After an eternity we landed and stepped on to the tarmac to a chorus of yoo-hooing from behind the wire fence. In a photo we have my mother looks a little deranged and we girls shell-shocked. I’m clutching the wretched hatbox. The family had clubbed together to finance the rescue mission that had brought us to New Zealand. There was an air of disgrace about the whole enterprise.
We were separated for the convoy home through the damp lush alien landscape. We girls climbed into the back of Uncle Jim’s blue Mini. I had never seen a car so small that didn’t have pedals. "What do you think of the scenery?" Uncle Jim said. "Lovely!" I quavered, lighting on the correct answer to any question about how we found our new home. "I expected you to be glamorous but you’re just ordinary girls," he said. Maybe in New Zealand that was a compliment.
There was a gathering at my grandmother’s house to greet us. Other than at funerals, I would never again see so many of our relatives together. My Great-aunt Alma was small and perfectly square. She said "Hooray"when she meant goodbye. Also, "We’re a mad lot" and, encouragingly, "It’s a great life if you don’t weaken."
Four months later it’s Christmas. We are living in a tiny prefab beside my grandmother’s house, one road back from Milford Beach. My father phones. "Come back, Diana," he says, "it’s snowing in Vancouver."
I say, "How can we come back? Mum is working six days a week. We don’t even have enough money to buy shoes."
My mother takes the phone away.
I am fourteen, angry, a bitch. He knows how much I love the snow.
PART II
CHAPTER 6
On the beach
I mis you all terible it is very hard to describe and I only hope I will have strength enough to carry on until I can see you.
Letter from my father to my sister, January 1966
MILFORD ON AUCKLAND’S NORTH SHORE IN I964: bungalows, baches, tūī, hedgehogs panting through the garden where my grandfather grows tomatoes, lettuce and silverbeet, and trees that produce strange, bitter fruit. Even in winter in Auckland you can go barefoot. I kick a hedgehog by accident, and get a ringworm.
The ice cream is so rich it makes me feel sick. The money is indecipherable. Threepence can buy a bag of orange squash gums and milk-bottle lollies. A shilling is a bob, a guinea is a fortune. A trailer is a caravan. Tea is dinner, but also a cuppa, with everything. The beach in winter is, like New Zealand, beautiful and empty.
My first letter to Anne, written in transit, had struck a satiric tone. “Talk about swanky! You should see this jet. All sorts of buttons for all sorts of things! They even have a separate little air conditioner that you can adjust to blow a nice little hurricane in your face... We got on the plane at 9 o’clock and they served a nice little ‘snack consisting of, and I quote, kebab a la polynisienne, pilau, fruits confites... A couple of minutes ago a nice stewardess came and served us a nice pineapple juice. Wasn’t that nice? Oh, by the way, guess what I had to drink for dinner? Champagne.”
The only sad feelings safe enough to express are about our dog. “We all felt just awful about giving up Dukey. We think she got a good home though because it’s a 150-acre farm in Mission and the people know dogs.”
We cram into my grandmother’s bungalow across the road from Milford Park. I remember the house as greyish-blue, but then everything from those first two years in Milford is tinted grey in my memory. The park looks, as they say here, as though it’s been in the wars. There used to be a pirate ship. There used to be a swimming pool with a slide. Word is it’s going to be turned into a dolphin pool but for now it’s just an empty concrete hole in the ground where rubbish collects.
A photo shows my sister and me, castaways in the shift dresses Auntie Joanne gave us as going-away presents, sitting on swings, smiling wanly into the winter sun. I have expected a version of Hawai’i. Instead I get chilblains, something I’ve only ever read about in books about English girls sent to sadistic boarding schools.
When everyone has gone home after our welcome afternoon tea, we are left alone with Nana, Grandpa—Mum’s stepfather Scan—and Joey the budgie. Joey whistles but doesn’t talk, much like Scan. Nana wears tweed skirts, twinsets and hair “set” to within an inch of its life. She has lived a working-class existence bringing up her large family but thinks Keith Holyoake, the conservative National Party prime minister, is a gentleman. My mother tells me that she and any of her siblings who wished to vote Labour had to sneak off and do so in secret. Nana’s children adore her. You wouldn’t want to cross her.
“Shit!” she says. She’s burnt herself getting the tea out of the oven. We three children turn as one, eyes like saucers, to look enquiringly at our mother. We’ve never heard an adult swear.
Making a salad, Nana discovers the tomatoes that she cut up from the garden have vanished. Scan has accidentally chucked them out with the kitchen scraps. “Silly old fool,” she barks, and makes him go out into the night with a torch, crunching snails underfoot, and pick them out of the compost heap.
Nana’s place has two bedrooms. Scan and Nana share one. Mum is in the other with Jeffrey, who has an army cot. He has given up his “oing oing”, one of a long line of satin-fringed blankets he has stroked to shreds since he was a baby. Jeffrey wants to go home and has to be told we never are.
My sister and I sleep in the sunporch, where we huddle over a one-bar heater. “We wouldn’t notice the cold so much except there’s no central heating,” I write to Anne. “It’s just a matter of learning how to hop out of your clothes, into pyjamas, and into bed with a hot-water bottle in the shortest time possible. Rosalind has become very possessive towards the hot-water bottle.”
Our family are kind, inviting us over and taking us out, trying to make us feel at home. We have, of course, to go to school and they have to buy everything for us. My uniform for Westlake Girls consists of green blazer and jumper, white blouse, beret “and (don’t laugh) ‘stretchy grey stockings’“, I tell Anne. I don’t write about the green serge rompers we wear for sport: they are beyond my powers of description. My classmates roll them up until they look like hotpants. The uniform is rigorously policed via prefects and demerit marks. I start to have nightmares about arriving at school without gloves or the loathed white boater hat.
The culture shock is paralysing. In Canada we wore nylons and kitten heels and makeup. At Westlake we kneel on the gym floor so a teacher can see if our gym frocks breach the not-above-the-knee rule. In Canada there were boys. At Westlake a girl can be suspended for speaking to one on the way home from school.
We’re from overseas and therefore assumed to be backward: my mother probably didn’t think to bring our school records. My sister started Latin in Canada, so she is put in a good class. I am put in 3 General Academic for the last term, and next year into the even more disreputable 4 General Academic. There’s a girl in the class who gets picked up by a police car after school. Some of the others are filling in time until they turn fifteen and can leave by colouring in the noughts on the mimeographed daily notices. The ink on the notices has a delicious heady smell like gasoline.
The first day in 3 General a girl assigned to look after me points out everyone in the class who isn’t a virgin. “Do you let boys lie on you?” she says. I try to pretend I know why I would. Our aunts would have preferred us to go to Carmel College, the Catholic girls’ school. It’s possibly one of them who tells Mum that Westlake has the highest illegitimacy rate on the Shore. Mum stands firm. Her experience of nuns—being strapped at school for doing flips on the railings and showing her knickers—has put her off.
In some ways Westlake is a release from the social anxieties of my Canadian school, where you needed to worry about what you wore and whether a boy would ask you to the Friday night basketball game. But beneath our uniforms’ scratchy conformity lurks hormone-fuelled anarchy, a lot of it taking place in the no-man’s-land of the bottom field, where boys sneak down from Westlake Boys at lunchtime. The shenanigans are breathlessly related in maths class in t
he afternoon.
Our science teacher, a stout old trooper who doesn’t believe in bras, sometimes takes us to the field to look at nature while she murmurs Tennyson:
All his leaves
Fall’n at length,
Look, he stands,
Trunk and bough
Naked strength.
There are rumours she’s a nudist.
In the sixth form, I take German. It’s a strange choice, considering. But my father spoke German as well as Polish. When everyone brings their autograph books to school I tear out the message he wrote for me in Polish. I don’t want to have to explain who it’s written by, or where he is. I mean to keep it but it gets lost.
I know we are destitute. I try to make the most of the situation by casting myself as a girl who finds herself in romantically straitened circumstances, like Jane Eyre (“poor, obscure, plain, and little”) or Fanny Price in Mansfield Park. My mother is distracting herself by reading her way through the Brontes and Jane Austen, and I am following hard on her heels.
In Canada we had lived in the spiritual vacuum created when a lapsed Catholic marries an atheist Jew. Now religion is everywhere. Our aunts give us lacy black mantillas to cover our heads, and Catholic prayer books with lurid pictures of the Virgin Mary on their plastic covers. We’re taken to Mass at Milford’s little St Vincent de Paul Church. There’s something oddly erotic about submitting to the rituals of veil, holy water and incense, curtseying to the altar, and making the sign of the cross. The beauty of the Latin mass—”Dominus vobiscum / Et cum spiritu tuo”—lodges forever in my mind, like the Hebrew at Jerry’s bar mitzvah.
When some relatives return from overseas with a growing number of children, my family babysitting roster increases. I’m fascinated by the ways of this religious household. The living room has a holder for holy water. During Easter the pictures on the wall of the Blessed Virgin and the Bleeding Heart are covered with black cloths. The whole family kneels after dinner on Friday night and says the Rosary. There’s no television and nothing for me to do once the children are asleep but read books about how to tend the dying—”Make sure that a crucifix is placed within their view”—or the lives of the saints, where tortures such as being broken on a wheel are described: “And to make more exquisite her torment...”
For a while I imagine myself as Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’s Story. I’m trying to make a go of it although I think that all the proper families that surround us at Mass may not always be so perfect. The religious phase soon wears off. The sermons are not in Latin and they sound like a load of rubbish.
At Nana’s place there are also rules, unspoken but stringently observed. Mum has warned us never to mention Auntie June. Years later when Mum’s other sister Pam dies we know never to mention her name to Nana either. Pam and Nana lived a block apart but rarely saw each other when Pam became ill. It was too painful for them both, my mother thought.
It should be a clue to the way things are going that I also never hear Nana mention my father’s name. This is how she deals with things, along with sherry before dinner and, we will learn after she dies, an impressive amount of Valium.
Scan is an inscrutable benign presence pottering about the place. My mother’s memories of life after he came on the scene weren’t all good, but after watching him work three jobs during the Depression to help raise eight children, three of whom were not his own, she had come to admire him. He is often three sheets to the wind by early evening, having pedalled off on his ancient butcher’s bicycle in the afternoon to have a few beers at the Mon Desir. His youngest daughter Jill calls him affectionately “the cycling fool”.
One day I’m walking home from school with a couple of classmates when he comes upon us, pedalling erratically and whistling tunelessly, socks tucked into trousers and cap set at an inebriated tilt. My friends laugh: “Who’s that old nut?” I keep quiet and watch with mounting horror as he hops off his bike and begins to walk with us. I want the ground to open up, and am ashamed of myself for being ashamed.
In New Zealand they do things differently. “It’s impossible to go on a diet,” I write to Anne. “You get up and have breakfast, then have morning tea, then lunch, then afternoon tea, then ‘tea’ or dinner, then a cup of tea before bed.” I learn to eat cauliflower with white sauce, steak and kidney pie, and stewed tree tomatoes with cream. Everything is with cream. I’m too scared to say no. But even the spectre of Nana’s disapproval won’t make me try tripe. And once at Auntie Jill’s I see sheeps’ brains soaking in pink-tinged water, waiting to be cooked for dinner, and have to tell her I can’t eat them.
At night we gather in the lounge with a vague air of formality to watch television. Immediately after dinner it’s Coronation Street—old ladies in hairnets drinking steadily in a grey and blighted world. Nana loves The Black and White Minstrels and shocks me to the core by calling out, “Come on, it’s time for the nigger minstrels.”
We move into “the flat”—a prefab on Nana’s section that she normally lets out. We three children take the one bedroom, while Mum has a single bed by the door. We troop across the lawn to Nana’s to watch television.
We’re living here when Mum meets Stew. She’s working in accounts at Biss Thew Wine and Spirits, popularly known as “Piss and Spew”, and he is a dedicated customer. He comes one evening to take her to a movie. He’s an airline navigator. He’s from Vancouver. What are the odds?
Stew woos us with pound notes, and by cooking a North American treat, pork spare ribs, which he has had a butcher cut up especially. One night Mum rings from Stew’s place to say he is “very sick”. She has to sleep over to “take care of him”.
WE MOVE AGAIN, THIS TIME A FEW BLOCKS AWAY from Nana’s to 32 Muritai Road, a bach with dry rot just around the rocks from Thorn Bay. We are living our marginal lives on marginal territory, looking out every day to the surreal symmetry of Rangitoto Island, a sleeping volcano. The first night I can’t sleep for the roar of the sea sweeping the ragged edge of our front lawn where the beach begins. We are perched on the edge of the world. Our mother had shown us a map before we came: after New Zealand there is nothing. My father, who loves the beach, always wants to sit as far away from the other people on it as possible. He might like it here.
Around the scrubby patch of lawn at Muritai Road there are arum lilies and hydrangeas but not much else grows in the salt air. The bach belongs to two unseen spinsters, the Gunn sisters. There is a long inventory listing every bent spoon, chipped plate, and weapon in the vermin-fighting arsenal. I’ve never seen a mousetrap before. Once a seagull falls down the chimney and sits in the fireplace, as stunned to find itself there as we are.
That shack is our first real family home in Auckland. We have two bedrooms. One is for Mum. In the other there are two single beds with faded candlewick bedspreads and, across the bottom, a sort of stretcher for Jeff. The sheets are stiff and the rough army blankets smell of a second-hand shop, or perhaps of the mice we are somehow expected to exterminate. This is our third move in a year.
Next door live my mother’s cousin Ian and his wife Doff. I babysit for them too. When Ian and Doff have a gin and tonic in the evening they pour me one. Along the beach a bit is my grandmother’s sister, Great-aunt Alma. She and my Great-uncle Les, a lawyer, have a white deco house and three sons, John, Ian and Graeme.
White Christmas lilies grow wild. Nana won’t have them in the house because they remind her of funerals. In the backyard my mother hacks ineffectually at waist-high kikuyu grass and Tradescantia fluminensis, a persistent plant known as wandering Jew, with a rusty scythe she has found in the shed. Although she has her job at Biss Thew, because she also has children, no husband and a ropy backstory she is not allowed to rent a house, even a leaky bach, unless the documents are signed by a male relative acting as guarantor. She finds this humiliating but grits her teeth. She is a woman on her own, hacking out a new life for us with a blunt scythe.
Summer at this house seems like endless golden weather. From
the beach as the sun goes down you can see the pulsing beam from the lighthouse on the island of Tiritiri Matangi, thirty kilometres north-east across the water. It was built a century before we arrived. In 1965 it emits the power of eleven million candles. It gives me a weird yearning feeling, a lost world across the water, just out of reach. Later I will read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby looks longingly at that green light on the dock across the bay, where Daisy, his lost love, is. His tragedy is the thought the past can be recaptured if you try hard enough. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly...”There was a time when my father too believed in a future where the past could be redeemed. “One day you will fly to the moon!”
We are now the children of a solo mother, not that the term is used then: people just change the subject or make up stories. Mine is that our father is joining us from Canada, and as far as I know it’s true. Schoolmates keep asking, “When is your father coming?” After a while I don’t know what to say.
I am probably depressed. Mum is working six days a week, eight-thirty in the morning to six at night for fifty cents an hour. We are no longer parent and child but flatmates. I get drunk for the first time when she lets us have a bottle of beer on New Year’s Eve. A lady from up the road, also husbandless and largely toothless, comes over and drinks gin and tonic. Mum rarely drank in Vancouver; now she lets me start her cigarettes. “The girls”, as we are called here, have to shop, cook dinner and look after Jeffrey, who is running wild on the beach. The first time I boil potatoes they turn into a pasty sludge that runs into the sink when I try to drain them. At the Four Square up the road we pick up fish fingers on tick. “Tell your mother she needs to pay her bill,” the man behind the counter says one day. “Thirty shillings,” he calls after me as I slink away.
Somewhere around this time I devour Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, about people in Australia waiting to die from the fallout of a nuclear holocaust that has wiped out the rest of the world. They are alone in a beautiful empty landscape where the best available option is to kill yourself.
Driving to Treblinka Page 6