Unerringly the inner restlessness provokes a bodily one. The sense of conflict brings me to my feet and drives me stepping carefully among the fingers and toes on the floor. What exactly am I? To what world do I really belong? The intoxicating one of paint and music, memory and wine, or to this jagged-edged one of rough reality? To phantasy or to …. Small hands find mine or pull at my smock for everlasting attention. ‘Miss Poppoff, Twinnie’s she’s draween on my side!’ cries Twinnie.
‘Miss Vontopop,’ shouts Tame, ‘Bleedeen Heart he won’t learn!’
‘Make him then,’ I answer from one half of me while the other half, from its unease, sees a picture of a big boat steaming serenely out of the harbour of this country out into the open sea.
‘He won’t listen.’
‘Make him listen.’
‘I teached him and he won’t listen.’
With a sense of saving myself I cling to these accusations of Tame’s. Diligently I apply myself. Something tells me that this stormy pre-fab is the real and the right and the safe half of my world. ‘What did you say, Tame?’ I ask anxiously.
‘Bleedeen Heart he won’t learn! Bleedeen Heart!’
‘You’ll have to make him.’ These children will have to just teach each other for the time being. I’m busy.
‘Shall I biff him, or just teach?’
I haven’t got an answer for the moment and I look up across the sun-streaked prefab-full of vivid, black-haired life, to Bleeding Heart’s face smiling at us with that grand and enviable toleration of a situation, so wonderful in a Maori. I manoeuvre myself through the desks and blocks and bodies to where he holds his indulgent court. His mouth is the biggest thing in or out of this school and therefore his smile is too. Honestly it would be a shame to biff him.
‘Why don’t you learn, Bleeding Heart?’ I ask reasonably.
He leans back in mature relaxation, crossing his legs, and smiles back at me with far more wisdom than I’ll ever know.
‘Me, I’m dumb.’
Crash comes my laughter and in no time all the Little Ones have joined in. Gone is the picture of the pleasant laundry with my hands among the soap-suds and my mind to myself. Gone too is this regularly recurring picture of a big boat. I forget about the conflict within me and about how many worlds there are. I’m utterly lost in the present, and the time comes during the ensuing hour when I am back into my teaching on the surface level as usual, and working out on a lower level this interesting question of communication leading to understanding, and understanding to some degree of toleration, so that when silence falls, and loud yells bring me from my reading and writing groups, out into the spring frost, to find that dirty white Boy has gone home after a thrashing from brown Seven, I think, taking yellow Lotus up in my arms, that even this thrashing is communication of a kind and could lead to understanding of a kind and thence to a measure of toleration. After all Boy did apparently feel Seven’s hand, under whatever circumstances. Indeed I see not inconsiderable evidence that I should have allowed Tame’s biff.
Not that I believe the hiding sent him home; not the hiding alone. It may be just a rhythmic reaction to the passions of school. There may well be, in these first few months, a swing back sometime. But I could have tempered the retreat had I not been in this no-man’s-land between the week-end and school. I could have done the necessary comforting. But Boy is gone, and as an Infant Mistress I fail.
If there’s anything new in that. Fail seems to be my nom de plume: Miss Anna Fail. Pretty. I should use it when signing my cheques. I’ll put it on my Maori Books: ‘by Anna Fail’. Standing among the Little Ones outside in the trodden frost, and with infinitesimal Lotus in my arms I look back into those years of Inspectors … yes, as an Infant Mistress, I fail all right.
Although, as a person, I consider, I don’t. Fumbling back from another world, making the journey from phantasy to reality, is never an easy thing, and there is a … an allowable blindness. Still, brown sent home white and I have a ghost to lay.
I look across the frosty enclosure to the walnut tree beyond the pre-fab for Seven. He is a slight child with an uncommonly long face and big eyes like the children draw. He looks far more like a sad neurotic than the aggressor he is. His clothes, though expensive, are put on all ways; he has the same trouble as all the other little Maori boys of keeping his trousers up which hang half way to his feet, and his boots plain frighten you. But he comes when I call him, which means a lot to me, and in no time, as I kneel to his level holding Lotus on one knee, we are surrounded.
‘Was it you, little Seven, who thrashed Boy?’
‘No.’
‘Course!’ supplies the chorus. ‘Course’ is their abbreviation of ‘Of course’.
‘He was cheeky for me,’ defends Seven.
‘He dong him,’ supplies Tame. ‘He dong him and dong him and dong him.’
‘You liar!’
‘Not!’
‘Course!’
‘Not!’
‘Course!’
I straighten and take Seven by the hand. ‘Come in, Little One,’ I say, leading him into school. ‘Tame, you come in too for a mate for him.’
You don’t want to let them brood in loneliness. In fact you mustn’t let them brood at all. They’ll get enough of that anyway, later on. We don’t want more sad Annas than we can avoid. There’s only one thing to be done about Seven at this malleable age and I do it. I’ve got to start on this boy sometime, and force and punishment is not the answer. In the world behind my eyes I see a hazy picture of a volcano with two vents: one is creativeness and one is destructiveness. I sit the little chap gently down in his small desk with Tame beside him and give them each a board and clay.
Then I pick up my yellow spot of a Lotus and return to the crater of the infant room.
What was I thinking about … what was it that I was upset about now, when I first came over? I’ve no idea ….
Intoxicating ….
Just as intoxicating are these infants themselves. Silently the inebriation of ferment has glided into that of teaching; of the vitality about me, at my feet, in my arms, behind me and before. As the hour pulses on I lose myself in others; deeply in the personalities of others; more utterly than ever I do in the personality of brandy.
As for my breath, only Bleeding Heart smells that and he compliments me on my hair-oil.
Not everyone understands my artist’s smock, flared and short to the knees, with a tube skirt below, and Riti, who is new and only half-past four and God knows shouldn’t be here in the first place what with the rising numbers, takes most of the morning to work it out. However after hours of staring and following me about she at last sums it up.
‘Miss Vontopopp, your petticoat it’s showing.’
‘My apron’s pinched.’
Mark tugs at my red smock. He’s a little white boy who likes the right things in the right place at the right time.
‘Good.’
He stares up at me perplexed and I kneel to his level.
‘It’s not in my desk,’ he declares, ‘but I put it there.’
It is brown Matawhero who answers. He is fine-boned Maori and fine-minded, just like his grandfather the Chairman, and, like him, feels racial frictions. ‘You said, you said,’ he accuses Mark above the noise, ‘you said you were taking it home on Friday to get it washed.’ He misses nothing, just like his grandfather. ‘It’s at your place. It’s at his place, Miss Vorontosov!’ Ah! He can say my name ….
‘It’s not!’
Ah, Maori versus Pakeha. Which side am I on?
Matawhero slams down his book and stamps his way though the children to the porch and sure enough returns with the apron. ‘He didn’t even look for it,’ he splutters. ‘It was in his bag!’
All Maoris are thieves, I quote myself, to the Pakeha.
‘Miss Vorontosov,’ says white, nervous Dennis, with the classic whine of the incorrectly disciplined, catching me kneeling, ‘someone’s pinched my duster.’ How well his little t
ongue gets round my name!
‘I—I know where it is!’ sings out Matawhero. ‘It’s by the dead rat!’ He has big beautiful eyes in a big beautiful head, set on a small body, set on smaller legs, just like the Chairman. He slams down his book again with the resignation of an old man.
I look from one to the other. Dennis has the shifty eyes of the child thrashed too early by his mother, and the disgusting cleanliness of the respectable. He can’t dance like my filthy disobedient Tamatis. ‘Why,’ I say, ‘where is this dead rat?’
‘By the hole,’ answers Matawhero.
‘Where’s this hole?’
His voice rises in his Nanny’s exasperation with the Education Board when they stall over the improvement of the school buildings. ‘By the lavatory door, of course!’
I look from brown to white; whose side am I on? ‘He left it there!’ storms the Maori.
‘He didn’t look for it either!’ His English is considerably better than that of the Pakehas, and he fights with all the gusto of the Maori warrior. This is the way to stand up for the rights of the brown race. This is the way to wring buildings from the white Board.
‘I didn’t leave it there,’ lies Dennis conscientiously.
All Maoris are thieves and all thieves Maoris. Is that how the Board feels about our Maori school? Anyway whose side am I on in these racial interchanges? What colour am I?
What colour am I ….
I edge my way to the window and lean over the piano and look out over the long plains to the hills in the distance. I’m like those hills. They’re blue some days, and grey other days, and white in the early spring. It all depends on the weather ….
But they can both say my name!
‘What is it, what is it, Little One?’ I kneel to his level and tip his chin.
‘Thas why Seven he pinchded me. Seven.’
‘But he’s out in the shed. I sent him out there for kicking Hinewaka’s foot.’
‘He camed inside and pinchded me.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘In those shed. He camed inside and pinchded me.’
‘You don’t mean to say he came inside and pinched you then put himself back in the shed!’
‘Yeah. He camed inside and pinchded me.’
(1958)
A.P. Gaskell, ‘School Picnic’
Miss Brown dismounted at the school gate. She hoped the bicycle saddle was not making the seat of her tweed skirt shiny. It was damn good tweed and black-market prices were terribly high. She pushed her bike into the wood-shed and took her case off the carrier. Oh hell. … Joggling across those blasted sleepers had shaken open the powder-compact in her handbag. She shook it out and glanced at her watch. A quarter past and those damned Maoris had said they would be here at ten. Now after all her bustle she had to wait. As she lit a cigarette she noticed that she had chipped the varnish off one nail. Talk about roughing it.
She went round the front into the sunshine, unlocked the school door and entered. The sunlight was flooding the room through the windows and doorway, showing up the roughness of the match-lined walls and low ceiling. Little heaps of borer-dust lay on the desks, and as she entered a tiny stream of it filtered delicately down from the ceiling, through the slab of sunlight. The place some 30 years ago had been built as a cookhouse for the old sawmill, and no quantity of desks and blackboards, of ‘Rules for Writing’ or lists of ‘Joining Words’ could make it look like the city schools she was used to. It wasn’t even painted inside.
She dusted her chair and sat down, pulling impatiently at the now pinktipped cigarette. Me of all people, she thought, stuck away out here in this god-forsaken hole, and two weeks to go yet. I’m just halfway.
She had been sent to relieve for a month at this small King Country school, four miles ‘by cycle track’ from a station she had never even heard of. She had to board with the railway porter and bike it each day. The cycle track was simply a mark in the pumice that wound through the tea-tree and led to a crazy swing-bridge over the river. If she watched the boards as she bounced across, the water sliding beneath them made her feel dizzy as though she were falling sideways. The other half of the track was along the sleepers of an old bush tramway which wound through the scrub and blackberry above the river until it finally reached the clearing where the charred wreckage of the sawmill stood near the school. Beyond that, another swing-bridge led across the river to a flat wilderness of grey scaly tea-tree, fire-blackened in places. Somewhere in that mess of second growth the pupils lived. She often saw wisps of smoke rising against the bush on the hills at the back. Somewhere in there too the men were working. Sometimes she heard a lokey puffing, but where it was or what it was doing she neither knew nor cared. It was quite enough being expected to teach their snottynosed little Maori brats. She couldn’t bear to touch them. One of them smelled smoky, just like an old roll of bacon. Jabbering at her in their excited pidgin English.
And to crown it all the damned School Committee had to pick on this Saturday for their school picnic. The first time she had seen old Araroa and big fat Terari was the day she arrived. She had thought they were rather cute then. The two of them met her at the gate. Old Araroa was still very erect, white-haired, his face wrinkled like a dried apple, blue markings on his chin, his eyes looking so very old and brown and tired. He spoke softly to her in Maori, leaning on his stick and gesturing with his free hand. The skin was very dry and shiny and stretched tight over the bones. After the old man finished, Fatty rolled his eyes at her and said, ‘Hello, Miss Brown. The old man he say you be very happy here while the mahita away.’ Fatty wore an old hat, disgraceful pants that folded back under his belly, showing a filthy lining, and a thick black woollen jersey with short sleeves. His arms were bigger than her legs. He had long yellow teeth like a horse. He was so much like the comic Maori of the illustrated papers that she felt safe and reassured at once. But she wasn’t so pleased when they visited her again to tell her about the picnic. Fatty was rather excited himself at the idea. ‘We give the kids the jolly good picnic eh?’ he said. ‘The old man here he say pretty near time we give the kids the picnic. Have the feed eh, and the races. You don’t worry Miss Brown, we fix him all up. These jolly good worker these committee. We have him on Saturday.’
‘On Saturday?’ Of all days. Her voice was shrill.
‘Saturday,’ the old man whispered, and apparently satisfied, turned and walked off. Fatty stayed to reassure her. ‘You don’t worry Miss Brown. These committee fix him. You be here ten o’clock.’
And of course Saturday was the worst possible day. She had intended to have the day in Taumarunui, to go to the matinee and see Joan Crawford who always wore such stunning dresses and really did look wizard when she sat round sipping cocktails. She had really been looking forward to that. It was a pity Taumarunui was dry. She could do with a few spots herself to take away the taste of these last two weeks. Besides, she needed to have her hair set again, some of the rolls were coming out of place. At any rate she would feel a bit civilised again for a day at least.
She threw her butt in the empty fireplace. One of the schoolgirls usually cleaned the place. The sunlight outside was just pouring down and glinting off the pumice bank. She had to squint to see properly. Damn it, she should have brought her sunglasses. George didn’t like wrinkles.
How the gang at home would laugh if they could see me now, she thought, awaiting the pleasure of a tribe of Maoris. I wonder if George has thought of me at all. Lucky devils, I suppose they’ll all be going out on George’s launch again. They’ll probably have a few in by this time too, and boy, would I like to be the same. If it’s fine George will be taking them up to his crib. George was a nice job, beautifully muscled. He had dark wavy hair, white teeth, and he oiled his body before he lay in the sun. Sometimes he would let her do it for him. His swimming shorts were always tight around his small hips and flat stomach. He knew what he wanted and had a lot of fun. She was trying to do a line with George but the competition was so keen.
Still, just before he left she had thrown a spanner in Vonnie’s works. She told George there was a rumour that Vonnie had a dose. George would keep well clear of her. Anything like that, even people with skin trouble, made him feel sick.
A shadow darkened the doorway. ‘Hello, Miss Brown,’ cried Terari, his big belly bulging out above his pants. ‘You the first one here? Look nobody else here. You pretty keen on these picnic eh?’
‘You said ten o’clock, and look at it, nearly eleven.’ Her eyes focussed, hardened.
‘Crikey, that late? By golly I ring the bell. Wake them up. Those lazy Maori must sleep in eh? You can’t trust those Maori. Always late.’ A dark smell of sweat preceded him into the room. ‘You didn’t light the fire?’
‘I certainly didn’t light the fire.’
‘Nemind. We put him outside. If those fellow come you tell him off eh? They shouldn’t be late.’ He lumbered out and began striking the length of iron railing that hung from a tree near the door. The strong sound dinned and vibrated around her and rolled back off the hills. He was grinning in at her again. ‘Just like school eh? You give them the strap for late.’
She heard the sound of his axe at the back.
A small head was thrust round the doorpost. ‘Please Miss Brown.’
‘Hello Lena. Are you the first one? Have you got a clean nose this morning?’
Lena sniffed and licked her upper lip. She came shyly into the room, barefoot but clean, with her hair drawn back and plaited tightly. Two even smaller children stayed at the door looking in at the teacher.
‘Please Miss Brown, we gotta hundred pies.’
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 64