Something for the Birds

by Fahey, Jacqueline

  Another way Michael made some money was by writing obituaries for the Herald. That attitude, that ‘Look Mum no hands’ approach to life, undermined him here also. One of his obituaries I remember went something like this: ‘Poor little Linda, she flew through God’s winda.’ In fact Timaru liked his style but quite rightly suspected his intentions.

  Then how did Mary-Ellen contribute to the household? Well, she did various jobs but ended up running the women’s prison in South Canterbury. Mum, on holidays from the Dominican convent, loved going there for lunch. Mary-Ellen would produce a well-known prisoner to wait at table so Mum could satisfy her curiosity about crime and criminals.

  And what about the two dead-loss great-uncles? Michael called them the remittance men. Once a year a lump sum arrived for them. Why and from where I have no idea. Their smart on-the-town clothes from last year were brought out, cleaned and pressed, and the uncles took off for Christchurch. Two months and they would be back. It would take them another year to recover. Mum said they went to the gallops, drank champagne and stayed at the best hotels until the money ran out, then it was a twilight existence until the following year.

  Grandma must have received some money from her mother, but it was the older girls who kept things ticking over. My grandmother herself played the organ at the Catholic Basilica, and Eileah, the eldest girl, as soon as she turned sixteen took on any number of music students. She was also expected to babysit my mother at the same time.

  As soon as my mother Maggie (Margaret only for official and formal occasions) could speak, it became clear she had been learning music since birth, possibly in the womb. One day Eileah was trying to teach a not very bright student to recognise different notes. She kept pressing down on one piano key, calling out ‘And that is?’, and getting no response. This went on for some time and then Maggie, under the piano, pulled her thumb out of her mouth and lisped, ‘Octave above middle C.’ For a household that, as time went on, more or less relied on its musical skills to survive, this was great news. Maggie had perfect pitch. Obviously she also had the brain to go with it. By six years old she had appeared in the London Gazette as a child prodigy. Where the photograph is now I don’t know, but she stands clutching some certificate in one hand, and there is a look of complete concentration on her face. There is a slightly alien effect caused by her out-of-proportion forehead – the forehead my mother had inherited from ancient times. This head was supposedly superior to the head most humans possessed. The gene was passed down from a people who had inhabited Normandy, the west of Ireland, and the Hebrides and Wales. Their culture was destroyed by a new warlike people and they virtually disappeared. Certainly, it was true that learning anything was, for Mum, simply a matter of knowing about it. However, just doing something competently bored her. She often talked about the divine fire. She believed that without that illuminating energy, all the competence in the world was a complete waste of time.

  Some talent scouts from Italy heard of Mum and tried to convince my grandmother to let them develop her potential in Italy. This was through perfectly legitimate channels, but Grandma could not bear to give up her little girl. Great-grandma decided Maggie must go to the Dominican convent in Dunedin, so that at least she could come home once a year. At twelve she was doing her final music exams and then it was discovered that she needed first to have her Matric. In six months she had gained both.

  My mother’s music teacher at the Dominican convent, Mother Genevieve, was a member of the English aristocracy and in her youth had been a student of a pupil of Chopin’s. What was she doing at the ends of the earth teaching music to a little Irish Catholic girl? I will tell you what she was doing: she was attempting to adjust the balance of power. This was a conscious policy of the Catholic Church or, let us say, parts of the Catholic Church. It wasn’t just happening in New Zealand; it was also happening in Australia, Canada and the United States. The general idea was to produce educated, virtuous (of course) and cultivated young women who could speak the King’s English perfectly. They were to become examples to all, marry lovely Catholic boys, and perfect the art of living out the metaphor of the iron hand in the velvet glove. Mum, however, was something else again. She was not being groomed for marriage: she might bring prestige and even fame to the church.

  If you remember, my great-grandmother had sent her sons to the Jesuit college in Melbourne. It so happened that in 1960 I met the head of the Jesuits at a dinner party in Melbourne, in Toorak. The new super-rich of Melbourne were there, and I had to start on about the virtues of New Zealand as a then socialist country. The guest of honour was the Jesuit and he explained that he had to support me because his own lifestyle was a socialist style. When my husband Fraser and I drove him home, I said something about how in the early days in New Zealand girls could get a good education with lots of music and literature – how they were, in fact, cultured. Boys, on the other hand, couldn’t get anything like a decent education unless they lived in city centres. The quality of the education wasn’t really very high there either. That meant that the number of Catholic boys getting to university was very small. The Jesuit made it clear that he knew all about this and that the Jesuit Order had wanted very much to establish Jesuit colleges in New Zealand. They wanted to produce young men who could compete socially and intellectually with young men from Christ’s College or King’s; who would have the self-confidence a first-rate education could give them; who instead of propping up all the bars in New Zealand could join the mainstream as a positive force. They needed to understand that their low self-esteem was a product of their ignorance – of who they were, and of their own history and heritage. But the dream was not to be. Jesuits were banned from teaching in New Zealand.

  The problem of getting a decent secondary-school education for boys set up a dilemma for Catholic parents. It meant they must send their sons to a local high school and break with their own church, their own friends, their support group. It was a dilemma both my grandparents faced. I know one of Mum’s brothers went to the Timaru Boys’ High School and graduated with honours. Tom was very early apprenticed to a law firm. And Fred? I am not sure; he worked, I know, as an accountant after the First World War, so he obviously got some sort of secondary education.

  Fraser, the remarkable Jesuit and I travelled on across the wastelands of Melbourne’s suburbia. What I was trying to put into words was a feeling of the unhappy result of under-educating the boys and, in comparison, over-educating the girls. You could say they were priced out of the market, those young women. Young Catholic men felt a resentment towards young women who mouthed perfect English and had such fine sensibilities. Secretly they felt what they needed was a dose of real life – except that the young men’s low self-esteem prevented them from offering themselves as a means of providing it. Considering the attitude of these guys, one can only think those women had a very lucky escape.

  You know, this is all about why my three aunts, Eileah, Doozie and Viz, never married. (All were of marriageable age before the First World War – the loss of men to the war was not the issue.) They and my mother Maggie adored their handsome, darling brothers, Ted, Tom and Fred, and the other young men from more conventional backgrounds may well have paled by comparison.

  And theirs was undoubtedly an unselfconsciously bohemian household. This was partly because my grandfather was drinking too much, off doing the waterfront or boozing with the town personalities. He was indifferent in a bemused sort of way. Usually, if the master of the typically patriarchal Victorian household drank, he was likely also to be abusive and more controlling than even your sober Victorian male. But with Michael Dennehy’s virile but poetic nature, this is seemingly not what happened. There are no stories about him being even angry. The stories I recall portray him as easy-going, and very much the wry commentator. My great-grandmother Mary Carroll, later to become Mrs Gerity and then Mrs O’Driscoll, had a twin sister, Barbara. She and her husband (who I think must have been a Malachy) bred horses and produced a sort of roa
d show glamourising the tinkers or travelling gypsies. They became very famous, and millionaires, but then they died when a cholera epidemic ravaged the city and wiped out the family. My grandmother was informed that she would inherit the entire fortune. Without waiting for confirmation, she rushed out and bought two monster grand pianos on tick, one black, one white. As they already had a superb Bechstein, this gives some indication of the size of the house. Then word came through that on her deathbed, Barbara Ellen had changed her will. The Catholic Church got the lot. The Dennehys got nothing.

  The family around the dining room table were sunk in despair, and this is where Michael’s joie de vivre came to the rescue. He made jokes about how Jesus and Barbara Ellen had a lot in common: they both died between two thieves (Barbara’s being the church and the law). He then moved on to Tommy Moore, whose song ‘Let Erin Remember the Days of Old’ my mother loved, transposing the line about Malachy wearing a collar of gold into Malachy collared all the gold. He took them out of themselves, made them laugh, made light of life, distracted them away from the temptations of despair.

  Once Michael came back from the waterfront with a big, colourful and most intelligent parrot. The parrot and Maggie got on very well indeed, and he always waited for her when she returned late at night after playing for the silent movies. She was well paid for it, and Mum considered this an excellent way to do her practice. Beethoven was excellent for victory, Schubert was perfect for water and pastoral scenes, Chopin’s Sonata in B-flat minor, Opus 35, underlined tragic episodes. One night, when my parents had just started going out together, my father insisted that he would walk her home. Maggie’s parents obviously didn’t know about this, and when she attempted to creep into the house very late indeed she assumed no one need know. The parrot, who was annoyed at being kept waiting, wanted everyone to know. At the top of his raucous voice he announced, ‘Here comes Maggie. Here comes Maggie. Here comes Maggie.’ And then Mum had to understand that everyone knew.

  I rather think my grandfather’s lack of respect for institutions gave my aunts a sense of freedom. These were happy, carefree days for them, despite constant money worries. They were living, after all, in a beautiful house with stylish, lovely things. Duval had seen to it that the rooms were in the colours of the Victorian establishment. Dark scarlet, as in warm and welcoming, for the sitting room; Victorian green for the dining room to counteract overheating while eating; and a superb Chinese yellow in the master bedroom. Grandma’s bed was, in itself, like a lovely galleon floating in a yellow silk sea. Heavy tapestry curtains enclosed the bed to shut out the light for Grandma’s afternoon siesta – when she had finished reading (in French, of course) her favourite French essayist and letter writer Madame de Sévigné’s Letters to Her Daughter.

  It is a mystery how the family organised themselves. An Irish washerwoman spent all Monday washing what must have been a massive amount of clothes. There was talk of various women who did cleaning. But who attended the enormous vegetable garden? The fruit trees? The roses? Not the dead-loss uncles, and not Michael. Grandpa, Michael’s father? They might have contributed something at different times. There is a view of Michael, glimpsed through the window, working in the garden as my grandmother lay dying. Mum said, ‘After you are dead what will happen to Michael?’ (It is interesting how the children called him Michael, as if he were one of them.) And Grandma said, ‘He will die not long after me.’ In fact he died six months later.

  Meantime, Grandma, whether she liked it or not, had to take charge of everything. It would seem that the men, having found safe harbour, felt no need to do anything ever again. So who, for instance, cleaned up after the parrot? He was a big, strong-natured bird and as such was a living luxury in himself. Michael raced greyhounds. Greyhounds are a lot of work. Did Michael do the feeding, the grooming, the exercising? A man in a cart brought chopped wood for the fires, and perhaps the dead-loss uncles went fishing, but somehow I don’t think so. It is more likely that Michael on his prowls around the waterfront bought fish from the boats in the evenings. I also know the family had roast lamb dinners with vegetables from the garden, so they were living very well. What they thought of as hard up could have seemed like luxury to other people in Timaru.

  Mum had her suspicions about why her sister Eileah never married. Oh, she had lots of admirers. Eileah was statuesque – a true Gibson girl, with a beautiful profile and a mass of light brown hair. She was, however, flighty. There was the most charismatic German priest in town and he hung out quite a lot in the Dennehy household. In his opinion, none of the young men were good enough for Eileah. He had the idea that a call from Jesus would be a whole lot more acceptable for Eileah than any local yokels calling. Just before war broke out, this charming man was called back to the Vatican. Of course Timaru suspected that he was a spy. He travelled around New Zealand but he actually hid out in Timaru – a strange place for a brilliant scholar to be appointed. After the war he was made a Cardinal, which surely fits in with Timaru’s suspicions. Who knows, but it may just have been a small town’s reaction.

  Sometimes I am sure that the German priest was truly in love with Eileah, but with war on the way he had to go. He’d have been put in an aliens’ camp if he had stayed in New Zealand. After he had left, and her three adored brothers were called up, Eileah ran away to Wellington. The war destroyed their little bit of heaven in the middle of the Canterbury Plains. The good times became a memory. The tennis parties; the picnics at Caroline Bay; the singing – Michael, Fred, Ted and Tom all singing round the piano: ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’, ‘The Sally Gardens’, ‘She Moved Through The Fair’ and ‘Silent Oh Moyle’. All the old Irish songs. The whole family joining in the chorus – ‘The Rose of Tralee’ and ‘She Walketh, She Walketh, The Lady’. The house routinely rang with the repertoire of European classics. They sang as much as they ever talked. They sang as they worked. Where has all that joyful singing gone? What in our society killed it? An evil from that other world entered into that house, and it fell silent. The good times were all over.

  CHAPTER TWO

  When They Stopped Singing

  I have a photograph of the three boys before they went to the war. Had they any idea what awful suffering lay ahead of them? What a brutal initiation into the Army had been prepared for them? I search their faces for a clue as to their state of mind. Fred, the eldest and the only one to survive, is alert, intelligent, and as my mother said, so handsome. The two younger boys are more pensive, less present, even bemused. Someone has drawn an arrow into Ted’s body. This must have been inscribed when Ted was killed – I think that was about halfway through the war. Tom was also doomed to death. With a cruel irony he was shot after the Amnesty, and that’s another mystery. My mother’s photograph was in the pocket over his heart. It was sent back to the family with the blood from his heart staining her image. The chances of a bullet straight to the heart on the field of battle are rare. However, to die by firing squad often involves a bullet in the heart. Was Tom one of those New Zealanders who protested at their treatment after peace was declared and executed for lack of discipline? I believe that bullet through the heart and the bloodstained photograph were re-examined constantly, and with an anxiety that was never to be resolved.

  Fred only survived the war by pure chance. After the horrors of the slaughter on the Somme, he lay in the field, out in the open, bleeding to death. In his delirium he thought he saw some iron monsters getting closer and closer. These monsters ground over the dead and the dying without discrimination. The screams from the dying were pitiable but achieved nothing. On and on rolled the monsters, and just as they reached Fred for some inexplicable reason they veered to the right. What Fred was looking at were the first tanks ever to engage in warfare. A day later, immobile and speechless, he heard voices and saw scurrying figures. A stretcher bearer called out to his mate, ‘No joy here, they’re all dead.’ With a stupendous effort Fred managed to flop one arm over, and the stretcher bearer yelled out, ‘This one is still alive
.’

  Of course that was not the end of it. The damage the war did to Fred is perfectly illustrated by his return to Timaru. Fred’s three sisters had joined the crowd at the railway station to welcome the boys back from the war. Wild with excitement to be the first to greet him, they ran up and down the platform until the suspicion began to surface that he was not on the train. As the crowd thinned out they were sure of it. He wasn’t there.

  But then they had to notice an exhausted shadow of a man standing in the middle of the platform. Out of dark hollow eyes he implored their recognition. It was only because of his eyes that they knew who he was. Mum said when she first saw the pictures out of Belsen in the Second World War that was what he looked like: one of Hitler’s victims. The sisters had been running up and down the platform, passing him for at least half an hour. He had no strength to call out, identify himself. He must have understood the extent of the damage done to him when his own beloved sisters didn’t know who he was.

  After the Armistice, when the news came through of Tom’s death – Tom, that wild colonial boy, the clever one, the horse-riding one – Grandmother went to bed and died quite quickly. Michael died, as she had foretold, within another six months. When my mother asked the doctor what they had died of, he said, ‘Why do you ask? It is quite plain. They died of broken hearts.’ And of course, added to the loss of Ted and Tom, there was Fred’s return, which was its own tragedy; and I rather think my Aunt Eileah’s desperation in Wellington in the war years, her self-imposed exile, was also a contributing factor. Her mother had to know that a man like that German priest would make it almost impossible for Eileah ever to love anyone else. He had taken control of Eileah’s imagination.