The Autobiography of My Father by Martin Edmond

Author:Martin Edmond [Edmond, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781869405083
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2010-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

This was how you lived. In the morning you would wake, quite early, and turn on the radio. The National Programme. A sort of smorgasbord of news, current affairs, weather reports and music. I never knew you to lie in bed. What you did was sit on the side of it, hunched over, listening. In the days when you still smoked, you’d have cigarettes. If the drinking was bad, you’d be sipping from a glass. If not, you might have a cup of tea. You could spend hours like this.

Eventually, you’d get up and get dressed and make your way down the hall and through the passage to the kitchen. You’d turn the radio on there and get the heat happening if it was winter. You might or you might not have something to eat. Again, that depended on how much you were drinking. The newspaper would be at the gate and you’d get that and lay it out on the table, but you hardly read it any more. Mostly, you just sat. If you hadn’t had breakfast, you might have lunch.

Around one o’clock you would go out and rendezvous at the Working Men’s Club with your mates – Billy, Whisky Mac, a couple of others. You were all old reprobates, emphysemic, alcoholic. Whisky Mac’s emphysema was so bad he could only walk two or three steps at a time and needed over an hour to get to the Club. Once ensconced in a chair he would drink double gins and beer chasers until he could not walk at all. Then his wife would come to drive him home. Billy was a spirits drinker too; he also had a wife to look after him. Perhaps it was their wives who saved them from becoming complete derelicts. What was it that saved you?

There were some funny moments. I remember the day Pat Ward came into the Club selling poppies for Anzac Day. He had, as usual, an air of well-scrubbed Catholic righteousness about him. Billy looked up and through an alcoholic haze observed: ‘Why, Pat! Aren’t you dead yet?’ Pat didn’t know what to say. His confusion was so great he forgot himself long enough to take a drink with us.

You’d only spend an hour or so in the Club. They’d start expressing their sense of sexual frustration and you would get restless. You never joined in that kind of talk. It embarrassed you. Instead, you’d go back home, get your old string bag, go into town and do some shopping. That was probably the best part of the day, because you’d see lots of people in the street who’d wave and smile and say hello and perhaps stop for a chat.

In the afternoon you might try to get on top of your paperwork for Cobblestones, Rotary or the Kuranui College Jubilee. You were always behind and your papers were always in a state of complete chaos. I sometimes wondered if you preferred it that way – at least you could maintain a sense of having things to do.

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