|
Sunday
Star Times
August 10, 2003
A Creature of Contradictions
by Anthony Hubbard
The campaign to
clear Peter Ellis, convicted of child abuse in the 1993 Christchurch Civic
Creche case, refuses to die. Anthony Hubbard meets the man at the centre of
the storm.
It's a dodgy game, says Peter Ellis, lifting one's spirits. He blows out a
mouthful of smoke and the canaries witter and cheep.
"Hope's an extraordinarily cruel word. You get your hopes up, you get
your hopes dashed. So you just flatline."
Ellis sits on the bed in his vast yellow room, an outsider in the saga of the
"Peter Ellis case".
Reporters ring him and ask "what do you think of the latest
developments"? But they've heard the news before he has. He gives a
histrionic sigh. Oh, those reporters. He has no ambitions and no aspirations.
He would have been "happy if life had just passed me by, thank
you", he says, in a confidential stage whisper. "I didn't ask to be
part of this. I was minding my own business, and whammo."
Last week publisher Barry Colman burst into the fray with a two-page
newspaper ad featuring controversial old interviews with the creche children,
Ellis' supposed victims. Ellis is polite about his latest champion - he is a
stickler for manners, and anxious not to appear ungrateful. But he keeps his
distance.
Ellis is a complex man, a creature of contradictions: sombre and flamboyant,
outrageous and conservative, gregarious and solitary. His studio flat - he
lives above a cafe in south Christchurch
- is stereotype gay, a blaze of kitsch set among pot plants. Two tiny teddy
bears sit on a cane chair. A black gorilla called Sally slumps on another. A
one-metre long grey stone iguana lies in front of an old chiming clock. He's
proud of the tall gold-and-silver hat stand, all angles and prongs. "I
waited for that one until it dropped down to $35 - eeeeeh! I walked down the
road with it," he says, acting out the scene. "That horribly tacky
lamp over there - $15," he says, pointing to a glass-and-gilt horror in
the corner.
Canaries and zebra finches– Lizard Woman, Hattie, Ziggy et al - provide a
squeaky chorus for Ellis' whoops and groans, his sighs and whispers. He does
all the voices.
Ellis is high camp one minute and scratchy conservative the next. He would
vote National if he voted, which he doesn't. And "for someone who
doesn't have children, I've got some fairly strong opinions about child
rearing".
He is bothered by the prospect of young Maori men "who can't write their
own name but can talk about the Treaty of Waitangi".
He wants to nail the stereotype of "flamboyant and outrageous", the
media term that quickly attached to his name. "Sure, I didn't mind being
irreverent, and irreverent and outrageous really mean the same thing. And
being flamboyant - well, that was part of my culture if you like, it was part
of the gay culture. It's a defence mechanism."
But "I'm a product of the '50s. You respected the policeman, you
respected the vicar, you respected the doctor and you respected the
headmaster. There is no respect for teachers any more. They're glorified
babysitters who teach the Waitangi Treaty".
His own philosophy of child rearing is "almost seen-but-not-heard. Not
in the literal sense, but somewhere in those realms.
"If I was talking to a parent (at the creche) and their child came
running into the middle of the conversation and the parent stopped and
started dealing with the child, I'd say, Oexcuse me, we were having a
conversation. I've looked at your child. They're not injured, they're
actually butting in and being rude'. You know?
"So that sometimes may have been abrasive to some parents. But I don't
believe a child has an automatic right to butt in when you're holding a
conversation."
In 1992 he had a nephew and niece for lunch "and I asked them what they
wanted and one of them said baked beans and one of them said spaghetti. And I
couldn't shift either of them. And I was so peed off I opened up a tin of
each and dumped them in the same pot. And I dished them up and I says, Oyou
can pick out the baked beans and you can pick out the spaghetti' - because I
knew I'd end up with two half tins and presumably tomorrow we will do the
same thing. Now they never played that game with me again."
Children's rights advocates had empowered children to the point where it was
terrifying to be a parent. They dared not set limits. Kids grew up without
rules and then at 16 they were suddenly expected to conform "and the
wheels come off".
"For me, the feminist movement and the free play brought into
kindergartens, where children were able to do what they jolly well liked, has
created very much a me me me society."
He thinks one parent - father or mother - should stay at home to look after a
very young child. Parents trudge between office and creche and home and
everyone misses out.
"When children came (to the creche) with flowers specifically for you -
you know, buzz! When a child tied their shoelaces for the first time and
they're looking around and you sort of see that was a parent moment - you
think, buzz! Absolute buzz! You were there for that particular special
moment." But the parent wasn't.
Ellis never wanted children himself, but "I enjoy children as long as
they stay within the boundaries and they're my boundaries, so therefore it's
Hobson's choice".
He was boisterous and rumbustious at the creche. "I'd be trying to sweep
the floor and there would be a kid in front of me, so this particular day I
picked him up and put him in the rubbish tin. I had queues of them - 'sweep
me up'!" On another occasion a girl - "she was just a little
dot" - pushed in front of the others and demanded that he hang her coat
up. So he hung the coat up with the child inside - "and I had all these
kids wanting to be hung up. It was fun".
He was always glad to stop being a surrogate parent at the end of the day and
go "home to my pets and to my partner. You know, I wasn't a child abuser
- I was in a relationship, for four solid years".
Nowadays he has no partner, and he lives quietly on a benefit. He sits
reading in his room - gruesome murder mysteries are a favourite - or banters
outrageously with the cafe staff. A woman knocks on the door to tell him he
has a phone call, and they chaff each other. "A slapper from way
back," he laughs, rolling his eyes, mock-horrified.
He sits on the white crocheted bedspread alongside Monty the Persian cat, an
ageing fur rug with a protruding tongue ("he's got no teeth to hold it
in").
Ellis is a slight figure in bare feet, a darkish shape amid a riot of
unrelated objects. Yonder is a deep green bath with gold claw feet and gold
splashed along its rim. China
bears and penguins share the shelves with Chinese sages in conical China hats.
There is a brass swan and a stone dog. Stiff little cacti stand in small
pots; large pots cascade their greenery on to the floor. There is a red
sketch of Marilyn Monroe and a picture of two puppies beside a pond.
He watches the Trackside racing channel on the television - "Trackside,
with Donna Beck," he cries, imitating its slogan - and The Nanny. He
never bets on the horses. He's so leery of losing money that he can't even
play Monopoly.
Right now he has nobody to share all this. "It would be nice to have
someone to be irritated over because they slurped a Gingernut," he says
wistfully. But he's not sure. "It's nice to be able to have a whole
bed," he jokes.
Besides, a partner of his age - he's 45 - would have family, friends and
workmates, and how would they cope being in the middle of the Peter Ellis
saga? But how has Ellis coped? Partly, it seems, by laughing. He was the
class clown at school. Charm and humour were powerful weapons for a non-conformist
kid.
He disliked sport, although he was good at it. His mother, a teacher, was a
passionate sports fan, and his father - also an educator - "extremely
competitive". At Otago Boys' High School, he refused to play rugby by
the rules.
"I stayed down by the goal posts and the teacher came down and said,
'what are you doing here?' I said, 'is this the goal-line? Well, they've got
to cross it and I'm not going to run up and down getting sweaty for nothing'.
"You know, there's logic here. I mean, if someone comes down this neck
of the woods trying to cross that line, I'll be there."
When the family shifted north he entered Motueka High School
with his hair dyed bright red. He had a special dye-in for other boys. Later,
he was the first lad in town to demand a perm at the hairdresser. "They
refused at first, but in the end they did it."
The underage drinker found that he could buy liquor because he had good
manners, while his uncouth contemporaries were refused. "I'd politely
step up and say, 'yes, could I please have four dozen of dididididida'. And
I'm wandering out the door with all this booze and one of the biggest hoods
in Mot didn't get it."
He did just enough work at school to pass - "51% was fine, thank you
very much" - and devoted time to his animals. He put turkey eggs under
Bubbles the bantam to see if she would hatch them: she did. He raised racing
pigeons, an interest shared with his Dutch stepfather.
If he seemed a little odd as a young child in Gisborne and Wairarapa in the
'60s, he shared many of their conservative values. Christened an Anglican,
later he found himself at Sunday school with the Salvation Army. "I can
still sing Bringing in the Sheaves with the best of them. And even today he
"doesn't disbelieve" in God.
He did things his way. "I could go and clean the pigsty wearing white
clothes and come out wearing white clothes and I would have a clean pigsty.
My stepfather used to say, 'You can't have cleaned that pigsty', and I'd say
Oyeeeeesssss'. He'd go look and come back sort of muttering under his
breath."
But he won't buy into the "fastidious gay" stereotype. "I
mean, this is dreadful," he says, looking around at the birdseed
scattered beneath the cages. "You wouldn't want to look behind that
board over there," he says, pointing at his clutter. He has to
"lux" every second day.
There were "hilarious moments" in prison. An inmate told him he had
run out of "skins". Ellis had just finished eating a banana
"and I sort of waved this thing and said, 'I don't suppose you mean this,
do you'?" He pissed himself laughing.
"He says, 'no,' - 'I mean cigarette tissues.' OOh, I shall just go get
my little book of prison terminology and write, skins - not banana'."
Ellis wrote to companies asking for ice cream, soft drinks, and toys for the
family days he organised for the prisoners' families. They sent back loads of
stuff, he says, and polite letters: "you're most welcome, Mr
Ellis".
At the parties, he painted the kids' faces, just like at the creche.
"We had this pedophile who wanted to be Father Christmas," he says,
laughing. "I said, 'thanks very much, but I dooooooon't think so'."
Ellis says that though he may appear gregarious, he is quite comfortable on
his own. Just as well. He spent "17 months in maximum security, 24 hours
a day, wearing pyjamas. For 17 months! You don't need people".
Convicted pedophiles are notoriously unpopular in prison, but Ellis says he
was never mistreated. Some of the prison officers believed he was innocent,
he says, and it became clear that many inmates thought so too. He ran the
prison laundry and the medical area, he helped illiterate prisoners write
letters, he set up a library in his wing by asking his friends to bring in
old books.
Prisoners felt comfortable with him, he suggests, because he was not
confrontational. They would laugh and banter, not discuss whose pitbull was
the biggest or how many women they'd had. When he went to prison, he didn't
let any of his visitors hug him "because if I had burst into tears I
would have never stopped crying. I never hugged my mother, probably for about
five years".
There was no point in making yourself suffer in jail, he says. You simply got
on with it. And he got enormous support from the public. The cards and
letters have kept coming for years. One correspondent addressed a letter
simply to "Peter Ellis, North Canterbury".
It reached him safely.
Today there is another letter of support, forwarded by National MP Katherine
Rich, one of the many VIPs who signed the recent petition calling for an
inquiry into his case. He reads it out to his visitor. "Public
opinion," he says, "has been on my side for quite some time."
What keeps him going is the public support and the "unswerving loyalty
of my own family and my own innate knowledge that child abuse isn't my thing.
And probably because I'm quite happy just tootling along".
He always knew he was different, he says. When you look at the old photos, he
says, his brother will be standing like a boy, arms down and shoulders
hanging, while he will be "standing incorrectly".
He leaps off the bed and shows what he means, jutting his hip out and putting
his knuckles on it, palm pointing upwards, with his other hand behind his
cocked head.
He pulls out a photo album and shows off pictures of his old girlfriends. He
didn't discover gay sex until he went to England when he was 20. His
reaction: slight disappointment. What was all the fuss about? It wasn't very
different from the other sort.
He decided to break the news about his sexuality to his mother. "I sat
down with a bottle of Bacardi to have the conversation and mum just said, 'I
was wondering when you were going to get around to that'. I says, 'well, we
may as well talk about something else'."
He "didn't have to tell his brothers and sisters". They have all
been to gay dances with him. If he turned up at Christmas with a woman, there
would be a Christmas present for the woman. Three years later, if it was a
man, he would get a present too. His family "are not a judgemental
lot".
Sometimes, he confesses, he feels like a gerbil in a treadmill: forever
running, forever going nowhere. So has his long battle with the justice
system never shaken his conservative beliefs?
Well, he doesn't think juries understand the concept of "beyond
reasonable doubt". He thinks police and judges don't always get it
right, and for politically-correct counsellors he has nothing but contempt.
"What's the difference between a counsellor and a rottweiler? The
rottweiler eventually gives your kid back."
But through it all, he retains a kind of faith in the authorities - even in
the justice minister who refuses to set up an inquiry into his case. "In
my heart of hearts, I know Phil Goff knows it's wrong," he says.
Hope is dangerous, and in his case it has led to multiple disappointments,
"but I have high hopes that the justice system will at some stage kick
in correctly. That's probably something to do with my conservatism".
He pauses and looks thoughtful. The canaries witter and cheep.
|
