John Roughan: Long ago, but important today

Charlie Muir's music drew broke the official rules. Photo / Supplied

When word came last Sunday that Charlie Muir had died I knew this was a funeral I wanted to attend. The word took a few days to reach me. The funeral was less than 24 hours away - in Gore.

Funny how reality effects the mind. Had anyone asked me last week, purely academically, whether I would go all that way for someone who was not a close relative I would have said probably not.

I'm not as assiduous as I should be about attending these things. And Charlie, large as he was in my childhood, was a long time ago.

But suddenly he has gone, and you realise he was important.

Charlie was a farmer and a teacher of English at a district high school not far away. His farmhouse was across the road from the country schoolhouse where my father and mother were raising five kids.

The Muir family was almost as large and much the same ages as us. There were no other people nearby. We practically lived in each other's homes and shared milk from a single cow. Dad milked it in the morning, Charlie in the evening.

Just about every night, when all the kids except me were in bed, Charlie would wander across the road for a yarn with Dad and Mum. Television was still a few years away, people did this.

We'd hear his gumboots on the path. He'd leave them in the porch, step inside and settle on the couch, pulling out a packet of Park Drive to roll a smoke.

I'd have been reading but no book could compete with Charlie's chat. On the couch beside him I wasn't part of it, just a kid enjoying it all.

Charlie could tell a great story in a slow country drawl with his Southland inflections. He had a way of making acute observations that were extremely funny even when he didn't intend them to be.

He was mystified as well as amused by the oddities of ordinary life. Everyone knew everyone in the district, and news travelled by mouth. When Charlie heard a new tale his laughter was full-throated and infectious.

He relished language and would have been an unconventional English teacher, but I never went to the district high school. We moved away and, though Charlie and his wife Nola remained in contact with my parents, I didn't see much of him again.

He retired to Gore and in later years wrote books, mostly local histories for towns and clubs.

When I last saw him he had self-published some memoirs which he called Meanderings of a Minor Poet.

Between bursts of doggerel it supplies some good yarns, such as one about our joint house cow, which I remember as a docile old girl when it was my chore to walk her up the road every morning for milking.

But Charlie's book reports that she came to a strange end. When we moved away he didn't want to milk twice a day so he dried the cow off, put it in a back paddock and, he says, "more or less forgot about it".

"A couple of months later," he writes, "a neighbour said he'd seen the cow pawing the ground. I thought he was joking but went into the paddock to have a look. The next thing I knew it charged me.

"I got a vet up from Edendale ... He pronounced that she had twisted ovaries and that she appeared to be undergoing some sort of sex change.

"I asked the Dickies, who had been milking cows for three generations, if they had heard of such a thing and they gave an emphatic 'no'."

Charlie himself must have become a bit more unusual in his old age. He and Nola used to visit a Gore rest home where she read to the residents.

After a while, Charlie writes, he decided to enliven their sessions with Negro spirituals.

Some of the residents would fall asleep during the sing-along so he set about rewriting the verses of Rock My Soul, Dem Bones, Ebry Time I Feel De Spirit and Shortnin' Bread to make them more interesting.

"It was only after we had been performing for about four months," he says, "that the Matron attended a session.

"She took me aside as we were leaving and informed me I was out of order singing Negro spirituals as it was against the Health Department's rules."

He was one of those people who lives in your heart for life. I hope he knew it.