All my parents’ exes are getting in touch. At least that is how it feels. Although none of my parents’ ex-lovers feature in my book In the Time of the Manaroans, a memoir of my teenage years on a commune in the Marlborough Sounds, they ring and email and Facebook anyway.
The exes, or sometimes just friendly flings, wish to talk about the past; the mystery that is other people (my parents); the small blonde child I was (“you loved me swinging you around!”), or the adolescent I became. They are generous and retrospectively concerned; only sometimes nostalgic. I am pleasantly taken aback to hear from these past connections, and unsure whether to tell my parents.
Lesley confesses to being caught up in her own life at the time and unable to see that my father wasn’t coping as a solo-Dad. She laments what she believes, after reading my book, was “real poverty especially in winter and real creeps ready to pounce on the vulnerable young”. At the time none of us recognised the extent to which we were dealing with poverty or creeps.
On the line from Golden Bay, a retired teacher hopes my father became the cultured, even debonair man that she saw glimpses of when they were having an affair. The delicate subtext being that it was hard to be those things when you were a materially impoverished, diet-obsessed, proto-hippy art student in a crumbling marriage. Although she doesn’t appear in the memoir, Rosamund had an affair with my father at the time my mother was doing the same with a local painter. At six I liked her—darkly pretty, joyous—very much. I assure Rosamund that my father has had his ups and downs but, a writer, has also enjoyed a rich and cultured, at times romantically satisfying (if not quite debonair) life. Recently diagnosed with synaesthesia, she is a making retrospective sense of her tendencies and moved to speculate on my parents’. It is a rare and precious moment, this talking to someone who was there across half a lifetime’s unfamiliarity.
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An early boyfriend of my mother, a winemaker and filmmaker now (no, not Francis Ford Coppola), writes engagingly from London where he is under lockdown playing scrabble and planting fruit trees: an apple, a quince, a French plum. He has heard of the book and wishes to recall my mother with whom he went to the cinema to see the Italian Neo Realists and the French Nouvelle Vague. How they must have wished to graft the filmmakers’ sensibilities onto the grey of early sixties Wellington. He recalls the wry and quizzical humour of his Firth House boarding school friend, my father, and drops word of my mother’s beauty again. I calculate that it would be a year at least till I exist. He urges me to keep writing.
I think that there must be other adjectives to describe my teen mother. “Eccentric”, OK. Writing this I feel the inadequacy of the task. You can only get so far with an adjective –i n knowing another. Instead I visualise my mother in her belted trench coat in the dark of the Paramount Cinema where my imagination-memory sends her and her boyfriend Courtney Place, 1961 or 62.
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Sam Hunt, my mother’s drinking buddy and neighbour at Pukerua Bay where I lived as an infant, isn’t in the book either but, in time of Covid and Zoom, Sam is an early memoir-responder. He emails from Kaipara Harbour,
I rented the Last House South.
Your pa-rentals lived north up the bay.
In tacit acknowledgement that the seaside toddler he knew is her own person now, the poet doesn’t hang about in memories but writes in line breaks of his twice-read of Manaroans:
A find! Gold in the Wakamarina Valley!
That’s what your book is!
When Sam’s latest volume of poetry Salt River Songs and The 9th, a CD he cut with David Kilgour & The Heavy 8, arrive in my Dulwich Hill letter box, my partner plays the CD on arrival. The soundtrack to our mutual late adolescence was The Clean. For a week or so I forsake the sleepy fumble for the next set of deadly headlines on my phone and read a few of Sam’s poems every morning first thing: a palate cleanser between sleep and waking.
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Old friends get in touch too. “Stuart S wants to be friends”. A man I hadn’t clapped eyes on in 42 years contacts me on Facebook.
When I wrote Manaroans over three years in my Sydney sunroom, I did so under the helpful delusion that no one in the book would actually read it. Forty odd years on from the events described that seemed too much to expect. I was writing across time, an actual ocean and, maybe, impassable barriers of life and death too. Half convinced of this remove, I wrote as if in a snowstorm, hermetically sealed, a little enchanted: as if the book was a magic toy I could participate in, a time travel machine on whose voyage no one would get hurt.
That is not to say that I didn’t agonise over tender spots of representation. I sweated those, especially when there were miserable things to record. Sometimes I changed a name or two but mostly what happened is that no sooner did I take out a real name than I had to put it back in out of respect for the truth. Truth was one of the book’s projects even if it was truth of the uniquely personal or declaratively subjective variety that is memoir’s stock in trade.
Stu — Canvastown potter Lloyd in my memoir — tells me that he still makes pots but that his life’s work had been setting up an organisation supporting people with intellectual disability. Stu recounts scouring first Auckland then Thames before sourcing Manaroans at an independent bookseller. He confesses to finding the entry on mutual friend John Hadwen “beautifully and evocatively written” but wondering, a few pages on — who the fuck is Lloyd?!
I feel a dropkick for making brilliant, dynamic Stu, short, pugnacious Lloyd in the book. He was all of these things and, with hindsight, a good sport too. So why change his name? All I can say is that sometimes I got jittery when my sense of humour or satirical bent came out to play or when I felt — arguably — that others might need protecting. Now I think of what publisher Fergus Barrowman opined during editing as I flip-flopped on names: most people would rather be written about or remembered than not. Named rather than not too. I really do hope, that having read on, Stu still wants to be my FB Friend.
Another terrific surprise is that the man I describe in the book as Salesman John, who’s on-the-fly black and white photographs elevate the Manaorans’ text, tracks me down. By email he is as sardonic as I recall, and more confessional than when I knew him at fifteen. He is tickled with his Salesman pseudonym.
I tell him that Sam Hunt has said that Salesman John’s name and his photographs are some of his favourite things in the book. John divulges that the travelling salesman job which afforded him side trips to my father’s Floodhouse and the commune at Manaroa was for picture theatre maintenance, then Philips’ electrical components. That, at the time, these trips were fuelled by the fact his marriage was breaking down and he was “looking for a place to be”. As a placeless teen I intuitively related.
John sends me over a hundred work prints, a precious amateur archive of previously unseen photographs of the Manaroans and of others—including this girl — mucking about in boats at Saratoga. ‘By far the least effable of the refulgent pulchritude I’ve bordered in bromide, is you’ he writes. I rush Google. Pulchritude means beauty. I take this as the convoluted compliment it is. As to Salesman’s own presence in Manaroans, John finds: “Your description of me is utterly accurate (and quite flattering I thought, with just one exception: ‘Dressed head to toe in brown nylon’ as ‘plastic polymer crimes against fashion’…!) I had absolutely no idea that the intelligentsia of the Floodhouse might possibly be concerned about such crimes – of innocence…” Oh. We were such a judgmental lot.
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Kate, the loquacious American of my book, writes a thoughtful letter. Then a few more. I am happy to be fact-checked on one or two things I did not have access to at the time of writing. I learn that she was with John of Saratoga the afternoon of the evening he and lover Jane were murdered, and that she testified against the murderer at the trial. That Manaroa prepared her and husband Rob for tough times to come, for lessons in community and resilience. She and Rob have had three sons since the days of Manaroa, two of them with complicated special needs, and she is an active advocate for that community.
In her final letter Kate confesses that what she likes most about Manaroans is that I loved two men within it as much as she. That is how we get to Eddie Fox for whom I held a candle in my crushing teenage heart almost as bright as for Saratoga John and of whom I have long wondered, what became of you?
From Kate I learn that Eddie Fox worked as a deckhand on the research vessel Tangaroa and on land as a bouncer; that he purchased a parcel of land at Tasman; that well into a diagnosis of cancer, the Welshman was overjoyed to discover he had an adult son called Louie by a former connection. And that was how Eddie Fox came to spend his last Christmas with his new family and their new baby. On Facebook, a bloke called David contacts me to supplement the details of what, were this a movie, would be considered a redemptive closing.
But back to Kate. From his bed, not long before he died, Eddie directed Kate’s husband Rob to two silver ingots wrapped in a cloth stashed in a locked cupboard.
Who do you know who owns an actual ingot? Eddie Fox with the gypsy heart. There was something dragonish about Eddie, now I come to think of it. Battle-scarred, showy, splendid and cunning. Treasure loving. Like everyone who hears this tale, I am moved that Eddie Fox got his undisclosed wish—this solitary, affable, militant, wildly handsome character—and died a Dad and a grandad too.
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These days my own father, a central presence in Manaroans, is often at work in a community garden on a former prison site from which he distributes cabbages and silverbeet wherever he finds need, often to opshops. Norman keeps a weather eye on how my book is travelling but mostly he is concerned about global hunger. I report the correspondence and occasionally nudge his memory as to who is/was who. The memoir has a huge cast, many of whom pass through only briefly.
Some of these have stepped off the pages and waved. They seem glad to be recorded as participants in a life now past — for which I am flooded with relief and, occasionally, unseemly gratitude. Gladness travels straight as a die.
In the Time of the Manaroans by Miro Bilbrough (Victoria University Press, $40) has been shortlisted for the prestigious 2021 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for the best book of non-fiction. The winning book will be announced on April 26 and the author will receive $40,000. Bilbrough’s nomination rather makes up for the abject failure of Ockham New Zealand national book award judges to even put it on the longlist. Her book was named in ReadingRoom as the best book of non-fiction published in 2020 and is available in bookstores nationwide. She will appear at the Auckland Writers Festival at an event on May 15 chaired by Paula Morris.
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