Apr 28, 2005
He had nothing to carry him along but a sharp mind, and unbounded enthusiasm. His mother must have died when he was very young and his father put him into a catholic orphanage at Silverstream, where he got such education as was available. At some stage in his youth he must have injured his right knee, and in those days the only method of repair was to immobilise the joint so that for ever after he walked with a stiff leg. However, he stood very straight so that the stiff leg, far from giving the impression of a cripple, seemed to emphasise his resolve to get to wherever he was going regardless of impediments.
During the Depression he was put on a work scheme building a road up the Wanganui River somewhere, and as work was held up during wet weather, there was plenty of time for lying on one’s bunk and reading, so Morrie became very literate. His workmate at the time, happened to be one Winston McCarthy, later recognised throughout the land as the racing commentator who developed the style of calling the race in a monotone in time with the horses’ hoof beats, naming each horse two or three times even in a short race of five furlongs, and with his commentary rising to a crescendo as the field neared the post. These days everybody does it.
Morrie tells how one wet day when he and Winston were again killing time lying on their bunks, he had been counting the boards in the ceiling of the hut, and by way of conversation asked Winston how many boards he thought there were in the ceiling. “Forty-seven.” barked Winston immediately, and without further comment.
I first met Morrie when at the age of eighteen I was working as a mechanic in the telephone exchange in Wellington. My sister Hilary, then teaching at Foxton, had been at the Teachers’ College in Wellington, and retained several Wellington friends she had met there. The family of one of them had a bach on a hill at Point Howard on the east side of the harbour, and I got invited to sometimes spend weekends there when Hilary came down. Morrie who was working on the Dominion at the time, was a friend of one of the girls, and often spent the weekend there too. Perhaps because he was a reporter he always had a story to tell, or perhaps he made one up, -- interviewing his typewriter as he called it. He would sit down purposefully in a kitchen chair with his stiff leg propped out in front of him, then he would smack his lips and slap his thigh, and with great expression, begin.
“There was once a canary who lived in a golden cage where its owner showered it with everything its little heart could desire. And yet it was not happy. It felt the cage was cold and sterile, and it yearned for a warm cat in which to dwell. One day the owner left the door of the cage ajar, and a passing cat was quick to oblige. For a little while the canary was happy. But when the owner saw what had happened, he took a shotgun and let so much daylight into that cat that its abdomen became a playground for all the winds that blew. Moral: No matter what the place you’re at,
You’re better off than in a draughty cat.”
Or
“All homage to the saveloy, plump harbinger of breakfast joy,
In whose vicinity are blent the odours of the Orient.
This inoffensive little guy, bald boiled scalded on a plate
Without a whimper or a sigh, awaits his ghastly fate
To fangs which carefully empulp him, or hasty throats that merely gulp him.
But soon as one short hour has passed he hath his sweet revenge at last
And satisfies his life’s ambition to be an endless repetition.”
He had another story about a man who had got into the news because he dropped dead on hearing that he had won some amazing amount in the Queensland Golden Casket lottery. Apparently his last words when he came off the phone and before he succumbed were “I’ve won the Casket.”
During the week, Morrie lived in a boarding house belonging to a Mrs Mack. Whether the place was as hare brained as Morrie made it out to be is debatable, but he had some good stories about it. In those days just after the war, electric jugs were not at all common, and most people boiled the water with a coiled “immersion Heater” plunged into a billy or a milk jug. When the water boiled Mrs Mack, being rather absent minded, would sometimes remove the immersion heater and hang it on its nail without remembering to unplug it or switch it off. In due course it would glow red, and then explode, showering molten copper all around the kitchen. This apparently happened often enough for the family and the boarders to develop a ritual such that when one of them observed the immersion heater beginning to glow, he would shout a warning and everyone would then dive for shelter under the table and await the explosion. According to Morrie this was a pretty regular occurrence.
When Morrie first took up residence there, Mrs Mack was at pains to create an impression of a harmonious and well mannered family, so when her grumpy teenaged son came down to breakfast, she greeted him cheerily with, “Good morning, Dear. And how did you sleep?” To which she got the terse reply, “With me bloody eyes shut of course.”
There was a superstitious daughter too, who, though running late and hurrying to catch her bus, would nevertheless, if a bird crossed her path, turn back to the last power pole and swing around it for luck before continuing her course.
Morrie had an experimental turn of mind. At one stage he claimed to have fed a pot plant on Clements Tonic, and achieved remarkable results, it growing not only taller but also evolving unprecedented curves and colours. He claimed that when he planted garlic, the weeds fell back respectfully on either side even before the robustly healthy little garlic shoots appeared above the soil. He wrung more out of life than any of us.
He was fascinated by precision technology. Years later, in 1960, when we came to live in Palmerston North, he was a sub editor on the Manawatu Evening Standard, and later, editor of the Manawatu Times. He loved good quality recordings of classical music and also Jimmy Hendricks, and he had some really good amplifying equipment to play them on. He had a fine Leica camera, and I still have the Paximat slide projector that his wife gave me after he died. He would light his kids’ birthday candles with a blowtorch, and put them out with the hose of the vacuum cleaner plugged in in reverse.
He bought a crystal salad bowl, made of some special glass that made it unbreakable. You could drop it on the floor, and it would simply resonate and roll away. He was washing it when a friend called in, and Morrie took the opportunity to demonstrate its qualities. “Here,” he said, “What do you think of this?” and taking the bowl he tossed it onto the floor, where it shattered into a thousand fragments. The visitor was of course impressed, but without quite grasping the point of the exercise.
Even after he died, the jokes went on. One of his kids borrowed his car to attend the funeral, and left it parked over a fire plug. The police issued a traffic ticket in Morrie’s name, and when his widow protested that he was no longer eligible, she finally received a response to the effect that he would be excused on this occasion, but not to let it happen again.
He brought a lot of colour into our lives.
