XX. One Black Friday
Baby, when you say you want me
Oh, babe, you know it’s not true…
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Christchurch, Canterbury
July 20, 1984
Lange and McLay weren’t entirely surprised to meet each other on the way to Palmer’s office in the Civic; in the spirit of unity (or, more likely, in the spirit of not being seen to favour one over the other) he’d taken to seeing both at once for high-level briefings. Lange thought it showed poor party loyalty, but then very little Geoff had done since March had. As if there were any choice in the matter for the poor bastard.
What was surprising, though, was walking in on the Prime Minister examining a bottle of whisky in his hands with a kind of feigned concentration which was unbelievable in the circumstances; he had to have heard the two visitors walking down the hall, so this must be some sort of dramatic affectation of what he imagined looked sufficiently Prime Ministerial. Trust the law professor to be an amateur dramatist. Palmer motioned for them to sit down across the desk from him and opened the bottle, pouring out three generous measures of liquid amber somewhat unsteadily.
“Roger’ll have your head for that lack of austerity, Geoff,” Lange joked somewhat uncertainly with a dig at the Minister of Supply. The PM gave a tight-lipped smile as he passed over the glasses.
“I just received a report via the SIS from Tristan,” replied Palmer, referring to the long-distance shortwave radio network which allowed patchy communications with Britain via the series of isolated little rocks which had escaped the war (which the Poms had taken to calling, somewhat clinically in David’s opinion, the Exchange) “and we got one hell of a report from the task force.”
Lange’s heart sank. McLay’s turned to lead. Palmer’s look didn’t say ‘the missiles are coming again’, though. They’d’ve heard about that by now, though; this wasn’t that bad, but it couldn’t be good.
“We…NATO…I mean, the, the English, at least, they’ve been in contact with Europe,” the PM continued unsteadily and at length, his façade of serene know-it-all crumbling “and they found out from the Swiss that Munich…ha, ah-ha, half, half of Munich’s still standing. Not that that’s a, ah, a bad thing, mind you,” he added with a glance “but the division of Russians in the city gave everyone a bit of a shock.”
“Fuck.” Lange’s head swivelled to face McLay’s curse as questions exploded into his mind and Palmer spoke again.
“That’s not the half of it. Apparently some of the chaps down the hole” he used the colloquialism somebody had coined for the British emergency HQ at the massive bunker complex “thought it’d be a good idea to bomb the Ivans back to the Stone Age, end the war once and for all…as it were.”
“What, Buenos Aires wasn’t enough for ‘em?” joked Lange grimly.
“They were somewhat galvanised, you might say,” continued the PM as if there’d been no interruption “by finding out that the Russians had – ah,
have, I should say – a dozen medium-range missiles, an-” he paused again as the party leaders interjected again with escalating and inventive degrees of profanity “and there was rather a lot of dispute on whether or not to take the gamble. It seems that the Americans have also turned up in Portsmouth, and,” a cold, distant stare into the ether “they advocated for the plan.”
“Fuck me.”
“Then – and don’t ask me how – the British got a truce. The Russians have agreed to hold talks, begged for it if I’ve been told the truth, and NATO’s sending whatever survivors they can dredge up from the diplomatic corps to Munich. So with that” he said, raising his glass with the sickly smile of one about to throw up “cheers.” A grave tilt of the tumbler before he took a knock of the whisky, gasping around the firewater as he collected his thoughts.
“They nearly did it again, they really nearly did,” he said two or three times, eyes flickering upwards from his glass to the ceiling and back down to Lange as he made a questioning noise. “Yeah, David?”
“Are these the...official representatives of the Soviet Union? I mean, if the Allies are pushing for diplomacy…”
“They’re as many Russians as anyone’s seen alive since that submarine beached itself in Yorkshire; what’s more surprising, actually, is the number of Germans they reckon are still kicking. A hundred thousand or so, maybe more in the wop-wops near Switzerland.”
“Are…are we planning to send anyone over?” This from Jim. “I mean, we
did declare war as well,” a lifetime of regret compressed itself into a sentence “so are we planning to sign a peace treaty or negotiate or…well, have a look-in?”
“No real point; someone from the High Commission might try and nip over with the British if they’re in a sharing mood, but we’re probably not getting more than a second-hand account from the Australians, all things considered. We’re planning to send Duncan over for Charlie’s coronation, but that won’t be until August, at least. Depending if his heart’s up for it, otherwise we’ll deputise someone else.” Palmer idly eyed both men in front of him. They weren’t exactly slavering like hounds, but the ambition in each was clear to see. “Besides, we declared war under ANZUS; now that the threat to our allies has ended, peace with honour time.”
“And you think they’ll call it a peace?”
“You think they won’t?” interjected Lange. “I’m told there’s nothing left but howling wilderness between Munich and Tokyo; no point salting the earth any more thoroughly. Plus, I can’t imagine Whitelaw’s comfortable with the idea of even
more dead Germans on his conscience.”
Palmer nodded.
David might not have anything substantive to say, but at least the nothing he says is eloquent. “So,” Geoff said around a heavy sigh and another humourless salute with the tumbler, “to peace, gents.”
“Peace,” said Lange dully, the word heavy and rubbery and uncomfortable. A hard word. A foreign word. War was an easy word to say. Peace…that was going to take work.
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I know when you hold me
You won’t see it through…
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Te Aroha, Waikato
July 21, 1984
Grace had tried her damnedest over the last month to steer her way around talking about her feelings or herself. It was easier on a farm, she had to admit; you could always find some menial task to fling yourself into and lose yourself for a few hours, by which time your interrogator had either forgotten what they wanted to ask you or had been dragged into some chore of their own. Going down to Hamilton for the rugby had helped, too; Auckland edged out Waikato 27-24, which had given Grace and Mel and all the other evacuees from Auckland something to feel cheerful about as they squelched uneasily about the grounds of the imaginatively-titled Rugby Park while the odds-and-sods team scraped together from the scorched and scattered remnants of the Auckland Rugby Union crashed against the sturdy, well-fed and -housed men of Waikato like a blue wave. More than a few of the people about the place outside Te Aroha – including those who couldn’t have cared less about the game itself – insisted that their boys had just rolled over to give the bloody Aucklanders something to stop being so damn miserable about.
Grace thought, if they’d been watching the same match, that they were full of it.
Winter hadn’t made it as easy to keep dodging conversation, even if it wasn’t quite as cold and wet as she’d expected this far south of the Bombays, and Eileen could put the SIS to shame for sheer bloody-minded persistence. So it was that Grace had finally been run to ground, and having been trapped in the kitchen had decided to just tell the unfriendly, kindly, terrifying old hag what was on her mind. Surprisingly enough, being frank and honest had stopped her in her tracks better than any number of lies Grace could have turned out. People were strange like that; go head-on and they didn’t know which way to look.
So now the conversation had gone all weird and deep and meaningful, and they were talking about the meaning of life. Always small talk, naturally.
“Well,” Grace asked Eileen, “what do
you think about it? I mean, honestly, you know?”
The old woman paused and stared out the window at the damp landscape which stretched onto the horizon, shelter belts and houses and telephone poles pricking through the blanket of green, not saying a word for long enough for Grace to think maybe she hadn’t heard or was deciding to ignore the question or had spotted something more interesting in the distance, when her voice creaked into life.
“I remember Uncle Paul,” she said, “when he come back from France. Three times him and his cobbers were gassed, and he was the only one to live. All his friends were killed, and he ended up spending three months in Scotland, where he took up with a local girl.” Eileen didn’t move her eyes from the horizon, and kept her grip on the edge of the sink. “When he come back from France, he got home to the ‘flu. Well, it wasn’t a pretty time for him and Elspeth; the farm nearly got foreclosed, and Mum died in nineteen-nineteen, and their first son, ah…Robert, that was the name, well he was drowned in the water tank up at the old Stuart place.
“He never slept indoors, not for the rest of his life; he got terrible nightmares inside after being gassed in his, ah, in the – oh, what’s the word? Trench, that’s the one. Well. That made the honeymoon interesting, as you can imagine.” The pickled-walnut face cracked into a smile. “My point is, war’s a dreadful thing. It’s why Uncle Liam became a Quaker after he got sent home from Gallipoli with a pocket full of medals and an empty trouser leg.
“But life still has to go on, you see, and there’s
always something to wake up to tomorrow. You’ve always got to remember that tomorrow’s another day, girlie, and you won’t find out if it’s going to be better until you wake up to it.”
Grace frowned in thought as she mused on that, wetting her lips so her reply wouldn’t come out as a croak.
“It…I mean, you make a point, but…well, it doesn’t give you much to go on, does it? I mean, what’s the point of waiting around for it to get better when the world’s ended?” Her voice cracked at the tail end of that sentence, and Eileen was looking directly at her now, with those gimlet eyes which had seen three world wars and several lifetimes’ worth of hardship. “If everyone you know’s dead, then how are you meant to not feel like there’s no fucking point in it?” Definitely wobbling now, enough that she’d forgotten the old bat’s aversion to cursing: Grace was skewered ever so briefly by the steely gaze from those watery, white-rimmed eyes, before they softened and that wrinkled, thin-lipped mouth twisted itself into something resembling a sad smile.
“Well, what else can you do but work towards something? What’s the point in just giving up, then?” Her chin, or more specifically the short, patchy whiskers which are the domain of those too elderly to care about fripperies like vanity any more, pointed accusingly at Grace. “You find something that makes you happy and does some good for others, and you keep at it. There’s plenty needs doing for the world these days, anyway,” she said. “Can’t waste your blessed life in mourning. You just…well, you try to remember them, and do what you can to make ‘em proud, but when the sun goes down you just have to keep yourself going. Oh, you can do things for others – we need people to be so kind, and Uncle Paul wouldn’t’ve lived so long without our Elsie – but if you spend your life with the dead then you’re not living at all.”
“So that’s all I’m meant to do with the rest of my life, survive?”
“Better than the alternative, isn’t it?”
Grace supposed that was right. She’d never really thought about death before she got slapped in the face with it. Now that it was everywhere, she wasn’t sure what to think of life. Old Eileen had a point, though; it
was more interesting than…nothing? Heaven? If she’d never really thought about death, she’d tried not to think about what came after. Besides a vague sense of cultural Christianity that lent a sort of passive belief in the afterlife, the last few months didn’t really paint a picture of a kind or caring God. Supposing there wasn’t, though, you had to admit that hanging around had its benefits.
Eileen, for her part, took the lapse into silence as a sufficient end to the conversation.
“Now, that’s enough sugar, don’t you think? You’ll come right, girlie, don’t you worry. You’ve got a pretty face and a sharp enough mind and you can cook better than the hopeless lot I’ve seen so far. You’ll find someone before too long, I expect.”
Grace might have debated this reduction of her life’s meaning to her marital status (well, if she were Mel, perhaps; apparently one of the guys around the place had ended up with a dislocated thumb through some series of events or another), but it was at that moment that the rapid-fire thumping of heavy feet on lino announced the impending presence of one of the men of the house – it turned out, when the door burst open, to be Philip, one of the innumerable family members who’d come to roost for the duration – and a commotion at the other end of the house echoed after him. Eileen made as if to ask him what the devil was going on, and might have used a couple of choice words for him having just tracked mud along the hallway she’d mopped earlier were it not for him cutting her off with the rebuke still forming on her acid tongue.
“The war’s ended,” he said. “Just come through on the radio. It’s over.”
All of a sudden, Grace didn’t know whether she was crying with happiness, relief, or sadness.
It didn’t really matter.
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Going outta town as fast as I can go,
Going down and I don’t feel low…
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From James, C.
Shambling Towards Tomorrow: New Zealand 1984-1992. Masterton: Fraser, 1995.
6. All roads lead to Munich
“It is not with the usual choice between jubilation and delight…but instead relief that I can say to you today that…fighting has ended between the Western Alliance and the Soviet bloc.
The war is over.”
- Geoffrey Palmer
The words which, in days gone by, might well have set a population aflame into a conflagration of celebration, met in the warm, dry winter of 1984 with almost sullen acceptance. For most people the war had ended, one way or another, on February 22.
So it was that Geoffrey Palmer’s words were received with something approaching indifference. There was no dancing in the streets, no joyous singing, no carefree drinking. The reason for this stemmed from one essential thought: there was no longer any coherent thought of what shape the future should take.
The new generation of activists determined to have New Zealand, as Muldoon might have said, the way they wanted it, and who had been on the cusp of coming to operate the levers of power in late 1983, were left in limbo. Before the war, New Zealand had been frozen in place. As I noted at that time, there was ‘no choice and none needed. Small, rich and complete. Bland beyond boredom. The most comfortable place in the world’. [1] For the Vietnam generation, the natural reaction against this cloying comfort was to strive for greater personal and social freedoms, with the possibility of a loss of security accepted as collateral.
After February 1984, with the fabric of society under threat of rending altogether, the priorities were abruptly inverted. Freedom from want, and the basic securities of life, were suddenly worth continuing the sacrifice of control over many aspects of economic life to the government. Perhaps a little blandness, it was begrudgingly realised, was the price you paid to avoid starving to death in a world which had gone overnight from being a bright frontier to a nightmare landscape. The return of the aid mission to Britain – Belich’s famed ‘last stand of re-colonialism’ – and, more importantly, the stories told by the haunted eyes and terse reports of the young men themselves, confirmed these suspicions.
If New Zealand had been, as I insisted then and have steadfastly maintained since, on the cusp of a revolution, it was likewise forestalled. Radical change had already been imposed from outside; the pressures from within were now to respond to that change and attempt to re-impose equilibrium. Nevertheless, those radicals would seek to harness that pressure to pursue ends more in line with their pre-war desires than the pre-war status quo. This was neither a simple nor short-term process, with the liberal-conservative strand of National which inevitably returned to power under Birch in 1992 presiding over a country which would have been familiar yet foreign to a New Zealander from 1982: economic restructuring undertaken in the interests of efficiency in the rationing system under Douglas’ Ministry of Supply; constitutional law reform spearheaded by Palmer before and after his resignation at the end of the State of Emergency; indeed, the State of Emergency itself, wherein…
…survivor’s guilt is a well-documented phenomenon nowadays, it was poorly-theorised in the New Zealand of 1984, as indeed most mental illnesses were. It stemmed from a general resignation towards the situation as it was, as pre-war economic malaise was baked into the zeitgeist by the twin fires of Auckland and Wellington. The focus on survival certainly lent an immediacy to everything, but it was not sufficient to give people something to strive for. All that could be done, it was felt, was to rebuild things, to bring back the old. And in focusing upon what needed to be salvaged from the ruins of that old, comfortable world, New Zealand was forced to examine the scope of its losses.
The most reliable estimates, collated from 1986 Census data, reports from refugee centres and triage ‘clinics’ and, in some areas, simple word-of-mouth, put the total death toll at approximately 350,000; one-tenth of New Zealand’s pre-war population. Their absence was keenly felt in the unearthly mildness and eerie stillness of that first winter after the bombs fell.
We have felt it every year since.
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Don’t point me out in a crowd
Don’t point that thing at me…