In 1976 I was in the vaudeville business. The odds against this were fairly high. It wasn’t what I’d set out to do and I dropped stones all the way in so I could find my way back out.
Fred Dagg was working nicely on television but the going rate for two minutes of heroically underprepared material wasn’t sufficient to trouble the scorer, despite having doubled from a base of $38 in 1974. In order to make a living it was necessary to tour the country, take in washing and live on what my father called ‘a glass of water and a look up the street’. One night after a high quality workout at a cabaret in Auckland, I got talking to Bob Hudson, a boy of about the same age who’d been in the audience. Bob was from Sydney and had just had an enormous hit across Australia with ‘The Newcastle Song,’ an ironical tribute to the city of his youth. We were both dealing with the Micawberish aspects of being writer/performers and we agreed to meet up again in Wellington the following week. Helen and I were considering moving our base from Wellington to Auckland at the time and we spent a couple of days driving around the beautiful Waitakeres imagining ourselves somewhere up there, in the bush.
When we got back to Wellington, Bob and I had various things to do and we arranged to meet after I’d finished doing a record and book signing at James Smith’s. This was to be done in character so I was dressed in a black singlet and shorts, fashionable footwear of the period and a hat. Fred had a discerning audience of all ages and a large lunch-time crowd had gathered in the great emporium. After a while I noticed that Bob had found the place and it all seemed to be going gangbusters when the police arrived. Three policemen walked purposefully up past the queue of waiting citizens and directly to where I was sitting. ‘John Clarke?’ said one, a born leader of men.
‘Yes’ I said.
‘Step outside please’ and they waited for me to stand up, put down the tools of my trade and join them on a very public and completely silent walk out into the street. The population of Wellington quickly poured into Manners Street and watched as I was taken, in full costume, to a police vehicle for questioning. I’m pretty sure the crowd would have ruled out the prospect that I was a murderer. They were probably tossing up between sex crimes with small animals and some sort of tax fraud, possibly involving the $38.
‘You are John Clarke’ checked one of the policemen.
‘Yes’ I said.
‘Thought so’ he said.
‘What’s this about?’ I asked. ‘I’m actually supposed to be in there doing a signing.'
'Are you the owner of a red Mazda car, registration number HRV683?'
'Yes'
'Can you explain why your vehicle was seen last week in the Titirangi area driving very slowly and sometimes stopping in gateways and looking up driveways?'
'Yes’ I said. ‘I was driving around Titirangi last week'
'Were you driving slowly?'
'Yes, we were looking at houses’.
‘Your vehicle was seen in that area at that time'
'Yes. That would be right. That’s where it was'
'The vehicle was reported as behaving suspiciously.'
'Suspiciously?'
'Yes'
'Who says?'
'The person who reported it. The vehicle was reported as behaving in a suspicious manner.'
'Couldn’t you have rung me or written me a letter about this?'
'We read in the paper that you’d be here today so we thought it’d be a good time to pop down and clear this up.'
'Do you mind if I go back inside now and do what I came here for?'
'No, that’s fine. Just checking. Thank you Mr Clarke'
I went back into the store and completed the signing, explaining to people that my vehicle had been behaving suspiciously the previous week in Titirangi.
I never heard any more on the matter.
Bob Hudson, who tells this story rather well but who requires oxygen around the bit where the police haul me out of the signing and question me in the street, had a radio show on what was then 2JJ in Sydney and had been playing stuff from the Fred Dagg records, so when I was looking at working in Australia I found that he’d made me quite well known. A very smart and kind person, Bob has also given me very good advice a couple of times and he and his wife Kerry opened their house to Helen and me when I knew no-one else in Sydney and didn’t know what I was doing. We worked together on various projects, notably writing material for Bette Midler’s stage show. Bob later completed a PhD in Archaeology and now works at Sydney University, specialising in the medieval Buddhist period in Burma.