For all of the 1960s, the great New Zealand poet Denis Glover lived in a stucco cottage on Ames Street in the seaside village of Paekākāriki. His life and times there are recorded in a great range of fragments, memoir, poetry, letters, and biography, but mystery remains about what really went on in the little house with views of the sea and Kāpiti Island—including his exact role in the death of his partner.
Khura Skelton and Glover were together from 1950 to her death in 1969. The author James McNeish described Khura as “plump, with long black hair and hawk-like features … wearing bellbottoms and black sweater—ample bust” and “makeup thrown on, the voice harsh, and … always in movement”. She died at home, unexpectedly, aged 57, “on or about 25 July 1969 … in circumstances both macabre and bizarre”, according to Gordon Ogilvie, in his 1999 biography Denis Glover: His Life.
Weakened by smoking and alcoholism, and exhausted by caring for her old Aunt Ida who lived with them for a time, Khura caught influenza and collapsed one evening. Thinking little of it, Glover covered her with a blanket and left a hottie, food and drink beside her before leaving for work the next day.
In Paekākāriki writer Frances Cherry’s no-holds-barred account Friends and Neighbours: Denis Glover in Paekakariki (1996), a former neighbour, Eve, described her time living next door to Denis and Khura: “Sometimes I’d hear screaming and I’d look out and see Khura chasing him around the garden with the hose, and he’d have no clothes on. It was really bedlam living next to them … Many a time I’ve seen him lying in the gutter in Ames Street, absolutely unconscious, and I didn’t dare touch him, and I don’t think anyone else wanted to touch him.” Frances’s interviewees also talked of Glover’s helpfulness, his gardening tips, and the couple’s renowned hospitality.
Glover died in 1980. In 1996, at a celebration of his life held at the Paekākāriki Hotel, Frances was upset to find herself barred from reading aloud excerpts from her interviews, some discussing Khura’s death. They were deemed too provocative. This only fuelled the rumours that continued to circulate about the pair. Frances had died in 2022. She was my friend and I wanted to find out more about what happened in my hometown.
*
I headed to the hallowed halls of the now combined National Archives and Alexander Turnbull Library. I read Khura’s death certificate at Archives. The coroner confirmed the cause of her death as “extensive lobar and bronchopneumonia, toxic myocarditis, and cirrhosis of the liver”. There were no signs of violence or any suspicious circumstances.
But the time of death could not be determined. By the time the police and doctor arrived, even though her body was still warm from the fresh hot water bottles that had been stacked around her and the heater was on in the room, “rigor mortis was most distinct”. At worst, Glover could be accused of negligence towards Khura during her final hours, perhaps not surprisingly given their common state of inebriation.
Turnbull also holds a set of interviews recorded by Gordon Ogilvie in the 1990s, among them: Irene Adcock, Sam Hunt, Allen Curnow, James McNeish, Michael King, Janet Paul, Margaret Scott, and Lauris Edmond. They are viewable in the openly available transcript summaries. Most mention Denis and Khura’s relationship. As I stood in the Katherine Mansfield Reading Room waiting for the transcripts, I noticed the inscription on the wall nearest the front desk. Serendipitously, it was a poem by Glover, humourously titled: “Reading room rules at the Tumbril Library: a poem occasioned by the poet, a glass of water at his elbow, having the Rules of the Reading Room expounded to him by the Reference Librarian”.
The first two verses read:
Among those dry-stored documents
I didn’t oughta
Among prized succulents
Commit an offence making sense
By having a glass of water.
And I’m not allowed to try
To look at a book
While eating a pie.
Allergic to unnecessary bureaucracy, Glover wrote this satirical piece sometime around 1961, mocking the rigid and sometimes overly formal restrictions imposed on researchers in archival libraries, reportedly after he was scolded for pouring himself a glass of water in the Reading Room. (The poem was published posthumously as a limited edition, handprinted broadsheet for the Alexander Turnbull Library Endowment Trust by Alan Loney of Eastbourne’s Hawk Press.)
I imagined the raddled, red-nosed, rumbustious and, to use Sam Hunt’s description, “lamplight-eyed” Glover, in the old Turnbull library, back then a small brick building on Wellington’s Bowen Street, sitting in his coat hunched over a book or manuscript scribbling with a pencil, the only writing instrument allowed to prevent harm to manuscripts. Over 60 years later, I found myself similarly enmeshed in a web of protective constraints.
Details surrounding his relationship with Khura, and especially Khura’s death, are potentially sensitive. The Turnbull informed me by email that any quotes I wished to use would require the chief librarian’s permission: “This restriction was applied to the Denis Ogilvie collection upon receipt. Its intent was to protect the privacy of living individuals. The lack of recording agreements for the interviews adds another layer of complexity to the management of this material. As some time has passed since receiving this material, a review is needed. The Library will be reviewing this restriction in due course.”
In the case of Ogilvie’s interview at the Paekakariki Bowling Club with Glover’s old drinking mate, taxi driver Vernon McLeod, permission is needed from Ogilvie’s executor, McLeod’s executor, and the chief librarian, as well as the usual copyright requirement. Having perused the transcript and heard the recording I didn’t bother with this complicated process. Ironically, the most potentially incriminating section concerning the finding of Khura’s body is already cited in Ogilvie’s biography, with its foreword written by Glover’ son, Rupert Glover. Clearly, librarians and archivists cannot be expected to keep up with the sheer volume of open access material relevant to their restricted collections.
*
After Khura’s death, friends and neighbours put forward varying accounts of how she died, and of Glover’s reaction to it. None of them “flatters Glover particularly”, wrote Ogilvie.
Glover had called the doctor from work to talk about Khura. The police became involved. Their neighbour Eve told Frances Cherry, “One of the policemen stood outside in the garden so no one could get into the house and they sent for Denis. He rolled up, large as life, with two bottles under his arm. The police talked to him and then took him into the house. I remember him saying he didn’t see why he should spend money on burying her … Yes, he was a strange man.” She added that the next day she spotted Glover running around the garden shouting “Hello Mother, hello Mother” at Khura’s fur coat hanging on the line. At Glover’s request, his good friend Sam Hunt assumed responsibility for organising the funeral.
In 2021, Otago University Press published Sarah Shieff’s selected collection Letters of Denis Glover. It includes a letter he wrote to poet Allen Curnow and his wife Jeny on August 26, 1969, a few weeks after Khura passed away.
“It was old log Ida who got her down in the end,” he wrote. “When I got home it was to find Ida gone (to hospital, nothing wrong with her, but on doctor’s orders for Khura’s sake—’You’re the sick one’) and Khura lying flat out on the deck. Gin, I wrongly said to myself, or relief, or nervous exhaustion. I manhandled her into bed. The tongue that was never still produced an incoherent mumble. In the morning, I stacked up a couple of fresh hotties and left her sleeping. From work I rang the doctor and said she was in a semi-coma. At one o clock he rang me and said ‘Bad news, I’m afraid—she’s dead.’ A stroke, perhaps heart; what does it matter? The finality is there.”
In 1995, Paekākāriki taxi driver Vernon McLeod told biographer Gordon Ogilvie about bumping into Glover at the pub. “I was up there to deliver a parcel so I took him home because he was drunk. I took him home from the pub in the car, and we opened the front door—how we got in God only knows—we opened the front door and there was [Khura] lying on the passage. And Denis said, ‘Don’t worry about her. She’s drunk. She’s been lying like this all night.’
“I said, ‘Have a heart, man. She could be really sick.’ So, I stepped over her and took his booze and everything inside, and I came back. And she was dead … and in the passageway! Yeah. He was right out of his mind. So that’s when I got hold of the police and he said, ‘What do you want the police for? She’s only drunk!’ But she was not drunk at all … I knew straight away.”
*
My wild goose chase made me ponder various anomalies in our rapidly changing information landscape. Researchers and oral historians who conduct interviews often face a cumbersome permission process in contrast to journalists and other writers. And then there is the question of who owns history. The extension of copyright from 50 to 70 years widens the net of living descendants or others who have a potential stake in an author’s representation. But simultaneously some previously restricted material is to be opened up and digitised.
In a 2024 article, Turnbull’s chief librarian Jessica Moran stressed that improving access to the collections is the library’s primary goal, particularly as pressure grows to make them more accessible to marginalised groups—but balanced against the need to manage the “discoverability and control” of sensitive material, especially in an era of mass digitisation. Our official keepers, protectors and facilitators of information, the librarians and archivists, stand at the front line of the new information access wars.
But I doubt Glover would care what people thought of his relationship. After Khura’s death, he wrote a poem dedicated to her, ‘A Dead Woman’. Its last line is not one of the great masterpieces of beautiful romantic poetry. He wrote of her absence,
Nobody left worth quarrelling with.
Khura’s greatest wish was to marry Denis. It had been a source of great bitterness between the couple. A copy of her will is kept at Archives New Zealand. Poignantly, she had signed it Khura Eileen Glover.
