The Boat that Brought Me

By Nick Bridge

Possibly the only New Zealander to have been attacked by a library, Nick Bridge's frightening early encounter with words did not blunt his enjoyment of them. The former diplomat has written a memoir of disarming frankness and humour about a life that ranged the globe – with assignments in seven countries including India, China and the United Kingdom.

 

While air travel delivered him to his international postings, Nick's first move across the world was by boat – a seminal trip that liberated him from the class constraints of a secluded Hampshire prep school to what he describes as a 'whirlpool of classless 1950s co-ed New Zealand' at Hutt Valley High School, and the many opportunities that flowed from there.

 

Apart from diplomacy, Bridge's roles have included batman to a bishop, hotel bellhop, self-confessed cricket tragic, president of the National Library Society, member of the Wellington Civic Trust and husband to poet and China scholar, Diana Bridge.

 

The Boat that Brought Me bursts with the optimistic, dynamic force that is Nick Bridge, and has been praised by readers from the head of the PM's department to a former Indian foreign secretary to an ex-poet laureate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayfarer
• Release date: Jan 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9780995115460

Book preview

Early English years

I’ve led a lucky life, and sometimes I feel a bit guilty about it. There’s also ‘time torn off unused’, to quote Philip Larkin, a favourite poet of mine. I guess most of us have some of that. Living through the western affluence of some seventy-five post-war years, I sometimes wonder, towards the end of an innings, about the rightness of it all.

Amidst all my good fortune, three things especially stand out: moving to New Zealand as a youngster, meeting and marrying Diana, and having a deeply interesting career. A happy and optimistic disposition would probably come in fourth.

First, a quick glance ahead to 1968.

‘Morning, Bruce,’ said Keith Holyoake, looking at me as he got into the venerable lift at Parliament Buildings in Wellington.

‘Good morning, Prime Minister,’ I replied.

A colleague nudged me but I took no notice. If the PM calls you, a young neophyte, by another’s name there’s no cause to put him right. As they say in cricket – lucky to get a touch.

Holyoake repeated his greeting a few days later. It was clear that he was mistaking me for a senior Foreign Affairs staffer whom, as it happened, I was working under at the time. We looked quite similar: prominent noses, full heads of brown hair, and heavy rimmed glasses. Bruce Brown had been called back to Wellington from the United Nations to organise and run the 1968 South East Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO) Conference – the largest to date that New Zealand had held. I was the SEATO desk officer, a dogsbody in my second year in the department.

A week or so later and the same thing happened. By this stage my friends were dining out on the encounters and it was clearly too late to put matters to rights. This time my chief was also in the lift. Ralph Mullins was a high flyer with a keen and subversive sense of humour. As we walked round to the department he asked what was going on. I explained. He grinned. Agreed that it was too late to do anything. Had I told Bruce? Yes.

A couple of hours later Mullins put his head round the door of the room that housed the cadets and asked me to follow him. He had Bruce Brown with him. ‘We’re going to brief the PM on the SEATO arrangements. Given you do all the donkey work, I thought you should come along for once. No need to say anything.’

He was, I could sense, quivering with anticipation. We went into Holyoake’s office. He began to greet us with his customary goodwill. Then stopped short … seeing two Bruces. Ralph introduced me. The prime minister frowned. Next time he contented himself with just a ‘good morning’ to the lift at large. No names, no pack-drill.

The 1950s

All of that was a considerable advance on what would have lain ahead for me had a large map of New Zealand not arrived on my desk one morning, twelve years before, at my school in England.

It was early 1956 and my last year at prep school in Hampshire. I was destined – for what? Certainly not exchanging morning greetings with one of Anthony Eden’s successors. I was coming up to sit Common Entrance – the exam that led to a Public School or extinction.

Each year our headmaster arranged for the senior boys to sit the Eleven Plus exam as an experiment, even though it would have no bearing on our own education path. It was this exam that determined whether state school students went to secondary modern or, if they were clever, to a local grammar school. In our prep-school caps and blazers we went on our school bus to the local primary school, where we were regarded with puzzled hostility by the inmates.

We sat the exam – and we all failed, as our predecessors had in the years before. We knew our Latin, our Shakespeare, our irregular French verbs, our victorious English history … but hadn’t a clue about multiple-choice and problem-solving questions.

That map of New Zealand came in an envelope that landed on my head boy’s desk with a thump. I used to get three or four letters a term if I was lucky. Some of my friends got three or four a week. But they had mothers.

My mother, Tilly, whom everyone had loved, had died in 1948 when I was five and we were living in Jersey in the Channel Islands. It was the warmest place in the UK, so my father’s firm had posted him there after the war for my mother’s health. She had TB and the treatment was in its infancy.

Part of the Armenian diaspora, Tilly had lived in Burma and India all her life except for some school­ing in Europe. My father, Francis, an English boxwallah from Oxford, had been posted to Burma and then on to India by his insurance company. He met Tilly in Calcutta, where they married in 1937. In 1939 at the outbreak of war, he joined the RAF and took her to his post­ing in Doncaster, where he spent the war as an assistant adjutant on a Bomber Command air base. In his thirties, he was too old to fly. The Yorkshire wartime winters were unkind to a young woman from the Far East.

At age five, I started school in Jersey – De La Salle College with its Gothic buildings and forbidding priests, even in the junior school. Then after my mother died and my father was posted back to England, I was sent to live with family friends, the Playfair sisters, who looked after me fondly. I went to the local school. After a year I went back to England to live with one of my mother’s cousins, Dora Marcy, and her husband, Boy, in Weybridge, Surrey, for two happy and loving years.

I went to the same school as their daughter, my cousin Carole, and we became almost brother and sister. To all intents and purposes I was adopted by her parents. I am still close to Carole. A retired solicitor, she and her husband live near Weybridge. Our previous chief justice, Sian Elias, is Carole’s cousin. Now she has retired after twenty illustrious years, I can no longer go around saying, ‘My cousin, the chief justice.’

When my father remarried, I rejoined him, and we lived in a celebrated pub called the Wheatsheaf – owned by my stepmother’s family, the Reids – in Newport on the Isle of Wight. I spent a miserable term or two at a local school before being packed off to Broadlands, a boarding school in Petersfield, Hampshire. Mountbatten’s place of the same name was not far away. It was a lovely part of England. Still is.

It was there, some five years later, that I opened the envelope containing the map of New Zealand together with an attractive brochure about a new passenger ship, the Southern Cross, that sailed to Australia and New Zealand through the year. There was a rare accompanying letter: ‘Dear Nicky, this is to let you know that we’ll be going to New Zealand to live at the end of next month. Love, Daddy.’

What did I know of New Zealand? I knew quite a bit about Australia through my tragic addiction to cricket and from my cricket books, especially Jack Fingleton’s tour books. I knew backwards the 1953 Ashes tour by Hassett’s happy team. And Bradman’s 1948 tour. And the 1951/2 tour of Australia led by Freddie Brown. The books have become classics. Fingleton was a fine writer.

Of New Zealand, which had last toured England in 1949, I knew hardly anything. Only Everest and Ed Hillary who, in due course, was destined to be my predecessor-but-one as New Zealand high commissioner to India. But I’m climbing ahead … like Ed, whom I came to know in the 1990s.

***

It was from the Wheatsheaf, one of England’s oldest pubs, that I travelled across the Solent with my father to begin my first term at prep school. I was a trifle surprised, at the first half-term exit, not to go back to it but instead to a B&B in Ryde. My father gave no explanation. In the course of time, I came to think that