For the love of a good story and conversation
In an earlier piece, I touched upon my days in Wellington hanging out with journalists much older than myself in the various bars around town. They are a legion of ghosts now and occasionally I hear them roistering in the din of a smoky house bar, boasting successes, analysing the work of colleagues, holding forth on the issues of the day with a certainty glossed with acerbic wit and a cynicism that would make any old Greek stoic philosopher proud.
Of these larger-than-life individuals, Dirk de Ploy became a close friend – in fact, he drove me to my wedding some miles north of Wellington, and owing to the various pub stops on the way, it turned out I was the one who arrived late. Dirk was previously a London Reuters correspondent, originally from Rhodesia as it was then known. He and his family had settled in Wellington.
He moonlighted regularly for the dailies and radio New Zealand News in Bowen St, in the days before the Labour government under the deregistration policies of Rogernomics sold off most of the national broadcaster to private interests.
That was the finish of the freeand-easy New Zealand. A way of life ended that seemed more relaxed and colourful, less regimented.
Dirk was a tall, stringy guy. He died of a stroke at the age of 57.
The was no question about his talents as a journalist and bon vivant. I observed him on many occasions holding forth in a bar with his fine baritone singing voice. Although some of his ditties were bawdy army songs, he always entertained. I never met anyone else with a comparable ability to hold the attention of a crowd, at least for the first 10 minutes.
His rather self-destructive obsessions with women and sex did, I think, ruin him in the end. Unfortunately, he wasted a great deal of time in pursuit of these goals, yet this had as much to do with his sentimental nature as anything else.
Dirk never realised his dream of writing the novel he had already called Crumpet: A Personal Handbook on the Art of Seduction and How to Stay on Top.
I suspect that boast belonged to bar-room bravado. He lived at the bottom of a damp street in a house backing onto the Karori cemetery with his lovely cello-playing wife and their eight children. He left them in the end, or they him, and he ended up living in Alice Town with a telephonist who had fancied him for years.
A number of the journalists drank either at the Britannia, which was next door to the Evening Post and close to the Dominion in Mercer St, or in the house bar at De Brett’s Hotel in Lambton Quay, a watering hole I have previously mentioned though briefly.
You entered the nook via the dining room arranged in a 1930s Raffles-style decor with cane furniture and palm pot plants guarding the doorways.
The staff were superannuated individuals dressed in starched white shirts, bow ties, dark trousers and red cummerbunds. One of these, a Dutchman with a scar running down across his right eye and cheek, was always trying to sell you something from under the counter.
He was one of those ex-coffee or tea plantation owners thrown out of Indonesia, but still trying to recapture the lost colonial days of ownership and wealth in a pathetic sort of way.
Usually, the stuff he offered was ‘‘rare’’ Singer sewing machine manuals or sales catalogues for any number of discontinued brands from, say, the 1920s – worthless by any measure.
I guess this was his way of dealing with having come down in the world. That scar might have been a sabre slash, I thought, which give him a somewhat sinister aspect.
It was in that house bar that I saw the ‘‘silver cockatoo’’ holding forth, a cocky little bodgie who was president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. He was drunk and loudly obnoxious, and short – none other than Bob Hawke, future Labour prime minister of Australia.
Once, with Dirk, we were driving over the Mangawekas in his old Peugeot. Rather, I was driving at the time and not very experienced. I turned off the lights accidentally looking for high beam. Pitch black. Steep cliff face on one side of the winding hill road. I froze. Dirk quietly leaned over and switched the headlights back on. No sign of panic. A man never to be underestimated.
I guess I felt somewhat flattered hanging around with these older guys back then, reprobates most of them, but nonetheless able to converse engagingly but not in any great depth over a wide range of subjects. They had their own distinctive and hard-bitten wisdom you wouldn’t get at your average university tutorial.
For that, I am eternally thankful. They were a breed of individuals who certainly no longer exist, a mixture of the pragmatist-sentimentalist, enforced by a strong no bulls... factor, professionals in their craft and raconteurs over a drink. They belonged to the world of Pat Lawler’s Froth Blower’s Manual.
Great days and I’ll drink to that.