The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things. Tim Radford
the harbour, or when a converted Sunderland or a Solent flying boat carrying passengers from Sydney or Fiji touched down at the waterfront air terminal half a mile distant, the keel of its beautiful, curved hull suddenly creaming the smooth blue water and sending up a fine white spray before it slowed, slumped and taxied to the mooring. These are things I may never see again, and if they were before me now I would snap my book shut and read the landscape’s story as greedily as I then read Moby-Dick or Bleak House. I probably thought my surroundings were of no great romantic consequence, and I preferred instead to be with Ishmael and Queequeg in New Bedford, with its streets full of ‘Feegeeans, Tongatabooans, Erromanggoans, Panangians and Brighggians’. This now seems to have been perverse of me: I went to school with, and played rugby with, children from Fiji, Tonga, the Cook Islands and Eastern Samoa, and thought nothing of it. I inhaled the sweet, salty air of one of the world’s least polluted cities and longed instead for Dickens’s London with its smoke ‘lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow flakes’. I had, of course, never seen a snowflake.
In childhood, one tends to think that one’s surroundings can be looked at later, when there is nothing else to read. The understanding that landscape, too, is a thing you must read and understand, because it changes with time, comes later. Trees are felled, scrublands cleared, marshes are drained, wooden houses are torn down and replaced by brick boxes, green fields become car parks. Naturally, most childhood memories are episodic and confined: confined to a street and the interiors of one or two houses; confined to a regular route to school or to a friend’s home. My horizons were somewhat wider. I had a bicycle, and used it to deliver morning newspapers from the age of twelve, until I left school to begin work in a newspaper office; I also used the same machine to deliver telegrams after school, at weekends and school holidays, and in consequence got to know every street in Devonport. Some had Maori names. Some were the names of Victorian and early-twentieth-century England: Victoria Road, Albert Road and Allenby Road, Abbotsford Terrace and Jubilee Avenue. Some were simply descriptive: Domain Road led to the domain, or public recreation ground, Lake Road carried traffic north to Lake Pupuke in Takapuna. One bore the name of a Greek muse, Calliope, and it led to the Devonport Naval Base.
Only now, on looking at a street map of Devonport, have I noticed two streets that I must once have known, but now do not remember: Hastings Parade and St Leonards Road. Hastings is a common enough name in the English-speaking world. There are towns named Hastings in Michigan and Nebraska in the United States; and in Ontario, Canada; there is even a Hastings in New Zealand, the location of that country’s most damaging recorded earthquake. There are streets, avenues and roads called Hastings all over Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, many of them certainly named after Warren Hastings, the eighteenth-century adventurer caught up in the colonisation of India, but the street in Devonport was certainly named after Hastings, East Sussex, because the next street was called St Leonards, after the adjoining town in East Sussex. So there is a tenuously prophetic connection between the place in which I grew up, and the place in which I live now. The only impact of the discovery is to remind me once again of the intense physical difference between the gloriously warm, sparkling, almost landlocked harbour of Auckland and the muddy green chill of the English Channel. Memories mislead: Auckland must have been overcast and rainy for weeks on end. And I know from almost daily observation over decades that the English Channel, too, sparkles in the sunlight. But we keep a template of reality in our heads, and when we aren’t looking we remember a place as a snapshot taken at some contented moment.
Memories fade, telescope or mutate, but I find on my occasional returns to Devonport that nothing seems to have changed at all: everything is where it always was, only a lot more expensive, and each time I return I can find my way, without any pause for recall, to Derby Street. It wasn’t where I was born, but it provides me with a starting point: all shelters before that address were just that, places where we stayed. But in 1947 we moved into a weatherboard villa at latitude 36 degrees 49 minutes and a bit South, 174 degrees 48 minutes and something East, and stayed there until I was seventeen. Neither longitude nor latitude is anything more than a convenient way of pinpointing an address on the globe. Longitude 174 sweeps north and south across empty Pacific Ocean, crossing only a shallow reach of Antarctica and eastern Siberia before it touches the poles. The line of latitude, too, spans mostly sea: it slices across the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans, cutting through Chile just north of Concepción, and emerging from Argentina south of Montevideo. It misses South Africa altogether, and bisects Australia only in Victoria, a little north of Melbourne. It is an address distinguished only by its loneliness. Kipling’s salute to Auckland in 1897 says it all:
Last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart –
On us, on us, the unswerving season smiles,
Who wonder ’mid our fern why men depart
To seek the Happy Isles!
That’s what he thought about Auckland. I have no idea what he thought about Devonport. I remember very well, however, what I thought about Devonport. I thought it was the end of the world. That was a strange thing: we carry our geography with us, and wherever we are is the centre of our universe. But I, and other New Zealanders of my generation, felt acutely that we were on the edge, left out of it, and that the enormous, throbbing hubbub of the real world was far over the horizon to the north. As, indeed, it was: India became independent of the British Empire, and the empire began the awkward process of becoming a Commonwealth; Berlin was blockaded by the Russians, and fed by a continuous airlift by the British and American authorities; Western forces became bogged down in a brutal war in Korea, and Viet Cong soldiers encircled the French Foreign Legion at Dien Bien Phu; a king died and a young queen took over the British throne; there were bloody struggles for independence in Kenya, Cyprus, Aden and Malaya; the first tests of the hydrogen bomb were held at Bikini atoll; the Iron Curtain advanced across Europe; Britain, France and Israel tried to invade Egypt; the Russians invaded Hungary. We knew about these extraordinary events because we could hear radio broadcasts relayed from the BBC, there were newsreels at every cinema showing, and there were agency dispatches in the New Zealand Herald. But they seemed improbable, inexplicable and unreal.
Or perhaps it was Devonport that seemed unreal, because, at least in memory, nothing seemed to happen there at all, not even vandalism or car accidents. The circumstances that led me at nineteen to book a passage on an Italian passenger ship called the Castel Felice to Southampton via Singapore, Colombo, Aden, Suez and Naples seem barely worthy of remark. In those days, that was what young New Zealanders and Australians did. I rented a bedsitter in Earl’s Court, then two rooms in Hampstead, and then a flat in Hull. I married and then successively purchased houses in east Hull, in east Kent, and in Kingston-upon-Thames before my family and I moved into the house at Hastings, situated at 50 degrees 51 minutes and so many seconds North and zero degrees 35 minutes and a bit more East.
Longitude zero sounds like a proper starting point, a place to head for, but this most assertive of timelines runs through France and Spain without bisecting any famous cities, and cuts across North Africa touching on Fez in Morocco before it slices into the blue Atlantic and stays there all the way to Antarctica. For such a historic meridian, it seems an uneventful place to be. Latitude 51 N however is much more promising. It crosses or passes close to Waterloo in Belgium, and Aachen that was once Aix-la-Chapelle, before skirting Cologne, Weimar and Dresden in Germany, and running just south of Wrocław in Poland that was once Breslau. These are all place names that had resonance, even fifty years ago in a wooden weatherboard house on the shores of a new-found land in another ocean, under a different set of stars.
It occurs to me, not for the first time, that even when I set off somewhere, I haven’t left anywhere. All the places in which I have ever lived are still mine, in the sense that my memory contains them. They provide the theatrical backdrop to many of those intense moments that seem to have shaped and coloured my life, and their substance still intrudes in unbidden memories, old photographs and unexpected conversations. When we move from this present house – an increasing possibility at the time of writing – we will leave it, but it may not leave us. We head for new horizons, only to discover that we have already been there. We change our homes, but they stay with us. The story of our lives is a series of entries, many of them faded or crossed out, but still legible through