14.9.67 - Filling in another day

Sydney, 14.9.67 Morning.

Hi there! 

Spent an odd day yesterday not getting anything much done – Stephen Hall should have contacted me by last night, but there was nary a word. I’ll ring him this arvo if I don’t hear from him by then.

Had breakfast with a Mrs Notts (that’s right!) yesterday, and she and I chatted quite a bit. She comes from up country (near the Castlereagh River) and is down to see her daughter who’s been in hospital about a month with a baby that’ll have to arrive too soon. This morning had breakfast with a Melbourne man in Civil Aviation (he detests opera, but chatted about it) and he was very interested in the flight I had over here. (These two days are the first times I’ve had breakfast with anyone – generally the ‘woman who guides you to your seat’ plunks me down in some far corner where everyone (particularly the waitresses) ignores me!

Went outside after that (yesterday again) and did No 2 lesson in German – it’s not nearly as hard a yet! Then since I hadn’t heard from the Trust, I decided to go to Luna Park – it was shut until Friday; went to Manly on the Hydrofoil, but Manly was rather cold – there were still quite a few on the beach, though. If I thought it was cold, heaven knows how they felt! Didn’t stay there long, but it was about 2.30 when I finally had some lunch. Thought that I might go to Fiddler on the Roof, so I asked directions to get to Her Majesty’s, [as opposed to His Majesty’s Theatre which still went by that title in Dunedin] to see if I could get a seat. Still haven’t found H.M’s, but found about 3 secondhand bookshops! I don’t know what Customs will think – perhaps I’d better post some of them home! (There’s only nine including 2 I bought with me!)

language as I was led to believe –

Went back to K.C. via taxi after not finding H.M’s, and as usual arrived with me heart nearly popping out of me mouth. Sydney’s taxidrivers are probably the best in Australasia, but I wouldn’t bank on it! Back to town to see Barefoot in the Park which was quite a lot of fun, but not as funny as Mrs Notts had led me to believe. Had some tea in a place called the Poet and Peasant (I don’t know why) and then decided to be madly daring and go and see Guide for the Married Man (directed by Gene Kelly) which really was funny – Mrs Notts hadn’t liked it as much! [Not sure why I needed to be ‘madly daring’ to go and see this.] The theatre was apparently situated above the subway, as every now and then there’d be a terrific rumbling and the place would shake a little. GFTMM, which is all about a man trying to learn how to have an affair without letting his wife know about it (sounds a terrible subject, doesn’t it?) is actually a very moral film (!) because  not one of the characters is allowed to get away with any misdeed at any stage of the film. So it’s a Guide in more ways than one. [I think I was trying to reassure my mother that I wasn’t watching anything immoral.]

Back to me little room where I was too tired even to write to you – so I hope this catches the post and doesn’t break what must be an all-time record for me! See ya, love Mike.

(PS Thanks for the Peanuts – marvellous!) 

11.2.70 - new staff at work, bathroom leaks, and Lent

11.2.70  [two aerogrammes]

Dear Mum, me again. I received some more books! Another little parcel, with the Hamlet book I was asking about, Pickwick Papers, Verse and Worse (I told you Mike gave me another copy of that for Christmas, didn’t I?) and the copy of Nicholas Nickleby which I’d forgotten I had. I thought I had another copy of that which was in the same edition as some of the others I had ˗ perhaps that was the one that I borrowed off Flora Edwards. [A singer who’d been involved in the Dunedin Opera Company.] The copy you sent unfortunately is the abridged edition (Whitcombe and Tombs claiming to be able to improve on Dickens), and has so much missing it isn’t true. [W&T was a Dunedin retail and publishing company.] Never mind, perhaps I didn’t even have another copy of that: if that’s the case I’ll get another one one of these years. Sorry to keep muddling you up over these books ˗ just goes to show you how little I knew about what I had or didn’t have.

I finally heard from Kevin Rowlands, by letter, in which he merely tells me that he is working in Promises, Promises (which has been playing in the West End for quite a while) and gives me his address and phone number. Quite honestly since that leaves me to do the contacting again, I don’t know that I can be bothered ˗ probably any more than he can. [See more about this man here.] Well, we’ll see; I may pluck up whatever is required to contact him ˗ though I can’t see the point much, since he has no reason to want to know me, I think, and the same rather applies to me! I try to be outgoing, really I do, and I’m more than I was, but dear, dear, it’s difficult when you have to arrange a meeting where neither party is especially interested. It has the same opening gambit difficulties as Britain has been experiencing with the Common Market!

Hey, I’m glad you’re sending that new James Baxter. I have a tremendous amount of time for him, even though he’s sometimes inclined (or was, perhaps) (especially in his plays) to explain things that ought to be left for the reader or auditor to figure out for himself. But who am I to criticize? He’s certainly one of the greatest poets to come out of NZ (completely without any foreign influences, so to speak) and he’s one of us as well! [Baxter was all of this; later he would become something of a cult figure when he gave up ordinary society and went to live as a kind of prophetic hermit in     the middle of the North Island; young, drifting people gravitated towards him.] Did I tell you bought his latest collection (published by Oxford University Press, no less) recently? Worth every penny.

I’ve something else to say to you. What is it? It’ll come back, perhaps. It’s Ash Wednesday today ˗ gee, it has come round quickly this year. And as usual I’m unprepared for its (now self˗enforced) rigours. Though the older I get the more things there are that I ought to overcome, and obviously this is the time to resolve to overcome them. I don’t know why I’d always assumed that as I grew older I ought to become a better person, because that doesn’t seem to be the case. I think I’m improving in one direction, and I take off the blinkers and see all the other faults I’ve been carefully ignoring, or that have walked up behind me when I was pretending to be holier than thou! Age seems to bring greater awareness, of one’s own self anyway, and that no doubt is a good thing ˗ but good heavens the more I find out about myself the more I see what a difficult job my (so-far much ignored) guardian angel ˗ (definitely Fred, by the way!) - has to cope with. Poor beings ˗ they must be nearly visible with all the pity that they must needs show for us humans! (Angels, I mean ˗ this is all a bit mixed up.) Despair however is as much a sin as any of the seven deadlies, and with Fred’s firm arm holding onto me we may get there yet.

No more news from the CIB yet: I calculated it would take until at least the beginning of next week anyway before I’d hear anything, so in the meantime I’m remaining clam (no! calm!)

We’re in the middle of depression at work ˗ with the two managers having left, things have got so unlively, it isn’t true, and when Margaret comes in it’s like the circus arriving in the middle of an out-of-the-way town. She performs to me and I return the compliment (if you follow the rather messy metaphor) and the lights go on again in that part of London, but it’s amazing what a casual atmosphere reigned in that place before. Everybody has so much time on their hands that they tell you their life stories, apart from the long discussions Margaret and I have on everything and everybody. The doorman we have at the moment is a twenty-two-year-old who is the most sex-obsessed person I have ever met. If all he says is to be believed he has a pretty busy life (!) and while some of it horrifies me and some it even now shocks me, he isn’t really a bad wee guy at heart, and a sympathetic ear (though not generally agreeing one in this case!) doesn’t do any harm, I think. And the night usherette told me her life story the other night (she’s a Catholic, incidentally ˗ Irish as 99% of the London ones seem to be) and dear God, she’s been engaged, or attached, to three different men and they’ve all been killed! She’s about thirtyish, I suppose, but one died in an air crash, another in a car crash, and the third of a very premature heart attack. It’s a wonder she survived herself, somehow. But she came to London some time ago (six years or so) and seems now to be getting over it all. It all happened back home in Ireland. She’s not a bad stick, but a little, just a teeny bit, dreary ˗ and anyway she goes for older men, I think. Am I getting suspicious or something? I should really stop here ˗ but I’ll go onto another sheet.

P.S. The shop is going to give me another pair of shoes!

[second aerogramme]

Still about the people at work, in case I don’t send this with the other. The new assistant manager, a twenty-one-year-old (!) South African (born in Ireland actually, and lived in London for a little of his youth) is quite a nice guy, but he takes life terribly seriously, and as soon as a problem arises, as Margaret says, it shows ˗ all over his innocent face. I suppose I was like that all those terrible four years ago, and I think was probably worse, though I don’t think I’ve ever subscribed to the school of letting everyone know that now-and-at-this-instant I have a problem! Not at least once I got past the embarrassment stage; well, pretended that I had. My problems boil up inside, with my putting them aside for ages before anyone knows they’re there. And to tell someone one of my problems, at least up until recently, was quite a considerable effort. I still in a lot of ways tell myself that I’m quite capable of handling everything, and would sooner muddle around for some time before getting help. Obviously I revolve around my own little axis too much, and eventually would have screwed myself into the ground if I hadn’t realised that people don’t mind helping you!

The new manager, Mr Rogers, is an ex-policeman, I’m told, and smokes a pipe, and has a nearly grown-up family, and is very home-minded ˗ all the things that most of the mangers on the circuit aren’t. This is nothing against him, of course; he’s very sincere, and a true person at heart, but like John, the assistant, he doesn’t really understand the sort of slightly round-the-bend people that Margaret and I are. Don’t gasp, mother, I haven’t become any more crazy than I was at home ˗ but I don’t really think I have a dreary personality, and life apart from its fraughts ought to be quite a happy thing. The saints, after all (my examples, not my fellows!) were happy people: they knew where they were going, they knew that the world could be harmonious if it weren’t for the warped minds that we all have that make us think we know better than God. So, as I say, things at work aren’t as effervescent as they were, which is a pity really, because it makes me see the place in the pitiable light I would have seen it in previously if it hadn’t been for the previous staff. [Breathes.)

We’ve had a lot of fun at the flat over the last weekend: a leak in the bathroom developed overnight, after merely persisting quietly for some time, into a flood, and so we stuck a basin under it. The funny thing was that the water was somehow managing to jump out of the basin and walk across to the other end of the room. We discovered then that we had another leak. So we called in the two little men who fix things on the estate (we’re part of a number of houses all belonging to the same landlords) and they came and fixed up the more humble of the two leaks (at 8.30 in the morning just as we were all getting up to go to work or whatnot) and left its big brother for another drippy day. Fortunately they’ve now fixed that fellow up too (one of them giving himself a great big bump on his forehead in the process, and both of them leaving dirty footprints all over the bath, the plastic curtains done up into a bow, the wall singed where they soldered the pipe, lovely sharp little happy pieces of solder all over the floor, our toilet gear and such in the midst of the mess, and the covering to the Ascot water heater half-on, or perhaps it was half-off!), and we’re now reasonably back to normal again. I cleaned up most of the mess, being the only person in and up at the time, and then Angela did lots of finishing touches, so that it now looks like the bathroom we knew and loved.

I went to my second [piano] lesson on Monday, and if I’d any doubts about Doris as a teacher (did I say Reg seemed to infer I ought to have gone only to the best?) they were pretty firmly dispelled. I think this decision at least has the makings of a success. And there was considerable improvement in my general impression over the one I gave at the first lesson, too. It will take it seems about another year ˗ did I say that? ˗ to get to the stage of LRAM, but since I started things backwards, by going out and working as a musician before I was really ready for such things, it doesn’t matter I guess. [This is a bit of nonsense: I was perfectly capable of doing the music when working; additional training never fails to come in handy, of course.]

But I must get another job: for one thing, it doesn’t pay that much, and for another, it’s just driving me up the wall, though I have a lot of wall to go yet. I don’t want to leave just yet, but I think decision number five is called for soon. But I’ll have to get an interesting job ˗ if I’m to work in the daytime, say. Since this is one of the biggest cities in the world that shouldn’t be toooo hard. That’s for tomorrow, anyway. Today I have another hour and a half to face before I’m allowing myself anything to eat. And there will be gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair, etc. I’ve been on a Bible-reading ‘course’. That is, I read a certain specified section or chapter each night: I’ve kept it up for some months now, too. But dear me, some of the Old Testament is odd!

I can’t give up sweets for Lent ˗ I hardly ever eat them. Love. XXXX

P.S. Remembered what I was going to say in Part I! Kingsley rang the other night and I’ve invited him up for lunch on Sunday ˗ hope he survives! 

7.2.70 - Tiny Alice, books and shoes

7.2.70

Dear Mum, I’ve just received a couple of Tablets and that calendar (three newspapers indeed!) and then later on this morning two parcels of books, the ones that had appeared to vanish for a while. Thanks very much indeed, but can I ask you, is this the last lot of books you’ve sent? Because if it is, there are one or two things I’d thought I’d asked you for and perhaps haven’t. Did I ask for the Beethoven sonatas? They are in three books of the type that the Bach Preludes and Fugues are in, and should have been up on the shelf above the Jam. (!) And there were four books on Shakespeare by Granville Barker; the volume that hasn’t come is on Hamlet alone. Perhaps Marilyn has it ˗ if so don’t be worried, but I would be grateful if you’d have another ...wee...look, please.

The Dickens books too aren’t quite what I expected ˗ dear, dear, this does sound bloomin’ ungrateful of me, doesn’t it? Actually looking at what I have, and recalling what else was at home I’m inclined to think that perhaps you have sent another parcel. In case you haven’t, the other Dickens were Nicholas Nickleby (I’m sure I had a copy, but perhaps I’m mistaken there), Pickwick Papers ˗ definitely on the shelves! Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewitt (you’ve sent one copy of this ˗ there were two ˗ but this one is the old, old one that had been in the house since before I was born, and some darling child at some stage has scribbled all over it and torn out the last few pages!), Great Expectations (it was in that edition that I had some others from: small and red-covered and readable!) The only other one, as I think I’ve said before, that may not be there, because I don’t know if I ever got it back from Marilyn, is David Copperfield. Quite possibly if you have already sent these they’ll have arrived when you get this, or something silly. If you haven’t and have a couple of bob to spare some one of these days, can you forward them? Am I a blasted pest? Let me know please! [I imagine even my mother would have answered the question about being a pest with a definite Yes!]

After telling myself that I wouldn’t buy any more books this week, because I haven’t put anything in the bank for about three weeks or more, and because I keep paying out for necessary things, I went out and bought a much too expensive copy of Tiny Alice, a play by Edward Albee (who wrote Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a play which you must have heard of), which Mike and I had seen on Wednesday night [like the Broadway production, it starred Gielgud and Irene Worth.] How great a play it is I don’t know, but it was so elliptical and so interesting and so difficult-quite-to-understand on one viewing that I decided that a reading was required. David had seen it too, and we spend the little time we see each other these days in figuring it out, and getting ourselves further into its apparently endless depths. It’s all (well, some of it) about losing one’s faith (two of the main characters are Catholics, and I suspect Albee is - or may have been - a Catholic too, because of the fact that so many of the lines have a ring of Catholic liturgy about them), and symbolises to a certain extent a variety of things like the Mass and the Trinity and perhaps Christ even in the character of another man ˗ at least it does to me! Other people apparently have found quite the opposite: that it is more about diabolism than the other. Anyway it’s worth a further look into it. [I was wrong about Albee having been a Catholic; and I’m not surprised that we struggled to understand the play. Even Albee himself seems to have wondered what it was all about at times!]

I’m also at present on the third part of The Divine Comedy (that you sent); what a fabulous story and allegory and all things in one! It makes one feel happy to be a Catholic, and that one is part of such a great scheme of Love, so to speak.

The Story of the Shoe. Remember those shoes I bought last week? Well, the first day I wore them they seemed fine until towards evening when my left foot started to ache and hasn’t stopped since. Right where the laces are tied. I couldn’t wear the left shoe, and finally took it back to try and get it stretched, thinking that would help. Well, after two days of this (which quite honestly didn’t really help the look of the shoe, and anyway, my foot seems to have got annoyed and just refuses to be comfortable in any shoe, old or new) I took it home again, and this morning quite by chance had a look at the size of it, because it said a 7 and I thought I’d bought a 7½. The right shoe is a 7½! I took them back with considerable speed and annoyance, and at first they weren’t too happy about doing anything, and haven’t yet; they’re got to wait for the Guv’nor (English Guv’nors are apparently never on the premises). So I’m to ring them on Monday. But I’m not backing down on it, which I think they thought I would, because the blessed things cost me over five pounds and I don’t feel like damaging me foot for life for their sake!

I received a reply from the CIB, with a photo and some details of a young lady, and now apparently we have to wait and see whether she will reply favourably to my ‘details!’ If it wasn’t so serious it would be funny, and if it wasn’t so funny it might be serious! We’ll survive, I guess, and at present I’m looking on it as something of an adventure ˗ like all adventures rather fraught with terrors, and overcomable in the end. Wish me luck and lend us a few spare prayers, and we’ll get by.  Love, Mike

4.12.69 - sending books from New Zealand

4.12.69 [handwritten]

Dear Mum, thanks for the Peanuts. [The cartoon, I think, rather than nuts.] Thanks also for the list ˗ see below. 

...About things musical; as I said in the very end of the last letter, I’m not greatly concerned if it takes a year to sort out the things I don’t know, and get to know them. I’m living quite well, and am as happy as I’m ever likely to be anywhere. In fact I have fewer problems than I might have if I was working! What I’m trying to do at the moment is eliminate the problems that would otherwise arise if I was to present myself to prospective employers now. There are too many things I could get away with at home that I just can’t here, so I don’t think the time will be at all wasted. 

Now, before I run out of space. Books: actually, from the list I realise just how few really useful books I’ve got!! Anyway as most of the music books are ones I don’t really want, here we go: Please send:
1. Harmony: Walter Piston
2. Poems: Herrick
3. Poems: Robert Frost
4. Faber Book of Modern Verse
5. Penguin Poets
6. D H Lawrence
That’s all I would really want from that list. The only Gerald Moore I could do with I’ve never had! And the other orchestration books aren’t much use. The films books, except those cinema 51, 2, 3, weren’t really worth their money.
Secondary List:
Pan Book of Opera
3 (4?) Books on Shakespeare by H Granville Barker
Hilaire Belloc Poems and these Dickens:
(1) Dombey and Son (2) Bleak House (3) Little Dorrit (4) Pickwick Papers (5) Hard Times.

So, therefore would you, if they don’t weigh it up by too much send the books on the secondary list as well. If you can’t find some of them, probably Marilyn has them, so don’t worry too much! There are other Dickens I’d like, but that depends on weight. Davie has copies of both the Gerard Manley Hopkins and the 20th Century Music, but will you put them aside and I may yet take them. Let’s call that our 3rd List ˗ it also includes then: (3) Verse and Worse (4) Ogden Nash (5) David Copperfield (M. Has this possibly still) (6) Oliver Twist (7) Nicholas Nickleby (8) Great Expectations (9) Martin Chuzzlewit.

Incidentally, the Bach books ˗ there are two: the 48 Preludes and Fugues ˗ they should have been amongst the heavier music.

This is awfully complicated and is a darn nuisance to you, I expect. I will send you a postal order for the cost ˗ that’s a statement, not a suggestion.[Perhaps it should have been a promise!] in fact, I should again start paying my insurance ˗ it’s been on your plate long enough, hasn’t it. Will you let me know how much it is and I’ll send you money ˗ we can send up to £40 in Postal Orders here (I think!) That’s an order. Okay?

Anyway, thanks for all your trouble ˗ it’s very good of you to bother, really. Love Mike.  

[I doubt that these books were ever sent: I still have most of them, apart from the Dorothy Sayers mentioned in an earlier letter, so I suspect we either canned the idea, or my mother only sent ones that wouldn't weigh too heavily. And why didn't I think I could get them in England? I spent plenty of money on books and music there. As it was, when my wife and I left England in 1974, the bottom of the trunk containing many of my/our books collapsed with the weight, and they were left with my mother-in-law...and subsequently vanished.]

8.11.69 - fight on a bus, and books from home

8.11.69

Dear Mum, I’m writing this very late at night, or perhaps it’s actually very early in the morning ˗ but the trouble is of late that when I arrive home, somebody always suggests that we have coffee, and either this or else the lack of conversation at work during the evening tends to cause me to lie in bed for ages awake. So I thought I might as well stay up awake and do this instead. Thank you for the photo ˗ I have the funny feeling that I’ve already thanked you, but as I have that about everything these days I’m always under the impression that I’ve actually written letters I never have. You look a little plump (and so does Barbara [my younger cousin]) I must say; I’m certainly glad to see you looking so well and fit. Another request: can you send me one where you’re smiling? You look a little as though John had said something rude to you, or something! [John was Barbara’s younger brother.] No, seriously, though thanks for the photo, very much ˗ it mainly reassures me that I hadn’t forgotten what you look like after all!

I said to Reg that you’d sent it, and he was most interested because he hadn’t seen a photo of you since you were married. Good grief! They’re moving house soon ˗ don’t know if they’ve actually got a place, but the point is that Mavis has been told that the present place is too much for her (it’s a two-storey semi-detached, and the stairs even kill me ˗ I like to think I can run up any set of stairs anywhere; not this lot!) and so they are going to get a smaller bungalow. Which means Nina will have to go somewhere else, though Reg was a bit vague on where exactly. The funny part about that is that Nina does do a fair bit of the housework, so she may turn out to be a bit of a loss; and anyway they always have the place so spick and span it's positively unlived in; no wonder they kill themselves with work! (By contrast the flat is pretty messy frequently, though never despairingly so, and Angela is a great one for house cleaning at weekends, but we survive without going to great lengths to ensure that everything is always in a certain place. (That’s an old philosophy of mine anyway, isn’t it?) [I may not have adhered to it as strongly as Reg, who certainly had the motto: a place for everything and everything in its place.]

...The Fight on the Bus, by M F Crowl

I went upstairs on a rather full bus one night, followed by a slightly stewed group of East End boys, with two or three of their girls, and because there wasn’t enough room for them all to sit down up there (and no one is allowed to stand upstairs) they started clowning around and sitting on each others’ laps, etc. One even went bowling headlong down the bus and fell up against the front. Somehow or other they got arguing with some slightly older boys on the front right. And before we knew what was happening, the most drunk of these boys (the E. Enders) was punching someone violently on the head and his mate wasn’t trying to create much peace either. The other slightly less drunk ones, and particularly one girl, got worried at this and they tried to get the worst offender off the bus, and this just created chaos. Fortunately the bus stopped, and as well as several other people getting off hurriedly, so did all this lot of louts ˗ but apparently one of them was caught, I presume by some handy copper. End of Incident, though the bus sat there for ages after that while things were sorted out. the main victim had a bleeding lip, and blood all over his sportscoat. Ugh! Everyone’s adrenalin must have gone spinning around during those few moments ˗ my blood was certainly going a trifle berserk.

Can you do a small thing for me? I’ve been feeling it’s a waste of time having several rather useful books sitting around at home doing nothing, and I’m wondering if it would be too expensive to send them over? If it would be then we’ll forget the whole idea, and be done with it, but it was mainly a few reference books I mean. For example, Piston’s book on Orchestration, the three paperbacks comprising Dante’s Divine Comedy (Dorothy Sayers edited [translated, in fact]: are Hell or Inferno, Purgatory and Heaven); suddenly all the others I thought of have gone. Tell you what though, if next time you write an enveloped letter, can you on the back of the newsheets write a list of those music books, poetry books (just the paperbacks here will do) and books on films that are say later than 1950? If it doesn’t take up too much of your time, that is; and I’ll tell you which would be worth sending (cost considering, of course). Novels aren’t much use bothering with I think ˗ I can always get a cheap copy here if necessary. Hope this won’t be too much trouble ˗ I can’t new remember whether I had them classified purely under authors or if the reference stuff was separate. Anyway, good luck to you! I’d rather like the Beethoven Sonata and Bach P. and Fugues books too, I think. [Even for me, this seems an extraordinary request. The books would have weighed a ton.]