No, I said, except that maybe it’s not in the right place.
Of course it must have sounded like one of my wisecracks, but I was thinking of Dalmatia.
Anyhow Mrs Crump said she’d stood enough from me, so when I’d finished my tea I could go.
I wasn’t sorry. I stood on the road and wondered if I’d go up to Nick’s place, but instead I walked into town, and for a good few days I never left off drinking.
I wanted to get Nick out of my mind. He knew what he was talking about, but maybe it’s best for a man to hang on.
(1940)
Fretful Sleepers: After the War
If the 1930s saw the formulation of an ‘anti-myth’ in which colonial confidence in the blessedness of the settler society was demolished, the 1950s saw a broader attack on the complacencies of a newly materially confident world. Without jettisoning the cultural nationalists’ desire for attention to the ‘local’ and the ‘special’, writers in this period feel, as part of that attention, a sense of discomposure, of threat behind everyday normality, of local mores characterised by a hatred of difference and a tolerance of persecution, a sense of a larger world of history excluded by suburban complacencies.
In this schema, the writer becomes both outsider and social activist, excluded by the puritanical and conformist codes of the mainstream yet with a responsibility to castigate the population at large. Romanticism is an influential mode, with its celebration of the social outcast, its notion of the poet as both seer and critic, as well as its lyrical concentration on the nexus between the poet and the landscape. The beauty of the natural world, its superiority to any man-made social grouping, and its fundamental inaccessibility are both celebrated and deplored.
It is logical in this literature that the teacher becomes a vehicle of social commentary: part of the community yet separate from it; with a role to educate and discipline yet as an educated individual profoundly uncertain about the values they are professionally expected to defend; uneasily representative of culture at a time when notions of culture are embattled and defensive.
While some writers in this section deal with the domestic present and their place within it, others are still finding ways to express their experience of the Second World War: in descriptive terms, its trauma and dislocation; in moral terms, its challenges and discriminations; and in literary terms, whether to attempt realistic re-creation or whether to deal with it only obliquely.
The writers of this period express discontent with the idea of nation as promoted by the cultural nationalists of the previous two decades. Yet they are acutely aware of the flaws in the complacent nationalism of the mainstream. And as the experience of war recedes so the necessity of designing the post-war nation presents itself.
This is the point at which new voices begin to emerge. There is, in contrast to the cultural nationalist period, a more comfortable although still not entirely licensed place for women writers. And the experience of Māori writers, significantly here as part of the professional classes of teachers and nurses and public figures, makes a tentative start on what will by the 1970s be a major strand of New Zealand writing.
Suburbia
James K. Baxter, ‘Ballad of Calvary Street’
On Calvary Street are trellises
Where bright as blood the roses bloom,
And gnomes like pagan fetishes
Hang their hats on an empty tomb
Where two old souls go slowly mad,
National Mum and Labour Dad.
Each Saturday when full of smiles
The children come to pay their due,
Mum takes down the family files
And cover to cover she thumbs them through,
Poor Len before he went away
And Mabel on her wedding day.
The meal-brown scones display her knack,
Her polished oven spits with rage,
While in Grunt Grotto at the back
Dad sits and reads the Sporting Page,
Then ambles out in boots of lead
To weed around the parsnip bed.
A giant parsnip sparks his eye,
Majestic as the Tree of Life;
He washes it and rubs it dry
And takes it in to his old wife—
‘Look Laura, would that be a fit?
The bastard has a flange on it!’
When both were young she would have laughed,
A goddess in her tartan skirt,
But wisdom, age and mothercraft
Have rubbed it home that men like dirt:
Five children and a fallen womb,
A golden crown beyond the tomb.
Nearer the bone, sin is sin,
And women bear the cross of woe,
And that affair with Mrs Flynn
(It happened thirty years ago)
Though never mentioned, means that he
Will get no sugar in his tea.
The afternoon goes by, goes by,
The angels harp above a cloud;
A son-in-law with spotted tie
And daughter Alice fat and loud
Discuss the virtues of insurance
And stuff their tripes with trained endurance.
Flood-waters hurl upon the dyke
And Dad himself can go to town,
For little Charlie on his trike
Has ploughed another iris down.
His parents rise to chain the beast,
Brush off the last crumbs of their lovefeast.
And so these two old fools are left,
A rosy pair in evening light,
To question Heaven’s dubious gift,
To hag and grumble, growl and fight:
The love they kill won’t let them rest,
Two birds that peck in one fouled nest.
Why hammer nails? Why give no change?
Habit, habit clogs them dumb.
The Sacred Heart above the range
Will bleed and burn till Kingdom Come,
But Yin and Yang won’t ever meet
In Calvary Street, in Calvary Street.
(1960)
Mary Stanley, ‘The Wife Speaks’
Being a woman, I am
not more than man nor less
but answer imperatives
of shape and growth. The bone
attests the girl with dolls,
grown up to know the moon
unwind her tides to chafe
the heart. A house designs
my day an artifact
of care to set the hands
of clocks, and hours are round
with asking eyes. Night puts
an ear on silence where
a child may cry. I close
my books and know events
are people, and all roads
everywhere walk home
women and men, to take
history under their roofs.
I see Icarus fall
out of the sky, beside
my door, not beautiful,
envy of angels, but feathered
for a bloody death.
(1953)
Louis Johnson, ‘Song in the Hutt Valley’
Cirrus, stratus, cumulus,
Gentle or giant winds
Invoke the trees and cabbages;
The rising jet-trail finds
Space out of sight of valleys
Where the muddy rivers run
Past houses, groves and alleys
In the residential sun.
The placid eaves of evening
Purpled by homing sun
Pay little heed to reckoning
Broadcast by weathermen.
Houses still grow, the children
Like cabbages are seen;
Grandfather’s thoughts are hidden
Upon the bowling green.
The sky’s as much ambition
As anyone could eye,
Forecasts of nimbus, aeroplane
Pass over and pass by;
Tucked up at home, the passive
Who own their plot of ground
Sleep though the radio-active
Have a new formation found.
While history happens elsewhere
And few of us get hurt
Why should Grandad wish for hair
To line his sporting shirt?
His heart’s at one with the children,
He can be overlooked
And left to play in the garden,
His place in heaven’s booked.
The weather is established;
It will be wet—or fine—
The houses all are furnished—
In the styles of ’forty-nine.
No need to worry, hurry;
The questionmarks will keep;
The clouds and airmen marry
And the boisterous children sleep.
(1954)
Unhomely
Louis Johnson, ‘Magpie and Pines’
That dandy black-and-white gentleman doodling notes
on fragrant pinetops over the breakfast morning,
has been known to drop through mists of bacon-fat,
with a gleaming eye, to the road where a child stood, screaming.
And in the dark park—the secretive trees—have boys
harboured their ghosts, built huts, and buried treasure,
and lovers made from metallic kisses alloys
more precious, and driven the dark from pleasure.
A child was told that bird as his guardian angel
reported daily on actions contrived to displease;
stands petrified in the sound of wings, a strangle
of screams knotting his throat beneath the winter leaves.
Look back and laugh on the lovers whose white mating
made magpie of dark; whose doodling fingers swore
various fidelities and fates. They found the world waiting,
and broke the silence. A raven croaks ‘Nevermore’
to their progenitive midnight. The guardian is aloof
on his roof of the small world, composing against morning
a new, ironic ballad. The lover has found small truth
in the broken silence, in faith, or the fate-bird moaning.
(1952)
Mary Stanley, ‘Morepork’
Morning will never come nor light return;
But in the dark and drift of time this tree
Is night, a tent for the uneasy sleep
Of strangers. In his high pulpit the owl
Broods on a congregation of thieves,
Their honour threadbare in the pinching cold.
With the holy fire of his eye he keeps the door
Of each separate dream and in the secret ear
He’ll preach a sermon of despair. Forewarned
One sleeper knows for the least moment
That last when the heart stops; puts out a hand
To brush away the covetous soft worm.
Prophet or soothsayer, terrible bird in a tower
Of leaves, crying repentance to the wind,
What is the antique rite you celebrate?
What strange gods wait in the black branches?
We have forgotten their names and attributes,
And they are angry, making our thin skin sweat.
Hearing your voice out of the great tree
In a long night full of claws and eyes,
We crouch at the first fire and are afraid.
(1958)
Mary Stanley, ‘Sestina’
The body of my love is a familiar country
read at the fingertip, as all children learn
their first landscape. This is the accepted face
secure of harm, in whose eye I am at home
and put on beauty as the thorn in autumn wears
its bright berry, the sky its haycock summer of cloud.
And here in a miracle season no storms cloud
our halcyon day nor prophet stains a green country
with wry mouth twisted to what vision wears
his own griefs. Music is struck off rocks, we learn
the sun ripening behind walls of flesh, the bird called home
pilgrim tracing with sure wing a world’s face.
He whom I love is more near than this one face
shaped for me at my beginning, dispersed like cloud
in death’s careless weather. At the end we come home
to the same bed, fallen like stones or stars in a country
no one travels. Only the mindless winds learn
our history, yet for us each man his mourning wears.
We are what we have been. The living creature wears
like trees his grain of good and evil years. The face
is schooled by daily argument of pain to learn
disguises for the private wound. None knows what country
lies under the shut skull, or dazzling beacon of cloud
beckons the always outcast through stubborn exile home.
This dear shell, this curve my hand follows, is home
also to the stranger I may not meet, who wears
deeper than tears his secret need. He walks a country
I cannot touch or reach, where the remembered face
burns under brittle glass of winter, and every cloud
holds in its core of ice the dream I may not learn.
Or is he Orpheus, leaving my daylight kingdom to learn
Eurydice for whom he enters the dark god’s home?
Hermes, show him this woman, in her cerecloth cloud
of sleep! She is not prey to the subtle worm which wears
already at my cheek. No word unlocks her face
or voice answers him out of that silent country.
Yet always we ride out winter and the face
of famine. We return, and O then morning wears
mountains, our signal joy climbing a cloud.
(1953)
J.C. Sturm, ‘The Old Coat’
Mrs Simmons and I were standing in the kitchen one summer evening talking about domestic matters. The day’s work was done, the dinner dishes cleared away, the children in bed, and the house was quiet and warm after the heat of the afternoon. So it was with some irritation that I heard a knocking noise which sounded as though it were coming from the children’s room. Bother, I interrupted the conversation, I thought the children had settled down long ago, and went on talking to Mrs Simmons. But the noise persisted and grew louder as though someone were trying to open a drawer that had stuck. Heavens, I said, whatever is it, I’m sure the children couldn’t make a noise like that. I’d better go and see. Then I was stopped by the look on Mrs Simmons’ face and felt the first prickles of fear moisten the palms of my hands.
I wouldn’t go if I were you, she said quietly, I’m afraid it’s another visitation. It has happened before, you know. But we’ll be all right if we just stay here.
Another what? I asked; but by this time the commotion was so great the house felt as though it were being moved from its very foundations, and nothing could have persuaded me to go into the next room. In fact if it hadn’t been for Mrs Simmons I would have bolted out the back door to the nearest neighbour.
Just be quiet, she whispered, and I promise you everything will be all right; but at that moment there was a noise up the passage like a runaway horse, and the door of the adjoining breakfast room which opened into the passage was thrown violently back on its hinges. I had no time to see anything more than a dark blur as Mrs Simmons threw herself at the door separating the two rooms and slammed it shut.
Quick, she gasped, help me! We must keep it shut. Now Mrs Simmons was a small frail old lady and I am no heavy weight, but together we managed to hold that door although there was no catch, let alone a lock. I don’t know how we did it, but afterwards looking back, I guessed it must have been sheer strength of purpose. The effort seemed to go on for hours, and then suddenly we realised that the noise had stopped and
the unseen force on the other side of the door had given out.
I leant against the door and listened. The house was quiet once more. I looked around. Everything was just as it had been. Everything, that is, except for one thing. Near the floor, caught in the doorway, was a piece of dark material. Once again I felt my palms prickle and moisten as I stooped to have a closer look, but to my surprise I recognised it as only being part of an old coat which we used as a rug for sitting on outside. It was usually kept hanging behind the door of a small lumber-room at the end of the passage next to the children’s room. This was a damp-smelling dark corner of the house, on the south side, stacked with unused furniture, old pictures, boxes of old clothes, empty trunks and suitcases, old magazines, and discarded shoes. It was periodically invaded by bush rats and large spiders, and the ceiling was stained with water marks where the roof had leaked.
Look, I whispered to Mrs Simmons. What do you think of this? Do you think we dare open the door a crack? We did so very cautiously, ready to slam it again immediately if need be. But the breakfast room was empty and nothing out of place, only the old coat lying on the floor.
Well, I said, whoever the visitor was has gone and left their disguise behind them; and I stepped into the room.
I think we had still better stay here, said Mrs Simmons; but I wasn’t listening to her. I was looking down at the coat and thinking of all the impositions and mockeries and pretences and lies and bad jokes I had ever known of or experienced my self—no more than the ordinary person by any means—but their accumulated weight suddenly pressed down on me as never before and I felt such a rage of indignation I thought I must choke or give it expression. I took that coat and shook it and tore it, and flung it against the walls and trampled it till I could do no more.
As I came to my senses an awful thought struck me—the children, good God, the children. I snatched a kitchen knife out of the drawer, brushed aside Mrs Simmons who had been watching me in amazement and apprehension, and rushed through the breakfast room into the passage. Again that sensation in my hands and a tightness in the chest when I saw the children’s door open. The room was empty and the children sleeping peacefully, but I knew immediately that whatever it was had been there: its presence still clung to the room like the smell of some dirty animal. Once more that rage took possession of me, and the hunted turned hunter, I stormed up and down the passage, and in and out of rooms like a mad thing. I stood beside doors shouting to it to come out, and slashed and stabbed with my knife at shadows in the corners. I was both afraid and elated, prepared to grapple with any monster no matter what the outcome. But I found nothing, only the old coat which always seemed to be lying on the floor behind me. In this manner I wore myself out, the flood of fear and desire for vengeance receded, and I was once more an ordinary person in an ordinary house on a quiet summer evening.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 56