The Grass Catcher

by Ian Wedde

  Already I began to feel my default narrative of metaphorised unhappiness and imagination being subverted by these signs of transformation which, of course, had long been taken for granted by those who lived there, like my bright-eyed cousin pouring us a glass of wine at lunch. The landscape hadn’t really been strange for decades – not even to me when I’d come back to it over the years.

  And yet, all at once, it was strange, unexpected – and subversive. It was as if an alternative truth about my mother’s life in it had been lying in wait for me and had finally been given the chance to ambush me at my most vulnerable – faintly headachy and blurred, halfway to admitting that I’d run with a default narrative for too long, and encountering my cousin Norma’s lively memory of my mother whom she’d admired and perhaps in some ways even emulated more than sixty years ago, before there were vineyards as far as the eye could see, in an age that seemed to have been geographically erased just so I could re-imagine it as a place people came to rather than left (or got stuck in) – where enjoying life seemed to be what the place mostly expected. It was as though my gloomy default narrative, and the place in it that I’d reserved for my mother, had been reversed or turned inside out.

  At Norma’s sunny kitchen table I enjoyed some salad, a salmon vol-au-vent and a glass of pleasant pinot gris. She began to tell me about Linda. She remembered being a bridesmaid at Linda and Chick’s wedding. She was sixteen years younger than my mother, who was twenty-eight or twenty-nine when she married. To the twelve-year-old Norma, Linda seems to have been a glamorous figure. She remembers Linda doing her hair during the war years when it was the salon that kept the Wedde-Horne family afloat and, later, my mother’s passion for make-up and costumes associated with the Operatic and Repertory Societies.

  She has an earlier memory from September 1928 of Linda driving her out to see the hero aviators Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm, who emergency-landed their Southern Cross trans-Tasman flight on farmland which Dave later identifies as Fairhall, where the Woodburn air force base would be established. Linda seems to have been part of a young, fun-loving social crowd who rushed to see the aviators. On the way back, the car punctured, and in no time a dashing man pulled over and changed the tyre. The fact that Linda was driving a car at eighteen also surprises me – or surprises my narrative of dissatisfaction. Norma remembers her grandmother Wedde commenting somewhat tartly that, after the twins were born, Linda would often still be ironing at eleven o’clock at night; she wasn’t much good in the mornings, was a night owl by nature, didn’t like housework, but was very particular with the ironing.

  I can’t quite square up Norma’s account of Linda and Chick’s wedding with the dates in the official record, but I’m sure she’s correct in her memory that Chick wanted to marry Linda before he went off to the war; she remembers the wedding took place in January, and that Chick joined up a few months later. Something like that is possible – New Zealand declared war on 3 September 1939. She remembers that they honeymooned on a yacht in the Sounds and came in to Endeavour Inlet where Norma and her extended family were staying for the summer; a bedraggled, salt-caked Linda came ashore asking for a hot bath and somewhere to do her hair.

  I have two little black-and-white photographs from the vast trove my father kept; in each of them, one or the other of my parents is taking turns at the tiller of a yacht – they look wind-blown and sun-baked, with big grins. Nearby in the photograph folder is a picture of an elegant little cutter moored out in a bay – they probably rowed the yacht’s dinghy ashore from time to time. I think these are photographs of their honeymoon, but can’t be sure.

  Norma remembers a lot of music in the Francis Street house, and in her own mother’s house – Chick and his sister Phyllis both played the piano and sang, and took turns swapping the two between them. Apparently there was a strong music tradition in the Wedde family, which came from the Reepen side via my great-grandmother Maria: all of her and great-grandfather Heinrich August’s children, Dave’s and my great-aunts and -uncles, played musical instruments and would get together to perform. Reinhold – Ren – in particular was a gifted flautist. There’s said to be a statue of a Reepen relative, Klaus Groth, whose wife was related to Brahms, in a public square in Kiel – I hope to see it one day. Grandfather Wedde, Albert Augustus (A.A. on the published sheet music), also composed hymns, songs, and ditties for children; Norma remembers that he approached his favourite poet, Walter De La Mare, for permission to set ‘Silver’ to music, and a letter of consent from the poet was once among the family papers. I have a copy of the sheet music for his setting of the poet and novelist Will Lawson’s ‘The Song of the Saws’, with ‘words reprinted from the “Sydney Bulletin” by kind permission of the Author’. Will Lawson, an acolyte of his namesake the bush-balladeer Henry Lawson, came and went between New Zealand and Australia – it’s possible my grandfather knew him.

  Later in the day, at the Operatic Society archives, I’d find evidence of Chick’s and Linda’s involvement in the music and theatre of the small town. I began to realign my impression of all this as Linda’s imaginative refuge, the sign of her discontent. Instead, I began to see in Norma’s account a pattern of vivid social life in which glamour, adventure, music and theatre flowed around homes, workplaces, performance societies, and the wider environment of picnics and boating. Times may have been hard, but they were not as grim as my scenario had made them. The subversive life of the imagination was not quite the client of dissatisfactions I’d assumed and even wanted it to be in my young mother’s life.

  Norma drove me to the Blenheim Operatic Society’s rooms. Kids were walking on the sunny footpaths in bare feet where the tar was probably about to melt. Lawnmowers were working the berms of suburban streets – Masports and Flymos, not the chattering mowers with wire and canvas grass catchers of my childhood, but the smell of hot mown grass that came in the car window was the same.

  ‘I love New Zealand towns on Saturdays,’ said Norma. ‘Everybody is so busy!’

  At the archive we met Terrence Burtenshaw. He and Norma at once began a reminiscing conversation around the photographs he brought out for me to look at. She remembered most of the people in them. We found the Lady Mary Lasenby/Artemis photograph of my mother in her huntress deerskins. The production was in 1939. Linda was twenty-nine but looks much younger – almost teen-like. This must have been just before she married my father – the archive caption records her maiden name among ‘Vera Dix, Clarrie Jamieson, F.C. Carver, Linda Horne, D. Ovens, P. Grieg’.

  The name ‘Vera’ had a strange effect on me. I seem to remember my mother saying it. I remember the nasty taste of a green olive I spat out after I’d been given it from a drink ‘Vera’ and my mother were having. This woman had red fingernails, wore beige slacks, and rested one side of her bottom on the kitchen table of a two-storey house in Francis Street. Linda seemed to be laughing a lot on the day I was given the nasty olive from the drink – her laughter had a loudness I remember.

  In a photograph from 1938, my father and his brother Paul appear wearing what look like Cossack uniforms in the male chorus of The Belle of New York. Linda was in the same production, wearing the ivory bracelet over her long white glove, and looking (thought Norma) a bit like Wallis Simpson. With his sister Phyllis, Chick appears in the chorus of an October 1939 production of Rio Rita. He must have gone off to the war very soon afterwards, though the company records show he was the Society’s treasurer in 1939 and 1940.

  Norma remembered that he sent home a great many very long letters from Egypt, Palestine and Italy, ‘beautifully written’, with bits blotted out by the army censor; she remembered that ‘he’d always wanted to write a book’, but never did. I don’t know where the letters are. Probably they were disposed of when Aggie Horne died and the household at Francis Street was wound up. Instead of writing a book, he took thousands of photographs.

  ‘Most of them didn’t come back,’ said Norma as we left the archive. She meant the men in the Operatic
Society chorus line who went off to the war at the same time as my father. Yes, she agreed when I asked, it was during the war that he began to study for his accountancy qualifications. He finished his degree after he came back from Egypt and Italy – in fact, after Dave and I were born. Norma remembered him studying late at night in the Francis Street house.

  ‘I don’t know how he did it – with crying babies. Mostly you. David always sat up and ate his food like a good boy.’

  And so an alternative theme began to find the foreground of my narrative about my mother’s and father’s decision to quit Blenheim, and the consequences of that decision for the kinds of home I would live in. My father, who’d never settled to anything before the war (he was on the Ford sales team travelling the South Island, briefly managed a cinema somewhere near Gore, shot wallabies on the Canterbury Plains), returned to a small town from which many of the men he’d known were now buried on Crete, in the Western Desert, in Italy. Ahead of him would be the responsibilities of a father. Behind him was the daunting example of his own successful father, whose influence may have been cut short by his early death at fifty-three; and aunts and uncles who had gained university qualifications. Linda had waited a long time for her husband to come back from the war; she’d wait until she was thirty-six before she and Chick had children; and she’d been forced to leave the convent school she loved long before she was ready to.

  The darkness and dissatisfaction I’ve sensed around my parents’ lives in Blenheim now seem to me to have been produced mostly by the war, and the damage it did to the social fabric of the small town; and perhaps, above all, by the sense of thwarted opportunity felt by both my parents, which the war accentuated, and which came to be represented by what they saw as the enforced (in my mother’s case) or guilty (in my father’s) limitations of their education. These frustrations became ambitions – my parents dislodged the chips on their shoulders by taking their twins to England and sending them to school there. In doing so, they cleared the way for their own happiness. This was not won at our expense, but rather by transforming their disappointments into our opportunities.

  The basic architecture of my narrative hasn’t been entirely wrong so far. But that metaphorising diagram of dissatisfaction and imagination generating a third-term reality has to be realigned. It has to emphasise the impact of the war and the sense of almost-lost opportunity, the threat of time running out, that the war thrust into the foreground. Here, the threat of it being nearly too late warped the pleasure I’d always seen in the photograph of Linda in her Admirable Crichton deerskins – a pleasure I’d stubbornly scripted as her imaginative refuge from the doldrums of her life.

  But her life probably wasn’t like that, then, in 1939 – only later, after the war, after Dave and I were born. And that was when the dauntless Artemis of the photograph deployed her desire and challenged her husband to get her out before it really was too late.

  In his last few years, my father continued to express a yearning to write a book about his life. The closest he got to doing it was probably the long letters he wrote during the war, and the thick, blue-bound economics manuals and reports he wrote in Geneva between contracts for the UNDP. I sometimes sensed that he was afraid of writing the book, though he began to tap at his blue Olivetti from time to time when he and Linda had settled back in Auckland. After he died and we sorted out the contents of his desk in the house at St Heliers, there was no sign of whatever it was he’d been writing. But I did find some account books in which he’d composed what appeared to be imaginary balance sheets for fortunes that had never existed or that had ceased to exist (he did lose all his money once in a West Indian banking crash, and there’s the story of his Uncle Fritz’s mirage of wealth).

  Perhaps these imaginary fortunes were sad – but then, perhaps they were just entertainments; and he had after all made many such stories come true in his life, beginning when he was the energetic guru of Mr Qureshi and Mr Qurim at Chandraghona.

  Perhaps these impeccably presented fictional reports and balance sheets were my father’s book – the scripts for a last performance. And perhaps my mother’s last trip, the one that effectively killed her, was her version of the same thing. She went home to the wandering life she’d lived with Chick, to her friends in different parts of the world; then she came home to its banal aftermath, and died. This too was a kind of performance, whose end she’d dreaded but not avoided. Dave told me she didn’t even unpack; she certainly didn’t make up the drapes for her flat.

  Norma and I went to find the family graves at the Omaka cemetery on the Wither Hills outskirts of Blenheim. We drove through streets that were almost familiar to me, past the public hospital where I almost remembered visiting the foul-breathed Dave after his tonsils had been removed; along an almost recognised grid of tree-lined suburban streets. Norma parked up on the closely mown berm in the shade of a large tree next to the old Omaka cemetery. Across the road in the newer one we’d find the plot with my tragic uncle Hugh Lancelot, the suicide; my Wedde grandparents, Albert Augustus and Mabel, whose headstones were missing; and my aunt Kay. Kay’s husband, my uncle Paul, is buried with the returned servicemen in the war section of the cemetery.

  It was a blazing hot day, the Marlborough heat full of the scent of drying mown grass, the talismanic aroma of the grass catcher. The feel of the rough lichens I rubbed from the family’s headstone inscriptions was almost familiar too. Across the road in the old Omaka cemetery there was no longer any trace of my great-grandfather Heinrich August’s grave, though I found what I thought might be my early Tait relatives’ headstone – James Tait who died on 10 April 1897 aged seventy-nine, and Martha Mein Tait, who died five years later at eighty-one. I knew nothing about them and could only guess that they came out to New Zealand somewhat earlier than their young relatives William and his wife Susan, my Tait great-grandparents.

  I later searched the Births, Deaths and Marriages records, and found that Susan, whose maiden name Ogilvie was my mother’s middle name, died in what her death certificate describes as a Mental Hospital in Nelson, of ‘senile decay’, on 2 March 1918. The names of her mother and father were not known.

  Nor, in any embodied way, at the time of Norma’s and my visit to the cemetery, did I know anything about the others whose graves I’d touched with fingers that remembered childhood’s summer heat on the lichened river-stone balustrade at our home in Francis Street. Following Norma’s lead, I blundered along among the rows of tumbled and illegible headstones, through a layering of anonymous or affectless facts scattered across a half-remembered emotional topography and the grid of my own predisposed narratives. Trying to get my bearings in this hot, grass-scented maze, I began to understand or get the measure of the ambiguity I’d sensed opening up around my default narratives of home as shaped by these people whose marble memorials were themselves almost gone.

  The following day, in teeming rain, I sloshed uselessly around the hilltop graveyard at Tua Marina where my maternal grandmother Aggie’s first husband is buried. I hadn’t known she had a husband before Bertie Horne until Norma told me. I didn’t know his name, and Norma didn’t know it either – he seemed to have disappeared from all family records. So of course I didn’t find anything, only confirmation of my quandary and a reprise of that bewildering almost-familiarity, that recognition fogged as if by misty drizzle, that sense of a more complex narrative than the one I’d driven up the muddy cemetery access road with.

  Below the north-west slope of the cemetery hill, the paddocks and low hills where the Hastilow farm had been were halfway familiar. I had the feeling that if I closed my eyes and went over there with my fragmented memory map, I’d get closer to what I’d known as a kid than I would with any retrospective knowledge; I’d smell it, as I had the pattern of my mother’s summer frock when that aroma of dust, heat and cow-shit smoke came in the car window in Ceylon in 1969, ten years after she’d left us to go and live in Khulna. I’d smell the whey that ran to the Hastilow pigsty from the farm da
iry where the cream separator whizzed around and cheese was stirred in a vat; I’d smell the poopy chicken run where the chooks ran fiercely after the bootlace eels we threw them; I’d smell the dry hay-bales we climbed on, sneezing, with the Hastilow kids; I’d smell and taste the black paddock mushrooms Nana Aggie cooked in bacon fat.

  There had to be a connection to the Taits somewhere in all this – and if I closed my eyes and sniffed my bearings through the rain to the paddocks over by the river, I’d find the story; I’d see it written in a landscape that matched the one in my head.

  Later, back in Wellington, switching codes to the factual, retrospective record, I found Aggie’s first husband in the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, that other graveyard. His name was Frederick Charles Cox, described as a grain expert on his marriage certificate and as a clerk on his death certificate; his father was a farmer from Crofton in the Rangitikei. He and Aggie were married in the Methodist church, Blenheim, on 23 March 1904, when they were both twenty-five; Fred died of peritonitis of the appendix on 11 December 1904. Aggie, whose father William the marriage certificate describes as a blacksmith, remarried to my grandfather Herbert Stacey Horne, described as a clerk, in Wellington on 24 July 1906, at the residence in Thorndon of someone called Porter. One of the marriage witnesses was James Tait. The other witness was one John Aston, an advertising agent.

  James Tait could not have been the man whose headstone I’d found at Omaka, because he died in 1897 and was a joiner. The James Tait who witnessed Aggie’s second marriage must have been a brother or other close relative named after old James; and, once I’d deciphered the hastily confident handwriting of the officiating registrar or minister, Thas. Porter of Thorndon, I saw that this James Tait was a ‘Cheese Maker’ of Tua Marina.