My Father and sheds

Retreat. 

It was always understood that my father liked sheds.  Whatever house we lived in, rented or  owned, I remember that not long after we moved in, a shed would appear.  Whether the construction was used as a workshop, a cover for the motorcycle and sidecar favoured by my father, or for the car, there was always provision for garden tools, a lean-to for logs and another for storing his collected junk. 

My father lived in the woods for a time in a hut he built for himself.  The reason for his retreat was that his father took an irrational dislike to him driving my father from the family home.  The cause was a brain tumour which went undiagnosed until it was far too late to save him.  In the meantime here was a paradise for a young man whose lifestyle could embrace a certain freedom.  It was assumed that it was then he learned to like sheds and, as you do in your formative years, he became set in his habits.  From then on my father built sheds. 

My father outside his shed 

The shed was my father’s retreat.  It was there he worked on whatever project he thought may be important, producing for us a well built pedal car, gates, cumbersome furniture, and of course it was the place where his motorcycle and sidecar was maintained.  Later, when we were more affluent the family car was rested up for the winter and the necessary de-coke and valve grind was completed.  He did not watch television, nor was he capable of sitting long enough to listen to the radio without fidgeting.  My father was what many would call ‘rough and ready’ but that description would do him an injustice; he was a sensitive man, quietly romantic, a man who loved my mother and loved us, and loved cats, that was, on his side of the family a common trait.  I suppose that, like the cat who walked alone, there were times when he needed to sit quietly by himself.  A romantic notion on my part to imagine my father alone. 

My father and I are alike.  We both like cats.  We both emigrated and returned to the home country.  He chose Canada, and I went to New Zealand and lived and worked there and in Australia.   The romance began with an unexpected life change which forced me out of regular earnings and I was caught in a downward spiral that meant low income, rented rooms shared with my cat.  I began to write and mused often on the idea that here I was in a virtual retreat, living in a series of latter day garrets, the one room isolating me from society where I could suffer for my art like any youthful artist of an earlier time.  The picture is one of the struggling artist giving up his last scraps to feed his devoted cat, living in hope that one day he will be recognised, but until then the modern garret room will do. 

Isolation, like the retreat of the hermit, concentrates the mind, if not as sharply as one who faces a violent death, as a soldier, or perhaps the knowledge of some terminal illness, but will help in the creation of the finished work.  Our pale faced, consumptive garret tenants may fashionably deplore the hardships of living for their art; for we must accept writing as an art, which draws towards itself the rational and the tortured alike, yet as a means of producing good quality work is a useful writer's tool.  

I should remember instead the reason for my father’s isolation, and that when his father died how he was welcomed back to the family to take his place as the ‘man of the household’ loved by his six sisters and his mother.  Some of the sisters were working, others at school, and those who were at home, like him helped my grandmother with the smallholding.  He was no gardener, I discovered that; to him a garden was where you grew food, or built a shed. He liked trees.  In the last house we had as a family, our back yard was steadily filled with Christmas trees, and once he had made room for the shed, we had to make it obvious where the vegetable garden was.  I suppose he got the practical deployment of space from my grandmother who managed the house at Kits Coty estate focussing on crops that paid, and sold egs, chickens and plants.  My father learned his trade as a bricklayer, built the chicken houses, cucumber frames, repaired and erected the fences, did much of the digging and left the rest to the women and girls.  He learned to love cats from his mother.  

My mother wasn’t a cat person.  She made friends easily, loved the church and loved us.  She also loved my father who returned her love with devoted attention yet was bemused by the constant need to be part of the social life of our extended family.  He liked to retreat from it by working on some project, mainly physical work where, like the gardener who digs the soil for planting, he could be alone with his thoughts.  I like to do that.  Digging is a way of retreating from the world to a place where the mind can run its course.  The slow process of the activity is conducive to taking care to sort out the ideas that clutter the corners, and like the felon condemned on the scaffold concentrates the mind.   

The hut he once lived in has all the elements of my ideal place: isolated, close to the land with a verandah roof, and suggests going back to basics such as growing my own food, bartering for meat and the means to heat the place.  That romantic notion ignores the reality of how hard it is to live off the land; taking little account the hard graft of cutting wood, digging inhospitable soil, the fragility of the chosen crops, ablutions and of course access to medicine and health services.   

The alternative is the shed in the back garden serviced from the house with power, isolated from the telephone and other distractions in which to work.  Some can manage that.  I like the burbling radio, music, the luxury of untidiness, erratic mealtimes, suddenly succumbing to a need to sit and gaze, or to play with the cat, a must for the hermit writer.  Not for me the Paris room and angst ridden suffering; no, I want more than that.   Ideally I would want a place based on the good old New Zealand  ‘Bach’, the holiday home that in its conception served also as a place for men to live when working in remote areas.  Today, the Bach is a beach holiday home, as it was intended to be; a place where a family could stay near the beach in the summer and live in a little more comfort than camping.  

An old friend had a family Bach at Torbay on the North Shore where she lived for many years.  She took me in for a time when I needed a place to live.  Typically it had a porch-way for gumboots and coats, a small WC one side of the entrance and a shower on the other.  A door way opened out into a space where there was a kitchen, and a living room with French windows opening out onto a patio garden, a washing area and beyond that two small bedrooms.  Single story, as were many NZ houses, it was timber framed, clad with fibrolite under a sheet iron roof on a flat section.   

I like the idea of a place close to the sea.  Barry Crump, a man I admired for his ability to hit the spot with the ‘Kiwi Bloke’ , the author of  the popular book of short stories entitled Bastards I Have Met, lived in a bach at Piha north of Auckland.   I liked his place, and I guess if my father had seen it, he would have liked it too.   But the real experience was being invited to visit Frank Sargeson’s Bach in Takapuna by Riemke  Ensing, author of Dear Mr Sargeson..., and seeing how Sargeson had adapted the place to suit his writing methods and lifestyle.  I am sure my father would not have agreed or approved of Sargeson’s sexuality, but he would have felt vindicated by the man’s rough carpentry and practical furnishings.  I liked the study, the place where he wrote, with its view over what was once a sea shore.  Sargeson’s bach was far enough from the shore to require a walk to the water’s edge offering a different exercise when no more digging can be done. Riemke’s little book of poems did not prove popular but the chance to read where Sargeson had worked made up for the disappointment.   

I remember my father retreating to his shed emerging sometimes with useful things, and at others with monstrous objects intended to make my mother’s life easier that were fit only for firewood.  I can identify with my mother’s chagrin, and my father’s misguided good intentions, and thankfully for those around me, I have learned not to emulate him.  I suppose in a way this is my father’s legacy, his filal wisdom, the ability on my part to learn from mine and other’s mistakes.  

The lesson I have learned is to take time out from the world under my own terms if I can, or to adapt to the circumstances the way my father did when he was forced to retreat from his father’s wrath.  He found his place, built it to suit his needs and waited until once again he was accepted, learning the wisdom of patience.  I learned that wisdom too but had to suffer physical pain, a change of lifestyle and career to do so.   I think my father’s hut in the woods and my metaphorical bach have parallels in the effect it had on both our lives. 

My model, and ideal retreat has the loftiness of the garret, the isolation of the hermit’s cell yet is close enough to the sea to command a view of passing ships and to allow beach combing.   It is essential to gain a reputation for eccentricity, adding curiosity to isolation.  I would add, electricity, the telephone, the internet, preferably with fibre optic cable, an indulgence to enable me to keep up with current affairs, the way my father did in his hut, living close to the family and keeping in touch.  Television, in this ideal retreat, is not an option being too much of a visual distraction, especially when a garden, books, wildlife and the sea are the main attractions.  A boat would be fine; just to potter around in; to fish perhaps.  

It is not isolation from the world that I seek, but as my father before me, a place to go to be myself without imposing my eccentric ways on others.   My father worked on his vehicles and some of his creations in his shed.  I am sure that living in this flat on the Isle of Sheppey you could say I live in my retreat, happy to be with my cat, meet up with people outside knowing I can return there, safe and comfortable.  I like to be part of the world, but I still want that sense of isolation.  

In my ideal retreat, one room would need to be a well lit studio in which to paint, and my bedroom would be a writing room.  And naturally, the place will have to be cat friendly.  The disease I prefer to be wasting away from is anno domini – I think I could handle that.