The last hermit of Paekākāriki

Paekākāriki’s last hermit died late in 2023. The For Sale sign for his small home of over five decades described it as a “derelict shack that needs to go to make way for your stunning future home.”
The Hermit was a flawed and fascinating man. For our first 15 or so years as neighbours, his most embittered and booze-soaked period, it was hard to spot any redeeming features. Back then, on a summer’s evening, he would lean over his deck, bottle in hand, and loudly recount tales about fish and women that he had purportedly “netted”.
It was impossible to imagine ever having anything in common with this antiquated dinosaur. But, over the course of 40 years, many things changed, including our feelings about our neighbour.
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In his heyday, The Hermit was renowned for his prodigious drinking, his womanising, his violence, his mistreatment of many of those close to him, and his clever, but often savage, tongue, especially when under the influence. His friends were few and forgiving. This was fine with him as he preferred his own company.
He was 78 when he passed away. By the end, he was dry, having kicked the alcohol (and roll-your-owns) some years earlier.
The Hutch, as he referred to his old wooden cottage, was bought sometime around 1970. A set of steep, curving steps, most in disrepair, provided the only legitimate entry, although he had occasional access through a neighbouring driveway. It was a classic seafront cottage of a kind that now faces extinction. The long, narrow strip of garden out the back produced prodigious amounts of potatoes, carrots, and cabbages.
The Hutch was built in the 1920s and had a leaning brick chimney and a roof in need of constant repair. Only 50 square metres in total, there was one bedroom off the living area and a small alcove just big enough to fit a single bed. This was screened off from the main room by a curtain on a rail. The kitchen was part of the living area. It had a wall-mounted Zip water heater (later replaced with a kettle), mugs hanging from hooks, and a mustard armchair with a wooden, leg-elevating handle, surely the last of its kind. A fireplace sat against the south wall.
But the real action happened out the front on the cracked concrete deck overlooking the Cook Strait. It served as the occasional stage for a cast of often dissolute and sometimes well-known characters. Among his drinking companions were two of New Zealand’s greatest poets: Sam Hunt, from Paremata’s Bottle Creek, who regularly drank at the Paekākāriki Hotel between the late 1960s and the late 1990s, and Denis Glover, who lived in Paekākāriki between 1959 and 1970. 
A drinking session at the hotel often went on until well after closing time abetted by Denny the lenient publican. Afterwards, hangers-on might repair to The Hutch for Round Two. The Hermit told of driving the inebriated Glover, and sometimes his wife, Khura, home to their cottage at 66 Ames Street, following a hard night’s imbibing, sometimes in the hotel’s Ballerina Bar. Another friend from this time, artist Robin White, lived in the Pāuatahanui Inlet area and produced several iconic screen prints of the Paekākāriki Hotel in the early 1970s.
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The Hutch’s view was extensive, encompassing both Mana and Kapiti islands. The sea was so close at high tide that it was like standing on the bow of a ship. During the big spring tides when the ocean clawed the seawall below, The Hutch’s windows became opaque with salt. “Salt-spray beats prissy net curtains for stopping busybodies from peering in,” its inhabitant sometimes quipped.
A thickset man with tree-trunk legs, he usually wore a pair of baggy shorts, a ripped T-shirt, and jandals. In the way of many fishers and hunters, The Hermit was, at heart, a romantic, not about human relationships, but about nature: the impending changes in the weather, the strength and height of the waves, and the movement of the tides.
He relished the enforced interiority caused by the slashing nor ’wester squalls that regularly lashed his cottage, pounding the windows’ thin glass to near shattering point; even if these led to leaks through his bitumen roof. There was a perennial patch-up battle with his roof, aided by a helpful friend.
Among those men he mixed with in the early days, the term Hutch evoked not only the compactness of his abode, but also seemed to hint at its owner’s sexual proclivities. He certainly was not shy of boasting about his promiscuous past, although his friends possibly humoured him in his tall sounding tales.
The Hermit spent thousands of hours leaning over the railing of his sinking deck, forever on the watch for changes, whether in the sea, the weather, or bird, fish, and human activity. Many locals can recall his customary salute-like wave. It was here on his sand dune perch that he absorbed countless west coast sunsets. His wish to catch a glimpse of the green flash as the sun slid, eased, or plummeted into the ocean was repeatedly granted. He had a ringside seat of life on the beach stretched out below: the dragging of flounder nets in the days when those flatfish were plentiful, pipi collections until the pipi beds disappeared, and, more latterly, the fishing torpedoes and drones that he despised as ocean marauders playing by unsporting rules.
A black-backed seagull he christened Feathers hit his soft spot. Cultivated as an orphaned chick, Feathers showed his gratitude with an annual visit to the Hutch; where the bird lived in-between times, he could only ponder. How he could tell that the visiting bird was actually Feathers, and not an imposter, was beyond me.
Aside from paying off the mortgage, he made sure there was always a bit left over for betting on the horses, for the regular patching of his roof, and for fishing net repairs. The Hermit never bought new clothes.
Over time though, the deck parties evaporated, and the number of visitors dwindled to his elderly mother, a faithful nephew, a couple of old drinking mates, and the occasional pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses hopeful of saving such a tantalisingly lost soul.
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Some late summer evenings, he would row his dinghy out to sea, often drunk, no lifejacket, to catch fish. Neville Leak, the aptly named local plumber, would sometimes accompany him. With a worried eye on the sun setting on the horizon, we wondered at what point we should call for help. But then the boat would reappear, powered by steady rowing, no outboard motor in those days, back the long distance to shore, usually with a fish or two to gut on the beach.
His Barry Crump-like camouflage – the rough and ready talk, the shorts and jandals – might have fooled many of his early drinking buddies and other guileless mortals who accepted him at face value. But to those who knew him better he was a clever, thoughtful, widely read recluse as well as an easily angered, resentful misanthrope who burnt anyone who got too close.
Over the years, I had some fascinating discussions with my neighbour. His analysis of national and international affairs was informed and astute. But our conversations mostly concerned the vagaries of the cat’s dietary predilections.
After various fits and starts with lodgers – a couple of them long term, one paying his board with a weekly sack of onions – he gradually sank into full blown hermithood. He read, he fished, he gardened, he baked bread, he occasionally drove to the local shops for groceries, but most social engagement had effectively ceased, bar the odd phone call and visit. His Hutch became his refuge against the world.
But cats pay little heed to lifestyle choices. The first intruder was our black cat, BW, who enjoyed curling up in the sun on the Hutch’s wooden railings. After BW died, his successor, a tabby named Pickles, similarly made the Hutch home. He renamed the cats to his own liking: BW became The Weasel; and Pickles was The Weasel II.
When we took up research work in the US, The Hermit offered to adopt The Weasel. At his suggestion, we bought two-years’ worth of chicken-flavoured Jellimeat; the cans lined the Hutch’s walls. He regularly updated us on The Weasel’s wellbeing. When these emails ceased for a time, a friend fought her way up to the barricaded Hutch where she was offered a strong cup of Bell tea and a high-blown chat about the sorry state of the world. She spotted a cat in a corner too. Then, early on September 11, 2001, The Hermit was the first to contact us:  “Are you guys ok?”, he emailed.
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What drove this extremely clever, sensitive man into a life of virtual seclusion? Was his personality determined at birth or was it the forces of his life? He was born in England in World War II in a town that had been ravaged by Luftwaffe bombing. At boarding school, he was held by the ankles by a bigger boy and used as a human toilet brush, and worse. His family moved to imperial Iraq in the 1950s amid heightened anti-colonial tensions, and exited just prior to its revolution.
A bigger question concerns the nature of hermithood itself. Was The Hermit even a hermit? Reclusion and seclusion are two different states: isolation based on an aversion to people versus a solitude that is not necessarily hostile to humanity. Traditionally, hermits are distinguished from recluses by a philosophical, or spiritual aspect; recluse suggests an edgier, deeply misanthropic quality. New Zealand has many examples of men (and they often are men) who live alone but are not necessarily unsociable or inhospitable. Sometimes, their seclusion stretches to encompass lodgers, even ‘wives’. Henry Chaffey of the Cobb Valley’s Asbestos Cottage springs to mind. Born in 1868 to a well-off family in Somerset, he migrated to New Zealand at age 17 with his brother. A brief marriage in Wellington was dissolved on the grounds of drink, infidelity, and prostitution. Henry then moved south to work as a shearer and gold miner, spending long periods poking around in the bush of the Arthur Range in northwest Nelson. Later, he took up with a Cantabrian woman, Annie Fox, in flight from a violent relationship. In a uniquely Aotearoa-flavoured Mills and Boon story, Henry and Annie eventually ended up living in a bush hut: Asbestos Cottage. Here, they welcomed various hunters, prospectors, and trampers. Annie barely left the cottage for 40 years, while Henry hunted, prospected for gold, and regularly trekked into Motueka for supplies. After Henry died aged 83 in the mountains during the winter of 1951, Annie was forcibly taken to live with her sister in Timaru. Unable to adjust, she took her own life two years later.
Some who knew Paekākāriki’s Man Alone in his early cantankerous days would have dismissed him as a troglodyte: a caveman with reactionary views. They may have been right, although he softened as he aged, while his philosophical and intellectual bent remained a constant.
His  death went unnoticed and unremarked by most Paekākāriki residents. Yet his passing signals not just the demise of a unique individual, but also the end of an era for Paekākāriki as a refuge for such eclectic characters. Many artists, poets, writers, and eccentrics can no longer afford to rent or buy there nowadays.
When The Hermit bought The Hutch most of the houses along Paekākāriki’s beachfront were a mix of holiday homes and family households. They were, for the most part, modest houses: older cottages with new bits tacked on. The village changed over his lifespan. But given global warming, sea level rise, and more frequent storms, it is a strong possibility that any stunning future home on an eroding coastline will sink into the sea that Chris, the last hermit of Paekāk, so loved.
Wellington writer Jude Galtry was a long-time neighbour of The Hermit. A photograph of his dinghy, since smashed to smithereens in a storm, hangs on her living room wall.