It must have been about this time, 1956, that I was involved with the open-air exhibition outside the Wellington Library – a bringing art to the people sort of thing. There was John Drawbridge, Pat Day, Don Peebles, Vic Gray and a guy whose name I have forgotten. I don’t think we were the modernists by that time, and anyway it was already clear to us all that a modernist I would never be. But, inadvertently, I saw to it that the show was closed down.
Eric Ramsden’s attack on my painting The Cancer Ward drew attention to our show. The painting itself showed up large on the back page of the Herald. An indignant heading went with it: ‘What Can Possibly Have Happened To This Woman?’ I was very angry about this. The answer was obviously ‘Cancer! And you can’t get much worse than cancer, can you?’ Ramsden’s view ridiculed death and exposed a cast of mind that could not bear any insight into it.
I had glimpsed that stark image in a small side room in Fraser’s ward. The room itself was minimalist in the extreme. The tubes and cords in fine lines were running in and out of the woman’s body. The bedstead was high, narrow and as uncomfortable as the rack. The image was a harsh scream.
Another painting in the show was of a very red fisherman, boiled by the sun. He was chopping up a delicate blue fish, the fish reflecting the watery blue depths of the sea. On a board underneath this painting I wrote, ‘This is a painting of an old ram cutting up a poor fish in his den.’ Ramsden, get it?
The next day some suited guys clustered together in conspiratorial groups, then made it across the lawn to the exhibition. They decided, these characters from the City Council, to close the show down. Lou Johnson found the whole incident totally hilarious. It seemed, he told me, that Ramsden believed that the caption was a reference to his luring young Maori women into his house. This was not something I’d been aware of, his private habits.
There was a real affinity between Lou Johnson, his wife Pat, and Fraser and me. It is curious that I didn’t pick up on the fact that Lou’s poetry and my painting were motivated by similar insights; I didn’t see this at all at that time. I did appreciate Lou’s poetry, though I think he thought of my painting as more amusing and distracting than important. Years later he wrote to me after he had seen the Anxious Images exhibition in Wellington. He said something along the lines of how he hadn’t been reading my paint language. That he was totally convinced now of my importance; that they were the paintings in the show that meant the most to him. This mattered a great deal to me, for Lou had been sending me copies of his latest poems and I had to realise then our connection, how we had in the past been looking at Wellington with the same eyes.
Then, part of those times too were the cocktail parties we dressed up for, parties on yachts, and brooding poets’ parties. Our enemies quite rightly said that we were burning the candle at both ends. But the party I especially remember happened when Fraser was imprisoned in his hospital room. I had been given two months to find somewhere else to live, but meantime there was the party on the submarine to go to. It was a lovely soft summer evening, and Denis Glover and Khura his wife – partner? – turned up in our flat in the hospital grounds. Fraser had a balcony outside his hospital room which overlooked our flat, and he kept a sharp eye out for my comings and goings. He liked Denis Glover and Khura, and he waved us all off to the party.
It was Denis’s generous and hilarious mentality that launched the night, so that everything we did was illuminated by his inspired comments and cranky pranks. I mean, the submarine in the first place. Remember from my Evelyn Waugh days in Christchurch it was where you held the party that established the mindset. Such giving of oneself to entertain and inspire a night doesn’t happen much these days. I expect television has soaked that all up, and being paid makes it a more calculated performance anyway. Denis was the spontaneous master of the party. Fuelled by gin, the bottle often clutched under one arm like a theatre prop, he turned alcohol into a subversive weapon, a challenge. I suspected that being a naval officer during the war was the happiest time of Denis Glover’s life. On board the submarine, he was a child playing with one of his favourite toys. He was also playing with one of his favourite mates. I can only remember now that this mate was a Toomey, a Toomey from Temuka – the very same Toomeys my mother and grandmother and I do believe my great-grandmother visited there. I expect the Toomey sisters were this guy’s aunts.
All this happened fifty years ago, and the participants are all dead now and Toomey dead before any of us. But you could almost hear the rush of time passing, the night went so fast. Toomey and I felt as if we floated on a perfect cloud of communication, although we were not so high up in the sky that I didn’t know I must get home.
Toomey was a smooth operator, as Glover said. Later in the evening he collected me and Glover’s bottle of gin, and we were away in a taxi before Glover knew what was happening. You know how it is – that ease as if you have always known each other, the surprise and pleasure in the perfect attraction. To be allowed to kiss each other, gaze mesmerised into each other’s eyes. That only happens once or twice in a lifetime. We strolled about in the superintendent’s garden, drinking gin, enthralled. When he saw me to the front door, I understood Fraser was at his post on the balcony. Would I have asked Toomey in? I don’t think so. He was married with two children and, having delivered the submarine to the New Zealand Navy, was flying back to England in the morning. Back to England, his family and his career. I was married and busy developing a mentality that I doubt he would have shared.
Next morning Khura rang. She said Denis thought it quite bad enough to desert him like that, but to take the last bottle of gin with us was unforgivable. Then she rang again the next morning to tell me that Toomey was dead. Toomey’s wife and two children had met him at the airport. They’d driven out on to the highway, and there had been an accident. Toomey and the two children were killed; his wife survived.
How irrational Death is: allowing that Toomey should survive the war where the odds in a submarine were not good at all, then waiting, having already eyed him up, to finish him off randomly. Smash him up when Toomey thought he need not take such care any more. But you never know. Maybe Death was lurking round Fraser’s hospital rooms and, catching sight of Toomey who had once outwitted him, got on his case again. The Grim Reaper would leave Fraser for later.
There is a blank after this as far as Khura and Denis Glover go, but then they turn up again when we moved to Porirua Hospital. Fraser had been released from hospital with the idea that with a bit of luck he would be all right. Our major problem was to find somewhere to live. I remember I was in the bath and Barbara, my sister, and her husband Bill Glass were gnawing away at the problem in the kitchen with Fraser. Barbie found an advertisement in the paper that said doctors at Porirua Hospital had a house included, and that did it. Psychiatry it was.
The truth is that at that time we were not aware that we were making such a suitable choice – suitable for the new mentality that we had been working on. And, as an added bonus, the house there was really quite lovely.
I realise now that Ben Hart, the superintendent, ran Porirua Hospital very well considering how little money and public support there was. He had an indulgence towards patients and staff that allowed the hospital to function like an estate in a Turgenev novel – a very well-run, humane estate. The patients on this estate were playing the part of the serfs who were immersed in their own rich emotional life, whatever the squalor and turmoil of the Porirua Hospital. From the lowest to the highest, everyone was an identity. One star personality at Porirua was Mr Quickly, our gardener. He understood the workings of the hospital’s underworld and worked it like an Afghani chieftain works the tribes.
Mr Quickly (or Quickly, or Jock, depending on who was speaking to him, and the circumstances) must have arrived at Porirua not long after the war ended. He had his transforming experience when he was waiting on the beach at Dunkirk for the boats to pick the soldiers up as they retreated from the Germans. A bullet flew through one ear and out the
other. This, as it undoubtedly would, changed him. After such a dreadful trauma, Quickly could see into the future. Although he came originally from Glasgow and was proud of being a Scot, I rather think there was a Jewish connection. His obsession was with Israel and how the conflict there would herald the final conflagration, the fire next time.
Having studied at Kew Gardens and then worked as a gardener on a royal estate, Quickly had emigrated to New Zealand in the 1930s and been head gardener at Long Beach, at the Griggs’ estate. He had in fact known my favourite pupil at Craighead, Virginia Grigg, when she was a little girl. This gave me proper status in Quickly’s eyes, but I assure you it was about the only thing that did.
Quickly’s behaviour towards me was the behaviour of a very disapproving grandfather. He did not consider me a suitable wife for a doctor and that, in his opinion, started with my clothes. He became in time resigned to the fact that I would never learn; but, although he might criticise me, no one else would have dared to in his company. He was a product of the English rural class system. Everyone had their place; and it was his place to serve, and mine to fulfil my role as the doctor’s wife and be an example to all the villagers.
Mr Quickly’s gardens at Porirua included a prize-winning vegetable garden. Luckily, most of the produce went into the underground shopping system, often bartered for amazing fresh fish, delicious pork chops and of course Quickly’s cigarettes. I could cope with the flowers he delivered every morning, but I was completely baffled, even made quite anxious by all the fruit that would at seasonable times turn up on my kitchen table for bottling. I also discovered that there was a mystical side to Quickly. For the fifteen years we were to live together (eight at Porirua, another seven at Kingseat) we shared the ceremony of feeding the birds: red-billed gulls, black-backed gulls, great Arctic scavenging gulls and, on the fringes, clusters of blackbirds, sparrows and magpies. Every morning Quickly brought a big basket of leftovers, mostly bread, from his ward, and together we would lay it out on the rise just next to the house.
After Quickly went out into the world again I continued this ritual. I have in fact continued it to this very morning. I think it has become my religious practice – ‘something for the birds’, like the Americans say. Placating the natural world with gifts of food. A ritual cleansing of the soul for the guilt of killing and taking: giving back, sharing. Quickly and I never at any time talked about this; it was something we did.
When Fraser died in 1994 we held the funeral at Carrington Hospital, and the seagulls had remembered. As we came out of the hospital building with his body, a great wave of gulls rose, fanning up and, in a thick mass, spreading out. Such good eyesight – there I was with our daughters Augusta, Alex, Emily. Sometimes it happened that I would forget to feed the birds. In the evening a big gull would fly slowly past the kitchen window, really close up. A sharp eye boring into me. He features large in the painting The Ruined Dinner Party, cruising past the window to distract me from my disastrous preoccupations. Distracting me with his own preoccupations.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Commitment to Madness and Painting
Not long after Fraser and I went to Porirua some of our closest friends began to disperse – Don Peebles, John Drawbridge and Pat Day to England, Vic Gray back to Greece. They had a serious future in the arts to see to. Then my sister Barbie and Bill sailed away, and they were not to come home again for four years. Did Fraser and I resent the fact that we couldn’t go to Europe? That Fraser’s health made that not a possibility? I think we were happy that we had a life at all, and we simply recognised that the life we’d had before as a young couple was well and properly over. Lou Johnson and his wife Pat were involved in having a baby in Porirua, and in due course so were Barbie and Bill in London. We were all starting to work on the same programme, the baby programme.
We also knew that we were no longer dreaming about what we should be, but now must become what we had been dreaming of. Leading that meaningful life presented us with lots of false paths to follow, and of course we often did follow them, but we were headed in the right direction.
Nonetheless, we were in many ways on our own. Fraser’s parents were both dead. My family and the medical world – or rather, Fraser’s contemporaries who no longer saw him as a contender – largely rejected us. It was not everyone: Dr Hart, the superintendent at Porirua; Barbara and Bill; my dear aunts; the doctors who treated Fraser – they were indeed superb. But medicine was very competitive, and Fraser was now viewed as a loser. People had a very real fear of TB in those days, in much the same way people today fear AIDS; it was a disease very few people survived.
The reason my parents disowned me at this most crucial time was the result of misinformation. There is no point in going into the details of how this happened and I don’t want to anyway. I find it too painful to write about. Being cut off from my family had its positive side anyway. Feeling that I had to be in charge of my own mentality was good for me; I may never have arrived at that if I hadn’t absolutely had to. Fraser and I were indeed on our own, and it was over this period that we started to think in tandem, to grow up together.
I am allergic to the smell of old books, old papers, old clothes. In fact I am allergic to the smell of the past – it makes me sick. But every now and then getting sick seems worth it. I stumbled recently upon a diary from 1980 and risked opening it. There was an entry that grabbed my attention. It seemed I had just gone to see my mother, who lived in Parnell, and my sister Terry was staying with her. I wrote in my diary: ‘Why did I go? I should have made some excuse.’ From the tone in Mum’s voice I knew something was up, I just knew it. And now I have to know something about myself that I would sooner not have to know.
I have always assumed, and my past history has borne this out, that my instinctive response is in good order. If a kitten is being attacked by a savage dog I save it; if a child is drowning I jump in the river. But all is not well. Something has atrophied. Have the wellsprings of forgiveness and renewed hope dried up? It would seem so. I must have felt more grief at my family’s rejection of me than I realised. I have let it eat away at part of my proper nature. I resent now that my innocence has gone. They still have theirs; they are still open to their feelings. They took my spontaneity away from me, and no matter how much they wish to they can’t give it back.
Yes, I know I was innocent of any bad intent, and they knew it too. Does this mean that the sort of forgiveness they need and want from me isn’t in me any more? Were my emotions so damaged by that experience that when I call on my emotions for that tearful, warm forgiveness, all that is there is a meagre recognition? A recognition of their sincerity, their generosity of spirit in hoping to bring about a reconciliation – in fact, their right to forgiveness. All this is such a bitter irony. Certainly I had no bad intent, but I was heedless. Always rushing ahead, sure they comprehended. I was uncomprehending – or, more importantly, comprehended them wrongly.
I then add, like a sort of postscript, that I am too old to find answers in the past. I could say that then, but what do I think I am doing now, in 2005? It would seem that I am into that old necromancy thing the Faheys were so well known for. If I am not examining the corpses of the past, certainly I am examining the available remnants. Possibly I am beginning to realise that a great deal of my story is about finding that place to paint in – a physical place and a mindset. Achieving that mindset so that I will be able to see for myself. The heedlessness was part of it. I was looking somewhere else, seemingly going one place but heading off to another one, guided by some unconscious, ruthless instinct. In the diary I say that you can never go back – that’s what I wrote. That once you start that journey into the lonely fringes of the psyche you cannot return to the cosy inn. However, I do finish by saying: do the right thing and get on with it. Behave properly towards them and you never know the feeling may follow.
Most of the staff at Porirua were not frightened of madness. You can, as they say, get used to anything. Certainly the s
ympathies of the senior staff were with the inmates; their suspicions and fears involved the ignorant public reaction. I don’t mean that nothing bad happened in the hospital. Any institution is fertile ground for bullying, we all know that. What I do know is that all the doctors on the staff at Porirua while we were there were well intentioned. There had, in the past, been some nutter medicos whom the doctors would talk about amongst themselves. They were usually doctors with a theory that might involve blood groups or some genetic disposition which could allow them to behave in an insensitive and brutal way towards a patient. We only have to look at Hitler’s Germany for a good example of that sort of thing. With women, any passionate sexual response could be interpreted by these theory-driven guys as the behaviour of a psychopath. Yet I also realise there were elements of that thinking in society at large. How can a mental hospital reflect anything but the society that produces it? We are talking about the fifties here, but the pendulum has swung back again and the small gains that we have won in that interim are now being eroded.
You know that party game where, when the music stops, you hold that pose, that position? Out on the lawns the long-term patients, clothed in remnants like Russian refugees escaping from a bombed village in the war, posed in the silence. Their music had stopped and they were trapped in catatonic postures. There was a calculated distance between each figure, so that each was isolated in his or her own space. They were distorted figures of grief, zombies, the walking dead. Equally tragic were those for whom schizophrenia had burnt out their interior in bursts of insight and visions, leaving behind an uncomprehending shell. Nowadays the drugs for schizophrenia make the victim fat; in those days they were emaciated. As they moved around the hospital performing the most menial tasks, they resembled what I imagine slaves looked like during the Roman Empire. Taken in war from faraway places, their spirits broken, driven mad.
Something for the Birds Page 17