Reflections: My Father in Fragments

Reflections on not erasing the past: the good, the bad and the ugly.

Ken Howard m. Claudia Hodder—Auckland, New Zealand, 1957

Like most of us, my father is entangled in my childhood, he’s long gone now having died several years ago. All this talk of estrangement I’ve been indulging in, and thoughts of my own estranged children, brought him back to me.

The trouble with getting older is that the years tend to fragment into images and short episodes—captured moments in time, often with high emotions of joy or pain, moments that stand in for whole periods of one’s life. When I look back at my father, most clearly I see a man in uniform—I’ve always hated uniforms—but also a kaleidoscope of fragmentary bits that somehow form a picture of good times and bad.

From early days, I remember Christmases at my grandparents' house, the table laden with food, the Christmas pudding soaked in brandy sauce and silver sixpences and shillings scattered through, the warmth of family gathering, the anticipation of Santa’s arrival. There were birthdays, family holidays, moments of excitement as gifts were unwrapped under the tree.

A favourite family story was of my grandparents anxiously awaiting my father’s return from Christchurch, where he was undergoing Air Force entry training. He was meant to take the train from Wellington to Auckland, but their horror grew when they heard on the radio that the train he was expected to be on had been swept away. On 24 December 1953, the crater lake of Mt Ruapehu burst, triggering a lahar that caused the Tangiwai disaster—the collapse of the railway bridge over the Whangaehu River just moments before the express train crossed, claiming 151 lives. My grandparents would often recall their terror, only to laugh in relief as he walked through the door, having caught a lucky flight home instead and intending to surprise them.

When I was big enough, I rode his old bike around our quarter acre yard—inverted curled racing bars, flat tires and a rusty chain, the wheels turning under my small frame as I straddled the too high bar and learned to balance. There was the time he cooked a load of crayfish in the old wringer washing machine—yep, mum demanded and got a new automatic after the one! Sometimes we would visit the beaches around Auckland, digging into the sand for cockles and pipis, which he would steam and serve in a bowl of malt vinegar and sliced raw onion.

There were summer camping trips to Mangawhai Heads, setting off from home at 4am on the long ride my sister and I loaded in the open back of a small old Morris well-side truck, wrapped in a rug beside my sister, leaning against the back of the small two door cab, feet amongst the camping gear and baggage. We arrived mid-morning to a sunny day. It rained that night and I watched as my father desperately dung a shallow trench all around the heavy green and white canvas tent so the water wouldn’t flood us out. The family walking the mile or so down the road with a plastic billy, heading toward the nearby dairy farm’s milking shed to collect fresh milk.

A photograph hangs in my memory—one my father took of my sister and me, sitting on a large boulder on the ocean beach at Mangawhai, both of us twisting to smile at him as we played in the little rock pool on top, the wide long sandy beach at low tide stretching behind into the distance. That photo later found a place on my grandparents’ wall, a frozen moment in time, a reminder of a childhood that still exists even when the present fractures away from it.

In the late 1960s, my father joined the RNZAF helicopter squadron as a crewman and while with that squadron he was deployed to the South Island after the Inangahua earthquake struck on 24 May 1968. The quake tore through the region, leaving the northern end of the island battered and broken. He was winched down from the Iroquois helicopter into isolated pockets of devastation, helping to evacuate the stranded and lower supplies to those cut off and in need. Inangahua and Westport were later emptied out when a colossal slip blocked the Buller River, sending its waters surging 30m above normal—an eerie, rising threat that forced whole towns to flee.

There were quieter moments, too. My father was a keen archer, and we spent weekends at the archery grounds on the North Shore across the Harbour Bridge from the city, as he and my mum practiced with the club. I remember the focus in his hands as he shaped his own arrows, fletching and putting the points and nock on them and, after a day on the range, straightening the shafts on a jig he had made himself. I remember visiting Mr. Hinchcoe’s workshop on the North Shore of Auckland, where my father received his new laminated wood and fiberglass bow, crafted to his specifications. And him setting off to the world archery championships at Valley Forge in the USA around 1969 when represented New Zealand. His quiet devastation at later having to give up the sport when he developed tennis elbow.

He was posted to Singapore in 1971 for two years, and the family travelled in a DC10 and were put up in the Lion City Hotel until our house was available and seeing the city he knew so well from his earlier trips in the Airforce on exercises and in the mid-1950s during the Malayan Emergency. Somewhere I still have a box of his photos, dropping supplies out of a DC3 aircraft far above the jungle, and others of him running in a military athletics competition where he won several medals. Photos of him with many other nameless young servicemen drinking, playing cards and relaxing in the tropical evening heat. Lurid tales of Bugis Street and Singapore nightlife in the old days. Of him taking me to a tailor in Changi Village to have my first high school uniforms made and then of family travels in Malaysia during school holidays to Malacca, Kuala Lumpur and Penang—dirty brown rivers, elaborate Buddhist and Hindu temples, old Portuguese fort ruins in Malacca, Asian markets, hotels and days at the beach in Penang.

When the family returned in 1973, there were weekends cavorting in a neighbour’s home-made dune buggy among the sand dunes near the Rangitikei River mouth. He got me one of my first after school jobs cleaning on the nearby Airforce base where he had gained the coveted rank of Warrant Officer—“Better to be king of the bums than bum of the kings”—which allowed me to buy my first motor bike and, later, he taught me to drive on the back country roads near our house so I could get my driver’s license.

A few years later, when I was at university, I met him in the dank and empty bar at the Returned Services Association (RSA) club in central Auckland, where he worked for a while after leaving the Air Force. He soon got a job as a quality assurance manager, married my step mother and bought a modest two story unit in a block of flats where, after my first child was born, we would visit, sleeping on a mattress under the stairs. A decade later, he and my stepmother retired to a cottage in the countryside West of Christchurch, where he joined the local lawn bowls club and took great pride in fundraising to roof the club’s green.

We visited when we could, I paid to repair their car and we communicated often. Strange thing was, that while I often visited him and my step-mother at their places, in nearly 30 years he never once visited my home—I still wonder why. Somewhere I have a photo of me and him standing in their front yard, his arm across my shoulder, both smiling awkwardly for the camera. One of the last times I saw him—saying goodbye, then driving away with my wife, daughter and her partner—only to be overcome by emotion at the years wasted and lost, forcing me to pull over on the side of the road in tears.

After he died, my stepmother sent me a small box of photographs and his service medals. I didn’t go to the scattering of ashes my sister organised on Auckland harbour sometime later—on a job, working in another city, another country. I recently passed the medals on to my sister for one of my three nephews to inherit—yes, I’m moving on. All I have of him now is made from photographs and memories.

But, there are harder truths too. There was the night assaulted my mother, her cries echoing through the house, her begging me to stay out of it while she was dragged back from the hallway to their bedroom. He had been duty NCO on the base and jumped the fence going AWOL and running 6.5km home after somehow getting wind she was planning to leave. Days later, I fell asleep and burnt a stew he’d made, and when he got home, worn down, he snapped, “I’m doing my best without your mother here.” My sharper retort, “Well, whose fault is that?”—and so we fell into silence. I don’t think I even really know what was going on between them then—the details disappear into the shadows and hidden corners my mind—it’s nearly half a century ago and my mother passed away from cancer only 9 years later.

He was a man of contradictions—capable of love and harm, generosity and anger, pride and mistakes. There were demons too, alcohol among them, and others I can only guess at. This isn’t a simple tale of villains and victims, but a patchwork of flawed, human moments. He is part of me, for better or worse. To rewrite him as only a villain or to cast myself solely as a victim would deny the complexity of the collection of fragments I have left of him, where warmth and wounds coexist. I cannot erase him, even if I wanted to. He remains, in ways I cannot undo, in memories I cannot and will not unwrite.