The Lonely Sea and the Sky (9 page)

  During that year I had earned £700, and saved £400. I determined to go to Australia, sold my spare gear and booked a passage. This was in Wellington, and Harold had come down. He said, 'Come and meet my brother Geoffrey,' and we went into the bar of the Cecil Hotel for a drink. Geoffrey Goodwin was a man about seven years older than me, taller and very strong. He had amazingly strong wrists, covered in ginger hair. He had a freckled face, and looked somewhat like Chairman Khrushchev, with his baldish, roundish cranium and upper eyelids hooding the outer corners of his eyes, which indicated his shrewdness. He said to me, 'What are you going to do?' And when I told him he said, 'Why don't you join me in a little business I've started and become a land agent?'

  'What is a land agent?'

  'Oh, he sells land and houses and things.'

  'All right,' I said. Bang went my third attempt to reach Australia, and I became a partner of Goodwin and Chichester, Land Agents. My savings of the previous year went into a half share of the furniture and assets.

  My life seemed to split in two during the next seven-year period, between twenty-one and twenty-eight. The business half was a great success; I invested everything I owned – the money I had saved during the previous year – in Geoffrey's business at the start of it, and in seven years I was able to set off for the return visit to England which I had determined not to make until I had saved £20,000. This was book value and it was all tied up in property, but it did pay for my later flights.

  The other half of my life, my love life, was a disastrous failure. I took a bed-sitting room in a house high up the hillside above the Terrace in Wellington. From this room I had a marvellous view, looking out over the harbour. A strip of the city lay below, and only a few hundred yards away were the wharves with liners and cargo ships constantly docking and leaving. At night the twinkling lights of the buoys and ships in the harbour seen in the clear atmosphere of that place were breathtaking. But my loneliness sitting there every evening was terrible. People ask me, 'Aren't you lonely forty days in a yacht by yourself crossing the Atlantic?' But alone in the Atlantic is like a warm friendly party compared with the loneliness I felt in Wellington. New Zealand society was in sharply defined layers, and I had difficulty in distinguishing their fine differences. People all seemed much the same to me. There were strong elements in the social build-up of Scottish Presbyterianism, of Irish pub life, of English provincial, suburban, Methodist and Chapel communities. For a man and a woman to live together unmarried would have been a black social crime. The pubs all had to close at 6 o'clock in the evening, to force workers back to their wives; with the result that there was a wild rush to close offices at 5 o'clock and to drink fast and furiously till 6 o'clock if one wanted to meet and talk with one's acquaintances. After that, for a bachelor, or at least for me, there was nothing to do but sit in my room and read or work.

  I began a wretched series of love affairs. Unfortunately I never met anyone who had both a fascinating and intriguing personality, as well as the quality of arousing passionate love. A hurricane affair with one woman would perhaps set me hungrily searching for another with a personality and charming companionship. Once I had three love affairs going at the same time. I don't think my friends, whom I slowly acquired, would have been aware of these affairs. If my name was linked with any girl, it was most likely that it was only a platonic friendship. I fell madly in love with a tall blonde – not my type at all. She was friendly, but kept her love and passion in cold storage. I was so riddled with unrequited love that on one occasion I motored 40 miles at night to stare in the dark at the window of the room she was sleeping in. Then I motored back again to start work in the morning. Another time, I was sitting in my office, which was then at the top of a seven-storey building in Wellington, and from my desk I could see, at a wharf below, a ship tied up in which she was about to go to England via Sydney. Unable to concentrate on my job, I rushed down town and bought a ticket to Sydney, 1,400 miles to the west, and kept in my cabin till the ship had sailed. My loved one made a frightful fuss when she discovered that I was on board. What was so maddening about this affair was that I knew all the time that we were not suited to each other. One night in Sydney I went to a theatre alone and suddenly, after a joke on the stage, heard my friend's laugh from the circle above. It was a distinctive laugh, a ringing melody; it may have been too loud, but it slashed my heart in two that night. What a brutal thing modern love can be; how I wished I had been living in the Stone Age so that I could have grabbed her by the hair and dragged her off, or been killed in the process by a rival.

  One night I was out courting and had an interesting adventure. I motored out to the coast and was among the sand dunes close to the beach. Suddenly my friend, or shall I say
mon amie
, said, 'Look! Over there.' It was a dark overcast night but I could see on the crest of a sand dune silhouetted dense black against a less black sky a man creeping on all fours. I watched his position changing as he approached at an angle along the crest, though I could not see any movement. Then he disappeared, and I knew that he was coming down from the crest towards us. It was a thrilling excitement as he stalked us. There was no one within miles, not a sound of him could be heard above the subdued roar of the Pacific breakers and the rustle of the nearby dune grass in the light breeze. He had completely disappeared, and I had no idea whether he carried a gun or a knife. I took off my spectacles and passed them to my companion to hold. Suddenly she squeezed my arm and whispered, 'There.' I turned my head half left, and stared into the dark with my short sight. 'There.' Then I saw a black form. It was stationary. I could see no movement but suddenly it was nearer, close. When I thought the distance down to six feet I sprang! He was off like a streak, away, over a low dune, towards the beach. There was a steep hard bank down to the beach. He went down it at full speed and fell at the bottom. I jumped on to his body, pinned down his spread-eagled arms with my knees, and seized his throat with both hands. I had him. He stopped struggling. Then the whole thing struck me as grotesquely comic, and I wanted to laugh. I loosed my hold and said, 'Now, explain.' He told some cock-and-bull story about hunting for his girl who had gone off with another man. There was nothing I could think of doing. I suppose that if he had been going to murder me I could not legally defend myself until I had been killed. So I let him go. I should be surprised if he stalked anybody else for a good while, however, and, after all, he had provided a great thrill. I had found being hunted could be more thrilling than being the hunter.

  I fell in love with another young girl, and this ended disastrously. She was a sweet, charming brunette. I was passionately in love, and when she steadfastly resisted everything else, I asked her to marry me. Before we were married I knew, or felt, with a dreadful sinking feeling, that it was a blunder; but I was fettered by some terrible code of honour and we got married. I was only twenty-three at the time, and three years later my personality seemed to have changed completely. I was leading a tremendously active life, while she retreated farther and farther into a narrow circle of domesticity. Sometimes I would get into my car and drive all night, mostly over primitive potholed roads, to reach Rotorua, 350 miles to the north, next morning. Then I would go off on some shooting or camping escapade with Harold Goodwin. Finally my wife and I parted, and she went off with our son George to live with her family.

  All this period I was homesick and lonely and unhappy without knowing why. I had left England soon after leaving school without having any girlfriends. And I had had no chance to mix with any grown up social set. When I watch Giles, now sixteen, who is at Westminster School, and the lively, bright, active, press-on set of girls and boys in equal numbers with which he mixes, when I see the number of problems, serious and frivolous which they tackle with no inhibition, I realise what a restricted, inhibited youth I had.

  My business career was just as successful as my other life was disastrous. Geoffrey Goodwin already had a ghastly old-fashioned office at Lower Hutt. It was really a shop with the bottom half of the wide shop window painted bright green, and clear plate glass above. For these undesirable premises he paid a rent of ten shillings a week. He had acquired the local agency of the State Fire Insurance Department, the only nationalised concern I have found to compare with private enterprise for efficiency. There were 1,500 houses on the books, and our commission on the premiums paid for an office girl.

  When I started work I found that I had not the slightest idea of how a house was built, or what it was made of. Our first need was to get an agency for more houses to sell, so I started hunting round Lower Hutt (which was like a small suburb) calling on houseowners, to ask if they wanted to sell their houses. One of my first victims asked me what I reckoned his house was worth; I guessed a figure – £5,000 – and he burst out laughing; the house was worth about £1,500. However, it was not long before I could value a house to within £10 of its building cost.

  With Geoff's shrewdness and my press-on vitality, we soon began to make a success of the job. At the start, customers looking for a house or land did not come to us but went to the old-established firms in the township across the bridge on the other side of the Hutt River. However, on the way from the railway station they had to pass our office and I soon got to know the expression on a buyer's face and used to dart out and waylay him. Success depended on summing up a man's character and taste so well that one knew better than he did himself what was the best sort of house for him. This may sound smug, and naturally we had our failures, but it was surprising how many successes we had too. I found quickly that even if one could tell what was the most suitable property after a minute or two's talk, it would be inviting failure to take the customer straight to it. I always showed him the second-best property first, which I didn't think quite right for him. After three years we moved on to the Main Street across the cantilever bridge with a framework of squared, unpainted timber baulks above the roadway. We bought the baker's shop with his dwelling place behind the shop and the baker's oven. We had the wooden shop and five-roomed house jacked up, moved and resettled on concrete piles, so that we could build three new shop fronts facing the High Street. It was a corner lot, and we hid the old weatherboard wooden side of the dwelling with stucco on expanded wire netting. We made the corner shop into our new office.

  All this time I was working immensely hard. One night, after midnight, I was sitting alone in the office working at the accounts (I did all the book-keeping myself), there was no sound in the township, and I must have been concentrating on what I was doing to the exclusion of all else. Suddenly, I became aware of a mouse burrowing into my thigh against my skin; it had run right up my leg inside my trousers without disturbing me. I pinned it against my groin from outside with one hand, and with difficulty, as gently as I could, caught it with my other hand. As it had showed such trust in a human creature, I reciprocated as best I could; I left the office with it; and walked 200 yards to a fine garden which I thought a good place for a mouse and there let it go.

  One day we bought a fifty-acre property at an auction sale. This was 30 miles from Wellington, the capital city, and we named it 'The Plateau'. It was a flat rectangle of land, deserted, with plenty of evergreen native trees dotted about; there were also some man­planted exotics, cypresses, firs and the like which gave it a park-like appearance. A stream running from end to end had cut its way down to a lower level leaving a sheer gravel cliff 100 feet high in places. Before leaving the property, this little stream meandered round a razor-back ridge covered with tiny-leaved native birch trees. The saddleback of the ridge was sharp enough to sit astride it. It was a fascinating spot, and I used to love the days we spent there, walking about and planning its development. We ate our picnic lunch beside the stream to the tune of the cicadas zizzing in the heat. It was a social crime to chop this heavenly spot into small bits for weekend cottages, but if we had not done so, somebody else would have. We built a half mile road through it, cut it into fifty allotments and made a financial success of it.

  I advocated giving up our agency work, and selling only our own property. Finally Geoffrey agreed to this; I think he got bored with hearing me plug away at the theme that 'you cannot broke and deal at the same time'. We sold the goodwill of our land agency business with a lease of the shop we owned, and moved into offices in Wellington. Next we bought a property at Silverstream, about 10 miles from Wellington, and started developing that. It was 1,100 acres.