Autobiography: The First Four Chapters
1. My Grandfather’s Dream
I am a teacher, and whether I am teaching by speaking, or by writing, telling stories is fundamental to how I teach. When I was a child, I imagined that I would become a teacher of history, of the great story of humanity. A series of fortunate accidents led me instead into the field of teaching skills for relationships and for psychological health. Again, and again, I have heard my students say that my own life is also an important story that clarifies what I am teaching them, and of course I tell stories from this life in the course of teaching these subjects. Here, in this book, I am telling the story behind those stories.
After 66 years, I think it is fair to say that I have been a participant in history, as has anyone my age. For me it has been a history that included living in a house where the food was cooked on a fire and virtually all food came from the back yard; living in communities where money, clothing and food was all shared; living as a single parent; living by travelling constantly across the globe to scenes of devastating wars and tsunamis; living in children’s school communities where children and teachers jointly run their school… and more. And I trained for my part in it as a nurse, as a university teacher, as a psychotherapist, as an encounter group leader, as an anarchist activist, as a herbalist, as a teacher of traditional Chinese exercise and meditation, as an archaeologist, as a motivational speaker, as a parent, as a community organizer, as a factory union representative, as a company manager and so many other roles.
I have had the good fortune to live able bodied and relatively comfortably for over sixty years, and to pursue and bring to fruition projects that were my childhood dreams. In this time, I have learned that these results are not entirely of my own making, and not entirely luck. My aim here is to resist the temptation to turn my whole life into an educational lesson, and instead to tell parts of the story that may in some way resonate with your experience as a reader. Like a surrealist painting, I hope to evoke images and responses in your own mind rather than merely present a finished image of my own on the page. You’ll get heaps of my comments, because I am also using this as my own opportunity to transform distressed memories into inspiring learnings, but I urge you to use them as an encouragement to create your own learnings, not as a final word.
Nothing is more biased than autobiography. For those people I have mentioned in the story here, you may also decide that this unfairly represents you, or that you would rather not have the connection mentioned. For that reason, also, I have done my best to minimize identifying names of living people. This is not a collection of scandalous revelations, but merely my story and the story of social change that I have participated in. People named here are mentioned only because I could not find a way to tell my story without their name. I ask you to accept that different people remember events differently and this book does not claim to reveal some final truth about what happened. I have done my best to represent others respectfully, and have left untold some events, in order to focus better on my own story. The exception is perhaps with my parents, who have both passed on, and who were such a significant part of shaping my own life.
Sixty-five years is a long time, and I can remember a great deal from what happened in those years, so you are reading a tiny fraction of what I remember. Everything I tell you is filtered through my later experience and thoughts about it, so that (as is always true) there is no story separate from the meanings that I have added to it. In the same way, I hope that you will add your own meanings, using my journey as a way to deepen your own journey. One of my main aims is to record the extraordinary social contexts which I participated in, and which vary from the standard social history of New Zealand society. These include particularly the counterculture of the 1960s-1970s, and various alternative healing and psychotherapy movements since then. The world has changed so much, and these non-mainstream events are, I believe, an important part of the story for us to preserve.
During the school holidays, when I was a child of 5-10 years old, I would sometimes go to stay for a week with my mother’s parents, in their little two bedroom house across town in the suburb of Woolston, in Christchurch, New Zealand. Their stucco walled cottage had ornate English flower borders and a quarter acre vegetable garden section, terminating at a huge walnut tree and a series of chicken coops, containing 50 chickens. Morning began with my grandmother, Elsie, lighting the fire in the coal range, a woodburning cooking system, which simultaneously created the hot water for washing, heated the air in the main room, and boiled the water for oat porridge and a pot of English tea. My grandfather, Richard or “Dick”, was a thick-set Welsh-born New Zealander equally proud of his certificate signed by King George V at the end of the Great War (1914-1918), and of his certificate of membership of the New Zealand Communist Party. He would set off in the early morning for his proletarian duty at a local metal anodizing factory, a “retirement job” that he took up in 1952 after leaving his work as a Ward manager at the local Psychiatric Hospital. That left my grandmother and I mostly alone for the day. While she cleaned and ironed and cooked and sold eggs to local people, I set up pretend shops to sell flowers and other discoveries, and made a hut in the asparagus bush, and made toys out of wood in the shed.
I am telling you this story so you get a sense of the distant world I grew up in. The house had a radio (an ornate plug in device with glass valves at the back) and a telephone (a black box on the wall in the hall, with a circular dial and a receiver that you actually “hung up” on the wall mount when you were finished). But there were virtually no other plastic objects in the house, and all groceries came in cardboard, in glass or in brown paper bags.The world was also much more culturally stereotyped than the one we live in now. It was accepted that men and women had different, non-interchangeable roles in life. It was accepted that society was divided into social classes both by wealth and by degree of control over their circumstances. It was accepted that there existed racial groups and religious groups who by and large did not mix with each other. The fact that my grandfather challenged some of those assumptions only made their wide acceptance more obvious.
My grandmother bought me comics (English ones like Buster, as well as American ones like Classics Illustrated and Walt Disney), but she could not read these to me because she was almost blind from diabetic retinopathy. In the afternoon, she and I lay down on her bed for a “rest” time, and she would tell me a story from her memory – a story from the Brothers Grimm or from Aesop’s fables. I was fascinated by her ability to conjure up these imaginary scenes, and to create morals from the strange events. It is a skill that I now use to teach very similar life lessons.
One day we were talking about the cosmonauts. In 1961 Yuri Gagarin first orbited the earth in Vostok 1, and although this was something that only the Russians had done so far, we were all so proud that humans were finally reaching for the stars. My grandmother said to me that she couldn’t understand why Gagarin didn’t fall down. I told her, confidently and completely incorrectly as it turned out, that since he was so far from earth there was no up or down. This fascinated her, and she told me “You know Richard, the way you talk, you could be a teacher one day.” And there it was: the idea that shaped my expectations over my entire childhood.
My grandfather’s favorite subject was history, and he loaned me history books (books that told almost nothing about the history of New Zealand, but a lot about the semi-mythological story of England and its great empire that the sun never set on). And my grandfather told me that one day, far in the future, the history books would be different, because they would not be the stories of kings and emperors, but the stories of working men and women. One day there would be a great change, and the statues of the tyrants would come down, and in their place would be statues of people who fought the tyrants, who fought for better pay and safer conditions, and the right to free speech. And I understood that for my grandad, history was not finished. We were creating it. He quoted me from Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel “Looking Backward” (1888) in which an American wakes up after 113 years sleep to discover himself in an ideal, socialist America. His dream was to be part of creating that future.
I wanted, of course, to hear about my grandad’s real part in past history. He survived the Great War. One day I asked him “How many Germans do you think you killed grandad?” He was horrified. “None, I hope,” he explained. And then he told me his own story. After his first trip down into a Welsh coal mine as a teenager, he realized that he did not want to live and die in the darkness, breathing in coal dust for barely enough money to survive. And so he accepted a position as an indentured laborer, travelling to the colony of Queensland and working for two years on a sugar cane plantation at Bundaberg, where he drove a team of six horses in the hot sun. After his two years was up and his trip was paid for, he set out as a “swagman”, a homeless itinerate worker. There in the vast reaches of Australia, he met members of the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, and learned of their dream of a socialist revolution. One day, a friend of his was travelling across the Tasman sea to New Zealand, and invited my grandad to join him. My grandad said, if there was a spare bunk in his cabin, he would come. On that roll of the dice, he came to New Zealand.
When the call-up for the war in Europe came, he joined the artillery. He worked in a team of seven men who manned a gun that fired large explosive shells. Horses pulled the artillery guns, and he was an expert working with horses, but during the trench war, his job was to run on foot carrying the shells, while his mates set up the parts of the big gun to fire. On 12 October, 1917, his team were part of a massive push at Passchendaele, in Belgium. German machine guns hit them from the front and flank, and 640 New Zealanders were killed in a poorly planned attempt to gain a few metres of mud. A single strafe from a German machine gun killed all the other six men in my grandfather’s team, and bullets smashed his thigh. He was left bleeding out in the deep mud. And then, after what seemed an eternity, two of the German soldiers approached him. One explained, in English, that they were students, and they would help my grandfather get back to the English camp, and would surrender there. In return my grandfather would guarantee their passage to a prisoner of war camp: they were tired of the fighting. And so these anonymous German soldiers saved my grandfather’s life, and within a few days, my grandfather was convalescing in a war hospital in England, and preparing for the journey home. So, as the Christian Bible asks rhetorically after such a story, which man was this man’s neighbor? Who was my grandfather’s comrade in that story? The next year, the war was over, and my grandfather spent his war pension on buying a fishing boat in Timaru. My grandmother, meanwhile, was working at a new hotel, called The Hermitage, at Mount Cook (Aoraki) nearby in the Southern Alps, catering to the first package tours in New Zealand in the 1920s. And so eventually they married, and built their little house in Woolston, and thanks to those two German soldiers, my mother was born in May 1931. Patriotically, they named her Margaret Rose Watkins after the princess of England, Margaret Rose Windsor, born the previous August.
Somewhere in Germany, there is probably another man like me, who owes his life to that desperate conversation on the battlefield at Passchendaele. I may even have met him at a training in Germany, when I teach people how to recover from trauma and how to create cooperative relationships … so that one day the guns will be silent and the tyrants will fall, and my grandfather’s dream will become a reality. To understand where we are going, it helps to remember where we came from ….
2. Ex oriente lux, ex occidente lex
I grew up in Christchurch, an English garden city transplanted to the South Island of Aotearoa / New Zealand. My mother, Margaret, and her family, who also lived in Christchurch, prided themselves in being hard working and down to earth British folk (in fact they always referred to Britain as “home”, as if the whole colonial experience was just a summer holiday that got out of control). “Never be afraid of an honest day’s work” was one of the clichés that my mother had memorized from her father. For her, hard work was the source of all good things. She sometimes held that we were “middle class” – “not too rich and not too poor”, but in truth, her family were lower working class people with a pride in their laboring class as the “salt of the earth”.
My father, David, was, for most of my childhood, a signwriter (in the days when signs and painted scenes on buildings were painted by hand with brushes), having graduated from the School of Arts at Palmerston North Technical High School and a Wellington apprenticeship. But in his dreams he was far more, and eventually he attempted to branch out to advertising and then to sales. Three times, he would argue with his boss at the firm where he worked, and leave to set himself up in a business that would go bankrupt due to his overconfidence within a year or two. In his self-image he was a misunderstood artist, and he dreamed of being a wealthy entrepreneur (indeed he often believed this was just about to happen). Meantime, we were so poor that some years I had no shoes that fitted me, and I noticed that our family was always a couple of years later than my friends’ to get new commodities like a washing machine, a functioning car or a television.
In 1951, my father met my mother at a dance in Wellington, where she was on holiday. At the time she was working at Iggos, and then later at McArthurs chemist shops, and was planning a future as a cosmetician. He “swept her off her feet” as she described it, and the next year they married, moving into a small, cramped, apartment in Cranford Street, Christchurch. My father’s own parents lived in the North Island, and they came down by ship for the wedding, and again for my birth in 1955. After that, I did not see this second set of grandparents again until 1964, when I was nine. Until then, I did not realise that the two sides of my family represented two profoundly different worldviews.
It was no mere holiday that brought us together again. It was a gathering of the Freemasons Society. My father had become a member of the Masonic Lodge, a kind of international “gentleman’s club” whose members included Prime Ministers, heads of business, and (famously) the architects of USA Independence two centuries before. Members swore to keep handshakes, passwords and rituals secret, and believed that these rituals had come to them from ancient times, when they were part of the initiation for priests and temple builders in Ancient Egypt and Israel. For me the Lodge was simply a place that my dad disappeared to on Wednesday nights, dressed in fancy clothes and carrying a secret turquoise apron covered in mystical symbols. When he returned, he brought some peppermints smuggled from the meeting. Once a year, in summer, the Lodge held a picnic and the families got to meet each other, so by the time of my parents’ divorce in 1967, my mother had made friends with many of the other wives of members. Indeed, after the divorce she successfully applied to get funding for my “education” from these families – the lodge acted as a kind of charity or “friendly society” supporting members in difficulty. For my father, the Lodge was a sacred brotherhood that betrayed him; for my mother it was a practical social network that helped her survive my father’s grandiose ideas.
So in 1964, when my father was two years away from his stint as “Master Mason”, we took the overnight ferry from Christchurch to Wellington, and drove up to Rotorua for the national Lodge meeting. After a magical couple of days in Rotorua, when we also visited the Whakarewarewa Maori village and “thermal wonderland”, we drove up further to Hamilton, where my father’s parents, and his siblings Colin and Muriel, lived. A whole other side of my family was about to be revealed to me. A side that could not contrast more with my mother’s family and their hard working, down to earth, Welsh socialist ethic.
First, there was my grandmother Thelma or “Tuppy”. Like my more familiar “nanny” in Christchurch, Thelma Bolstad was obese, but there was something else extra-ordinary about her appearance. Her hair was shiny black, and her eyes were also black. Her skin colour was just a little more olive than usual. The ancestry that gifted her these things was a mystery out of Enid Blyton children’s stories and fairy tales: she was Roma (the itinerate people usually called Gypsy).When I checked my DNA ancestry in 2018, all my ancestry led back to north Europe (Poland, Norway, Wales and Scotland mainly) except for a few percent of markers from the area that is now Pakistan/Afghanistan. Over a thousand years ago, the Roma people migrated from here through Alexander of Macedon’s ancient trade routes, via Egypt (hence the term E’gypsies), into Europe. They brought those genetic markers that I carry in my cells. They brought with them their language, their caste system, their strange beliefs. They plied their trade as metalworkers, dancers and fortune tellers. And they brought with them a magic “book of Thoth” – called by its Egyptian Arabic name طرق turuq (ways or paths – in French “Tarot”), describing a series of spiritual paths, and forming both a base for a game of chance and a system of fortune telling.
After each meal, the New Zealand custom was to have a “nice cup of tea”, and after that, my grandmother Thelma would sometimes take everyone’s tea cup and “read their fortune”. My father told me that once when he was a child, a friend of the family came over and offered his tea cup, but his mother refused to read it. When the man left, she told the family “He will be dead within a week”. Indeed, he was hit by a bus a few days later. It was a freaky story, of the type that my other grandfather (a trained psychiatric nurse) would dismiss as “psychotic nonsense”. Of course, I was fascinated by the whole magical idea of fortune telling. My grandmother had learned from her mother, and her mother from her mother, far back into the past. Now, my grandmother promised me that one day she would teach me, and I would be the one to whom she passed on these mysteries.
As it happened, she never did, but she certainly encouraged in me a fascination about the supernatural. By1973 I was exploring both astrology and Tarot card divination, and had become delighted by the links between the Marxist theory of dialectics, and the Kabbalistic theory that the Gypsy Tarot was based on. Dialectics is the idea that truth is revealed by the kind of yin-yang interaction between one worldview (thesis) and another (antithesis) and their transcendence in a higher order (synthesis). Karl Marx saw the evolution of society from class society to future communal society (synthesis) in these terms, as a result of the interaction between the capitalist worldview (thesis) and the proletarian worldview (antithesis). In fact, the first written work I ever got published was a series of articles on occultism and its relationship to dialectical materialism, published in the Canterbury Students Magazine (“Canta”) that year. It was another 42 years (2015) before I was publishing my own Tarot deck and teaching a training linking it to my system of coaching.
An acceptance of fortune telling was not the only difference in belief system between my father’s family and my mother’s though. At one point in this holiday, my grandfather (Roy) made me a spoon shaped wire circle for creating bubbles out of dishwashing liquid. As he made it he cut his hand and when he told my grandmother, he said “I always cut my hand when I’m working out there in the shed.” Triumphantly, she explained “And that is WHY you do – because you believe you will cut it.” I looked shocked – I had never heard anyone claim that beliefs unconsciously affected actions. “I’m a great believer in that.” She told me. The next day, I saw how far that belief extended. I, my younger sisters Anne and Christine, and our cousins (children of dad’s brother Colin and aunty Dorothy) were playing in the back yard, and my cousin Arthur hurt himself. He ran screaming and crying into where all our parents were sitting talking. Uncle Colin took hold of him and fixed him with a calm stare. “Does it hurt?” “Yes” sobbed Arthur. “No. It doesn’t hurt; it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt” chanted my uncle. “Does it hurt?” “Yes”, repeated Arthur, and the chanting began again, until Arthur agreed that it did not hurt. “Don’t cry” he was then ordered. “Now go and play.”
As we got ready to run out and play again, I listened to my parents discussing this strange event with my father’s family. “If you hug them and give them an orange drink,” uncle Colin explained “Then every time they want an orange drink or a hug, they will hurt themselves. It’s conditioning. In Scientology, we believe in clearing the engrams of these traumatic events from the memory, immediately.” That night, in the caravan where my parents, my sisters and I were sleeping, my father explained it all to my mother. My father defended Colin’s action, which my mother clearly thought was a kind of child abuse. I had discovered that there was a whole different way of thinking about the world.
I understood that there was a theme behind Freemasonry, Scientology, and the Gypsy belief system. It was a belief in the almost magical power of thinking. My father had “investigated” yet another version of this “new thought” as it was called at the time. As a young man, he had a kind of counselling session with New Zealand teacher Herbert Sutcliffe, founder of the “School of Radiant Living”. The most famous champion of Sutcliffe’s school in New Zealand was Sir Edmund Hillary, in 1953 the first man to climb Mount Everest. Sutcliffe took a couple of minutes to scan my father physically, and then proceeded to do what occultists would call a “cold reading”. He told him about his personality and hypothesized about his future. My father was astonished at what Sutcliffe seemed to know. Sutcliffe’s aim was not merely to show people how to “read” other human beings in this way, but how to become aware of their own inner world and change it. His motto was “Faith in goodness will produce good things. Faith in abundance will draw conditions of abundance around you. Faith in health will establish health in body and environment.”
From that time on, my father was sold on “positive thinking”. In later years, even as he faced repeated bankruptcy, he continued to talk as if wealth was just a few steps away. Smoking over a packet of cigarettes a day, he scornfully discussed lung cancer as a result of negative thinking, right up until he died of it in 2007. My father would explain to my sisters and I “You are better than other people, because you are Bolstads. You are more psychic, more creative, destined for greater things.” I remember that one of the first books on psychotherapy I read, aged 16, was Karen Horney’s “Self Analysis”, in which she recommended doing a personal inventory to look for delusional beliefs about one’s own special nature. Suddenly I realized that this belief in Bolstad uniqueness, deliberately installed by my father, was in fact crazy. On the other hand, the idea that if things had always been a certain way, they probably always would be that way … that belief of my mother’s did not serve me either.
To my father’s family, my mother was a sad and disempowered victim of negative thinking, who failed to believe in my father’s unique talents. My father confided in me that it was my mother’s negativity that held him back from abundance. To my mother’s family, especially my grandfather, my father was simply “schizophrenic”, like the “mental patients” who sometimes came round to visit him at their home, after his retirement from the hospital. A lot of my life, in which I trained both as a Psychiatric nurse and as a teacher of that ultimate “new thought cult” Neuro Linguistic Programming, can even be understood as the attempt to reconcile the dialectic between these vastly different world views.
And as a historian, I also wonder if the difference goes even further back in history, to the great migrations of the proto-Indo-European speaking tribes (the “Yamnaya”) who (according to the most popular archaeological theories) rode their horses out from the Russian steppes around 4000 BCE, some moving west into Europe and some south into Iran and eventually India. While both branches shared their horse and cattle herding culture, and their warrior-and-priest patriarchal social system, the traditional mythology simplifies by saying that the eastern or Vedic branch evolved into a far more other-worldly spiritually focused culture, while the west evolved into a more pragmatic and object-based culture. As the Latin saying has it “Ex oriente lux, ex occidente lex” (from the east comes light, from the west comes law). In my family, from the east came fortune telling, cold reading, positive thinking and magical rituals; from the west came skepticism, working class pride, and practicality. Both have been precious to me.
3. The Vikings of the South Seas?
How does someone with a name like Richard Bolstad end up being born in the South Pacific in 1955? The answer is the colonial system. On December 22nd, 1842, my grandmother Elsie’s grandparents arrived in New Zealand as children on a ship called the “Prince of Wales”. In 110 days sailing, the ship (one of 19 to arrive in the same port that year) brought 203 immigrants from Gravesend (on the Thames in England) to one of New Zealand’s new settlements, named “Nelson” after a famous English admiral who fought successfully against Napoleon in the great European wars of the early 19th century. George Chapman and Ann Hughes were both twelve years old when they arrived, and their parents gained employment as agricultural labourers in the rich farmland of the new colony.
The colony was organized by the New Zealand Company, by a kind of pyramid marketing scheme which extracted money from wealthy migrants, funded poorer workers like my ancestors to be their servants and employees, and purchased the promised land to build their colonies only once their ships had already set sail (using some of the money collected from the wealthy emigrants). The idea, as Edward Gibbon Wakefield of the New Zealand Company explained, was to purchase land cheap from its Maori guardians and sell it expensively to the immigrants, so that ordinary labourers like my ancestors would be forced to seek employment rather than immediately set up farms on their own. In this way, Wakefield said, the British class system could be successfully replicated in the new colonies.
Of course, the next challenge the company faced was that the land of Nelson was already occupied. Under the Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840 by the British crown, by the independent Maori tribes and by the previously recognized sovereign nation called the Confederation of United Tribes of Nu Tireni, all land sales had to be approved by a governor, who acted by authority of that treaty. The New Zealand Company paid local Maori tribe Ngati Toa £800 for a poorly defined 810 sq.km of land, but the governor prevented them immediately occupying the best farmland adjacent to their new city. By June 1983, the company was desperate for more land, and an attempt to seize land from Ngati Toa at Wairau near Nelson resulted in a gunfight where 22 settlers and 4 Maori were killed. Sadly, it was to be the first of many such battles. The next year a British land claims commission agreed with the Maori that the land had not been sold, and the settlers were ordered to pay compensation. However history (in the form of hundreds of thousands of European settlers) overrode the application of the original treaty in this and so many other cases. It was actually 100 years later, in 1944, that the government of a now independent New Zealand agreed to pay $2,000,000 in compensation to Rangitane tribe, who were ruled to be the correct owners. And it was 2010 before the dispute finally ended in the signing of the Rangitāne o Wairau Deed of Settlement. It took, then, 170 years of continuous court cases to tidy up the legal mess created by the men who brought out my ancestors.
In my family when I was growing up, none of this history was remembered. Instead, what was remembered was the story of Great Britain, which was called “home” by my parents although they had never been there. Meanwhile, of course, hundreds of colony ships had brought out settlers, not just from Britain but also from several European sources. By 1852, there were more settlers than Maori. On December 1st, 1873, my grandfather Roy’s great grandparents Hans Hansen and Kristiana Peddersdatter arrived on the “Høvding” after a 115 day voyage from Kristiania (Oslo) in Norway. The Høvding carried 270 Norwegian passengers, and each settler family was to get a 40 acre block of land in the new colony of Norsewood. This time the crown agent who organized the deal with the Ngati Kahungunu tribe made an honourable deal, and the settlers all received a welcome and a handshake from Paora Rerepo, Tareha and Paora Taki. Working on the Norsewood Road, Hans was paid 50 pence a day, at which rate it took twelve days wages to buy a 100lb (45 kilograms) bag of flour. They bought a cow for milk, created a family name of Bolstad, and set about clearing their land, which was thick Totara forest. Within a generation, their children had abandoned the original farm and were working in forestry and carpentry. They went from being poor labourers on someone else’s forest near Arundel, Norway to being poor labourers on farms and forests here in New Zealand.
One of Hans and Kristiania’s sons was Christopher – my father’s paternal grandfather. Another of Hans and Kristiania’s sons was Johan, and his grandson was “Sonny” Bolstad, described as “The greatest axemanNew Zealand has ever seen”, and a world champion competitive woodcutter. Though he died in 1988 (in a logging accident of course, in Kaingaroa forest) and his son David and grandson Morgan both went on to become another world champion in this sport, it is “Sonny” whose name is most easily recognizable when I mention my surname in rural New Zealand. People tend to remember him as a giant with huge hands and broad shoulders. I’ve seen a photo of Hans Hansen, cutting down a two metre diameter native rimu tree, and he was also a big guy. Of course, famous as these Bolstads are in the history of New Zealand sport, they were also part of the process by which New Zealand lost most of its native forest. Settlers were actually paid incentives for “clearing” trees to convert forest into farmland. It was 2002 before the government ordered a halt to the cutting of native timber.
In 1997, I visited Norway for the first time and went out into the forest near Arundel, to a little railway stop in the forest called Bøylestad. It may or may not have been the place that my ancestors came from (There is a Bolstad Loppis Antique Furniture Store at Bolstad Prästgård 5, 464 66, Mellerud, Norway that may be our origin place too), but it sure was cool to phone my father up from Kristiansand, just south of there, and tell him I had visited the ancestral homeland. Following the genealogy of my Norwegian ancestors, I can track all the way back to a Jon Gliddi, born in 1460, almost six hundred years ago. Like my cousins here today, he was a forester, and he lived in a land that had been farmed and forested sustainably for millennia. We just need to remember how to do that.
Living in the heart of New Zealand forestry, of course Bolstads were working side by side with Maori foresters, and now inevitably, while all Bolstads in New Zealand trace their ancestry to Hans and Kristiania, many of the Bolstad family are also descendants of the original people of the land. In my generation, there is a vast movement of decolonization across the world, and in New Zealand that has involved reparations (through the Waitangi Tribunal), educational initiatives, and reassessments of sovereignty as it becomes clearer that the original intention of the treaty of Waitangi was to create a shared power situation in Aotearoa – New Zealand. As part of that process, I run a one day training each year on Treaty Issues and Decolonisation. I know that my ancestors were coming out here with the dream of being financially independent, breaking with a past of oppression and poverty in their homelands. Unlike the founders of the New Zealand Company, they believed in an equalitarian New Zealand (to quote a saying popular here in my youth) “where Jack is as good as his master”. It seems to me that it also honours their positive intentions to support the recovery of that future for those whose land was stolen in the pretense that, as savages, they did not have a right to it.
New Zealand is not Britain, however much it may sometimes look like a “carbon copy” of the tidy sheep fields I saw around my maternal grandfather’s home village of Trefeglwys in central Wales. To understand our lives in this distant place, we need to know all the stories that weave us together, and that includes the stories of war, deception and outright invasion. Like all colonization, the New Zealand settlement was also an attempted genocide, and not far from where I am writing there is a monument on a hillside saying “To a dying race”, reminding us that the settler government fully expected that they would exterminate the original inhabitants. They saw that as a kind of social Darwinism: European civilization was intrinsically better and ultimately it would replace all others. As we look around at a world almost destroyed by the relentless advance of that civilization, there are few who would now be so confident that one model of civilization, one set of cultural norms, beats all. We need all the sustainable choices we can get!
Below you see a chart of my direct line of ancestry from Jon Gliddi (1460-1520) and even from his (undated) wife Ukjent’s parents. When Jon was born in 1460, the Eastern Roman Empire (Constantinople-based “Byzantium”) had fallen just seven years ago. The Wars of the Roses were raging in England with armoured medieval knights. Joan of Arc had been burned at the stake just 30 years before. The printing press had just been re-invented in Germany 20 years before his birth, and Leonardo da Vinci was still a child in Italy when he was born. Colombus first sailed to America when Jon was 32 years old, and Vasco da Gama first sailed around Africa when he was 37. The Timurid Mongol empire ruled East Asia, the Kingdom of Mali dominated Africa and the Ming Dynasty was at its peak in China in their new capital at Beijing.
4. The Child Is The Father Of The Man
My parents met in Wellington, New Zealand, at a dance at the Rainbow Ballroom, in 1951, when they were twenty years old. After completing his apprenticeship as a signwriter with Advertising Craft Ltd, Wellington, my father David moved down to Christchurch and began working with National Signs Ltd. A year later he “quit” there and established “David R. Bolstad Signs”, actually painting signs in one of the henhouses at the back of my mother Margaret’s parents’ house at 85 Charles Street, Linwood, and hanging wallpaper in new houses (“interior decorating”). After their marriage, on February 7th, 1952, David and Margaret moved into a “flat” (apartment) at 143 Cranford Street. The next three years were a struggle as they coped with the tiny flat and fluctuating income. My mother’s first pregnancy was also a crisis, as she developed pre-eclampsia (a kind of high blood pressure precipitated by pregnancy) and was hospitalized for the last few weeks. I was born prematurely on 19th September 1955, at 5.30am, at St Helens Maternity Hospital in Christchurch. My first two weeks were spent in an incubator, with very little physical contact, and I was not breastfed (and at the time that was considered normal, of course). It was probably the first of a series of experiences that shaped my personality towards introversion. Studies on premature babies show they are more introverted, more anxious, more eager to please others, and yet more autistic.
When I was nine months old, my mother was moving my baby “stroller” past the kitchen area when the cord of an electric jug got caught, and near boiling water was poured over my legs. As my mother said, she picked me up screaming, and the skin of my legs just fell off in her hands. For over three months I was recovering in the Burwood hospital burns unit, while the doctors skin grafted tissue over the areas that had third degree burns (skin and subcutaneous fat all destroyed). During these three months, I only saw my parents for two hours a week, 1.00pm – 3.00pm on Sundays, because the hospitals at the time operated on the belief that “it only upset the children to remind them of their parents”. During this three months, my mother insisted on getting a larger residence, and so, with money from her parents as a deposit, and with after-hours work every night by my father (painting, wall-papering and even building a garage), they created my childhood home at 9 Hercules Street, in the new northern suburb of Shirley. They may be constructed memories, but I certainly have memories of crying for my mother in the darkened ward at Burwood hospital. As an adult doing nursing training, I eventually worked briefly at the Burwood burns unit, and saw the immense pain that old style debridement (removal of dead skin) and skin grafting involved, so I have a real appreciation for what a time of hell this was. Over the rest of my childhood, I had painful physiotherapy visits every few months, but apart from applying creams over the areas, it did not affect me on a daily basis.
I guess physical pain was a fairly strong theme in my childhood. Beatings with a leather strap were the educational tools used most frequently by my parents for misdemeanors starting with wetting my pants as a three year old, building up to arriving home too late from playing with friends, and attacking my sisters (my sister Anne was born in September 1957 and my sister Christine in May 1960). When my father lost his temper, he would beat me hard enough to break the skin and leave bruises for a week, and he would throw me across the room to make a point. This was standard for children growing up in my social class and area of the world, but at times it was severe enough so that even my mother would be crying and pleading that “He’s just a child, David”. She seemed to forget that too when she was wielding the strap. The brutal treatment of women and children tends to be cross-generational. Not only was my father beaten by his own father, but his father actually beat his mother so badly that on one occasion she was hospitalized with a broken arm (In those days, a woman might be expected to explain that she fell and injured herself, and no-one at the hospital would investigate). To his credit, my father made sure he never hit my mother, but he carried out his “fatherly duty” with the three children vigorously. The method continued in preschools and schools of course. At kindergarten I was smacked (for experimentally pouring water down the slide and wetting the next child to use it), at primary school I was hit on the hand with a leather strap (for not remembering the correct spelling of words – once for each word that was wrong), and at high school I was hit on the buttocks with a cane (for failing to complete my homework).
This is not to say that I had a “Harry Potter” or “Oliver Twist” kind of upbringing. My parents were kind to me at other times. I have happy memories of my mother reading me a children’s version of the Walt Disney “Bambi” story, hundreds of times, until at 4 years old I worked out that each cluster of symbols on the page was a word, and taught myself to read the first page word by word to recreate the enjoyment. I remember my father carrying me on his shoulders for hours at the annual Christchurch fair, and buying me fresh multi-coloured sweet popcorn and candy floss (cotton candy). Once I was older and my mother went out to work again as a shop assistant at Hays (later Farmers) department store, I remember her baking chocolate squares and leaving them for us children for when we arrived home from school; and I remember my father paying me extra pocket money to help him with household and business jobs (chipping the plaster off used bricks to make them re-usable, packing advertising in envelopes, cleaning his car, and so on).
And even the teachers at school were sometimes amazingly compassionate. I remember that when I was seven years old I had a crush on a young girl in my class, and one day we were asked to write a story, and my story said “I love Suzanne, but she doesn’t love me. On the weekend I wanted to go round to her house and play, but my mum said it’s not allowed.” The teacher read my story, and looking into my eyes, she said “Oh Richard, that is so very sad!” In these kind of moments, I would realize that the adults were actually human, and had feelings just like me. In Primary School, we had a class teacher who was with us for almost our entire school time, for an entire year (at High School, we had different teachers for each subject, and, if they were the main teacher specializing in that subject – say Latin – they might teach us for several years, but just in that subject). My school experience was significantly shaped by the personality of these Primary School class teachers: austere men like Mr Downs in Standard 1 (1962), Mr Fry in Standard 3 and Mr Bain in Standard 4, and gentler women like Miss Bowker in Primer 4 (1961).
One of the most important things my mother did for me as a child was to recognize my interest in history, and arrange for me to get, from Christmas 1962 on for the next 7 years, a subscription to the British children’s magazine “Look and Learn”, a beautiful illustrated 24-40 page large size magazine with articles on history, science, and the arts, which I read virtually every word of.
Of course, my peer group of boys in my class were an important source of “affirmation” for me. Television only gradually appeared in our lives as I was growing up, and there were no electronic toys apart from cars with batteries. The big advantage of the world we lived in was that after school and on the weekends, children were largely left to play on their own, unsupervised. As boys, we would build huts out of wood, create secret clubs with passwords, damn up neighborhood streams with mud and stones, pretend to be an army, and create miniature worlds of various kinds using toy cars and houses. But the most amazing game was one I learned from a friend who had a huge supply of cheap brown paper at his house. We would fold over a series of pages and staple them together as a “book”. By the time I was seven, I had begun writing these books, which all seemed to be some version of a “history of the world”, copied from the books I was taking out from the library. I could spend hours doing this, and indeed my mother became quite concerned about it. “Why don’t you go outside and play like normal kids?” she would say. And when I tried to explain to her what history was about, she would say “You’re a great talker Richard, but you’ll never earn any money talking.” And “Why do you want to write about history? That story has already been written. You need to find your own story.” However, by the time I was ten, I realized that was not true. I could become a teacher of history, and write books, and people would pay me to do that. And so that was my dream, and my answer to the interminable adult question “What do you want to be when you grow up?”.
Only one adult really encouraged this dream: my mother’s mother, my “nanny”. When I stayed at her place in the school holidays, it was heaven. She never hit me, and she understood my fascination with books. She bought me books and comics, and took me to a comic exchange shop to feed my ever-growing fascination with historical and science fiction stories. When I was four years old (1969), she took me to my first movie at the movie theatre. She wanted to take me to a Walt Disney film, but I told her I wanted to see “Herod the Great”, a Roman historical epic dubbed from Italian. Without a blink, she agreed. She herself was almost blind, and she couldn’t even see the movie, so I told her a running commentary while we were watching. She encouraged me to believe that I could be a teacher. As she listened to me talking about history, she even seemed to think I was some kind of child genius (this may have been fairly common for grandparents at the time).
In July 1965, diabetes-related heart failure kicked in, and she was admitted to hospital. We went to visit her, in her bed in a ward with two long rows of beds. First the three grandchildren went in, and then we waited outside while mum and my grandad went in. She was depressed, and she talked about how everyone on the ward was dying, and people cried out in pain. A few days later, mum got a phonecall, early in the morning. She began to cry. “Mum died at three o’clock this morning”, she told us. “She’s out of her pain now.” I couldn’t cry; I couldn’t even make sense of it.
A couple of days later, it was the day of her funeral. We children were not allowed to the funeral, but we were to come straight home from school and the family would meet for dinner at my grandad’s. I was so shocked, I didn’t remember, and I went around to a friend’s house, to play after school. I got a phone call from my mother telling me to come home immediately. My father met me with the leather strap even before I got inside the door. He was furious, shouting about how my grandmother would be ashamed of me. “Please daddy, I’ll be good. I’ll never do it again” I pleaded. “Damn right you won’t” he shouted as he began to hit me. And then I did the unthinkable. Something I had never done before. I ran. He caught me half way across the road, in a grip that bruised half my upper arm at once. He beat me until I was covered in bloody welts, and promised me that he would beat me again before I went to bed, when I was undressed so it would hurt more (which he did, of course: this was one of his favorite “sadistic twists”). I had to eat my dinner alone in a room at my grandad and nanny’s place, waiting for this second beating in the very place where my most precious adult friend had played with me. It was a final crushing blow for my sense that life had good places. Now, of course, I can see that my father, who repeatedly said he didn’t even like my grandmother, was just really stressed out. At the time, it seemed like my life had become a prison with no parole.
A few days later, I packed away a few of my precious handwritten books and other toys in a cardboard box, and I hid them in the back of my wardrobe, with a note on them addressing them to the one adult left who I knew would understand me: “To Richard, to be opened when you are 21.” It was a sort of “time capsule”, and it felt like I had put all my secret dreams and hopes into it and sealed it. In the next few months, I became more “disturbed” at school. Also, my vision suddenly deteriorated, and a vision test determined that I was short sighted and needed glasses. But in my internal prison, I waited …. For me, for the me who writes this now, who survived to create a career out of teaching: not teaching history so much as teaching parents and others how to live without punishment. I would eventually find my own story; one that no-one had told before. This one.