Miramar dog, p.1
Miramar Dog, page 1
Miramar Dog
Denis Edwards
To John and Jane
My long-suffering and ever-tolerant younger brother and sister
CATHOLIC DOG
SITTING ON A LOG
EATING A BELLY
OUT OF A FROG
Popular taunting rhyme, Miramar circa 1950
introduction
I’m Denis. I’m eight and this is my story, and the story of my family and some of the people around us. It is set when I was eight because that was when many of the things described in this book happened. Some of the other things, particularly the effects of Frank Wilkins’ visit to the Newtown workshop to explain his accounting, and what happened to him there and afterwards, happened earlier. So did the aftermath of the sermon; the arsonist, the lawyers, the wives, the nuns, the priests and the violinist, and the desperate effort to save Catholic men from perdition and ruin. The slygrogs, the morning talks and the experiment with the media all happened more or less at the same time as the soccer match.
Our family was near the centre of all this. It had been in Wellington since the 1930s, not long enough or rich or influential enough to be a Great Family. But long enough to be close to the currents diverted from the main stream and flowing in unpredictable directions.
My grandfather had shifted the family to Wellington. He had tired of being the policeman at Takaka, near Nelson, and having to fight the drunken concrete workers every Saturday night. Once across Cook Strait he would end his working life as a warder at Mount Crawford prison. He was the oldest man working there, and because he was a kindly soul he wound up being given the job of sitting up at night with the condemned men. He would wait with them through their last night, until 8am, when they would be executed on the prison gallows.
He would leave them at seven, and walk down to the house at 144 Nevay Road. On those days breakfast was a silent affair, until the prison siren sounded at precisely eight o’clock, the signal the hanging was happening.
There was one man who had sat and talked through the night, most of it cleaning away a life spent in the courts, prison and doing harm to other people and their possessions. At seven, when my grandfather was due to leave, the man looked him right in the eye and said in a calm voice, ‘I didn’t do it. I never killed her.’
That day the silence over breakfast lasted until nightfall. My grandfather took the edge off hearing the dead man’s denial with a whisky binge.
The unofficial history of Miramar, and of Wellington, spun and bounced off the walls of our house, mostly in the little room just beside our kitchen. The back door opened into it and was the door everyone used at our house. It was the best way to approach, because you could see the Wellington Harbour and the boats, or the foaming waves or the cold steel-grey of the water just before the storm arrived, or when it was calm and the sea was soft green or blue.
In 1968 we stood outside that room, and watched the inter-island ferry, Wahine, drag itself up the harbour, to stop opposite Seatoun and slowly roll on its side, and we saw the clouds of steam rising hundreds of feet in the air. The water had run down its funnels and into the boilers. When that happened the ship could not be saved. My father sobbed when he saw that. He had been at sea, on ships like the Wahine, and for him its loss was a death.
That little dining room was where I heard a lot of things, many of them from my father and his friends when they were drinking together, slowly emptying the warm beer from the flagons, drinking from peanut butter glasses. They gradually ceased to care about the little kids wandering around. They kept telling their stories and passing on their gossip, forgetting that little kids remember things.
There was a lot to remember. Our family was mixed up in almost everything in Wellington, except banking and big business. Uncle Dennis was near the heart of the Labour Party and on the Petone Borough Council. My father and mother were heavily involved in Catholic affairs, which meant news of strange things and fears and excitement came through our house, borne by a procession of Marists, Franciscans, Dominicans, Redemptorists and Sisters of Mercy.
To be deep in Catholic affairs was to be just a short jump from the union movement, and from there to the radicals fighting to keep hard-won pay and conditions. Toby Hill, who was the second-in-command of the Watersiders Union during the bitter lockout in 1951, when people talked about civil war, when terrible legislation was shoved through Parliament making it illegal to give food or other help to watersiders, would come to our house. Mostly it was because his wife and my mother were friends. They had much in common, mostly the struggle with raising children with too little money.
Friends of my grandfather visited. Some were still in the police or working in the prison, or were retired, but they knew the stories, and as the beer and food appeared they relaxed and talked of strange people, strange events, and awful deaths.
This means that some of the stories, repeated here, are second-hand, verified as best I can by talking to the people still living, adding weight and substance to the fragments I already knew. As I got older and the people who are the focus of these stories died, and could no longer be hurt and offended, people would feel able to open up and tell me the choices they faced and the things they had done.
Some people’s names have been changed. Some are still alive and might not want their story told. Other names have been changed because while the people are dead, their children are still alive. They might want to tell their story their way. My name, those of my parents and brothers and sister are real. The rest have been changed. Readers will notice a gap in the time line. Frank Wilkins and Marie West died in 1947. The rest of the story, of our family, and the events leading up to the soccer match, the effective end of the Catholic ghetto in Miramar, takes place a few years later. This has not affected the story, simply removed the need to fill in the intervening years, when little of relevance happened.
Most of the people at the heart of the story came through our house. When my mother and father married, Pat Conlin sat at a table near the front of the room. Uncle Pat was important. He was Wellington’s most important bookmaker. The legend was he had been working in the South Island, where my grandfather was born. There was a suggestion he was my grandfather’s half-brother, but we never really found out for sure.
Pat had been working in Christchurch. There had been a strike. The employers brought in strike-breakers. Pat helped some of them rethink their commitment to the employers, with a piece of four by two timber. At least one man was never quite the same after Pat finished using his head as a drum. Pat got four years in prison for that, and did four, when he could have done three, because of a couple of incidents with prison officers, for which he paid with long sessions in the punishment wing.
Pat emerged into an employment market then screaming for anyone upright and with a pulse, but could not find work. His reputation was too fearsome, and employers kept blacklists. He drifted to Wellington, struggling along on bits and pieces of work. When his fourth child arrived he decided enough was enough. Prodded by an anxious wife, he set out to make some money.
It was just after two on a Saturday afternoon when he walked into Arthur Cody’s slygrog and bookmaking set-up and told Arthur that he was now a partner in the business.
Arthur looked at him through his rheumy old eyes. ‘Why don’t ya fuck off, before ya get taught a few fuckin’ manners!’
Pat kicked Arthur in the balls. Arthur gasped and spluttered for Alex, his standover man, to kill Pat. He was disappointed at what happened next. What happened next was absolutely nothing. Alex and Pat had been in Paparua prison together. The afternoon before they had shared a jug of beer in the Caledonian Hotel, and Alex had suggested the gaming industry as a career. Pat liked the idea.
Arthur Cody, rolling around on the floor with his hands over his groin, looked up at the two men. It was not difficult to work out what was going on. He took one hand away from his balls and held it up in the air. Pat shook hands with Arthur.
Not long after this Arthur Cody took the suitcase full of banknotes from under his floorboards and retired from the industry. Pat went on to bring a considerable energy and imagination to the work, tripling the turnover and creating jobs and opportunities, and behind them, no small amount of misery, because his debt-collecting policy was to commence with aggression and violence and escalate from there.
His success caught the eye of the man who would be sitting at the same table, enjoying my parents’ wedding reception. Murray McCarthy was famous for being the toughest of the tough policemen. A lot of rumours curled in the air around him. One story had him beating a suspect to death. Another, more closely based on fact, was his taking a very mature attitude to certain activities. One of these was bookmaking. McCarthy took the view that people did not have to bet. If they lost it was their own fault and they could expect consequences.
It was not long before Pat Conlin and Murray McCarthy’s career paths intersected, and they quickly reached an understanding. Conlin would arrange for people to be available for bookmaking arrests, to enhance the police reputation for diligence in the war on illegal gambling.
Soon after, McCarthy’s standard of living began improving. He bought a better car and his wife and children were much better dressed. Mentioning this was not considered wise. One man did. Not long afterwards his car was found to be full of stolen property when stopped by the police.
McCarthy kept the Wellington police’s Homo Register. These were the files on sexually active homosexuals. In those days any homosexual act, anywhere and by anyone, was illegal. McCa rthy expanded the definition of ‘homo’ to include any sex offender. Anyone caught stealing women’s underwear, flashing his penis anywhere except at a urinal or in a rugby dressing shed, who interfered with children, had sex with carnies—unlawful carnal knowledge of a girl under sixteen—or who spent too much time around the Courtenay Place public toilets known as the Taj Mahal, because it resembled a small version of the great building in India, left behind as an architectural joke by a team of long-gone city engineers and architects. All these people were classified as ‘homos’ and became citizens of a world ruled by Murray McCarthy.
From there on, until they died, they would be harassed. They could expect to be stopped whenever there was a sex crime. They would have to prove their whereabouts when the crime happened, or they would be taken down to Wellington Central and given time to explain themselves. If they did not co-operate they would be visited at work. Nervous employers would find reasons to move them on. If they complained it was taken as proof they had something to hide, and grounds for freshening up their entry in the Homo Register, so they would be stopped more often.
My mum never liked Murray McCarthy much. There was too much of a sense of darkness around him. She was sure his years of roaming around the ugly side of people’s lives had left him cynical, angry and slightly prone to depressive fits when he was capable of hurting people, to make himself feel better by comparison.
Much of this story is written in direct quotes. I was there, or the conversations were told to me by my mother or father, or by one of the people involved. I take the view that if you know half a conversation and there is a subsequent action, as happened in the little saga of the two priests, then it is reasonable to fill in the gaps even if I wasn’t there.
Conversations where I was not there, and did not speak to the participants, but where I know what happened after their conversation, I have reconstructed and shown without quotation marks.
Some of the story flowed through the confessional, let slip after the priests had spoken of strange events without actually mentioning names — and sometimes letting things slip, knowing the person was dead and could not be betrayed.
There were others who had an interest in muddying the trail. Mick Mahon was one. He had worked with my grandfather, had liked and respected him, and kept in contact with our family. Mahon, a devout Catholic, had talent and had risen in the police to become an inspector. Once he had crossed into the ranks of the commissioned officers he was able to do more or less as he wished. One of the things he wished was to spend hours talking to the police librarian, a man often denigrated for not being out on the front lines, like a ‘proper’ policeman.
Mahon was different. He was interested and was kind and treated the librarian with dignity. In return the librarian taught him the quiet little pathways through the files, including the built-in checks and double checks to prevent files going missing.
After the librarian went home Mahon would come back to the library and spend long hours, looking for and finding what he wanted. He was a modest man, who knew he had achieved a great deal, and none of it would earn him medals or commendations. He did not worry and he did not say much. He just smiled his queer little smile, watched through his soft lazy eyes as the Freemasons, his mortal enemies in the police, foundered when digging in the files for information on prominent Catholics.
All this — crime, politics and Catholics versus Freemasons, then a bitter and real rivalry — was talked about, argued over and raged at in our house in Nevay Road. Not that I cared. I had other things on my mind. One of them was being fed up at the way the cricket season had ended. Kilbirnie, who became the eastern suburbs representatives in the Wellington-wide finals, had just beaten our under-10 Marist Miramar cricket team. Kilbirnie lost to Karori, who would be plastered by Johnsonville in the finals. It did not look as if we would have had much chance anyway, but this did not matter. We played to win.
Now the soccer season is beginning. Teams have been selected and are under way. There is a lot of soccer. Games are on both Wednesday and Saturday. This makes it more attractive than rugby, the national religion. It offers only one game a week. Those who want to play all the time choose soccer.
The mothers promote soccer. They don’t like rugby’s inherent violence. Headmasters dedicated to rugby have long, intense sessions with the parents, especially the mothers, and especially after a game produces injuries. These headmasters always provided themselves with an escape route, a soccer team.
The eight and nine-year-olds in our team, playing in the the Under-11 grade, but which through a quirk of eligible birthdays excludes ten-year-olds, have done their calculations. The wisdom at the start of the season was that if the Marist Miramar team could win the easy games against Seatoun, Strathmore, Kilbirnie and Lyall Bay and Miramar South, and got a draw against Miramar Central, and hopefully another one against the consistently best team, Miramar North, we had a chance of winning the league.
Winning matters. There is a religious component to boasting — losers are jeered and taunted as failures, and it is pointed out which religious affiliation, Catholic or Protestant, is superior.
Of course the same calculations are being made at the Protestant schools, where eight and nine-year-olds are also pondering the consequences of losses, and particularly at losing to a mob of Catholics.
Powerful passions surge and roll around Miramar and are about to be let loose.
chapter one
It turned out to be surprisingly easy to do serious damage to another person. Killing them was also a lot quicker than the usual ritual, which took nearly an hour of yelling, threatening, kicking and punching in the balls, stomach, ribs and face, particularly the nose. For most of the time the person at the centre of this attention was lying on the ground, begging for the punishment to stop, and yes, they would swear they would be more diligent about settling their accounts. It was an almost-civilised routine, with a definite script. Pat Conlin sometimes thought its air of ceremony resembled the Catholic Mass: everyone knew how it would start, what would happen in the middle and how it would end. Until now no one had ever been killed in these sessions. Damaged past the point of repair, certainly. But killed? No.
Joe was looking at Pat, who was staring open-mouthed at Frank Wilkins lying there on the floor. This was well past the Mass. This was real. Joe had felt the rush of red mist when Frank began his lying and cracking jokes about the trouble he had caused by not paying off his winners. The instant that sneering grin spread across his face Joe had decided to teach him a real lesson, grabbing the ball peen hammer, swinging it high and then down. It was still picking up speed and force as it smashed into Frank’s big, bald head.
Whuuump! Just one smooth movement, and then that soft, folding sound, like punching a feather pillow. Now Frank was on the floor, his suit stained with the oil dropping on the floor from the machines in the workshop. No one was worried about that. Frank wore cheap suits and he had never looked after them properly.
For Joe it was the eyes that were the most shocking. They looked straight up, not seeing anything, a spooky stare like the eels in the fish shop window. He was also surprised. He thought there would be blood and brains all over the place. But no. The hammer had gone into Frank’s skull, which didn’t seem to be much tougher than the piecrusts his wife baked. That might not be fair. His wife made these incredibly tough piecrusts, and her pies were almost impossible to eat.
He pulled the hammer out of Frank’s skull. It had little bits of blue and red sticking to its business end. Jesus! Those were Frank’s brains. He dropped the hammer on the floor, shuddering at the sight. Frank was twitching and fitting. White spittle and blood were coming out of his mouth and his legs were flicking up and down and back and forward. It looked horrible.
Pat had recovered enough to yell at him. — Joe, you fucking stupid prick! You’ve fucking topped him off.
This was not quite correct. Frank’s twitching and fitting were signs of some sort of life. There was more blood than spittle dribbling out of his mouth.
— What’d you bloody do that for? Pat half-screeched.
