The Lonely Sea and the Sky (8 page)

  I had my first experience of solitude while Dibbs was away on this extended binge. The bush was lovely, but seemed sad and lonely. The beautiful silvery notes dropped one by one by the bell birds and tuis became the most monotonous and lonely sound after I had been alone for a few days. My thinking got slower, until it seemed to be done word by word with long periods between. Solitude had a strong effect on me at twenty. I think I needed more to do. During the day, digging in the river, there was the urge of gambling fever, the gnawing hope of striking it rich. It was at night, after cooking the meal, that loneliness took charge. Once I heard a kiwi call.

  We were short of stores, and while Dibbs was away so long I got very hungry. One day I went into the bush and shot a kaka (a native New Zealand bird of the parrot species). By scratching a stone on the edge of a tin matchbox to imitate their harsh squawk I attracted a dozen of these birds down to a tree. They flew in and out of the tree and round it, making a frightful din. Now I am sorry I shot that interesting bird, but then I was glad. It was good to eat and I was hungry.

  We cooked in our big iron camp oven. In order to bake 'damper', which is unleavened bread, we used to hang the oven high above the log fire and pile hot ashes on the lid.

  During six months we won enough gold to pay for our food. The biggest nugget we found was 9 dwt or 3/8 oz. Afterwards I made a ring out of it for a girlfriend.

  One day, when I got back with stores, feeling hot and exhausted, I came into the hut to find Dibbs sitting by the door. I was annoyed that he was not out working in the river while I had been struggling through the bush. 'Oh, I don't have to go into the river to get gold,' he said jauntily. He had found a tin of gold that had been cached underneath the hut. All the gold and the colours were rusty, so that it must have been there for a long time. Unless he had dumped it there himself, I thought that he must have smelt it.

When I left England I had made up my mind that I would not return until I had saved £20,000. Gold digging showed no sign of bringing me closer to this target. One day in the pub a man said to me, 'Why don't you become a book agent?' 'What's that?' 'A man who calls from house to house selling books. A lot of money can be made at it, but you have to do it in Sydney.'

  So once more I set off for Australia. On the way through Christchurch I called on the editor of
The Christchurch Press
to try to sell him my story of the gold strike. He said that he was always getting such things and wasn't interested. He did, however, buy a snapshot of a gold dredge that I had taken, and for which he paid me five shillings.

  When I told him what I was going to do he said, 'Why not sell the Weekly Press?' So bang went my second attempt to reach Australia. I went north to Wellington, and started canvassing from door to door for yearly subscriptions to the
Weekly
Press
. The arrangement had been that I was to get a commission and travelling expenses but his accounts department must have been surprised when I immediately started earning £400 a year in commission and they 'reneged' on the expenses. That was not my style, so I quit.

  Then I was offered a job selling a book-keeping system to farmers. Five guineas covered the cost of a ledger and two years' making up of income tax returns from it. I was sent out with the sales manager to learn the job, and I was eager and impatient to start. When my opportunity came, I went through my sales talk to a farmer and at the end he had agreed to take on the system and said, 'What about a cheque for you?' 'Oh,' I said, 'you've already signed it and it's in my pocket.'

  This was a tough job, and only one other salesman beside myself, out of sixty-one, stuck it for a year, which was the target I had set myself. I found that if I could visit five farms in a day, I was fairly sure of making two sales, but if I could go to as many farms as I liked I would make no sales at all. To get round the country I bought a motor-bicycle. I had looked forward for a long time to having one. (I used to be keen on ordinary bicycling, and when at school used to bicycle home sometimes, sleeping under a haystack, or trying to sleep while listening to a nightingale singing in a nearby bush.) This motorbike had a clutch but no gearbox, and could be started only by running it along the road. I set off from Wellington, and the first obstacle to climb was the Rimutaka Range. I climbed 7 miles up these hills, until I reached a sharp corner that was protected from the wind by a high palisading on each side. The wind funnelled down that gully in gale blasts, and some cars had been blown over the side. At this corner the wind stalled me. I could not restart the motor-bicycle by running up the steep hill; when I started it downhill, and then turned to head uphill, the engine stalled as soon as I let in the clutch. I was a hot man before I gave up, and coasted back to the bottom to start afresh. Next time I came up with a rush and, knowing the hill better, I got round the corner and over the summit. When I reached the Up Country in the middle of North Island, where I was due to start work, most of the roads were still unmetalled. The surface was volcanic clay, and became so greasy after a shower of rain that the back wheel skidded to one side or the other and the motorbike would not stay on the road.

  I turned up in Taihape again, and bought an old Ford five-seater, with a hood. I paid £120 for it. It was worth £60, but I was new to business. I added a bicycle and a tent to my gear, and set off in the car. My technique was to drive to a new territory, and pitch camp there. I got so used to this that within twenty-five minutes of stopping the car, I could be lying on my folding campbed ready to sleep after unpacking the gear, driving tent pegs in all round, erecting the poles and rigging the tent, laying out my gear and the campbed inside, and getting undressed. Next morning I would set off on the bicycle. I found that this limited the number of farmers I could see to an average of five a day, which was what I wanted. I set out with my mind made up to get two sales out of the five, and I nearly always got them.

  I gradually worked up the centre of North Island, until I approached Rotorua, the famous thermal district. I finished one day's work some miles south of Rotorua and had to pitch camp in the dark. The countryside was covered in manuka scrub, also called 'ti-tree'. This grows nearly as dense as bamboo, and frequently it is only possible to pass through it by slashing a track. I had trouble finding an open space for my tent, but at last I did, and was soon asleep in the usual way. During the night I was several times woken up by a strange noise, a kind of bubbling, rumbling noise. I looked out of the tent, and could see nothing strange, so went to sleep again. In the morning I found that I had pitched camp on a dried lake of volcanic mud, and the noises I had heard during the night came from pools of boiling mud about five feet away from the tent pegs. This blue-grey mud slowly formed into bubbles up to a foot in diameter, which kept on increasing until they burst with a loud plop. Other noises were rumbles underneath, and hisses of escaping steam.

  I used Rotorua for my base while working the outlying district every day. I found it a fascinating place. Quite apart from the usual tourist attractions, it had a strange – indeed, unique – atmosphere. I don't mean the nauseating smell of sulphur, which was ever present, but the eeriness. Now I understood why people went back to live on the slopes of Vesuvius after their villages and the people in them had been destroyed. Rotorua could be destroyed any day by a giant eruption, but not only do the people not worry about this, it seems to add a spice to life there. The soil of pumice and volcanic sand is exotic; there are hot and cold rivers, boiling mud, geysers, and earthquakes. The cold lakes and rivers grow some of the biggest trout in the world.

  I stayed in a rambling old wooden hotel of one storey called Brent's (all the buildings have to be, or should be, of wood because of the earthquakes). One day we left our lunch there, and rushed off to the edge of the lake. The owner of a little wooden bungalow wanted a supply of water for his detached wooden wash-house at the back, and proceeded to sink an artesian well through the middle of the floor. When we arrived a geyser had blown the roof off the wash-house, and was playing sixty feet into the air through it.

  Once I went pheasant shooting (or perhaps it would be fairer to say
trying
to shoot a pheasant) over the site of the Tarawera village which had been overwhelmed by the great eruption in the nineteenth century. It was now an arid flat plain, with a few clumps of manuka. It was queer to think of the village, perhaps still intact, several hundred feet below our feet. In Rotorua I became friendly with a man named Harold Goodwin. He was a queer cuss, very quiet spoken; he really ought to have been a Maori chief because he was so adept at grunting. We used to laugh at his views on women; the girls thought them a great joke. He was like a public schoolboy in the way he regarded women as a nuisance and a useless hindrance to enjoyment of life. But Harold had the laugh later: he made one of the happiest marriages I know to an adoring wife, and thirty years later he sailed from England to New Zealand in a yacht crewed by himself and his two daughters. He was an excellent companion for me, and we went on many little expeditions together. Later, he was indirectly responsible for my life's being changed.

  In the First World War he had joined the New Zealand Navy and had commanded a torpedo boat patrolling the English Channel, until he got TB and was invalided out. In Rotorua he was an architect, and a most ingenious one. Among the things he had devised was a folding canvas canoe, then a new idea. To try this out we set off to the Bay of Plenty and launched the canoe in an estuary. That wasn't enough for him, and we had to proceed across the bar out to the open sea. We survived; later we motored up to the Bay of Islands and he introduced me to sailing. We rented a seventeen-foot half-decked yacht from a Maori. As we were hard up, we could not afford a dinghy. Each evening we sailed the boat as close inshore as possible, one of us dropped off to wade ashore, and the other sailed the boat out and anchored it, before swimming ashore. In the morning we reversed the process.

  One day we were fishing in the middle of the Bay of Islands in twenty fathoms. Even in this volcanic country I was intensely surprised when suddenly the bottom of the sea came up alongside us, a great grey-brown bank. This could be a serious matter. Fortunately, it moved away slowly, and we were relieved to find that it was only a whale. We had good sport fishing but it was not entirely on our side. Once, when Harold bent down to pick up a fish lying on the deck, it seized him by the finger and bit him to the bone Harold flung his hand back so violently that the fish shot off back to the sea. As he was alternately dancing his arm about madly and sucking his finger, he could not see how funny it was. I could.

  After that we could not get the anchor free. We tacked and jibbed and sailed in all directions, but nothing would shift that anchor. We put a four-gallon kerosene tin down the cable in the hopes that it would work the anchor free, but no luck. Finally we had to cut the cable. Now we had no anchor, and no dinghy. We set off for Russell, which used to be the capital of New Zealand, and was then a small township on the east side of the bay. As we approached the long wooden jetty night was falling, and the wind dropped until we were barely moving. Presently we could see people hurrying down the jetty until it seemed that the entire population of Russell was collecting there. As soon as we were within hail, somebody sang out, 'Is that you, James MacDougall?' The only answer to this was, 'No'. The figures began drifting along the jetty the other way, and by the time we made it there was no one to take a line from us. They had thought we were the first boat of the Auckland to Bay of Islands annual 200-mile race. That was my first experience of an ocean race.

  Once, after a day's selling I found myself 10 miles from my tent and car by road, but only a mile away across country.

  All that I had to do was to cross two valleys, and to climb a steep ridge between them. This I set out to do carrying the bicycle on my back. The creek had cut deeply into the soft volcanic soil of the valleys, so that I had some precipitous cliffs to negotiate. The ridge had not long ago been virgin forest, and scorched trunks lay all over it. In addition, it was steep on both sides. I did succeed in completing the traverse, but next morning I woke up with a bad attack of jaundice. A doctor told me that I must give up drinking whisky for life or it would kill me. Fortunately I didn't take his advice.

  I had sworn to stick out my selling job for a year, and when I came to the end of the year I thought I would do one more week for some pocket money to have a spree. When I turned out the next day, the first of my extra week, I not only failed to make a sale, but realised that I could not have made another one for £1,000.