Fleur Adcock one of New Zealand’s greatest poets died at the
end of last year (10 October 2024). She was my mother’s oldest
friend and because of that friendship I had the good fortune to
spend a day with her. This is a story of that remarkable day.
Mum (Diane McKegg) had given me strict instructions to go to
the door to get Fleur, as she says she is quite frail and I cannot
expect her to be waiting on the roadside.
I knock on the door, and she opens it, peering at me through
glasses with very thick lenses framed by undulating waves of
slightly oily white hair.
“A clone of Diane,” she says.
I say “Your sister (the novelist Marilyn Duckworth) bought my
house in Roxburgh Street in Wellington”
She says, “Why are you, not Diane, picking me up?”
I say, “Mum has a cold,” and the very word sends the famous
poet into a spin. “A cold, a cold! I can’t possibly get a cold! I
have to fly all the way to England on Friday, and I have such a
fear of colds that I only have to come near one, and it catches
me.”
I feel I have betrayed Mum by associating her with such a
fearsome affliction and try to downplay it. “Well, it’s not that sort
of cold; it’s more an exhausted cold. Mum has a weakness for
this type of cold, but they don’t seem catchy as we never get
them.”
We stand uncertainly, trying to decide whether to proceed with
this perilous expedition and then I follow her as she wanders
uncertainly down the hall. All the floors are wooden, with no
carpets, and the floorboards seem a bit haphazard.
“Andrew, my son, did the floors himself,” says Fleur, “and now
he is selling the house.” The way she says it suggests that this
is the saddest thing Andrew could possibly do to his mother.
She points to a small corner made up of windows with a dear
little armchair sitting in it. “Just look at that view of three extinct
volcanoes,” she says. “The laundry used to be here, but such a
view is wasted on a washing machine.”
Fleur then sadly waves her arms around some original pastel-
coloured cupboards, saying the new owners will be such
philistines they will paint them. In the middle of the room is a
pristine round Deco Formica table with six perfect Deco chairs.
The villainous Andrew, she laments, is even planning to sell
this table. I ask if the chairs are comfortable, and she says, “Of
course, Marigold the cat sleeps on them.” Fleur gazes out over
the extinct volcanoes and points to a house that sits just
beneath Andrew’s.
“In this house,” says Fleur, “lives Evie, the best friend of Rosa
(Andrew and Michelle’s later-in-life child). Poor Rosa will never
walk to school with Evie again when Andrew sells his house.”
“Do you have a pen?” I ask.
“Of course I have a pen,” snaps Fleur. “I am a writer.”
She picks up her glasses and says, “What a bother!”
I commiserate with her about failing eyesight and that her eyes
might not be what they once were. “Of course they’re not,” she
snorts. “I have macular degeneration, quite normal for my age,
and Marilyn, my sister, is as deaf as a post, and her deafness is
much worse than my blindness.”
At this point, Fleur decides the expedition will proceed and we
move to the front door..
I pause by an old sepia-coloured photo that hangs just to the
left of door. It is of a dark-skinned, frightfully handsome man. I
ask if it is Alistair Campbell, her ex-husband, (and another of
New Zealand’s most famous poets) but it is of Stuart, his older
brother, who was shot by friendly fire just before the war ended.
Fleur says quite brusquely that it was very common to be shot
by friendly fire. I actually know this, as I went to the Battle of
Long Tan with Gigi, and in one scene, men come running out of
the trees, and the Australians open fire. Some men fall to their
knees before one of the soldiers yells, “Cease fire, they’re our
boys.” The scene is indelibly sad, as is the sepia photo of
Stuart Campbell.
Fleur climbs into the car, and Bella licks her undulating slightly
oily hair. She says, “I think a dog is licking my hair.”
She tells me about Alistair Campbell. His dad was a Scotsman
called Jock, and his mother was a Penrhyn Islander called Teu
Bosini. They, along with their three children—Alistair, older
brother Stuart, and sister Margaret—lived in Rarotonga. Jock
worked for Boss McKegg (my grandfather and owner of the
Cook Islands Trading Company) on the boats that carried
goods to the outer islands. Fleur is very clear that Jock worked
for Boss, not the CITC. Teu died of TB when Alistair was
seven, and Jock died a year later of prostate cancer. The
children were sent to New Zealand but their grandmother
couldn’t care for them. They were put in an orphanage in
Dunedin, and Alistair could not speak much English and was
the butt of racial slurs.
Fleur met Alistair at a party. She explains that at the time she
was dating, “in a chaste fashion,” another young man called
Barry Metcalfe, but she fell hopelessly and madly in love with
Alistair and married him at 18: “Silly girls like me, foolish
enough to marry what I wanted to be.” Her love for Alistair
could not compete with his attraction to other women, and he
left Fleur with whom he had had 2 sons for Meg with whom he
had a further three children. Meg told Fleur that she thought
Alistair was a wonderful lover, but Fleur never thought so; “so in
hindsight, it was for the best that he left,” she said.
Fleur says Alistair was happy when he died, as all he wanted
was to be with Meg, who had died before him, and Fleur wrote
of his death, “Beautiful poet, goodbye.”
I mention to Fleur what a strange twist of fate it was that she
and Mum, who became best friends at Wellington Girls, were
later to be connected historically through Jock Campbell and
Boss McKegg (Diane’s future father-in-law). Fleur says, “Yes,
the coachman and the squire.”
I ask Fleur why she didn’t stay in New Zealand, and she says,
“It is a long story, but I married Barry Crump, and he was
notoriously famous, and every time we went anywhere people
would buy him ten beers, so I had to run far, far away from
him.”
We arrive at Mum’s house, and Fleur exclaims, “There she is!”
and there is mum waiting by her garage door all dressed in
blue. She climbs into the back seat of the car and we set off for
the Louise Henderson (Mum’s mother) exhibition at the
Auckland Art Gallery. Fleur instructs Mum not to give her her
cold. Mum says in a rather feeble voice, “I am fine; I just don’t
feel like driving.” Fleur replies, “Well, I can drive. I got my
license after 90 lessons and three attempts when I was 49, and
then stopped 15 years ago, so it really was a small window of
opportunity.”
She then tells Mum about Andrew’s wicked plan to sell his
house. She says she arrived at Parliament House to get the
Prime Minister’s Award for poetry. Her older son Gregory,
whom she calls “my green grass growing in a far plantation: my
first invention,” was there talking conspiratorially to Andrew. I
asked ,“What is going on?” and they told me “Andrew is selling
the house. And now I think, why did they tell me? I will never be
back. And I could have died without ever knowing that they had
sold the house.”
Mum says, “Of course, you’ll be back. You keep saying you
won’t be back, and look, here you are again after just seven
months.” (Fleur was never to return to New Zealand.)
“Yes,” says Fleur, “but I had to come to be hugged by Jacinda
and for my award and cheque, though it’s not a cheque these
days. I’m so sorry I couldn’t tell you I was coming, but I was
sworn to secrecy about my award. And then when the
announcement was made, no one was in the slightest bit
interested.”
We then talk a bit about artificial intelligence, and Fleur says
she read H.G. Wells in her bed when she was ten years old
and she has no intention of being ruled by aliens, and she is
not responsible for the world as it is.
After the exhibition, I drive Mum and Fleur to mum’s house as
they will have an hour or so before going to Carl and Kay
Stead’s for dinner.
“We will have a cup of tea,” Mum announces from the back
seat, “or a glass of wine.”
“Oh no, not wine,” says Fleur. “I gave up wine, coffee, meat,
and dairy when I got an ulcer on the tail end of a bout of
salmonella caught from chicken that had sat too long in the sun
of Newcastle. Newcastle is not used to hot temperatures.
But my greatest achievement in life was stopping smoking
when I was 64.”
But I think Fleur’s greatest achievement is this:
The Three-toed Sloth
The three-toed sloth is the slowest creature we know
for its size. It spends its life hanging upside-down
from a branch, its baby nestling on its breast.
It never cleans itself, but lets fungus grow
on its fur. The grin it wears, like an idiot clown,
proclaims the joys of a life which is one long rest.
The three-toed sloth is content. It doesn’t care.
It moves imperceptibly, like the laziest snail
you ever saw blown up to the size of a sheep.
Disguised as a grey-green bough it dangles there
in the steamy Amazon jungle. That long-drawn wail
is its slow-motion sneeze. Then it falls asleep.
One cannot but envy such torpor. lts top speed,
when rushing to save its young, is a dramatic
fourteen feet per minute, in a race with fate.
The puzzle is this, though: how did nature breed
a race so determinedly unenergetic?
What passion ever inspired a sloth to mate?
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