by Peter Wells
The final part of the letter is a patchwork of thoughts. The lawns at 4 Lawrence Road had grown long in his absence and required mowing. Ern would struggle to do this himself.6 It was part of his make-up — a belief in thrift and caution — that he did not pay someone else to mow the lawns, just as he kept to a bicycle all his life although he could well have afforded a car. It was not his style.7 He stayed a cautious, economical man, taking pleasure in providing for the financial security of his family — even when he would no longer be there. (‘You never know when your number is up.’)
His final thoughts reflect back on how much he enjoyed seeing his second daughter’s vitality and health: ‘By Jove Pattie [sic] look well and gets about like a 2 year old you would not think she was expecting in a week or two she seems even better than Jean is.’ This was positive news — the prospect of another child. (Geraldine was born in May 1947.)
The letter ends: ‘I think this is all the news with love to your self Mum & Gordon & the cat.’ (The cat was a typical wry touch.) It was signed ‘Your aff[ectionate] Father, E Northe’, a surprisingly formal wording for a family letter. Perhaps he thought so himself, for he followed this up with a further note: ‘I am writing this to you because Mother might be on her way home before this letter reaches you.’ This was signed more informally, but still with considerable panache in his penmanship, ‘Dad’.
It is a simple almost demotic letter, with nothing self-conscious or posed about it. It gives me glimpses of the man I never knew: his delight at his granddaughter’s quick uptake with a piece of saucy vaudeville wit (‘what happens to good girls’); his awareness of death in the way he circles round the subject without ever acknowledging its presence; the misuse of verbs which infers his speech patterns were ungrammatical (‘By Jove Pattie look well’). This seems to point to the kind of man he was. He himself had no anxieties about social class. He was not a snob. He was better than that. He was himself.
It is the letter of an affectionate father to a daughter within a close family of the sort I never really knew. Possibly this sense of a missing happy family life is what drew me to imagining what their lives were like in the first place. This man was dead long before I was born, but he lived on in my mother’s stories. She conjured him up constantly. He was her moral touchstone. A man of honour.
I’VE ALWAYS HELD MY GRANDFATHER up as a thoughtful man who tried to do the best of all possible things in the circumstances. One action of his, however, provided a model that in effect changed my life.
Right after the quake and the city had caught fire, Ern made a snap decision. The city was ablaze, and he saw that nothing could be done to stop it. But there was a grocery shop (the Northes owned the building but not the business is my understanding) and he directed one of the firm’s lorries be backed up to it, and the shop gutted of all food supplies. Tinned food, tinned milk, biscuits, cheese, anything you could eat. This was by way of looting during a disaster, one could say. Or, alternatively, it was a farsighted way of saving much-needed food that was about to be destroyed.
Current thinking is that you need to have emergency supplies for up to three days after a natural disaster — the time it takes for any sort of relief to arrive. You are, meantime, essentially on your own. In the days following the Hawke’s Bay earthquake of 1931, 4 Lawrence Road became a sort of informal food depot, dispensing food to those who needed it in the immediate environs of Hospital Hill.
Something about the individuality of this action — in a moment of extremity, a clear-sighted action — haunted my imagination. It was more than this. It taught me by example: always think outside the square. Make your own assessment of what needs to be done. Don’t follow the crowd. It is an approach that guided me throughout my younger life, and has continued to give my life meaning.
During the 1980s, the demolition of Auckland and other New Zealand cities went into overdrive. ‘The greed is good’ decade had arrived. The intricate urban fabric — a horseshoe theatre, a glass arcade, old warehouses, tiny lanes — was cleared away for glass-sheathed office blocks that, theoretically, allowed maximum exploitation of the site. (Post-stockmarket crash, Auckland had more empty office space per capita than any other city in the world.) I decided that history — the pulse of the past, the stories of the ancestors — was important. I made a film in 1985 that provided a vision of the architectural beauty of Art Deco Napier — shabby at the time, and under threat of demolition — so that people could see its potential. It led to the conservation movement that today exists in Napier. In 1989 I went on to help save the Civic Theatre in Auckland, a beautiful, much-loved, atmospheric picture palace, when it too faced demolition.
My grandfather helped me in other ways, too. When I was setting up the Auckland Writers Festival in 1999 with a close writer friend, Stephanie Johnson, we were told by Wellington funders that Auckland could not sustain serious cultural activity. I thought of my grandfather: make your own assessment and act on it. Don’t follow the crowd. Follow your instinct. Indeed, even working for sexual equality and homosexual rights (something a conservative man like him would certainly not have approved of) or fighting the stigma around HIV-AIDS in the 1980s, I was influenced by his example of thinking for yourself. Be independent in your analysis of what is happening. Do what needs to be done. And act.
It was as if, in my dreams and reveries, this man I never knew was always ahead of me, just around the corner. His spirit led me forward, at times fearlessly and against great opposition — and this was unusual, as I saw myself as timid and shy. I felt his (and my grandmother’s) presence palpably when I was in Napier making the documentary to rally support for the city’s at-risk architecture. Their footsteps echoed ahead, leading me forward.
People so often say Māori are spiritual, Pākehā are materialist. My view is that it is not a matter of race, it is all about listening. Anyone can listen. You just have to train your ears to hear.
Notes
1 Less than 15 per cent of New Zealand children went on to secondary school in 1900, so Ern was an exception, even within his family. His younger brother, Robert Percy Northe, also went to Napier Boys’ High. It is possible that going to Napier Boys’ High School gave Ern a wider range of professional acquaintances than his other brothers had, as well as a better general education. This may have given him a sense of the wider opportunities available. ‘History of Education in New Zealand’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_New_Zealand (accessed 9 August 2017).
2 Information from my cousin Philippa Larkindale, followed up in an email of 26 May 2016 from her sister Suzanne Blumhardt, the eldest grandchild and the only one to remember Ern. Suzanne wrote: ‘Grandpa was a qualified plumber.’ Suzanne is affectionately referred to as ‘Tuppence’ in a letter in this chapter.
3 When sorting through her papers, I found that Bess had written down the costs of the first house. The house at 517 Point Chevalier Road was purchased on 16 December 1948 for £1016. Commission was £35. Mortgage stamp duty was £6 1s. Solicitor £20 3s. Paint £3 10s; cupboards £25; hot-water electric system £22 10s; plus £31 other set-up costs. The interest rate on £500 was 2.5 per cent, to her father, Ern. The detail is typical of Bess who was described by Janet Coombes, a Solway old girl and friend, as ‘one canny customer’.
4 Dior had debuted his New Look Collection in February 1947, and its sumptuous use of material heralded the end of wartime restrictions. Its excesses became a source of popular commentary and humour.
5 Suzanne Blumhardt, in an email 26 May 2016, wrote: ‘He smoked roll-your-owns of a dark and tarry brand of tobacco called Tasman Dark. It came in tall cylindrical green tins, I remember.’
6 Ibid. She wrote: ‘Grandpa mowed the very steep bank in front of the house by letting the mower down on a rope … I remember Mum being worried about him doing the lawns when he was so ill.’ By this time Ern was in his late seventies.
7 Ibid. ‘Part of his insistence on still riding a bike,’ Suzanne writes, ‘was so that he could sto
p and talk to people he saw on the way. You couldn’t do that in a car, he said. Besides this attachment to old ways, he had very conservative taste in clothes and always wore navy blue socks of a certain type which became increasingly difficult to find, and navy ties with white spots.’ Another reason he did not buy a car was that feared he would ‘never see his wife again’, as she would be out playing bridge all day and night. It is possible the indulgent widow I knew was the reaction of a wife kept on a tight leash all her life by her budget-conscious husband.
Polly
Who was Polly Northe? Her 1942 obituary in Napier’s Daily Telegraph struggled with the dilemma. While she was ‘one of the most highly respected residents of Napier’, she appeared to have done nothing more than be born, marry, have children and die.
‘THE LATE MRS NORTHE DID not take any active part in public life but was well known and esteemed for her kindness and generosity to all deserving cases.’ The obituary went on, as if struggling to find some further redeeming quality or achievement: ‘Her many friends and relatives were always certain of a hearty welcome at her home.’
So she was kind, a ‘hearty’ hostess and helped people in need — so long as they were deserving. This hardly amounted to much, considering her lifespan of eighty-two years. What had she seen, felt, understood — misunderstood?
Like so many colonial women, her life was subsumed in her husband’s biography. Even in her obituary he takes up more elbowroom. She was the ‘widow of the late Mr Robert Northe, founder of the well-known firm of R. Northe and Sons, merchants’. She had accompanied him to Clive ‘when her husband took up farming’. She had had eight sons, and a daughter who predeceased her. She had twenty-one grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. In its own way, it was some sort of accomplishment. As a heterosexual woman she had fulfilled her function. But was that all?
I ask this question because her apparent lack of accomplishment — she took no ‘active part in public life’ — meant her life, like those of so many colonial women, was routinely underestimated. Even in the graveyard, the most these women got was a single line, in second place, below their husband who in death, in granite or marble, still got further space, a bigger headline.
In the absence of any other information, I wondered how I could evoke this woman who featured in Bess’s conversations as if she were still very much alive. Polly, or Grandma Northe, as Bessie called her, was a kind of emotional touchstone. She lived just around the corner, and Bessie went with her parents and sisters to visit her on a Sunday. (All Polly’s sons lived ‘around the corner’, like planets orbiting round their sun.) Ern ‘was always very good to his mother’, Bessie told me. ‘He loved his mother.’ In one way his relationship with his mother stood as a model for mine. But when I asked Mum about Polly, hoping to find some historical romance, all I ever got was: ‘She was very kind’ — which was pleasing news but it hardly qualified or quantified her.
No letters of hers survive — well, she lived ‘around the corner’, so letters were unlikely. And there were no objects that expressed Polly’s personality: no jewellery, gloves, even any stories. There was nothing, apart from the rather stilted photographs of her as a matriarch surrounded by her family, much as a convict might be surrounded by arresting officers. It took me a long time to realise there was not a single photograph of her as a young woman or a bride. There was a reason for this, but like most absences in family stories (or any story), it takes a while to recognise what is missing. A silence usually indicates a story.
The obituary had dutifully sketched in her origins. She was born at ‘Onepoto Valley’ in 1859, ‘the daughter of the late Mrs Thos. Campbell and the late Mr John Summers, of the 65th Regiment of the Imperial Army, who was lost in the Maori war in the Waikato, in 1862’. Now we edge a little closer to a story. ‘He was eaten by the Maoris,’ Bess said to me when I asked about this vanishing. He was ‘lost’, as the obituary said. He leaves the story neatly at this point, never to be referred to again.
When I became old enough to undertake independent genealogical research — that is, I was old enough to write letters, address them to government authorities and ask for information — I sent away for the marriage certificate of Polly’s mother and the man I thought was Polly’s stepfather, Thomas Campbell.
To tell the truth, I was lured by a single word in the drumroll of Polly’s birth name: Mary Ann Alice Earl Summers. What was the origin of Earl, I wondered. Was this a hint of fabulous aristocratic ancestry hidden like a gilded thread in the rather dull and threadbare family tapestry? What I received was the equivalent of an electric shock. The marriage certificate listed Polly’s mother Agnes as ‘laundress’ and Thomas Campbell as ‘labourer’. When I asked Bess, the gentrifier, what was the meaning of this strange information, she was uncharacteristically terse. ‘Life wasn’t always like it is now,’ she said. ‘It was tough back then.’ When John Summers was ‘eaten by the Maoris’, she explained, his wife was left with two daughters to bring up. Taking in laundry was one of the few things an uneducated but respectable working woman could do.
John Summers was Irish by birth. He had managed to get away from the death machine that was famine-struck Ireland and had washed up in Tasmania. He was a twenty-year-old labourer when he enlisted in the British Army in 1852. He then moved with the army to Wellington, and married Agnes Earl, a Devonshire lass the same age as himself. She was an assisted immigrant, part of the Wakefield scheme. The army moved to Napier in 1858, at a time of tensions among Hawke’s Bay Māori, and it was here that Polly and her sister Elizabeth (Lizzie) were born. Neither of the daughters was registered at birth, which gives some sense of the obscurity and modesty of their lives. But Polly, or Mary Anne, or variously Marianne, was baptised on 18 April 1860 in the Anglican Church.
Some two years later, whatever shreds of respectability Agnes had been able to gather around herself vanished. To be a soldier, as her husband John was, was to be moved like lumber to wherever points of tension were. In 1862, this meant the Waikato. Governor Grey had instructed that Auckland’s Great South Road be built, pointing like a dagger straight at the heart of the King Movement in the Waikato. It was the beginning of another war over land.
Waikato Māori began picking off by sniper-fire soldiers labouring as road builders. On the night before an attack on 8 June 1862, when the situation seemed especially threatening and Summers’ unit had been ordered forward into terrifying enemy territory, Private John Summers vanished. He was listed as five feet, eight-and-a-half inches tall, of ‘Irish complexion’ (meaning fresh), with brown hair and grey eyes. He was last seen wearing a ‘blue serge’ jacket.
He was a deserter. This made sense of the ‘he-was-eaten-by-Maoris’ story. His abandonment of a wife and two tiny girls (Polly was three) precipitated a crisis. Agnes, aged thirty-two, had no capital and now no income. She had no skills. She became a laundress, working in what was called ‘Soap Suds Gully’, an open well in what is now the Napier Botanic Gardens. It is difficult to think of a harder job. But the benefit of being a laundress was that she could keep her children; they were not sent off to an orphanage. In a very small way, then, she operated as a contractor selling her labour. But it was backbreaking work for a pittance.1 Within six months of being abandoned, Agnes had married Eugene Hibbens, twenty-two years older than she was. This could only have occurred if her first husband was dead. The story of John Summers being eaten by Māori was a ruse for a hard-pressed woman who was prepared to marry a much older man, bigamously, in order to give her daughters a roof over their heads and to put food on the table. It is not a pretty story.
Hibbens, husband number two, was the son of an Eton-educated judge advocate who had retired in disgrace. The marriage lasted three years. The wedding certificate listed him as ‘a settler’, but when Eugene Hibbens died in June 1865 he was described as ‘a shepherd’.
Once again Agnes was thrown onto the merciless open market. Once again she turned to the only thing she could do: laundering other peo
ple’s soiled clothes. Then on 18 December 1866, thirty-six-year-old Agnes married Thomas Campbell, a Scotsman of the same age, in a registry office on Milton Road, Napier. Her daughter Polly, who was now seven years old, had already had three ‘fathers’.
If this was a contemporary story, this narrative might have been advanced as an explanation for addiction or dysfunction. Agnes could have taken to the bottle or prostitution and abandoned her children. She did not. Agnes held staunch through all the changes, inculcating love and loyalty into her daughters as well as the example of the honesty of hard work. Perhaps people expected less and took what they could within the narrow margins of their lives. Besides, what lay outside that narrow corridor was frightening: children were often abandoned as unwanted encumbrances or even became prostitutes themselves. Indigent men and women sometimes committed a minor crime so they could spend a night out of the cold in the cells. The myth of egalitarian New Zealand had not yet been born. There was of course no social security, only charity. If Polly was remembered in her obituary as being responsive to ‘deserving cases’ of charity, it was perhaps that she understood only too well the terror of need.