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A certain official of the Department of Education was travelling through the King Country in his big Humber car. And he came to a crossroads, where an old Maori was sitting, enjoying the evening sun. He climbed out of the car and looked at the sign-post; but the wind and rain had blurred whatever had been written there. So he turned to the Maori. ‘Excuse me,’ he said awkwardly, ‘but could you tell me where this road leads to?’ And he pointed along the right hand road.

‘I don’t know, boss,’ said the Maori. ‘Over the hill somewhere.’

The official pointed in turn to the other two roads, asked the same question, and received each time the same answer. He grew angry. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if I don’t get to Auckland today I’ll miss the beginning of a very important conference. They can’t run it without me. This country needs education, and they need me to make the right plans for it. It’ll be a tragedy if I don’t get there. What’s wrong with you, anyway? You’re more lost than I am.’

The old Maori sat in silence for a minute, still enjoying the last rays of the sun. Then he took his cigarette out of his mouth and replied gravely – ‘No, I’m not lost, boss. You see, I’m not going anywhere.’

Perhaps I resemble a little the mythical Maori; at least as far as my schooldays were concerned. It’s a hard thing to say, but I don’t think any school ever touched me where I live. Things that happened at school touched me all right – thefts, fights, escapes, punishments, humiliations – but these could have reached me anywhere, in prison or on a sheep station. The educative process never touched me, that’s what I mean – as soon as it came near me, I instinctively slipped my mind into neutral, became passive, inert, allowed myself to be pushed around mentally or physically, and in a sense came as near as I could to a state of suspended animation. I still do that when I’m in company I have to tolerate but don’t really like. It seems that the schooldays were mainly a blank period, a time of waiting – waiting for what? For action, I suppose; for the dinosaur’s egg I carried inside me to hatch and break open. It did in the long run; but schools had very little to do with that.

I remember, at the age of eighteen or thereabouts, lying in a bed on a fine morning in a small rented room in Dunedin, and reading A Dominie’s Log, by A.S. Neill. A moderate hangover did not stifle the peculiar sense of joy that came to me from the book, a sense that a key to certain episodes in my own past had been given me by Neill. It was a sort of conversion, I suppose – Neill was concerned to de-educate the children in his charge, or let them de-educate themselves. He wanted to put the Calvinist engine in reverse and hand them back their own personalities. Since that time I’ve heard Neill damned with faint praise often enough by those of his own profession who bother to read him; and perhaps I’d be willing to admit that a Summerhill kid is bound to be a freak in the Age of the Nuclear Deluge. But I still owe page 224 old Neill some words of love for what he did for me at eighteen. He told me in effect that the running fight I’d put up against education from the age of five onwards might well have come from a kind of subconscious wisdom, and not from any source of malign perversity. And as I read his book an old, sad cloud began to lift from my mind. It wasn’t too late: there was still time for me to shift the boulder on my own, to start getting de-educated and find my own way by a sense of smell. Neill’s name is inscribed with reverence on the wall of my spiritual bomb shelter:

Here lies the bones of Neill
Who worked it out by feel . . .

It boils down to this. I’d seen a school first and foremost as a jail. Jails have their purposes; but the views of the prison management and those who serve time are likely to differ profoundly. Once in South Canterbury towards sundown, I went into a deserted one-room country school, and the smell of chalk dust and plasticine and ancient body odours carried with it a piercing message of gloom; as if the demon who inhabited the place were saying, ‘There’s no door out, boy; you’ll be here till Doomsday!’ The message was a rock-bottom one, quite unmistakeable; and I record this impression because it very probably echoes an older one – my own feeling at five or six, as a young calf being trodden underfoot in the infant school stockyard.

I did not begin school auspiciously. On that first grim day I sidled into the room and went straight up to the fat black stove and put my hand on it. It was hot; not red hot, but black hot. So I hid behind the teacher’s dress. She probably comforted me. I remember her as a vague, kind middle-aged woman. Some time later, when I stole her strap and took it home and hid it in a rusty can under a macrocarpa tree, she did not punish me for this infantile protest. But the teacher who came after her was a very different woman – a young tough lass with a black moustache, who decided to give one cut for each spelling mistake over two in the morning tests. I did all right there, because my home was full of books, and my reading was well ahead of anything I learnt at school. But the farm boys, who had no books in their houses, and had to milk the cows before they left home in the morning, came off badly. I remember one big mother’s boy with a running nose going up for his dose of leather morning after morning. The question was – Would he howl or wouldn’t he? Sometimes he did; sometimes he didn’t. This early initiation into the rites of sadism gave me an insight into myself and others. The audience were always fully awake – on their toes, you might say. I think that boy avoided being educated more successfully than I did. His term in the salt mines of education is long over now; I believe he is an able farmer in the district.

Neither then nor later did I want to learn anything. The usual verdict was – He’s bright but lazy – or else – He’s a daydreamer. I think the real situation page 225 was even simpler than that. I was already unconsciously erecting my defences around that core of primitive experience, that ineducable self which I like to call a dinosaur’s egg. Unfortunately the abstract analytical processes which the schools were able to offer me – and ram down my throat, if necessary – have the side-effect of neutralising this kind of experience and making it inaccessible to the conscious mind.

When Ratana visited the Prime Minister of New Zealand in 1935, he brought with him a potato, a gold watch, a greenstone tiki and a huia feather. Michael Joseph Savage bent over them. Prudently he said, ‘Brother, I can hear them speaking to me. I think I can just hear what they are saying. Yes, I think I can hear them; but I’d rather you told me what they’re trying to let me know.’

Ratana explained the meaning of the symbols. The potato signified the Maori, who needed his land to live, just as a potato cannot grow without soil; the watch had belonged to his grand-father Ratana Ngahina – it had been broken, just as the law relating to Maori lands had been broken, and only new machinery could mend it; the greenstone tiki signified the spirit and mana and traditions of the Maori people, and if the Prime Minister guarded these, he would have the right to wear the huia feather, signifying a spiritual fatherhood and leadership. As a result of this remarkable encounter, two Ratana members joined the Labour Government, and the course of New Zealand politics was slightly changed.

Ratana left school at the fourth standard. If he had carried on in the pakeha mode of education, perhaps to a university level, and become an active member of the staff of the Maori Affairs Department, could he then have thought or spoken in this broad symbolic way, expressing complex practical issues in a unity of the imagination? I doubt it. The Maori people would have lost one of their prophets and spokesmen, and the Government would have gained another civil servant.

No Bunyans, no Ratanas; no Blakes, no Dylan Thomases – because it involves an entirely primitive movement of the intellect, the natural contemplative faculty can hardly have a place in our schools. There are two types of learning which seem to be mutually exclusive – the first being the discovery of a sacred pattern in natural events; the second the acquisition of the lens of abstract thought, which sees nothing sacred in heaven or on middle earth.

There was something to learn, though, in the playground fighting. I was a slow lad and physically timid, but I had the advantage of weight. If I could get a headlock on my opponent, and drag him down and sit on him, the battle was mine. But the time would come when I had to let him up again – and on his feet he would be quicker than me, and angrier, and I would usually end up with a bloody nose. Once, inspired by boredom, when the class had been set to cut up sheets of coloured paper, I clipped a stronger boy’s nose with the page 226 scissors – unwisely, for he jumped on me from a high bank as I dawdled home after school, and punched my face while the back of my head rested on the ground. It taught me to find other ways of countering boredom.

Waves, rocks, beaches, flax bushes, rivers, cattle flats, hawks, rabbits, eels, old man manuka trees, meanwhile provided me with a great store of images that could later enter my poems. Among the books at home there were one or two of Norse and Greek mythology. I became the companion of Odin and Thor and Jason and Ulysses. That was an indispensable education.

When I was eight the family shifted up north to Wanganui, and I attended a Quaker school on St John’s Hill for a year. There they used to sing Blake’s Jerusalem in the morning assembly, and this gave me a strong sense of religious joy; though in the Scripture tests I got full marks for the theory that Jesus was the son of Joseph, but a good man nevertheless. There was a gully below our house where bushes made a thick roof above a small creek. There my personal education went on at its own pace; and also at Virginia Lake and Kai Iwi beach:

And by the bay itself were cliffs with carved names
And a hut on the shore beside the maori ovens.
We raced boats from the banks of the pumice creek
Or swam in those autumnal shallows,
Growing cold in amber water, riding the logs
Upstream and waiting for the taniwha . . . (‘Virginia Lake’, CP 74)

At this school they had an interesting system of discipline. Each child carried a penny notebook on its person, in which a teacher would set down a black mark, the nature of the child’s offence, and his (the teacher’s) initials. Thus each pupil had his or her own criminal file to look at. At the end of the week one took the notebook to the headmaster’s study, and there was a close examination of motives and causes, and penalties assigned if one had more than three black marks. Some stainless individuals acquired no black marks at all. The system induced in me a curious reaction. After I had acquired two or three black marks, a kind of impenitent despair would take charge of me, and I would acquire in rapid succession fifteen or twenty of them. As a result I found myself more or less permanently deprived of privileges and confined to the dungeons.

When I was nine the family shifted to England for a year or two, and I attended a Quaker boarding school in the Cotswolds – a pleasant enough place with farms around it, where one could escape at times to disturb the tribes of rooks in the high trees and steal eggs from the farmers’ chicken sheds. There was a science master who had a great enthusiasm for the ringing of birds. I think I could still identify the egg of a spotted flycatcher. And there was a large grass snake in the lab who used to curl round my arm and rest his page 227 head on my shoulder while his tongue flickered harmlessly in and out. There were also other less formal factors. This was a period of undesired sexual enlightenment for me. No doubt some turmoil at puberty is inevitable. But I think my own transition from childhood to manhood would have been less gruelling under different conditions – in a Maori pa, let us say. I remember the barbarities of the dormitory as the beginning of adult life. One could see clearly the irrelevance of any external authority in that world of violence and wry self-knowledge.

I remember one night in winter when the strong men of the dormitory were engaged in beating up a homesick German lad. One at a time they moved over to his bed in the dark and punched him. I had a choice to make – for I too was a foreigner, and the gang initiative could easily swing in my direction. So I put on my slippers and moved over and got in a few hard punches. I knew somebody was being betrayed. And I knew too that this was the underlying process of the world in which I had to live from then on – either to betray or else to be at the receiving end of group violence, either verbal or physical:

Hard to forgive them even now,
Precursors of the adult nightmare –
Franey, Nero of the dormitory,
Holmes, with the habits of a jaguar
And the sleek animal hide,
Waiting in a bend of the high stone stair . . .

The village like a mother stayed outside
With wells and horses, till the coat
Of manhood could be stitched and worn –
And the green mandrake Poetry
Born whole and shrieking some bleak night
Under stiff sheets and wincing at the dawn . . . (‘School Days’, CP 194)

There were things well worth learning. One could very easily falsify those early occasions. The wet nurses used to put vinegar on their teats in order to wean a child who had stayed too long at the breast. And so those various negative violent occasions forced me to begin to grow up. Those from whom I stood in most danger were not my jungle companions, sad recent exiles from childhood, yarn-spinners, players of dominoes, amateur sadists and sodomites, but more likely the ones who lived in the upper branches of the tree of knowledge – harsh or kindly pedagogues who would muddle my mind if they could, or even the matron-housekeeper, the old lady at the end of the corridor, who often called me in to her room and called me a bad boy and stroked my hair, and gave me a cup of wrinkled warm milk before I went page 228 to bed. Before I left the school she gave me a copy of Wordsworth’s shorter poems. This pillow-breasted mother-substitute was waving me back to the pastoral Muse and to childhood again. A journey that invariably kills the intellect. But I remember her good intentions.

An older boy asked me to write a poem for him to give, as his own, to a fair-headed lass in the Upper School whom he was courting. To win his friendship I tackled this job of poetic journalism, enumerating in a conventional way her hair, her eyes, her teeth:

From the bright white tips of foam
Teeth fit for a mermaid’s comb . . .

But there my knowledge of anatomy failed me, and the poem remained uncompleted. Another girl, the daughter of the woodwork master, used to meet me secretly in the lane beside the school and give me pies that she had made in the home cooking class. She was a large, square-built Circe. The attachment on my side was wholly gastronomic; on her side, maternal and romantic. Later on, however, it led to pedagogic misinterpretation. There was also an English teacher in that school who read my juvenile verse and liked it and encouraged me to write more. There was some trouble between him and the art mistress. I think they were found in the art room behaving in an unseemly manner. But he was young then. No doubt he acquired the terrible discretion of his profession as he grew older.

When my family moved back to New Zealand I boarded for a year at the St John’s Hill school. Though I must have done the minimum work to avoid penalties, I can’t remember any of the actual instruction I received there, except for a clumsy frieze around the wall of the classroom which had mammoths at the beginning of it. But a difficult guerrilla warfare developed between me and the headmaster. With the negative sexual obsession which is characteristic of a certain kind of pedagogue, he had intercepted letters written to me by the pie-cooking English girl, and had inevitably concluded that these were evidence of a precocious sexual liaison. My encounters with him were marked by avoidance on my side and a dour dislike on his. There was also the matter of music. Being tone deaf, I did not appreciate the music lessons, and used to sit in a corner of the room making farting noises with my hand under my armpit while the class was being instructed in Doh-Ray-Me. The relief of being regularly expelled from the class was countered by the fact that I had to visit the headmaster each time. I recall, however, in particular one night when the headmaster’s son wagered that I and another boy would not go down the road to a place where some bulldozers had been working among the sandhills. We put on our dressing gowns, went secretly out of the school grounds to the required place, and there leapt and slid among the sandhills in the moonlight. There was a strong sense of the jailbreak about page 229 it – the wild mottled globe of the moon overhead; the feel of the wind on our faces; the noises of trains from the town in the distance. Trains have always struck me as being symbols of adventure and liberation. On our way back up the road we were met by a procession of torch-bearing staff members. There were hushed and lengthy investigations. There was talk of expulsion; for the headmaster could conceive of only one reason for two boys being out together at night; though in fact the only practising sodomite in the school was a cautious immigrant lad whom the headmaster regarded as a potential saint. My own concern was mainly to conceal from him that his own son had suggested the expedition. In this I was successful, and fortunately managed to avoid betraying anyone.

I owe one very real debt to the old pedagogue with whom I clashed at the St John’s Hill school. For many evenings he read Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Imp in the Bottle to a group of whom I was one; and later, if I remember correctly, Mark Twain’s The Yankee at the Court of King Arthur. He had a good reading voice and gave himself to us and to the books he read us. He was, I think, a simple man unsuited to a position of authority, who might have been happier in a different job.

The next year I attended a day school in Dunedin. In the school library there were one or two anthologies which I found helpful, though the best were those I discovered for myself in the local bookshops. I think I would have liked that school much better if it had been co-educational. The school had a militant and active cadet corps. On days when the school as a body had dressed themselves in khaki fancy dress and were practising with unloaded rifles on the lawns, I weeded flower plots, under the charge of the gardener, in the company of another lad who had weak lungs. The arrangement was a compromise between my parents and the school authorities. It might have been pleasanter to put on the tribal finery, fire empty rifles, remove and replace the magazines, and get oil on one’s hands, inhaling the smell of grass clippings, metal and scrubbed khaki. On the other hand, it would have been one more mental jail which I’d have had to climb out of in later life. I could see that the boys I knew became less themselves the more they became members of the corps. Their faces became wooden and their language monotonous. They were entering the borders of the collective fantasy generated by Ares, dealer in souls. My own fantasies were Venusian, perhaps less harmful. My unwillingness to learn never deserted me. But by now the dinosaur’s egg was hatching. Some of the verse I wrote privately nearly every day of the week had control and shape and meaning.

What kind of education would I have preferred? Perhaps – till ten years old, on a farm in the South Island mountains or the Urewera country, learning to handle a horse and a dog and a gun; then, for a year or two, during puberty, in a Maori pa; then perhaps on the coastal boats. By now I might have owned a good fishing launch. One could still have learned to read and write. There page 230 is no lack of libraries in this country. But our firms and departments require literate peons for their dreary empires of economic liberalism. So we have universal and compulsory education.