So Far, For Now, page 8
On board the Captain Cook, where he was renamed Paddy, he quickly made friends. In particular, he became close to a lad from Liverpool called Peter Simpson, and another couple who settled in Christchurch. It was Peter Simpson who would keep Albert’s last letters, written from Mount Eden.
Albert and Peter, indentured for two years to a government department, were sent to work in the Hutt Valley, north of Wellington, for Post and Telegraph. At first, they were housed in a transit camp but, soon tiring of that, sought accommodation with a widow in the local suburb of Naenae. This woman, called Rose in the book, provided a stable home for the two young men. She had a garden with roses and taught music; there were home-cooked meals and friendly cats. Albert and Peter became part of the family. One of the children, a small girl at the time, remembers Albert singing, helping to build a playhouse, keeping a pet hedgehog and crying when it died, and a Christmas when she stood on his feet while he waltzed her around the living room. She remembers his gentleness.
The land in the Hutt Valley, once covered in a forest dense with nikau palms and rimu, had been disputed land, fought over by Ngāti Tama and Ngāti Rangatahi tribes, before successive waves of occupying settlers cleared it of its natural groundcover. Rose’s quarter-acre section backed onto market gardens, first planted in the rich valley soils by the Chinese in the late nineteenth century and taken over by returned servicemen at the end of the Second World War. Then came an enveloping tide of houses, row upon row of square plain dwellings built by the state as rentals for low-income families. A wide river dominates the landscape; it eddies and swirls beneath willow trees, and it can flood the entire valley. A delta fans back from the river and flares towards the Wainuiomata hills, which burn brown beneath summer skies of cobalt heartache blue. In the years after Albert Black left Naenae, I came to know the place well. For thirty-five years Ian taught at the high school there. He had a little office at the periphery of the school buildings where he saw troubled kids each day. Most of them lived in those huddled post-war houses.
In 1953 the Hutt Valley became the centre of a storm about teenage morals. Underage girls, the newspapers trumpeted, were said to be having sex on the banks of the Hutt River and ‘petting’ in the back seats of the local picture theatres. To make matters worse, they were meeting leather-jacketed boys who rode motorbikes around Elbe’s, the local milk bar. The movie Rebel Without a Cause, starring James Dean, was still a couple of years away, but the influence of a different kind of culture, an American one, which people saw as having started with the ‘Yanks’ in wartime New Zealand, was becoming pervasive. It had to be stamped out.
Bodgies and widgies, comic books and Mickey Spillane, suggestive American songs on the hit parades. The bodgies wore stovepipe trousers and thick-soled shoes, and hair greased with Brylcreem touching their collars. And coloured socks. Lime green or red or pink, colour manifesting itself after the drab years of the war. The widgies wore their cardigans back to front with the sleeves pushed up to their elbows, one of the sure signs a girl was going off the rails. Or, pedal-pushers, tight three-quarter-length pants, another sign of degradation.
Prime Minister Sid Holland, who had swept into power in 1949 on promises to treat farmers well and break the power of the unions, had used strong-armed tactics during the 1951 Waterfront Dispute. His government had also restored the death penalty, which had been suspended by the Labour government of the previous fourteen years. Now he ordered a report on this dangerous delinquent behaviour.
Sex, he made clear (although he preferred the term carnal knowledge), was not something polite people talked about, and young people had no right to get up to it. Young girls needed protecting from themselves. (It wasn’t so bad for boys.) They would never get husbands if they got up to tricks beforehand. If a girl fell pregnant, she got sent away, out of sight [usually to work as a domestic servant in a rural household or to a hard labour ‘home’ for unmarried mothers], or hastily married in her parents’ front room if the father could be captured. That is, and here the voices lowered even further, if the girl knew for sure who the father was. Or if she was even old enough to get married.
The man chosen to head the inquiry into the morals of teenagers all over the country was a high-profile and God-fearing lawyer called Oswald Mazengarb, who had a flair for the dramatic in court, and political ambition. He was also a close friend of Sid Holland. The revelations from the inquiry shocked the older generation and fulfilled their worst nightmares: teenagers were running amok. Mazengarb’s report was made public and landed in the letterboxes of anxious parents, just before the 1954 election, which National would win again by a handsome margin.
There is no way of knowing for certain why Albert decided to abscond, as it were, from his bond. There is a recurring suggestion that he was homesick, that the Hutt no longer appealed to him and that, if he could make his way to Auckland, he could earn more money and return to Belfast, or perhaps work his passage home on a ship. Nothing I was told suggested that he was involved in the Hutt scandals and Peter Simpson certainly was not. In January 1955, Albert would become the temporary custodian of a boarding house at 105 Wellesley Street in Auckland.
This is the way I half imagined, half learned of his leaving:
Paddy [Albert] arrived in Auckland after an overnight train journey through the central heart of the country late in January. He had slept little. The train stopped often at sidings and small towns lit by dim lanterns over station platforms, staying a few minutes, then seemingly picking itself up with a mournful blast of its whistle, hurtling further on into the night. Twice there were stops long enough for passengers to alight and join a crush of people at the counter where they bought food. He remembers buying a pie and a cup of tea in a thick white cup at one stop, a rock cake and more tea somewhere else. He sat upright in a second-class seat, and in the shadowy darkness of summer he glimpsed canyons of bush and, it seemed to him, desolation. His heart felt as if it would explode with grief. He had left behind the only people in the country who cared about him, the woman who had looked after him as if she were his mother, his friend who had emigrated with him, children who had welcomed his presence, the wee cutie who had danced on his feet.
Peter had been awake when he left. He was lying under the covers of his bed, smoking a cigarette …
‘Paddy, my old mucker, don’t go,’ Peter said, as Paddy stuffed his duds into his suitcase.
‘I have to, mate. I’ve got to get home to Ireland.’
The tangle of wooden houses, with their verandahs and alleyways between, have been replaced by high-rise buildings. There is nothing left to show what 105 Wellesley Street looked like in the 1950s. But it’s still just a five-minute walk to the main thoroughfare of Queen Street, past the neo-Gothic St Matthew-in-the-City, the turn-off to Albert Street and on to Smith & Caughey’s, the venerable department store. While there is no record of how Albert came to be in charge of the boarding house, we do know that the woman who owned the property was to be away for a few months. They had met within days of Albert’s arrival in Auckland. In return for taking care of the property, he would have free lodgings. He was not to allow people to stay there.
This is where things came unstuck. Albert was still only nineteen. Down the road and around the corner, in Upper Queen Street, was a café known as Ye Olde Barn, where patrons could buy cheap steak and chips. It was also a meeting place for the very people he had left behind in the Hutt Valley, mostly Kiwi kids done up as bodgies and widgies. Teddy boys congregated there too, and often young seamen, whose clothes were stylishly Edwardian to distinguish themselves as English. Or they may have come from Britain as children. New Zealand was one of several Commonwealth countries that took orphaned or abandoned children after the Second World War. Often, on arrival, they were sent to unsuitable homes like farms, where they were required to do heavy manual work or domestic duties and received little education.
I see myself sitting on the school bus in the Far North. At the front, a girl sits alone. Her name is Margaret. She wears a white blouse and a pleated skirt. Her face is very pale, her long hair caught in a bow. I think you’d call her pretty, but aloof. Or that is how she seemed to us other children on the bus. I remember we were told to leave her alone because she was unhappy and wanted to be by herself. Her surname was that of a local family, but then we heard that wasn’t her name at all. In fact, she wasn’t related to this family. And then she disappeared. How long did she sit there solitary and withdrawn? I don’t remember. Weeks, a few months at most.
At one of the farms where my husband lived as a child, he remembered another girl, whose name was ‘Jane’. She was supposed to be his sister. Or his cousin. Or something. She married into one of the families in that neighbourhood, and never left. We saw her now and then in the decades that followed, a righteous woman who bore a certain air of contempt when she talked about the locals, particularly those of colour. You could see it behind the smile; she wore her anger like a shroud.
Jane never left the farming area where she had been sent. But when many of these children were old enough to walk free, they tended to drift towards the cities, which felt more like the environment they were used to. There they banded together and proclaimed their differences.
Not long after Albert moved in, the house in Wellesley Street became party central. His new friends at Ye Olde Barn Café flocked to visit him and soon he was agreeing to people staying. He began to drift, moving around various labouring jobs, not staying long in any of them. He was also meeting and sleeping with a number of girls. It seems likely that at Rose’s house, where certain rules were observed, he had not had much opportunity to explore his sexuality. Now his options were wide open. He was undoubtedly handsome and he liked to sing and dance and to make love.
In the last month that he would live at the boarding house, six months into the Auckland sojourn, Albert turned twenty. Among the people lodging there was Alan Jacques.
Born in London, in January 1936, he was a year younger than Albert, although he passed himself off as twenty-four. He had been sent to New Zealand in January 1952 when he was almost seventeen, an age when he might have been considered old enough to refuse migration. He came as an unwilling companion to two younger sisters, under the auspices of the Child Welfare Department, who placed him with foster parents on a farm in Hawke’s Bay. His sisters went to other parts of the country. His mother was then living in Essex; it remains unclear why she allowed her children to be sent so far away. Alan was a well-developed youth, five foot eleven, with broad shoulders. It was said that he had done his three months’ compulsory military training immediately after being released from the farm. I was not able to confirm this but the theory makes sense and perhaps explains his undeniable fighting skills. (Albert appeared to have avoided service up until that point, possibly because he was indentured to the government.)
Alan Jacques modelled himself on Mickey Spillane’s Johnny McBride, the central character in The Long Wait, and assumed his identity. That novel was one of the books I had guarded on the mezzanine floor of the library. I reread it recently. Its violence, accounts of beatings and constant degrading encounters with women appal me. Johnny McBride, the character, carried a gun; Johnny McBride, the boy in Auckland, was known to carry a knife. McBride, the character, frequently insulted his enemies as ‘yellow bastards’. McBride, the boy, was known to use this epithet too.
From the outset, Albert and Jacques, under his McBride alias, rubbed each other up the wrong way. Survivors of that time say that Albert was terrified of McBride and his bullying ways.
Albert asked his lodger to leave 105 Wellesley Street. The landlady was due back and he needed to clear the house. Jacques, with nowhere to go, was angry and resentful.
Throughout much of July, Albert had been sick with a heavy cold. His twentieth birthday came and went. But as the time drew close for the landlady to return, his friends persuaded him to let them organise a party on Monday the 25th as a wrap for the occupation of the boarding house and, for Albert, a late birthday celebration.
The following day, the young men at Ye Olde Barn made plans to pick up beer and invite the girls. Albert asked one particular girl, although he had a steady girlfriend who had already been invited. I called her Bessie Marsh. The other girl was a sixteen-year-old I christened Rita Zilich. Rita went home after her work as a shorthand typist, ostensibly retired early and then climbed out of the window of her parents’ house, in order to go to the party. I did the same when I was sixteen. That yearning for the unexplored life, the wild energy that catapults us into our futures.
It’s not clear whether the invitation was directed to Rita as a potential partner for Albert, or whether she was invited because of the coterie of girls she would bring with her. As it happened, Alan Jacques, the uninvited guest, turned up at the party and, before long, Rita was making out with him in an alleyway beside the house. Albert appeared and ordered her inside. It has always been maintained that he was jealous of this interaction. Perhaps he was, or perhaps, recognising her age and some vulnerability, he wanted to protect her from Jacques. Bessie had left the party earlier in the evening.
In the violent clash that followed and spilled out onto the street, Jacques kicked Albert in the testicles, blackening his eyes and otherwise delivering bruising blows. Jacques left, pulled away by other partygoers, promising to finish Albert off the next day.
Rita stayed behind. Subsequently, there was some dispute over whether she had stayed willingly or wanted to go with Jacques. While Albert lay down to recover, she tidied up the living room, putting away a scout knife that Albert appears to have brought from Belfast that had been used for opening beer bottles. Albert talked in a generally maudlin way and they attempted to have sex, but he was too injured for this to happen. Rita appears to have been a willing partner. According to the evidence she later gave against him, as the night wore on, Albert muttered that he would kill Johnny McBride. He told Rita he expected to die young. She left around three in the morning, when Albert called a taxi for her.
The following day, the young men who had been at the party drank in a desultory way around Auckland’s pubs. Albert got up late, finished cleaning the house and later in the day, carrying his knife, went to a pub where he drank until he vomited and was thrown out. He then retreated to Ye Olde Barn Café where his mates, if that’s what they were, had assembled to eat. A group of Teddy-boys-turned-seamen also entered the café and sat down near the jukebox. One of them was another former child migrant from England named Richard Douglas, although he became Henry in the novel.
And it was at this point that the ‘incident’ occurred.
There are two versions of what happened. Albert would maintain that Jacques came in, told him to come outside and fight, called him ‘a dirty yellow Irish bastard’ and hit him in the face. Earlier that day, during Albert’s absence, Jacques had gone back to 105 Wellesley Street and put his belongings in a suitcase. Albert would state that he believed he was about to be killed. In order to save himself, he pulled the knife he was carrying and stabbed Jacques in the shoulder, hoping to scare him.
That is one version.
At the trial, the young men sitting by the jukebox would say that they saw nothing, that there was no exchange between Albert and Jacques. As Jacques stood, choosing a song, Albert had got up, walked over and stabbed him.
That is the second version.
Whichever you choose to believe, Albert left the café, accompanied by another youth. They walked to the nearby police station, where Albert made a series of muddled statements, claiming self-defence.
Back in the café, some of the young men had rolled Jacques over onto his back. The knife had sliced through his neck and emerged from his nose. Blood sprayed in all directions and panic ensued. Jacques died within minutes. A pathologist’s report would say that the initial stab wound was the cause of death – it had penetrated soft tissue and cut Jacques’ spinal cord.
The youths were terrified out of their wits and, it later appeared, believed that they had caused the death. When the police arrived, they offered themselves as witnesses but were told there were enough already. They then left the premises as quickly as they could.
Richard Douglas is still alive. He has a clear and exact recollection of that evening. In his version, an altercation did take place in front of the jukebox, before Albert retreated to his seat. Albert, he says, tried to play the Bing Crosby version of ‘Danny Boy’. His little brother back in Belfast was, of course, Daniel, or Danny. Jacques overrode this choice with, according to popular narrative, a song called ‘Evil Angels’. It seems more likely that it was ‘Earth Angel’, recorded by the Penguins in 1954.
Richard was therefore one of a number of potential witnesses who were not called at the subsequent Supreme Court trial in Auckland the following October. But, from his different vantage point, he maintains that there was a disagreement between Albert and Jacques, and that the threat Albert complained of may have been made then. Although Richard doesn’t recall a punch, his detailed memories of the ensuing minutes have been put to the test over a number of interviews and his story holds up. All these years later, we appear to have a truly credible witness.
