Reminiscences
Wit & wisdom
by Gary McCormick
They toured New Zealand as the Two Kiwi Musketeers, sharing laughs, quips and boiled eggs. Gary McCormick remembers his sparring partner, the Rt Hon David Russell Lange (4/8/42-13/8/05).
The first real conversation I had with David Lange was around a table at the Waitangi THC many years ago. The event was a dinner at the Auckland District Law Society Conference. I was sitting between Ken Douglas and David.
I knew Ken (he lived in Titahi Bay, where I grew up), and he once saved my bacon on Parliament grounds when Robert Muldoon ordered the removal of a Maori tent embassy. The crowd enthusiastically watching the police remove the “embassy” turned ugly and I was on the wrong – in their view – side of the argument. I was arrested, but without Ken’s intervention it would have been far worse.
I asked David why, in his famous stoush with the Roger Douglas faction, he had not called upon the people of New Zealand to rise up and support him.
His answer: that the new (at the time) and fashionable ideas about privatisation, monetarism and Thatcherism were too deeply embedded in the bureaucracy to change.
I saw in him, then, that sense of weariness and resignation that seemed to cross his face whenever serious politics came up when we later toured New Zealand doing our two-man comedy show. When I knew him, his heart wasn’t in it.
And what a heart it was! David never lost his enthusiasm for people’s lives. While writing this in the bar at the Airport Grand Chancellor, I was approached by Mohammed Hai, or Victor, whom David helped to get into the country. He has a treasured photo of David with his son Imran. Whenever they met in Mangere Bridge township, David never failed to enquire after the health of Mrs Peri – Victor’s mother-in-law. Out of respect for David, Victor has spontaneously given me the keys to his car so that I can use it to get to the funeral.
David’s incredible memory and ferocious attention to detail amazed me. After our shows, people would come backstage to thank David for a host of good deeds. David would not only remember who they were from years before, but the names of their children and in-laws as well.
For some reason when I think of David tonight (the night before the family funeral), I think of his happy face wreathed in cigar smoke. He didn’t smoke all that often, but the morning after a show the night before, in Ashburton, Hamilton or Timaru, he would sit outside the motel door, arms folded, puffing away. Then he would engage some busy cleaner (many of whom were clearly from other parts of the world, where they were probably surgeons or engineers) in conversation about where they came from, their backgrounds and lives. A happier man you could never see.
He would claim that Margaret would never allow him to smoke cigars around home, which may or may not have been true. But like all good Kiwi blokes, he liked to play the part of the maligned. He thrilled in the naughtiness of it all.
In Ashburton, I stole his huge suitcase (which had next to nothing in it – as always) and put it on a traffic island across the road from the motel. The loneliest suitcase in the world. I used to joke in the shows that the declining power of New Zealand men came about when they started wheeling suitcases on those sad little wheels. A real man, I used to say, no matter how sickly or incapacitated, should pick up a case by its handle and carry it like a man. As a result, David told me he was afraid to wheel his.
On our tours, I left David in some awful motels as well as some good ones. He had the knack of being able to boil eggs in motel electric jugs without leaving any evidence.
He was, of course, very funny in the shows we did. We called ourselves the Two Kiwi Musketeers. I used to play the part of an aspiring PM, with David my mentor. In one of our early outings together, I floated the idea that the old-age pension would have to go because it sent out the wrong market signals: it encouraged people to grow old.
A forceful elderly woman stood up and asked what we expected her to do?
“Go quietly, Madam,” was David’s immediate response.
David worried about his first wife Naomi, and was proud of her actions confronting hostile and violent partners at women’s refuges around Auckland.
“Your ex-wives,” said David, “are always with you!”
David’s children were always with him, too. Nothing would please him more than the chance to see Roy, who lives in India/Melbourne, or hear good news from Byron and Emily in the UK (both of whom are imbued with their parents’ strong social consciences). And it was for young Edith that he held on so long.
David used to tell the story of how Edith discovered, at the age of three or four, that her father was a former Prime Minister.
“Were you Prime Minister, Papa?” she asked.
“A long time ago,” David replied.
“Did you have a fat bum then, Papa?” was her response.
The subject of his changing relationships are covered in the Penguin book My Life.
Margaret Pope is like David – formidably bright, a loner and someone who cares deeply.
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