The truth is out there

Ingrid Derbyshire at home with her terrier Hugo. Picture by Liam Clayton

"As a child my family were Anglicans, and I went along to the Presbyterian and the Methodist churches to see what they were like, so I’m just intrigued by all these different belief systems, and where they all come from. Was it Karl Marx who said if man didn’t have a religion he would invent one?”

Ingrid Derbyshire grew up in Rotorua, but as a girl started coming to Gisborne to improve her horse riding.

“As a child my mother said I had to go to England, she said I had to ride and hunt, so I learned to ride. I did dressage in Rotorua, and I started riding here in Gisborne at Winnie Lysnar’s Riding School. When you were very experienced you could ride all around the boundary of the school. Where all those new houses now are, that’s where the riding school was.

“We had friends of the family living in Gisborne and I used to come over in the school holidays and learned to ride here. One of the trainers at Rotorua was a British equestrian trainer.”

All that equestrian training might have paved the way for Ingrid’s eventual long stint in England which like many Kiwi adventurers started with an OE. Her speech still carries a distinct British inflexion.

“I met and married Phil 37 years ago. I stayed in England 22 years, and when Phil retired from his job I came home and he emigrated.

“He was born in Dublin and grew up in Yorkshire. He was a prison officer and we moved around the country for his job.

“When I went to England it was for an adventure. Most of the Kiwis were in London so I went to Gloucester. That’s where I met him on a barge in Gloucester docks.”

An arts centre was housed in a barge permanently moored at the docks and on Friday nights it ran the “Happy Parrot”, where people came to recite poetry and play music, where they could overcome their stage fright and practise and share their songs.

“I went down to meet a friend and Phil was the emcee.

“I enjoyed living in England. It’s very different and class structured and you have to know your place and all that sort of stuff. Phil was a folksinger and I probably got to see a lot of things. We went to a folk festival in Sydmouth for our honeymoon. There were French stiltdancers there dancing on their stilts, and he was friends with people like The Dubliners and lots of professional musicians.”

After Gloucester came stints in Cheshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, all related to Phil’s work.

“We went to the palace to meet Princess Anne. Phil belonged to a group that had their annual dinner in the House of Lords as guests of Lord Ponsonby, so I had dinner in the House of Lords. And we went to Lambeth Palace for his Butler Trust award, a special prison service award. The Princess Royal is the patron and she hands out the gongs.”

Ingrid has just returned from Ireland on her own pilgrimage of sorts, scattering Phil’s ashes on Dublin’s River Liffey.

“He was born in Dublin in the Rotunda Hospital, was baptised in St Mary’s Pro Cathedral — it’s Roman Catholic. He died in March last year and his dying wish was to have his ashes cast on the Liffey. He had two daughters from a previous marriage, and the ashes went to Rachel to do it, and I decided to go and join her.

“You’re not allowed to drop ashes off a bridge because the Liffey runs through the middle of Dublin, so we went out in a boat to the river mouth and tipped the ashes out. I felt that was closure.”

Conveniently, Ingrid says, Gisborne’s coffin club is only two doors away and they painted Phil’s casket with the Irish flag and a golden harp.

“We all wrote notes to put in the coffin in case he woke up. We weren’t expecting that.”

The urn for the ashes was shaped as a glass of Guinness.

Ingrid is now the only original member of Gisborne’s Sceptics Society, which still meets regularly.

“When they advertised their initial meeting at the Cafe Villagio — now the Neighbourhood Pizzeria — the people advertising were John Marks, a psychiatrist at the hospital, and Kevin Hyde, a retired teacher and prolific letter-to-the-editor writer. When I saw the ad I said to my husband, ‘I’ll go along and have a look’.

“I’m not interested in religions. They’re all phallocentric, but I went along to the initial meeting and they asked, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘I’ve not really made up my mind yet about whether there is a God or not’.”

On that issue she mentions Lloyd Geering, a New Zealand theologian charged with heresy in 1967 for teaching that the Bible’s record of Jesus’ death and resurrection was wrong. The charges were brought by a group of conservative laymen and a minister, but were later dismissed.

Besides the Sceptics, Ingrid is also an active member of Gisborne’s Orphans’ Club, almost a continuation of that club on the barge where she met Phil all those years ago.

“We have a couple of bands. We have a skiffle group —they do American songs with washboards and kazoos. We have traditional banjos in the American style, bluegrass, and we have a choir. We have lots of people who perform either in small groups, duos or solos.

“Groups will get together to do skits, poetry and jokes, and some of the blokes do ‘Oh Lord It’s Hard to be Humble (when you’re perfect in every way)’.”

The Orphans’ Club gets together at the Senior Citizens rooms in Grey St on the third Wednesday of each month over winter.

“We also run some concerts on Sunday afternoons.”

She has been treasurer of the Orphans’ Club for some years, and has just been elected president of the Senior Citizens’ Association, which owns the hall the Orphans use. It has always been a close relationship, she says.

For the time being, Ingrid continues to wrestle with religion, spirituality and even the state of world affairs with the Sceptics.

“There are so many beliefs in the world.”

She attended weekend retreats with “Brahma Kumaris” when she was living in the UK, and has looked into the esoteric Emin Foundation, a spiritual movement based on the work of Raymond Armin, known to members as “Leo”.

“You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find the prince,” she says.