Hogg - Going south : a road trip through life

Living with Summer (1983)

Angel Gear: On the road with Sam Hunt (1989)

Is That an Affair on Your Mind or Are You Just Glad to See Me? (1997)

Cinema: A world history (1998)

The Awful Truth: An unauthorised autobiography (1998)

The Zoo: Meet the locals (2000)

A Life in Loose Strides: The story of Barry Crump (2000)

CONTENTS

the world is held together

by cobwebs

Sam Hunt

It was late afternoon and a few of us were sitting about in the sun having a drink on my birthday when the friend Ive known the longest sat down opposite and looked at me like he was going to say something serious.

He was, and he got straight to it. He had health issues, he said, in a tone that put the issues word in ironic quotes. Hes an ironic guy, only a couple of months younger than me. We started work on the same small-city New Zealand newspaper 46 years ago, which seems quite ridiculous to both of us now. Id told him earlier how less than happy I was about my new age and how angry at that damn Beatles song. But now the talk was serious.

Hed been to see his doctor the previous day, he said, and, not to piss around the post, he had cancer and it was terminal, and there was nothing that could really be done about it except some chemo at some point to slow it down. He had maybe a year, he said. Maybe a bit more.

The others at my little birthday party couldnt hear what was going on between us, and Gordon was intent on telling me his dreadful news like it was something he wanted to get out so he didnt have to talk to me about it ever again.

I was so shocked by what he told me that, after an initial gasp, I said the only thing that seemed to make any sense to me in the circumstances. We should go away for a road trip, I blurted out.

He nodded as if he knew I was going to say that. Back south, he said.

Yeah, I said back to him.

South meant Southland, where our story started, as mentioned, 46 years earlier. And that was the end of that conversation. Within weeks the trip was all booked and ready to roll. I felt nervous.

My ironic friends name is Gordon McBride. Like me, hes what we used to call a scribbler, and its still the description I like best. I first encountered him, fresh-faced in the Reporters Room of The Southland Times around the middle of 1968, a great year to turn 18, which we both did then. Id started at the paper as a cadet reporter in February that year, a nervous fool in my new Italian-cut suit, bought specially, with a bit of help from Mum, from Hallensteins Menswear, down the road.

I got the job, I think, because I touched a happy place in the newspapers editors heart. The editor had a terrific name: Jack Grimaldi. In the midst of the interview, hed asked what sports interested me, and Id said golf because thats what Id played at my Invercargill high school. Id taken up golf only because of my failings at what are often whimsically referred to as contact sports. It was odd that my school even offered golf, but it did, and just as well it did.

Because it turned out that Jack Grimaldi liked golf a great deal, and in fact he went on to die on his favourite golf course a few years after interviewing me. But in his smoky office that day, on the first floor of the Southland Times building with a view out over Invercargills busy Esk Street, I saw his eyes light up when I said golf and I had the feeling I was in.

Gordon must have said something else that impressed Jack Grimaldi, who was an editor of the old school stocky and leathery and ancient-seeming, not unlike the old movie actor Edward G Robinson. I now recall only two things Mr Grimaldi ever said to me, apart from that question about golf.

On keeping things simple, he once instructed me, after I must have foolishly inserted a fancy word into some story Id written, Fires arent extinguished, young Colin, theyre put out. And then another time, a little later on, when the two of us were travelling together in the claustrophobic, slow and creaking metal lift up to the editorial department on the first floor, he leaned in towards me, smelling faintly of whisky, perhaps from lunch at his club, and rumbled, I hope youre getting enough greens to eat in that flat of yours, young Colin.

And of course I wasnt getting anything like enough greens to eat in that flat of mine, which Id recently moved into with the newest reporter in the office, young Thomas Gordon McBride, a bouncy farmers son from Wyndham with a Beatles hair-do, a souped-up Mini and a lot more confidence than I had. But, like he did, I pretty much instantly fell in love with newspapers and the whole wayward world of scribblers.

We were both only kids, and if it seems odd enough that we should have been working as newspaper reporters aged only 17, it now seems even odder that we were each doing it while living away from the safety and comforts of our family nests.

Gordon had had to move out of his familiar boyhood bedroom at the old family farm, way out across the Southland Plains at a place called Glenham, near Wyndham, so he could take up his exciting new job in Invercargill. And my family, by wonderful coincidence, had moved away from Invercargill when my father landed a promotion to Christchurch soon after Id started my job at the Times.

There was a failed attempt by my parents to take me to Christchurch, too. There was even a job lined up for me at a newspaper there, but I really didnt want to go and, after a fair bit of anguish from Mum, Id been allowed to keep my job at The Southland Times and sent to board with an old couple who had a room to rent in their big old villa in a quiet part of Invercargill.

The old couple might have appreciated the $12 a week I paid them out of my $20 weekly wage, but they never adjusted to my working hours, which ran as late as two in the morning, and I didnt always go straight home afterwards. Going home to bed wasnt what a boy wanted to do immediately after all the excitement of making a newspaper. I was out of sync with everything.

It was the Invercargill tradition, in those days anyway, to serve dinner at midday rather than in the evening, so Id rise to be greeted with soup, tripe and onions, and a hefty pudding. In the face of the tripe especially, so early in my day, Id had to run swiftly for the bathroom a couple of times.

Gordon, it turned out, was suffering similar misunderstandings where hed been put to board, so the two of us plotted together and somehow managed to reassure our worried mothers that we could look after ourselves. Then we tricked some foolish landlord into thinking we were responsible tenants and found ourselves a flat.

It was in the northern part of Invercargill, in the back bit of an old villa in a street called Dublin, behind some young cops who had the bigger flat in the front of the house. Our place was tiny, but we didnt care. We were kings of our domain, though we had to share the only bedroom. The bathroom was the biggest room in the place. The sitting room was too tiny to actually sit down in. We had very little furniture anyway and often very little to eat.