The most wonderful offer came. Would I like to join three well-known male poets, Alistair Campbell, Sam Hunt, and Hone Tuwhare on the Students Arts Council Four Poets Winter Tour 1979? Our schedule would be to give 66 readings in six weeks all around the country and as far south as Dunedin. We were to travel in a minivan with a driver and each be given a motel room of our own to overnight in, every night. Meals we could make for ourselves in the motel kitchens or buy for ourselves /order in as we went on round the country. Stunned and overjoyed that it was me who’d been chosen, I told Tony who immediately said, you must have the right costumes to wear, so I toured the Ponsonby Road junkshops and found suitably dramatic clothes and a fluffy pale honey-coloured jacket with a red lining that would hopefully keep me warm in the south, a dark-green Stetson and had some metres of my treasured batik made into a long gown to wear onstage.
Later, I heard Lauris Edmond was miffed it wasn’t her who had been chosen to travel with the guys, but me. Sam had said it was because I was younger, they thought I’d be more fun.
Before the tour proper began, we were all to meet at Sam’s place at Death’s Corner near his later home at Paremata, to be photographed by Don Higgins and interviewed for a student newspaper. Sam hadn’t far to come, Alistair only had to drive up from Pukerua Bay, Hone to fly up from Dunedin and me down from Auckland, our trips all paid for. The Students Arts Council then made a poster featuring a photograph of us four walking happily down an unpaved gritty country road, laughing together as if we were already touring.
This and other photographs were also put into an A3 sized Four Poets Tour newspaper which would be sold at all readings and bookshops en route. On their request I quickly typed up the manuscript of my poems since Against the Softness of Woman and handed it over to Sam and his Wellington entrepreneur/publisher friend Chris Hampson who’d brought out Sam’s own Drunkards’ Garden in 1977. They were only too pleased to put together and bring out Diamonds & Gravel – as Sam jokingly said, our books have the same initials – as they knew it might well sell on such a national tour. And it did – 1,000 copies were sold within one year. Gil Hanly came round to 4 St George’s Bay Rd flat and took more publicity photos of me in various outfits, one of them Sam nicknamed my ‘Jane Fonda look’.
Unfortunately for Tony’s and my continuing relationship, I came back from Wellington entranced by one of the poets and he immediately picked up on it. You’ve fallen in love with Alistair Campbell, he said, quite piqued. Well, it was true, I had. Not that anything had happened except the feeling of sympathy, warmth, and mutual understanding. Of course, Alistair had Meg, his wife, also a poet, a strange rather reluctant creature, I found later, who sometimes suffered from depressions as Alistair too said he did.
Possibly because he’d been an orphan and shipped with his brother from Penryn Islands to NZ with their names on labels pinned to their jackets. I found him too intelligent to let himself indulge in depression now he was adult and ageing. In 1979 he was 54, 24 years older than me at 30 when we toured in winter. So, that was it with Tony, with whom I never quite felt the same belonging, though we were fond of each other, there was always a distance.
*
My book Diamonds & Gravel was launched at the very start of the tour in the huge Auckland University Students Association Cafeteria Building with Gil Hanly photographing me in my velvet jacket looking totally out of my tree with excitement. We all gave readings that night to rapturous applause. The next morning, boxes of all our books were loaded by Clive, our indefatigable tour manager and driver, into the back of the van along with all our travel bags. In we climbed and we were away.
Six weeks and 66 readings plus radio stations and interviews: that’s a lot of onstage time. Even for the troopers we were soon to become. We travelled from town to town and upon hitting a new town, under Sam’s instructions usually went straight to the local radio station to announce our arrival and be cheerily interviewed, so that the audience would be primed up by hearing our voices, then come that evening to our reading.
I was determined to keep my weight watcher weight and fitness up, so bought and cooked small light meals according to the book; and ran around the motel grounds a few times before dinner in my new track suit. Then a shower and into our stage clothes and off we’d drive – to whichever theatre or hall where we were to perform with question time and book-buying opportunities afterwards. We’d sometimes sit on the edge of the stage, Sam dangling his long stove-piped jeans legs down asking, what’s your name and signing, having dedicated it to the person with a flourish in his signature. Alistair taught me to strike out my own printed name with a quick dash (always using a pencil not a ball point, as graphite lasts forever unless someone erases it and doesn’t show through the paper) and so, they have your own ‘hand’ and not the printed name.
We usually said that Hone or Sam, being the drama queens, would go in first and last place and Alistair and I, the quieter ones, would go in second or third place. Hone would sometimes creep up to the microphone and then pause – the audience waiting with breath bated – for the onslaught.
I used to love sitting next to Hone in the tour bus and leaning against his stalwart shoulder if I was tired, though sometimes he sat alone on the very back seat, as Sam often did. Or I’d sit next to Alistair on the seat behind our driver Clive, with the other two behind us. Sam once muttered, when Alistair was obviously feeling low, don’t pull me down into the hole you’re in, mate! Both Cancerians, both chock-a-block with deep feeling.
In Wellington we performed in the cathedral to an audience of approximately 400 attentive listeners. People swarmed up to the stage afterwards to buy copies of our books, have a little chat and have the books signed. Someone told me later she could see my aura – it encircled me and was a lovely clear light.
On we went. On and on to all the cities and towns, all the radio stations, many secondary schools with the children responding especially when we did our performance poems, rather than love poems. Near the very end, there’s a set of photos with me standing by Alistair. Behind my fluffy jacket we’re holding hands. That night, I slip into his motel room, and we make love. Next morning, we all parted.
Each of them had sweetly offered that I might slip into their motel room, after our drinkies’ session each evening together, usually in Sam’s room, where we laugh and relax and have a drink before going back to make our own supper – or sometimes bringing what we’ve cooked and sharing it. But it was Alistair I’d fallen for, just as Tony had said. Oh dear. And a married man. It could not ever be.
Once back in Auckland, the letters started to pour in from Pukerua Bay. I still have about 50 of them ranging from the sweet nothings of our beginnings and occasional arranged meetings to a copy of ultimatum from me to Alistair that we must part and go our own separate ways, especially after Meg had threatened to leave, move out and stay at a friend’s, in other words abandon ship. He then wrote, I love you both, but you are strong; you will manage on your own. Meg needs me more, which I saw was true as I knew she suffered from huge depressions, and so accepted it.
From then on Alistair would write to me Hey kiddo, instead of My darling and gradually we stopped corresponding.
Over our time together, I wrote four poems for him, including “Kapiti poem”.
Kapiti poem
Until I heard your voice
I had hidden the ocean
in my heart.
Now my resolution
rages on the beach
my longing echoes down the coast to Kapiti.
A mildly abbreviated chapter taken with kind permission from the new memoir To see a World by Jan Kemp (TransLit, $40), available direct from the publisher or from the author by emailing her on jantranzlit@gmail.com. The sequel to her first volume of memoir Raiment (Massey University Press), which ReadingRoom devoted a week to when it was published last year, To see a World covers her personal and literary life from 1974-1994, with many an adventure in locales such as Papua New Guinea: “In that heat, in our stolen afternoons, Dante always made sure we showered together first before going to bed. Most particularly, he said, he’d liked it when he met me that my fingernails were clean.”
