From There to Here: A memoir from the award-winning New Zealand columnist, teacher, and international bestselling author

By Joe Bennett

From Willingdon to Lyttelton, a memoir about love, learning and the journey to thirty

Joe Bennett is the author of countless columns, over twenty books, and now, at long last, a memoir. From There to Here describes a childhood of fishing, cricket, friends, a dog, some mild molestation and a few deaths. There's the long-haired gloom and vehemence of adolescence. There's love and heartache, an urge to write and a fruitless struggle against teaching for a living. Superbly written, of course, and laugh-out-loud funny in places, but it's also honest, unsparing, unexpected and moving.

'Every now and then in the twilight the door of the pub would open and emit a great sough of smoke and light and adult laughter and it seemed the most wonderful place in the world, the place you wanted to be.'

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: May 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781775490937

Joe Bennett

Joe Bennett was born in Brighton and since leaving Cambridge University has taught English in a variety of countries, including Canada, Spain and New Zealand. He now lives in Lyttelton with his dogs, cat and chickens.

Book preview

Chapter 1

My father, aged six, was bitten by a neighbour’s dog. He ran home to his mother, wailing. The neighbour showed up soon after, bringing the dog along to show it was a sweet-natured beast. My grandmother hit it on the head with a rake and killed it. It’s the only thing I know of my grandmother’s life, and my father’s youth. We are not a story-telling family.

My father was raised in Sheffield in the north of England, but if he’d ever had a Yorkshire accent he’d scrubbed it by the time I was born. We lived down south in Sussex. The north, with its cloth caps, coal mines and heavy industry, seemed as remote as Patagonia. When we once went on holiday to Scotland, my father drove through Yorkshire without stopping.

By the time I knew my grandmother her great dog-killing days were behind her. She had followed my father south and lived across the road from us, in the village of Willingdon. To visit her was to be given a rich tea biscuit. These were kept in a round glass jar and they were soft. I got into trouble for spitting one out.

She lived in the last of a little terrace of grey cottages. Her eyes were poor and her legs dropsical. Ants and mice increasingly had the run of the place. Eventually it became clear that she could no longer keep house, and my father found her a place in an old people’s home. She resisted the move, but within a week of settling in you couldn’t have dragged her out. There were just so many people there to talk about. She was happy.

Until, that is, some ten years later when my father died, and she lost interest in going on. In her last months she was befriended by professional befrienders, and she left them most of what she owned. They turned up gloating to her funeral. But she did leave each of her grandchildren £200. My bequest arrived just in time to pay a fine that I couldn’t otherwise have paid. I’ll come to that.

I was born Julian Bennett in 1957. It was a lucky time. The post-war gloom had ended; the boom begun. I was part of an Anglo-Saxon population explosion, a subconscious urge to repopulate the country. Conditions were good for breeding, and my parents, along with a whole newly confident generation, went at it. Every house seemed to swarm with kids. I was the fourth of four. We went boy, girl, boy, boy, just like the royal family and more or less in time with them.

We lived at 2 Huggetts Lane, Willingdon. Over the road was the recreation ground. A hundred yards along Huggetts Lane, houses gave way to fields. Our house was called Ryton. I don’t know why. It was large and detached, with a long back garden. The near half was lawn, the far half vegetables. Separating the two was the tallest hedge in the world. It was possible to climb up inside the hedge and emerge through the top and become emperor of everything. At the front of the house stood another wonder, the lilac tree. It could be climbed to the dizzying height of perhaps a couple of yards.

In what must have been the fabled winter of 1962–63 the snow lay deeper than I was tall, and was littered with the corpses of birds. Ice formed on the inside of the bedroom windows and we kids came down to the kitchen in the morning to dress in front of the range. This was a vast and primitive coal-fired device that seemed like the house’s single vital organ, its seat of warmth and energy. That it was a temperamental beast and the bane of my mother’s life never impinged on my consciousness, because nothing much did except selfish pleasures. And Mr Fisher.

Mr Fisher was the village dentist. My mother didn’t drive then and my father was at work, so whenever we needed a tooth filled, which was often, we went to Mr Fisher. Though ‘went’ is hardly the verb. The entrance to his surgery was scored with parallel tracks carved by children approaching in the manner of dragged puppies.

He operated from his own house, with the surgery in an upstairs room, presumably to give his receptionist more chance of intercepting patients when they ran. The waiting room was the landing, and devoid of fripperies such as picture books for the children, the better for them to concentrate on the noises coming through the wall. The surgery door was an ordinary bedroom door, except for the bolt on it.

Mr Fisher must have been over sixty, which meant he would have qualified not long after the First World War. I remember him standing in front of the window in looming silhouette. Behind him, arrayed across frosted glass, ran an elaborate series of cogs and gears and chains. This dread engine was driven mechanically by a pedal under Mr Fisher’s foot in order to rotate the drill in Mr Fisher’s hand. I didn’t wait for the drill to start to get crying. I was at it from the moment my mother unpeeled my fingers from the door jamb and lifted me into the chair for the dental assistant to pinion.

Eventually I suspect it was my mother who could take no more. She put us all on the bus to Eastbourne and took our custom to ‘nice Mr Mabberley’. Mr Mabberley had a high-speed drill that ran on new-fangled electricity. And he offered anaesthetic injections in a range of flavours. I chose strawberry and could taste it. But I still cried, cried by reflex, cried in anticipation. Even today when the dentist reaches for the drill my body arcs like the Harbour Bridge.

My brother Simon was two years older, old enough to have school friends and a brick-red scooter, and I can see them now scooting away up Huggetts Lane, and me running to keep up on my fat little legs. ‘Wait for me,’ I wailed, ‘wait for me.’ Needless to say they didn’t wait for me, indeed the point of their scooting was not waiting for me. They scooted around the bend towards Hampden Park and unimagined happiness, and I yearned to join them more that I thought it possible to yearn. I ached with scooter-lust. The scooter I eventually inherited, of course, was Simon’s, by which time he and his friends had graduated to bikes. On which to pedal off down Huggetts Lane etc.

What I wanted was justice, and justice was defined as getting what I wanted. In this I was no more selfish than other children, but I suspect I was more persistent. I attended a children’s party, the only one I remember ever going to, around the corner in Meadows Road. It was to celebrate the birthday of a boy of about my age whom I considered fat, so he must have been effectively spherical.

There was a game supervised by Spherical’s mother. I forget how it went but the rules had an obvious flaw, which I exploited to win. The prize was a sherbet fountain – a threepenny confection consisting of a cylinder of yellow cardboard full of sherbet. You sucked the sherbet up through a liquorice tube, then you ate the tube just as soon as you’d finished sneezing.

Having done all that, I returned to the game, won again, demanded another prize and was told I had already had one. This was injustice on a cosmic scale. I pursued my hostess like a bloodhound. Whenever she turned it was to see a plump little boy with his hand out. That I got another sherbet fountain in the end was due less to my legal case than to my doggedness. That I can remember the tone with which the mother finally conceded suggests perhaps the birth of self-awareness.

At the same party there was orange squash in thin glass tumblers. Used to chunkier tumblers or plastic ones, I bit the rim of the glass. It snapped and crunched between my teeth. I had fragments lying gaggingly on my tongue. I wanted to swallow and spit at the same time. I compromised by screaming. Mothers came running. One plucked glass from my mouth with tweezers while my own mother held my jaws open. I was back at Mr Fisher’s.

Willingdon lies at the foot of the South Downs, a range of chalk hills with a skin of springy turf. For my mother the Downs were her mental salve, the place she went to throughout her life for a sense of wellbeing. When I was the last of her four children not yet at school, she would often take me for a snatched hour on the Downs, to clear, as she put it, the cobwebs. To this day the Downs are my template of countryside – windy, open, fresh.

I learned from my mother the names of the wild flowers, names as old as the language: lady’s slipper, cuckoopint, campion, deadnettle, hawkbit, birdsfoot trefoil. Sometimes she’d take a flower home to confirm its identity. Her reference book graded plants for rarity, with the rarest having three stars. I yearned to find a three-star flower but never did better than two.

Then my father got a new job and we moved. We went twenty miles west of Eden, to the village of Hassocks, near Brighton, and a raw, new house on a raw, new housing estate.

Chapter 2

My mother’s father died when I was seventeen. I’d always liked him. I went to see him in a hospice in Brighton. There was a television above the bed showing cricket highlights from Australia. Lillee and Thomson were terrifying the English batsmen.

Though Grandpop had no interest in cricket, he tried to say things about it because he knew I played, but he had cancer of the throat and there was almost no voice left. And coughs racked him. He’d been a twelve-stone man. Now he weighed six. He was hollowed out, skeletal, grey. He could get no food down. They gave him half-pints of Guinness to sip, decanted into a baby’s plastic cup.

We watched the cricket for a bit, then he gestured to me to hand him a black book from a bedside drawer – his form book, in which he kept records of race horses, his only sporting interest. The pages were dense with neat notes. He wrote down the names of two horses, the times and places they were running, gave me £2 from the same bedside drawer and asked me to go lay a bet on each. I would need to hurry, he suggested. The bookmakers would be closing.

I had no doubt he was doing it as a kindness, but I was grateful for the excuse to leave. I thought of not placing the bet, of keeping the money. Perhaps he’d meant me to, but I was curious to enter a betting shop. I’d only ever looked through the doors at the little men and the television screen and the litter of paper and the fabulous fug of cigarette smoke. Nowhere on earth was smokier than a betting shop. I placed the bets.

Grandpop was born in 1895, about the same time as the first motor car. He never owned one. The hamlet of Isfield in Sussex where he was raised would have been like a Hardy novel: horses, carts, crops, candles, shepherds in smocks, Victoria on the throne and a horizon that stretched all the way to the next village. And he retained something of that rural patience, that unflustered submission to the seasons and the way things were.

He left school at twelve as everyone did and worked on a farm. Then the First World War gave him a chance to see the world. They sent him to East Africa, what is now Mozambique and Kenya, where he saw no fighting. I have a few postcards he sent back, and the medals they gave him just for being there. He loved Africa, apparently, wanted to stay, but already, at the age of twenty, he was married and obliged. The chance to go anywhere never came again.

He did many things – tobacconist, railwayman, clock cleaner, nothing that ever paid much. He and his wife could not have children. They adopted my mother as a baby. She knew them as Ma and Pop.

Throughout my childhood we went to see them most weekends in their tiny dark front room in Eastbourne. They had an armchair each aligned to a little black and white television, where of a Saturday afternoon Pop would be watching the horses on Grandstand and smoking skinny roll-ups and Ma would be sucking mint imperials. A goldfinch hopped from perch to perch in a cage on the mantelpiece, its brilliance long since faded. I never heard it sing.

Pop would say little. Ma would issue a shrill torrent of complaint. Many years later my mother told me she was a cruel woman. Pop, however, she loved. They came over each Christmas Day and Pop would stand around being benign and deferring to everyone. He seemed to see the world with a kindly absence of expectation, which he would never dream of imposing on anyone else. He was modest and practical, and just once he took me fishing, on a stretch of beach somewhere near Eastbourne.

He had made his own rod and reel. The rod was bamboo, the eyes whipped on and the whole thing varnished to a gleam. The handle was of tightly wound cord. And the reel was a wooden centre-pin, turned on a lathe and dark with age and handling. It wound in oiled silence.

The tide was coming in. He paid out line and placed his baited hook in a rock pool just above the water’s edge, then went back up the beach, stood the rod in a rod holder with a bell clipped to its tip, and went to sleep in a deckchair with his brown felt hat pulled over his eyes. In the thin brown suit he always wore – with braces and a collarless shirt – against the blue striped canvas, he looked like a dumped sack.

While he snoozed I played in the rock pools, each a temporary aquarium of darting fish fry, transparent shrimps, swaying strands of seaweed – a captive miniature world. There were alien anemones whose sprays of waving tentacles I was shy of, and little crabs whose claws I dreaded, crabs that scuttled unnervingly sideways, then shimmied down into the sand like settling skirts. I was wary, too, of the sea itself, its waves, its saltiness. As it crept back over the rocks I stayed well ahead of it, and went back up to Pop, who had woken and now sat with a finger crooked around the line just above the reel.

And without fuss he noted a knock on the line, took the rod from the holder, checked the feel of the line again, raised the rod tip and then reeled from the sea and up onto the beach a plaice, flapping wildly on the sand where I ran down to fetch it. Then he packed up fishing for the day.

When Ma died my mother found Pop a little flat to move into but almost as soon as he went there cancer got him, and my mother brought him to live with us. Us, by then, meant just her and me. I was in my last year at school.

Pop sat all day in what had been my father’s armchair, a faux-luxurious leather beast that swivelled. Beside the chair he kept a little plastic bowl with a lid. Whenever he coughed, which was often, and paroxysmically, he would swivel the chair away, and spit a slither of thick and bloody phlegm into the bowl, then click the lid back on. Even in my self-absorbed adolescence I noted how hard he tried not to intrude.

Many evenings my mother would be out at her job on a hospital switchboard and she would leave instructions for me to cook dinner for Pop. But he would never let me, would insist that he’d eaten or wasn’t hungry. And despite the fact that he was dying he mended the bathroom door.

It had always been warped. To lock it you had to lean a shoulder against it just above the handle. One day I came home from school to find the lock and handles removed, and a little bag of tools stashed by the towel rail: chisels, screwdrivers, a hand drill, their wooden handles worn smooth by use and polished by skin grease. The following day the tools had gone again and the door was reassembled, and the key now turned in the lock as sweetly as one could wish, at the bidding of just finger and thumb. And it did so for the following forty years, years when my mother occupied that house alone. And always, when I visited, to close the bathroom door was to remember Grandpop, kindly, patient, skilled, free of all resentment, a man who, had he had the opportunities, might have been remarkable.

The horses he bet on lost. I didn’t go back to the hospice. He died before the test match had finished. If there was a funeral I didn’t go. I don’t think there’s a grave, or any sort of memorial. S. F. V. Gurr, he was. S was for Sidney.

Chapter 3

My father was Gordon Bennett. I have no reason to believe he was the original, but it didn’t help. He’d served as an engineer during the war and had been involved in building temporary runways in Normandy to support the troops advancing after D-Day, but I learned of this years after he had died. Only once to my memory did he mention the war. I’d asked him why he didn’t put jam on a piece of bread and butter, and he said that for anyone who’d lived through the war bread and butter was a luxury.

He liked things clean, neat, conventional and English. If you’d asked him what he’d fought for he’d have thought it a dumb question. If you’d pressed him he’d have said Jevington Cricket Club. My father loved cricket, though he wasn’t much good at it. He bowled slow-medium nothings and he batted a little. But it was the doing of it that pleased him and Jevington