What Was I Thinking: A Memoir (21 page)

Prime Minister Jenny Shipley came to help. That may have been my idea, but it was not a vote-winning manoeuvre at this stage. I took her around some schools and a couple of
businesses. We made the most of photo opportunities, and the media followed along obligingly.

I got to sit in her car and it infuriated me that she didn’t have the New Zealand flag flying. I thought then and there, one day I’ll be the Prime Minster and I’ll have the New Zealand flag flying on my car all the time, even when I’m not in it. Why bother being Prime Minister if you’re not going to have your country’s flag flying on the official car?

I had a New Zealand flag flying on my old $6000 Volvo, which was painted with my election advertising. I still have the New Zealand and US flags flying at my home. I got a lot of flak just for driving a Volvo, even though it was the cheapest car I ever owned. People used to boo as I drove around the district. Whether they were booing me, the car or the flag I’m still not sure.

However, Jenny Shipley was very generous with her time, and we ended the day back at Homebush with a do for about 80 key supporters. It was very pleasant but I remember it most because the girls climbed up onto the landing on our big staircase in the vestibule when she finished making her speech, and Sophie thanked her and handed her a New Zealand flag that she had bought in the two-dollar shop the day before.

The family were brilliant throughout. The girls turned up to dreary functions in their party frocks and Rachael worked hard to keep the day-to-day domestic worries in the background. I was so proud of them. We had campaign headquarters at the house, which wasn’t easy. I didn’t focus enough on the family that year because I was very worried about the election slipping away from me. I was in to win. Campaigning wasn’t a part-time job. I used to look at my rivals and see them doing their day jobs while electorate organisations were doing the work for them.

My father came to visit me once during the campaign. He was based between Singapore and Australia at the time. It was
typical of him to just turn up every couple of years or so. ‘I’m in New Zealand. I’m in a rental car, I’m on my way down’ or ‘I’m in Wellington, I’ve just arrived. Can you come and pick me up?’

He didn’t have much time for politicians, and I was increasingly coming to share his views, but I think he may have been a little bit proud because he gave me a cheque for $10,000.

‘This is just to help out,’ he said. That meant a lot, and it did help because I was making no money and my overdraft just kept going up.

I lost the election. Once again, the exciting part of the project would have been getting in. I saw myself possibly as a one-term politician but there were things I wanted to achieve in that one term. I wanted to shake the country up and also have the chance to be an honest politician. I suspect I could be Prime Minister by now if I had succeeded. If you have a look at the way things went when Labour got in and the way National completely disintegrated, it was that National intake who are in very strong positions now. I was the orator. I had the dream. I could see the light. But it wasn’t to be. No matter.

There’s a wonderful photograph which the
Wairarapa
Times-Age
took on election night. It shows Wyatt and me in the Frank Cody Lounge of the Masterton Town Hall. There is no mistaking that we have lost.

The night itself was torture because I knew what the result was going to be, but our figures were among the last to come in. I was in the odd position of waiting for the inevitable to occur. But there were people around me who had still not accepted that I would not win. They spent the evening saying things like ‘Shit, it’s not looking good. Obviously, we’re going to win but it’s going to be close’, before moving on to ‘Just a couple of booths could change everything’, and ‘It’s not over till it’s over’; so when the final result came they were genuinely shocked and that shock and disappointment is somehow contagious.

And, of course, I had to make my dignified, conciliatory, morale-boosting, gracious speech of concession at the end of the evening, when all I wanted to say was, ‘I told you so. Maybe if we’d done it another way it would have been different.’ As well as myself and my family I felt I had disappointed my wonderful campaign team. The National Party had disappointed me.

Soon afterwards, true to form, the
Wairarapa Times-Age
ran a story about how bitter I must have been because I hadn’t taken the election stickers off my car. It was the only car I had, and they had seen me driving around the day after the election with my campaign paint job still on it. Apparently candidates who are not bitter stay up all night peeling election stickers off their cars when they lose. Like most newspapers, they have their fair share of arseholes.

A few years later I was asked to comment on that time, and I said I didn’t win because of the pig ignorance in the electorate. That has been quoted several times subsequently by the
Wairarapa Times-Age
— quite recently, in fact. 

WHEN RACHAEL AND I
got married my vision for a family extended exactly as far as one daughter. In the end I got three. I don’t know why I wasn’t keen on having a boy. Perhaps because boys are lovely for a while but then they turn into people like me. A daughter, on the other hand, seemed like a fine thing.

I had just moved a step beyond my father. ‘You don’t want too many children,’ he advised me. That was rich, coming from someone who hadn’t wanted any. At least I was up for one. Actually, I was up for two, because when Rachael got pregnant I said to myself, ‘If this is a boy we will definitely be having another one.’

Lucy was born in 1988 in the old maternity annex of Masterton Hospital in the middle of a horrendous storm that rattled its old foundations. Trucks were blown over on the road that night. Because I was the breakfast host on Radio Wairarapa, which passed for a celebrity in those parts, there was a photo of us in the
Wairarapa Times-Age
the next morning. Next to it was a picture of a truck lying on its side. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would be even slightly interested in what had happened to the truck and its driver when they could be looking at my daughter.

I wasn’t brilliant with babies. I couldn’t do the nappy thing. Actually, I could. I had to deal with far worse, far more fully developed nappy situations as an international correspondent. But in the case of the children I reasoned there was no point us both getting our hands dirty, and since Rachael was going to be there all the time, it made sense for her to be the one.

Our parenting was very structured. Rachael stopped teaching to be a stay-at-home mum. What’s more, she enjoyed it. She is one of those natural mothers who love every bit of it and excel at every aspect of parenting. She was even good with other mothers and had get togethers in the house. I occasionally came home to find a circle of topless women in my lounge with their breasts out and wondered why I didn’t find it even remotely attractive.

It soon become clear that left to her own devices Rachael would have kept conceiving well into double figures. I was more than happy when she wanted a second child. Sophie was born two years later and Bella two years after that.

Every time the subject comes up people say, ‘Did you want a boy?’ as though we kept trying in order to rectify a mistake of nature. Obviously, not having a son meant I missed out on things like rugby practice. Equally obviously, given my lack of interest in sport, that has not been a sacrifice. Fortunately, none of the girls was particularly interested in ball sports.

Lucy was spectacularly uncoordinated but would give anything a go. Having a go and not persisting has always been my philosophy and I’ve always made that clear to them.

Lucy could never be accused of not giving things a go — she was in the choir, lead performer in the musical at the school, did ballet and tried ball sports. She got so excited if she touched the ball. Usually if it came near her she threw her hands in the air and you could see her thinking, ‘Am I supposed to touch that?’

Rachael is an academic and believes academic qualifications are vital. I, on the other hand, believe personality will carry you through anything. I worry that being hell-bent on academic achievement can suck the life blood out of a human being. If you can manage both, that’s great.

I wanted them to have a similar childhood to mine — but without the emotionally distant father. I wanted them to enjoy freedom, be close to nature and have the opportunity to try lots of experiences.

In Carterton, and later in Homebush, they could come home, dump their bags on the floor and head straight out into the garden. They made up songs and games. They loved trees. Some of our trees had huge supple branches they could play on like rocking horses. They gave some of them names, like Jockey Rocky Lines. We had a deep hedgerow in front of the house, made up of trees that were deciduous so you could just see through it in the winter, but in summer it was completely impenetrable. They were convinced, partly because I had convinced them, that fairies lived in the hedgerow. Sophie saw the fairies from her room. We created a magical world. I had a full stage built into the hedgerow, wired with twinkly lights as well as spotlights and a sound system for when we put on shows. At Christmas I hired a performer to host the evening and we invited the whole street. They came with blankets and sat on the lawn while all the kids did a turn. It was the professional’s
job to encourage everyone and most of the neighbours got up and did something.

But to some extent, both the international correspondent work and then my attempt to win Wairarapa brought the magic to an end. Magic is time-consuming and takes a lot of energy. I didn’t value it quite as much then as I do now. Those were the best years of my life and I had no idea. If there is one thing that I would change, if I could go back, I would try to appreciate more the value of that time.

One of the things that’s organised very badly in life is that most of us have small children at an age when we are also focused on things that we hope will establish our — and their — security and prosperity. You know these lovely things are happening here and now but you’re also focused on the future. And you kid yourself you are doing things that take you away from your children for your children. I was looking forward to being able to take the kids wherever we wanted and being able to do whatever we wanted. But what was happening at the time was better than anything we could have done.

It’s nice to be able to give them all university educations but they will probably be able to do that themselves if you’ve set them up properly. The important thing is to just live in the moment at that time and just exploit it for all its worth. It’s basically the only thing I’ve learnt in my entire life that’s worth learning. Not only is it the carefree time when children should be having fun, it’s also the time when money matters least. Kids don’t know if you have lots of money and they certainly don’t want it themselves. They have no idea. I used to think the people having a cup of tea and a lamington at Farmers were rich. One point on which Rachael and I differed considerably was our attitude to safety. I wasn’t really that interested in it, to be honest. Thanks to her, we were probably the first family in the southern hemisphere to embrace fully the concept of the car seat.

How and why to say no to your child

How: Say ‘no’.

Why: I was walking along the street with Bella, my youngest daughter, and as we passed a pet shop she said, ‘I’d like a dog’. I didn’t say no, I said, ‘Great, let’s go in and have a look for one!’

Introducing Louis, the least productive, most problematic of my family members. Show name Professor Spanky. Though for obvious reasons he’s never been shown.

Obviously the evidence suggests it’s ludicrous to have a loose object, such as a child, rattling about in a car, but when I was a boy we used to beg the school bus driver to drive back and forth, from one side of the road to the other so we were thrown about, and he always obliged. When we were staying up north a lot and travelling back and forth, my father used to take us out in our lethal, steel Vauxhall Velox and drive fast along loose metal roads through the night, which was equally exhilarating. All inadvisable, of course, but suddenly finding myself expected to strap all my children in like astronauts just to go to the dairy came as a shock.

We compromised. For instance, if we had been out in the truck, as soon as we got to Homebush Road the girls were allowed to sit on the tray for the last leg of the journey. The free and easy approach to safety, while invigorating, didn’t always end up on the right side of the ledger. You can’t watch the little scallywags all the time.

Once, the day before Lucy’s birthday party, I was hammering at a waratah with an axe, going ferociously, swinging the axe back and bashing it in again. All of a sudden she found something she wanted to show me.

‘Daddy,’ she shouted with glee, and came running towards me, just as the sharp end of the wood splitter went back. She ran straight into it. Funny what you think of in those situations. My first thought was: ‘I’ve split my daughter’s head open with an axe.’

She was screaming uncontrollably, which you don’t enjoy but logically you know it’s a good sign because it indicates life. Children scream all the time on a farm, so as I carried her inside Rachael had no idea how serious it was. Then she saw the blood, which was everywhere.

‘What did you do?’ said Rachael.

‘I smashed her in the head with the axe,’ I said, handing Lucy over. ‘Make her better.’

As it happened, the axe must have been at the point where it was just about to swing back, so the accident had been more of a case of her running into it than it hitting her. And now she has a conversation point whenever people look at photos of her birthday party from that year.

‘Oh, what’s wrong with your nose?’

‘Daddy hit me with the axe the day before my birthday.’ She didn’t even need stitches, but it’s amazing how much blood there is in a nose.

Bella was involved in a similar incident. I had a big paddock at the back that I used to mow using the tractor whenever I needed to destroy some nature. I was also a great buyer of junk at farm auctions and had implement sheds full of things that probably didn’t work but it didn’t matter because I was never going to try to use them or even learn what they were for.

I had bought a flat-based tractor trailer for $20 at one of these auctions and used to tow things around Masterton, often at night, because if the police had seen it there would have been trouble. Sometimes the kids came too.

One night as we were coming home, Bella and one of her friends were sitting on the back of this trailer, with their legs over the end where it was hooked up to the tractor. As we drove through the paddock I went over a particularly big bump. The girls bounced up in the air, fell between the tractor and the trailer, and the trailer rolled over them. Fortunately they didn’t stick their heads up, or there could have been an accident. Both of them were hysterical but apparently not hurt because they ran into the house, holding hands, with me following behind saying, ‘You’re fine, you’re fine. Hop back on the trailer, everything’s great, I’ll buy you an ice-cream later.’

‘Daddy’s run over us with the tractor,’ alleged Bella, between sobs, as she ran into the kitchen where Rachael was standing at the sink. She turned and looked at the girls and then over their heads at me.

‘Rachael,’ I said, ‘do not believe a word they’re telling you.’

‘Bella, turn around,’ said Rachael. And she turned around, allowing me to see the trailer tread marks that ran down her face and across her chest. Rachael then tried to introduce a ban on children riding on trailers but it didn’t last because she could see the fun they were having.

That wasn’t nearly as dangerous as a game we had called Fire in a Box, which is one of the most accurately named games ever invented. Certainly more so than tennis. It entailed me playing the part of a delivery man. I had a great big cardboard box with screwed-up paper in it and stood outside the house while the girls waited inside. I lit the paper, put the lid on the box and knocked on the door.

‘Delivery,’ I said.

‘Oh, we weren’t expecting anything,’ the girls said. ‘What is it?’

‘Fire in a box for Bella.’

‘Oh, we weren’t expecting fire in a box.’

By now smoke was coiling out of the box.

‘Do we have to sign for it?’ they said from behind the door.

‘Yes, I need you to sign for it.’

The challenge was to see how long you could delay opening the door or getting rid of the box.

Who was going to give in first? Was it going to be the delivery guy or one of the three recipients. Sometimes, by the time they opened the door, their father was standing there with a box that was completely ablaze.