Jack Body Interview - Page 2

You're asking me for some sort of time scale and this has always been confusing for me because my birthday comes at the end of the year on the second of November. I was born the second, eleven, fifteen. And to take another signpost, I went to Waitaki Boys' High School in the South Island in the 1930's, I would have just turned 14, and before that I would have had two years at St. George's Intermediate in Wanganui, and three years before that in the Friends' School on St John's Hill... I took the Proficiency Examination when I was eleven, and after two years at St George's Intermediate I went to Waitaki, where I was put into the Lower 5th form, and I matriculated the next year at the age of fifteen... In fact I matriculated very young...

Why was I sent to Waitaki? Before my family moved into Wanganui, all my brothers went to Wanganui Collegiate as boarders. I was never quite clear about this, but it probably would have been ignominious to have been sent to Collegiate as a dayboy: on the other hand my father was quite firm that he wouldn't send me there as a boarder and have me cycling home every weekend. And the alternative was to be shipped off to this unknown place in the South Island, which upset me very much at the time. They chose it because Frank Milner was a rabid Imperialist, a personality, and the school had a considerable reputation. And it was in a cold dry climate and this was supposed to be good for me because I had weak lungs ... I thought it was an utterly barbarous place when I first hit it: you know I'd never been away from home before except to a member of the family. And suddenly to be slung into this arena of bullying little bastards - oh God, I hated them, and they hated me, especially because I was brainy. In the lower fifth I was a year or two younger than any of them, and in fact I gained higher marks in Matriculation that year than anyone else of the boarders, and the head prefect who had instigated an investigation, when he found that I had beaten his marks he was furious with me. Yes, and so were they all. And so, as I say I survived...

There I was. I'd been sent off to this remote place and I gained my Matriculation the first year and then I was in the sixth form and what was I to do? I was far too young to go to university and it was cheaper for the family to keep me there at boarding school. And so I did university courses extramurally from Otago. Of course this was disastrous because for two formative years I had no proper supervision or instruction. It was all very hapless. I did English I, History I, Economics I, French I. I think I sort of slopped through by memorising pages of Hamlet. At least I could quote most of the play from memory even if I didn't understand what it was all about. It was only when I got to Christchurch later - much, much later - and met up with Ngaio Marsh producing Hamlet that suddenly the play became alive, and I was able to cash in on the memory of it.

The reason why I was able to go to Christchurch was that I probably persuaded my parents that I might have a career in journalism or something. It was a sideline. I took the Principles and Practice of Journalism from someone who was editor of the old Sun I think, the evening newspaper. He cured me of wanting to work in journalism very quickly... In the meantime I'd waffled into the Music Department and gained high marks, so I began to switch. Oh yes, I was still learning the piano. When I was at Waitaki I'd been put with one of their three bumbling old men - he was impossible, and I then wanted to go to the person who I knew to be a good teacher, Kate Cartwright, who produced some distinguished pupils down there... but I wasn't allowed to go to her because she was a Catholic, and this seemed to me iniquitous. And so, happily, on Saturday afternoons, the football matches used to be played at the Athletic Park just down the railway line from the school, so we'd all charge down there to go to the football match, and I would charge on another hundred or two yards and have a music lesson with Kate Cartwright, and then join the crowd as they came back...

My first interest in composition - this happened in the middle of lunch at Waitaki. I had an idea in my head and I couldn't wait to get out of lunch to write it down. I just knew that I had to be a composer. Why it should happen in the middle of lunch no-one knows. But anyway that was the turning point.

And so she [Kate Cartwright] sent me on to her mentor, a very grand old piano teacher in Christchurch, Mr Empson, one of the best teachers ever... I went to Ernest Empson for a year, but alas he was feeling the economic pinch and he headed off to Australia. But meanwhile I pursued university courses. I think I completed the requirements for a Diploma of Journalism and for a Diploma of Music. I never actually wrote an Exercise, which had to be a work for chorus and orchestra, in order to complete a MusB. Despite the fact that I had won the Percy Grainger prize for an orchestral composition by a New Zealand composer against all comers I still wasn't eligible to qualify for a BMus degree! Nor even after I'd come back here and won three out of four of the Centennial prizes I still wasn't qualified to take out a BMus degree. So I thought to hell with that ... and got on with being unemployed in Christchurch.