Something for the Birds

by Fahey, Jacqueline

  Where, while all this was going on, were my sisters? Cecil had her own friends from the preparatory high school. I must have had friends because Daddy said I could call our pet Friesian cows after my kindergarten friends. There was a Daisy, a Betty and a Jean, and as it turned out they all had bovine TB and were summarily slaughtered. I never had got used to it. Killing things and living on a farm developed its own crazed, delusional system. Rats, rabbits and feral cats became pests when you killed them; the preordained fate of cattle and sheep was to be butchered. My first drawings, drawn with clay on the concrete wall at the bottom of the garden, were a memorial to dead creatures. Other than horse riding, these drawings were my first experience of excellence. They said what I needed to say, and other children read them with understanding and admiration. I was chosen to be an artist by popular acclaim. I also, sometimes, wanted to be a vet and save animals, but my father said being a vet wasn’t like that. (My only other change of direction happened in my first year at art school, when I attempted to join the police force in an effort to emulate my father’s father, the remarkable Detective Fahey. In a roundabout way they explained to me that the police force was no place for a young lady like myself.)

  The nuns said that the creatures I loved at Marchwiel did not have a soul, they did not go to heaven. I knew they were not only wrong but cruel. Saying animals did not have a soul meant you could do whatever you liked to them. It was a licence to kill. I think it was about then that I decided that I did not like God.

  Among my most loved creatures was Fifty Legs, a very long, low-strung sort of a terrier dog, charming and intelligent. She got her name because after she had babies her teats just about brushed the ground. She slept on my bed. Then there was Tipsy, full name Tipperary, because that’s where he came from – Tipperary in Ireland. It was a project of my father’s to get the first Irish wolfhound into New Zealand. Unfortunately, when Tipsy first arrived in Timaru on the train, after what must have been a traumatic journey, he slipped his leash. He took to the hills and lived off the land for a month until he was spotted by a farmer. Rumour reached Dad that a great grey wolf was prowling the foothills. Tipsy’s favourite food was rabbit, and during the Depression there were plenty of rabbits, so Tipsy didn’t go hungry on his dash for freedom. But Tipsy stayed unhappy and he kept running away. He was sensitive, convoluted, and built for long-distance running. He simply wanted to go home, while Dad wanted him to do as he was told. But it turned out Tipsy couldn’t do as he was told – Irish wolfhounds come in circles. Dad learned this eventually, but still had the urge to control him. For a little while, before I was found out, I would sneak into the stables to sleep with Tipsy. I felt an overwhelming compassion for his sweet shaggy face, his mild brown eyes, his delicious paws, the grace of his elegant body. How depraved and deprived a heaven would be without Tipsy. He got distemper, and he died in my arms. I have never forgotten him. Fifty Legs died some time later. I waited for her one night – she was late in – and she crawled into her place at the end of my bed and was dead in the morning.

  To get back to my family and my place in it – why didn’t I see a lot of Barbara and Terry or my mother at this time? Barbara and Terry were still in the nursery. Sometimes on rainy days we did play on the verandah, I remember that. We played ‘Saying the Mass’, ‘Doctors’, and, of course, ‘Dentists’. Mostly I liked being a priest, dressing up grandly, intoning approximations of Gregorian chants and dramatically, with a great deal of arm-waving, turning bread and wine into the body of Christ. Barbara and Terry were either worshippers or patients, as the rewards of being the director involved my getting all the lead parts.

  There was a most excellent young woman who looked after me. She was in the most sensitive way my cuddly, my touchstone. Gwen, a Seventh Day Adventist, could only have been seventeen, maybe sixteen. Everything she saw was transformed into a poetic magical story, and she wove her religion into this imagery. She wasn’t trying to convert me, just let me know how she saw the world. Her good intent was as clear as fresh running water. Her own perfection of spirit overrode the irrational convolutions of her religion. Somehow she was able to bypass all the tacky, hysterical stuff, and she picked up only on the poetry. And it was through this that I betrayed her.

  Gwen must have been with us three or four years when Canterbury endured a hot dry summer, the hottest and the driest for at least twenty years. We were off to Temuka to visit the Toomey sisters. Burnt tussock on the hills, cabbage trees ailing in the paddocks, and the Opihi River shrinking. Mum enthusiastically pointed out all these disasters, crying, ‘Look children, look! The cabbage trees! The river!’ We sat hot and bored in the back seat, exhausted by Mum’s energy. About halfway to Temuka I saw them – a cloud of white butterflies rising up, fanning out across a field. One of those miracles of nature that transcend, inspire everyday life. But I knew what it meant: it was a sign. Gwen had told me so. Before the end of the world there would be a plague of white butterflies.

  That’s when I betrayed Gwen. Mum called out, ‘Look, look, clouds of butterflies, beautiful’, and I had to say, ‘They herald the end of our world. Soon there will be the resurrection. The dead will climb out of their tombs.’ Something of the sort, anyway. My mother fell silent, and I knew I had said something that was not going to do Gwen any good whatsoever.

  Children lead secret lives, and I endured my stupidity in silence. Surely I must have known that Gwen didn’t talk in front of other people in the same way as she talked with me. That other people would think she wasn’t right in the head, that it was dangerous talk in front of a child. I knew there was nothing wrong with her head and that her thoughts did me no harm whatsoever. I understood what she told me in the same way as I understood Cinderella or Hansel and Gretel. I betrayed my hero the horseman and Gwen through stupidity, not evil intent, and I was well aware of that. I was guilty about the harm I had done by being stupid.

  I don’t remember any more about this episode except that Gwen disappeared. Well, as it turned out, she didn’t disappear completely. When I had my first exhibition at the Barry Lett Gallery, she rang me. She was living in Auckland. She had married a good man from her church and lived happily ever after, which she certainly deserved to do. We had afternoon tea together, and all her memories of Marchwiel were precious and beautiful. Marchwiel was as much of a fairyland for her as it had been for me. She described how, in the evenings, she would creep up the hall to the music room and stand behind the door, transported by Mum’s thrilling renditions of Chopin, Schubert and Beethoven. I could only think Mum must have sacked Gwen in the most tactful way possible, as she seemingly bore no resentment whatsoever towards my family.

  At different times in my life I felt very close to my parents, but at Marchwiel they aren’t really there. Mum was working, often performing and acting as repetiteur for visiting musicians, singers, etcetera. She also did some teaching. During the Depression parents paid a lot to give their children a skill, and the piano and singing were still seen as a way to learn a rewarding skill. Think of the more prosperous Blacks in New Orleans after slavery was abolished. The first thing those Blacks’ parents did was to pay for their child to learn an instrument. Mum only took on students sitting their finals, and she screened them most carefully. These pupils must do her credit. She had a household to organise, and four children, two of whom were still in the nursery.

  Of Dad there are flickering memories. Sometimes, instead of bicycling straight home from the convent I would go to his rooms in Church Street with the gold plaque on the front door – A. C. Fahey – that was polished every day by his nurse. Dad had great piles of National Geographics in his waiting room and I was particularly addicted to the Aztecs and the Mayans. Interesting that I could break my heart over the pain animals endured but didn’t worry too much about throbbing hearts being ripped out of the bodies of agonised human beings. Driving home with Dad one Friday evening he had to collect stuff for the household for dinner. At the cluster of shops at the bottom of the s
teep hill Dad got chops, and then we went next door for ginger ale. Meanwhile I was complaining, as if I really cared, that it was Friday and on Friday you eat fish, not meat. Dad, irritated, said all right he would get me fish, and he bought me a chocolate fish. Now I should explain our diet was strictly supervised – no white flour, sugar and so on – and here was Dad presenting me with a chocolate fish. I took it and I ate it, but I knew I had been foully tricked.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  My Father’s Teeth

  My father was obsessed with teeth, his own and everybody else’s. This obsession took hold a long time before he ever became a dentist, and I believe developed from a mistake: his own diagnosis. Later in life he talked about referred pain the way Captain Ahab talked about the great white whale. He had been for so long in search of the source of the pain in his face that he felt obliged to come to a conclusion. He decided the problem lay in his top teeth. He turned out to be hopelessly wrong, but he had to find that out the hard way.

  My mother said that he had lovely teeth, and lips shaped like a cupid’s bow. She didn’t know he had a problem with his teeth or thought he did. He didn’t talk about his facial pain with her.

  My father had always been acutely aware that teeth were a social issue. That if you went to the gallops you most likely had your own teeth, but that if you fancied the trots the chances were you would be wearing false teeth. Long before he did dentistry he was conscious of the role of teeth in propping up the face. Take the teeth out and the face collapsed; take the teeth out and you automatically joined the working class. All this observation fed into his own struggles against social injustice.

  When Dad started his practice in the second half of the 1920s, New Zealand had, with Greenland, the worst teeth in the world. Lack of fluoride in the water and an overload of sugar in the soft diet gave us perfectly awful teeth. When young women turned up at the dentist’s to have all their teeth out, this was considered an economy. To go to a dentist to save a tooth was a luxury a young married woman could not afford, so it seemed to many to be sensible to have them out first. Dad was determined to change this mentality because he identified with the working class. He believed that those young women could learn to want to keep their teeth, and look after them into the bargain. He could teach them how to do that, and indeed he did.

  ‘So your mother is a great baker? Is that right?’ That’s how he started. Then he would pounce. ‘You, I suppose, intend to also be as good a baker as your mother, is that right?’ He would then move on to how she would not be helping her husband and children by ruining their teeth. ‘But,’ he would say, ‘let’s begin with you. You’re a very good-looking young woman, but I will show you what getting your teeth out will do to your face.’ He’d show her an illustration of before and after a complete extraction, and then he’d move on to how much she would save by following his advice. He would fix any current problems at a very reasonable price and then, if she followed his diet sheet, she could save not only her own teeth but also her family’s.

  Dad had made some remarkable discoveries. Toddlers with the beginnings of cavities could, on a strict diet of wholesome food, find the cavities healed themselves.

  Dad was as convincing as a gambler who had just seen Jesus walking on the Mississippi River, and he needed to be. What he was asking these young women to do was abandon their own culture. You could go so far as to say that their sexuality, certainly their womanhood, was demonstrated by their baking skills. Dad was telling them to invent a new lifestyle. No cakes, biscuits, lollies, no white-flour products, no sugar. No best cake at the gala day. This was very hard. Many nonconformist families in New Zealand didn’t drink, and sugar had filled up that void. Addiction to sugar had replaced addiction to booze, and now Cecil Alphonsus Fahey was saying that that was bad for you too.

  In fact, Cecil Alphonsus Fahey did have something Freudian going for him here. Daughters do have a very real need to be superior to their mothers. In having to learn to cook all over again, they escape their mother’s supervision. They could say, with great confidence, ‘No, Mum, that is not how it’s done, what are you trying to do? Poison my children?’ An endless source of conflict.

  Dad’s final pronouncement after he had stated his solution was, ‘If you are still determined to have your teeth out, I will refer you to another dentist. I myself do not extract perfectly good teeth.’

  The only perfectly good teeth he did extract were his own. He had convinced himself that the pain in his face would miraculously disappear if he pulled his top teeth out. What an awful punishing thing to do to himself – the pain must have been unendurable. He was like some Plains Indian committed to suffer in silence: no painkillers and certainly no calling out. And his self-torture achieved absolutely nothing. The pain in his face continued for the rest of his life. I do believe it was his sinuses.

  It is interesting that my father’s determination to bring dental good health to the working class was what attracted to him patients with more money. It happened like this. A young man, the top jockey from the South Canterbury Racing Club, presented with a damaged jaw and broken teeth. Dad did a superb job of reconstructing the jaw and the teeth. He was really pleased with himself. But that was not the end of it. The president of the racing club, furious, barged into Dad’s rooms, accusing him of gross overcharging. Dad, equally furious, defended his costs. He explained that he always did the best work he was capable of for all of his patients. Would Mr Fairhaven expect him to do half a job if the patient was one of his own children? Was he objecting to so much money being spent on a lowly jockey? Was that it? Dad said he believed this jockey had chosen him as his dentist because he believed that he, Cecil Alphonsus Fahey, would do the best job, and so indeed he had tried to do.

  ‘This jockey’, Dad said, ‘made some real money for you. Now you can pay him back.’

  Not only did the racing club pay the bill, Fairhaven also decided that his family could do with a dentist who had integrity.

  Did my father, having now acquired more affluent patients, change his politics? Not really, because only people with money and style went to a dentist anyway. Other than for emergencies, the bulk of the population were resigned to having their teeth out. The patients who had been convinced by his arguments for a life change – a life change that included visiting a dentist – stayed with him, and he continued to believe they could change the conditions of their lives. There was another part of him, though, that admired people who had always had the best in life. He was not envious or resentful of them, but interested and admiring.

  In a curious way he didn’t see himself as part of the society he lived in. He didn’t feel he belonged. But that was not entirely true either. His love of the Mackenzie Country and Mt Cook, Caroline Bay and the countryside was a part of his identity – but it wasn’t something he felt he could express or had any legitimate claim to. The Fairhavens, by contrast, had that legitimate claim, and he was curious as to its influence on their lives. What surprised him was their talk about going home, the fact that they were not completely at ease in this country. My parents had no such illusions: desperate, poverty-stricken Ireland didn’t seem like a solution to anything. They must find their solutions where they were. The Fairhavens, however, regarded London in the same way as an eighteenth-century squire in the north of England regarded London. That is, as the centre of the universe, as the only place in which you could properly make your mark. This surprised my parents, who felt that families like the Fairhavens who had a legitimate claim on the land would be devoted to it. But this was the thirties, and that colonial mentality persisted: as in Mansfield Park, such families’ property in the colonies was there to fund a lifestyle – and a very expensive one – in England.

  I understand now that my father was only human. Sometimes he thought one thing and then, at other times, he thought something else. Mostly he liked the Fairhavens and he thought their colonial stance was just the natural result of their environment. The natural result of the baking en
vironment was poor teeth, and the natural result of being a member of Empire was to believe in the colonial illusion. England must be where the power and the romance were.

  For different reasons the Faheys and the Fairhavens ended up with an estrangement from the place they lived in. The Faheys because they still carried the stigma of their history, the Fairhavens because they dared not properly identify with this landscape. They knew how much harm they could do themselves if they forgot that their power lay in the history written by their people in their home country. Their view of England was essential to their survival, was the source of their power. Empire’s task was after all to erase other people’s history and replace it with its own.

  Of course the sort of social interaction that was going on between the Faheys and the Fairhavens was going on in every town in New Zealand, and led to further changes. At this time in the South Island, for example, the remarkable parents of James K. Baxter and Colin McCahon were brooding and interacting, thinking way out of any small-town square.

  Now all this time while the Fairhavens and the Faheys were trying to discover their identity I had a problem, and it was the same problem as my father had. Really bad pain in my face. My face? My jaw? My teeth? Was it in my sinus? In 1951 my father made me a sort of clamp for my teeth. I personally believe the pain made me grind my teeth, rather than vice versa, but I must say that the clamp did stop me grinding. What it didn’t do was stop the pain. I have always noticed in medicine that a sickness is all your own fault if the doctor doesn’t know what is wrong with you, or if there is no cure for what is wrong with you. The doctor is, after all, only human and gets irritated. He says that you are too tense, which stresses your neck and your jaw, which causes the pain in your face. But then there was always my father’s referred pain. Referred from where? The stressed neck? Some evil tumour inhabiting the spinal cord? As my husband Fraser would later say, if it was cancer I would have been dead years ago. It certainly wasn’t rheumatism or arthritis or tooth decay. There were numerous scans to prove that one.