot of time for that. The answer I’d been giving ever since leaving NZ, was that I’d wait till I got back and saw what the opportunities were. I didn’t want to make the big decision from an uninformed distance. This lightness, this seeming carefreeness, this expectation that there will be opportunities, sounds to me like a travelers voice. It doesn’t come just from experience; it’s a condition of travelling successfully. If one hasn’t got it, it’s time to quit – you’ve parted company with the necessary underlying belief.

It was time in La Jolla for me to quit.

They say, I’m sure this is common mythology not some erudite book, that when a man is drowning he sees his whole life flash in front of him. Life gone by that is. In Canada and the States I’d encountered the opposite, a vision of a future life tailing off into the distance. In Niagara, visiting her aunt, Suky took a pregnancy test, and had it confirmed at the clinic. Neither of us reacted well. For most of the first day I wrestled with being enthusiastic, for though both of us deplored the timing it was the result of a positive emotional decision earlier. Suky, to my recollection, never showed a minutes enthusiasm. Mine, briefly operative in my head was no doubt fairly muted verbally so who knows. She was feeling particularly unfit and unwell in general after a pretty indifferent summer healthwise. So in Portland Oregon, and these placenames will always have a different ring to them now, Suky and I went to the downtown clinic for her to have it aborted. I would still, a month later, make the same decision.

Due to the need for a checkup two weeks later, we moved our flight back a week. A good thing too as it turned out because Suky did need to have further checkups. I’ve heard from her since, a couple of days ago in Guatemala and she was feeling OK. In the meantime, tracking us across the Continent since we’d arrived had been Gertie. She of Hurricane fame, and suggesting that we all meet up in Guatemala. The new prospect of over two weeks with Bill and Jopie followed by Guatemala with Trudi confirmed my decision. I felt embarrassed in their presence, aware that our Portland decision was due to our uncertain future, and in particular the role I’d play. I’m never quite at my most comfortable with Bill despite seeing quite clearly what Suky loves about him. I have to admit that in terms of just knowing how one stands, I find Trudi much easier than Bill. He’s got an exceptional mind, and he’s a great talker, but he’s not a great conversationalist. If one’s scoring faults, Trudi asks questions but doesn’t listen to the answers if they’re not what she wants to hear. Bill asks if you know something he knows, usually to do with the period around the Peloponnesian wars. As I get to know them both better over the years, or at least their personal histories, I slowly begin to piece together what bizarre influences make up their characters. But I’ve never yet known the answer to one of Bill’s questions. I get to feel a bit thick – or irritated. Jopie is rara USA, which irritates like a skin infection even before you get into the heavy stuff.

In the previous weeks my major growing feeling was one of worry, (coupled I must admit with a slight feeling of interest). It didn’t make me a great travelling companion – I was aware of that. And I couldn’t help but feel that Guatemala, pure tourism, would be an unsuccessful trip, a wet blanket along for the ride. The difficult bit about changing plans turns out to be telling people, but I suppose I’d had the germ of the idea for ages. I didn’t wish to offend Bill and Jopie, or Suky, but it was now or never. One very real reason to return early was the chance to apply for University. The subject I’d decided upon was law. It’s an interminable course, hacking off into the distant mid-nineties, but it’s probably the only vocational study that I could do reasonably well at. There was a need to make a decision, a need highlighted rather than reduced in Niagara/Portland. University study, thanks to my now faded York references, was the only certainty I could decide upon from a distance. Not allowing myself the traveler’s luxury of waiting. It also had the virtue of something concrete and respectable to offer Bill and Jopie for a somewhat indecent departure.

The only thing holding me back from leaving early was Suky’s health. Mentally, despite the trauma of the preceding weeks, maybe because of it, I thought it was for the better. Physically she appeared to be doing fine. We both underestimated the speed of her recovery and it frightened me to hear her talking on the phone of the possibility of hemorrhaging. She says she’s now out of danger, and in medical matters she could be in worse hands than her mothers. She still wanted to go to Guatemala and is treating it as convalescence. I don’t suppose it’s in the BUPA brochures but I hope it was wonderful.

You’ll have heard mention of Ellen over the years. The potter in Portland with her potter husband called Ed Thompson, which is easy for me to remember. Americans can be nice. They can’t all be exceptions. Ellen and Ed put us up in their old wooden mansion on the hill with great hospitality, and great understanding in the circumstances.

Ed inherited the house after an exhaustive search by solicitors to identify the twin brother beneficiaries of an old early 1950’s will, made just after Ed was born. Ellen then bought the brother out and they’re now painstakingly restoring it. After three years they’ve still at least another year completing the exterior before they start inside properly.

The restorer’s a very un European beast. I don’t think circumstance is on their side. There’s something inherently defeating in the project. It’s the fine line between period and craftsmanship, the simple fact of the matter is that progress has changed aspirations and some of us don’t even visit museums, let alone live in them. Or maybe that is just the European modernizing voice. Adapt, identify and move with the tide. Perhaps even specifically English virtues because the French are different, the French have revolutions and move into new houses using the old house as a barn. But in the new countries the restorer’s a recognizable character on the scene even if the predominant ethic is bulldoze and build again.

In honour of our visit Ed and Ellen took their first days off work for an eon, and hired a car and drove us out of Portland into hills where waterfalls came plunging down shouting Oregon exuberantly. We walked along a spectacular forest trail through mist and lunched by a pool and rapids. A country day, using feet, like with Tim in the Dales. They’re never bad.

On other days we toured the city visiting amongst other places a wonderful downtown bookshop with attached café, and then high on the hill above them, the crème de la crème of the restored houses of Portland. It’s now owned by a trust and open to the public. Portland is by and large the same age as Christchurch, if anything more recent but one can sense the American wealth in a way that I doubt ever existed here. There was well established wealth is the States by the time Portland was settled. Here in NZ, waves of successful export ventures, lamb, butter, more locally grass seed (destined for the vastly expanding grasslands of the North Island, Australia and Argentina) were allied to the occasional gold rush and the abundance of local timber. The wealth was spread through communities; whole areas felt the affluence or the restrictions. There are few millionaire mansions, at least not on my route home.

On the last full day we were having a leisurely morning reading the newspapers. Ed was engrossed in a court report, the effect of which was suddenly to remember he was meant to be doing jury service. He could only get a recorded message on the phone and decided he’d better get down to the court. I’ve always wanted to go to a court, I always meant to go to the Old Bailey but never got round to it. More recently this desire had become a slight more academic (stuffy old shirt meaning of the word). The day before in the bookshop, I’d even scanned titles like ‘Do you really want to be a lawyer’?

As it turned out, Ed wasn’t needed. But we stayed anyway and watched two cases with a true fast food lunch inbetween. The first case was a guy failing. Up for a probationary review or something. He got sent down for nine months. It was pretty awful. The whole thing was in balance right till the judges summing up. He’d been droning on ambiguously recounting the history of the case when he did the hand folding bit (You must have seen the movie!) ‘Call me a slow learner if you like’. The secret I discovered is to watch the defendant’s shoulders. That way you know when they do. This guys’ just slumped.

After lunch was a jury trial between General Motors and a big fat guy who was suing them. He alleged he’d burnt his foot in a GM truck four years ago. The expert witness called in to examine the truck claimed he also burnt his toe. (He was just stupid enough to have done). All the debate concerned whether the expert witness could say he burnt his foot. He said it once and the jury was told they didn’t hear it. Then the jury was sent out while the lawyers argued over whether they should be allowed to hear it for real and if so in which words. No one suggested he was lying. It was beards versus the rest. The fat guy and his two suburban lawyers had the beards. They were better looking than the corporation who had two fat guys, but the corporates had better suits. The suburban lawyer had watched Henry Fonda movies as a kid. Unfortunately he was writing his own script. The method he used was to subtly suggest that the judge and he naturally agreed on things, ‘it’s us versus him’. The judge reminded him of his individuality from time to time. The opposition doing the talking was a neat little man who swivelled on the balls of his feet and worked on the machine gun principle. Being corporate man he had the facts. Temperature ranges on that day in ’86, travel distances and times, dates of birth, carpet squares, and air pumps. Sooner or later he’d hit the target. You wanted to scream. It looked bloody high stress to me but I was on holiday in a deserted No 11 state courtroom on a Wednesday afternoon in Oregon. They seemed to cope. At some point they all smiled. The most fun would be the jury but not if you kept getting sent out. Anyway I missed the beginning and I missed the end, it was running for days. That stuff is litigation. I know about conveyancing. It seems to me the whole subject is highly debatable.

Debatable, but not on the commodity dealer scale. We started our American experience at JFK where the white Cadillac was waiting. ‘Well,’ John laughs his John laugh, that mix between a snort and a giggle, ‘you’ve got to have one haven’t you. It’s your only chance. And they’re so cheap. No really they are’. I’ve laughed my Doug laugh whatever that may be. John and Maura’s is an impressive house. It’s a relatively old colonial house they are modernizing, or rather have. Contractors do work faster. Our humble abodes would fill his garage, but housing the Cadillac and the touring cruiser is all that’s asked of it. Maura is a rags to riches story. John, despite the Anglia with no third gear going up University road could hardly claim that. Maura decided at six she was going to be rich. She was obviously laying her plans for quite some time because she only stopped sharing a family bed with her sisters at eighteen. Maura looks good despite three pregnancies and says she can make herself up to look amazing. She works hard at getting rich, and tells you so. There’s a school of thought (Suky) that says you must admire her for her energy. (Maura also belongs to this school). Which I do, a bit. But I wouldn’t be John, and I don’t think I’d be one of the numerous offspring. Self-publicists on the grand scale should be arrogant artists. John seems fairly happy though he doesn’t quite agree that she’s had all the good ideas and he made all the foolish mistakes. She’s just taken up tennis, maybe in the context an unfortunate sport, for when I closed my eyes it made me think of Jopie.

When we arrived it was evening, and the children were already in bed. There are three under five, none of whom we’d met. After getting us a drink John showed us a home video, introducing the kids in turn. ‘Here, this is James on the slide, Anna at the zoo’. They’d had a Halloween party the week before, which we also saw. It was recent history on the movies. I remembered how I’d felt in the States before. A kind of permanent déjà vu, as though I’ve already seen it on TV. The only difference is whether it was a good movie like getting offered guns for sale in Denver or a bad one like the rodeo there. John and Maura have the birth of their latest on video. John took it. So much for stalking the endless hospital corridors with a new butt at the fingertips every five minutes. We didn’t see it, to my relief.

We met the kids the next day. This was pre-Niagara. For the last two years I’ve frequently looked at the kids of friends from the perspective of possibly being a father. I think that Suky and I probably differed in our response. She was impressed by the way John and Maura organized their lives to diminish impact and increase escape chances. I couldn’t see the reward. They were certainly marshaled effectively, Maura is a no nonsense Mum. Maybe it was just that it rained heavily all through the day and the house had that drowsy rainy day feel when people slowly drift off to try and catch up on some sleep they missed along the way. The children were on the list of possessions, lying around, the ones that meant you were doing OK. And could afford them. But it was a good visit. We acted in bad movies by going to Stu Leonard’s superstore and tenpin bowling, the good ones were a lively dinner and a trip upstate to a winery, driving through the last few colours of the Fall.

Suky and I spent a day in New York. It’s not a day I remember with great affection. We strolled around Greenwich Village before finding a pancake house for a waffle breakfast. The background sound in NY is sirens. Even from the top of the World Trade Centre you could hear the sirens drifting up. We ended an indifferent day of walking city streets and waiting for buses with an argument up there, high above the city. Sitting there silently staring at the skyscrapers, as I did two weeks later in the Portland clinic. Not the best of views, and maybe not entirely unconnected.

I wouldn’t hurry back to New York, and I’d rather know someone to stay with, but it no longer intimidates me as it did in the abstract. It periodically goes bankrupt and there’s a feeling of edge to it, but most cities amaze me as to how they keep going. Niagara’s different. At Niagara there are the Falls. On the Canadian side there’s the park and the view. Back upstream on the US side there are the chemical factories and the infamous Love canal. The Canadians have the tourists despite the desperate attempts of the Americans to build viewing platforms out over the river. One of the best views is from the bridge and thousands of Canadians get it each week driving over to the States with a carful of citizens to buy petrol and goods at cheaper prices. Canada, like most countries we visited and certainly NZ, is absorbed in its own economic downturn. Each thinking there’s the worst.

We escaped Vi for the odd occasion, which was good; age accentuates tyranny in her case. Bettye looks after her with incredible patience, displaying an extraordinary temperament. I sat next to Bettye at the clinic while Suky was being examined and she told me about her one-year marriage, her naïve hope that marriage would change someone, and how she’d have liked a family. She knows she’s a server now, but looking back she’s a good understanding of the pattern of circumstance that led her there. The pluses and minuses, the duties and debts. Without that kind of knowledge she maybe couldn’t have accepted the decision Suky and I made at the time. I wonder now, as I did then, what Kelvin is making of the pattern of circumstance.

Britain has a new Prime Minister. We read about the resignation at an airport newsstand, transitting in San Francisco – where were you the night Kennedy was shot? Or Lennon? Keith and Sharon told me about Major when I arrived. There’s been a National landslide here. Christchurch stopped defiantly Labour but it was a night of long knives elsewhere, and some gerrymandering out on the Peninsula here has put us in the seat of NZ’s nearest approximation to the one and only Granthamite. For whom the American papers were full of eulogy. I didn’t recognize her or her country. It’s foreign affairs the Yanks screw up so badly. As tourist, businessman, or marine. War in the Gulf? Kelvin used to have the boardgame, I wonder if he still does. I never played it but he described it to me once, over cups of coffee. We shared many of the same paranoia’s, Kelvin and I; the nuclear threat was one of them. War then was unavoidably nuclear, I wonder if it still is.

Sitting downstairs on the verandah prior to writing this, I watched a gull circle slowly in the high sky and then decide on a direction, an acceptable current and glide away over the bay. I’ve gazed up at the sky above very little. It’s been mostly bright sun or rain, but it’s probably more to do with the new lower horizons capturing my attention. The ridgeline of the hills to the east, or the wonderful eucalypt, which dwarfs the macrocarpa in our shelterbelt. Even the delightful birdsong comes from the trees and bushes around, birds I suppose sing on the perch not the wing, so I haven’t looked up before now and just watch the seabirds at work or play.

It reminded me of two Leavening memories, one relatively unique though it was repeated, the other a frequent event. Walking up Leppington Lane during the first summer there, in the Oakeshott years, on an afternoon stroll with Truffle, gazing over the patchwork of fields. No doubt there were some honest toilers to add persuasion to my feeling but I don’t recall. What I do remember was a sudden feeling of deep resentment at the arrogance of men who are prepared to go to war and threaten such a landscape. Amidst such an old landscape, worked at for centuries, the idea of the destruction that would be wrought by a simply temporary disagreement appeared utterly immoral.

I suppose if I’m going to get poetic, I’d add that this same moment was for me the birth of the idea that farmers are merely guardians of land. It turned out to be an old and familiar idea, but when I encountered it in the late seventies it’d had a lean few decades. And though it’s undergoing a revival, even making it into the publicity brochures of the conservation movement, reading it as acclaimed wisdom still seems a far cry from feeling it and seeing it in action.

Most things I suppose are opposed to destruction, that sounds almost logical, but guardianship is as opposed as any. Concepts like guardianship, depending on mood, can either sound irrelevant, pretentious, philosophic, or poetic. They’re a bit heavy for everyday conversation; they probably work best from the pulpit, in the seminar room, or on the radio. Because I can remember thinking about it that first time, I know that for me the notion of guardianship was conceived by my anger at the possible destruction. I needed some idea above the petty or the mortal to grab hold of. Something more historical or transcendent to use against the nuclear threat. Otherwise I felt I’d be saying ‘that’s my toy, don’t break it’. (Because it’s mine). A sort of massive Nimbyism.

By all accounts the first Maori and the first Europeans in New Zealand acted roughly on a par. Arriving in an abundant land they set to harvesting with glee. The Europeans did much more damage much faster, having the education and equipment for these things. I may be wrong here but it seems ironic that by all accounts the Europeans had to work much harder despite all their education and equipment. Perhaps that’s just because the image of working all day in a sawmill appears harder than stalking a big fat moa through the bush, an image that the average size Maori does little to dispel. But after centuries of occupation, you find now in Maori lore the same strong notion of guardianship that was awoken in me walking a quiet Yorkshire lane.

The other image from Leavening conjured up by the gliding gull was the aeroplanes. Shape, size, sound. The deafening spectacle. Anger, arrogance and waste. Maybe that’s why I don’t casually look up at the sky. I hated them, hated them for themselves as agents of destruction and as images of waste. They seemed to me to represent not the peak of achievement, as the RAF tried to persuade us one dismal night at the Milton Rooms in Malton, rather the failure of civilization as we know it. Though the planes were everywhere, down the fields, up the Brow, it’s from the small house garden that I remember them most vividly, especially the five-plane dogfight above the village that finally caused Suky to crack and phone the police and the airbase, ‘I hope they DO crash’. From the garden it seemed the worst.

Between those two memories, between the lane and the garden were the trees. The beautiful seventy year deciduous stands, still reaching towards maturity, through which I walked and tractored each day. If you ask me now why I left, weary with asking myself that question, I’d say it was the trees. It isn’t of course the whole reason, in other moods there are other equally total, almost unconnected ones. But the mood that holds it as its’ main reason is a familiar one. The trees were chopped down. For a few firewood pennies. Planting trees here is one of the things I want to do the most. ‘Plant trees’ said both Mark and Jeff on my first conversations with them on my return. ‘Bring back the birds’. A practical, actual environmentalism. Advice from farmers. Yes, ‘the times they are a’changing’.

Just as I used to share cups of coffee with Kelvin, I do so now with another roll-up man. Pete Overton. He was renting our house in our absence. I phoned him up on a Sunday evening from La Jolla to say I’d be back in a couple of days and he said fine. He hadn’t bothered to tidy. I’m not entirely innocent myself, living this bachelor existence. He appears much loved by those who know him, and his children who visited for the weekend were neat kids aged twelve and ten. A good age I suspect. Pete’s been shearing now for about seven years and this is the busiest time, but his other preoccupation is getting himself together in the wake of divorce. Twenty years ago he and a bunch of others rented a house down in the Bay and became the Peninsula’s first hippies. They only went to the pub the once in those early redneck days. He and Annie met almost straight away, and have lived in several houses around the bay. Of them all Pete is the only one remaining, and he wants to stay on the Peninsula. Early on, he told me with a smile that he thought the Maoris might have something in calling it a very spiritual place. That there was a Maori legend about the Peninsula, that the spirits circled the South Island in an anti-clockwise fashion, doing their various business and when they reached the Peninsula they relaxed and kind of dipped down into the harbour for their cups of tea. That was Pete’s version. He doesn’t pretend to believe the legends as fact, but nor is he just mocking. He sees them as representations of how people feel in a place. And he added darkly after a pause, that spirituality he thought could also be destructive as well as creative.

Pete’s been collecting junk for most of those years. Things that were once good quality but are now broken. Strictly speaking it teeters above junk but falls easily short of antique or museum. Much of it is original, innovation is an important part. I walked for several days past a bizarre lampstand before a visitor pointed out that the shade was an old tin teapot upside down. Not to mention the mounted dangling piece of iron that turns out to be an old rusted tractor seat in what Pete, not I, calls the drawing room. He’s interested in sculpture apparently.

It’s a nice old house. It has a nice feel to me, a kind of open containment. Or maybe that is how life feels right now. I think I felt this happy in late May before the sale fell through and Suky got ill. When I was working with Todd on his house and swimming in the Derwent. It is I suppose the ideal, when there’s enough to do with no pressure to do it. When one’s happy with what one senses is the unrolling future. And it isn’t pessimism, just realistic, to know that life can’t always be like that, that it’s just a wonderful fortune to experience it once in a while.

Houses are part of any tour to friends. Les and Jo had moved the week before we arrived. They also moved in before the previous tenant moved out. But in their case Paco had lived there as owner for thirty years. Paco is now building himself a house in the village of Castaras, high up above them where his mad wife already lives. It’s about an hour on foot to the village or half that time to the car that is parked near the bottom of a privately constructed road that looked capable of becoming impassable. They live on $10 a week, running the old 2CV for a weekly outing with Jo’s home made ‘crunchy bars’. The tourists buy them and I would too. She gave us a bag to eat on the bus.

The house is on three floors, animal, human and crop. They moved from the picturesque cortico perched on its hillside, the little two room faintly ethnic house in which they had set up the base domestic apparatus including a shower. It takes a while before you can understand why, being there that first week that they were. And afterwards more abstractly it’s still a bit difficult to see. The density of population now is hardly existent. Les and Jo talk very quietly, presumably unused to competing with sound. It was the first thing I noticed, it’s almost a whisper, and the level alone is curiously foreign to laughter. At the beginning opinions were a kind of trial, especially with Les. You had to very carefully lay out your credentials – the most important being that you don’t threaten. Looked at from his perspective I imagine he’d say he looked for understanding, that you also felt the draw of the place. I know they’re physically far nearer England but theirs is by far the more distant valley. In it grow figs, olives, almonds, and more succulent fruits. It was once a grand place. The house had running water and electricity from the water mill beside it when Paco moved in. One of Franco’s generals built it fifty years ago. So when Paco moved in, the path behind the house cut through old cottages, there were washhouses by the river, and all the hillsides were under cultivation.

If ever one wanted a model for decline Paco is waiting. He’s a short proud man with no words of English and no learning outside of his world. The house now is dark, the roof on the shattered mill finally collapsed this year. The tumbled cottages house his goat, the washhouses were swept away by a freak rising river years ago. You collect water by bucket from a spring at some distance, and throw dirty water and peelings out of the first floor window into the chicken midden below. In macho Spain with the lot of a woman, any wife would have gone mad. Even in the south the winter nights draw in early, and amongst the mountain folds the sun dips earlier than on the plains. There’s an open fire in one corner on the stone grate. As in Nepal, logs and sticks lie with one end only alight and are edged in as they burn away. Paco heats his goat milk on the iron stand above the fire and tears at his bread. For most of the time that he’s not eating, Paco bends over sideways towards the fire resting his head on his hands, eyes closed. The five of us sat for the evenings on five hard chairs, clustered around the fire. No, laughter was not uppermost. It hesitated longer than usual, but then it slowly came.

The secret of literature I imagine is that we live remarkably similar lives. We recognize the emotions, thoughts, and psychology, even the actions of various protagonists. Whereas the secret of travel is supposed to be that you see the differences. Europe is always going to be more exotic than the new countries because of the languages themselves. In the city centre’s internationalism is putting paid to that but in a market town in France the very names of the shops have a soft romance. Boucherie, charcuterie, patisserie, they tease your brain with the subconscious caress of lingerie. French women can sit on trains with elegance. In Spain the beauty’s are young and they lose it fast ripening in the familiar sun, but in France they develop it for years, from the child through to middle age. Maybe it has something to do with the pace of life of a café culture.

You’ll understand that this is in lieu of a short story. I don’t spend that much time at the keyboard. There are gardens to be dug and windows to be replaced. Visiting Les and Jo was a pole of experience, they live out there at the edge. It’s relevant for me but not difficult to know how I feel about that distance from the centre. They listen to the World Service occasionally, but it’s Paco’s world they’ve inherited. Out of time. Being European, whether Spanish or English, I imagine they won’t try to restore the place. There’s no longer a viable market for much of the produce, the Californians who know a thing or two about progress have seen to that. They will adapt. They may still be in time to save the house but there was a perilous slope to the floor that makes me feel easier about our gentle decline.

This house in the new countries is in fact much older. Older than we ourselves had thought. It sits on timber and stones called piles, and one option would be to repile to try and level it out. It was built by a David Le Comte who emigrated to NZ to avoid military conscription in France. Around about the 1860’s, I don’t know which war the French were fighting. Later just after the turn of the century it was owned by a Scottish carpenter who came out here to build houses but turned to farming. It was he, I imagine, who added the kitchen and who didn’t bother to match the join of the boards at the front. Maybe he was thinking of farming while he did it. After them it reverted to French ancestry with Frank Le Valliant. Frank? The 18.6 hectares with it I was surprised to find had come down through 130 years. Subdivision is part of the less complicated language of the new countries, and to remain unscathed is remarkable. As in 1860 there are still only three houses on the hill, not surprising given that the Barry’s Bay population, currently 65, is now only half of what it was at its peak. It means that I now recognize 25%. Barry, I guess was an Englishman, the image of Birmingham comes from Auf Wiedersen Pet. But the hill up behind us that we must climb is called French Hill and there have been French on the hill until the last decade.

Sarah’s cottage is in Normandy. A depopulating area, touched by its distance to the offerings of Paris. Those who have gone have left behind film sets. I almost forgave Polanski the audacity of shooting Hardy’s Tess in France. William the Conqueror will have recognized the mists and contours, but whereas Peugeot 205’s now tuck neatly behind the bigger cars in Sussex driveways, in Normandy the grass grows up to the door and mushrooms cover the manure heaps nearby. And all around are Tudor tumbledowns. Sarah’s house stands in the middle of a field. The view from the house depends on the season. More than most when the field crop is sweet corn. An oasis in summer, a landmark in winter. It was late autumn when we were there and the last day the tractor ploughed up and down on all sides turning the soil a deeper brown. She’s having a new roof put on which is a slow business for the neighbour working on his own in his spare time. The still exposed untiled section was cloaked with a taut tarpaulin, like one of those pale blue plastic mac hats pulled over an old ladies face turning into the rainy wind.

The worries of ownership are apparent in Sarah’s attitude. It’s not a conventional holiday home, somewhere it just fits into the pattern of circumstance. Her brother was with her and Roger. Chris is her opposite. The fact that they sprang from the same family is extraordinary. They share barely a single virtue or vice. We shared his more though we bridged some of the gap. Sarah has rules. I imagine we all do, but hers are easy to mock and abuse. I’ve read a book recently, Milan Kundera’s ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’. Part Seven is called ‘The Border’ and I recommend it heartily. You’ll tread familiar territory if you care to take the walk. Only about twenty-five pages. I read it on the aeroplane. I recycled it off Bill’s bookshelves, books are the enthusiasm he and I share the most, the one that link our families, and I finished it in Auckland’s airport café waiting for my Christchurch flight. Sarah’s the other side of the border. Which is why Roger cannot, and I would guess will not, say yes. She’s prepared to move some ground, perhaps into no mans’ land. But we can’t always choose our borders. When we saw her in London she was planning a change of hairstyle to surprise him. You should read the story if you can, but certainly not with just her in mind.

One of the strongest influences in my life, I’ve frequently mentioned it, was a Guardian article by Jill Tweedie, the last she wrote before taking a six month break back in 1972. It’s about having a holiday cottage and is a personal piece describing the rushing around at either end of the weekend. The time there is filled with lawn mowing and other tasks. The bit part heroes of the piece are a couple who live in a small country cottage that the Tweedie brigade flash past on their commute each Friday and Sunday. And she wonders what they do, do for work to survive so far from the Smoke, out there in Paradise.

Add in a night ferry. I could easily leave my heart in the fields of the Pays d’Auberge but it’d muck up my head. Growing up in the Lake District, growing up where other people go on holiday I’ve always exercised my mind as to what the residents do. Looking out over the harbour to Akaroa I’m struck yet again with the same question. Finally obliged to come up with an answer.

After leaving Sarah’s we took the train to Paris and then on to Dangley in Holland. Of all the Hallgarth visitor residents I think Dangley was the most influenced by the experience, and in particular by my lifestyle there. Dangley makes me laugh when he talks about his now. He treats me and often Suky as kinds of confidants in a secret he’s discovered. He gives a slightly furtive look around first to check no one’s listening, as though if he talked too loudly he’d get found out and the game would be up. He thinks he discovered the secret at Hallgarth and he’s probably right, but it wasn’t meant to be a secret. Maybe because he grew up in a house where his father went out to physically arduous and unsatisfying work meant that he’d never thought that adult life could be fun. I’d have thought that lots of people discover that, but maybe Dangley’s right and they don’t. So it was with a hushed voice that Dangley told me that part of the motivation for becoming a father was the guarantees it entailed for his lifestyle. I’m sure it was one moods’ major reason, and the one he thought I’d most understand, explanations after all have their audiences, but I saw him also in other moods, quite simply loving his daughter. He’ll make a wacky father if he keeps it together, which I think he will. He and Marianne have a nice set-up for children, the support we saw was a baby doting friend and a nearby grandmother for Janneke. She stayed with her while we all went off hooning around on forest paths being thoroughly silly adults, riding tandem bikes for the first time.

Dangley is the official househusband, or homemaker as Maura called it in Connecticut, referring to herself. He finds it quite a lot of work, and says that the thought of studying for his translation exams as well is going to be difficult. I can see what he means, but I have a memory not totally eclipsed in which he found studying for chemistry much the same, without the excuses. It’s slightly ironic I suppose, that a similar route to Dangley’s was one of the many options for me here. From time to time, I don’t think of it quite as a continuum, Suky has suggested she’d be happy with the option of continuing much as before in employment roles. The possibility to do that financially in combination with having children was, I think, her most common mood when she opted for NZ. In order to have the choice, to make the decision, it had to be possible. It took the reality of Niagara to finally convince me that that particular arrangement wouldn’t work well for me. But if we do have children, I’d like to be as fully involved in their upbringing as her.

I arrived back here with very mixed feelings about whether this place was where I wanted to live. The drive out with Keith had made me feel the distance from Christchurch. We came the long way round, using Lyttelton tunnel and over Gebbies Pass, my head full of Tweedie’s dichotomy between town and country, and thinking it a rather dismal commute. It was over a year since the hurried weekend in which we’d bought the farm, suddenly casting aside other brimming ideas in consequence. Since then I’d worked at the Epicentre and become attracted to the possibilities that might evolve there, visions of a slightly urban(e) environmentalist. And now applying to the University with a city job most likely at the end.

Very soon though, in fact within a day, I was won over. It still seemed a travesty to live here and leave it for the majority of each day, especially in the shortened daylight hours of winter. Wrong also to own such a place and not use its potential more fully. Empty daytime houses to me lose their soul, they can work in the town but not in the country. But that didn’t mean I’d resolved my problem. Pete added his opinion. ‘Farming’s fucked’ he said. But he also thought it was wrong for both Suky and I to commute to Christchurch. However I didn’t expect him to have viable employment suggestions for a newcomer – fighting, as I’ve said, to stay here himself. Even working, half of the bureaucracies are on his back while he waits for his last block of land to sell, (the other half are the ones holding the sale up), and he’s bought a dunger of a house in Little River for just under $10,000. He’s going to steam clean it first. He watched me get out the paint-stripping gun to tackle the fireplace. ‘If one could pick up the tanks secondhand’, he mused, ‘there might be a good sideline business for a strip tank somewhere like this. Lots of people doing up old houses’. Not giving false hopes he repeated himself. ‘It wouldn’t be worth buying the tanks new. Just as a sideline, it wouldn’t make a living’. No, I asked Pete lots of questions but I didn’t ask him what I should do.

Being so far away, and it does feel far to me, I’m more rather than less inclined to make the immediate area important to me. The distance, I hope, will lessen over the years with letters, calls, and visits, but it’ll always be there. It isn’t a question of lessening ties with friends and families, but this place does need to become home. Otherwise this emigration is a failure, feeling at home is my personal yardstick. It’s the one I know. For me it means things happening here. This struck me first in relation to the house and then the garden when I started work in it.

When I arrived first of all, it was the Portland house not the Spanish valley that was more in my head. Perhaps also working mostly indoors at Todds, and because at Hallgarth it was the house I was most satisfied with. If I’d been making financial decisions those first few days, I’d have spent everything on rearranging the house, moving walls and doors, repiling, adding windows and extensions in every direction. The gut reaction of a cold climate man. I think I only really changed when I cut off my four year old Rohans to become a pair of shorts. It changed my perceptions. And my priorities. Some of those things may get done, I’m sure winter will sing with a different song, but for now summer holds sway. In the garden.

It’s surprising that so many of my queries about the farm itself were misplaced. Or is it, given that we’d barely been here. The garden was one of those queries. Where to site it so as not to be windswept or sun blocked or worst of all, exposed to the road. The Petherams hadn’t grown vegetables although I was delighted to rediscover Yvonne’s legacy of flowers around the house. It turned out to be an easy choice. Courtesy of Frank. Le Vaillant. He obviously didn’t have a father who grew wonderful vegetables in Christchurch like Yvonne did. I might be wrong but I think I’ve chosen his site. Courtesy also, indirectly, of Les. Before we visited Spain he’d asked me to try and get a copy of Fukinawa’s book on natural farming for him. Suky and I walked up and down Charing X Rd looking for it, and failed to get a copy, even in Foyles. Central London is not very tuned in to agriculture, the other thing they wanted was udder cream which we also failed to get, though we didn’t try hard.

I was delighted therefore to spot the Fukinawa book in the Portland bookstore. It was bigger and heavier to post than I’d imagined and so I took it along to the café and browsed it a while, wondering if it was worth sending. I have my doubts. Not so much the ideas or principles although Ellen who is a great botanist was very skeptical, but rather the practical use it would be. I decided if nothing else Les would lap up the polemic against chemical and even organic farming. Who, faced by 50 acres of hillside terraces could deny the attraction of a theory that almost says ‘Do nothing’? By a curious quirk of fate it turned out also in Portland that Ellen had some udder cream. Being potters they use it on their hands, and she offered us an ancient tub to send, but we made do with the book.

There was just one bit in Fukinawa that rang a warm response from me, a paragraph extolling the virtues of farming or gardening on a hillside, but even there the actual advice seemed scanty. But it did say that planting a vegetable garden in an orchard was an excellent idea. It’s not an idea I’d have had myself. It’s very un-English, that climate again. The picture book orchards of an English childhood, or those still existing in Normandy, are grazing areas. For chickens, geese, pigs, sheep, even for cows to wrap their rasping tongues around lush grass. (Not for goats, they’re safely stuck out on the roadside verges). But in the Spanish mountains where Les and Jo live there are almonds or olives on every terrace with the land cultivated right around. We are not as warm as they but it’s a scorching sun and the seasonal pattern of most fruits and nuts should mean we can mimic Spain rather than England. So our garden is in amongst the orchard, not the old one that’s part of the shelterbelt where I hope pigs and chickens will one day mimic England, but the more recent one to the southeast of the house. The Petherams horse destroyed or damaged many of the trees but there may be hope for some. Any that have some life get at least this year’s reprieve. It’s a lovely patch of the dirt as they call it round here.

Although I’ve been quite social, catching up on most of the friends that I hoped to, quantified by hours I’ve been virtually on my own. In those situations music is always more important as an influence. Music and poetry, they merge easily into each other, lyrics the uncertain divide. Music’s one of the few influences that comes entirely from outside my family. I hadn’t realized it until Maria pointed it out. Maria grew up with music, not just the rock and pop that are the boundaries of my knowledge, but the classics as well. She’d been visiting the Lake District cottage with Steve and others, and they’d had a great time climbing waterfalls and hills and looking or laughing at photos of me as a child. But what astounded Maria was the total lack of evidence of music.

I imagine that for every deprivation some other talent is more developed. I’m pretty sure this is a theory that’s currently knocking around, it’s got that reassuring ring to it that I recognize from Hilary or Maria when they’ve worked with the handicapped. As opposed to Sharon here who looks at her daughter despairingly, ‘No, she’s no good at anything’. For me anyway I think of the trade off between music and words. Not as a choice to be made, like whether to have one child or two, but as existing fact. Maria’s comment made me realize why words are deeper in me than music. Perhaps why unlike most people I can barely feel the strongest of beats, and consequently am so appalling at dancing. It’s a particularly tortuous psychological answer and it doesn’t help me dance, but in my opinion drugless psychology can only explain not cure. (It cures if explanation’s enough).

The music that did exist in my family life was outside the home, in church. Hymns. They were also the official music of school, every morning and twice on Sundays. The rule at school was you had to move your lips, mouth the words. They couldn’t check on whether any sound came out. To be hard at school, to be a rebel, one of the ways was to slouch in assembly without opening your mouth. I did that in the sixth form briefly before realizing it was more fun to skip assembly altogether and spend the time having a hot bath. Before that though, I read the words and mouthed along. I learnt the habit.

For me there were first and foremost the words of the Bible, texts to study and make sense of long before any school examinations made a meal of that idea. The Bible, hymns, poetry and literature, if I’m to try and reinstate a chronology. Music was the background, so when Lennon met McCartney, it was their lyrics not their twanging sixties guitars that I latched onto. The lyrics that went round in my head while others hummed tunes. I couldn’t claim there’s anything highly individual in my taste, I don’t have to search through stacks of mildewing albums in a secondhand store, it’s probably already out on CD. Mainstream stuff, the chronology of success. The Beatles, Dylan, Joni Mitchell, CSNY, right up to Tracy. What’s slightly more individual is such a lyrics bias in what I hear. I wouldn’t want to blow it out of all proportion, it’s far from unique. In Nepal on the Everest trek, sitting for four days in the little hut at Gokyo waiting for the weather to clear, I talked to a young Nepalese student. He’d got a holiday job, which he was hating, as a porter for two fairly obnoxious Americans. In a schoolbook he carried, he’s written out the entire Tracy Chapman lyrics, and by the time he reached Gokyo he knew them by heart. Given his employers, I imagine he trekked the entire way singing to himself, ‘Talking about a revolution’. Music’s part of Art which usually challenges the status quo, it’s how we move forward. When I’m inclined to doubt the historical political liberty of England, it’s bookshelves that reassure me. Dictators soon burn books, giving themselves away with the smoke signals. Killing authors is also pretty debatable stuff.

It’s probably a sign that I should go to bed, but I’m inclined to say that the pre-eminent culture of my generation has been pop and rock. (The borders between them, like those in the high Himalayas are ill defined, almost irrelevant, but still argued over by some). For me, as for many others, the albums dating back to Help and Revolver have marked the years. In general, apart from the odd nostalgia evening, they were sequential enthusiasms, each one played to exhaustion before being abandoned for the next. It was in a forward looking mood that, to Kelvin’s dismay, we sold our entire record collection for what now seems a pittance before leaving England. The consequence is that almost all my tapes are compilations. Either commercial ‘Greatest Hits’ collections (because why buy all the albums when they’ve packaged the best), hurriedly assembled home compilations made before flogging off the records, or those sent from afar, by Simon in Arundel or Graham in Perth. Thus the music I play isn’t this years’ favourite, it’s the whole gamut, and with no neighbours in earshot, it’s belting it out. Only an archaeological psychologist I guess, out delving for bigger treasures, would miss the happy coincidence of considering a new future to the collected sounds of Joni and Co. There are very few songs about lawyers. Just ‘Harry’s House’ perhaps. Maybe they’d sue, I’ll have to ask Dick.

In London briefly for a couple of days between Europe and America, we visited Sotheby’s again, to have a lunch drink with Roger. As it turned out he was auctioning so he couldn’t make it, but we thought we’d watch him auction a bit in the afternoon. Catalogues at Sotheby’s cost the earth so we glanced, waiting to see him, at the one in the foyer. Almost the first entry I saw was the Collected Works of W.H.Davies, scheduled to come up soon after lunch. It isn’t a particularly rare book but it’s out of print. I know that because I’d seen it at the Burches a few weeks earlier in the Forest of Dean. I know a few of his poems, ‘Leisure’ has long been a favourite of mine, but I’d never seen this collection, and while I was there I wrestled with the idea of asking if I could have it. I didn’t dare in the end, and a couple of days after that scoured the secondhand bookshops of Cambridge in search of a copy. Most had heard of it but there weren’t any about. Fate, coincidence, a small world, call it what you will, there’s a lot of it around. I frightened Roger to death by waving my paddle in the midst of his auction and got it for the reserve, ten times as much as I’ve spent before on a book. It’s actually the looseleaf handwritten poems by the poet that are worth the money, and the Sevenoaks address at the top of his writing paper was just one of those things that added up to the extra bid, the one over your limit that you have to go. Sevenoaks was where my mother, aunt, sisters and cousins galore went to school. Where we were burgled but nothing was taken. The first trip on my own, though hardly ‘travel’ was from Eltham to the specialist dentist at Sevenoaks, whose practice turned out to be in my aunt’s old house. The first time I had that awful helpless experience of passing through your station on the fast train was on the way back. I have plans for the manuscripts, Roger told me how to frame them, and I have a wall in mind.

In contrast to music, my poetry enthusiasms have never been sequential. Most of them are in a single anthology, compiled by Yeats back before I was born, although it’s the more recent poems of Ferlinghetti that interested me first. At this point therefore, sitting out on the verandah with time to read them, they like the music, are influences that sprawl easily over two decades or more. I don’t write poetry myself. I scrawled a recognizably adolescent outpouring when I left school, the familiar stuff, all death and love, but since then I’ve only written one. I wrote it after getting our visa for NZ, inspired also by hearing the poems of U.A.Fanthorpe on my Arvon course. It was meant to be a light piece, masking deeper feelings. Very poetic. It joked about how poets weren’t on the NZ Immigration Priority list, but ended up saying they were getting in anyway, ‘under cover’. I’ve still got it in my shuffle of notes and it reminds me how I was thinking then, back at Hallgarth, the hopes for the future, and if I take it at all seriously it challenges me not to forget my former aspirations.

Prior to travelling, prior to learning the ‘what opportunities exist’ approach, and then applying for law, I spent many hours wondering about this future that’s now arrived. I had relatively few ideas. I wanted to shift balance without losing my feet. Towards the world of literature in some form without losing the country. My own garret like vision of the poet novelist has usually been distinctly urban. I remember thinking on the Annapurna trek the first time in Nepal that I’d write a poem each day. The first day I sat down and wrote that amongst such devastating beauty it’d be greedy to want poetry as well. At Arvon though, I’d sat in my little writers hut in the walled garden and written the bones of what was later my accepted ‘Morning Story’.

It’s space that Arvon provides. Cocooned in your headspace you’re isolated from the external world, (the hurricane took place while I was there and none of us knew until the southerners tried to go home). That kind of isolation, not from other people, for Arvon is very sociable, but from other worldly concerns, is easier to achieve in the country. For many people, attending a course has a profound effect, not always intended. It probably splits as many domestic relationships as it publishes stories. At a little lodge, in the strung out village of Nagarkot, which crests the hills east of Kathmandu, I met a woman who’d been to Arvon. We watched the sunrise together, for that is what you do at Nagarkot, why the tourists go, to see the sun rise in the cold dawn over that vast Himalayan range which includes Everest itself. As is the way when travelling we discovered to our amazement other friends in common, Sue Coppard who started WWOOF was one. But it was Arvon we talked of mostly. She’d been more than once; it’d given her the confidence to call herself a poet. It’d ended her marriage but she at least thought that a good thing, and it’s the way I see it.

It isn’t to me very surprising that this should be an effect of Arvon and I don’t think it should be criticized on that statistical evidence. At Arvon you have the chance to see writers struggling to explore themselves. You also see them struggling to write, and writing badly as I did myself with the second piece I tackled. It’s an opportunity you never get with the fiction that’s passed through an editors hands – even in women’s or men’s magazines. And seeing the authors face to face you realize that most writing is a complicated way to express an emotion, or provide an explanation. As, eventually, if you hang on in there, you’ll see this is.

Arvon is neither a writers’ circle nor an evening class. If it approximates anything it’s an apprenticeship, but more simply it’s an inspiration. Some people I imagine never write again but that’s probably no bad thing. The list of success stories is legion, and most I think would acknowledge some debt. It was with this admiration that I returned to Arvon on a private visit before leaving England the first time. I went to see one of the two facilitator – managers, (titles are changing as always, in NZ I notice almost all spouses are partners, a change welcome I imagine to those who cringe at the unavoidable possessiveness of wife or husband). What I had in mind was establishing a kind of Arvon in NZ, and she was very helpful explaining the problems she’d encountered. It’s run as a Trust, not a money making venture, but it involves a salary and plenty of work for the organizers. The main problem for them is the deteriorating structure of the house itself now they’ve established their credentials. For me in NZ, amongst many other problems, it’d obviously be the lack of local knowledge and contacts. And when I got to NZ clutching my notes, moving from one backpacker hostel to another, uneducated in the local scene and seemingly unemployable, I felt utterly inadequate to even contemplate the task.

I got a letter from Suky the other day. She’d managed to have at least some of the conversations with Bill that she’d wanted for so long. The purpose of life ones. His yardstick is worthwhileness. It’s suitably elastic I imagine, to evoke either feelings of failure or contentment, dependent on mood. From somewhere or something in my past I evolved a suspicion of ambition expressed before the accomplishment. Maybe the electioneering lies of politicians, who knows, but it occurs to me now that the seeming grandiose delusions of those who speak out in advance might be a necessary part of actually achieving those purposes. So, with less equanimity than usual (but transparently not without some), if we’re talking of ambition in the public sector, concretely defined, for me it’d still be most fully attained by setting up a NZ version of Arvon. It’s the nearest I come to public ambition. Put another way, I think it would be worthwhile. But not first, not in a day. For now, I’m drawing routes on maps, checking which roads are open before starting the engine.

I met Annie today. Pete’s ex. She came over for the kids fishing rods, tumbled in amongst the junk in the garage, which we laughed over, somewhat wryly, from different standpoints. She’s now partnered up again in Christchurch, and enjoying the new life. She’s always wanted to travel and this year finally got to Thailand and was amazed at how easy it was. Pete had told me he wanted to travel, but to Europe not Asia. He was quite emphatic about where, but whether this is an old difference or a new rivalry I’m not sure. Annie also told me that the Peninsula was a special place, and recounted Maori legend. It was the tradition at birth, she said, for Maori women to bury the placenta of their child, and this burial point was then the place that the spirit of the child would return to when dead. According to Annie, Maori legend covers all sorts of eventualities, and so as a kind of failsafe backstop, those without a burial ground go to the spirits burial ground. For the spirits, Akaroa harbour is their womb, the Onawe peninsula which I look out on, is the clitoris, (Annie is a schoolteacher and has no problem using the proper words for things), and it is to the head of the harbour, (I forget the anatomical term), that the spirits return. Kevin, her new partner in Christchurch has a batch above Robinsons Bay at the head of the harbour, and for her returning out to the Peninsula, weekending not farming, it is slightly emotional. Somewhere in her legend and Pete’s about the tea drinking spirits I thought I identified the same theme, differently expressed by different people, each matching their own personalities (for when Pete calls in he stops for a cup). Like he said, legend is an expression of how people feel about a place. Verbal literature.

The cat gave birth on Christmas Day. I knew she would on Christmas Eve when she climbed into my big Yak jumper that was lying around, although her eventual chosen stable was under the floorboards. It’s still Pete’s cat in ownership terms although I’m the feeder, and I was pleased not to have to do the gruesome with the kittens. There were four, and I imagine one at least will stay here, albeit with an unimaginative name. The cat is pretty well my only animal involvement at present, apart from fencing the sheep out from the garden, unfortunately not before they’d had a munch at the cabbage seedlings. There are around 150 sheep and twenty cattle grazing the land. They migrate around, but in the evening they’re usually within sight of the house on the bank just above. I love seeing them there, having them so close, but I find I don’t care a whit about ownership. On the contrary, it’s reassuring to know that if they misbehave, it’s the telephone not the fencing mallet I’ll probably be reaching for. Except of course with the garden. There are always exceptions. I’ve rented the land out again, to the owner of the sheep, for six months to July, with a caveat that it’s just possible Suky will want to stock it instead. And excluding the immediate fields surrounding the house giving us options there.

I’ve walked on the land relatively little, though I mapped it out as best I could and identified water pipe routes. Clean spring water we may find in the future is one of the luxuries that otherwise only money could buy; it’s one of the attractions that come with a place like this. A step nearer self-sufficiency than was ever possible in Leavening. For the first time I can leave a tap running and not feel a Kelvin comment inspired guilt. Talking to Annie I was struck by how wonderful it is to have the chance to start again. With experience. She’s done the hippy bit, the farmer’s wife bit, and is now pleased to be pursuing her career, the role she feels good at, with her partner in Christchurch. Especially if they can get out to the Peninsula from time to time. Her more immediate ambitions are to take the children to Thailand. Kevin works for Air New Zealand, which has obvious benefits for travel. She’s opted for change. With good reason, for she sees the past, the farm background as economic and emotional failure. Always teetering on the edge, finally spilling over. She woke one morning to hear Pete muttering away and realized she didn’t give a damn that the hoggets were out. The equivalent experience to me in La Jolla. She’d parted company with the underlying requirement of a way of life. It was time to quit.

I hope in our case though that we come from a background of success. Hallgarth to my mind, and I hope to Suky’s, was not failure but accomplishment. Our problem was that we felt we’d exhausted its potential except in the small details, and we didn’t know therefore where ambition pointed. The difference of this background to decision making is almost everything. Starting again from failure all one would carry forward would be the grim faced mutterings of lessons learnt, unconfident hopes that history would not do a repeating act on a festering stomach. Previous failure must undermine optimism for the same attempt; most high jumpers clear at the first go or fail. Seeing the past as success though allows unbridled optimism. Knowing what one can do and enjoy, as well as the already learnt lessons from experience. Second time round looked at from this angle can actually be better, appearing to have a greater element of choice.

One thing I wouldn’t do again is set up an illegal business. I think Suky might feel there is an element of flannel here – retrospective justification, but it’s the way I see it. Though I did have doubts about the business itself, its’ basic illegality undermined it significantly when I looked to the future. I won’t embark on the detail of not being able to advertise or even accept free publicity when offered, or more significantly, the paranoia’s of being apprehended mid sausage making. Suffice to say, amongst its successes there is a lesson learnt.

Farming here, animal farming (and there is precious else, doesn’t for me have the attractions of England. The fences are longer and the grass burns away in front of your eyes. I wouldn’t rule it out, I hope one day to stock it, but it isn’t an initial enthusiasm. Farming always seems to involve machinery and my hands are happier covered in soil not oil. And so, in contrast, gardening is more attractive than before. Warm sun and a longer growing season give options denied in England or at least the North. I’ve started working in it and enjoyed it immensely, so far at least taking the visits by possums and sheep in my stride. The possums will have to be dealt with and shooting them is the only real way. But for now I am clearing, digging and planting. And surveying what I hope will one day be a Fukinawa like exuberance of crops and beauty. The garden is the leafy lane turnoff on my map.

I didn’t start in the garden till I’d got the University application out of the way. Using previous study as the basis for exemption from some requirements, I thought it wise to include a brief synopsis of my work on Oakeshott. The eventual description was very brief, a touch self-mocking, but after ten years even that seemed a notable achievement.

It’s the way of the world and I don’t complain, that the Oakeshott years are seen somewhat as failure because I didn’t submit my thesis and get the Phd. I myself of course do not see them that way; the goal I didn’t achieve was never my goal. I see it differently, although I admit I could have used the opportunities more fully. Leaving aside the practical advantages of that quasi-employment allowing us to move to Leavening, for me the Oakeshott years were the academic opportunity I’d always wanted. The final fulfillment of a long frustration, the chance to study a subject in depth. During O level, we were told we would at A level. During A level, at university. At university, in graduate study. To he who waits, I guess all things come. But even I was somewhat astounded to find that I’d be supported for three years to study essentially a single book, Oakeshott’s ‘On Human Conduct’.

I’d specialized as an undergraduate in Politics and the Novel, (Conrad’s ‘Secret Agent’ I most recall), and State of Nature arguments (the long line, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke etc). What most people think of as relevant in politics; empiricism, the study of institutions, party politics, or international affairs, was rarely my interest as student. Studying Oakeshott, as a graduate was a choice suggested by a previous lecturer, Dave Edwards, whom it was presumed would supervise me. A man very different from me but equally enchanted by the language of Oakeshott. It didn’t surprise me when I later found Dave E wrote detective stories in his spare time. Philosophy may be partly detection, looking for clues and barking endlessly up wrong alleys, but mostly it was the style of Oakeshott that we fell for. After the dry barren terminology that dominates much political philosophy, here was Chandler writ large on the page. I can still read it for pleasure, and occasionally do. It was philosophy as lullaby, the link between politics and literature.

It was an originally overlooked technicality that changed who’d be my supervisor. Dave E didn’t have the required Phd himself necessary to supervise a Phd student. Instead I was allocated the department’s rising young star, Albert Weale. There’s no personal vendetta intended here. I admired the fast thinking ambitious man who took me on and devoted time to my concerns. But it’s true that we never talked the same language. Albert in his spare time wrote about politics I imagine. Perfectly conversant with political theory although primarily an empiricist, his admirable socialism opposed him absolutely to the conservatism he saw in Oakeshott, and the tasks he set were detailed attempts to undermine the basis of Oakeshott’s argument. It was an unsuccessful pairing of minds. I usually felt intimidated, rarely stimulated, by his quick mind. Over the years I pieced together what he thought a fairly coherent series of criticisms and it was they that I’d have submitted at the end. There were other reasons why I didn’t submit the thesis, but the critical moment came and passed in a brief conversation with Dave E near the end of my third year. (Albert went to Africa for his sabbatical that year, and I was passed on to an American woman whom I never liked and tried to almost totally avoid).

I forget the words now, and even, with any accuracy, the conversation with Dave E, it only lasted a few minutes, mostly on the stairs. But it had a fairly devastating effect. What I remember was how his sympathetic reading of Oakeshott allowed him an understanding that was for me virtually irrefutable. I’d been tackling Oakeshott’s ‘poles of explanation’ as actual logical entities, ferreting around in the gutter of Hayek and Co for evidence against him. For Dave E, as for me, and I believe Oakeshott himself, they were nothing more than aids to understanding. My criticisms appeared trite and in vain. After three years, what I felt most of all was that with minor differences, I agreed with Oakeshott. Yes, I thought his was an informative way to look at the emergence of modern European states. It was Weale I disagreed with not Oakeshott. Every academic knows that agreement is fatal. Criticism, probably rightly, is the way forward. That’s how I see the public side of the matter.

Intellectually they were lonely years. It’s the perennial cry of the graduate student, studying his narrow interest about which the world neither knows nor appears to care. I don’t think any friends showed any interest and I don’t blame them. The idiosyncratic pedanticism of individual philosopher’s language doesn’t make for easy discussion with the layman. Sentences like that which try and convey a tight meaning just frighten people away from even trying to work them out. Did it? For her part Suky was engaged in discovering the all too concrete realities of computer programming. Our spectrum, however you look at it, has always been large. We’re very different people from very different families. At the centre are the conversations we can have. They in turn are enriched by the shared delights of living in a country setting.

What I got out of it was the reward I was seeking. Philosophical answers I could be content with. On such little questions as the meaning of life, or religion, history and poetry. Briefly, I believe there are no absolute truths in the affairs of men, no natural laws or justice. Everything is made up, shaped willy-nilly by emotions, seeming necessities, power, the whole gamut of influences. Thus the rules we adhere to are not cosmic, not absolute, but those currently believed to be necessary and desirable. They are constructs. The notion of guardianship in farming, which I’ve already mentioned, Annie referred to it today calling it caretaking, is just such a construct. In the state of nature no such human constructs exist, harmony and evolution battle it out. These constructs are more easily understood and promulgated if they are grouped together into a kind of coherence – a body of belief. I imagine few people would deny that religions do this most completely. My heritage, the one where I see these grouped beliefs expressed most richly and eloquently, is of course Christianity, but I believe this essential pattern is common to all religions. The groupings of beliefs I’ve studied most are political, the isms. Liberalism, socialism, conservatism, communism, and capitalism. For all the statistics, they are words not of Truth but persuasion.

I finished reading Kundera in Auckland, and on the plane down they gave out free magazines. Having crossed the Pacific, making my new way home, I rejected Time and Newsweek for Metro, which turns out to be the NZ yuppie in-house mag. The front-page leading article was a long attack on the NZ liberals who hadn’t abandoned their outdated ragbag of beliefs that this previous enthusiast, now turncoat, saw as responsible for much of NZ’s apparent decline. It was a challenging hard-hitting article to read after 20 hours on planes and in airports, and if the cloud had been higher I’d have enjoyed the view. But it was well enough written to require some thought, especially if you fell into the target group as I did. Of the political isms, I suppose that I’ve seen the attraction in almost all, you can even throw anarchism in there. But if I had to choose an enduring allegiance it’d be liberalism, the focus of her attack. And to me it was interesting that it wasn’t individual issues that she was attacking, it was the fact that they were grouped. The cunning part of her piece was that she managed to make them seem a complete hotchpotch, by carefully ignoring any feature that they might have in common. I suppose it’s not surprising given my recent experience that the word she carefully avoided was one pretty current in my mind. Choice.

A lot of people think that political choice is something that takes place at the ballot box, not an ism but democracy. For me, democracy itself is insufficient (even if it existed more than it does in NZ or Britain’s electoral system). I’d wish for choice to be what existed in society. Thatcher appealed to this sentiment and I think in the money mad eighties she reaped the reward of appealing to the deep liberal tradition in the electorate, but personal money is only part of it. She screwed the country up by not allowing anyone in the public sector any choices at all; it was tighten ze belten all the way to demoralization. Anything that needed public money was squeezed to death in the name of private choice. What you got was this incredible waste of talent, in hospitals, schools, universities, councils, and I just don’t know that the CD players were worth it. For the moment anyway, I’ll stick with my tapes. And my bumper sticker, if I didn’t think they were so naff would read, ‘Fight for choice, but then choose wisely’. It seems to me that if we don’t make wise choices now, the requirements of the latest ism, environmentalism, may well end up as that most threatening to liberalism.

The conclusion of agreeing with Oakeshott’s view that there are no absolutes (that religion is part of the practical world, that it doesn’t stand separate and above it) is a permanent debate about what is acceptable. The world is what we make of it, for ourselves and for others. There are no hidden rewards that will right the wrongs committed here. All we have to go on is perception and experience, our own and others, much of it history. The challenge, I believe, is to have faith in one’s opinion of what is right, fair and just, to understand that though philosophically speaking they are constructs; they’re our real world. That those constructs are necessary. With such a view, there is no single ‘meaning of life’ such as ‘serving God’ or ‘being happy’. All that can be pointed out is that people do act as though their lives have meaning to them. For me that answer teeters on a psychological knife-edge. Out there in the fields, in the practical world, other people’s obvious purposes are not always enough. It makes me at times envious of faith, which I understand as non-rational conviction. But it’s a consolation that I answered, at least to myself, the million-dollar schoolboy question.

Since getting the University business out of the way, I’ve hardly been to Christchurch. This Christmas I hope I’ll be forgiven for failing to shop. I’m not a great shopper, and travelling persuaded me that it’s not just a question of time, an excuse which otherwise might be self-persuasive. When travelling I lurch instead towards the eatery or the bookstalls. The former were a feature of China. In Hong Kong the voice of commerce rings in your ears and the sight dominates your eyes, a dual pronged neon enticement. But in China as a foreigner you often had to ask twice. I remember pleading to buy writing paper in the old town of Lijang. In Lijang I spent much of my time in the cafes, talking either to travelers or the Chinese music teacher that I later read about in Chatwin’s ‘The Songlines’. Learning rough Chinese astrology and teaching even rougher Italian pizza. Or just simply reading, with people around. For the European the mention of cafes conjures a Parisian chair and table strewn pavement, or the vine covered patios of the white washed Mediterranean coast. But they’re part of Asia too, if anything I think the notion of sociable eating is stronger there. I could indulge both those enthusiasms even more in Kathmandu, for though it’s post hippy reputation is as a cosmopolitan eating place, it also boasts the best secondhand bookshops in the world. At least in my experience.

The idea of secondhand books is an increasingly attractive one to me. Of all commodities they’re surely the easiest and most useful to recycle. The rewards are obvious. Less wealth is required of the reader, and in bookpricey NZ entering recession that seems a social blessing. Fewer trees are cut down, and entering any new bookshop now I’m terrified by the profusion of temporary print – the environmental imperative is the strongest argument against writing I know. Yet I know all too well that books on my walls are a personal delight, not just individually but collectively. In particular fiction. Practical books I’m ambivalent about, apart from the obvious reference ones. Part of me is inclined to agree with Oakeshott that all practical learning should take place as apprentice, by working with someone better. I know from farming, writing, and carpentry that this is so. I learnt almost all the carpentry I know in one day with my father. A few simple skills and techniques while making a bookshelf in the Dulwich bedroom. (It’s lucky that in carpentry, as in cooking, a little knowledge can go a long way). My weaknesses with buildings have usually stemmed from inadequate site plans, initial squaring and leveling the base, factors conspicuously absent from bookshelf building). But if apprenticeship is the ideal, I recognize it’s not always viable.

The craft of writing appears to be a modern novelists obsession. Non-writers are probably getting sick of it. Dennis Potter is probably to blame for doing it so much better than anyone else. The only good non-fiction book on writing I’d recommend is Patricia Highsmith’s on writing suspense fiction. I read it a few years ago. The bit I remember is the bit about the germ of an idea. She records the small tiny idea that’s started off some of her stories and screenplays. One of them is the Hitchcock film ‘Strangers on a Train’, an old black and white film which was on TV when we stayed at the cottage in Threlkeld for the last time. The germ in that screenplay was the idea of two strangers meeting and agreeing to commit each other’s desired murders. She makes the point that you can’t just sit down and think up the germ of an idea. All you can do is have your mind receptive so that you recognize it when it comes along. Then you can work at it laboriously, teasing around the various possibilities, developing useful and useless strands, and clues and red herrings. No lies though. The author is God in deciding the fates and actions of her characters, and she can mislead, but she mustn’t lie to her audience.

The identifying a germ of an idea and the way it spreads out, rejecting some directions, choosing others instead, won’t just be familiar to writers. I imagine most businesses start that way, or any major change in life, moving house or a job, choosing a career or to study. Or to emigrate. The only difference is that in suspense fiction the author can usually remember it accurately. With novels I suspect it’s more like real life, you remember what you’re left with rather than the early dreams. Some people can keep diaries, but I’ve never been able to. I scrawl the odd paragraphs down from time to time and they serve me as a kind of record. They’ve no chronology, though I can roughly date a few. They’re a mumble of papers mixed with odd cuttings and articles, yesterday’s idea next to an Oakeshott remark or a Dylan song. It’s the way I like them. Sometimes I’ve thought it would be good to write down right at the start of a venture what your reasons were, your aspirations, your thoughts in general. But most new ventures that are going to work need finding out about, and you get absorbed in the detail so that you miss the chance. It isn’t often that about to start something you have the time or inclination to interrogate yourself.

Neither am I a regular letter writer, that habit unfortunately died when allowed. But when it comes to explaining decisions, writing is for me the most effective way to explain. I’m not strong on simple explanation, I like to see at least two angles which doesn’t help. For a lot of people, legend, literature, or writing are the way they speak when they’d be embarrassed otherwise to make a sound. Not for money, but because they’ve something to say. I grew up in a family where the pattern of circumstance made letter writing almost the normal method of communication. With all its attendant pluses and minuses, its duties and debts.

I was thinking about all these things I’ve mentioned, except writing suspense fiction, the other morning. At the Atomic Café in Akaroa where I went for a coffee. With good reason I hope. There’s only one shopping street in Akaroa, called Rue Lavaud. It enters the town at a corner by the Grand and then runs straight before finally adopting the curve of the bay taking it round to the wharf. That’s the Main wharf, which we can see from our house. Daly’s wharf and the Atomic café which is set a couple of hundred yards back from it, across the recreation ground, are just out of sight, masked by the lower folds of Takamatua Hill as it encloses Children’s Bay.

I felt like spending the morning in Akaroa. Just getting to know it, making it part of home I suppose. Looking in Steptoes (guess what business that is), picture galleries, craftshops, and the aisles of the hardware store, before having coffee at the Atomic café. I’d picked up my mail on the way, the road from us to Akaroa goes down to each bay and then up over each headland, it’s a lovely drive. Duvauchelle is the second bay, (after Barry’s). I kept the letters to read in the Atomic, (I find it rather awkward otherwise, just sitting drinking alone in a café). There was a long one from Suky written just before leaving the States, She’d warned me on the phone that her spirits were down when she’d written and I’d expected a rather terse discontented letter. Her spirits were understandably down, but it was a touching letter. A letter giving me more hope for the future together than for a long time. Attitude after all is more than half the battle. We’ll both have to try hard to understand and help each other in our chosen courses. I hope they’ll be compatible, I’m sure they can be. For myself it’s years since I felt so hopeful. They’ve been years of interest, looking around, but perhaps too much inside. I wanted that introspection; it’s surely part of any respectable mid-life crisis. But the interest of tunnels wears off, as Suky tried to persuade Pete and Catherine this summer, the nicest thing is seeing the glare of daylight at the end. Or a new dawn as I saw this morning, still up, tapping out this swan song.

The Atomic as you might guess is fairly zany. They play good music; I think Steve would feel at home there, as would Andy or most of our Woofers. It was set up by six young unemployed locals two years ago on a restart scheme. Now, although pretty successful, most of them want some cash out. Keith told me when I got back that it’s up for sale. For just under $5000, with a six year lease. Before turning to jazz he was trained and worked as a chef and is always considering that option. So far he’s always stayed with the jazz. It’s just one room, with a counter dividing the kitchen from the four tables. It’s small, very small, kind of Schumacher size. A more creative real estate agent than Les Day would have used the word intimate in his advertising leaflet.

Yes, a small premise, but in deciding to buy it, my ambition is large. Of course I’ll be nervous serving that first salad, but Hallgarth was like a café at times, and Keith has offered me a brief apprenticeship. As for coffee, anyone who knows me… There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to change the name, but titles needs must convey the current meaning, and so it’ll be called the Bookstore Café. The vision I have which I’m sure will be corrupted in the pattern of circumstance, is a slight literary feel, so there’ll be a few books, newspapers and magazines to read in the café. Not for sale. For the solitary traveler or local who wants to pass time, or maybe can’t afford a daily paper, or the ‘Weekly Guardian’ from abroad. There’ll be music of course, and I hope conversation, and tucked amongst the artbooks and ‘Rough Guides’ will be the odd slim volume of poetry, Davies, Ferlinghetti, Fanthorpe et al. Which in the commercially disastrous days of winter will have at least one reader hovering nearby. And like a gay given the choice to come out, there’ll be framed on the wall, a poetry manuscript. Written in Sevenoaks.

The secondhand books for sale will have standards too. I shelved my last Mills and Boon in York library in ’77 and it can stay there. It’ll be mostly fiction, that year at York gave me a basic grounding, and I’ve followed the names round half of the world. I know whom I want without having read them. As a separate business in Akaroa, such a bookshop would die an almost instant death. I doubt any sort of bookshop could survive, certainly not the range I want to cover. I never see it as more than a boost to the café income. I’ll keep the café vegetarian, for business and practical reasons, not just to satisfy my sense of irony. But I imagine a few pigs will gobble the organic waste. Along with chickens, and maybe even those worms to improve the soil in the garden to grow the food to…

I hope it’ll give Suky the options she deserves, a better chance to make the choice than Portland gave. Or than a partner studying for future gold could, one still puzzled about how to live outside of Tweedie town.

No folks, it’d be interesting to serve on a jury sometime, but my commute ain’t going to burn my toes. I’m going to keep sharing Dangley’s well kept secret. I’m not going to live in Harry’s house. Not now, not so close. From the café you can see our land though not the house. One day you’ll be able to see the young trees growing up. It feels right. It has the greatest of all possible virtues for me right now, of getting on with life. It gives me a buzz. A personal purpose, even worthwhile ambition. For I hope somewhere down the road, down Rue Lavaud, beyond the reputation of the small one roomed bookstore café, lies Arvon.

The enticement of literature is that it’s complete in itself. Traditionally at any rate. That was the hallmark of the Well Made Play, I remember reading in my Eltham study, and it’s still mostly adhered to. Plots are wrapped up, characters accorded their destiny. Real life on the other hand weaves a pattern with delicate stitches we can’t foresee. It’s incomplete. The uncommercial stuff of letters, when one chooses to write them. Thanks for reading it. I hope you enjoyed it.