A friendship between a 10 year-old girl and the artist veteran who lived downstairs.

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Artwork by Denis Bounsall and Joanna Bennett

Denis was my “adopted grandfather”. This title helped when I tried to explain to strangers what he meant to me, but it wasn’t strictly true. 

As a child I would walk outside barefoot, down the cold stone steps that led from my parents’ house to Denis’s flat. Before knocking on his door, I would peer through the window and watch him work in the kitchen. The room a modest size, white and undecorated except for two stained glass paintings on the windowsill. A pot of beans boiling on a camp stove next to a jar of paintbrushes and an old crumpled newspaper. His easel set up next to the fridge, and the room glowing with the generous warmth of an Auckland afternoon.

Denis was not tall, but even then, in his 80s, he had a lean and pugnacious build. When I was older, he’d remark that my boyfriend had the physique of an athlete, then wink at me and say, did you know I used to be a lightweight boxer? mocking a one-two punch in the air. He had a sprightly face, and observant, fallow eyes that moved slowly across each object, like an owl. When he laughed, which was often, his wilful eyebrows sprang upward in surprise and genuine delight. He always wore his chalk-white hair neatly combed to the side, and a black and blue flannel shirt buttoned right up to the neck. His wardrobe held a couple of beautifully tailored suit jackets, a leather coat, and a variety of parkas for his daily 10km walk to the sea and back. 

Hello, Jo! he’d warble cheerfully in his Bristolian accent. After he hugged me, he’d hold my shoulders at arm’s length, studying my face for what felt like a long time. When we talked, he always stopped what he was doing to look at me directly. 

Denis was an accomplished oil painter and stained-glass artist and, when working in those mediums became less practical, he painted in acrylics, mostly staying with the theme of bright colours and black lines. This style seemed to suit him somehow, a balance of beauty and pragmatism, dark and light.

Denis came into my life when I was ten years old. My parents met him at the dog park in the grassy Auckland suburb of Waikowhai. He was recently widowed, and after selling his house he didn’t want to be encumbered again, so they offered him the rent of our empty granny flat. We quickly became friends. From the start we talked in shorthand, mostly in colour and light and form – occasionally veering into books when I found him reading my favourites like Birdsong or Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – but mostly we discussed ideas for our paintings, and the artists he admired like Don Binney and Peter Sidell. 

Many people, including me, knew him as the cheerful elderly man at the dog park who could outpace a teenager. But as I got older, his stories of the war started to become more than just anecdotes. His face showed no sign of sadness or trauma in the retelling, but the whites of his eyes grew as he described how he outwitted two heavily-armed German soldiers with a pair of medical scissors, or the time he went out in the dead of night, under heavy artillery fire, to rescue a wounded man, carrying him over his shoulder for two miles.

In my twenties he loaned me his unpublished autobiography – 600 handwritten pages neatly divided into sections of his deployment: Egypt, India, Sicily, Malta, Normandy, Germany. He departed England in 1937 as a 16-year-old in the army band, and returned nearly a decade later having served as an unarmed stretcher-bearer on the frontlines of three major assaults, earning him England’s Distinguished Conduct Medal, France’s Légion d’Honneur and Malta’s George Cross.

I was living in London when I had the book and reading his words in a courtyard in Europe, the war seemed uneasily close. I imagined the conflicting emotions of homesickness and anticipation as he left Southampton, barely a teenager, onboard HMS Neuralia bound for the North-West Frontier in India. He writes of how he remained on the bow of the ship as long as he could, watching the glimmering lights of the coastline growing fainter by the minute, I wanted to see all I could of my homeland because I knew it would be a long time before I returned to it.

As one of the first British infantries to land on Gold Beach in 1944, he observed the tension on the night before D-day – some men withdrew into themselves, alone with unshared thoughts while others erupted in nervous laughter. But as always, the waiting was the worst. On arrival at Normandy, he tripped off the ramp and into the sea – with a 60lb pack of medical supplies. He exploded in a profanity-laden rant that would have earned the wide-eyed admiration of a London docker and saw him completely oblivious to the missiles flying around. After the landing he wrote, I knew If I survived this war, I would never fear anything again, except illness and disability.

But there was also extraordinary beauty – sailing through the Bay of Biscay was like being in an exhilarating elevator up high one minute and plunging downward the next. In India, the howling of jackals on the Afghanistan border kept him awake, and the soft violet light was shot through with tiny flecks of gold formed by particles of dust drifting on the air. One viewed the world as through a gossamer veil, beautiful and mysterious. Crossing the Red Sea the western sky was a riot of savage reds and deep purple, against which the jagged peaks of North Africa stood in black silhouette.

When he returned to civilian life, the outlook in post-war England depressed him, and he took an opportunity to move to New Zealand. He hand-built a house overlooking the beach at Piha and took moonlit walks around Karekare with “the love of his life”, a German shepherd called Karl. 

While enjoying a Peter Sidell exhibition at an Auckland art gallery, he met and fell in love with a fellow artist. Their life together in Piha was simple, and enchanting – painting together, playing badminton on a makeshift court with a net they hung between two trees, and in summer, having cold showers outside using a junky old hose and a tin can. When life is good one is hardly aware of the rapid passing of time, he wrote. 

I had only been back home for six months, in a hasty return from London mid-pandemic, when Denis started dying. He had just turned 100. He told me he was not frightened but, logistically he said, the wheels are falling off.

My partner and I rented a house in the countryside with a view of the ocean. I loved falling asleep to the call of ruru, and the lilac sunrises from my bed in the morning. My inner-city parents thought we were a little mad living so far from the city, and when they visited for the first time, Denis came too. My mum commented on the odd colour of the carpet, while Denis pulled up beside me, hands resting on the gnarled wooden stick he used as a walking cane. He smiled at the surrounding native bush and the view over Waiheke. Your life is so exciting, isn’t it? he said. I wasn’t ready to let go of him yet. 

A few weeks later, now bed-bound, he showed me his painful fingers, hardened like twigs. I have a terrible feeling I will never paint again. Unsure how to comfort him I could only hold them in mine. They felt as if life were cooling down inside them. He asked me to bring his paints to his bedside and went through each one. Where is the Paynes Grey? Now this is a brilliant colour, this is what artists use for black. Can you see the Cerulean Blue? I told him I couldn’t take his expensive paints. Don’t argue with me, he said, dark weather crossing his usually jovial face.

On the day he died, he was barely conscious, but I felt he had a few things to say. I often wondered why he took a shine to me, and I couldn’t shake the feeling I reminded him of someone. I think that you and I have a like-mindedness, he said. A life spent creating, is a life worth living. He remarked how my parents had always been good to him. I replied that it was because he was our family – and he was my adopted grandfather. He smiled at that, and as I walked out of the room we saluted each other, like two old friends across a battlefield. 

That evening I had a dream of a large grey and white dog standing beside my bed. I got up to shake off the strange, unsettled feeling. I soon realised the dog looked like Karl. A text message in the morning revealed what I already knew – that Denis had died overnight.

I spent the next day on the beach at his beloved Piha, the sky French Ultramarine Blue and the sun Naples Yellow. I imagined him trekking across the black sand with a square cardboard frame, holding it up against the sea and the sky, looking for the best composition. The world seemed strange without him appreciating it.

To me, an artist was someone mired in emotional turmoil, inward and tortured. I wasn’t sure I wanted that for my life. But Denis modelled a different way – he could be sensitive and attuned to metaphor, but he was also pragmatic, accountable and optimistic. He had his feet on the ground. He preferred solitude but was always connected to something bigger than himself. 

I realised what I mourned most about him was his hopeful, courageous way of looking at life – he saw its beauty, even in the middle of war. 

At my parents’ house I no longer heard his delighted laugh below the kitchen floor. I walked down the steps to his apartment like I had done a hundred times before. The day was grey and empty. He left everything to my parents, so I shuffled through his belongings. In one box there was a picture of him striding down a street that looks like London, in a three-piece suit, tailored coat, and signet ring, with a beautiful woman in a fur stole beside him. In another, photos of him skydiving at 80 – thumbs up at the camera. I decided to take a few books on astronomy, a small, framed picture of a horse with her foal, and a stained-glass window of Karl. His manuscript lay near the front door with my name on it. I flicked through it before settling on a page in the middle.

My heroes were all strong handsome men of honour, and my heroines supremely beautiful, but the one virtue common to all is courage. Which is to my mind of all qualities, the most to be desired.

I took his pieces back to our house, into my studio with my easel, and tubes of Paynes Grey. I put the stained glass of Karl up on our window by the sea and let the last of the daylight filter through. I saw the world as he did, as though through a gossamer veil, beautiful and mysterious.

Love The Sunday Essay series? Be sure to check out The Sunday Essay postcard set over in The Spinoff shop. The set includes 10 original illustrations from the series with insight from the artists.