Books
Free spirit
by Nelson Wattie
Poet Meg Campbell’s life was sometimes turbulent but also full of independence and resistance.
On November 17, 2007, two days before her 70th birthday, Meg Campbell died at home, with her husband and children around her bed, having made a free choice to discontinue medical treatment. It was a peaceful end to a sometimes turbulent life, but the element of free choice was characteristic. Meg was often said to be rebellious, but a better word to describe her stance is the one she chose as the title for a book of poems: Resistance.
She resisted social conventions, labels, political and all other forms of power, and people if she thought her integrity was at risk. For example, her resistance to authority led to expulsion from Wellington’s Samuel Marsden School, which is now proud of this old girl. Any form of power exerted by one person over another – not only over herself – aroused her wrath, but her resistance was usually inward, expressed quietly and firmly and rarely in acts of violence (though she did once storm through a studio smashing the pots she had fashioned).
In her unpublished autobiography, Meg recalls her first favourite book was Willy Nilly the Penguin by Marjory Flack (the author’s name gave her the giggles), and that she “benefited from a life-long love affair with the oddball anti-hero Willy Nilly”. She also loved Ferdinand the Bull, by the same author, and saw him as “a radical character”. In the nursery, Meg was already in love with rebels.
It was a terrible irony that she was forced to submit, at key moments in her life, to the irresistible and absolute authority of doctors, nurses and wardens in a mental hospital. Like so many returned soldiers, she rarely spoke of the struggle and humiliation of that battle, and yet she could speak if the listener was sympathetic, and she sometimes found the page welcoming to her written words: “Morning arrives with a shock/and the sleepers stir/in the long white ward/as the key turns in the lock./My mouth drains dry of dreams.” (What Dreams May Come.)
In hospital, simply being there, as well as all the daily events and rhythms, was under the control of others. “On the nurse’s belt are some large keys/which unlock the thick doors and the giant fire-screen./Rattling keys make this a prison hospital./I know, in a dull way, that we, the totally dispossessed,/will not leave this extraordinary place.” (Glimpses into Porirua Mental Hospital.)
Although she was released again and again (17 times), there is a sense in which she never did leave that “extraordinary place”. But it is not inconsistent to say that she also led a free and happy life in the home of her choice, high on a hill overlooking Kapiti Island, for almost 50 years with her husband, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell. Pukerua Bay is a friendly community, and the support of neighbours and friends, as well as family, always gave strength to Meg’s sometimes wavering spirits. In her autobiography, she wrote that her first impressions in 1961 were that she had come to “a nurturing little village”.
Margaret Anderson grew up in Palmerston North. It was not a place she loved: “I could never be one with ‘Palmy’,/being ‘different’ and somewhat arrogant,/proud not to share the basic values espoused in this town.” (Dear Janet Frame.)
But she knew it was an ineradicable part of her life, and she could appreciatepeople who shared that background: “Some/of New Zealand’s greatest eccentrics/hailed from that rural mire/of impossible dullness and snobbery.” (Poem for the Blairs.)
At school, she was already writing copious poetry. Once out of school, she found jobs around Wellington and was welcomed in theatrical circles for her acting talent. She met people from the “bohemian set”, and one evening in 1956, she went to a party at the home of Maria Dronke, a drama teacher. She went with Maurice Shadbolt, his wife, Gill (who had written a profile of Meg for the Evening Post), and Maurice Gee.
At the party, she saw a striking couple: Alistair Campbell, “propped on an elbow drinking a beer”, and Fleur Adcock, “silent, withdrawn and beautiful”. Fleur went home, and Meg accompanied the two Maurices, Gill and Alistair to the Shadbolt home. “Alistair’s soft brick-red shirt billowed in the wind. That colour and fabric can still make me breathless after forty years.” The atmosphere seemed amoral. “It was a sort of emotional free market.” Meg was 19, the others were all older; she was carried away by the atmosphere and by the beauty of Alistair. (The quotations are from her autobiography.)
Soon after this, Alistair and Fleur parted (for reasons not connected with Meg), and he and Meg became lovers. They married in 1958. At first, they lived in a house in Tinakori Rd given to Alistair and Fleur by her parents. At one time, Fleur and her lover were living in the house together with Alistair and his new wife.
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