The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature

by Jane Stafford

  ‘Peaches and bloody cream!’ said Dad, thumping the table so his tea spilled. ‘There weren’t too many peaches around back in 1848 when her lot were gorging themselves in London while our lot ate grass, and don’t you forget it.’ Dad hated the Queen, Oliver Cromwell and Winston Churchill because of the Troubles and the Famine and because they-came-across-and-tried-to-teach-us-their-ways.

  ‘That’s years ago,’ said Mum. ‘Now turn around, Maura, so I can brush out the other side.’ Maura turned, glad to be relieved of the tight ringlet sausages which had dug into her scalp all night. ‘And what about during the war?’ said her mother, who was pink-cheeked today in her best crêpe de chine and ready for a fight. ‘They stayed in London didn’t they? They stayed with the people in the East End right through the Blitz and the Queen Mother even said she was glad the palace got bombed because then she could feel they were sharing the suffering.’

  ‘Suffering?’ said Dad. ‘What did she know about suffering, one of the richest families in the world and you know how they got there don’t you? Murder and betrayal and half of them illegitimate into the bargain, born the wrong side of the ….’

  ‘Shh,’ said Mum, her mouth tight-lipped round a blue satin ribbon. ‘Not in front of …. Hold still, Maura, for pity’s sake.’

  Dad drank his tea morosely. ‘Eating grass,’ he said. ‘Eating dirt, so some English bugger could go in velvet.’

  A final tug at the ribbon and Maura was released. ‘Well, are you coming or not?’ said Mum, driving a hat pin into her pink church hat, and Dad said he supposed he would, if she was that set on it, but he was damned if he was going to get dressed up. The Queen would have to take him in his gardening clothes or not at all, and Mum said, ‘Nonsense, you’re not leaving the house in that jersey, so go and get changed, there’s still time,’ but of course there wasn’t and they could hear the crowd roar like a wave breaking before they were halfway down the hill and they had to run and push even to find the place to stand by the Gardens gate.

  The Pipe Band was wheezing and wailing a few yards away and Maura would have liked to go and stand up close to watch the men’s cheeks puff and the rhythmic flap of their white duck feet and to feel her ears buzz with drum roll and drone. But they were inaccessible through a dense forest of legs and bottoms: fat, skinny, trousered, floralled and striped, milling about so that she felt as frightened and inconsequential as she had when she’d opened the gate at Grandad Forbes’s and the cows had pressed through before she’d been able to jump to one side, buffeting her in their eagerness to get to the paddock. She’d have liked an elephant ride on her father’s shoulders; other children swayed above the crowd clutching their flags and safe from harm, but their fathers didn’t have bad legs from the war, and she was getting too heavy for Mum to hold.

  ‘Don’t fuss, poppet,’ said Mum. ‘Just hang on tight. I’ll make sure you see her when the time comes.’

  Maura needed no instruction. Around her the huge bodies pressed and she took sticky hold of her mother’s skirt. The crowd noise was like static which tuned in snatches into God Save and cheering. (The Mayor’s wife was presenting the Queen with a white gloxinia called Majesty in a silver casket, Miss Croad told them next morning, and the Mayor, Mr Cudby, was giving the Prince a photo of the Begonia House to hang on the wall at Buckingham Palace.) Then the roar built like rain drumming and Mum stood tiptoe saying, ‘There she is, there she is! Maura, you must see properly, this is a Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity!’ And before Maura could protest she had scooped her up, and was tapping a man’s shoulder and asking, ‘Could my daughter get down to the front please?’ Handing her over like a parcel, passed from person to person till she stood at the very edge of the crowd where there was no coach and no horses and no limousine even but an ordinary man and woman walking along the road past the baths, talking sometimes to the crowd or waving, and the woman’s face was a bit like the Queen’s but not peaches and cream, and topped with an ordinary hat, not a crown. People were calling hurrah hurrah and the pipe band shrilled so Maura waved her flag uncertainly as the man and woman passed by and in a very ordinary way, exactly as anyone might, climbed up the stairs onto the train, turned and waved, and the train chugged (whooshaaah whooshaaah) away down the track.

  Then the crowd broke. Maura stood with her paper flag but no hand came down out of the press of bodies and no voice said, ‘Ah, there you are, Maura,’ lifting her up to safety. She was pushed and prodded, spun and stepped about until she found herself up against a floral arch and beyond it lay a smooth and empty lawn, so she went there, and once she was there she remembered the parrot and then Peter Pan and then the Begonia House where you could pick up fuchsias from the floor and wear them for earrings, and that was how she found the baby.

  It was like finding the kittens mewing blind and wriggling in the long grass by the sand pit, except that the baby’s eyes were open and it waved its hands sticky and streaked with cream but perfect just the same with proper nails. Maura took her hanky and spat on it as her mother did for a lick and a promise and wiped at the baby’s dirty cheek. The baby turned instantly to her finger, opened its pink toothless mouth and sucked. Maura was entranced. She gathered the baby up as she had gathered the kittens, tucked firmly inside the dirty cardigan, and carried her discovery out into the sun.

  (1992)

  How to Live Elsewhere

  Whether it is a characteristic of New Zealand in the 2000s or not, this section is marked by works that are quiet, carefully structured and intellectually complex. Writers of both poetry and prose are alert to patterns of everyday speech, to life in the world—the domestic, the communal and the national—although they might write of them in ways that are sidelong and indirect.

  There is an awareness of the experience of living in places other than New Zealand and of the ubiquitous presence of the foreign in the familiar. The world outside is an ever-present context for reflection and self-definition, and it is a world that is conceived of as both dangerously alien and reassuringly human. At the same time, the position of the newcomer, the immigrant and the sojourner here acts as focus for and a critique of more familiar and complacent narratives. Writing is concerned with what the immigrant brings to the new place, what fits and what does not.

  As in earlier decades, writers go back to the colonial past for their subject matter but as a way of reinventing literature or unsettling history, not as a homage or a record but as a source of something new and often disquieting. The political is often implied but far less overtly present than in previous decades.

  Traditional subjects of the poetic—love and death, memory and change—are registered often in a manner that is unashamedly lyrical, playful and accommodating in contrast to the fractured and sometimes rebarbative postmodern tone of preceding decades. Writing still concerns itself with the marvellous and its limits but those limits might be found in a suburban garden rather than in some strenuously manufactured fictional realm.

  Living Here

  Paula Green, ‘Waitakere Rain’

  Ernest Hemingway found rain to be

  made of knowledge, experience

  wine oil salt vinegar quince

  bed early mornings nights days the sea

  men women dogs hill and rich valley

  the appearance and disappearance of sense

  or trains on curved and straight tracks, hence

  love honour and dishonour, a scent of infinity.

  In my city the rain you get

  is made of massive kauri trees, the call of forest birds

  howling dark oceans and mangroved creeks.

  I taste constancy, memory and yet

  there’s the watery departure of words

  from the thunder-black sand at Te Henga Beach.

  (2004)

  Anne Kennedy, ‘Whenua (1)’

  In a flowerpot in the yard they buried her whenua

  buried her jelly whenua in temporary

  accommodation, its uncomplaining nature

&
nbsp; rewarded by being put on a waiting list for

  next Saturday. The sun shone, the rains came

  petals fell and webs collected raindrops

  for the poor and all the while the whenua

  waiting for its dream home carried on its

  wormy business, its wormy pilgrimage knows

  no waiting list, no slow lane. Meantime

  she sucks hard, sleeps hard, rearranges

  the furniture, considers herself at home in

  her new pad, the world. Her first

  Papatuanuku reduced to a red-earth island

  baked, bonsaied, ignominious. The ancient

  boy’s rested Up North in silent ground, bleeding

  into the organic cycle of silences—totaraed.

  Every trip they planned to get hers Up There

  turned to custard—car, storm, sickness—all the while

  the whenua getting runnier and runnier.

  They were trying to sell the house but nobody

  wanted to buy it. The father said, It’s the whenua

  it’s keeping us here. They looked out at the little pot

  growing in the yard, and the baby in her highchair

  with her baby’s heart-melting disregard

  for past tense. In the end they went for urban iwi

  Waipareira Trust kind of thing. Friday afternoon

  drove the earthernware pot and the children

  out to the West Coast, Karekare, staggered

  down, down to the waterfall and its lovely pool.

  The father dug a hole and tipped her derelict

  home and income into the ground, planted

  a cabbage tree from Up North on top—

  karakia, waiata, then dusk began to fall. It fell

  quickly. They gathered up kids, spade, ascended

  the track, a race against dark, the bush darkening.

  Soon it would be black as a cat and they’d be

  stuck there. Couldn’t see the path, instead felt

  its bony twigs and previous souls. At the top they can

  just see their car, a meaty blob blacker than old liver.

  Drive home, slightly ruffled, lucky, foolish

  to expect the day to wait for them. Nothing

  waits. The mother fretted a bit about the girl’s

  whenua left there in the dark, in the lonely

  beautiful place, and understood for the first time

  place isn’t prettiness, isn’t a tinkling waterfall

  (and remembered the Pogues—I met my love

  by the gasworks wall, dreamed a dream

  by the old canal). Back to their whenua-less yard

  her little world gone off to seek its fortune.

  Next day the house sold. Good. But the mother

  is niggled by the whenua, leaves it there for years

  without visiting, and anyway the winding road

  makes the kids sick. It becomes mythical

  the pool, the waterfall, her abandoned atoll.

  (2003)

  Anne Kennedy, ‘Blackout’

  There was a brass rod with singing

  rings across the porch, empty of

  curtaining since the war, when a light

  might have drawn a Japanese

  bomber. The warless girl was curious

  about this pole, and asked and was told

  over and over (how they wanted to tell!)

  of the skeletal remains of evenings

  abob in a ship at sea and brothers

  and their best man shot dead the first

  day out—never forget the brass rod

  emphasis, underlining the document

  of their war. In the middle of

  so many sleepless nights mother

  and baby had long lost count

  in both the numerical method and the

  baby method of the here and now

  (in the middle of both the nights and

  the sequence of nights that ran into

  years) it occurred to the mother that

  the baby was connected to documents

  as if she had things written on her body

  notes, ideas, and the mother wished

  she hadn’t. (No, no, that’s not true

  there were no fancy ideas

  only the time of night.)

  (2003)

  John Newton, ‘Trout-fishing and Sport in Maoriland’

  1

  When I got home from the cricket match

  your light was still showing, upstairs in the big house.

  I wanted to wade through the long grass towards you,

  advertised by sheepdogs, by frogs shutting down.

  I wanted to get it all out in the open

  but of course I was blind drunk, I don’t remember anything.

  Kneeling, you made yourself child-sized

  and caught kokopu with me on a bent pin.

  I wanted you to open up the wound in my mouth

  but when you took out your pocket-knife I thought better of it.

  A green beetle was trapped in the wipers.

  You dream of places where there are no fish.

  When the barbed wire spiked me through the sole of my gumboot

  you cried out in sympathy and hurried towards me.

  The wire-strainer lifted the skin off your hand.

  I was so scared I ran home effortlessly.

  2

  In the fireplace the chilled, mis-mothered lamb

  coughed and came tentatively back to life.

  The feeding tube reached to the pit of its stomach.

  A thrush puffed out its chest in the rain.

  The woolly ewe laboured the length of the swim dip

  blowing shitty scotch-broth-coloured water through her nose.

  The lamb in the black lamb’s skin was suckled

  by the black lamb’s mother, who mistook it for her own.

  Ahead of the mower a hare broke cover;

  ears tall as antlers, it sprang through the clover.

  Smell of the grain shed: sweet and mousey.

  Waxeyes dripped through the five-finger leaves.

  We trailed our hands in the clover seed

  as it flowed from the belly of the harvester.

  The wasps’ nest was hidden in the scrub like a city.

  Schoolfish lifted in the windows of the waves.

  3

  All day you worked alone crutching lambs

  in your scruffy idiosyncratic way.

  Somebody’s got to do the work around here.

  You could hear the river now above the rain.

  Old Hand-Newton, we thought he was Danish, that he

  couldn’t speak English, he was so reserved.

  The old man by now was only fishing for exercise.

  Hidden, his left hand burned to a stump.

  Old Terry Hebberd took you under his wing,

  which was just as well: you were green as grass.

  You sat on the road with your field glasses

  blasting stragglers out of the bluff.

  The smoke from the gorse fire, rich and oily,

  boiled off the hillside in a chocolate plume.

  A possum wandered out with its fur on fire.

  The seed fell like gold and purple stars among the charred limbs.

  4

  A photograph: rubbing your hands in glee,

  as if to say, Let’s all get absolutely hammered.

  A kodachrome with a litter of pups.

  Of course he could be charming when he set his mind to it.

  The big eel was following a plume of blood, it had blue

  skin, the water was clear as gin.

  Where have you been for the last hour?

  The five-thirty dash to the pub from Craiglochart.

  You broke the worm at its fatty saddle

  and threaded it on to the suicide hook.

  The hook tore through the webbing of the hand.

  The butterfish had been picke
d to the bone.

  When morning arrived you were missing in action,

  pegged out by the fenceline like an old sack,

  frost-flowers bristling in the weave of your jumper.

  Thistles sprang up in the bulldozer tracks.

  5

  She sat you down and dictated the letter:

  you copied it, meekly, in your spidery hand.

  The taps in the washhouse were choked with ice.

  Christ, would you listen to that woman talk!

  In Canada did you feel more free

  than in the dark of winter at the top of Lake Hawea?

  A frozen landscape, a bush clearing,

  colourless, nothing but the smoke of your breath.

  You woke staring up at the lid of your coffin—

  flaked out in the back of the car, the cream

  leatherette, the upholstery buttons.

  It was simpler to spend the night where you were.

  And when your father fell off his chair,

  tell me, did you ‘right’ him or not?

  When you came out of the RSA

  you had lost the gamecock feather from your hat.

  6

  You wired a cable to the laird of Tongue.

  You happened to be dummy so you took the call.

  Skylarks flew overhead at midnight while you fished.

  The sand at night was deliciously cool.

  There was splendid bathing to be had in the canal.

  The sport was everything you might have wished.

  The professor was a small man with an icy manner.

  The black silk line ran singing from the spool.

  The crayfish in the stockpot bubbled bad-temperedly.

  The gurnard skulls were threaded through the eyes.

  The tiny red rock cod stung like a scorpion.

  The porcupine fish had been washed up for days.

  The parrot fish hovered on its scarlet fins.

  The sea lice were buried in the flounder’s gills.