The Varnished Untruth

by Stephenson, Pamela

  But I don’t think our family had the funds for things like cinema outings; money was to be used for education, not entertainment or luxury items. Our mother made our clothes on her Singer sewing machine. We listened to children’s radio programmes, but there was no TV then. Oh, and there were a couple of dirt tennis courts in the area. We did play with the neighbourhood children – I was given a red tricycle for my sixth birthday and a small gang of us used to take it in turns to free-wheel it, helter-skelter, down the hill. I suppose that was the beginning of my addiction to adrenaline . . .

  You discovered that it felt good to move fast, be scared, perhaps a little out of control?

  I suppose I did. It excited me more than anything else in my life at that time. Yes, definitely it elevated my mood from everyday boredom. But apart from that, I don’t really remember having very much fun. Oh, I do remember that I tried to organize the neighbourhood children into a drama club to perform plays but, very wisely, they’d have none of it. But my parents were not particularly happy people so I suppose it never occurred to them to have fun with us. I’m not exactly sure why they weren’t happy. My father Neville came from a lively, down-to-earth family from the North Island of New Zealand. His father, Octavius, was the postmaster of Opotiki, a town in the eastern Bay of Plenty. Dad was the youngest of nine. Of the four boys in the family, two brothers – Ted and Norman – were killed in World War II (they were in the Allied Air Force), so I imagine there was considerable pressure on my father to make his mark in the world. I recently learned that Dad really wanted to go to war but Ted wrote him a letter from the South Pacific (where he was eventually killed) telling him in no uncertain terms to stay at home and hold the fort there.

  Most of the New Zealand Stephensons I’ve met are pretty laid-back and good-humoured. We are descendants of Samuel Stephenson, the son of an English sea captain – also called Samuel – who was murdered by pirates in Indonesia in 1820 when his ship The Rosalie ran aground. After hearing of his father’s death, Samuel junior sailed from England to try to recover his father’s assets in Indonesia, but when he failed to secure his inheritance, he moved on to New Zealand and established a trading post in Russell in the Bay of Islands. He married Hira Moewaka, a Maori woman from the Kapotai tribe whose father was probably Scottish (she also had a European name – Charlotte MacCauliffe), and the pair tried to settle down amid the volatile climate of fighting and land-grabbing that occurred between white colonists and Maori people in those days. Well, that’s the Cliff Notes – I’m romping through this bit of family history because I already wrote a whole book about what happened to my great, great grandfather called Murder or Mutiny?.

  My father, who told me he used to go to school bare-footed, eventually became a scientist and teamed up with my mother to form a cancer research duo. As an adult he was shy and a little insecure in social situations; however, as a parent he was a tough disciplinarian. But he had an earthy sense of humour and a rather irreverent view of the world that I regard as his greatest gift to me. I think he may have been a bit of a prankster in his youth, but I imagine my mother would have reacted pretty sourly to that kind of ‘silliness’. Early pictures of him reveal his wiry, film-star looks, although his bemused expression while holding his first child – me – suggests that he may not have been quite ready for prime-time parenthood. But then, who is?

  My mother Elsie spent her early childhood in Fiji. Her father was a businessman in Suva and her mother was a Methodist missionary. I was told my grandmother used to go door to door to try to persuade the Indian merchant families who had settled there to allow their girls to be educated. I’ve visited the property in Suva where my grandparents lived, a colonial-style house with a white, wooden gate and lush tropical garden. Early photos of my mother suggest she was a true child of the colonial empire – dressed to the nines in frilly, long-sleeved dresses and woollen socks in the tropical heat, posing coyly with her parasol. Like the children of wealthy white families in India at the time, my mother had an ayah or local woman who looked after her as a nanny, and there were probably other servants, too. But her father died suddenly when she was twelve and, immediately, her life changed. She was sent away to New Zealand alone, to board with family friends and be schooled. I imagine she was well looked after, but the sudden losses must have been traumatic, and I doubt she was happy from then on.

  As an adult, my mother always seemed miserable. Now I realize she must have suffered from depression, and she was also highly anxious. She knew she had poor mothering skills (she apologized to me about that a couple of years before she died). To be honest, I always felt she didn’t really like me. And the pervasive envy, bitterness and dismissiveness I felt from her – especially during my teenage years – constituted a deeply painful trauma I have only recently come to understand. It spurred a deep sense of unworthiness, guilt and fury that continues to plague me from time to time . . .

  Tell me more about that . . .

  My parents told me once that I was ‘an experiment’. Bastards. I was always afraid to ask just how far that went. Did they deliberately deprive me of love and comfort to see how I’d turn out? Sometimes it felt that way. They had huge expectations of me, partly because some clipboard-wielding IQ tester had turned up at my kindergarten and pronounced that I was way too smart for Plasticine, paper chains and Snap (I could read when I was three). I was whisked off to a more advanced classroom where all the kids were sprouting pubic hair and talking about dating and periods, which meant that, at seven, I was a social outcast. And even though I was still near the top of my class, my father made it clear that second place was unacceptable. Yeah, I was an experiment, all right; a miserable baby-monster whose classmates didn’t understand that my savage competitive streak was solely in the interests of receiving what every child deserves no matter what their exam results might be – appreciation. How I wish I’d felt loved for who I truly was, not just for what I might achieve.

  I know, I know – complaining about being bright seems like I’m perversely blowing my own trumpet but, as I learned when I was studying psychology, there are many different types of cleverness, and very few of them are teased out in standard IQ tests. I think it’s terrible that we expect everyone to perform the same way in school. Many absolutely brilliant people learn differently from the ‘norm’, but even though we now know more about learning differences than we did in the fifties, we still tend to value people who are, say, good at maths over those who are visually creative. And when it comes to dealing with life, I don’t even think IQ tests relate to success. I, for one, can be remarkably stupid—OMG, there I go again, apologizing for being smart. This has bugged me my whole life. It’s got more than a little to do with being female, but why exactly do I feel the need to beg your forgiveness when a) I’m sure you’re just as smart as me and b) you don’t catch Stephen Hawking saying, ‘OK, I can explain everything about the universe, but please don’t hate me cos in many ways I’m really an idiot’, do you?

  I had kind and helpful teachers at the Boronia Park Primary School but, because I was perceived as ‘brainy’, I was thoroughly disliked by my classmates. I remember burying my head in my lap to try to block out the entire class chanting ‘Teacher’s pet. Teacher’s pet! Teacher’s Pet! TEACHER’S PET!’ But, by then, my tears of humiliation and frustration were tempered with some kind of inner knowledge that, one day, there would be transcendent rewards. I still marvel at that – as a young kid I really did understand envy; after all, it was perpetrated on me by family members, friends and even my own mother. But I learned to tolerate it, and that strength has set me in good stead. Thank God that resilience never left me, despite the punishment I took – and not just for my braininess. I was just never . . . liked . . .

  . . . Well, of course you would have been unpopular. When parents fail to allow a child to be herself, she will assume a false self, more invested in pleasing adults than getting on with peers, and other children will recognize that lack of authenticity.


  Hmmm. Looking back, I feel so sorry for my little child self, who felt she had to try so hard to be loved. She was terribly lost. At least I had my ballet lessons, which I absolutely adored – although, like everything else, I took them way too seriously. And there were a few disasters; some have said I peed in my bear suit during a performance of ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ but, erm, I think that might have been my sister. In fact, my performing career properly began at the age of five when I danced a solo as a butterfly. I had net wings and feelers on my head made out of pipe cleaners and, naturally, I was extremely anxious about being perfectly butterflyish. (See, the fact that it was my mother who made that outfit contradicts the part of me that believes she didn’t care about me, doesn’t it?)

  But was that what you truly needed, or was it . . . something else . . .?

  You’re right. I would gladly have swapped the butterfly outfit for one gentle caress. Anyway, the following year, when I was the ‘Spirit of Winter’ in a furry-edged tutu with sparkly snowflakes on my headdress, you could just tell I was a Strictly contestant in the making. Dancing was my escape. It offered me a way to slide outside my head and enjoy all the good feelings my body could provide. It was also beyond my parents’ area of expertise and, therefore, not under their control. It was mine. I could not have articulated it at the time, but now I understand how important that was. I felt transported by the beauty, the passion, the music, and the exactitude of ballet, and dreamed of being Margot Fonteyn, Alicia Markova, or New Zealand prima ballerina Rowena Jackson. How I wish I’d kept it up.

  But dancing also provided me with a lesson that would haunt me forever and instil in me a lifelong fear. My ballet teacher Edna Mann was a beautiful, poised woman who had a little TV show in the very early days of black-and-white Australian TV. She gave lessons to viewers, using her pupils to demonstrate barre techniques, and once or twice she chose me. The last time I appeared, she asked me to perform a short Irish dance, a gaillard, which was part of the syllabus. In my green tutu and apron, I started off confidently, but halfway through I lost my way and forgot the steps. Terrified, I glanced at Miss Mann, who got me through by smiling encouragingly, but I felt totally humiliated. I remember how embarrassed I was when I got home and heard my mother laughing about it with a neighbour outside in the street. I had learned the price of being in the spotlight.

  Aside from ballet, my childhood delight lay mainly within the pages of the books I read. I liked the Noel Streatfeild ballet books, the Famous Five stories, and anything about adventure. I cringe now when I think back to some of the books I was given that are now considered racist, like Little Black Sambo, about a child in Africa. Although, strangely enough, I seem to remember that Sambo was presented in a very admirable way, always being able to outsmart the things that challenged him, like ferocious tigers. The Noddy books – and even some of the Tintin stories – are also considered questionable nowadays. But, at the time, I read everything I could lay my hands on, and I am so grateful that my parents provided us girls with a comprehensive library. My mother found it very hard to coax me to the dinner table because I was so absorbed with Peter Pan, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and especially with a beautifully illustrated book I had of ancient Greek and Roman legends. I absolutely loved those tales. I was very drawn to the convoluted soap operas of their lives, and was tickled by the drama of the relationships between gods and mortals, and all the bickering that went on between the gods and their peers. Our household was a highly religious, Church of England zone, so only in my daydreams did I dare identify with the daring huntress Diana, the self-involved, vindictive Aphrodite, or the clever, warlike Athena. Their stories were so much more thrilling than anything in the Bible.

  I especially loved the story about Eros and Psyche (no wonder I eventually became a psychologist). I reread that tale recently and was struck by the significance of the deep message it imparted; this was so much better than the well-known ‘someday my prince will come’ western fairy tale. Aside from its deeper significance – the marriage of love and sexuality, the connection between mind, body and spirit – this was one of the rare stories in which the protagonist was a brave female who strived hard in myriad ways and who successfully undertook trials and travel. In the absence of female adventure heroines, I mainly had to imagine myself as a boy, striding off to achieve derring-do. But this girl Psyche kicked ass.

  When I was around ten years old I began to write plays. I know – I was insufferably precocious, but no one really saw them except my grandmother, and she was nearly blind. They were all in verse – kind of quasi-Shakespearean – but with plots and characters that owed more to Greek literature. I would scribble away for hours and then type them on my parents’ manual typewriter, after which I would look around for people to perform them. But I wasn’t popular and had few friends, and dabbling in amateur theatre arts came way down on everyone’s list of fun things to do on a Saturday ‘arvo’ – probably just below being bitten on the bum by a red-backed spider (which commonly happened in the Sydney suburbs).

  My best friend (actually my only close chum at primary school) was Kathy Rosner, who lived about a mile away near Gladesville. Kathy was sweet, smart and pixie-like, with lovely curly hair and a mouth that was always turned up in a wry smile. She was as crazy about acrobatics as I was about ballet, and could flip her body in entire revolutions, sideways, backwards and forwards, which impressed me enormously. Best of all, Kathy didn’t seem to mind that I was overly serious, younger than everyone else, and had parents so strict they made Stalin look liberal. At least I was allowed to stay overnight at her place from time to time. I loved being around her family – Hungarian-Jewish immigrants who told terrifyingly interesting stories about escaping from Hungary during the war. That, I decided, was true adventure. Kathy’s older sister provided a novel musical education – the latest Frank Sinatra records (only classical music was played in our house), and I also received vital information I did not get elsewhere about developing bodies. It was Kathy who told me important facts of life, such as, ‘If you get a cold during your first period, you’ll get the sniffles every month for the rest of your life.’

  My studies at Boronia Park Primary School continued to create enormous anxiety for me, and the scribbly bark tree that shaded one corner of the playground was often secretly watered by my tears. Suzanne Stubbs was my bête noire. Two or three years older than me, she came top more often than I did, and this fact was an endless source of shame. My parents did not seem to have such high expectations of my two younger sisters but, for me, second place seemed like a monumental failure. Saying my prayers, while kneeling at the edge of my sister Claire’s bed at night (I slept in the top bunk), was taking longer and longer (why didn’t anyone notice that my knees were always bruised?). I tried to remember to ask God to bless everyone I knew, but if I thought I might have forgotten anyone I had to start again. I now understand my general anxiety was starting to be expressed in an obsessive-compulsive manner. I felt compelled to avoid stepping on any pavement cracks, and developed a highly noticeable facial tic, in which I violently twitched my nose. People I barely knew started teasing me: ‘Hey kid, what’s with the rabbit faces?’

  What was that like for you?

  I felt terrible shame, so much so that I was in denial about it. I couldn’t accept that my face was doing that, or that other people noticed. But it was unstoppable; when the urge came I just HAD to twitch. I sort of found a way to disguise it a bit, like pretending I had a cold or something, but people knew, I’m sure.

  Did your parents ever mention it?

  No. At least, I thought they didn’t notice – but now I suppose they must have done . . . I’ve just remembered my father had a slight stutter and no one in his family had ever done anything about that – and most people didn’t really bother about treatment for such things back then. My sisters never mentioned it either. Strange. Until I was a teenager, I shared a room with Claire and Lesley, yet I felt quite isolated from them. This was partly due to the
common burden of the oldest child; I was a trail-blazer who also felt a sense of responsibility for them. Perhaps I deliberately created separation from my sisters because we were so often lumped together. Being so close in age, we were collectively known as ‘the girls’ – and were always dressed exactly alike. George Harrison once told my husband and I how frustrating it was for him and the band to always be known as ‘the boys’. I really got that.

  Claire was born eighteen months after me. She was an adorable, round-faced cutie who looked exactly like my mother did at that age. She developed into a more placid, far less anxious person than I was. Throughout her childhood she was teased for not being as . . . delicately formed . . . as Lesley and I – which was terribly unfair. She wisely – and brilliantly – found escape routes, forming strong relationships with neighbours. I don’t know how she did it, but I envied Claire’s various local safe havens – in particular, the home of a childless couple, Mr and Mrs Peters, who lived a few doors away. Within those walls, there seemed to be comfort, warmth, iced biscuits in the shape of animals, and television. We didn’t have a TV until I was a teenager. I would sometimes wander down to the Peters’ house and knock on the door, hoping to be let in. Mrs Peters would answer the door in an apron, with curlers in her hair, and stand guarding the entrance. A marvellous aroma of freshly baked biscuits would fill my nostrils. Peering past Mrs Peters’ slim frame I could just see Claire, stretched out lazily on the sofa in front of the TV set, munching a pastry and watching I Love Lucy with a satisfied grin on her face. She would glance over her shoulder and acknowledge me for an instant, secure in the knowledge that Mrs Peters would protect her sanctuary and send me packing.