by Peter Wells
This needs some explanation. Nancy Isenberg opens her book White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by saying, ‘We know what class is. Or think we do: economic stratification created by wealth and privilege. The problem is that popular American history is most commonly told — dramatized — without much reference to the existence of social classes.’10 It is the same in New Zealand. Theoretically, social class does not exist as a lens through which we view our apparently stoutly egalitarian country. Race, yes, most definitely. But not class.
Possibly Hawke’s Bay, like Canterbury, was unusual historically in having long-established sheep-farming families who intermarried and adopted the self-assured tone of an English upper class. It was not unusual for these families to send their sons to Oxford or Cambridge to be educated. The women shopped in Sydney and London, and featured in the social pages of newspapers and magazines; their children attended the same exclusive private schools; their sons married the daughters of sheep-farming families in Canterbury or Australia, perpetuating a sense of superiority over anyone involved in ‘trade’ (let alone a business as dirty as coal). By 1959 New Zealand had been enjoying a sustained period of affluence, helped along by the demand of wool for uniforms for the Korean War. This period was really the high-water mark of these families’ wealth and influence. In the foreseeable future the protection they enjoyed would be removed and the vision of a rural aristocracy living in splendour on great estates would fade away.
Generally speaking, however, under the long and stultifying reign of the conservative National Party (which came to power in 1949 and had three terms in government), New Zealand regarded itself as successful, peaceful and racially harmonious. In fact it was a stifling period of socially enforced conformity in which Pākehā enjoyed the highest income per capita in the world, while most rural Māori lived in poverty.
This general sense of ease felt by well-to-do Pākehā — it could also be called obliviousness — is present in the letters. Jessie attends a farewell party to ‘Mrs Chisholm who is going to Australia till October’ by ship. She also talks of Audrey, a young woman who inherited a medical practice from her father. Audrey is in the process of selling it, and has decided to go to live and work in New York (as a modern touch, she is flying there). ‘They may come back in ten years but she does not think so.’
A strange detail attaches to Audrey, who by common consensus ‘was one of the nicest girls’ anyone knew. ‘Audrey does everything so naturally and so quiet. She did all for her father. Everyone admires her.’ She was marrying a man who had no arms, whether as a result of injuries suffered in the war or some other cause is not made clear. To make matters even more complicated, the marriage crossed the religious divide, so there was a compromise: communion in an Anglican church (St Matthew’s, where Jessie was married in 1910), followed by a marriage ceremony at the St Peter Chanel Catholic church in Hastings. ‘I did not know he was a catholic,’ Jess writes, ruthlessly demoting the religion again with a small ‘c’.
Jessie touches here on the collusive, even vehement opinions typical of a small-town environment. Her venom centres on an unfortunate woman by the name of Mrs O’Meara, whose sin was surely to be of Irish and Catholic descent. ‘Mrs Baillie thinks just like I do about Mrs O’Meara,’ writes Jessie, standing breathlessly at the parish pump. ‘Everyone knows Mrs O’Meara has never been known to do a thing for anyone. It is Mrs O’Meara first, second & last.’
Mrs O’Meara dealt with, Jessie’s relentless social whirl moves on: ‘I played with Mrs Hindmarsh & I did enjoy it. She did too & said she would like to play again with me. I meet her a lot at bridge. Her husband is a cousin to Jack Hindmarsh [a noteable cricketer] … They lived in Selwyn Road, but have moved to the Bluff. She is always very charming.’
This is what Jessie would have liked: to be ‘always very charming’ and to move from the equivocal status of Lawrence Road on Hospital Hill to a much better address on what was virtually nob hill. Other women, meantime, get a sharp rap over the knuckles. ‘I can quite see how people hate playing with Mrs Renouf. I could not put up with her chatter & jokes all the time & talking to both tables.’11
Then Jessie casually flourishes a feather in her cap. On Thursday ‘Clinton Holt called for me at a quarter to seven in a great big sumptuous Jaguar car, a real beauty.’ The Holts ran a much more successful company than R. Northe & Sons. (Robert Holt’s business went on to become part of Carter Holt Harvey in the 1980s.) Clinton Holt was a descendant of Robert Holt, for whom Jessie’s father-in-law Robert Northe had worked in the 1860s. Napier was a small, incestuous town in all sorts of ways, with interconnections streaming back into the past. People generally knew what your grandparents did for a living, and your standing in the community was based on this knowledge of set social and economic gradations. The geographical isolation enforced this rigidity. There was a saying — in fact there is still a saying — that you are not ‘a local’ till your family has lived in Napier for three generations. The three daughters of Jessie and Ern Northe escaped this parochial world by going to live in bigger cities.
But Jessie, who had lived in Hawke’s Bay all her life, was comfortable with the world she assumed she knew, and a world in which people knew her and respected her — even if this exacerbated her social anxieties and kept her perpetually on edge. It was a world with a very small circumference.
After going to the Services Club in Hastings to play bridge (in this era Hastings, a service town, was conspicuously more affluent than Napier thanks to high wool prices; it had much better china, crystal, clothing and hat shops, as well as better tearooms), Jessie runs down a list of socially notable women with whom she has played bridge — ‘Mrs Von Dadelszen … Mrs Herrick is back & just as charming as ever’ — before describing a micro-crisis in her world. There was a big party occupying ‘our supper room & we had to go to the tearooms through a small passage. I did not like it all, no one did. Now the worst news.’ We pause for a crisis. ‘Mr Franzssen is giving up the tea rooms & going to manage the new Mayfair Hotel which is being built … he is going to cater for weddings their [sic], but no nice tea rooms, & we will never have supper for the E.S.K. or afternoon tea for our committee meetings & nowhere nice to go for lunch. Everyone will be sorry I am sure. Hastings has always been so proud of its Tea Rooms.’
By now the letter, written on a Friday, has been running on for six tightly handwritten pages of tittle-tattle, observation, reflection and wry humour. Jessie has even informed Bess about calling a plumber: ‘I really thought I would have gone silly last Sunday with the drip, drip & really running tap. I rang the Plumber & told him if he did not fix my tap, he would hear of me going to Porirua [a psychiatric hospital in Wellington]. He said he would hate that, & came that morning. He fixed my taps … I said I would pay him, it was too small for an account. He would not charge me as he said, it is always such a pleasure to work here & for me. He thinks my garden is lovely. He told me my house is a credit to me …’
This is Jessie ruffling her feathers with pleasure at being acknowledged by a younger man as an ace housekeeper, with a beautiful garden and everything ‘just so’. She was not dirty; she was not a panic artist. She did not sit down and mope. Her immaculate house and beautiful garden were all part of her identity as the redoubtable ‘Mrs Northe’ — a local institution on the hill. She had lived at 4 Lawrence Road for fifty years.
She could enjoy a leisurely life now, with an assured income from the interest from her husband’s estate (which, in customary practice, she had for life, so long as she did not remarry). She still did all the housework for the roomy three-bedroomed villa, and cooked for herself. Jess also employed a gardener, Mr De Leuw. Whenever he worked in the garden she baked him a morning tea — a madeira cake, or scones with home-made jam — which he ate sitting at the outside table on the porch. She was always ‘Mrs Northe’ and he was always ‘Mr De Leuw’. It was part of the understanding of a more humanly connected, if hierarchical, world.
On the seventh page Jess wrote ‘Sat’ to indicate a break in the stream of the letter. She also refuelled her fountain pen. The weather had worsened into ‘rain hail snow & a bitterly cold wind. One of our bleakest days. I am so tired of the cold.’ It seemed to alter her mood. (It is equally possible she was feeling hypoglycemic, which expresses itself in feelings of irritation.) The following page is filled with trenchant criticisms. She is about to go and stay with her elder daughter, Jean, in Karori, Wellington —‘I hate Karori I’ll die if it is weather like this. I wished I was not going now’ — and she criticises her second daughter Patti’s decision to sell her house before finding another, without due regard for the fact Patti is a widow of slender means who will need to sell a house in order to buy another. There are quibbles about sinus trouble following flu: ‘You will have to take care.’ She does not have time to write to ‘Pete’ (I had picked up the letter-writing habit but she dispatches me without too much regret): ‘I really have no time to write this week & next week I will be in Wellington & so it goes on. Never a spare moment in this home for some reason.’
The final page is devoted to very specific instructions to Bess to purchase some silk stockings for her. By 1959 silk stockings were an anachronism. Nevertheless, Jessie writes: ‘… through old Nash’ (a dismissive reference from a seventy-six-year-old to the seventy-eight-year-old Labour prime minister — Labour had come into government in 1957 and introduced steep taxes and severe import restrictions) ‘we cannot get any more [silk stockings] & I simply can’t wear nylon stockings. I would like 6 pairs the best you can get.’
With this imperious injunction to a daughter who is struggling on a budget — ‘I will send a cheque straight away, if procurable’ — Jessie backs out of the letter with a few asides: ‘I hope Gordon is better. You are like me I always think men are the worst patients’; a sudden thought that her washing is not yet dry; she is going away soon ‘& it looks like it is going to rain for ever’; then a very swift nod to her daughter’s health: ‘Hope you are feeling better.’ This is followed by a ritualistic farewell that also has a degree of truth to it: ‘with fondest love, Your loving Mother’. The surprise to me was the series of kisses — four — ‘to the boys’.
It is an epic letter, perhaps arising from her loneliness in a big empty house and the need to ‘converse’. It is almost breathless in parts, but it also illustrates her vitality and energy levels. ‘Get-up-and-go’ was a term she used approvingly. She was an intelligent and insightful woman in her own way, achieving within the parameters of the small-town goals that mattered to her. She was highly opinionated and she managed her ill health and the risks of living alone with some panache. Like my mother, had she been able to invest all her energy in creating a career or running a business, there is every chance she would have been successful. But the times dictated that all her energy was put into managing a house and garden, into self-adornment and maintaining a lively social life. Her driving ambition passed to future generations. Suzanne, her granddaughter, became the Deputy High Commissioner in London, for example. We, in turn, realised goals she would have liked to pursue. Upward mobility, after all, is the fuel which powered the colonial quest.
YOU CAN PROBABLY TELL THERE is an ambiguity in my attitude to my grandmother: love, but also something that seeks to critique her. Maybe this is because she was a resident deity in my repressed youth, so came to seem part of a false religion. As a young man coming into his own, I felt a need to shrug off her baleful influence, with all its snobbery and small-mindedness. At the same time, I loved her with the unquestioning love of a child. It is not too much to say I adored her. (I think of how as a wee boy I would not leave the bathroom in Point Chevalier when she bathed till I saw the rose embroidered on her brassiere. What was that all about? It was as if I was seeking to understand the code to her enigma.)
While I was musing on how to express all this ambiguity, I suddenly recalled that I had written something about my grandmother in 1975. She had been dead for seven years; I had matured and was now a know-all twenty-five-year-old who was trying to feel my way towards some personal truth. I sat down and wrote out my thoughts. And what form would this piece of writing take — but a letter?
‘Dear Grandma,
‘You have been dead 8 years now. You are almost forgotten. We are allowed to express our feelings for you, like disrespectful children. My cousin called you a vicious old woman; and even worse, for you — “a plumber’s wife”. Oh Grandma how my heart even then summoned up a sigh of protest in your defence: though I laughed too, glad to hear these defamations against your karma. You, a plumber’s wife! You would have risen up and struck down even we your grandchildren at this. Yet why was it so unmentionable? Because it was true. Because you did not wish to know it. Because your starved imaginative nature demanded some other romance, the key to which I found in your dusty, shadowladen bookcase, filled with books of ex-empresses, eccentric American millionairesses of the East Coast variety; because you created your own universe within the perimeter of a small provincial town on an isolated island flung off like a piece of spit from the British Empire and made yourself its empress, its duchess …’
This was really the first piece of imaginative writing I’d done that addressed a central obsession: Who am I? Where do I come from? The letter was written in pencil, in the microscopic handwriting I used at the time. It runs on for three and a half fullscap pages, and is an explosion of thought and pent-up feelings.
How did this ‘letter’ come about? I was on my way to Britain to begin my doctoral studies at the University of Warwick. It was my first real time away from New Zealand. I was profoundly stimulated by a sense of distance and that curious, almost magical way omnipotent New Zealand shrank back to reveal its specifics. I was staying with my cousin Philippa, whose husband was second secretary at the New Zealand Embassy in Vienna. Philippa and I got drunk one night, and freefalled about the person who, like some holy figure, seemed to join us together: our grandmother. It felt freeing to spit on the icon. But among the galloping illiteracies of this letter was a clutch of very different and often conflicted feelings.
‘I never knew you well enough … I was your slave … Perhaps naturally I identified your extraordinary advent into our domestic tensions and straitened circumstances [when Grandma came to stay in Auckland] as something almost mythical … I wonder now if this perception owed so much to you as to my feverish need then to locate some type who was different to all who surrounded me, and who would, by your extraordinariness, explain my difference.
‘This is important to me. Because for me, as for all my cousins, came the disillusionment consequent on encountering the hard empirical fact of “builder’s wife” “plumber’s wife”; not the grande dame at all. The actual process was something … I used against you. I taunted you with it in my mind even as I grappled to accept it. Oh you have no idea how hard, Grandma, it was to accept that this imaginary, almost visionary woman who brought so much happiness to our house when you visited … occupied an unimportant place in the social environment in HB. It always surprised me that people coming from Hawke’s Bay had not heard of you or your family name. I was positive our family name (by irony my middle name) was a great dynastic name like in a British novel.
‘Meanwhile our family waited for your death to release the inheritance which would make my mother’s life so much better.
‘I waited for your death with almost unbearable impatience. If I was your slave when I brought your tea to you I was also your invisible poisoner. When I picked up your pink rug and placed it over your knees, in my mind I wrapped it round your feeble neck and quickly tightened it. My guilt only drove me to deeper piety. I did love you somehow but I seemed to see my entire youth dissipate before this old woman full of quibblings about manners, who had never brought up boys; who hated to see bare feet; also regarded coloured shirts as offensive because labourers wore them. You used the word “common” as others might use the word “wicked” and it extended to a ran
ge so infinitesimally minute that even the handling of a teaspoon was not beyond your surveillance. Ah the unconscious things we do! I know you will take a step back before all this, shaking your head with horror, saying no, no — I didn’t know I was doing this; that it would lead to this; that it would affect you in that particular way. My love for you is so confused with hate, I resent so much my implication in this guilt.
‘You never touched me. You never clasped me, or cradled me, or caressed me. With you I didn’t expect it … Yet I loved you … Your self consciousness was limited by a kind of selfishness. A narcissistic selfishness … You were a shop girl … Yet you had a sense of humour. A delight in life. You had your own individuality, I recognise. I admire it. Yet … You were so unbendingly ambitious. You had a back of iron as regards “getting on”. You worshipped what you yourself possessed in abundance — “get-up-and-go.” This is what I mean by my carrying on unconsciously what you aspired to. I feel an enormous weight to achieve, pushing behind me. I push myself beyond my capabilities — hence I achieve so much less than I imagine I can that I detest my own capabilities. “I have achieved nothing”: how often this has crossed my mind. “I have achieved nothing.” No. My entire life has been taken up in an attempt to extricate myself from … the ludicrous sack of ideas I inherited from you.
‘Yet wait. Here I am in full cry against you — yet “you” … I am thinking of my own mental image of you … You cannot answer for my over-identification with you: or my revolt from this over-dependence.
‘Why did I seek to make you responsible? I wish I suppose for you to re-enter that stage, to sit before me so I can announce my homosexuality to you. I wish to kiss you on your cheek, kiss your tears away, hold your hands and say it is alright; it is alright; I am happy. I lift my head up and out through my eyes I see the world. If I taunted you and made you to blame it was as a child would, who wishes to return a deeply embedded hurt. I resent so much the inequalities of my situation as a gay man but not the fact I am gay. Ah, yet even as I talk to you I see its impracticality. You cannot understand. You cannot see, or know, or understand what this world is like. You are in the imprint of your world. Me in mine … If you were unimportant there would only be silence.