The Hut Builder, page 1
the hut builder
Laurence Fearnley
for Dave and Jan, and Sputnik (1993–2009)
Whenever the opportunity presented itself, my father would lift down the framed enlargement he kept on the shelf above the cutting block and show it to the customer who stood waiting to pay for her meat.
More often than not, I was able to predict what would come next. The conversation always took a familiar shape. A typical example:
‘Do you see who that is?’ my father asked, jabbing his finger at the glass.
The woman, not one of his regular customers, took a step forward and peered at the snap, examining the blurred black and white image of two men standing side by side on the summit of a mountain.
‘Your son?’ she responded uncertainly, despite having seen me only a few seconds earlier as I started to refill some of the meat trays in the window. ‘Boden, isn’t it?’ she guessed, squinting at the picture.
It was not the response my father was looking for.
‘No, not him,’ he replied, brushing my likeness with the edge of his bloodstained hand. ‘Not him,’ he repeated, his voice barely containing his excitement. ‘Next to him. The big fella.’
At that point the customer often took the photograph from my father’s hand and surveyed the mountain scene more closely, turning it this way and that to catch the light.
Behind the figures, disappearing towards a bottom corner of the snap, was a long, undulating ridgeline, punctuated by small shadowy indentations – footprints in the snow. Taking up the remaining background was sky, featureless around the heads of the men, but lower down it was possible to detect a white carpet of cloud. The surface of this cloud was smooth but not flat; it was rippled like sand exposed at low tide.
It was difficult to recognise the figures because both men wore metal-framed snow goggles. The dark lenses obscured their eyes but reflected the partial silhouette of a third figure – the photographer. Pushed back onto the crown of the shorter man’s head was a balaclava, while the other man, the ‘big fella’, wore a white cotton peaked cap with neck and ear flaps – the kind of headwear favoured by soldiers in the desert. Though the sky was clear, the cloth of both men’s jackets was flapping, indicating that the weather was windy. Indeed, if the customer had had more time with the photograph, she may have noticed that the sharp outline of the ridge behind the men was softened by spindrift, pluming skyward. But my father made a grab for the picture and, his voice rising hopefully, asked, ‘Now do you see who it is?’
The woman shrugged. She was still uncertain. Could he give her a clue? I remained carefully out of the woman’s line of vision, hovering in the small workspace separating the front of the shop from the chiller out the back. I could see the woman but I was too embarrassed to intervene. On the one hand I wanted to disown my father, but I also didn’t want to deny him this small pleasure.
I experienced this conflict whenever he began his performance. If it hadn’t involved me it would have been bearable. But it required my presence in order for my father to complete the show. And for me the performance was false. I knew only too well that despite appearances to the contrary – my jubilant smile, my raised ice axe – behind the dark lenses my eyes expressed alarm. No one could see it in the photograph but I was scared. My feet were rooted to the spot, my hands inside my mittens were clammy and my pulse, I remember clearly, was racing. Having reached the summit of the Middle Peak of Mount Cook all I could think was: how on earth am I going to get down?
‘Tell you what,’ said my father. ‘Take one more look and if you still can’t guess …’ He didn’t get the chance to finish because at that precise moment a look of faint recognition surfaced on the woman’s face. She frowned, puzzled. An inner voice said, ‘It looks like him – but no, it can’t be. Can it?’ She didn’t want to appear foolish but eventually, taking charge of the moment – if only to put an end to the game – she mumbled, ‘Hillary?’
‘Yes!’ roared my father, the skin on his face flushing, so proud was he of the photograph, and what it implied. ‘Sir Edmund Hillary …’ he chortled, stroking the great mountaineer’s hat with his stubby thumb. ‘That’s my son Boden on top of Mount Cook and beside him, as you so rightly say, is the greatest living climber of our generation.’ He paused, beamed at the woman who, from the look of joy on his face, might now have been his closest friend and ally. Neither of them was aware of me in the background, muttering, ‘Middle Peak – it’s just the Middle Peak.’
At this stage in the game my father glanced my way. It was my signal to reappear. I hesitated. For once, could I not pretend I hadn’t noticed, or turn my back and retreat into the cold safety of the freezer? I took a step forward and it was as if a spotlight had been hung from the ceiling, its beam falling on me. Where, minutes before, I was my father’s invisible assistant, I was now the star act: me with my fingers clinging to a tray of pure beef sausages.
‘Here you are,’ said my father as I re-entered the shop. I nodded and smiled at the woman, who said, ‘Hullo.’ I stood looking at my feet, wondering if my father would launch into the second act. Before I had time to hope that he might abandon the show he remarked, ‘See those sausages?’ He nodded towards the tray in my hands. ‘I sent a tray of those sausages up to my boy on Cook and I heard back – via Boden here – that Hillary thought they were the best he had ever tasted.’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘Imagine, sausages made by my very own hands winding up on Edmund Hillary’s plate …’ Though a cynic could have detected a hint of false modesty in my father’s expression, he was, in truth, deeply moved. The fact that Hillary had enjoyed his sausages – and for that I can vouch – humbled my father as completely as if the Queen had placed an order for one of his black puddings.
If only my father had stopped then, but, ever the businessman, he suddenly winked at the woman across the counter and said conspiratorially, ‘You should take some for your husband. Sir Ed’s bangers!’ He paused: at this point he had been know to add ‘as eaten on Everest!’, but to my great relief this time he didn’t. He simply reached across to my tray and speared a string with his fork, lifting it up for the customer to see.
‘Go on, then,’ she said, ‘cut me off four.’
Her eyes were keen and my father, aware of her scrutiny, made sure to select four of the plumpest from the string. ‘Lovely,’ he murmured as he wrapped them in paper. ‘Ed’s bangers. Fit for a knight.’
The woman handed over her money and permitted herself a faint smile. ‘It must have been a wonderful day,’ she said to me as she dropped the package into her basket.
I nodded. I wanted to say, ‘Yes – it’s one I’ll never be allowed to forget,’ but her remark brought that day back to me: the exhilaration and joy I had felt once safely off the mountain and back at our shelter. ‘It was a wonderful day,’ I replied. ‘Remarkable.’
fairlie
My father’s public face bore little resemblance to his private one. I discovered this at a very early age and, strangely, it was a lesson I learnt from a photograph. Years before he began showing customers the picture of me on top of Mount Cook, Hillary by my side, I was busy showing my school friends – and others, too – an image of my father perched on top of a camel, a vast expanse of desert spreading far behind him. I knew no one else who had seen a camel, let alone ridden one, and it was with great pride – and a large dose of superiority – that I explained to my friends that during the First World War he had served briefly with the Imperial Camel Corps.
Without the photographic proof in my hands I would never have believed that the healthy, suntanned soldier in the snap was the man I saw limping around the butcher’s shop in front of our house. It was very hard for me as a young boy to reconcile the two images in my mind. It was even harder to persuade some of my classmates, who, having seen my father hobbling about town, suggested that the photograph was some posed theatrical portrait. Even as I relayed the story of my father’s bravery, which I naturally embellished – having no idea if he had been a brave soldier or simply an adequate one, repeating the little I knew of his being wounded during an attack on Gaza – I also had my own secret doubts.
My father was a quiet man who, through sheer willpower, gave the impression of being outgoing and confident whenever necessity required it, in order to deal with a customer, a stranger, or even sometimes my mother. He never talked about his war experience, and by the time I reached school age he had been weighed down by so much tragedy that he gave the impression of permanently staggering beneath the load of one of the meat carcasses he lugged from his van to the freezer. He was lopsided with sorrow and yet no one but my mother and myself ever knew.
My father tried to carry the full load of grief but my mother was just as broken, if not more so. I was not to learn of it until I was a teenager, but my mother had suffered several miscarriages between the birth of my twin brothers in 1921 and my own appearance in the mid-thirties. No one used the term ‘miscarriage’ and, looking back, I cannot but feel pained – on my mother’s behalf – by the few enigmatic references I did overhear: whispered terms such as ‘problems’, pregnancies that ‘wouldn’t stick’, or babies that were ‘lost’. All these phrases, which I do not believe were uttered maliciously so much as carelessly, must have suffocated my mother in a cloud of failure and guilt.
Never once did I hear such talk escape from my father’s mouth. His words conveyed only respect and pride. According to him my mother, like her older brother Boden – the man I was named after but never met – was a ‘toughie’, a fighter. Unlike Boden, who died before I was born, my mother battled on and, lo, one day, victorious, another healthy child appeared – me.
Because I didn’t know about the sad episodes in my mother’s medical history, I was not able to appreciate her strength. For as long as I could remember – insofar as my own personal experience enabled me to see – my mother seemed frail, hollow. She spent a great deal of her time sitting at the kitchen table, working away on jigsaw puzzles – 1000-piece depictions of exotic locations and grand buildings, which she laid out on a large tea tray made for her by Dudley, my parents’ neighbour and only friend.
Connie, my mother, had been disabled by the grief that burdened us all. In 1941, at the age of twenty, my twin brothers, Ralph and Edward, had been aboard the HMS Neptune when it struck a minefield off the coast of Tripoli and sank. The air that we had breathed so freely immediately thickened in our lungs. I remember this quite clearly: the pain in my chest that increased minute by minute, day by day, week by week, month by month until finally, in desperation to break free from my suffocating surroundings, I begged my parents to allow me to move across the street to live with Dudley and his family. Remarkable though it now seems, they let me go. I can only imagine how strange this living arrangement must have appeared to our other neighbours. In a small town like ours we must have been the subject of gossip. But, out of respect for my mother’s fragile condition, no one raised the topic – publicly at least. And so, blissfully ignorant, I lived with Dudley, off and on, for nearly three years.
Though I was only six or seven, this period remains fresh in my memory. I see myself hovering uncertainly between two worlds. It was as if a wall had been erected down the middle of our street. On one side was my parents’ house and on the other was the house belonging to ‘Uncle’ Dudley and ‘Auntie’ Hilda and their children, Ted, Geraldine and Frith. On my parents’ side of the wall everything appeared drained of colour, as if life had been captured on black and white film and was projected back to me on a makeshift screen. Though still a member of the family, I was absent from the film itself – and yet my presence was still strangely felt. I was like an audience member who accidentally comes between the projector and the screen, stooping awkwardly in an attempt to squeeze imperceptibly between the rows and yet, despite their best efforts, creating a large black shadow on the screen.
On the side of the street where my ‘adopted’ family lived, the world was full colour. But, though warm and golden, the light seemed artificial, turned on for my benefit. Because of this I always felt a little confused. Where I expected shade there was none. No matter what time it was, whether early morning or late at night, it was as if I was stuck in a perpetual high noon of sunlight, with not so much as a shadow to keep me company.
I walked between these two worlds, crossing the invisible line, on one side of which I would be drained of everything except some faint remnant of will, while on the other I was bathed in light. As a result, I never knew where I belonged. Dazzled by the generosity and love lavished upon me by Dudley and his family, I would yearn for a quiet room, one in which I could lose myself in my thoughts and not everything was rendered visible. Then, retreating from time to time to my parents’ house, I would feel weighed down, burdened by all that went unsaid and lurked in the dark corners and empty rooms.
I never spoke of my feelings – or the terrible way I felt torn by these extremes. Looking back, however, I think both my father and Dudley must have had some idea of what was going through my head. My father, tuned in to unhappiness – as he needed to be, living with my mother – saw what was present within me. Dudley, on the other hand, who was always smiling, always happy and taking pleasure in life, must have seen what was absent. In me, he recognised a child who needed attention, encouragement and affection, all of which he lavished upon me, occasionally to the detriment of his own children. And so it was that Dudley, a carpenter by trade, began to take me out with him on Saturdays whenever he had a small job to complete. Ted often came with us but, being that bit older than me, he sometimes had inter-club sports. These outings were magical, for a number of reasons. Silly though it now seems, I remember feeling incredibly proud of being singled out by Dudley. I always knew when he was planning to take me because he would notice me being particularly glum or quiet over breakfast and would reach across the table and place one of his huge, slab-like hands on my shoulder, giving me a gentle shake. In his booming voice he would ask if I could spare him an hour or two to hold his ladder. Once he had dealt with the protests of the younger girls – who wanted to come too – he would butter me a thick piece of bread and off we would go.
On cold mornings there was a chance our departure would be delayed by twenty or thirty minutes – causing me great anxiety. Dudley’s truck – old by any standards – rarely started on frosty mornings, and one or other of us would be sent off on the bike to fetch the mechanic, who would arrive unshaven and foul-tempered in his late-model tow-truck; his muttered profanities inaudible but clearly visible in the vapour that puffed from his mouth into the freezing air. I was terrified of this man – Ray – and retreated into the house while he fired words of contempt at Dudley’s truck, the tangle of jumper leads and the day itself as he settled into the job of getting the old wreck started. The more Ray cursed, the funnier Dudley found it. When he was in a particularly playful mood he would mimic and tease him to the point where the poor mechanic would go purple in the face, throw the leads on the ground and threaten to back over Dudley’s truck with his own, more powerful vehicle. Rather than attempt to placate Ray or make amends, Dudley would all but collapse with laughter while I prayed that Ray would not carry out his threat.
It used to puzzle me why Dudley never asked my father to help. I was sure the butcher’s van would have been up to the task of getting the old truck up and running, but whenever I mentioned this to Dudley he would simply smile mysteriously and say that Ray liked to feel needed. Later I learnt the real reason why Dudley always sought out Ray when, as he admitted himself, it would have been far easier to ask my father. It transpired that Ray believed he owed his life to Dudley and, through gratitude or shame, felt compelled to repay that debt over and over again.
The story went that one evening, towards the end of June, Dudley had been returning from a job in the small settlement of Burkes Pass when, rounding a frost-covered bend, he had caught sight of tyre tracks veering off the road towards a patch of scrub. Though it was almost dark and bitterly cold, Dudley pulled over to investigate and, scrambling down the bank, happened across Ray’s tow-truck, which lay rolled onto its driver’s door, with Ray floundering around inside. Blind drunk, Ray was disorientated by the unexpected layout of his cab and could not find the passenger door, which was now located above him. ‘It was like watching a bee trying to escape from a closed jar,’ Dudley explained. ‘And not just any bee – but the angriest bee you’ve ever seen. When I finally got the passenger door open,’ he continued, ‘the smell of alcohol almost blew me off my feet. Ray was so busy cursing and thrashing that I had to reach down and grab him by his hair and pull him out. Just as well he still had hair back then, though I dare say he was a good handful balder by the time I finished with him.’
Ray could remember nothing of what happened, but, returning to the crash site and seeing his wrecked truck and the thick layer of frost covering it, convinced himself he would have frozen to death had he spent the night in the cab. ‘He sobered up pretty quickly when he saw his truck, I can tell you that much,’ said Dudley. ‘He doesn’t drink now, of course.’
So although in many ways Ray resented helping Dudley, at the same time he felt compelled to do so. Some echo of gratitude and a sense of male pride obliged him to repay the man who had saved his life. On top of that, he needed to re-establish the power he had lost as a result of that accident; he needed to regain his footing as an equal.
It was after one especially drawn-out episode involving Ray and his truck that Dudley, Ted and I finally set out one morning for the hotel at Burkes Pass, where Dudley had a small job to complete. It was bitterly cold and, to make matters worse, my trousers and jersey were slightly wet. I had been pouring warm water over the windscreen of Dudley’s cab when Ted’s large dog had come bounding down the driveway, hit a large frozen puddle, skidded out of control and side-swiped me. I was knocked off my feet and splashed with water. Not wanting to change out of my damp clothes and hold up the group any longer I insisted that I was fine and quickly climbed into the cab, making myself as small as possible so as not to be caught out.
