The intro read:
Phyllis Gant recalls her night with Ronald Hugh Morrieson.BRIEF ENCOUNTER
There’d be no partying for me. I went to my room in the newly-built student hostel with a monumental migraine. After trying to doze off I was suddenly alert: “There’s a man outside my window,” and told myself not to be silly. Then, in the glow from an outside light, a hand appeared, clutching the sill. There was a low moaning. The hand fell away.
I slammed the window shut. Below it I could
see a figure on all fours. Terrified, I watched it crawl away, pulled the
curtains together and, trembling, got back into bed, my head throbbing.
Presently there was a rattling at the
window: he was trying to get in. “Go away!” I yelled, panic-stricken. “Some
drunk, can’t find his room.” After a few minutes I peered out. He was sidling
along the wall and away.
All was quiet; the migraine was settling
down to something like bearable, and I slept – to be awaked by the sound of a
male voice crying, “Help me! Oh, someone please help me!”
I looked out the window but could see
nothing. The cries and moans continued. They seemed to be some little distance
away and I decided there must be someone nearer to whoever it was than I, one
of the men. He would go.
“Oh please! Someone help me! Please help
me!”
I leapt out of bed in my long wincey
nightie, not stopping to put on a dressing gown or slippers, and ran outside.
It took some minutes to find him. “Where
are you?” I called. “Where are you?”
It was dark in the quad and the ground had
been rotary-hoed. Shivering with cold and fright, I stumbled on the damp,
sticky lumps of earth, my feet frozen.
There was a shape on the ground: I didn’t
believe it, it was only a shadow. At that moment my ankle was gripped hard and
I almost fell. I had met Ronald Hugh Morrieson.
It was only the second time Morrieson had
been away from Hawera, the occasion, the writers’ conference held at Massey
University in August 1973.
He stood out, with his paper-white moon
face and his loose overcoat; someone said he had just come out of hospital,
straight from hospital and onto the train to the conference. Fellow writers
pointed him out: “That’s Morrieson.” It was said that he had written a number
of important novels, but no one in New Zealand would publish them. There was
talk of one, possibly two, being published in paperback in Australia.
He was a man of mystery, a man alone. When
he got to his feet at one of the sessions, what he had to say confirmed the
suffering his appearance suggested.
A brisk, older woman, German-Jewish I would
guess from her features and accent, took issue with his criticism of his
country, along with his remarks about his own depression and despondency. “You
do not know how lucky you are to live in this beautiful land!” she cried.
“Depressed? What have you to be depressed about? Everybody should be just so
happy! No one in New Zealand need be depressed!”
Morrieson said not a word, simply looked at
her, incredulous, from his depths.
Thereafter this lady took him in hand,
pursuing him relentlessly and plumping down beside him at mealtimes,
interminably extolling the beauty and bounty of our wonderful land, cajoling
him into conversation, self-justification, and a resigned, even tolerant
acceptance of her dubious comfort. It wasn’t easy for anyone else to get a look
in; I’d like to meet him, I thought, but I can’t compete with that.
Now I called for help. The man was
floundering in mud. All was quiet, the rooms dark. I tried to prise his fingers
loose. “I’ll fall if you grip me like that,” I said, reasonably.
Taking him by the hand and trying to drag
him to his feet was beyond my strength. I got my hands under his arms and
somehow got him precariously upright. We proceeded, he leaning heavily on me,
to cross that no-man’s land to a concrete path.
I was going at the knees and back; I had to
have help. As we reached a lit area, two male students, tittering, passed by.
“Help me, please help me,” I said. We must
have looked a comedy turn there on the path in the middle of the night, a
middle-aged woman in a bedraggled nightie and bare, mud-caked feet, and what
appeared to be a paralytic drunk covered in mud.
“Oh please don’t go,” I said. “I really do
need help – this man is ill.”
With that they came back and between them,
no trouble for two strong blokes, got Morrieson up to his room, undressed, and
into bed.
Morrieson went back to Hawera next morning,
leaving a message of thanks for “the kind lady”.
It would be nice if I could recall the
things Morrieson said. Maybe it was here that he observed he “hoped he wasn’t
going to be one of those poor buggers who become famous after their deaths”; I
don’t know.
He did speak bitterly of the rejection of
his work in his own country, of the anguish of keeping on writing in a climate
of indifference and a state of isolation.
And he has proved to be “one of those poor
buggers” after all.
UPDATE
Phyllis Gant, author of the novels Islands (1973) and The Fifth Season (1976), died in April 2010, aged 87.
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