Paul Ashford Harris - Odd boy out : a memoir

First published in 2018 by Ventura Press

PO Box 780, Edgecliff NSW 2027 Australia

www.venturapress.com.au

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Copyright Paul Ashford Harris 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any other information storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Harris, Paul Ashford, author.

Odd Boy Out / Paul Ashford Harris.

ISBN: 9781925384284 (paperback)

ISBN: 9781925384307 (ebook)

Biography.

Australian and New Zealand history.

Cover and internal design: Kate vandeStadt

Cover illustration: Lady Harris (Frieda), The Hierophant, Thoth

Tarot deck. Used with permission from Ordo Templi Orientis and the Warburg Institute.

Dedicated to my children Mark, Sophie, Nicholas and Sam, and my eleven (for now) grandchildren and with especial thanks to my wife Gail for her forbearance.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my endlessly patient editor Catherine McCredie and all the staff at Ventura Press for bearing with me.

Thanks also to photographers Glenn Thomas and Jack Penman.

CONTENTS

FAMILY TREE

The fan given by Emily Pankhurst, leader of the British suffragette movement, to my grandmother Frieda

THE FIRE

L ate one July evening in 1996 the tenth, the newspaper clippings now remind me, I was opening the back door to our Sydney house, sweating from a just completed squash match, when my wife Gail called to me.

Quickly! Joan is on the phone, from New Zealand. Te Ramas on fire. She passed me the phone.

Te Ramas burning. Te Ramas burning. Joan was crying and out of breath.

Joan and her husband Brian lived in the cottage next to my parents and looked after the homestead known as Te Rama and the spacious gardens that surrounded the house.

She calmed down enough so I could establish this was no minor blaze soon extinguished. From one end of the house to the other the flames were roaring into the night sky, feeding on the century-old timbers and the bone-dry flax that had been packed between the walls for insulation.

Joan left me holding the phone and rushed off to see what she could do; not much, I sensed. I put down the phone and stood for a moment in shock.

My wife tried to console me. After all, the family was dispersed, my parents in Australia and Singapore and my brother and sister elsewhere in New Zealand. But the realisation was dawning on me; everything that meant anything to the history of the family, the story of our lives, was crammed into that house standing alone in the middle of forty acres, just over the river from the tiny town of Waikanae. It was as if someone in the family had died.

It was hard to order my thoughts. What had I not asked? How would I tell my parents? They had invested their lives in the house and it held all their precious treasures. What about the pets who were family? Had the Great Dane and the pug escaped? The cats would be safe cats are survivors but Papeeto the cockatiel would most certainly be gone. Locked in his cage in the kitchen there would have been no escape.

After a night pretending to be asleep I was up at 5.30 am (7.30 am New Zealand time) and called Joan.

As I had imagined, the 93-year-old timber homestead had been ablaze from end to end; the house had been exterminated. Even the towering redwood, at fifty metres from the cottage, was badly singed. Joan was confronting nothing but a smouldering heap of ashes and blackened timbers. Only the remains of the brick chimney and some charred walls stood over the wreckage.

The local fire brigade had rattled up the bush-flanked gravel driveway but their efforts to put out the fire were frustrated when water from the pool and reservoir ran out. One firefighter fell through the staircase. A rescue helicopter was called, and a beacon was placed in the main paddock to help the pilot land between the tall surrounding trees. At least the firefighter was rescued.

I quickly realised I must give up any idea that anything would have survived. I knew every inch of that house and it also came to me that there probably had never existed a structure so flammable.

I rang my sister Maggie, six years older and living in Waikanae, where she ran the local riding school. She was distressed but emitted a sort of horsey practicality. Next, I rang my brother Christopher, ten years my senior, in Wellington. He hated the house and my parents anyway and was mostly concerned that I should find out if they had bothered with boring stuff like insurance. He reminded me of just what the house contained.

After putting the phone down, I took stock from memory as best I could. There were my grandmother Friedas Thoth Tarot card paintings, at least a dozen, the main ones hanging in the corridor that ran down the centre of the house. There was the Adams chandelier, the Sheraton chairs, the mahogany dining room table, the red Venetian glass, a dozen Hepplewhite chairs, the fan given to my grandmother by Emily Pankhurst when they were striving to secure womens suffrage, and two special pieces: the Chippendale mantelpiece and the King George VI Coronation chairs.

The mantelpiece had escaped from an old house in Wellington, under demolition, when an architect friend of my mothers stopped the builder, who had destroyed one mantelpiece and was about to take an axe to the second. The architect called my mother. Would she like to buy it? Twenty quid would do it. The fireplace arrived a few weeks later. It was blackened by years of smoke and inattention, but after being polished and polished again, it revealed its beautifully inlaid and intricate wood patterns. It was made for Te Rama.

The Coronation chairs were two elegant upright chairs of simple design, covered in a striking, rich, moss-coloured velvet, and decorated in one corner with a large gold-and-crimson embroidered crown. I often used to climb on one of them to reach high places. These chairs had been produced for the Coronation of King George VI, which my grandfather Percy attended. He was graciously allowed to buy them, presumably as acknowledgement of his long and loyal service to Parliament. My father ensured they were not lost after Percys death by promptly shipping them to the other side of the world, thus sealing their fate. The chairs would have quickly been a victim of the flames.

I tried to make some sort of inventory of the paintings in the house. Apart from a dozen or so of Grandmother Friedas tarot card paintings, I managed to conjure up the Braque, two Miros, a Dali, and the painting of the seated dancer my father thought was an early Picasso. There were more I could see in my minds eye but I could not remember or maybe never knew who had painted them. The picture I regretted most was the Braque. I had not seen it for years but remembered every detail. It was a very simple picture, paper on paper. It was called the Blind leading the blind, with a nod to Bruegel, and showed a blue figure leaning forward with his hand out to another, smaller figure who was following in his footsteps. Both seemed to be leaning forward as if into a gale.