What Was I Thinking: A Memoir

MY MOTHER’S ARTISTIC PROWESS
is displayed in this book at its absolute finest.

I NEVER IMAGINED
I
would ever have the time, energy, patience or inclination to write a book. In short, the heartbeats. Over the years, on numerous occasions, people have said, you should write a book. I always openly mocked the suggestion. However, finding myself somewhat unexpectedly with a bit of spare time — ‘thank you, New Zealand On Air’ — and being approached by Paul Little and Random House to write my memoirs, I thought, how hard can it be? … What are memoirs?

For the sake of clarification, in my book, memoirs are nothing more than memories: the memories I hold of my life at this point in time. As such they are 100 per cent accurate. I give my
personal guarantee that everything in this book is exactly as I remember it. It may have never happened, but this is, I promise you, how I recall my life and circumstances. It’s by no means a complete picture for a number of reasons. First, I have found that even remembering things is quite hard work; second, if I remembered it all, the book would be just too long; and third, I have decided to keep two areas of my life private and so not remember anything about either of them. Those two areas are philanthropy and romance.

As for what remains, I have made absolutely no effort to check or in any way clarify names, dates, places or any of the tedious things often referred to as facts. I’m just far too busy with all my philanthropy and romance. I would just say this though: knowing me, as I do, there is just as much chance the fish in this book were bigger than I remember them as there is they were smaller. Indeed over the years, recounting my stories to people, I have often pedalled back on some of the true detail because of its unbelievability.

MY FATHER NEVER CAME
home in a bad mood. He would almost always arrive excited to tell my mother and me about something amazing that had happened in his day.

I had just started at Cockle Bay School in Auckland when he came home one day to find me talking to my mother about swimming lessons we were going to have. He was surprised to learn that his son couldn’t already swim.

‘Go and put your togs on,’ he said. ‘We are going down to the sea and I’m going to teach you to swim.’

It was late in the day and I sometimes used to get scared going to the beach if it was getting dark because it was quite a
long walk through the bush from our house to the water. But I wasn’t at all scared this time. I thought it was cool — my dad and me, doing man stuff together.

We clambered up on some rocks at the water’s edge.

‘Here’s the thing,’ he said, bending down to me. ‘People float. The thing that stops people from floating and the reason people drown is they panic and they flay their arms around and push themselves down under the water, which is where you’ll die. What I want you to remember when I throw you in is, essentially, if you do nothing you will float. Swimming has nothing to do with staying alive. Floating will keep you alive. I’m not interested in quality. We’re talking about saving your life.’

He was very good at taking things that could be quite complex and making them simple. Then he picked me up and threw me out off the rocks into the sea.

I hit the water and not one part of me thought I wouldn’t be able to swim. I didn’t have to do anything. I was gasping a bit, but I was floating. Then I started to move a little. Water was going in my mouth and I was spluttering a bit.

‘You see?’ he called out. ‘Now, you’re moving slightly so you’re swimming. You’re doing very, very well. When you finally get to shore here, we’ll go up and you can tell your mother that tomorrow you’re going to school to tell everyone that you can swim.’

Then he started explaining to me about moving my arms and when I got to shore I didn’t get out. I turned around and swam back out, swam in, swam out, swam in again. By the time I went home I was a swimmer.