Читать книгу The Pavlova Omnibus - Austin Mitchell - Страница 19

NEW ZEALAND is a land without leisure. What you call leisure time, Kiwis know as a period of maximum exertion. Outside working hours this is an ant hill (as distinct from Cashmere, the aunt hill) of effort. Inside working hours they recover. Maximum ingenuity has to be exercised in spreading out formal ‘work’ and reducing its strain to conserve energy for the ordeal ahead. The moralist may complain about lazy and slipshod workers. No one heeds him. The forty-hour week is a necessary recovery period for the other 128. Unlike the Germans and Japanese, New Zealanders have a sense of priorities. If they work hard it must be for themselves.

Leisure is so exhausting because there is nothing to do. Other countries have leisure and entertainment industries. Bowling alleys, drive-in brothels, theatres, clubs and other institutions cater for every taste from blackcurrant cordial to geisha. Everything is done for them, so the workers can gallop back to their factories relaxed, refreshed and entertained.

In New Zealand it’s different. Show biz hardly exists outside of a few itinerant pop groups, the Rev. Bob Lowe and that popular group, Dr Geering and the Presbyterian General Assembly. Visits from overseas artists like LBJ are few and expensive. By the time they get there they’re not at their best after an exhausting trip. Lord Reith, a titled undertaker who believed that television was a branch of the embalming industry, still wanders NZBC corridors, giving people what is good for them rather than what they want. As for night life, cities, while beautifully planned, are so well laid out that you wonder how long they’ve been dead. A search for the liveliest spot in town usually ends up at the YMCA As for discotheques, in the world of the with-it they stand without, though a few daring entrepreneurs have converted their milkbars into psychodelicatessens. Ten o’clock closing has hardly made the pubs social centres; in mixed bars you have to ask for an estimate before you drink.

Restaurants are poor by overseas standards. When Graham Kerr talked of ‘New Zealand, Land of Food’, pies may have entered his mind but he was probably thinking of sandwiches. This is their basic food as well as the foundation of their way of life. Before the sandwich all men are equal. It sustains more people more cheaply to the ton than any known nutrient, even Asia’s rice. It allows Kiwis to spend their money on essentials—such as cars and slimming cures. Schoolgirls stoke up on it into unlovely monsters beyond the help of power net Lycra or Maiden form bra. The menfolk are de-energised by the cloying pap. Citizens only eat out when they’ve got sandwiches. Otherwise it’s too expensive. With a night out costing as much as a gnome for the garden there’s really no choice. After a day of indigestion the meal is forgotten. A gnome is forever.

The Kiwis entertain themselves. Leisure begins at home. In the day they entertain there with coffee, at night with beer, and if the furniture needs renewing they give a party, pronounced with a ‘d’ to distinguish it from the less important political version. Whatever the social class of the host, parties are all eatathons and drinkathons. If it’s a student do, keep your half-G up your jumper. If everyone is wearing suits it might be a mistake to paw your host’s wife too soon. If it’s your party insure against damage, though remember third party rates are high. Attempting to ingratiate myself with my students, I gave occasional parties while my house lasted. At the penultimate party the bed legs were broken off by the weight of couples dancing on it (this was, after all, New Zealand). At my final party, a fellow lecturer was pushed through the livingroom window and a gatecrasher locked himself in the lavatory for four hours, with disastrous consequences for the lawn.

If you are at a loose end ring a taxi firm and ask them to drive you where the action’s thickest. Or follow people home from the pub and sidle in with them. Or join the other cars prowling the streets looking for signs of life. You won’t be welcome but it would infringe traditional hospitality rituals to throw you out before you actually collapse vomiting on the carpet. After all, the party is the great Kiwi contribution to social betterment. One of the great literary classics is called Government By Party.

The home is the focus of the nation’s life. Other countries go out for entertainment—Englishmen to sit in pubs, Ulstermen to murder each other in the streets. Kiwi homes are so much bigger, better and more beautiful, veritable people’s palaces, that the occupants don’t want to leave. The homes are also so expensive they can’t afford to. The home is the venue for their most popular forms of entertainment: television, gardening and peering out of the window. It’s also a hobby you inhabit, and so exhausting that no New Zealander ever calls his house ‘Mon Repos’.

Americans flee the noisy cities to the quiet of suburbia. If you want weekend peace you must go to town. The suburbs are a cacophony of power drills, motor mowers, hammers, carpet and child beating and revving cars, all punctuated by the screams of amateur roof menders falling to their deaths. A New Zealand house begins life as a 1,000-square-foot wood or brick box, sitting in a sea of mud and rubble rather like Passchendaele. Within months the garden is a condensed and improved version of Versailles, likely to turn Capability Brown green with envy. Hand-manicured lawns get more care and attention than the owner’s hair. Vegetable gardens carry a crop large enough to feed the entire Vietcong for decades.

The house’s turn comes next. First a decoration, then an extension and enlargement, then an extension and enlargement to the extensions and enlargements. Once the major work is done, maintenance, redecoration and the addition of the occasional bedroom or ballroom keep things going until it’s time to move on and begin over again. The Englishman’s home is his castle. It’s the New Zealander’s mistress.

All this he does himself. In countries where work is highly specialised, do-it-yourself is a kind of escape from specialisation of labour, a return to craftsman traditions. The man who spends his life on a car conveyor belt tightening, or in Britain half-tightening, the fourth fender junction bolt can recapture the joy of being a jack of all trades. In New Zealand work isn’t specialised. The only division of labour is the relationship between Tom Skinner and Norman Kirk. It is a nation of all-rounders who have to repair cars, build houses or decorate them because no one else will do it for them. Break down by the roadside and any passing driver can repair your car; one astute Englishman took a wreck from the scrapyard, dumped it by a country road, and by the time the twentieth passing driver had contributed his skills he had a machine capable of 0-60 in 10 seconds and 58.5 mpg

I still remember the hysterical laughter on the other end of the line when I rang a Dunedin plumber to ask him to put a washer on the tap. My inability at gardening was a short-lived joke until the landlord realised that the psychosis was incurable. Then it became a subject for hostile comments and surreptitious dawn visits to do the garden with muffled mower while I slept. I was lucky. One friend allowed his garden to get into such a state of neglect that the neighbours reported him to the Health Department, presumably after finding the Security Service reluctant to intervene. No official inspection machinery is necessary when Big Neighbour watches, and most New Zealanders spend Sunday afternoons driving round the suburbs inspecting everyone else’s homes and gardens. The law intervenes but rarely, as when Otago University students started an epidemic of gnome stealing and butterfly daubing. This ended only when Mrs McMillan threatened to reintroduce the death penalty.

The home is a basic unit of production for children and goods. Other countries have mass production and conveyor belts. New Zealand needs cottage industry because it is less efficient. For the men the home is a garage and service station. The car isn’t a consumer durable but a shrine, as well as being one of the few means of population control not proscribed by the Pope. For it kills over six hundred people a year. There is one car to three people because home garages keep on the road cars which would elsewhere appear only for veterans’ rallies. It is a bit early to tell, but New Zealand may have discovered the secret of perpetual motion. The glory that was grease.

The home is also a market garden. And a brewery. The massive hoardings which proclaim ‘Dominion Bitter’ aren’t to encourage you to drink this brew, but to express the feelings of the directors about their untaxed competitors.

The female production staff devote themselves to making jam, clothes, cakes and scones on a massive scale. The fruit is better preserved than the women. In the preserving season places where teenagers meet are suddenly all male—the girls are bottling. ‘She’s a bottler’ is the highest praise a man can give about a woman. Yet female ingenuity extends in all directions. The Woman’s Weekly regularly offers thousands of ideas for economy, ranging from making candlesticks out of bobbins to interuterine devices out of short ends of fencing wire. Indeed its surprising that dustbin men have to call at most New Zealand homes. Continuous recreation of matter was invented here.

This massive cottage industry allows the people to afford all the consumer durables they couldn’t buy if they had to spend money on clothes, vegetables or jam. Unfortunately it also makes these things inordinately expensive for the less dextrous.

Most people are exhausted by the demands of their homes and leave them only to rest and recuperate. Yet for those of insatiable energy there is a range of do-it-yourself activity outside. Elsewhere some act, sing or play, others pay to see them. In New Zealand everyone has the right to sing in grand opera, dance classical ballet or play in the symphony orchestra. Unfortunately all too many of them do.

Voluntary effort runs the political parties, and helps educate the children. Volunteers also provide nursery education, many of the welfare services and much of local government. Political scientists equate a country’s degree of democracy with the vigour of voluntary organisations. New Zealanders are among the most enthusiastic joiners in the world. If wife swapping or sex orgies did catch on, they would form committees to organise them. The purpose of an organisation is usually irrelevant. It exists mainly to provide an outlet for energy, bring people together, and keep them off the streets.

Committees also organise sports. Tom Pearce’s Law states that one hundred full-throated spectators and ten organisers, officials and administrators are necessary to put one man on the rugby field, a bigger back-up than the American army has hors de combat. Old rugby players never die, they graduate to committees. Study of the labyrinthine processes and the inscrutable personalities of the New Zealand Rugby Union is the Kiwi counterpart of the CIA science of Kremlinology.

Sport isn’t merely a physical expression of do-it-yourself. New Zealanders aren’t a peaceful people and if they can’t fight German enemies or thump American allies they need aggressive sport as an outlet for their violent instincts. War and sport bring out the beast in them. Yet sport is the cause of the country’s social progress. Would the social security system have come into being without the incentive of the 20,000 injuries a year inflicted on the rugby field? Sport is also a major political issue. Look at the energy expended in keeping politics out of sport or Maoris out of South Africa or South Africans out of New Zealand. Look at the interruption of parliamentary debates to announce results, or at the meteoric rise of one Minister who threatened to resign from Parliament if his local trotting club didn’t get extra racing days. Sportsmen are the folk heroes. If they could manage words of more than one syllable they would be the nation’s leaders too. Sport is a vital element of colour and excitement in the people’s lives. In short it is their religion.

This doesn’t mean they are all sportsmen. A 1966 survey of leisure time showed that two thirds of those interviewed played no sport and a fifth took no interest, but these are lower proportions than any other country and the same survey showed that a third of the men devoted five hours or more to sport each week. New Zealand has more sporting opportunities. Britain boasts 64 racecourses for 50 million people and as many universities. New Zealand has only seven universities but 80 racing clubs and 30 trotting clubs. It crams 271 licensed racing days and 133 trotting days into a 365-day calendar.

To succeed, Kiwis concentrate their energies on a limited range of sports. The girls concentrate on hockey and netball. Men play rugby and cricket. Swimming, soccer and rugby league are also permitted. One of them you must be good at or at least interested in if you are to avoid ostracism; Lord Rutherford wasn’t good enough to be an All Black so the only future for him was to go overseas and split the atom.

Sport is the only field where professionalism and skill are tolerated. Kiwis excel at rugby because their children are drilled from an early age, adolescents inspired with a lust to kill which makes the Kamikaze pilots of World War II look like simpering girls. A couple of games after their arrival, a French rugby team had suffered two sprained ankles, two back injuries, two hamstring injuries, one scalp wound and one burst blood vessel. Harder grounds were not wholly to blame. Also New Zealand had the wisdom to concentrate on a game which only four other countries play, and they only as one game among several. Thus New Zealand is able to lead the world, with the possible exception of one of the four other countries. Finally there is no international market in rugby thugs. A ballet dancer would go overseas to reach his peak. The rugby player’s art reaches its finest expression in his homeland.

Every so often New Zealand sends overseas as ambassadors the All Black team, much as if Haiti sought to win the world’s esteem by sending the Tonton Macoutes as plenipotentiaries. Internally all is dedication. Tom Pearce was not being too flowery when he once exhorted the nation: ‘Now that this team of very fine New Zealanders is about to leave these shores it is incumbent on every loyal New Zealander to get wholeheartedly behind the team.’ It could be painful to get in front, but unless you take an interest there’ll be nothing else to talk about for the next few months. Courteous New Zealand husbands have been known to ask their wives if there was anything they would like to declare before the tour commenced and family talk ended.

As a final pastime, the New Zealander has the great outdoors, greater and more extensive than anywhere else. The coastline divides up at three feet and eighteen sandflies per inhabitant, so a crowded beach is one on which you can see people. Hong Kong has 243 vehicles to every mile of road, New Zealand roads work out at over a hundred yards per car, enough even for me to park. The mountains are one per active climber. The \vhole country could be shared out at 27 people per square mile compared with a jostling 577 in Britain. Every year 500 tons of fish are pulled out of Lake Taupo alone and 100,000 deer and several hunters are riddled with lead. Indeed, old-timers will tell you that you were safer on Vimy Ridge than in some of the New Zealand forests. Tramping tracks like the trail to Milford take a harder pounding than any parade ground. Pity any foe with the temerity to invade New Zealand. The whole population would simply take to the hills. Guerilla war would decimate the entire Red Chinese Army in days.

The outdoors is normally reserved for holidays. You will recognise them because activity rises to ever more frenzied levels. In Britain holidays are an escape from reality, two hectic weeks on a package tour to a world which is slowly being plasticised, processed and sanitised for trippers. With the Kiwi, they are a concentration of reality, a period in which the people leave their houses and go to camping sites or motels, where life can go on as normal, the women cooking, the men tinkering. Holidays New Zealand style can also mean visiting relatives or friends and living off them. The country is a vast network of obligations and owed visits. Not even Petone is immune. When people with sleeping bags arrive at your door talking of a chance encounter in the Midland Hotel five years before, or a distant relationship with your wife’s mother’s first cousin, to turn them away is a breach of hospitality. So is taking seriously their offer to sleep on the floor. They want a bed, yours if necessary. No New Zealander away from home ever goes short of a bed, though as a Pom you may well be too squeamish to exploit a system which demands only thousands of relatives and brazen insensitivity.

Perhaps all that I’ve described, the do it yourself world of industry, entertainment and holidays, seems a little crude and unsophisticated to you. You may miss excellence and expertise. Seriously, though, life is better. You’ll be doing things for yourself. After the initial blunders you’ll come to enjoy it. If you don’t you can always go back home and pay someone else to do everything for you. Even grumbling.