Cartoonist’s seriously funny memoir
Famed Kiwi cartoonist Tom Scott reveals how a palm reader on the streets of India gave him a new lease of life, Dani McDonald writes.
It was on the streets of Delhi that cartoonist Tom Scott realised he would have enough time to write a memoir.
There he was, following Sir Edmund Hillary and his wife Lady June Mulgrew for a documentary he was making on Hillary’s May 29, 1953, conquest of Mount Everest.
Scott recalls a fakir stopping him mid-street asking him if he could read his palms. Scott agreed, after being astonished by the fakir’s knowledge of his favourite colour, number and mother’s last name.
The fakir revealed to the then 49-year-old that he would live to the ripe old age of 104. ‘‘It’s quite nice to hear that, I don’t know why you would trust a stranger in a crowded Indian street, but I just had this notion that I was going to live a long time,’’ he says.
‘‘I think I have another 30 years to fill, at least. I might take the last four years off, I don’t know, I’ll see how it goes.’’
Twenty years later and Scott, still a cartoonist for The Dominion Post, has just launched his latest book Drawn Out: A Seriously Funny Memoir.
The book, released on Monday, delves into Scott’s childhood, his student-newspaper days, his falling out with prime ministers, collaborations with comic legends and travels to the ends of the Earth with his close friend Hillary, plus more.
His clear recollection of his childhood allows him to start at the beginning as a baby traumatised with the scolding water of a bath.
Without wanting to spoil too much of the tale, here is another, equally traumatic story.
He was running through the grass at his family’s Manawatu home as a 2 1⁄2-year old.
‘‘At the back of a dairy farm there was a big sewage pond from the piggeries and the cow shed and it was covered in green mould and I thought it was grass,’’ he recalls.
‘‘I ran across the crust and plunged through into this bog, becoming soaked in poo.
‘‘There’s all these happy, wonderful things that happen to us all – a golden birthday party, a christening, a wedding. All joy merges into the one common experience, but unfortunately sad and unhappy experiences remain like shards of glass.’’
The memoir has been eight months in the making, over which two other utterly heartbreaking moments of his life took place – the deaths of two of his friends.
Footrot Flats creator Murray Ball, who he co-wrote the film with, and John Clarke, who played Wal the Kiwi farmer in the film adaptation, passed away within four weeks of each other. Scott grew up with the pair in the dairy country of the Manawatu.
‘‘I was at page 71, when I got the phone call that John Clarke died, which was shocking. I couldn’t work for four weeks, I was so, so distressed,’’ he said.
It’s a poignant time of life for the nearly 70-year old cartoonist, who was conscious of the fact he could have called it Dead Bastards I Have Known as he was digging up memories.
‘‘When you get to my age, suddenly all these wonderful people you have known, all these politicians that you’ve written about, they’re all dead.’’
His own ageing doesn’t worry Scott. Maybe it was to do with his Irish mother.
‘‘People would say to us, ‘your mother’s amazing, she’s absolutely amazing, we saw her in the supermarket and she was flying round like a whirling dervish. At 98, she’s just astonishing’,’’ Scott says.
‘‘Very Irish, isn’t it?’’
He’s happy with the experiences life has dished his way. To the point that he even wrote a book about it.
Days of writing weren’t always easy for the perfectionist dyslexic, who was determined to get sentences right before moving on to the next.
But the publicists were pushing the writer, asking him to just ‘‘bash the copy out’’ and they would edit it.
It wasn’t like drawing cartoons, he says. Scott has his written alphabet kept on a digital copy, which saves him the effort of whiting out an incorrectly spelt letter.
‘‘They asked me to correct a spelling word and then I put white out on it and I’d send it back and I’ve fixed one word and made two others wrong in the process, it’s terrible,’’ he says.
He got to the point that in the months leading up to his deadline, he would write for 16 or 17 hours a day, annoyed at the fact he needed to sleep.
‘‘Twice I’ve come close to childbirth – one was writing a play about my father [The Daylight Atheist], and this book. But men don’t get any credit for this sort of thing, women just sneer at us when we say things like that – and quite rightly so,’’ he says. ❚ Drawn Out: A Seriously Funny Memoir, by Tom Scott, published by Allen and Unwin, is available now.