My Grandfather’s Dream

An Excerpt from My Autobiography (Richard Bolstad)

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 is part of the story behind those stories.

After 68 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.

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. She collected the eggs from the henhouse and the milk bottles and bread from the gate where they were delivered every day. There was no refrigerator, and instead there was a small wire netting enclosure that stuck out the side of the kitchen (a “safe”), and kept things cool in the winter, and stopped them stinking out the house in the summer. Washing was brewed in a large “copper” which was in the kitchen also and had another fireplace under it to heat the water, because grated soap (or the fancier soap flakes) didn’t do much good in cold water. You wrung the clothes dry by a hand wringer next to the copper.

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 nursing manager at the local Psychiatric Hospital. That left my grandmother and I mostly alone for the day. While she cleaned (no vacuum cleaner of course, just a broom) and ironed (with an iron heated on the coal range) 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. Speaking of sheds, the toilet was in a little shed outside the main house. It flushed when you pulled a long chain, and filled up with water channeled through from the kitchen. I wandered around the area playing with other kids at the (completely unsupervised) local playground, on dangerous “swings” a climbing frame, and a self-propelled “merry-go-round” (which often ended in tears for those who could not get off safely, while other spun it ever faster).

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. Paper bags were precious. There was a drawer full of carefully folded ones, and another drawer full of the pieces of string that held parcels together without any sellotape. Most groceries were bought from a local shop where everything from flour to clothes-washing soap flakes were measured out into paper bags and bought by the pound (0.45 kilos). All clothes were made locally, and were incredibly expensive, so I had one pair of shoes, which sometimes didn’t quite fit me, and my mother and grandmother sewed or knitted many of our clothes from scratch. In the evenings they darned socks and sewed odd buttons back on shirts, and otherwise made the most of the clothes we had. Sewing clothes was done on the Singer sewing machine, which was powered by foot movements, and was, my grandmother told me, a great advance on her old one, where she had to spin a hand-wheel to make it sew. There was in fact a music machine in the house too. The gramophone played wax records, including some Welsh songs recorded by my grandfather’s brother in Wales. At 78 revs per minute, they were limited to about 5 minutes per side, and the machine worked by being wound up first (like a wind-up toy, but that’s another story no-one today knows much about). Wax records actually means wax (shellac to be exact), by the way – there was no plastic. A wax record left in the sun would simply melt, twist, and be near useless.

This 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. Men and women spoke different words, they drank different drinks, they read different parts of the newspaper. 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. I knew that my Maori friends were somehow analogous to the Indians in the cowboy and Indian movies, and my family were analogous to the cowboys … and the cowboys always won. I knew that our family was Church of England, and that those of my friends who were Catholics were probably not going to heaven because their church had done bad things. 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). He would test me on my memory of the stories in them: “What year did Julius Caesar reach Britain? Who was the last Norman King before the Plantagenets? Who killed Thomas à Beckett?”. 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 emperors and kings and bishops, 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 (1914-1918). One day I asked him “How many Germans do you think you killed in the war 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 itinerant 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, unknowing, at a training in Germany, when I was teaching 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 the best of my grandfather’s dream will become a reality. To understand where we are going, it helps to remember where we came from ….