by Lloyd Jones
The old man leant towards the interpreter and in a hoarse voice muttered at length. ‘Yes,’ she said. And, looking around for me, she added, ‘He is the last one left.’
No one spoke while the old man closed his briefcase and stood to leave. No one moved as he made his way out the gate. The interpreter took hold of my arm. ‘Any relative of your wife,’ she said, ‘almost certainly drowned in the river.’
I had taken to travel at quite a young age, thinking that if I moved through the world with my mouth, ears and eyes open, something would catch. And it did, fleetingly. The world flooded in through the windows of buses and trains across America and Europe. And at odd times a picture of Dad would slide into view—of him at the kitchen sink, gazing out through the window to the street with his ship-rail stare. And always it was a disappointing place to arrive back to, one that I had fled from because it seemed to locate me, as well as define me. And I didn’t wish for either.
But that winter, as I wandered through zones of dereliction in Christchurch, I was being nudged quietly homewards on currents I was hardly aware of.
The air in the city was thin, it almost hurt to breathe, and a week-old snow stuck around. I found myself outside the basilica staring through the barrier at the autumnal bronze leaves of a hornbeam tree. I was told the leaves would hold on until the spring growth began to come through. The tenacity of the hornbeam stood in stark contrast to everything crumbling around it. It would hang on until it didn’t need to. Things, it seems, had first to set, then unravel, for the new growth to begin. In this way old information had a way of becoming new information.
FIVE
IN MY MOTHER’S memory things just happened. Big life-shattering breaches went unexplained or were distilled down to a Punch and Judy line: Well, she had to choose between him and me, and in the end she chose him.
But things don’t ever just happen. Things occur in a particular way and for a reason.
Mum never did see inside the folder held in the vaults of the national archives. Here, the past was presented with disarming bureaucratic plainness—a brown folder bound with packaging string. In late 2011, it sat before me on a reader’s desk. For a few minutes I did little more than stare at it. Then, slowed down by a ceremonial sense of how to proceed, I pulled gently on the ends of the string, and the folder breathed out. And I smelt the old air of an unvisited room shut up for the better part of a century.
It was like the end of a long flight when you wake in time for the descent through the cloud and look out the window to the startling detail of a place you have only vaguely heard about. And because the detail has a fresh and unclaimed quality, the fevered eye seeks out everything all at once.
That is what happened with my first reading of the 125-page court transcript of Maud’s divorce from Harry Nash. I read quickly in order to reach the end, then I went back to the beginning and read everything more carefully. It was the third or fourth reading before various details found one another. Inevitably, a narrative began to take shape. I began to see Maud. And, rather wonderfully, a grandfather whom I never knew, emerged—my mother’s father, a farmer from North Canterbury. I read with a jurist’s attention. I read with glee, and I read with a next-of-kin’s cringing sense of embarrassment. Opinions formed and shifted. I read with an open mind, which led to a sympathy for someone for whom I’d only ever felt contempt. And then I read with imagination in order to bring to the surface the motivations that the jury apparently could not see for itself, and I read in such a way that I found myself reconsidering everything that I’d known about my grandmother, Maud.
The pity is my mother never got to hear Maud tell her own story, or to hear what her own mother had had to say about her.
Now there were dates, departures, places, occupations to consider. The positioning of a life in Somerset followed by upheaval. And, of course, the ‘facts’, such as they are.
Maud was an assistant mistress of a ‘high school’ in Wellington, Somerset, where she spent seven years looking after ‘the little ones’ (receiving ‘a certificate for efficiency’).
In 1912, aged twenty-eight, she worked her passage as the governess to the children of a headmaster and his wife and sailed out to New Zealand. As the court transcript doesn’t mention this fact, I have an idea Mavis told me. I have a faint recollection of her describing a general uprooting of the family around that time to various places across the globe. Canada was mentioned, and a number of American cities. Chicago, I seem to recall.
A brother, Bert, who surfaces during the divorce trial, said his sister came out to New Zealand in order to ‘better herself’. But look at what she left behind.
I type ‘Wellington Somerset 1912’ into my browser and discover a very pleasant English market town. Ivy, hedges, canvas awnings shading a line of shops. People on foot share a thinly populated road with a few figures on large bicycles and a horse and carriage. In their caps and heavy black footwear three boys in a market street look like miniature adults. There is a monument on a hill and a public garden, much like any to be found in Christchurch or Wellington at that time: flax, a cabbage tree, cypress trees, paths, a sweep of lawn. A steady sky, a wisp of cloud. There is a tranquillity not easily found in the landscape that Maud arrives to.
The slopes of the Rimutakas that rise like the gates to a forbidden kingdom at the head of the Hutt Valley have been relentlessly logged. In the city of Wellington a deforested Mt Victoria looms above dwellings of corrugated iron and unpainted timber like a giant mudslide waiting to happen. From the wharves the bare hills look hobbled and barnacled with small timber cottages. It is as though the original builders set off with a wheelbarrow and spade, and a tool to hack their way through the bush, with instructions to pitch their tent wherever they saw fit. If Maud’s eye for efficiency took in all of this, she will have noted that roads do not rule these hills. It is hill first, then outlook and aspect, then the house itself, and finally the road, which is a glorified term for a track pitching in and out of ferny shadow to sun-lit bends walloped by the wind. The same wind that threatened to lift me off the tops of Pencarrow as a small boy shakes the living daylights out of anything not pegged or anchored down. The bonnets in the market street of Wellington, Somerset, would not last a second.
Why did she settle here, in the wind-blasted Wellington down under? For my mother’s sake. I’ll come to that.
Maud leaves the headmaster and his wife in the capital and continues to Christchurch to stay ‘with friends’. Who are these friends? No names are given. They live on a farm ‘in the South Island’, which again is not very exact. Maud is there a year. Then, towards the end of 1913, she takes a position on a North Canterbury sheep farm, where for another year, she says, ‘I acted as a housekeeper’.
If she came up from Christchurch, she would have taken a train to the small North Canterbury township of Hawarden, and from there driven by horse and buggy to Taruna, the sheep farm of Owen Tibbott (O.T.) Evans.
I have always thought of Maud as old. Her name makes her old to start with. And being my mother’s mother makes her older still.
I have to remind myself that this traveller is a young woman. In Taruna, she is a young woman with barely a neighbour for miles around. There are the mountains at the back of the house. Sheep in the paddocks provide small shifts in the landscape. The wind from the nor-west is like some incessant curse whistling in the eaves when she is heating water, hissing in her ear when she is pegging up the washing. It is there in her face, in her hair, whenever she walks down the long drive to stand by the letterbox. But then, without warning, come moments of absolute stillness, and it is as if the world is telling her, ‘Look where you have arrived. You have fallen through a hole in the earth.’ Of course I am imposing my own thoughts on Maud. She may have felt differently. Taruna with its majestic setting may have seemed like the start of something new.
The court transcript has very little to say about Maud’s time at Taruna. But it is here that she became pregnant to O.T.
So, clearly, she is part of the community, pitching in. She is already two months pregnant when she helps out at the stall. People will know her—perhaps by name. At the very least they have seen her face around.
Perhaps she doesn’t yet know she is pregnant—but the moment of discovery cannot be far off.
If Maud’s world is about to gain another dimension, O.T. must have felt as though his was teetering. It is also clear that Maud’s family in England never knew about the pregnancy. The decision to keep it a secret was taken early. One imagines the conversations, difficult conversations long into the night, about what to do. In 1914, a child born out of wedlock was occasion for tremendous shame. The Salvation Army gathered at the bottom of the cliff with its various categories of ‘fall’ to consider—how long fallen, first fallen, twice fallen, and so on. The method of fall had its particulars—taken advantage of, alcohol, foolishly led astray, bad company, seduced, ruined under the promise of marriage. A high percentage of ‘fallen women’ in the care of the Salvation Army Home were domestic servants, often from humble origins.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story of a fallen woman in The Scarlet Letter brought him fame on both sides of the Atlantic. For a time the novelist was the American consul in Liverpool, a role that his wife excitedly wrote is second in importance only to the embassy in London. In Liverpool, Hawthorne liked to roam the docks. One day he stopped to observe a procession of girls and young women from the workhouse heading to the dock to board the ship that would take them out to the new world to work as domestic servants. He wrote in English Notebooks:
I should not have conceived it possible that so many children could have been collected together, without a single trace of beauty or scarcely of intelligence in so much as one individual…[their] coarse, vulgar features and figures betraying unmistakably low origin, and ignorant and brutal parents. They did not appear wicked, but only stupid, and animal and soulless.
The Asia, with the Bibbys on board, had stopped in Ireland to pick up a number of women from the workhouse to deliver to Port Chalmers in New Zealand, where most of them, according to a follow-up report, proved themselves to be entirely useless as domestic servants. A small number were held in barracks from where they were in the habit of escaping, getting drunk, and coming into quick money in ‘unexplained ways’.
If Hawthorne’s notebook entry speaks of type, in The Scarlet Letter we find a more sympathetic portrayal of the fallen woman in the form of Hester Prynne.
As in a Puritan village in Massachusetts, so in a colony emerging from the Victorian era at the bottom of the Pacific, a child born out of wedlock was a life-shattering event. The shame had to be absorbed until the fall became part of the life story, shaping all those touched by it.
The catastrophe for fallen women such as Maud and Hester is the length of the fall. Both women will go on breaking their fall with one hand while clinging onto their child with the other.
My mother’s story begins here—with her own mother in flight.
How fiercely present the world is.
How nice and orderly its arrangement.
Through the trees the glinting paddocks and their bright promise. The road that brought Maud here now leads her discreetly away.
This is the last time she will set eyes on Taruna. And then she is on a train, on her way out of the farmer’s world. An overnight ferry pushes by the mountainous Kaikoura coast and on to the windswept strait.
Until the baby arrives there is not much to do other than wait in Wellington, perhaps grow bored with the hospital window and its cloudless day. It is coming into summer.
Maud’s confinement is spent in a private hospital. Later she will tell the court that she paid for this herself—clearly a matter of personal satisfaction to her. But which hospital? I wonder if it was Calvary where I had my tonsils out when I was eleven. Nuns, the first I had ever seen, had glided along its corridors. Or St Helen’s, a specialist maternity hospital on Coromandel Street that climbs up from the Newtown shops on Adelaide Road. But that maternity hospital was for married women.
She may have snuck in there. Funny to think of Maud’s recourse to invention beginning with her admission to a maternity hospital.
There were options—abortion, adoption, infanticide. But Maud’s mind is made up, if indeed there was any doubt. The bathroom mirror holds her gaze and reports back the ordinary truth of someone looking for something that is not there. She is pregnant with a child. She hasn’t robbed a bank.
She will keep my mother. But to do so will require another sacrifice. She decides to drop out of sight, to self-erase.
She stops writing to friends and family in England. She will end all communication with the people who knew her before she entered hospital.
By the time she has given birth to my mother, Maud has accomplished something similar for herself—she has a new name, a whole new identity. She has created a widow’s story for herself.
She is now May Seaward. Maud has an aunt by that name from Portsmouth. She will say May is from Portsmouth as well, and since she must give an occupation to ‘the late Mr Seaward’, he can be an engineer, someone able and essential to the creation of new worlds.
A man named Harry Nash has advertised in the local newspaper for a live-in housekeeper. In her letter of application Maud says she is after such a position with a ‘refined family who would not object to her and her little girl’. When Nash replies that the position has been taken, Maud writes back, ‘I was sorry not to have got the position of housekeeper to you, but would be pleased if at a future time you are unsuited you would write to me.’
The letter is on file; her forwarding address is care of a Mrs Harrison, Rodrigo Road, Kilbirnie. Who is Mrs Harrison? We hear no more of her.
Maud finds another live-in position, this one on a farm in Gladstone in the Wairarapa, 130 kilometres from Wellington. The Tararuas, which divide the Wairarapa from the Manawatu in the west, are not nearly as imposing as the Southern Alps, but they offer the same feeling of wilderness at the end of the road. Maungahuia, which is the name of the farm, and locality, sits inside a bowl of cleared hills, where the grasslands are still coming into being. The summer air is filled with thick smoke. Ash drifts across the farm—it gathers along the windowsills, and marks the lines of washed sheets.
On summer nights, people drive to the edge of the burn off to take in the spectacle. Buggies and drays by the dozen, one or two cars, a truck, and in the dark the awe-struck crowd gazes up at a sky that burns like a fabulous city. Bright embers fill the night and as one dies another takes its place. High above the lit sky is another, larger chamber containing the galaxy that is permanent and glowing.
Weeks later, by which time the lit sky has drifted down to earth, the blackened stumps smoulder into the grey hour. Shouting men call their dogs back from the burning ash. Within a year or two no one will remember what was there. A cow will graze on grass where once stood a three-hundred-year-old tree. And a dreadful silence rolls out where once the distinctive call of the huia was heard through the forested slopes. Women liked to wear the huia beak as a brooch and its distinctive white-tipped tail feathers made an attractive adornment. Now, the only huia left are stuffed and mounted. When I was a child the bird still graced a sixpenny postage stamp. And I have heard it said that it derived its name from a distress call—uia, uia, uia, or (in Maori) Where are you?
Maungahuia, ‘the hill of t
he huia’, can be seen on a country road before Gladstone. The original farmstead where Maud and my mother stayed has gone, and the forest that covered the hill of the huia has disappeared. The farmer of a farmhouse I visited believes the last huia was found lying dead on a tennis court around the time of the First World War.
The spell in hospital must have made a favourable impression, possibly it was the nurses who moved swiftly and unseeing, because within a few months of moving to isolated Maungahuia, Maud has decided she would like to become a nurse. She writes to St Helen’s Hospital, the maternity hospital for married mothers, and receives notice that a new intake won’t be accepted until September 1915. Meanwhile, a letter from Harry Nash arrives to say that the position in his household has become free. Maud replies that she can offer him six months until the hospital intake later in the year. Nash writes back with his acceptance.
In late February 1915, armed with their invented histories, Maud and my mother enter the household of Harry Nash on Upland Road.
The widow and widower ought to have this much in common—the persistent shadow of the absent spouse, and the confusion thrown up by a suddenly lopsided life.
Everywhere inside the house are photographs of the late Mrs Nash. Maud, of course, has none to show of the late Mr Seaward. And Mr Nash has three children, two sons and a daughter, all of them at boarding school. Their faces are easily traced back to the photograph of the late Mrs Nash. But when Harry Nash studies my mother, her lineage is not so easily pinned down. Perhaps there is something of Maud’s long face, and her pale blue eyes, but then the terrain mysteriously changes into the features of the farmer who cannot be named.