By Rhonda Bartle

A small dinner guest of someone famous...

As a boarder at Wellington College from 1930 to 1934, Vivian King says he was not daunted by the prospect of meeting his famous relative for the first time, despite Sir Truby's  reputation as eccentric. 

'Not a bit.  I felt quite comfortable in his company. He was a gentle, very pleasant person. I went to meet him at two o'clock.  But when I got there he said 'I'm taking you up to Karitane Hospital to meet Matron'.'

After hailing a taxi to Melrose, they made their way up the winding driveway to the Karitane Hospital where matron brought tea on a silver service.  Later, Sir Truby showed off his art collection and the thought of where it hung still amuses Vivian today.

'He had all these beautiful paintings he had bought in Paris and so on, and of all places these fantastically beautiful paintings should be, they were in a place where women went to have their babies.  And I don't think they would have had the slightest interest of what was hanging on the walls!'

After the guided tour, Sir Truby took the schoolboy back to the Windsor Hotel for dinner. 'The taxi was still waiting, of course, with the meter running.'  The dinner that followed was memorable.

'In those days, dinner started at six o'clock and ended at seven o'clock and that applied to all hotels and woe betide anyone who went in after seven.  Well, we went into dinner at five minutes to seven and we took one hour to eat so we came out at five minutes to eight, and in the process, the dining room was practically emptied.'

The dining room was large, with dozens of tables with fine white tablecloths.  Vivian says the girls that silently glided in and out in black uniforms and crisp white aprons must have known Sir Truby well.

'Half way through the meal the lights were turned down low and they were taking the tablecloths off, getting everything set up for breakfast in the morning.  We were not only the last ones in the dining room, but Sir Truby was at great pains to point out that he always ate 32 chews to the bite.  And 32 chews to the bite means you take an awful long time to eat!'

He remembers Sir Truby, not only for his eating habits but for his feet.

'When we were living in Stratford, Sir Truby actually came and spent a night with us and slept in my sister's bedroom and she always remembered looking in the door and he had his feet stuck out the end of the bed.  Now, if you can imagine anyone doing that in Stratford... Only 9 miles from the foot of the mountain and 1000ft above sea-level and here he is sleeping like that!'

Sir Truby's odd way of sleeping was probably due to the onset of the unique disease 'red neuralgia.' The condition causes extreme pain in the soles of the feet and had never before been seen in New Zealand until Sir Truby's family doctor diagnosed it. It causes the affected feet to become so red, hot and swollen that morphine is usually needed to control the pain.

As Lloyd Chapman, his biographer wrote, 'Truby King was never likely to succumb to some ordinary disease... He had Mr Ritchie construct an ingenious cooling contraption that involved a tank at the end of the bed and circulated water around his painfully heated feet.'

Vivian laughs when he relates another true story.  One day Sir Truby returned to Seacliffe to inspect the place, staying in a room in the asylum. When the nightwatchman discovered the door unlocked and someone sleeping inside, he turned the key in the lock. In the morning Sir Truby woke and couldn't get out. He began banging on the door.  'Let me out! Let me out! I'm Sir Truby King!' he bellowed. An attendant unlocked the door. 'Yes, yes. I know,' he said patiently. 'We've got two more Sir Truby Kings upstairs.'

Vivian also knew Sir Truby as a sound lover of books.  'I remember my Grandmother complaining because Truby had come up from Wellington once and he had taken all the French books, not that they were any use to anyone.  I don't know what even he did with them.'

The books were a grand set of 20 or 30 volumes bound in black leather and embossed with gold.  'The library at Brooklands had a 12ft stud with shelves right up to the ceiling and a ladder to get up to the books on the top shelf. And all these French books…they were quite an official history of something in France and were very boring for most people.  But I think they were very impressive as a sort of top shelf beneath the ceiling.'

They ended up in Sir Truby's celebrated library at Melrose House. 'He was a bookworm, a bit like my son Truby, who is also a bookworm.'  Vivian says his son was meant to be called Christopher but after pressure was put on his wife Pat, she gave in and called him Truby. 'We had all sorts of people ringing us up, like the local fish shop retailer in the King's building (in Devon Street, New Plymouth), who said the child must be called Truby!'

Vivian's father was also a Truby, named after Sir Truby King.  And it's not only the name and a love of books that has filtered down through the generations but a hearty love of plants.  The King's garden in Mangorei Road, New Plymouth, is filled with abundant and beautiful blooms.

'Sir Truby was a great gardener,' Vivian says quietly.  'As all the Kings are.'