Another friend passes on

My very close and dear friend Brian Davey died suddenly in Australia a couple of weeks ago; my wife and I went over to the funeral. Here is my tribute:

My name is Rick Long, I’m from New Zealand and live in a town called Masterton where Brian and his young wife Joyce came to settle from New Plymouth in 1963. Brian had bought a physiotherapy practice in the town.

Masterton is 90 ks north of Wellington and about the same size as Ballina with a population of around 25,000 people. Last year it was voted New Zealand’s most beautiful city.

My wife Marion got to know Joyce when they were in the maternity ward at Masterton hospital together where they had their firstborns, both sons, Gregory for the Davey’s and Brandon for the Long’s.

I had already met Brian as he had become a regular customer in our family butcher’s shop.

The Davey’s bought an imposing house looking down Masterton’s main street just around the corner from where we lived.

Their house and ours both backed on to my parents’ home which had a quite substantial in-ground swimming pool where our growing families spent lots of time together.

Brian and I became firm friends, having an occasional drink together (and I can see both Joyce’s and Marion’s eyes roll when I said the word “occasional”) and we were both invited to join the Masterton Rotary club where we were both very hard-working members.

Brian in fact made a big impact on the town with his enthusiasm and energy and besides being very active Rotarian he was also chairman of the Crippled Children’s Society and chairman of the finance committee of the local Catholic Church.

Brian and Joyce had all their children in Masterton; after Gregory there was Susan and then Fiona. A few hundred yards from where we lived was Lansdowne primary school; our kids all went to the school and Brian and I were both on the school committee.

We used to get away with murder, well almost. On one Saturday morning Brian and I took over the local radio station at gunpoint, binding and gagging the announcer and then reading out ads we had pre-sold to local businesses to raise money for the Plunket Society. You’d never get away with that today.

Few of you will know this, but in 1972 Brian and I started up a very successful business.

Some background; Masterton was dry for 40 years up until 1947. By dry I mean you couldn’t buy alcohol in the town. The citizens voted for restoration in 1947, but also decided the town would own all the liquor outlets and the profits would be returned to the community. A Licensing Trust was set up with a six man board of directors who were voted in every three years at the same time as the local body elections. Incidentally there are twenty six licensing trusts in New Zealand; many other communities followed our lead.

In 1972 the Masterton Licensing Trust built a splendid new lounge bar which they called the Elizabethan Room. It was built Tudor style with high wooden beamed ceiling and a parquet dance floor and a stage for a small band.

It was to be a ladies and escorts bar, but it never took off. A friend of ours who was an elected trustee on the licensing trust board took Brian and me in there one Friday night and we were surprised how few patrons there were. He told us the three piece band on the stage was costing the trust $37.50 a night and the takings over the bar were around $35. Charles Dickens’ Mr McCawber would have been appalled. “Nightly income $35, nightly expenditure $37.50 - result misery.”

Brian and I had had a few drinks and with our usual misplaced optimism we told our friend to tell his fellow board members to give us the room and we’d show them how to fill it.

To our amazement a few days later the trustee rang us and said he had discussed the offer with his fellow board members and they said we could have the premises every Friday and Saturday night for $5 a night, they would keep the takings over the bar, but we could set a door charge at whatever figure we considered viable and that would be ours to keep.

So now we had to put our money where our mouths were.

Discotheques had just come into being though there were few if any in New Zealand but Brian and I did some research, had a local sound technician build us a desk with two turntables, attached to a 400 watt amplifier with four huge speakers which we suspended around the dance floor. We put coloured lights that danced to the music hidden underneath the curtain pelmets, projectors that played psychedelic images on the walls and we installed a large strobe light.

We called all this The Light Fantastique (you Aussies would pronounce this fantasteek, but then again you never ever did learn to speak properly English) and invited dancers to join us every Friday and Saturday night. The fire department decreed we could only have 150 people in the room, we upped that to 200 and charged 50 cents per person at the door. I was the disc jockey playing 45 rpm records on the turntables and Brian was the genial mine host.

Thanks to Brian’s incredibly good welcoming manner at the door and my choice of the right music our enterprise really took off. After the second weekend we had to have a “house full” sign made. Closing time was ten o’clock, as required by law back then, so it wasn’t too much of an imposition. Many of our friends came to join us and in fact we were really just having a party every Friday and Saturday night and making money to boot.

We were taking $200 cash over the weekend which meant a $100 each into our pockets; good money in 1972. The only expenses we had were buying new 45 records from time to time; the trust never ever charged us the $5 a night rent. They either forgot or were so pleased with their bar takings they decided they really didn’t need to.

But all good things must come to an end. I got elected on to the board of the licensing trust at a bye-election when one of the trustees died. Four others stood against me, but Brian was my campaign committee chairman, so I couldn’t really miss.

I worried that there was a conflict of interest with being on the trust and running a business in their premises and Brian said he would like to go overseas and find a new place to settle with his family.

So we sold the business in 1973 after a year of solid trading. Six weeks later the new owner went broke which just proves butchers and physiotherapists really know how to run a disco!

Brian settled in Sydney with his family and I settled down to selling sausages.

In 1990 I rang Brian to boast that I had just been elected the national president of the New Zealand Licensing Trusts association. He countered with the fact that he had just been elected the World President of the Physiotherapists Association, so my news paled into insignificance.

Shifting to Australia didn’t mean the end of our friendship. We have regularly visited the Davey’s and them us. We have been on lots of holidays together in both Australia and New Zealand and on one occasion we took our respective families to America.

And there are constant phone calls and emails.

I rang Brian on the 4th of August, the day after his 78th birthday and a few minutes after the Crusaders had beaten the Lions in the Super 15 final just to remind just how good New Zealand rugby was. He was in high spirts then, unbelievable that he passed away two days later.

And those emails. The last one from him was just a couple of weeks ago and it typically went like this:

A Canadian walks into a New Zealand bar and there was immediately some tension among patrons thinking he might be, God forbid, an Australian. The barman served him a beer and then said, “What do you do for a living mate?”

“I’m a taxidermist,” the stranger replied.

“A taxidermist,” said the barman, “Does that mean you drive a taxi?”

“No,” said the man, “I mount animals.”

“Relax fellows;” said the barman, “He’s one of us!”

You Aussies never let up.

Rest in peace old friend.

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Aids not necessarily a death sentence

I’ve just received a letter from Joel George. Mr. George you will recall is the genial gentleman who runs our public hospital. Been there a while too; which says something about his tenacity and fortitude. It must be frustrating managing an organisation where the funder underfunds you to ensure your frugality. But I digress. Attached to his letter was a survey form which he asks me to fill in as I was, according to his records, latterly a user of his facilities.

I struggled to recall when I had been a patient at his institution in recent times. Apart from visiting the odd indisposed friend I have had no cause to use the services he administers as far as I could remember. It wasn’t always that way. Before I was married I was a regular visitor to the hospital. My sojourns at that time however were centred around the Nurse’s Home and if a survey had been thrust at me back then I would have revealed that the matron was crabby and made strenuous efforts to hamper my progress into the building, but that the nurses were wonderful. They must have been; I married one of them.

But then the penny dropped. I had visited Choice Health in Chapel Street, which is of course an outpost of the Joel George empire and no doubt his questionnaire related to that attendance. The awful truth, which I shall now reveal publicly, is that I have aids. Those of you who would look forward to the inevitable demise of the column and the columnist will be disappointed to hear that the aids are of the hearing variety and sit snugly and almost anonymously into both my ears.

I came about these appendages virtually by accident. Walking past Snowsill’s friendly chemists some years ago I spotted a sign offering free hearing tests. I marched in and demanded an appointment forthwith. I told the lady, visiting from Auckland, who conducted the tests, that I needed a credible certificate showing conclusively that my hearing was perfect. I was even willing to pay for such documentation. 

For years my family had been chiding me for having the TV turned up too loud, accusing me in the process of being deaf. My grown-up children reckoned that when they visited they could start to hear our TV three or four streets away. The little brats. During their upbringing I told them hundreds of millions of times not to exaggerate. 

It reminded me of when I was a kid and our next door neighbour bought a new radiogram. For the uninitiated ‘radiograms’ were the forerunners of ‘hi-fi’s’ which were themselves the precursor’s of ‘stereos.’ The proud purchaser suggested over the fence to my parents that perhaps they would like to come over to his place and listen to his new radiogram. Dad’s callous response was that the neighbour could just as easily come over to our place and hear his new radiogram.

But again I digress.

The friendly lady at the chemist’s shop told me after conducting the tests that she had good news and bad news. The good news was that my family was very perceptive, the bad news was that my hearing was appalling. “What do you do for a living?” she wanted to know. At the time I was endeavouring to sell real estate. She looked puzzled. “Have you ever had any other vocation?” she enquired. Well, I admitted, I had spent 36 years as a butcher. “Did you perchance use a bandsaw?” was her next probe, and I allowed that I had used one for about four hours a day during the duration of my tenure in the meat trade. 

Her examination was complete.

Using impressive alliteration she reckoned ‘butchering beef bones on a bandsaw’ was the worst thing you could do to ruin your hearing, though perhaps she really meant it was the best thing you could do to ruin your hearing, but whatever, “You’re lucky,” she gushed, “ACC will pay for your aids.”

I was glad I hadn’t told her that from about age 17 and into my early twenties I had played in a Rock’n’roll band. An unkind but not entirely uninformed music critic, writing in the Manawatu Evening Standard after a concert in Palmerston North wrote this about our performance: “What the band lacked in talent they made up for in volume.” The lead singer - and that was me- he went on to say: was “Unimpressive” and “over-amplified.”

ACC may not have been so generous had they known about the routine punishment I had given my teenage eardrums.

But the aids, state of the art seeing I didn’t have to pay for them, have put me in the class of the six million dollar man. Well, in his hearing section anyway. Eavesdropping is easy. I can now hear intimate conversations from across crowded rooms and people who want to keep confidential information from me ought to learn sign language or resort to written memos. Rather than hasten my departure from this earth they supply such clarity that I confidently expect to live to 120, an age I have worked out I will need to reach to get all my taxes back.

Meanwhile I will reply to Mr. George’s questionnaire in a positive manner. The treatment I received at the hearing clinic was exemplary and I will tick all of the boxes at the highest end of the scale. But he may not necessarily get the answers he wants from all he surveys. An acquaintance, presenting for surgery, got as far as the front door of the hospital when he saw a sign on the building saying: “Guard dogs operating.”

He hasn’t been seen since.

(First published on the 31st of January 2001)
 

“My doctor gave me six months to live, but when I couldn’t pay the bill, he gave me six months more.” - Walter Matthau 

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Lest we forget

The phone rang frighteningly in the middle off the night. I picked it up with trepidation, as you do. Calls at this hour seldom bring good tidings. I needn’t have worried. It was around midday in England and a gentleman with a polished British accent announced that he was a spokesman for the R.A.F. It seems the good people in the village of Dennekamp in North Eastern Holland are unveiling a memorial to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of a bomber crashing on the outskirts of their village in Holland in 1941 with a total loss of life. My father’s brother Frank was the pilot. The unveiling is to take place on the 13th of March, sixty years to the day since the tragedy.

I was to let other members of the immediate family know and if any of us were to make the pilgrimage to the ceremony he promised we would be made extremely welcome.

It reminded me of this coming Sunday’s airshow at Hood Aerodrome and the heroic pilots who made it back, some of whom will no doubt be in attendance to watch with respect a display of some of the planes they flew that helped win the Battle of Britain. The fact that some of the planes and their pilots still endure is a testimony to their fortitude. These men and their aircraft played a huge role in allowing us to live as bountifully as we do today.

They might well reflect, however, that in the interim we have become a nation of wimps.

Last week for instance ACC announced that anyone who has witnessed a traumatic event may be eligible for compensation. Whilst I have the greatest sympathy for those folk who have observed a tragedy at first hand, I am mystified to know how throwing money at those traumatised, by whatever the event, is going to make the unfortunate images dissipate.

But that was just for starters. It was also disclosed that the precious people who work for the N.Z. Qualifications Authority had been given $2000 each for the severe discomfort they had suffered when they shifted from one centrally heated/air-conditioned office to another centrally heated/air conditioned office, just up the road. This was on top of a $1000 performance bonus for presumably doing the job they were being paid for in the first place. And not all that well according to students who rang the 0900 number to get their exam marks and were told that they had got 0! “A glitch in the computer,” explained the Qualifications Authority spokesperson as he or she no doubt downed their caviar with champagne.

Then there were the highly indignant Air New Zealand passengers who threatened, through their lawyers, to sue the hapless airline for not disclosing to them the risks they took flying in economy class and contracting a form of thrombosis that could prove fatal. Never mind that Air New Zealand reported that since its inception it had flown millions of passengers with no known clots.

An ex-RAF pilot rang last week after reading about these litigants and wondered how he and his colleagues survived World War Two. My caller flew Lancaster bombers for up to 12 hours at a stretch in cramped conditions and the thought of blood clots never entered his head - nor his legs. The Catalina crews, he told me, were in the air for up to 22 hours. He didn’t say so in so many words but I suspect neither those Lancasters nor the Catalinas had stewardess service, with drinks and nibbles, in-flight movies or stereo headsets. I’m not sure that they even had toilets.

My uncle survived dozens of bombing raids before the one that killed him and a magazine interview he gave in 1939 after a reconnaissance flight over Germany, gives us some idea of the discomfort they endured so that we might live in comparative luxury today.

“ As the temperature, increasing with our descent, approached freezing point a snowy type of ice grew on the control column, on the insides of the windows, and on the instrument panel....the visibility was bad..so I opened the window to see better. It was snowing. The navigator table and the instruments were soon covered again with half an inch of snow.

The front gunner could see nothing from his cockpit but white snow - when he came back to see us his helmet and his shoulders were buried beneath an inch of the stuff. Shortly afterwards a blinding flash, and a bump bigger than the others, took away our trailing aerial - and knocked all the snow off the instruments.”

Later in the article he said the discomfort had been shared with other planes in their group.

“In one machine the tail gunners eyebrows became frozen when the aircraft was at twenty-one thousand feet where there was 72 degrees of frost....Two of the gunners of the other machines suffered from frostbitten fingers.”

The Whitley bomber had much of its wings shot away on this trip and its safe return to England was described as “a miracle” by the newspapers of the day.

“We thought we should have to land in the sea, so the navigator went back to prepare the rubber dinghy and collect the rest of the crew. However as we got down to 500 feet the engines began to pick up and when the navigator returned to report “all OK for landing” we were maintaining height at one hundred and ten miles per hour and it seemed that we might be able to make England.”

Those brave men and women who served in the army, navy and air force could never have envisaged at the time that we, as a result of their sacrifices, would have inherited a society that today has so many creature comforts. Not that they would have begrudged us these, but those ‘so few’ might have been disappointed to know that it now takes monetary compensation to help us overcome those uncomfortable events that life throws at us from time to time.

A phone call in the middle of the night might even be worth a couple of hundred dollars. I must check with ACC.

(First published  on the 24th of January 2001)

“Older men declare a war. But it is youth that must fight and die.” - Herbert Clark Hoover 

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The camera never lies

My late father had a wonderful sense of humour. I remember when the young Queen Elizabeth came to Masterton in 1953 she had lunch at the Empire Hotel. Rival butcher Mr. C. L. Neate, who had only recently settled in the town from Britain, served the Empire with their meat requirements and immediately after the lunch, while the Queen and the Duke were still driving out of town to their next destination, he wrote on his shop window in white poster paint: “The Queen ate our meat.” Quick as a flash my father wrote on our shop window: “God save the Queen.” One of the national weekly periodicals at the time, concluding a story on the incident, asked: “Would you buy meat from a man like that?” Fortunately many did.

In 1961 I went to Sydney to work in a butcher’s shop that had won an award that year for the most modern meat market in Australasia, Dick Stone Ltd. at Rockdale. 

Rockdale is one of Sydney’s southern suburbs, back then buoyant and very Australian. A visit there a couple of years ago revealed the butcher’s shop has given way to a lending institution and the population is predominantly South East Asian. In the fifties and sixties the white Australia policy was hugely obvious.

The owner of the shop was Richard Setten Stone. He had three shops in Rockdale; one called Richard’s, another called Setten’s and the award winner, where I worked, called Stone’s. Each was independently managed, mine by a hard taskmaster named Jimmy Blakemore, and each shop had a fierce rivalry going with the others. When I first started at Stones, as I was unknown to the staff at the other two shops, Jimmy Blakemore would send me to spy on their prices and report back. We would then undercut them. This, despite them all having the same owner.

Stone’s had a staff of eleven butchers and we were constantly busy. There was always a sea of faces at the counter waiting to be served. One evening, at around closing time, I managed to assemble everyone behind the counter and take their photo which I sent back to Dad with a letter explaining this was the staff of the shop where I was working in Aussie.

This was too much for my father. He had a staff of about seven back then so he rang up the laundry, asked for all of our white coats and aprons to be delivered back to the shop post haste and then rushed around the neighbouring shops seeking recruits to boost his complement for a return photo. Dad managed to line up 17 people behind our shop counter. Another phone call, this time to photographer Ted Nikolaison, and the shot was taken, processed and sent to me at the shop in Rockdale. A simple note attached said: Dear Rick, thanks for the photo of the staff in the shop in Australia. Here is a recent photo of our team in Masterton. 

I opened the envelope at the shop, saw the possibilities immediately, and soon had all the staff, including Jimmy Blakemore, gathered around me to see the photo. They were all amazed, none more so than the erstwhile manager, who had justifiably been treating me like a serf/peasant type from lowly New Zealand. His attitude warmed markedly when he saw the apparent size of our family business. “What did all these people do?” he was keen to know. He was particularly intrigued by the two Chinamen, Tommy and Charlie Wong. Their fruit shop backed on to ours and they had been Dad’s first two recruits as he had sought help to increase, albeit temporarily, the number of his employees.

Back then I could think quickly on my feet so I told the impressionable manager that they made the smallgoods. I said that they locked themselves in a backroom each morning and produced, with secret herbs and spices, the best sausages in the country. People, I prevaricated, came from far and wide to taste Long’s oriental polonies. Next on his question list was the huge bear of a man in a bow tie and chef’s hat. This was George Bogala, actually the Yugoslav cook at the A1 restaurant, but I told Jimmy that he broke down all our beef. I said he could single-handedly process about six bodies of beef in a day, and that he kept a bucket of cold water on the floor beside him so he could dip his knife in it from time to time when it got too hot.

I found various jobs for the photogenic conspirators including gift shop owner Jack Whiteman, Army Stores proprietor Frank Pool, abattoir manager George Brown, plus two hairdressers, Mel Catt and George Corlett, all of whom had been press-ganged into posing for the photo. Pharmacist Wayne Snowsill had arrived when all the coats and aprons had been used up. In his chemist white smock he looked a little professional to be a straight butcher so I told the boss that he was a window dresser. This was the too much for Jimmy Blakemore. “You employ a window dresser?” he said incredulously, and now saw me in a totally, if unjustifiable, new light.

From then on I was looked upon as something of a guru in the field of meat retailing.

Jimmy would constantly ask me, as we were completing some task, if this was how we would do it in New Zealand. I enjoyed by newly acquired status and milked it for all it was worth. Once I had established myself, about six weeks after the photo had arrived, I admitted the deception. Fortunately, Aussies enjoy a good joke. Although I went back down the rankings ladder, I never descended to the bottom rung from whence I had started.

Wellington’s Evening Post published the story and cleverly captioned the accompanying photo: “Camera proves Masterton Butchery a much larger joint.”

Like my own children today I always thought fathers were of little use, but I was pleased that mine, with his incorrigible sense of humour, had given me the opportunity to excel in a country where New Zealanders had about the same credibility as the Irish have in England.

(First published on March 31st 1999)

“Everything is funny as long as it is happening to someone else.” - Will Rogers.

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Man's inhumanity to man

The fiscal outlook for the world’s eighth largest economy Brazil looks gloomy with The Financial Times suggesting it has gone from zombie to walking dead.

I spent six weeks in the Amazon region of Brazil in 1986, leading a Rotary Group Study Exchange team. I never really felt safe the whole time I was there. I was physically assaulted on three occasions during the six weeks. I was unscathed - only my pride was hurt - thanks to people around me who came to my assistance, but I vividly remember wanting to do a papal kissing of the tarmac when I got back to Auckland airport. 

The problem with Brazil, and I guess this applies to a great many countries, is that abject poverty resides alongside audacious wealth. The two don’t co-exist and the have-nots, with little to lose, often decide to take what they want. NZ yachting hero Sir Peter Bake Blake was murdered there in 2001 and apparently died for the sake of a couple of watches and some banknotes of the near worthless Brazilian currency.

In 1986 I also found the scale of poverty in Brazil to be frightening, Back then it was claimed the majority of the wealth resided in about five percent of the populous. The biggest city at the mouth of the Amazon is Belem - pronounced Belame - short for Bethlehem, its original name. It has a population of a million and a half souls. From the air it looked like a modern metropolis with high rise buildings in abundance. At ground level it wasn’t quite so splendid. Most of the high rises were tenement buildings; concrete bunkers stacked on top of one another providing the most basic of living amenities. But the ‘favelas,’ corrugated iron lean-to shanty towns, on the outskirts of the city, were far worse and the multi-storey bunker dwellers would have considered they were comparatively well-off.

We were in Belem for two weeks before moving on to other parts in the region and while there I was billeted with a well-to-do Japanese family. They lived in a modest home by our standards, but it was pretty spectacular for Brazil. As it was surrounded by the dwellings of the poor. It was distinguishable by the bars over the windows and every evening at seven o’clock a hired armed guard would arrive, wearing a holster with two six-guns, who would parade around the house all night providing protection for the inhabitants. It was hard to sleep in that heat, despite the house being air-conditioned, and the footsteps going past the window every few minutes were an unhelpful distraction.

The poor seemed never to go to bed. No matter what time of the night you arrived home the whole population appeared to be occupying the footpaths, with the kids invariably kicking soccer balls around. Even at one or two in the morning the suburban streets were full of people. We were told their houses were so hot it was nigh impossible to sleep.

In an area that attracts few tourists we were conspicuous of course and were generally believed to be Americans, for whom the Brazilians have little respect. As you walked passed a group you would hear them say disparagingly: “Americanos Gringos!” whereupon we would hastily turn around and exclaim: “Noun, noun, Nouvelle Zealandia!” which made us much more acceptable. 

Peter Blake probably didn’t have time to make the distinction.

One city we stayed in, just up-river from Belem, was Manaus, which has the sordid reputation of being the murder capital of the world. More murders are committed there than in any other place on earth, and I understand that this is not calculated on a population basis.

There appeared to be no social welfare system in Brazil; if you didn’t have a job the government offered no handout system to get you through. Beggars line the streets, many with severe physical disabilities, and it was explained to us that this was due to polio, still rife in that country. The vaccines of the first world were unaffordable in the third world, although Rotary International programme to immunise the whole world will have meant this will not now be the case.

We visited factories where working conditions were so draconian that it made you sick to the stomach. You’d wonder where the world’s labour organisations were, but it would seem they only operate in the wealthy OECD countries.

Life expectancy was short and life was cheap. I saw a man run over by a bus one day. He died instantly, but no one ran to his aid. They all stood on the crowded footpaths and watched him lying there in a pool of blood. No ambulance came and I was told he would remain there until relatives came to claim him. I asked what the road toll was, but no one knew; no statistics are kept.

Things no doubt will have improved in the intervening 30 or so years. Inflation back then was running at 300 percent and interest rates were 1400 percent! I assume they have got their monetary system back in some semblance of order, but the poor will still be poor and the vast majority of the population will be struggling with their day-to-day living.

There is a lesson in this for us of course. Since 1986, reforms in New Zealand have hardly created the utopia promised and have most certainly resulted in a greater gap between the rich and poor. Not that we compare with the deprivation of the average Brazilian, but the trickle-down theory that didn’t work there, hasn’t worked here either.

Sir Peter Blake and the memories of him, so poignantly encapsulated in documentary films, will be an ongoing inspiration for those who follow on to complete his work which was to save species of the animal kingdom heading for extinction, but now we require some heroic leaders of his ilk to turn their attention to the human of the species.

Homo Sapiens is desperately in need of some new champions to save his own skin.

“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills to prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.” - Oliver Goldsmith 

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Forty years in the wilderness

When I was a youngster we had a wind-up gramophone. My father had received it for winning an event at harriers. The turntable used to revolve at 78 rpm, and you had to put in a new needle every time you played a record. Needles came in little tins of 100 and you bought them at local gift shop Arts and Crafts. I remember my cousin Bill Geary moved the technology forward by building a turntable powered by electricity. He made the pick-up arm out of balsa wood. This marvellous machine played the new ‘long-playing’ records that went around at 33/and a1/3 rpm and had a needle that played over and over.

There were no record shops as such back then - the popular music industry had not yet started and so the selection was limited. I was so enthralled by the electrified player that I was unwittingly exposed to classical music, which I grew to enjoy. My favourites were the Hungarian Rhapsody part 2 and The Waltz of the Flowers.

Films influenced our lives; we called them ‘pictures’ and in my early teens my unlikely hero was Mario Lanza. I saw all his films, bought all his records (our wind-up gramophone had now been replaced by a ‘radiogram’) and I even wrote to him in Hollywood expressing my admiration. I got a letter back from his secretary with an autographed picture of the great man himself. I had this framed and hung it above my bed. My parents watched me quizzically; most of my contemporaries would have had Marilyn Monroe on their bedroom walls. (Later on, when I started to take an interest in the opposite sex, mum and dad yearned for my Mario Lanza era).

I was fickle though. A new hero emerged in the form of clarinetist Benny Goodman. I saw ‘The Benny Goodman Story’ at the Regent Theatre four times. We had a music shop in the State Theatre building back then called the Geoffrey Farrell School of Music. As I recall Mr. Farrell showed a greater interest in alcohol than he did arpeggios, but I espied a second hand clarinet in his window and determined I must have it. Mr. Farrell allowed me to put it away on layby and I was soon its proud owner. I offered myself to the Wairarapa College orchestra as first clarinetist and I’ll never forget the sheer thrill of playing in an orchestra with violins, violas, cellos, and the like.

When I left college my father sent me to Palmerston North to learn the meat trade at an old and well established butcher’s shop in that city. I found myself a clarinet teacher over there and continued my studies in that instrument.

But as Bob Dylan was to later put it: “the times they were a-changing.” A fellow named Bill Haley was making his mark with a new and exciting style of music and I put a guitar on layby at a Palmerston North music shop. My music teacher, sensing the interest was waning on the clarinet said I had to choose one instrument over the other. I sought wise counsel with my landlady. She told me rock’n’roll would soon die and that clarinet music would live on forever. I listened attentively then opted for the guitar. I went to her funeral in Palmerston North seven or eight years ago. It was too late to point out that rock’n’roll had outlived her.

I taught myself to play the guitar; I sold my clarinet and bought an amplifier and when I came back to Masterton after two years in Palmerston North I formed a rock’n’roll band with a friend named Melvin Carroll. We called ourselves ‘The Drifters’ then later 'The Signatures.’ I was the band’s vocalist and alternately played guitar, bass guitar and double bass. We were the only rock’n’roll band in the Wairarapa at the time and played regularly two or three nights a week. I was making more money strumming a guitar than I was stringing sausages.

Marriage, family and business interests intervened but a couple of years ago my wife suggested we go to Wellington to the ballet. I nearly had a fit. Me go the ballet! Then I had pangs of conscience. Hadn’t I dragged her over the years to concerts of my choice, like Neil Diamond and the Shadows? I agreed to make the pilgrimage as long as I could go in disguise in case there were other people from Masterton there. I had a reputation to maintain. I didn’t want anyone to think my pre-pubescent love of Mario Lanza had more latent meanings. In the event I sneaked into the Wellington Opera House without being seen, slunk down in my seat and waited to be bored out of my brain. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I was enchanted from the minute the curtain went up. The ballet was The Nutcracker Suite and you can imagine my delight when, the orchestra suddenly burst into Waltz of the Flowers and I saw Tchaikovsky’s imagery as it was intended. I had to choke back the emotion and fight back the tears. Now I knew how the ancient Hebrews felt; I had spent forty years in the wilderness.

It’s not that the rock’n’roll we played was all that bad. The lyrics were simple love songs and the music basic 12 bar blues. As it has progressed, however, the words have got more complicated and somehow twisted in the process. There has been a sort of a darkness emerge that was never there in its infancy. Music can influence us hugely; it has a power that can either enhance or destroy. I peruse some of the lyrics from today’s offerings and can only conclude that they are concocted in depraved drug-induced minds. You hear of teenage suicides and suspect that for many, evil music had dominion over their lives. On the other side of the coin it has been discovered that classical music has healing powers and surgeons are playing it in the background during operations with amazing results.

It’s not for me to preach. I still tend to have a liking for middle of the road popular music and to date The Nutcracker Suite is the only ballet I’ve attended. But I have a belated admiration for my wise old landlady and from time to time contemplate what direction my life might have taken if my clarinet teacher had only been a bit more persistent.

(First published on 30th of September 1998)

“At every one of those concerts in England you will find rows of weary people who are there, not because they really like classical music, but because they think they ought to like it.” - George Bernard Shaw. 

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Endeavoring to hold the peace

There was a good deal of comment that the presiding priest at Prince Harry and Meghan’s wedding asked if anyone saw just cause for the couple could not be joined in holy matrimony. It was a regular feature of weddings in “my day”; I haven’t been to a wedding for some time and it seems the custom may have been discontinued. So I thought it may be appropriate to re-run this column which I wrote back on February the 24th 1999. You may find it hard to believe, but every word is true.

Marion and I tied the knot on Masterton Show day in 1963 at around 5 o’clock in the afternoon, and after the nuptials we were greeted by my butcher’s shop staff dressed as undertakers, complete with top hats, forming a guard of honour at the church door.

They and some friends had also sent off the taxis and had replaced these with horse and gigs. We were then paraded down the main street, now full of people coming home from the show, bagpipers in front, the undertakers next and the horses and two gigs with the bridal party bringing up the rear. My new bride, who hailed from Eketahuna, didn’t know what she’d struck.

I was determined to get even at the future weddings of those who had perpetrated this and I didn’t have to wait long. Lew Milne was to marry Alison Cooke in Greytown. I was to be a groomsman. Lew was a stockbuyer for Borthwick’s and he had organised the horses and carts for our wedding from Tom Hood at Kopuaranga. Retribution was in sight.

It had always occurred to me that it would be exceptionally funny if somebody responded when the minister intoned the words: “If anyone can show any just cause why these two cannot be lawfully joined together, let them now speak or hereafter forever hold their peace.” Mind you, it’s quite difficult to find anyone who will actually make a response.

Locally no one was game.

I had a friend in Wellington named Ian Dawson who owned the Sorrento coffee bar and managed The Libretto’s, New Zealand’s foremost rock band at the time, and I rang him to see if he could find an outgoing Wellingtonian who might be able to assist. He rang back and said he’d found someone, but the price would be quite high. I agreed to pay whatever it cost.

The wedding was at 4.30 p.m. at the Methodist establishment at the north end of Greytown. The groom and we groomsmen were resplendent in white ties and tails and the little church was packed; standing room only. When the minister, I’ll never forget his name, Reverend Hornblow, made the statement I was anticipating “If anyone can show any just cause (etc.) speak now or forever hold your peace.” there was the usual pregnant silence.

Then suddenly a dapper little chap in a dark suit and thin black tie came running up the aisle; “Stop the wedding, stop the wedding,” he cried. The atmosphere was electric (electric atmospheres, pregnant pauses, don’t you just love the English language?) My expensive actor person got to the startled couple, looked them up and down and said, “Oh no. Sorry! Wrong wedding” and ran back out the other aisle.

At this juncture I expected the congregation would burst out laughing, the wedding would continue without further delay, and afterwards I would be congratulated by all and sundry for organising the ultimate practical joke. Not so. Close family members of the bride suffered discomfiture; some quite seriously. Nobody laughed, not the least the Reverend Hornblow, who stumbled through the rest of the ceremony as though it was his first outing. There was a pall over the breakfast and I was sent to Coventry by most of the guests, though I must say the bride and groom took it in good humour.

On the Sunday I sat down and wrote a long letter of apology to the brides’ parents. The Methodist vestry held an emergency meeting on Monday and considered taking me before a church court to discourage other misguided humourists from attempting the same prank. However, they saw the letter I had written to Mr. and Mrs. Cooke, assumed I was repentant, and asked that a similar letter be sent to them, and all would be forgiven. I couldn’t write that second letter quickly enough.

The Sunday News in Auckland ran the story, describing me as having “a curious sense of humour,” whatever that means. They asked for comment from prominent clergy in that city. Most were strongly condemnatory.

Jokes I played at subsequent friends’ weddings were low key and more acceptable all round.

The dapper Wellingtonian who had made the foray up the church aisle was a regular patron at the Sorrento coffee bar, an Argentinean named ‘Chico.’ They never did send me the bill. I’m not sure whether they forgot or if they felt sorry for me for all the trouble I had got myself into.

I’d like to think it was the latter. Though to be fair, I probably didn’t deserve the sympathy.

“Before a marriage a man declares that he would lay down his life to serve you. After marriage he won’t even lay down his newspaper to talk to you.” - Helen Rowland.

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