Home Truth

by HarperCollins Publishers

  The railway towns of the deep south, Dunedin and Timaru, are familiar from Frame’s autobiography. In the North Island she is associated with a number of sites. And then you read a novel like Living in the Maniototo (the ‘bloody plain’ which I thought might be an imaginary place but isn’t) and discover she has colonised New York and Berkeley, California. Anywhere can be home to the novelist’s imagination.

  Charles Brasch’s white ships that lie smoking beside the quays: for generations they were what took you home, if you lived in the antipodes. In 1939 my aunt Mary went home to England, some twenty-seven years after she had left it as a girl of ten or twelve, on a ship that had sails and steam. She came hurrying back to her real home when war was declared, and tried to enlist with the armed forces. She was a nurse, but they refused to take her on the grounds of her flat feet, which annoyed her—she saw them as a badge of her profession. If she had been accepted she’d likely have been among those nurses who were shot on the beach of Banka Island by the Japanese, as a number of her friends were. Twenty-two nurses who survived the sinking of the ship on which they were being evacuated from Singapore were made to wade waist-deep into the sea and then machine-gunned. Only one woman survived; she was shot but played dead. That was St Valentine’s Day, 1942. Other nurses from the ship were washed ashore on other beaches but they all ended up in the hands of the Japanese and spent the rest of the war in concentration camps.

  Mary lived all her life until she retired in nurses’ homes; she found it perfectly satisfactory. For many years she was matron and had her own quarters in them. Nurses’ homes don’t actually exist any more; young women don’t want to live in them. Hospitals sell them and developers turn them into bijou apartments; that’s what has happened in my home town of Newcastle.

  Not quite thirty years later I made the same voyage as my aunt, on a great white ship, round the coast of Australia, across the Indian Ocean to Ceylon as it was then, and India, and up through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. The great white ship—called the Himalaya—slid slowly into scented tropical ports—did I actually smell the air, or did I get the idea from Conrad, with his scents of spices drifting far out to sea, seducing the young man on his first voyage into exotic waters? The harsh bright colours of desert towns. All the tiny bum boats sallying out, the lads gazing upward, offering all manner of things for sale. We didn’t want to buy anything, and you could see the disappointment on their faces; these rich people, sailing in such luxury, it should mean nothing to us to be lavish to them. And of course compared with them we were rich, whatever we were in the context of that floating palace. And then through the Mediterranean to England, to dock at Tilbury. Remembering that was where Elizabeth I rallied her troops against the Spanish Armada. I did not see myself as going home, having been brought up a good Australian girl and proud of it. But I knew I was going to the home of my forebears, and of my language, and of my literature.

  The defining thing was, we had a baby; Lucy was about five months old when we travelled. We went to Cambridge and lived in a flat in Barton Road, in a set of handsome enough apartments which belonged to King’s College. It was an odd mixture of the grand and the exiguous: the rooms were big, there was an enormous white tiled pantry, the gas stove belonged in a museum, the only heating was a small gas fire interred in the large living room. The glass front door opened on to a long passage that led to the small lavatory. Lucy was at the clingy stage, where she did not like to let me out of her sight, so when I went to the loo I had to sit her on the floor outside it, with the door open, and hope nobody came to the front door.

  There were apple trees in the garden, and I used to cut the mothy bits out and puree them; Lucy ate a lot of apple puree. In those days you travelled with vast trunks so you could buy things and take them home. I’ve still got a set of orange enamel plates that we now use for picnics but which were essential housekeeping then. A brown Arabia fireproof dish that wasn’t. Not many things, in fact: we were too thrifty. I used to make a potato pie, a case of mashed potato filled with cubes of mortadella and gruyere cheese, in the brown dish, out of Elizabeth David’s Italian Food; it was good, and cheap compared with meat. I must do it again. I was too scared to light the gas stove, which exploded with a whump every time; Graham would do it for me.

  Our flat was a pleasant one, and though freezing cold it did get some sun. I became friends with a young woman in another flat, who had a child slightly older, and whose husband taught at the King’s Choir School, sports, or PE, some such; she had damp crawling over her walls, which froze in winter. I didn’t know much about damp, I’d never come across any, but frozen damp I knew was something special.

  Once a week Graham dined in King’s, and I stayed at home and ate brown bread and honey and read a book, which was a treat. Once I dined at King’s too, at high table; we had pheasant. The post-graduate students had chicken and the undergraduates had lamb chops. A distinct hierarchy, but who knows which was nicest? We had OK wine with dinner but afterward in the wine room we had superb old clarets and burgundies with bananas and dried fruits.

  Does this sound like a happy time to you? It was to me. We were a very snug unit, myself, my husband, our beautiful baby. The English winter was harsh, we had no television, or washing machine, and no need of a fridge though there was one, but we were young, we loved one another, we had fun. Sometimes Graham brought home a fine old bottle of wine cheap from the King’s Cellar; they sold them at cost price to members. He bought them from the buttery, which means the butler’s pantry. We went to the market and bought fen celery, short, nutty, sweet. To the game shop; once we cooked a chicken that had lead shot in it; we made jokes about hunting down wild chicken, but guessed that maybe a fox had got into the henhouse and the farmer had shot the chook accidentally. This is all the stuff of stories that make a lifetime together, that become the narratives of a couple and a family. Do you remember, you say, and you dwell in that other country, the past, for a little while. When you were that other self, young. We went to plays and art galleries and movies, and drove around in the Standard Vanguard that we had bought for fifty pounds. We went to Grantchester to see if the church clock still stood at ten to three, as in Rupert Brooke’s poem, but couldn’t have tea because it wasn’t open in the winter. Graham had Pevsner’s book on Cambridgeshire and we followed that like a bible. We searched out Norman churches and Gothic cathedrals and wool towns and old villages with streams and ancient arched stone bridges.

  Once we drove to Canterbury and looked at the cathedral, then went into a teashop. We left the pram outside, an enormous folding Australian affair that people were always stopping us in the street to ask enviously about, and carried Lucy in our arms. Afterward we thoughtlessly got into the car and drove home. Not until we got there did we remember the pram, left outside the teashop. Panic: we could not afford to lose it. Graham rang up the Canterbury police, who were pleased to hear from us, since they were supposing that there had been a kidnapping, given that they had an empty pram. He had to go by train next day and get it, crushed in the crowded underground with this unwieldy massive object.

  Christmas came, and we had a tree. I love cold Christmasses. Lucy’s first real word was pretty, pretty, because there were so many sparkly interesting things to point out to a small child. I could walk into town, or catch a bus; it was a fair hike, but easier than trying to hold the baby in one arm while I folded the pram with the other, especially if I had any parcels.

  Toward the end of our stay I went into a dress shop called the Birdcage, which was all of a twitter because Rita Tushingham, who’d just become famous in the movie A Taste of Honey, had been in and bought three dresses. I settled for a Mary Quant crocheted bonnet which I thought was very swinging sixties. I went back to Australia in mini-skirts and lace stockings with flat strappy shoes.

  We were at home in Cambridge; our small snug unit made a cosy home in that cold flat. And it set the pattern for all our travelling. We would go overseas for a year at a time—sabbatical lea
ves, renting out our house, needing to stay a decent length of time to make the fares economical—and live as a family, keep house. I have never been a backpacker, never hitchhiked, never done the Kombi van thing round Europe. Always when we went overseas we set up a new home, and lived like the locals. Small cheap flats in Paris, never much money, going to the market, being thrifty. The French used to admire thrift, they were always sympathetic. The kids went to school, eventually; sometimes we had a schoolgirl to babysit. To this day I like going to a place to stay, first of all setting out to the shops and bringing home food, putting fruit in a bowl, books on the tables, working out how this will be our place for a little while. When I have made a meal for us, however simple, bread and cheese quite likely, I know we are a family and this is our place. Now it is John and I who are family in this manner.

  In one dull flat in Paris, whose walls were a dreary cream, not a picture or an object on them, though there was a hook, I hung a long jumper I had that was brightly coloured and patterned. When I chose to wear it, the room suffered. That was the apartment in the rue St Jacques with a corner-wise view of the Val de Grâce’s silvery stone where I thought of the story that became my novel Valley of Grace; it had an enormous marble bathroom and a kitchen so tiny that one person had to come out before the other could go in.

  When we went to the house in Sévérac le Château for the first time, in 1971—Lucy was five, James two—when our friend Bernard had just inherited it from his grandfather’s cousin, its great charm was that it was still someone’s home. La cousine had died but her belongings were there: her sewing basket and playing cards, her umbrella, the copper jam pan, the coffee pot, the grandfather clock (which terrified James; he called it the mother clock and wouldn’t walk past it on his own), her fruits preserved in alcohol, her story-patterned plates and linen napery, her blackcurrant jam, her hand-made filet net curtains with pictures of cherubs on fountains, boys of stone made of thread, and quantities of enormous heavy linen sheets embroidered white on white: the trousseau she had spent her life sewing, never marrying, eventually living with her brother, embroidering his initials on sheets, as well as hers, among the lilies and the daisies and the ears of wheat. You can buy such sheets, one-time trousseaus, possibly never used, in posh homewares shops in Australia as well as France. There were a lot of tables and shelves made of cotton reels; she emptied them and the brother constructed furniture from them. Louis Bobbin, Bernard called them. Each bedroom had a crucifix on the wall, with a sprig of rosemary tucked behind the small bronze Christ, the herb dry and dusty and no longer scented. I felt honoured and humble and lucky to enter into another woman’s life like this.

  There were photographs of the family on the walls, la cousine in a group of young women sitting stitching under the great chestnut trees in the court of the château. They sewed gloves for a living out of the fine skin of the newborn lambs, which were killed because their mothers’ milk was used for making Roquefort cheese: the finest silkiest gloves imaginable. They had sold them from a shop in the basement of the house. When we were first there and for some time there was a small leather goods factory in the village, called Gant Albatross, which made bags and clothes as well as gloves.

  We bathed in basins, and I did the washing in the same basins on the kitchen steps because I splashed so much water about. There was a public washing place just up the hill, a lavoir that the village women used, but only for their husbands’ working clothes. It was practical, not picturesque. The village was full of plumbing shops. Bernard put in a bathroom, then another. Last time I visited there was a washing machine in the cellar. The plumber has misconnected the waste-water pipe; when you use it soapy water goes flowing down the cobbles of the steep street outside, just where people would have stood to buy the gloves from the basement shop; its arched shutters remain.

  Bernard gradually fixed up the various bedrooms in the house. Once when we arrived he’d just renovated and furnished with old family furniture a bedroom on the second floor. It was to be Lucy’s. She moved in, with treasures; very exciting, her own special place. Went to bed. Soon there was a call for a glass of water. Then she drifted downstairs like a little pale ghost. She couldn’t couldn’t couldn’t sleep there. It was too lonely. My mother was with us, it was shortly after my father died, so Lucy slept with her, in la cousine’s bedroom. I don’t think granny minded. I would have; Lucy was a demanding sleeper and the bed wasn’t very big. They had a wonderful time. You’d hear them giggling together. They often recalled the narratives of that time; do you remember, they’d say, and go off into giggles again. One morning early they were awakened by the one-armed postman, bringing a telegram sent from a train in Italy, by a friend who would be passing through Sévérac. He’d knocked at the door but they hadn’t heard so he’d walked through the house till he found someone. They sat up in instant fright, but the postman calmed them. Graham worked out how to send a telegram back to the train but sadly the friend never got it. Obviously we didn’t lock the doors; we felt very safe.

  No wonder I write domestic novels; my life has been centred in domesticity. But I don’t write about misplumbed washing machines, I write about birth and death, and love and marriage, or not, about betrayals and jealousy. About life that is a walk with love and death, which I recall was the romantic name of a not madly good film that I saw in a Paris cinema. The same subjects as the Greeks, and Shakespeare. The things that matter. My characters aren’t kings and queens, aren’t nobles or grand, but their passions are as real.

  On one stay the children went to school, in the square with the plane trees, by the war memorial. They learned a poem called ‘L’enfant et le serpent’, which they recited with a marvellous twanging southern accent. They went on an excursion to Chaudes-Aigues, where hot water from springs is piped through the town. Fabrice the baker’s son fancied Lucy; he sent her a note in class saying I love you in English. A little girl called Patricia gave her a small porcelain statue of a boy which we still have. They came home for lunch and we had little hot meals in the middle of the day.

  Monsieur Joyes, who had been la cousine’s tenant and remained Bernard’s, used to invite us to take an apéritif with him, usually vermouth or perhaps some vin doux, with little biscuits and olives, and we in turn would invite him to come and do the same with us. He gave us lettuces from his garden, and we would hear him walking up the hill with his little metal trolley that held six-litre bottles of wine. Up the hill with the empty bottles, down with full ones. Decent wine it was, here in the country, local. Monsieur Joyes rather fancied my mother. He wanted me to be the go-between in translation for them, which I found hard. I could understand his strong accent well enough, I thought (he told us stories of his days in the Resistance, and how they had talked in patois to keep their secrets from the Nazis), but turning it into English was another matter. It was a laborious flirtation; I knew I was losing all the subtleties in his pretty speeches. My mother smiled and looked very charming, her famous complexion became rosier still, but she wasn’t interested.

  I don’t know how honourable his intentions were. My mother wouldn’t have dreamed of attaching herself to a strange Frenchman and I don’t suppose he expected her to settle down with him; did he want a small fling? I think it was just a pleasant game, over drinks.

  Looking back on those times I have a sense of the dense fabric of the family, so closely woven, so intricate, so safe and enclosing. I can still catch the feeling of it, though now so many of its threads have broken and frayed away. My mother is dead, so is Graham, and so is Lucy too; James and I recount the stories and though we sometimes fear this fabric of family has become skimpy, nevertheless we can invoke its warmth. The two of us work at weaving it strong and dense again, to keep us warm against the world, and now he has a wife and baby it is thickening up. My grandchild is an elegant tiny girl, but the threads she spins are strong and tight, and the pattern intricate.

  Of course life in a family is frequently like this. But the thing about being in S
évérac was that these small passages of time were enclosed, were framed, were marked, so they could easily be taken out and considered after they had passed. In the several decades a family is likely to live together there are many times of delight and pleasure, but they can get lost in the mass. Being in this place that we all loved gave a special luminosity to moments, so that they are easily recalled.

  When we put the death notice for Lucy in the newspaper, we wrote, Peacefully at home. It seemed important.

  There’s a poem by Mallarmé called ‘Brise marine’, ‘Sea Breeze’, whose first line can be purchased on a postcard. La chair est triste, hélas, etj’ ai lu tous les livres. I had been amused by these cards, and bought them, and sent them to people. The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books. But I hadn’t read the poem until the last time I was in France and went to Mallarmé’s summer house, which is now a museum devoted to him. It is in the forest of Fontainebleau; in front of it is a little narrow road and then beyond that the swift flowing River Seine. Mallarmé and his family used to come from their flat in Paris to spend the summers here in this rented house.