Page 36 - Exile-ebook

36 AN EXILE OF THE MIND MELTING TONES OF THE PACIFIC 37

due to a temperance liquor law handbrake working to slow it down.
passed in 1917. On the upside there A reporter friend suggested

was no unemployment and only one journalism as an honest career.
murder a year. The drug culture English and art were my best school
was non-existent. Auckland had just subjects, and art was not seriously
embraced the North Shore with the considered by educators to earn a
opening of the Harbour Bridge. crust. I was taken on as a cadet
New Zealanders lived high on reporter with the Hawera Star.
the hog to enjoy one of the A journalist cannot be seen
highest standards of living in without a car and Loui offered
the world. to find one for me. I declined. I
I shared a flat with the wanted a car that had brakes.
legendary Loui Kuthy. The And so Midge entered my life. A

Hungarian Revolution has- wartime Morris 8 convertible.
tened his migration to New My very first wheels.
Zealand where he bought a I drove in circles around
bowler hat and an umbrel- the block where I lived in
la to ‘fit in’. My rabbit gun first gear, not knowing
was more practical. Later how to change it, and not
known as the ‘Old Man of having the courage to
the Sea’ and already meld- make a right turn into traffic.
ing into folklore as a successful But I did know how to stop. After
fisherman, he reeled in a steady several circuits a policeman became
stream of women, earning him the suspicious and explained that I had
moniker, ‘the fisher of women’. to have a driver’s license. He got in
On a visit to Hungarian friends in the passenger seat and taught me to
Wellington, Loui drove like a maniac drive.
on a breakneck of road. With teeth Armed with my shotgun and a
rattling I clutched the seat white damaged record player, I set off for
knuckled. There were no seatbelts Hawera, south of the mountain.
to stop the car’s occupants from Home of Wendy with lantern aloft,
hurtling through the windscreen searching for Peter Pan in Neverland.
should the car make a sudden detour
into a gorge. The car had only the Ohawe cliffs, South Taranaki.