What Was I Thinking: A Memoir (2 page)

THE FACT MY FATHER’S
mother was a gypsy had been a family secret — secret because in England the gypsies are the lowest of the low. They still are. My mother, Olive, was told, well after she and my father had moved to New Zealand, by one of the family friends: ‘Well, of course, Gladys was a gypsy.’ Apparently, my grandfather stole her from a gypsy camp when she was very young. So, predictably, there hadn’t been much contact with that side of the family subsequently. Looking back — the earrings, the plastic jewellery, all that hair — how could anyone not have known? And if you look at my father, Brian, you can see it with the complexion and the dark hair. But it had been a
secret and my mother decided to keep it a secret because she thought everyone else would be as appalled as the people who had told her.

We weren’t great communicators as a family. When my mother finally told me, I thought it was fantastic — I finally had something interesting in my background. Not long after that, I was driving over the Rimutaka hills with my father and I said, ‘I’ve heard that we’re gypsies.’ I didn’t know whether he had been told himself, and I couldn’t tell from his non-committal reaction whether or not he already knew.

‘There’ll never be a battle over land if you’re a gypsy,’ was all he said.

He was Brian Henry Hopes. It was decided all of the men in our direct line would be called Henry or their middle name would be Henry. I was Paul Henry Hopes but I dropped the Hopes officially when I was standing for Parliament. I thought it might be a problem because everyone knew me as Paul Henry, which is what I called myself on the radio. You have to have your full legal name on the ballot form, so I changed it officially.

Both my parents were born in England. My mother was lower working class and worked at Imperial Tobacco in Bristol. All she knew was the one street where she lived and worked. She had no father, which meant she was regarded as a bastard, and in those days that actually mattered. My father’s family were a bit better off, probably upper working class, but the family lost a lot of money during the war. They lost quite a bit when Granddad went to the war, as a lot of people did. My father finished school and used to spend all his time at the library teaching himself about engineering. He worked as an engineer on the railway. He was a bad father and a bad husband but he saved my mother from a life of abject mediocrity by bringing her out to New Zealand and by making her step well outside her comfort zone.

The move to New Zealand came after they got married and would have been all his doing. The journey was the important thing. I don’t know that he’d worked out what was going to happen when he arrived. The plan was for him to come out and establish a base and for her to follow. He made sure the journey would take the longest possible time by deciding to travel overland in a Bedford van. He bought the vehicle and found some people to pay for the privilege of making the journey with him. It was quite innovative and even got newspaper coverage. It wasn’t an easy trip and there were several near-death experiences on the way. When they got to Nairobi, two of the guys decided they had had enough and they booked their passage from the port to carry on by train. On their last night together they were in a market where there was a fortune teller and they decided to get their fortunes told.
The first guy went in, sat down and showed the woman his palm. She told him all the usual vague stuff that anyone could have made up. When the next guy went in and held out his hand the woman closed it up.

‘I can’t tell you your future,’ she said. ‘I can’t see your future.’ She wouldn’t take any money from him.

My father was third and again got the vague generalisations we’re used to from
Sensing Murder
. But when the last of the group went in she folded his hand up and again said she could not tell him his future. He was a bit more persistent than the other guy.

‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘Why can’t you tell me my future?’ He kept on at her.

‘Because you don’t have a future,’ she finally said.

Later they realised that the two guys who didn’t get their futures told were the two who were leaving the group. Two days later, the train they were on slipped down a bank into a river and Dad and his remaining passenger had to go and identify their bloated bodies.

I think Dad was an atheist, and certainly the least gullible man alive. He really wrestled with this whole incident. He tried to calculate what the odds were that the fortune teller would refuse to tell the fortune of the two going on the train, then of them dying so soon after her saying they had no future. He was a man who needed answers to questions and it haunted him for years that he could not explain this.

Eventually my mother came out too and there was tension there because she desperately wanted children and my father almost equally desperately didn’t. He didn’t want anything that would tie him down. I was an only child. My mother got pregnant again, but the child was stillborn. I was 15 months old. My mother had planned to call him Andrew. It was one of those terrible cases where the new baby had died but she had to
deliver it normally and endure weeks of people asking her when the baby was due.

As a result of his attitude, my father didn’t care for me when I was very young although I became slightly interesting later on, when I was less needy. I used to clash with his perfectionism. He found me difficult because I had a very short attention span when I was young — and an even shorter one when I was older, for that matter. He would try to slow me down to get things perfect and in so doing he could suck all the fun out of a day.

Once I found the old plastic hull of a toy boat and decided to paint it. I showed it to my father when he came home, and he couldn’t understand I could be so stupid as not to realise the drag that the paint would impose on the hull. I had to scrape the paint off. Doing that, of course, I scratched the hull and the drag was now extraordinary. But he was happy because the paint was off.

He once made a Meccano cable car which totally enchanted me. But I wasn’t allowed to touch it or any of his Meccano bits and pieces in case I damaged them.

He was a marine engineer and spent a lot of time travelling the world, making things work when other people stuffed up. I idolised him, I still do. I loved him desperately and missed him when he was away. He was a true adventurer and when he came back he would fill my mind with amazing stories, some of which may not have been true or were embellishments of the truth. I saw him do enough amazing things myself to believe they probably were.

He was interested in conservation and the way things grew, but if nature’s interests came into conflict with man’s, man always came first. If there were people who needed water and bush had to be cut down to get it to them, then the bush was cut down. This happened on one occasion overseas where environmentalists were trying to stop his project going ahead.
In the end he said to them, ‘Obviously we’re going nowhere here with this project, we’re at a stalemate. Why don’t I take you for a drive and show you how beautiful this bloody island really is.’ He hired buses for the environmentalists and while they were around the other side of the island his men cleared the part that needed to be cleared to get the pipes through with explosives.

If he hit a possum he would stop to make sure there weren’t any babies that needed looking after. If there were he brought them home in the boot and usually managed to nurse them back to life. One day he found a baby octopus and brought it home in a milk bottle filled with seawater. The intention was to keep it for a few days and then throw it back out to sea. My mother put the milk bottle in the sink, surrounded by water to keep it cool, and of course the damn thing crawled out of the bottle and into the fresh water and died. He got very annoyed with my mother if he left her to look after something and it perished.

Once he had just finished a long day’s work and was getting ready to leave the site when someone heard mooing. They found a cow that had got stuck in mud and, tired as he was, he climbed in and spent the night holding its head above water until he could work out and organise how to get the cow out.

He used to marvel in the smallest of things, plus the most complex of things, and obviously imparted that to me. He also loved gelignite, which he used in his work, and had several gelignite storage sheds that he rented on farms in the middle of nowhere. They looked like farm sheds, but really they were arsenals.

‘I’ll take you for a drive,’ he said to my mother and me one day, which was unusual in itself. We were heading for the coast when he stopped at a farm gate.

‘I’m just going to pop in here and grab something quickly.’ He headed over to a shed and I ran after him.

‘Don’t come in here,’ he said. ‘You’ll get a headache. It’s full of jelly.’

I wondered why jelly would give me a headache but
apparently
gelignite does. Eventually he emerged with a box of detonators and a box of gelignite and put them in the boot and we drove to the beach.

‘We’ll go for a wander down to the beach,’ he said. ‘There’s just something I want to have a look at.’

This was at the beginning of the iron-sands project in New Zealand, a search for ways of extracting the iron content from sand, and he was calculating which type of gelignite, buried at what level, would shift the most sand. As we were walking to the beach we had to climb over a stile. My mother grabbed hold of an old piece of wood as she was climbing over and it snapped. And so did my father: ‘Marvellous isn’t it? God knows how long that bit of stick has been there. God knows how many people have climbed over that stile. None of them snapping that piece of wood and now no one will be able to hold on to it again.’ Within an hour of him saying that he would be blowing huge holes in God’s beach.

Mum sat down with a magazine and Dad and I laid the gelignite. Then we had to stand well back.

‘Where should we stand, Dad?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know where we should stand, do I?’ said my father. ‘Would I be here experimenting with gelignite if I knew where to stand? That’s the whole point.’

So we stood right back at the car and watched these
phenomenal
explosions. I couldn’t wait to get on the beach and ran towards one of these holes to see how big it was. ‘Don’t get too close or you’ll be consumed by sand,’ my father called out. And at that point I was sucked under. Everything went black but he managed to haul me out without too much trouble.

Predictably, he hated bureaucrats and unnecessary rules
and regulations, another trait I’ve inherited from him. On one occasion we had to take a boat he had designed down a river to drop something off. It became grounded at the side because the channel had moved since the chart he was using had been made and because the boat was sitting so low in the water. Someone pulled over in a small boat.