First Lady Read online

  In 1948, when I was five, we moved out of my grandparents’ house and into a house that Mum and Dad had built. Leaving Grandma and Doogie’s home was an enormous shock; everything changed, and very much for the worse. I was no longer protected by my grandparents’ love or their moderating power over my father. Whatever happened, if a lightbulb blew, in his eyes it was my fault. I have a crystal clear memory of one Christmas Day at my aunt’s house. We’d had Christmas dinner there, and when we were leaving the old aunties poured the remains of the alcohol the men had been drinking down the sink. I remember them being very religious and perhaps they didn’t want it around. I thought that was quite hilarious and was giggling about it to Mum as we left, and in the street outside Dad hit me in the head, out of the blue, and knocked me clean off the pavement. Just like that. That’s the way it always happened after that, out of the blue and always around the head.

  When I was about nine or ten my uncle and aunt were over at ours for supper, and were sitting around the fire after dinner when I crept out of my room to go to the toilet. Dad had been drinking, and when he saw me and said something, I stuck out my tongue at him. He sent me straight through the glass door that night, with one punch. I remember my aunt saying, ‘Oh Alex, pull yourself together!’ He told her: ‘The little bastard deserves it.’

  Dad’s disdain for everything ‘arty’ that I did was a regular flashpoint. I used to love to make things, at one stage I had an obsession with making marionette puppets out of paper. Dad would wait until I’d finished and brought them to his chair to show him, then he’d destroy them in front of me, burn them in the open fire, or rip them up.

  At intermediate school I won an art award, and Mum and I went up to the school to collect it. We were pretty proud, both of us, but when I got home and showed the prize to Dad, he really lost it. He told me he was going to kill me, had his hands around my throat, and eventually Mum hit him on the head with a coal scuttle to get him off me.

  I was thirteen then.

  My sister Faye, who was seven years younger than me, never saw even half of it. There was only once, when he was having a go at me, and she giggled, maybe the nervous giggle you make when you’re scared but don’t know how to act. He punched her in the centre of her back and knocked her across the table. I don’t know whether she remembers that or not, but it was the only time I saw him use any violence with her.

  He said he couldn’t control me, but in fact he just didn’t want me in the house, and once I was gone, I think it was okay for Mum and Faye.

  The last time he hit me I was seventeen. I remember it clearly; by that time I was getting quite clever at getting out of the way when he was winding up for a punch. I would jump clear and say, ‘Have another drink, Alex’ and he’d growl like an animal at me.

  But at thirteen I was gone anyway.

  Dad had contacted Child Welfare and told them he couldn’t control me. We went to Children’s Court and I was sent to the Christchurch Boys’ Home in Stanmore Road, for a year.

  It sounds so grim, for a thirteen-year-old boy to be banished from home like that, but for me it was a relief.

  Strange as it sounds, Boys’ Home was a place of refuge.

  2

  BOYS’ HOME

  Excerpt from a letter from my mother to me, aged 14

  Now Garry boy I am going to ask you a question and I want the full truth from you. Are you still going to make the puppets when you leave the Centre? As you know yourself, you got into a lot of trouble over these and also you know how Dad disliked you doing anything like that. We don’t want you to go back again into trouble we both want you to think seriously about work and going forward getting a good job and settling down like a man when you leave the Centre you want to forget that 12 months and look forward for our sakes as we have both helped you in many ways along the road. Now please Garry give it serious thought. I am looking forward to the day that I get a letter from you saying well Mum, I’ve made my mind up what I’m going to do, but so far you haven’t done that, I suppose it takes time well you must start and think from now just think to yourself, well I’m nearly 17 and its about time I took heed. Well son I think I have lectured you enough now but read that part 2 or 3 times to make sure you see what I mean.

  Now I see you wanted more scraps, well Garry I’m being honest with you I’ve burnt every piece I could lay my hands on. I’ve really cleared the lounge room of bits and pieces altogether so there is nothing to send up.

  Your loving Mum, Dad & Faye

  This letter was never given to me to read — I saw it much later, when my life was handed back to me. It was discussed at a staff meeting, and I do know that my Housemaster, Pat Gooding, thought it would be a terrible thing to give to a teenager with quite enough problems to deal with. Obviously my mother was still trying to keep the peace at home. She had become an accomplished fence-sitter.

  Teenage life was difficult for Garry Roberts. Perhaps that’s underselling it a little. It was Hell.

  Teachers at Linwood Intermediate, and then later Linwood High, found me strange and unfathomable. I was not without academic ability and my grades were acceptable, but some were concerned about my propensity for drawing fashion and costume sketches in my school books. Others just scoffed.

  Beaten with the cane by teachers, bullied by the other boys, I was a total misfit. Even I thought I was weird. It was only after I was taken from school to the Boys’ Home that I realised there were people who could accept my difference and treat me with dignity. This was a real revelation and it took me quite a time to uncurl and lower my defences. I had become introverted, even more shy, and increasingly lived in a dream world where I could enjoy the beauty of colours and the excitement my passion for drawing and design brought me.

  Perhaps it was the sheer relief of being away from my father, or that I felt accepted, in a manner of speaking, but Boys’ Home was a watershed experience. It was there at the age of thirteen or fourteen that I first had the revolutionary thought that there was no way was I going to live the rest of my life as a male.

  From the start of my time at Stanmore Road I was lucky to find some staff who encouraged my unusual interests. Jim Keane, the House Manager, encouraged me to start making my paper marionette puppets again. The gardener, Mr Graham, helped me make a replica set of the Crown Jewels by cutting a tin can in the shape of the Imperial State Crown. The assistant matron, Miss Read, gave me broken pieces of paste jewellery, and made the waterfall curtain for my puppet theatre. Although it was a welfare environment and not far from home, where everything I did was somehow wrong, it was a haven.

  I remember my father finding out about the puppets and coming to Mr Keane in a rage.

  ‘Garry is not to make those fucking DOLLS!’

  Mr Keane was not to be bullied.

  ‘He’s in my care now, and he’ll do what I let him do.’

  Although they were kind to me, my new guardians still clearly thought there was something odd about my behaviour, which is how I ended up in front of Dr Stenhouse.

  Every Thursday afternoon, Mr Keane and I would get in the car and drive to the Templeton Centre, a facility known then as the ‘Funny Farm’. Not a very nice term and not at all accurate, as the inmates were mostly children with Down syndrome and other disabilities who’d been put there out of sight by their families. I was taken there every week for afternoon tea (something I used to look forward to hugely, as the food was very good) and to have a chat to the psychiatrist, Dr Stenhouse.

  I realised much later that this was Boys’ Home’s way of keeping an eye on me and evaluating my behaviour. I had to write my dreams down for Stenhouse, and in one of our sessions I wrote that I’d dreamt I was walking along the middle of the street and I had long, blonde hair. I’m not sure who I thought I was in the dream, but I looked up at him then and said, ‘When I’m old enough, I’m going to become a woman.’

  He didn’t bat a
n eyelid, that little Scotsman.

  ‘Would you like another piece of fudge, son?’

  Nothing more was made of it, but the conversation was noted in my file.

  At around the age of fourteen I went back to school, but eventually found trouble again. The notes from the time (later found by the psychiatrist Dr John Dobson and used to help me change my birth certificate from male to female) talk about ‘truancy and provocative behaviour’. The decision was made to send me to the Levin Boys’ Training Centre, where they sent the boys who had got ‘out of hand’.

  My welfare officer, Doug Sellars, was to drive me to Levin. There wasn’t much talk in the car on the way there. Then, out of the silence, he said something unexpected.

  ‘You’ll be alright, Roberts. They’ll beat it out of you up there. You won’t know what hit you.’

  I was fifteen. I didn’t have a clue what ‘it’ was. When we arrived at the centre I was taken to meet a Mr Johnson. I sat in his tiny office looking at my shoes while he tried to talk to me, but all I could think about was the thing Sellars had said in the car, the thing I couldn’t understand.

  ‘Why don’t you just do it and get it over with?’ I blurted.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Beat it out of me!’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Mr Sellars said you’d beat it out of me.’

  Johnson looked at me for a long moment, then stood up and left the room. Moments later I could hear him confronting Sellars in the corridor.

  ‘What have you told this boy?’

  ‘He’s a wee queer.’ I heard Sellars say.

  It was the first time I’d heard that term.

  Johnson came back into the office.

  ‘I’m not going to do that to you, Garry.’

  ‘But Mr Sellars said you’d beat it out of me and then I’d be alright.’

  ‘No one’s going to beat you. We don’t do that here.’

  He was right — there were no beatings, only insults from the other boys.

  ‘Sissy boy, sissy boy,’ they’d call me.

  Hope can often be found in unexpected places. At the Training Centre I met a group of ladies who gave me, the sissy boy, some hope for the future. Gently and without making a fuss (which would not have been appropriate) they encouraged my hobbies, so violently frowned upon at home, and helped me in little ways to develop them. One of those women was Avis Acres, the artist who wrote the popular Hutu and Kawa series of children’s books in the 1950s. A brilliant artist and a kind and creative person, Avis painted the backdrops for my puppet shows and wrote little scripts for the plays I put on. Sometimes I was allowed to take the shows to Kimberley Farm, an institution much like the one at Templeton. The ‘inmates’ there loved my little performances.

  I also had the great good fortune to meet Miss Dorothy Bevan, owner of a florist’s shop and considered the guiding light of floral work in Levin.

  I’d been at the Training Centre for nine months when a big farewell concert at the Town Hall was planned for the manager, who was retiring. One of the staff called me in and suggested I be in charge of ‘doing something pretty with the hall’. I had no idea what they meant and said so, but he urged me to ‘just go and put some flowers up’.

  So I did. I put together a huge arrangement as a centrepiece, careful to coordinate the flowers and make sure it looked perfect. All the local dignitaries arrived for the concert, Dorothy Bevan among them. She noticed the arrangement, and asked who’d done it.

  ‘That’ll be Garry.’

  ‘I’d like to meet him.’

  Dorothy took me under her wing, letting me come to her business on a Saturday and work alongside her. One weekend we were working on an arrangement, when out of the blue she announced she’d found me a job at a florist in Wellington. The Training Centre had agreed to release me.

  My father hit the roof when he found out. Floristry! It was more than he could bear, but probably better from his perspective than the alternative, which was to have me back at home. Even my mother baulked at the idea, telling me I should think about ‘growing up and becoming a man’.

  ‘Men don’t do those kinds of things, Garry.’

  Well, I’m sorry, but they do. I told Dorothy I’d accept the Wellington job.

  Wellington was an enormous metropolis compared to Christchurch or Levin, bustling and frightening, full of grey government people who flooded the city all week and disappeared back to the suburbs on the weekends. My employer’s name was Lloyd. He lived with another man and although I wouldn’t have made the connection at the time, looking back I assume he was gay. He had long hair worn in a bob, and when he was excited he’d throw his hands through it, making it spring up all around his face.

  Lloyd was very good to me, patiently teaching me the trade, overseeing my at first amateurish attempts at arrangements, and taking me with him to all kinds of jobs. We regularly did flowers for the Japanese Embassy — a very grand place where everyone bowed when you came in. I loved the theatre of all that.

  Welfare had found me a boarding house to live in, run by a woman called Sue. When I first arrived she showed me to my small room and left me to get settled — I pulled back the bedcovers and was horrified to find the sheets were filthy. I’ve always had a phobia about bedding, even as a child, so that night I slept on one of my own towels laid on top of the sheets. Alone and miserable, every minute that ticked by was torture. In the morning I packed up my case and disappeared.

  Despite my lack of familiarity with the big city, I found another place off my own bat, near the Embassy Theatre. It was run by a right bitch called Mrs Romanos, but at least it was clean.

  When they realised I’d gone, the welfare officer assigned to my case, John Kidd, came to Lloyd’s florist shop to find me.

  ‘Why’d you take off, Garry?’

  ‘The place was disgusting.’

  ‘Alright. Don’t worry, we’ll find you somewhere else.’

  They put me in a house with a religious couple, where prayer sessions were compulsory at least twice a day. I lasted a week, then with a couple of boys I met, found a flat. That was much better; I could have stayed but I was young, lonely and missed my mother desperately. I’d been away from her for so long by then, and really just wanted to go home. After six months in the job with Lloyd, I convinced Welfare to send me back to Christchurch.

  I got a job as a florist in Christchurch, but it was dirty work and I hated it. It was cold, and my hands were always cracked and sore. I thought I’d become a hairdresser. I was seventeen.

  3

  HAIRDRESSING

  There’s one person I owe more to than most in my life, and that’s Joyce Jacobs, God rest her soul. Larger than life in both person and personality, Joyce taught me most of what I know about hairdressing, but also about values and courage, and how to behave in almost any situation.

  Joyce was not my first stop in the hairdressing career I was determined to build for myself, however. Free at last from Welfare and from floristry, I turned up at the Cashel Street salon owned by another great character, Lorna Hislop, and asked for an apprenticeship.

  Lorna was a horsey sort of woman, hard-faced but great fun, and one of the best hairdressers in New Zealand at the time. Her husband worked with her — he was as awful as she was delightful — a barber who’d learned to do the occasional hair set. He looked like a Spanish waiter; in fact at functions they went to he would often be asked by the other guests to get them a drink.

  Truly outrageous in the best way, I can thank Lorna for teaching me all the naughty things in life. In her employ I saw things I’d never seen before in my rather sheltered upbringing. She had lots of parties, mostly doctors and their wives (her clients), at her house up at St Martins, which wasn’t really as posh as she seemed to think it was. One night she asked me to come and help with the supper, and when I po
pped outside for a moment I saw a couple of the guests having it off in the back of a Rolls-Royce. When I told Lorna she didn’t turn a hair.

  Lorna was full of ideas and never shy about pulling a risqué event together. I remember her deciding to hold a ‘Vice Versa’ fashion parade at her house, which was a great laugh and an excuse for everyone to cross dress. I had made a pile of wigs from sheep’s wool at the salon and dyed them all in different colours, and on the day we were upstairs in her bedroom helping a doctor friend get ready. Lorna was gluing false eyelashes to the man’s face, and when she stood back to admire her work she lost her balance, and they both rolled off the bed. Lorna was laughing so hard that she literally wet her pants. She got up from the floor, took her knickers off and kicked them under the bed, then carried on as if nothing had happened!

  All the posh people would come to the salon on a Thursday and Friday to get their hair set. Most of them treated it like a social gathering, some more than others (Mrs Goff, would be tipsy under the dryer by eight o’clock in the morning on sherry, her favourite tipple.)

  One morning I alerted Lorna to a client under the dryer.

  ‘She doesn’t look so good.’

  ‘She’s always a bit strange under there, don’t worry about it.’

  By this stage the woman had slumped to the side, and I could just tell she’d dropped dead in the chair. I managed to get Lorna away from another client and told her.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ she said, ‘That’s all I need.’

  As quietly as she could, she asked me to move all the ladies to another bank of dryers.

  ‘What am I going to tell them?’

  ‘Tell them there’s a fault in the electrics, they’ll have to move.’

  I managed that without anyone twigging, and then she told me to call for an ambulance.

  ‘What now?’