March 7, 2025 • 15 mins
World famous in New Zealand, Dick Frizzell is a defining force in our art scene.
You will know his work on Kiwiana icons like the Four Square man with moko and Mickey to Tiki.
He has worked across many mediums and is about to release a memoir titled, Hastings: A Boy’s Own Adventure.
Dick Frizzell joins Jack Tame to discuss his iconic work and upcoming book.
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack tam podcast
from News Talks at Me.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
I'm Jack Tayne with you through to midday today and
my guest this morning live in Studio is a bona
fide legend of the New Zealand visual arts scene. Dick
Frizell is of course known for his keiwana icons think
the four Square Man with morec or Mickey Diticki, but
has worked across so many mediums and is about to
(00:32):
release a fantastic new memoir. The book is called Hastings,
A Boy's Own Adventure, and it's a collection of stories
that Dick has written about life growing up on the
East Coast in the nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties.
Dick's here with us this.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Morning, held a good morning, Good morning.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Hey, I just love the concept. I've just said this
to off microphone. I just I love how you've gone
about writing this. You've really illustrated a kind of vivid,
a vivid picture of your childhood and I really delighted
in the way you've gone about this.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
But just tell us about tell us about how your
family ended up in Hastings in the first place, because
you were actually born in Auckland, right.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
I was born in Auckland, out at Mount Albert, a
little nursing home that's still there, funnily enough. But when
my father was in the Merchant Navy, an engineer in
the Merchant Navy, and the deal was that he'd come
ashore when I was born. So he came ashore and
got a job on the Dredge and the Auckland. But
as I said in the book, I think the Dredge
(01:31):
was a bit of an anti climax after the convoys
in the Pacific, and his sister's back in Hastings, which
is sort of the family seat if you like it
sounds grand, They offered him this really cheap loan to
if you go back to Hastings, back to where all
(01:51):
the other Frazels were, And Dad, who was a bit
strangely unambitious, thought, oh yeah, he just kind of just
did it. So we left our lovely little sunny flat
and Pickton Street and went to the dim little cottage
and the shadow of Tomato.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Which is which is I mean, you moved around a
little bit, but that's that's where you spent your childhood,
and you you kind of I mean the boys own
is totally such a such a good description, because really,
this is a collection of adventures that you had as
a little boy.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
I didn't want to. I didn't see that to write
a memoir as such. You know. Then I did this,
and then I did that, and then I went on
here and I write. I wrote that thing about me
writing a short story for a short story competition on
national radio, and then I couldn't submit it. I think
I got it wrong. It said if you were I
(02:50):
thought it said if you were a published author, you
couldn't submit, but I think it actually said if the
story had been published, you couldn't submit. And I got
it wrong, as usual, which is a story in my life.
My great guiding principle, just get everything wrong and it
would be better than ever. I I didn't submit it,
but it got me going, and I've got me thinking
(03:10):
about how the memory works. And I just all those stories,
Why don't I just write them down? Because I can write,
you know, writing. I taught myself to write with that
diret journal and things, and and once I started, I
just couldn't get over the phenomena of recall, fake or otherwise,
(03:34):
you know what I mean. It just poured out of
the pen. I write with a pencil because I can
write longhand quicker than I can type. And then if
I write into those moleskin notebooks, and that became a thing,
the romantic idea of the mole skin notebooks and everything else.
Of course, you can carry it with you, you carry
there's your pen and your pencil and your pad. You
(03:55):
can write them right on the moon, you know.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah. Of course that story you're referencing is one of
thirty that's in the book, and that's called Fish in
the Barrel. Yes, yes, it's the story of you and
you and you and a couple of mates who, as
kids decided that you have a go at literally shooting
a fish in a barrel. Right, how did that go down?
Speaker 3 (04:17):
Well, it was a disaster. It should be called shooting
fish and a half barrel, really standing over a half
barrel with a three O three right, Yeah, yeah, that
was funny. That was That was That story was a
collection of incidents that I kind of wove together. It
(04:38):
wasn't sort of quite as straight out as it sounds
in the book, but it kind of more or less was.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Because this is the funny thing, isn't it I mean
it's a it is you know, a few decades since
the fifties and early sixties, and yeah, and I mean
there's a These are beautifully collected stories, but I mean
I struggled to remember things from a couple of weeks ago, clearly,
And so I suppose that this has been a kind
of interesting experience in that perspective.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Well, I mean people have often, my family whatever, have
commented about my memory is if I'm just making it
up all the time. There he goes again, you know,
like the silly old uncle. And then I thought, well,
there is maybe I have got an interesting memory, and
could I assumed everyone remember things like that. I think
(05:28):
it's something to do with my visual memory too, Being
an artist, I do remember things like like a movie
or like a painting, like a tableau that'ssed that way before.
That's exactly like every story is an assemblage of tableaus.
If you read them, you can see those boys standing
around the barrel while that kid gets up climbs up
(05:51):
on top of it, you know, and you can just
see them, can't you, Even though I'm one of them. Yeah,
you know, but I was like, I'm there, but I'm
actually standing back watching as well, like a time traveler.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
That's the trick, steering down on it.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, just standing back under the
makarp is watching thinking, oh god, you know, get out
of the way, guys.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
I hope we're not giving too much a way to
say that the fish survived. It's lucky the boys did too.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
It's only one of them surviving. Yes, yes, but when
I keep I try to keep it alive with snacks, biscuits,
and I think the salt might.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
Got them in the end.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Yeah. As someone who we associate so strongly with visual art,
how do you find storytelling and writing for the eye,
how do you find that as a different creative pursuit.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
Well, the only the only difference that is the mobility,
of the astonishing mobility of it. You don't need all
the paraphernalia of the paints and the easels and the
space and the god knows what, And it's the the
kind of transparency is the trick is That's what I mean.
I think my paintings, that's what they're about. There's no
(07:07):
sort of conceptual skullduggery or whatever you want to call it.
It's just like the thing just laid out, like the
landscapes just completely laid out. There's no well, I mean
there's conceptual ideas involved in there about construction and whatever,
but it's the same with the writing. But if you
(07:27):
it's about openness really like leaving yourself wide open and
just risking some sort of integrity to leak through. I
mean something like that. Yeah, it's the same spirit. Yeah,
if you like.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Yeah, so I'm just going to give our listeners a
bit of a kind of flavor of some of the
stories that are in there. So as well as shooting
fish in the barrel, there are stories about kind of
foundational things in your childhood. I love the story about
when you went to hospital after an appendix issue and
the different characters who were turning up and not because
you got put in in an adult ward as opposed
(08:02):
to in the kids.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
Well this is see, this is the magic thing that
how things happen. Yeah, you know, like these things that
happened to you like that, I mean that was magic that.
Then it became the sort of mascot figure in the ward,
you know.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
And the nurses, the nurses were preparing for a ball.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Gorgeous. Yeah, honestly, I goosebumps and I wrote that.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Yeah, so, yeah, there's that. It's funny because my dad
is of a very similar generation, same generation, and he
when we asked him about his childhood, I remember he
would always tell us about the time that he broke
his femur and spent a couple of months in hospital attraction.
And it's funny, how you know, just reading your story
reminded me of that, and how you know, going to
(08:44):
hospital as a little boy is like a really kind
of exciting and you know, quite affecting experience learning to drive.
Of course, in an Austin Sherborne.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
We called it the Shoeborn. We didn't know it was a.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Shoe now, of course, he just called it the Austin Yeah. Yeah,
so but it's sort of it does kind of throw
back to what feels like a more innocent time.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
Well it was innocent because there were so many I mean,
the media was limited and it's access to anything, and
we used to see newsreels at the cinema that was
about it, really, with all those soldiers marching along with
black and white, you know, yeah, and that was all
over there. It's kind of vague that you never got
updates on the war or anything, you.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Know, because you would have just you were born in
forty three, right, so you yeah, yeah, So I suppose
Korea was still you know, was maybe underway when you
were old enough to remember it better.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Well, I don't think most of the time we didn't
know watch which war we were watching. They're all the same,
They're all troops on ships and stuff, you know. Yeah,
And it was a very abstract commodity and there was
no I mean, the whole book was written in the
time and there was like only you wrote letters, you
know what I mean. So communication was so abstract, you know.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
That was one one point that struck out to me.
It's the little detail that you've that you've recorded that
make this so special.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
It's about details.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
Well, no, this is the one where you talk about
your mum because you're you're one of six kids. You
talk about your mum writing letters to you for years
to come. Once you'd left, once she left Hastings and
you'd spread your wings and you're all in different parts
of the country or the world, and your mum would
send you all I think five pages like a carbon copy. Yeah,
and then she would have one page original for each child.
(10:33):
I mean, that's there's delightful.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Yeah, it's delightful. It's so lovely. You know, she's of course,
she just wrote, she just wrote, or anything about having
a cup of tea with a lady next door or whatever.
And I actually got such a little prick really the
varsity and I wrote to mom and I said, look,
just why why didn't you wait till you've got something
to say? What aral thing? I didn't realize it was
(10:57):
just fatic communion.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Yeah, I didn't know what that was. So you listen
to Jack Tame on New Books. He'd be speaking with
Dick Frizzell about his book Hastings, A Boy's Own Adventure.
It's a meanwhile of sort, the collection of short stories
from his childhood growing up in Hawks Bay. Do you
do you reflect fondly on your childhood on that innocent time?
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Oh, very much. I had it. I had it all
to myself. I mean really, I was the firstborn boy
prince with his own room, and it went like those
McDonald duck comics. My sisters weren't allowed to read them
till i'd read them, because I used to like every
time you open a page, you get all that ink,
fresh ink smell and stuff and if they read them first,
(11:39):
they all those molecules would have escaped.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
You see, yeah you said that. So you moved to
Hastings because your dad got a good deal on a
mortgage and he had a good job there. But he
was an engineer, so he was very he wasn't artistically minded.
He was very kind of utilitarian mind.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Utilitarian. He couldn't like, he couldn't understand the point of art,
because in his mind everything could be solved with engineering.
You didn't need art. It was. He was totally bewildered
by the idea where did it fit? And yet he
read a lot. He liked his novels Raphael Sabatini and
(12:18):
all that sort of stuff, and he got me onto reading.
But he somehow he didn't he quate literally with art,
literature with art. It was art was art was just
a swanky rubbish over here, you know, funny, really weird.
And he was terrified because he'd been in the navy.
He seemed to have a really interesting idea about gay
(12:42):
what it wasn't called gay then, you know queers and things. Yeah,
it's funny saying words like that out loud. But he
would say, always say strange elliptical things like to me, like,
just stay away from the bo'swin Richard Bosin, what's that?
And then I used to a favorite comic that he
used to he bought me when I was six months
called Chocolate and the Bo'swain, which was a little black
(13:05):
kid with you know, stereotype looking big round eyes and everything.
And I used to think, what's this? He was a
bos And yeah, it's so complicated. I can't tell you, Jack,
and and so if I just but if I did
anything like sigh deeply or whatever, Dad would panic and think.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
It's because it was a different time.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
Yeah, it was a different time.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
It was a different times.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
It's weird. It's it's amazing how we've got Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yeah, so so, I mean I imagine that a lot
of the time when people write memoirs, they do it
to kind of, you know, in their own mind and
and their readers distinguish between nature and nurture and all
that kind of thing and see see the different events
and people that help shake them become who they become.
Do you feel like that was that was part of
this process as well?
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Do you know? I honestly, like I wrote on the
forward or the introduction that you can you can do that.
You can you can set out to try and understand yourself,
or you can just write stories about yourself. And as
I said, I think the former just leaks into the ladder.
(14:17):
If you're just open, if you just let it go,
your personality is quickly going to be exposed. You know,
that's who you are and how you came to be.
And this kind of slightly dopey observer because I never
seem to initiate anything. I was never like that participated
(14:38):
all these adventurous layabouts from Havelock North, and that would
be they would say, let's go and play snooker. The
next thing you know, you're up in the snooker hole
and I would never have dreamed of doing that. Or
let's go up here, let's go up here, and let's
do this. And they say let's drive up to the
top of the Tomato Peak and your mum's car. I'd think,
oh god, and I could never say no. So it was.
(15:00):
But the thing I had to myself was the art.
You see, I initiate. That was my world and they
weren't in it at all. So the rest of it
I just went along with it and that's kind of
how the book happened.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Really, it's a real delight. It really is. Hastings a
Boy's Owned Adventure as a new memoir by Dick Frizell,
a collection of wonderful stories about life growing up in
Hastings in the fifties and early sixties. Thank you so
much for being here.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
It was a pleasure.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Yeah, good, No, it really was. We'll make sure all
of the details for Dick's book are up and available
on the News Talks He'd big website.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame. Listen live
to News Talks he'd be from nine am Saturday, or
follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack tam podcast
from News Talks at Me.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
I'm Jack Tayne with you through to midday today and
my guest this morning live in Studio is a bona
fide legend of the New Zealand visual arts scene. Dick
Frizell is of course known for his keiwana icons think
the four Square Man with morec or Mickey Diticki, but
has worked across so many mediums and is about to
(00:32):
release a fantastic new memoir. The book is called Hastings,
A Boy's Own Adventure, and it's a collection of stories
that Dick has written about life growing up on the
East Coast in the nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties.
Dick's here with us this.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Morning, held a good morning, Good morning.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Hey, I just love the concept. I've just said this
to off microphone. I just I love how you've gone
about writing this. You've really illustrated a kind of vivid,
a vivid picture of your childhood and I really delighted
in the way you've gone about this.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
But just tell us about tell us about how your
family ended up in Hastings in the first place, because
you were actually born in Auckland, right.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
I was born in Auckland, out at Mount Albert, a
little nursing home that's still there, funnily enough. But when
my father was in the Merchant Navy, an engineer in
the Merchant Navy, and the deal was that he'd come
ashore when I was born. So he came ashore and
got a job on the Dredge and the Auckland. But
as I said in the book, I think the Dredge
(01:31):
was a bit of an anti climax after the convoys
in the Pacific, and his sister's back in Hastings, which
is sort of the family seat if you like it
sounds grand, They offered him this really cheap loan to
if you go back to Hastings, back to where all
(01:51):
the other Frazels were, And Dad, who was a bit
strangely unambitious, thought, oh yeah, he just kind of just
did it. So we left our lovely little sunny flat
and Pickton Street and went to the dim little cottage
and the shadow of Tomato.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Which is which is I mean, you moved around a
little bit, but that's that's where you spent your childhood,
and you you kind of I mean the boys own
is totally such a such a good description, because really,
this is a collection of adventures that you had as
a little boy.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
I didn't want to. I didn't see that to write
a memoir as such. You know. Then I did this,
and then I did that, and then I went on
here and I write. I wrote that thing about me
writing a short story for a short story competition on
national radio, and then I couldn't submit it. I think
I got it wrong. It said if you were I
(02:50):
thought it said if you were a published author, you
couldn't submit, but I think it actually said if the
story had been published, you couldn't submit. And I got
it wrong, as usual, which is a story in my life.
My great guiding principle, just get everything wrong and it
would be better than ever. I I didn't submit it,
but it got me going, and I've got me thinking
(03:10):
about how the memory works. And I just all those stories,
Why don't I just write them down? Because I can write,
you know, writing. I taught myself to write with that
diret journal and things, and and once I started, I
just couldn't get over the phenomena of recall, fake or otherwise,
(03:34):
you know what I mean. It just poured out of
the pen. I write with a pencil because I can
write longhand quicker than I can type. And then if
I write into those moleskin notebooks, and that became a thing,
the romantic idea of the mole skin notebooks and everything else.
Of course, you can carry it with you, you carry
there's your pen and your pencil and your pad. You
(03:55):
can write them right on the moon, you know.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah. Of course that story you're referencing is one of
thirty that's in the book, and that's called Fish in
the Barrel. Yes, yes, it's the story of you and
you and you and a couple of mates who, as
kids decided that you have a go at literally shooting
a fish in a barrel. Right, how did that go down?
Speaker 3 (04:17):
Well, it was a disaster. It should be called shooting
fish and a half barrel, really standing over a half
barrel with a three O three right, Yeah, yeah, that
was funny. That was That was That story was a
collection of incidents that I kind of wove together. It
(04:38):
wasn't sort of quite as straight out as it sounds
in the book, but it kind of more or less was.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Because this is the funny thing, isn't it I mean
it's a it is you know, a few decades since
the fifties and early sixties, and yeah, and I mean
there's a These are beautifully collected stories, but I mean
I struggled to remember things from a couple of weeks ago, clearly,
And so I suppose that this has been a kind
of interesting experience in that perspective.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Well, I mean people have often, my family whatever, have
commented about my memory is if I'm just making it
up all the time. There he goes again, you know,
like the silly old uncle. And then I thought, well,
there is maybe I have got an interesting memory, and
could I assumed everyone remember things like that. I think
(05:28):
it's something to do with my visual memory too, Being
an artist, I do remember things like like a movie
or like a painting, like a tableau that'ssed that way before.
That's exactly like every story is an assemblage of tableaus.
If you read them, you can see those boys standing
around the barrel while that kid gets up climbs up
(05:51):
on top of it, you know, and you can just
see them, can't you, Even though I'm one of them. Yeah,
you know, but I was like, I'm there, but I'm
actually standing back watching as well, like a time traveler.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
That's the trick, steering down on it.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, just standing back under the
makarp is watching thinking, oh god, you know, get out
of the way, guys.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
I hope we're not giving too much a way to
say that the fish survived. It's lucky the boys did too.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
It's only one of them surviving. Yes, yes, but when
I keep I try to keep it alive with snacks, biscuits,
and I think the salt might.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
Got them in the end.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Yeah. As someone who we associate so strongly with visual art,
how do you find storytelling and writing for the eye,
how do you find that as a different creative pursuit.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
Well, the only the only difference that is the mobility,
of the astonishing mobility of it. You don't need all
the paraphernalia of the paints and the easels and the
space and the god knows what, And it's the the
kind of transparency is the trick is That's what I mean.
I think my paintings, that's what they're about. There's no
(07:07):
sort of conceptual skullduggery or whatever you want to call it.
It's just like the thing just laid out, like the
landscapes just completely laid out. There's no well, I mean
there's conceptual ideas involved in there about construction and whatever,
but it's the same with the writing. But if you
(07:27):
it's about openness really like leaving yourself wide open and
just risking some sort of integrity to leak through. I
mean something like that. Yeah, it's the same spirit. Yeah,
if you like.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Yeah, so I'm just going to give our listeners a
bit of a kind of flavor of some of the
stories that are in there. So as well as shooting
fish in the barrel, there are stories about kind of
foundational things in your childhood. I love the story about
when you went to hospital after an appendix issue and
the different characters who were turning up and not because
you got put in in an adult ward as opposed
(08:02):
to in the kids.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
Well this is see, this is the magic thing that
how things happen. Yeah, you know, like these things that
happened to you like that, I mean that was magic that.
Then it became the sort of mascot figure in the ward,
you know.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
And the nurses, the nurses were preparing for a ball.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Gorgeous. Yeah, honestly, I goosebumps and I wrote that.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Yeah, so, yeah, there's that. It's funny because my dad
is of a very similar generation, same generation, and he
when we asked him about his childhood, I remember he
would always tell us about the time that he broke
his femur and spent a couple of months in hospital attraction.
And it's funny, how you know, just reading your story
reminded me of that, and how you know, going to
(08:44):
hospital as a little boy is like a really kind
of exciting and you know, quite affecting experience learning to drive.
Of course, in an Austin Sherborne.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
We called it the Shoeborn. We didn't know it was a.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Shoe now, of course, he just called it the Austin Yeah. Yeah,
so but it's sort of it does kind of throw
back to what feels like a more innocent time.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
Well it was innocent because there were so many I mean,
the media was limited and it's access to anything, and
we used to see newsreels at the cinema that was
about it, really, with all those soldiers marching along with
black and white, you know, yeah, and that was all
over there. It's kind of vague that you never got
updates on the war or anything, you.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Know, because you would have just you were born in
forty three, right, so you yeah, yeah, So I suppose
Korea was still you know, was maybe underway when you
were old enough to remember it better.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Well, I don't think most of the time we didn't
know watch which war we were watching. They're all the same,
They're all troops on ships and stuff, you know. Yeah,
And it was a very abstract commodity and there was
no I mean, the whole book was written in the
time and there was like only you wrote letters, you
know what I mean. So communication was so abstract, you know.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
That was one one point that struck out to me.
It's the little detail that you've that you've recorded that
make this so special.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
It's about details.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
Well, no, this is the one where you talk about
your mum because you're you're one of six kids. You
talk about your mum writing letters to you for years
to come. Once you'd left, once she left Hastings and
you'd spread your wings and you're all in different parts
of the country or the world, and your mum would
send you all I think five pages like a carbon copy. Yeah,
and then she would have one page original for each child.
(10:33):
I mean, that's there's delightful.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Yeah, it's delightful. It's so lovely. You know, she's of course,
she just wrote, she just wrote, or anything about having
a cup of tea with a lady next door or whatever.
And I actually got such a little prick really the
varsity and I wrote to mom and I said, look,
just why why didn't you wait till you've got something
to say? What aral thing? I didn't realize it was
(10:57):
just fatic communion.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Yeah, I didn't know what that was. So you listen
to Jack Tame on New Books. He'd be speaking with
Dick Frizzell about his book Hastings, A Boy's Own Adventure.
It's a meanwhile of sort, the collection of short stories
from his childhood growing up in Hawks Bay. Do you
do you reflect fondly on your childhood on that innocent time?
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Oh, very much. I had it. I had it all
to myself. I mean really, I was the firstborn boy
prince with his own room, and it went like those
McDonald duck comics. My sisters weren't allowed to read them
till i'd read them, because I used to like every
time you open a page, you get all that ink,
fresh ink smell and stuff and if they read them first,
(11:39):
they all those molecules would have escaped.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
You see, yeah you said that. So you moved to
Hastings because your dad got a good deal on a
mortgage and he had a good job there. But he
was an engineer, so he was very he wasn't artistically minded.
He was very kind of utilitarian mind.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Utilitarian. He couldn't like, he couldn't understand the point of art,
because in his mind everything could be solved with engineering.
You didn't need art. It was. He was totally bewildered
by the idea where did it fit? And yet he
read a lot. He liked his novels Raphael Sabatini and
(12:18):
all that sort of stuff, and he got me onto reading.
But he somehow he didn't he quate literally with art,
literature with art. It was art was art was just
a swanky rubbish over here, you know, funny, really weird.
And he was terrified because he'd been in the navy.
He seemed to have a really interesting idea about gay
(12:42):
what it wasn't called gay then, you know queers and things. Yeah,
it's funny saying words like that out loud. But he
would say, always say strange elliptical things like to me, like,
just stay away from the bo'swin Richard Bosin, what's that?
And then I used to a favorite comic that he
used to he bought me when I was six months
called Chocolate and the Bo'swain, which was a little black
(13:05):
kid with you know, stereotype looking big round eyes and everything.
And I used to think, what's this? He was a
bos And yeah, it's so complicated. I can't tell you, Jack,
and and so if I just but if I did
anything like sigh deeply or whatever, Dad would panic and think.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
It's because it was a different time.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
Yeah, it was a different time.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
It was a different times.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
It's weird. It's it's amazing how we've got Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yeah, so so, I mean I imagine that a lot
of the time when people write memoirs, they do it
to kind of, you know, in their own mind and
and their readers distinguish between nature and nurture and all
that kind of thing and see see the different events
and people that help shake them become who they become.
Do you feel like that was that was part of
this process as well?
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Do you know? I honestly, like I wrote on the
forward or the introduction that you can you can do that.
You can you can set out to try and understand yourself,
or you can just write stories about yourself. And as
I said, I think the former just leaks into the ladder.
(14:17):
If you're just open, if you just let it go,
your personality is quickly going to be exposed. You know,
that's who you are and how you came to be.
And this kind of slightly dopey observer because I never
seem to initiate anything. I was never like that participated
(14:38):
all these adventurous layabouts from Havelock North, and that would
be they would say, let's go and play snooker. The
next thing you know, you're up in the snooker hole
and I would never have dreamed of doing that. Or
let's go up here, let's go up here, and let's
do this. And they say let's drive up to the
top of the Tomato Peak and your mum's car. I'd think,
oh god, and I could never say no. So it was.
(15:00):
But the thing I had to myself was the art.
You see, I initiate. That was my world and they
weren't in it at all. So the rest of it
I just went along with it and that's kind of
how the book happened.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Really, it's a real delight. It really is. Hastings a
Boy's Owned Adventure as a new memoir by Dick Frizell,
a collection of wonderful stories about life growing up in
Hastings in the fifties and early sixties. Thank you so
much for being here.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
It was a pleasure.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Yeah, good, No, it really was. We'll make sure all
of the details for Dick's book are up and available
on the News Talks He'd big website.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame. Listen live
to News Talks he'd be from nine am Saturday, or
follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
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