There is no place in normal New Zealand society for the man who is different. The boy whose misfortune it is to be sent to a snob school like Christ’s College or Wanganui Collegiate where a special dialect is taught, is immunized for life from contact with working men. He will always shy from them because he will sense their contempt for his speech. Even if by effort he makes permanent friendship with any of them he will always be apologized for: ‘Course he talks la-di-da, but he’s a real white joker once you get to know him.’ It is not only difference suggesting social superiority the New Zealander fears, it is any variation from the norm. The man with a cleft palate, with a stutter, with short sight, will suffer. There will always be jokes behind his back; he will find it hard to make honest contact with other men because once he has been isolated, most men will talk to him only with tongue in cheek, humouring him at best, saving up a report for the boys in the bar. Even educated people feel they have to should when they talk to foreigners, a habit as insulting as anticipating a stammerer. An Italian has trucked in a West Coast mine for twenty years: he is still alone, no girl would marry him, the fear of his broken English and the contempt for his pleading eyes have been handed down from his first workmates, so that ropeboys just starting can feel cocky pride in shouting: ‘Good day, you fucking rotten Skypoo bastard!’ When I was a lad in Greymouth there was an inefficient teacher with holes in his socks, he hadn’t much control over his class; the word got around and soon not only children but parents would point him out and laugh at him. There was a policeman, too, who had come off the worse in an argument with some local roughs: it seems he was hesitant, and he had a horse face. Soon the whole town was lusting after the chase, every few days there was a latest anecdote of indignity provoked by young bloods who had set out to ambush him and whet their wits on his helplessness. He couldn’t go on his beat but someone whistled ‘Horsey, keep your tail up’. In a month or two they shifted him, and the day he left someone rang up the railway station and ordered a horsebox. You can gain a reputation in New Zealand in a few backroom mumbles; you don’t lose it in a lifetime.
The boycott is not always malicious: the tormentors need not know they hurt. The motive force is usually fear. It’s not a pleasant thought; but it is true how afraid we all are of ‘public opinion’, ‘what people will say’. Because always censoring and supervising our every act is the jury in the bar, the jury over the teacups, the jury in the editorial column. The jury makes weaklings of us all: we may kick against it, challenge it like D’Arcy Cresswell; if so we finish preoccupied with our act of defiance. Most of us give in, play the coward, and knowing it we become the puny little men leaning over the bar, pontificating in new juries, in the same way as this year’s pullets pecked by old hens grow into next year’s hens to peck the new batch of pullets. (Footnote 3)
Some papers and organizations seem to exist for no other purpose than to enforce conformity: think of the Auckland Observer, some (though certainly not all) of the editorial policies of Truth, the public pronouncements of the executive of the R.S.A., the observations on public morals from the Women’s Institute. Now that the Sedition Bill is law, it is an open question whether the jury habit will prove too strong for Mr Holland by criticizing the government in spite of the law, or whether (as I fear is more likely) it will co-operate with the law by making advance judgments on those people likely to be the victims of this law.
III
In public morality the New Zealander’s guiding principle is: Do others do it? I doubt if a New Zealander has any other moral referee than public opinion: crimes he has been in youth educated against he will lose distaste for as soon as the wind changes. This is noticeable when a lot of New Zealanders go to another country of people with inferior standards of material comfort, as in a war. With our troops the home-grown moral standards are valid only among themselves: Egyptians and Italians were fair butt for a cruel, predatory and jocularly cynical approach. There is a legend, true I think, that when a Kiwi was beaten up in a brothel area, every Kiwi in Cairo assembled to riot his way through the Sharia-el-Birkeh and there wasn’t a piece of furniture left whole in the district. Soldiers in search of more innocent sport would throw chairs at the orchestra in cheap cabarets; the sport of the A.S.C. was to up-end fruit-stalls with the tails of their trucks. The black market was, in Italy in Japan, accepted as a normal means of living without drawing on one;s paybook. Of course British troops did these things and Australians, I believe, were worse, and of course such conduct is as old as the Vikings and older. Yet there is a special quality in the ease with which the New Zealander violates his home-town respectability, and admits it to be an expedient for getting by without trouble. A less violent example illustrates this: March 1950, in St Stephen’s Hall in the Houses of Parliament, Westminster. Three old ladies from Dunedin waiting to be admitted to the gallery, because they wanted to hear Mr Churchill. A Swedish woman was the first to get a pass: she had been there before them, but they hadn’t seen her. ‘A foreigner! A foreigner getting into the British House of Commons before a British subject! A British policeman putting a foreigner before the British! Mr Churchill would give a lot to know about this!’ ‘She probably greased his palm or something.’ “Some of them are so low they’d stoop to anything.’ The one who had said this called the policeman and tried to slip him, unobtrusively, a florin, ‘just to get yourself some cigarettes or something’. The policeman protested loudly that it wasn’t necessary, she flushed and prattled about cigarettes, possibly telling herself that of course she wouldn’t stoop to foreign policy, and in the end he took the money, and they got in no sooner. The suspicion that a rival or enemy had done something she claimed to disapprove of was a challenge to do the same thing, to beat the rival at her own game. This is a dangerous mental habit and will help Mr Holland tremendously in his campaign to convince us that if you don’t kill communists they will kill you.
We boast when under alcoholic liberation we violate our professed code of morals. This of the animal comeback in the remark, common among New Zealand troops, usually said with a touch of flattery: ‘He’s a nice chap, he’d shit anywhere.’ When a well-bred girl greets a man friend: ‘Don’t you speak to me!’ she seems to imply that they both know that he’s a rake and it’s a secret to be proud of: of course, he isn’t, but the idea is that the best people are rogues at heart, or rather, secret rogues are the nicest people to know. Among young people greetings like ‘Hophead’, ‘Ram’, ‘Burglar’, ‘Sheik’, ‘Stopout’, are accepted as flattery: ‘burglar’ I heard only in the army. We are in other ways as hypocritical. We claim to be social democrats at heart – or did two years ago – but we have a great respect for the man who can get away with it. In public we condemn the profiteer, in private we connive and rather admire him and envy him his opportunities. It is because we know our public sentiments are recognized to be subject to private reservation that we don’t hesitate to do what we have condemned when we get the chance. So in public we always say the right thing, to which we are not committed. Any platform statement in New Zealand is suspect: the orator is only emptying his lungs to fill an occasion. When the Prime Minister spoke from the B.B.C. in January 1951, all he could produce was a tissue of naïve clichés which here seemed odd because they weren’t the British clichés. He was on his best behaviour, like a soldier sending home greetings on a Sunday-morning broadcast. (In fact Mr Holland did end with a message to all at some address or other.) Politicians and editors say one thing without expecting to be taken at their word: Mr Holland was reported in the London evening Star as saying: ‘Britain will get all the meat we can send, even if we have to give it away, though that of course has never been suggested and is in fact quite out of the question.’ He was simply saying the decent thing, only he corrected himself in case he should be taken at his word. So with us all: we profess decent neighbourly democratic ideas, but in practice we undermine them. And we feel no hypocrisy because we know everyone else does the same. It is usually the man who tries to live up to his word who is called a hypocrite.
An English schoolmistress left New Zealand in 1948: she told reporters she was disgusted at the lack of morality in New Zealanders. Since we usually see morality as a restraint on lust, most of us wondered what she meant. I think it was this: that few of us have the guts, at the challenge, to uphold any moral principle (except in sexual conduct) when it is flouted by a party of a greater number than ourselves. Think how easily the Rugby Union capitulated when the South Africans refused to have Maoris. (Though we pride ourselves that of course we have no colour bar, no one protested at first except some trade unions which were, most people assumed, just being trouble-makers; but when General Kippenberger spoke up, everyone sat up and listened because he was a war hero.) We proclaim the sanctity of property, yet we enjoy small thefts (say raiding a hotel meat-safe outside a country dance-hall): what group of New Zealanders could resist broaching and unguarded keg? We legislate to protect our forests and birds: we raid the bush for ponga fronds and lycopodium to decorate dance-halls, we know down pigeons with stones and forestall protest with a sneer. We are the most puritan country in the world, yet we love a dirty story. (Footnote 4)