April 11, 2016. A Tinker's Cuss – ANZAC Day

My dad never went to WW2. He was a tractor driver on a farm up the Pig Root in Otago and he was either excluded because New Zealand needed to keep the farms going or his broken lungs stopped him. My dad was an asthmatic and he gasped for breath his whole life through and more so when he felt lonely or misunderstood.

I remember being vaguely embarrassed about my dad not going to war when I was a kid in Dunedin in the 1950s.

My uncle went. He was with the 23rd Battalion. His records show that he went to Scotland in 1940 and then in early March 1941 he arrived in Egypt. My uncle served 14 days field punishment in late April that year for drunkenness. I am quite proud of this because if there's one thing you want to do when you are young it's that you want to flare up with your mates.

My uncle came home in 1943 after being medically discharged and he could never put a sentence together again for his whole life. His discharge address was the Clarendon Hotel in McLaggan Street, Dunedin. I'd say that's mighty staunch.

My family moved into Dunedin from the country in around 1950. My Uncle Les loaned my parents the money to put a deposit on a house in Russell Street. My uncle's records show that he was given a gratuity of 144 pounds, 16 shillings and sixpence. I think this is how much El Alamein was worth.

I was the late-comer to the family. I was born in Dunedin and I will always be born in Dunedin.

My closest sister was twelve years old when I was born and now she is dying.

I was Sweet Baby James and my two oldest sisters who were 16 and 17 when I was born loved me to bits. My brother who was fourteen when I was born was the best mate I ever had. He showed me how to love people and he once stood up on a table at a pub in South Dunedin and led the whole bar in We Shall Overcome. This was in about 1963 or 1964 during the American Civil Rights era.

When I was a kid, my mother would sometimes say that I was a mistake and my father would sometimes say that I was nobody's bastard. This was because they were unhappy. People are sometimes cruel to other people when they are unhappy. I've never seen a happy person be cruel to anyone else in my whole life.

My brother died in a tractor accident in a road gang out near Ravensbourne when I was fourteen. My two eldest sisters died of cancer within a month of each other in 1989. In 1990 I sweated out the methadone working on a farm about seventy miles out of Nashville, Tennessee. I cried every day for my sisters and gradually got back on my feet.

My old man worked in the store at Fletcher Steel in Dunedin when I was a kid and every single day of his life he got up and went to work.

I love my mum and my dad.

My dad never went to high school but he quoted Shakespeare all the time. He'd say, over and over, that the quality of mercy is not strained. I think he basically missed working on the farm by himself and to this day I still feel like a country boy myself. I love Nashville like you can't believe. I miss the Nashville piano sound every single day of my life but I can never tell what I'm yearning for, whether it is Nashville itself or my mum and my dad or my brother or my sister who is currently dying.

My sister who is dying now is probably the one I loved the most. She didn't like me when I came along because she was twelve and I got all the limelight. She gave me War and Peace to read when I was six and she used to play piano in our lounge. She got her photo on the front page of the Otago Daily Times when Dunedin got its first big mainframe computer.

I am going to miss my sister. She's a fiery one and I have always been attracted to women like that. I want to go home to Russell Street and start the whole goddamn thing over again and have us all sing a Hank Williams song and for my dad to look at me and smile and for my sister to hit them keys Nashville style.

But I've learned that life is a long hard song and most things are a long way easier than being in the front line at El Alamein.

It's ANZAC Day on April 25th. Buy a poppy because the quality of mercy is not strained. Whatever you are going through in your poor forsaken life someone else is going through worse or the same.