Sep 3, 2003
Jerome K Jerome, whom most people older than me will remember as the author of “Three Men in a Boat”, also wrote an essay on shyness, and in it dwelt on the burden that shyness can be to those, like himself, who are stricken with it. He claimed that babies would burst into loud cries of rage and anguish at the least sign of attention from him, and that their mothers would comfort them and remark that “the little ones can tell” as if the child could discern a potential molester at 40 paces. Dogs, likewise, though playful and limp in the presence of everyone else, would unaccountably stiffen, utter low and menacing growls, and snap spitefully at his ankles if he happened so much as to glance at them. Their owners too, would smile a knowing smile and wisely nod their heads.
The truth is, of course, that babies and dogs, and other members of the lower orders, do not expect to be included as participants in human communication, but prefer to be regarded as part of the inanimate world of furniture and the like. This is the sort of treatment they are accustomed to getting, and they are quite naturally embarrassed by any attempt to raise them to the status of sentient beings.
But shy people don’t always realise this, and may develop a somewhat jaundiced view of the world. While they feel that it is somehow all their own fault, they are at a loss to know what they can do about it.
My Uncle Murray was a shy person. He was a Wellington lawyer, highly respected for his wisdom and integrity both by the civic authorities and the government. Yet in his face to face relationships, at least with his family and relatives, he never got off first base. He would never look at you while he was talking to you. I don’t recall seeing him in the presence of a dog, but I have a pretty shrewd idea of how such a meeting would have panned out.
I suppose he had a good deal to be shy about. He was no oil painting, - inclined to be tubby, with a prominent lower lip, and rounded facial features that would have looked better on a cabbage patch doll. We are none of us as beautiful as we would like to be, but most of us learn in the end to accept our appearance, as one of those handicaps that fate has dealt us, perhaps with some half-formed intention that it will help us to build character. Uncle Murray didn’t see it in that light. He would never look at you when he spoke to you, and he always spoke in short phrases with long pauses between. In his dealings with young relatives, he had devised a simple technique for avoiding the pressures of conversation. He would take you down into a dusty space under the house and you would pass the time sawing firewood, one on each end of a crosscut saw. Furthermore, at each stroke when it was your turn to pull, he would bear down on his end of the saw so as to make your pulling effort greater. Consequently you were soon too short of breath to be concerned about making small talk. If you did try to get a conversation started he had a way of cutting it short with such remarks as “You should go and take a course in economics”, or “I don’t suppose your old man will ever leave you anything.” You could of course respond to such remarks, but they didn’t do much to help the conversation to flow.
And yet he was kind, even if he was reluctant to let anyone know it. Once when I was about ten, my brothers and I took Uncle Murray’s rowing boat out on the harbour to do a bit of fishing. We anchored about 100 yards off shore and managed to catch a few leather jackets and spotties, but when we came to go home, nothing we could do would get the anchor up. It must have been caught under a rock ledge or something, and simply wouldn’t shift. We were worried. It was getting near lunch time, and the way things were going we could be there forever. In the end we had to untie the anchor warp from the boat, and tie it on to one of the oars for a float, and then paddle our way back to the shore as best we could with the other oar. There we told Uncle Murray of our distress.
“Oh dear!” he said, and went on doing whatever he had been doing in silence while we sweated over our misdemeanour and wondered what dire consequences we had generated. And then “Oh dear!” again, followed by more silence. After about ten minutes which seemed a lot longer, he led us back to the boat shed where he fetched down a spare oar from a rack in the ceiling, rowed us out to where the anchor was. Then by pulling at it this way and that, he soon got it to disengage, so we could hoist it aboard. On the return journey he even burst into song, if you could call it that. As far as I can recall it consisted of just the one phrase oft repeated in a rather tuneless tone. “Will the anchor hold? Will the anchor hold?” I suppose it was some sort of a joke at our expense, but we were so relieved we didn’t care.
On another occasion, when I had left home and was working in Wellington, I was driving my parents to Wellington in their car, when we came up behind a little Vauxhall somewhere near Waikanae. This was just after the war, and the speed limit was set at 40 mph to save on petrol and tyres. The Vauxhall was taking it too seriously though, and was creeping along at no more than 30. A car in front overtook him, but when I moved to overtake he decided he was being humiliated and sped up to try and make a race of it. Another car was approaching in the distance, so as soon as I calculated I was past the Vauxhall I swung back onto the left side. I must have miscalculated though, because I clipped his front bumper in the process. We stopped and exchanged number plate numbers, and he had a bit of a grumble and that was that.
About a fortnight later I was at work in the Kelburn telephone exchange when I got a bill for panel beating and painting. It was for an amount well out of my reach and must have been enough to have given the Vauxhall a pretty thorough facelift. I sent it home to my Dad in Palmerston North, with a note asking his advice. I then phoned Murray and asked if I had done the right thing. “No.” he said, “You have done very wrong.” Then after a long pause, “You’d better come and see me after work.”
I sweated through the afternoon, wondering if I had sent my father to jail, or whether I was headed there myself. At 5 o'clock I got the cable car down to Lambton Quay, where the old liftman took me at a snail's pace up to Murray’s office. He grunted me to a chair, and went on writing for a few long minutes. Then without looking up, he asked me what the bill had had on it. In those days I had a good photographic memory, and was able to tell him pretty accurately, including the phone number that was pencilled on the back. I also tried to prove mathematically that the Vauxhall must have sped up while I was overtaking, but he wasn’t interested in that. “No. no,” he said, “He will probably say that he was going very slowly because he will want to show what a cautious driver he is. Just leave it with me.” And that was that. I heard no more about it. I presume he wrote to the injured party under an “Atkinson, Dale and Mather” letterhead, just to let him know that he was not just dealing with a callow youth, - but I don’t know. He may even have paid the bill, though I think my father would have told me if he had. As for “having done very wrong” I never did find out what that was, but perhaps it was the error of sending the letter off to my father without asking my lawyer first.
So you see he was helpful when you needed help, even in spite of his gruffness. Is it perhaps that shy people are more sympathetic on account of having known more about suffering, whether from angry babies or from biting dogs.