What Was I Thinking: A Memoir (3 page)

‘Do you want to dig it out?’ he called. ‘People get stuck here all the time.’

‘I don’t think you’d be able to dig it out,’ said my father.

‘Oh, people get stuck here all the time,’ said the other sailor.

‘No, no, no, it’s a pretty heavy boat.’

‘Why don’t we try and dig it out?’ I said, as I thought it was very odd. Dad was the kind of person who would climb in the water and fucking dig it out.

‘This boat is full of very heavy stuff that we shouldn’t have on it,’ hissed my father. ‘There is no way we’re going to be digging this out with a spade. We are in real trouble here, boy. We’re going to need a big boat here to get rid of this.’

It turned out our boat was full of gelignite, which is really heavy. Sitting under a tarp in the baking sun would’ve been tonnes and tonnes of gelignite. That was so exciting for me.

I think I was a terrible disappointment to him, but he had standards that were impossible to meet. And while I wanted him to be proud of me, I never particularly wanted to meet those standards because I was interested in other things. I don’t imagine that he saw the arts as important, so when I wanted to be an actor he would have been greatly unimpressed. He used to talk about there being doers and talkers, and we are both doers — but I think he used to worry that I was just a talker.

He was sceptical of university, but not of study. If he didn’t understand something, he went to the library and got books out. He taught himself engineering and everything else he knew, based on a pretty skimpy education.

He was impatient with my mother too. She was very sick with diabetes. When I was young I could tell when there was a minor alteration to her blood sugar level, often when she couldn’t. She collapsed once because my father was
preoccupied
with a project and refused to believe she needed help. I got very panicked once when we were on a bus and she started to fade and I didn’t know if we would get home in time to get her something to eat. She and I formed a very close bond over that.

My mother was enthusiastic about everything I did and she especially fostered any signs of creative ability. Once when I showed her a drawing I had done of a car she looked at it very closely. ‘Would you like me to show you how to make the car move?’ she said. And with that she drew three little speed lines. I was amazed that anyone could do something so magical.

There were very few restrictions on me. My father was of the opinion that if it was an adventure, anything went. He was an adventurer. My mother, on the other hand, was and is quite timid, but it never seemed to occur to her that anything bad would befall me. She didn’t worry about me but she depended on me. She wasn’t keen on me going to kindergarten. I went for one day to see if I liked it and I was in two minds about it apparently, but she wanted me around. There were days she wanted to keep me home from school because we were a team and my father wasn’t around.

However, I was allowed a dinghy, which I could barely carry, that I took down to the ocean and rowed about in for hours, in the days before anyone thought about lifejackets. I imagined all kinds of things in that boat. I imagined it was much bigger than it was. I imagined I was leaving harbours to get to foreign countries. I imagined I had a job checking on moorings. I went out at the crack of dawn and came home at night struggling with the dinghy in the dark. I took food from home if I thought
of it, but life was too exciting to worry about stopping for food. I was a bit of a loner, although I had plenty of friends in our street. I used to like going into the garage and pottering, being away with my thoughts.

We used to visit Waiheke regularly because my father bought a large number of sections and we used to go there to cut the scrub. ‘Son, one day half of this island is going to be worth a lot of money,’ he said to me on one visit, ‘and I’m picking it’s this half.’ Years later I went back there and his half was still covered in scrub. He had been half right.

Not long after I started school my father got work at Marsden Point and we relocated to a house on sand dunes at Ruakaka. It was just like outback New Zealand. I walked to school in the morning over sand dunes, through marshes and a bit of bush. Even then, it was like New Zealand 30 years earlier. There was still this pioneering spirit. A Maori family was building the first motel, there was one dairy and a scattering of houses. It was a nice little spot which now would cost millions. You went into the water, and it was ocean straight away. There was no fear. It was fantastic.

Combined with my risk-taking side, I had an absolute need for security through permanence. I had a bookcase behind my bed with lots of books. But I only had a relationship with the books with staples, because I imagined as I was reading the books that I was wearing the paper out. ‘If the worst comes to the worst,’ I thought, ‘I could save the staples.’ I only wanted things that I thought would last forever. Logic was telling me I wouldn’t live forever, but it was important to me.

I’m still like that. My house, which I had designed and built, is completely over-specced. It’s got steel beams that run from one end to the other. There’s not one tree growing up against it. I like houses that stand proud in the environment. It’s solid brick and concrete — concrete is my favourite product — and then all
around it are asphalt or concrete or stones. Then I have a little bit of slightly manicured garden and then Jesus looks after 10 acres of bush, which is enduring too, because it replaces itself.

My mother used saccharine that came in oval containers. You slid the top around and one saccharine came out. She gave me her saccharine container with one saccharine left in it. I developed a relationship with this saccharine which focused on my desire to live forever.

‘If you are really careful,’ I said to my mother, ‘if you never smoked, if you never did anything bad, could you live forever?’

‘Oh, people just don’t live forever,’ she said.

But I was obsessed with the idea that if you were unreasonably careful, if you
really
looked after yourself, then you could. In the end I persuaded my mother to say that if you lived an entirely wholesome and impossible-to-live life, you could live forever. And the saccharine represented that to me. It was so secure in its container.

When we lived in Howick, I would be bundled into the car in my pyjamas on the occasional Friday night for a trip into Farmers department store. It was incredibly exciting. I took my saccharine with me one night. Walking from the car park to the store, it was dark and I slid my saccharine so it was sitting in the open area of the container. If someone had knocked my hand, it would have fallen out and been lost. I walked quite a distance with the saccharine at risk like that before sliding it around so it was safe forever.

I was one of the kids brought up with Hector the Farmers cockatoo. It always seemed to be Hector’s birthday sale or Hector’s Christmas sale, with balloons and decorations everywhere. At the time I thought, ‘This is as wondrous as it must get.’ I’d sneak into the ballroom and look around at these quite fancy people sitting there and think, ‘These people must be so rich.’ It was so simple in those days.

I could only love things that would last. People sometimes gave me wonderful toys and I could see they wouldn’t last. I played with them a bit but I didn’t love them. That has never disappeared. I’m a bit
obsessive-compulsive
— and finding that out doesn’t usually come as a surprise to people. I read meanings into things that other people wouldn’t even have noticed.

We used to buy sherry, which my father was partial to, and my mother used the flagons to make lemonade from the Meyer lemons on our tree. Getting a bottle of lemonade was just a phenomenal treat — having the bottle and opening it and listening to it. One very hot summer there was a water shortage and a truck delivered water to Howick. My mother decanted the lemonade and took the flagon down to the truck. I stood there as she was holding the lemonade flagon under the back of the truck and it slipped from her hands and smashed on the ground.

‘Well, that’s childhood fucked,’ I thought to myself. ‘Time to grow up now, the flagon’s gone.’

I DIDN’T KNOW FOR
ages that my parents had separated. There was no formal conversation where anyone sat me down and explained it and even now I don’t know the exact details. My father was away so much and gradually he was coming home less and less and I think my mother found out he had a mistress overseas.

It was obviously very hard for my mother because she had to make all the decisions. They never got divorced. My mother offered my father a divorce after they had been separated for years and he said, ‘I don’t need a divorce.’ He had no intention of coming back to live with her but he wasn’t interested in
another marriage. Even when he was married to her, he wasn’t interested in marriage. His mother had said to my mother, ‘He’s not the marrying kind’, before they married. He turned out to be not the divorcing kind, either. And he never wanted children — he wasn’t interested in having children.

So my mother decided to go back to England permanently when I was 11. I was told that we were going there for six months, but I don’t think we went on a return ticket. Ironically we moved in with my father’s parents as my mother had no family left there apart from a couple of aunts who were quite batty.

The communication around the whole thing was very bad. Once I was in a van with my Uncle Terry and Aunty Edna, my father’s older sister. I’d just recently worked out or found out that we weren’t going back.

‘I’m being kept here under false pretences,’ I complained. ‘I was told this would just be a holiday.’ Edna got very annoyed. I was told I was selfish and I should think about other people.

Going back was an odd move. My mother had only a few friends left in Bristol from the old days. She would have been far better off materially to stay in New Zealand, but she was probably lonely and maybe with the realisation that the marriage was over she thought she needed to change her life and start anew. I’ve got huge respect for my mother because she isn’t endowed with extraordinary ability but she is a terrifically hard worker. My father was endowed with extraordinary ability, which he coupled with intuition and a capacity for hard work. Arriving in England we went from being quite well off to suddenly very poor, and my mother needed all her capacity for hard work. She was doing treble shifts — sometimes working 24 hours in a row — in a plastic bag factory.

After staying with my father’s parents, we applied for and got a council flat in Redcliffe, Bristol. Our new home was next to the cut, a smelly river dug by prisoners. Number 19 was on the
second floor of a tenement block called Frankcom House, one of three blocks that enclosed a concrete playground with rusty swings and a car park that was a sea of concrete. It was very different from Cockle Bay in Howick.

The kids I went to school with had very low expectations. They dreamt about things that would have been barely tolerable for me. They lived all their lives in the streets they were born into. After school they got jobs at the Imperial Tobacco factory. Bristol was an Imperial Tobacco city, dominated by huge brick nicotine-stained factories. Almost all the boys were signed on to the pension plan at Imperial Tobacco before they left school. The future was discount cigarettes and a job for life, unless you were caught thieving.

But I knew about the rest of the world. I had seen this other life and I knew I had to get out of this one. I developed grand ideas of being a famous actor. From my early teens I used to think of three outcomes — rich, famous and infamous. I tried to decide which would be best if you had to choose one and decided that obviously the answer was rich, because you could buy either fame or infamy. Somewhere along the way I dropped my ambition to become infamous. Which is ironic.

I didn’t understand the culture in Bristol, and at intermediate school the culture was really important. It was important what pop stars you liked — the girls all liked David Cassidy — because you spent all your time in your room listening to music. There weren’t any options. In my mind you spent all your time running home from school and getting down to the beach with your dinghy.

Southville School was a hole in the ground with big steel bars like a prison on the windows. I turned up in my shorts and sandals, for which offence I was immediately named ‘Jesus Boots’. I was teased mercilessly at the start. That was a personality builder for me, and I already had quite a personality. I used to beg my mother
to get me proper shoes but we had no money for them. The months wore on, it was winter and I was still wearing my Jesus boots. Eventually they got to the point where they had actually broken and couldn’t be worn any more. But by then, if I had got shoes, everyone would have pointed and said, ‘Ooooh, look. Jesus Boots has got shoes.’ They would have thought they’d won. So I made my poor mother hunt high and low in an English winter to find me another pair of sandals.

Meanwhile, she was struggling to pay the bills and it was hard going for lots of reasons. We had to put coins in the gas and electricity boxes for our power and our flat was broken into a couple of times and coins stolen from them, which wasn’t uncommon. People were so poor they would break into their own boxes to get money for bread and say they had been robbed. The double whammy when you were the victim was that not only was your stuff wrecked, but you also had to refund all the money that was taken before you could get your power going again.

It didn’t have as much effect on my mother as it did on me. She could render her life down easily. It was a small life and one she had been used to so it wasn’t that hard to return to it, even though my father had taken her out into the wide world and she has ended up back in Bristol/Shitsville. Even today, a lot of her friends there are still in the same street they have always lived in.

I went back there for TVNZ, 27 years after I had left, when the British elections were on. My producer went and knocked on the door and explained who she was.

‘The programme’s host is out in the car and he used to live here with his mother in this flat.’

‘Oh,’ said the tenant, ‘was she that old woman who was going to New Zealand?’ So she remembered one conversation she had when she came with the council to look at the flat when my mother was coming to join me in New Zealand. My mother had
told her that her son was taking her out to New Zealand to live and the woman obviously hadn’t believed her.

I went in. It was even smaller than I remembered it. There was this woman and her husband, sitting in this tiny living room. I could barely comprehend it. They had lived in this shithole overlooking other shitholes for 27 years and they’re watching
Avatar
on a giant plasma screen. How could they not know there’s a bigger world out there, that there are spaces that aren’t the flat, the pub and the factory? Nothing had changed.

My father had two sisters, one in Bristol who we used to visit regularly, in one of those oppressive houses whose inhabitants have covered the walls with photographs of themselves. They spent all their time watching game shows and
Coronation
Street. But they also had a big tropical fish tank that captivated me. They used to joke that I would wear out the fish tank from watching it so much, but there was more exciting stuff happening in that glass box than anywhere else in that entire city.

I had been at school in England for a month when I was pronounced dyslexic and told I also needed glasses. Perhaps I needed them because I had squinted so much with my dyslexia. On the National Health you could get wire-framed glasses for free or, for a very small amount of money, black plastic frames. I knew everyone with wire glasses at school was really poor. ‘Can we get the expensive ones?’ I asked Mum. These were the cheapest glasses you could buy, but they weren’t free. She got them for me and, of course, I wore them for a little while and then couldn’t be bothered with them any more.

I wasn’t a slow learner, but I was a slow reader and still am. Anyone reading this book will almost certainly finish it in less time than me. Although I never became a lover of reading, I was a lover of information, so I read for that reason. I read even though it meant having to read. Reading always held me back at school, but perversely I have always put myself in positions
where I have to read — whether at acting school or in radio and TV.

I was always interested in drama and was able to study it at Ashton Park Secondary School. With scripts, you learn to jump ahead and work out your words before it’s your turn. This was a big school on something called ‘Lady Smyth’s Estate’ which included a crumbling stately home. There were grand entrance gates and most of the property was parkland, but everything else was a disappointment. It’s been restored since.

In class, people wanted me in their groups because I came up with great ideas. I became very good at delegating tasks and saying ‘We need someone who’s really good at this because I’ll be too busy doing something else’, but actually it was because I couldn’t read. You learn great skills to cover up inadequacies.

Most dyslexics excel in sometimes unexplained areas. Dyslexics are like Scientologists in that they love making lists of famous people with dyslexia. It amuses me greatly because they tend to reel off a few names and then say, ‘And that’s just four.’ And I think: ‘Four’s not that fucking many.’ Or: ‘Einstein was dyslexic and he was a genius.’ And I think, ‘Yeah but there have been plenty of geniuses who didn’t have dyslexia.’ You can always find someone who fits into your category but it doesn’t follow that you have an ounce of their greatness because you share one trait.

In the end, I did all right with exams — partly because I worked hard, partly because they weren’t very challenging. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for doing well.

Conscious that we were short of money I was always trying to generate some income of my own. I did what I thought lots of kids did, going door to door asking if people needed odd jobs done. But English kids didn’t do that and I never found out why. Perhaps it was their natural English reserve.

On the other side of the cut from our tenement blocks there was a completely different setting — terraced houses with Bedminster Bridge at one end. These were extremely grand houses with substantial sections. Naturally I thought this was where we should be living, being to the manor born as I was. I genuinely thought at that age I had some direct link to the throne. I just
knew
that I was better than everybody else. These houses were quite run down because, although they were grand, they were also the perfect example of the best street in the worst area. I looked at them and imagined which one I would choose and how I would do it up to look even grander. And these were the houses where I used to doorknock.

At one house an old woman answered the door. ‘There’s a bit of work in the yard out the back,’ she said. So I went out the back and it was fantastic. There was a barn-sized stone garage there that I instantly knew was perfect for the recording studio I was going to establish as the foundation of the music industry empire I had just realised I was going to build.

The woman lived on her own in this house, which I am sure was at least five storeys — six or seven if you added in the basement or extras. I knew immediately that she was going to leave me this house when she died, which wouldn’t be very far away, she being at least 50. She couldn’t afford to maintain the house and certainly couldn’t afford to pay me, so we agreed that I would do odd jobs in return for use of the garage. What can a 12-year-old do with a garage? I used to go in there with a notebook and draw plans and scheme. There was going to be a mezzanine and a big sign out the front saying Metropolitan House or something grander if I could think of it. Of course, nothing was ever done. I didn’t have time to clean it let alone do anything else to it. Unfortunately, that involvement came to an end as I really needed to find something that paid.

Not far from where my grandparents lived was a pet shop,
sitting in the middle of these little run-down terraces. Fish were very popular pets in England because you could keep them in small spaces. This shop sold daphne, a little creature that’s used as live fish food. I saw the daphne in the shop and realised there was a large amount of it down at the docks, which were miles and miles from our home and the shop. I went in and asked to speak to the manager.