"Which of us escaped first?” Jim asked, as we sat outside a coffee shop, the dog became increasingly agitated as we showed no sign of taking him for his daily run along the river bed.

"Had to be me, I replied. "Spent three days on the good ship Wanganella being tossed all over the Tasman getting my arse over to Australia in 1959."

"Yep, you win." Jim sucked on his pipe, nodding. "Early sixties for me. That American artist woman. Followed her to California. She reckoned 'Aoteoroa' should be translated as 'land of long grey shroud' in those days.'

"Bit severe."

"Come on, you know what it was like. A bunch of bloody dull and dour Calvinists running the show, and the closest you got to youthful rebellion was buying a half gallon of beer at the back of the pub after six o'clock"

"Things didn't get going till the late sixties, that's true." "Okay, "said Jim, pushing the dog's muzzle away.

"I was chasing skirt. So why did you leave in 1959?"

"I was running away from one. Among other things."

"Pregnant?"

"Nope. Far more complicated."

Jim waited but I wasn't going to volunteer anything more on that one - too much mental morass. Combined with other disenchantments. Jim took another sl1ck on his pipe and then launched into his theory of post war generation meri having a lot to answer for because they returned from overseas battlefields and taken their trauma out on the next generation. Then he went full circle and returned to his theme of what a bunch of grey flannelled trousered conformists they all were, young and old. The dog by now had moved from restless to frantic so we headed off to one of the forests past McLeans Island and let him chase phantom rabbits over the pine needles and alluvial stones.

Later, after we had 'headed back top our respective boxes made of ticky tacky, I started to recall my early days in Wellington. They didn't quite match the colourless portrait Jim had painted. There was at least one coffee house where you could drink in the atmosphere as well as the caffeine. Mary's cafe up the top end of the city. Mary was all colour. Bird's nest blond hair- compliments of the peroxide bottle, a decayed peaches and cream complexion layered with excess makeup, and always dressed in the most bright and exotic clothes she could find.

Mary liked to talk - and shock, easy to do in the early sixties. We would sit open-mouthed as she described her "arty" days with the Chelsea Set in thirties England. Tales of how she added a guardsman to her collection of males, how she convinced the Sybil Thorndyke set she was not a lesbian, and descriptions of characters she lived with in an old house. One of these was a woman who would only sleep with painters, but requiring them to paint a mural on her bedroom wall before tumbling between the sheets. Seems she had to keep moving rooms and the house eventually was made a national treasure, after some of the painters went on to achieve a measure of fame.

Mary's fondness for eccentrics 'and painters came back with her to Wellington. One night we were listening to Nicki's troubles. Nicki was a painter who had overdue rent problems. She couldn't do a runner because her paintings were so big that sneaking them out of the building was impossible. An American with more Yankee dollars than it was wise to wave around sat drinking coffee in the corner. Mary switched him to wine until his perceptions were well below the functional level, and then produced a Nicki painting. A nude done in green, one breast grossly lopsided, macabre over size teeth, it looked rather unlovely overall.

The American was convinced he should buy it for an exorbitant price, with a suggestion of possible "extras" being thrown in, but he passed out before paying. When he eventually woke up, he took one look at it, shrieked, sobered up, and scarpered. Mary's oath would have startled the coarsest seaman in the port.

There was a photographer who was a regular visitor to the cafe who certainly stood out from the crowd and who could be relied on to hold an audience. Brian Bell seemed to have periods where he would start talking about himself in the third person at a high rate of knots. The first time I heard him he was waving a letter over the coffee cups at a table where I had joined a mutual friend.

"They're trying to get me again you know. Got the evidence right here. This letter....

"Who's trying to get you Brian," inquired my friend.

"The Police. The Vice Squad. It's a set up."

Brian showed us a letter inquiring as to when he would have some photos ready that were taken before Xmas at the topless waitress restaurant "The Doodle Inn." He described how the waitress posed with a married couple, and he had taken some shots.

"It's the police alright. Trying to get me for indecent photos. The guy put her tits over his shoulder you see. And the Police are trying to get Bell to photograph tits. Then they've got him. It was a set up."

From there he moved on to the problems of being commercial photographer with a boss who just kept on insisting that he was mad. The boss complained that Brian's photos were always of beatnik parties and drunks in pubs, instead of the cocktail party assignments he had been sent on. Close up photos of pigeons perched on a smashed car fender did not pay the bills.

A few months later I was in the civil courts on a journalistic assignment and Brian was defending an attempt to get him to pay maintenance on the grounds he was destitute and had no money, income or assets. The judge leaned forward and remarked that for someone claiming destitution, the suit he was wearing looked a fine and expensive piece of thread. Double quick Brian turns around, bends over, and displays a quite large hole in the arse of the said trousers.

"You are coming dangerously close to contempt of court Mr Bell," thunders the judge in his best judicial tone. The court staffs facial contortions would have made great photos.
Brian was also well known in the city's morning newspaper. He would be on the booze or in a manic phase, or both, and would come rushing in with "news" of a new society that had just been formed, with him as president. An hour later he would come rushing back in with his first press statement. Always brightened up the evening sub editor's shift.

There were rainbow pockets in that grey shroud, Jim me old mate. You just needed to know where to look.

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