‘Oh, make no promises that bind us all as passengers,’ says Andrew. ‘All life hangs by a thread.’ He’s right there.
‘I told Mum not to expect us until this afternoon: that we’d have lunch on the way down,’ says Ruth.
‘But she’ll still be expecting us earlier,’ says Donald. ‘Whatever time I arrive she says she thought I might have been there earlier.
One day I’ll come at daybreak.’
‘Mum will have the bed turned down from the night before,’ says Andrew.
Ruth will have organised the boys. She will have said they should be coming down to be with me on my ninetieth. She and Nigel flew down to Christchurch yesterday morning and Andrew on a later flight. To be honest, their talk has often bored me, but I think about them a lot. I’ve had close, special things to say, but rarely said them when the opportunity was there; instead fallen back into the old pattern of trivial, nothing, everyday talk. Sometimes the more you care for people the less risk you take with them.
It’s nice, though, that they’re gathered up, that they’re coming as a family to see me.
Ruth makes herself comfortable in the back with Nigel. It’s a long time since she’s driven from Christchurch to Oamaru. Her mood is one of family reminiscence and reflection. ‘I had a dream about Mum last night. We all gave her our birthday presents, but she wouldn’t look at them. She said she wanted to buy back the farm so we could live there again, and she took sets of false teeth out of her mouth one after the other as she talked.’
‘It wouldn’t take much to buy it back today, by Jesus. I’m glad I got out when I did, that’s for sure,’ says Donald. Nigel mumbles something about getting out with a packet too, and Donald complains that he can’t understand a thing he says.
‘All those false teeth in your dream,’ says Andrew, ‘one set after another, you said. That’s an odd thing. Maybe it’s a repudiation of age: going back to the good old days of personal virtue and the horse.’
‘For all your fancy notions, the age of the horse may well be in front of us as well, the way things are going. Don’t write horses off.’ Since boyhood, Donald has been impatient with his brother’s departure from practical considerations.
So they talk of horses! What do people know or care of horses now. Today they’re on the race track, or they’re runts of ponies for children to ride. Ralph and I worked in the breath of real horses — draughthorses of strength and even temper, and riding hacks of a decent size. There were drays and traps, waggonettes and sledges. As a girl I went to town on wet days in the gig, when my father couldn’t work outside.
The Depression kept horses on, Ralph used to say. Most of us couldn’t afford tractors for years and kept the horses going through the thirties. A working horse sweats a lather like sea foam, and at the large concrete troughs, big almost as country swimming pools, they’d stand to drink, and you could hear the water rattling by the gallon down their throats. And after winter work the steam would drift from their great bodies as if they were gradually smouldering away.
Andrew passes the time by gently ragging his older brother. ‘When technology fails, you could corner the market in horse transport. You should start secretly now, breeding Clydesdales, and make a killing when the world is desperate. There’d be jobs for all of us too. Nigel as a pooper scooper, for example. A sort of human dung beetle.’
‘Keep it in the family, you mean,’ says Nigel. He smiles, but continues to watch the houses thinning into the flat farms and orchards south of Christchurch.
It’s strange that the ordinary circumstances of your life become novelties with the passing of time. We used to go on school picnics to the top crossing in a wagon. People were admired for skills that aren’t known or understood today. Ralph was thought to be the best stacker in the district. He used to go all over the place, from farm to farm in the early days, stacking oats and wheat. Who knows anything of stacking oats before threshing now? Who cares for the skill of the ploughman, the smith, or the water diviner, like Wally Nind who found over forty good wells with a branch of willow.
There was nothing glamorous about it all, God knows, but there were skills that gave livings and personal satisfaction then, that are nothing today. Time gives things a sense of quaintness, and the quaintness disguises the same serious business of living that’s always there, so that even your own children are cut off from your early life. In the end you find yourself part of your grandchildren’s projects on women in the Great Depression, or the aftermath of the First World War.
They pass Burnham, and Andrew and Donald swap anecdotes of the National Service as eighteen-year-olds. The barracks and the AWOL trips to the city: the regular instructors and the platoon hard cases. They weren’t there together, but the experience seems much the same.
Before that there’d been a real war, of course. My young brother, Clem, died at Maleme airfield in Crete, May 1941. Ralph and I had a radio in our bedroom. It had a varnished case almost as big as a grandfather clock. We were tired in the evenings after the farm, but sometimes we would listen for a while, particularly during the war, for news of how things were going.
Ralph would fall asleep before me, especially in the winter. In the winter too, we often lit the fire in the bedroom. The fire would die down during the night. I remember waking up now and then late at night, because there was a sudden last flame behind the guard which lit up the room with flickering patterns, so that the wardrobe would bob, and the varnished radio case and tongue and groove ceiling would glimmer. The last brief flame would soon be exhausted and the dark return, and I’d lie in the warm room waiting for sleep again. There would be the call of a morepork perhaps, or the wind in the woolshed pines like an ocean close at hand, or the rattle of the chains as the dogs slunk in and out of their kennels.
I used to wonder what other people were doing all over the world. I felt for people who were up against it in some way: up against war, or famine, pain, or loneliness, up against sly old age itself.
They’re coming to Dunsandel on the plain, and Donald decides he may as well fill up there. He reminds the others that it’s the place Ken Avery wrote the song about, and sings a line or two — ‘By the dog dosing strip at Dunsandel …’ Andrew joins in. ‘A dead and alive place really,’ says Donald afterwards. ‘I remember coming potato picking here one May school holidays, and Dad thought I should have been helping at our place.’
‘That’s a while now, Donald,’ says Ruth.
‘Nineteen forty-nine it would be. One of the guys had beer hidden in the water tank, and when he climbed up to get it he gashed his hand, and had to be taken to hospital. Old man Keen told us he’d get lockjaw.’
‘Did he?’
‘He may have for all I remember. Old man Keen said, “He’s a goner, lads, with lockjaw and he’s brought it on himself, you see.”’ Donald pulls up at the pumps, and leaves his story to get out and talk with the pump attendant.
Andrew asks Nigel what job he wants now that he’s leaving school, but Nigel is uncommunicative as usual. Andrew looks out at Dunsandel and wonders what makes Nigel tick. His own adolescence is so far behind him. I guess Nigel still thinks there’s some special life in store: opportunities to make the changes he dreams of, but won’t talk about. He’s about to join the dole queue, but won’t be doleful either way. Youth is never completely daunted by circumstance.
Keep moving, Nigel. That’s the secret. Keep moving. Too many weighty considerations and you’re through the thin crust of things and into quicksand beneath. All those supposed meanings, motives, spiritual assessments and the paralysing self-consciousness that nails you down. Keep moving, that’s the story. Keep bobbing and weaving, and don’t ask for any reason with your rhyme. Keep moving and talking inside: fast talking, sweet talking, soft talking, smooth talking, tall talking. Keep moving, talking, so that the reflex hit men at all the doorways of life don’t grow bored and tighten their trigger fingers in their boredom.
Nigel begins to sing what he’s picked up of
the Dunsandel song, and Andrew joins in more confidently. ‘Stop it. They’ll hear you,’ says Ruth, but she laughs anyway.
‘Shut up,’ says Donald from outside. ‘A couple of bloody humourists,’ he tells the attendant. So Andrew returns to his thoughts.
You need to be a humourist here in Dunsandel on the plain. I can’t see anyone with lockjaw despite Donald’s story. There’s no railway station any more; just the compacted gravel and weeds of the yard, just the ramp facing the line. The tracks are rusted on the sides, yet worn shiny on the top despite so few trains passing.
Two garages and the yellow, roughcast tearooms. There’s an antique shop, and a thin grey spire of the country church sticks up for its beliefs above the Honda sign, but proves, as it comes closer, to have been taken over for antiques as well. For a young country we are stuffed with antiques.
I look out at Dunsandel, but I’m thinking of Wolverhampton, and the rooms I shared with two art teachers. From my top-storey window I could see the canal’s trapped water with its blowfly blue on the oily surface, and an unofficial cycle track among the rubbish on its banks. A quiet Canadian girl and I made love by the window of that view on a wet Monday. I think the dingy threat of the visible world urged us to make a show of defiance: to mimic creation in all that expanse of decay. Lying with her, and just a few post-impressionists, for company, I looked out and saw the rain on the blue-bottle water of the canal and streaking the fences, and the cartons thrown away. She talked of winter in Alberta Province, and I talked of summer in the Mackenzie Country. The two of us drawn close in disillusion with Old England — and camouflaging it as love.
There are Wolverhamptons everywhere, of course. You need to be strong in the Wolverhamptons of Taihape, Gore, Cannons Creek or Remuera, because they’re hard on ideals and pretence. You have to pack in all your own spiritual supplies to such places, and not rely on any renewal while you’re there.
Ruth is saying that they should take me out to the farm tomorrow, as part of my birthday. Other people own it now, but she thinks they won’t mind a visit. I’m quite pleased it won’t happen. Other people muck your place around, no matter how pleasant they are. ‘If she’s well enough,’ says Donald. ‘You haven’t seen her for ages and don’t know how frail she’s got. You’ll find Mum’s gone back a lot.’
Of course I’ve gone back. Who wants to spend their time as a ninety-year-old widow? I’ve gone back in ways Donald wouldn’t dream of. Now I’m free to go back altogether. I don’t need any permission now, or any help.
Recently I’ve never talked much about the past. It’s tiresome when you have to keep explaining things that everybody used to know. Like tin-kettling and first-footing. In our district we went firstfooting after midnight on New Year’s Eve: farm by farm and some of the men getting the worse for drink as it went on. At Tolliger’s once before the war, the men shifted the outdoor loo into the vegetable garden. Ray Tolliger lost his rag and threatened to push one of them down the exposed long drop. At least two of those men were killed overseas not long afterwards: killed in places where first-footing in the small hours had greater dangers even than Tolliger’s long drop.
Our fun was local and inexpensive. Card evenings, tin-kettling, woolshed dances, A and P shows, weddings and send-offs, were the big things. Ruth talks of progressive dinners, ethnic restaurants, barbecues. I’ve never been to a barbecue in my life. I waited too long to have a decent kitchen around me, to want to go outside and cook without it.
I worked hard in country schools before I was married, and we slogged on the farm afterwards. Every fine Monday morning for years I lit the copper at six o’clock to heat the water for wash day. The electricity came to the district in time, of course, and I had a washing machine afterwards. Years later Ruth said she’d like the old copper bowl for her plants, and not long before he died, Ralph broke down the concrete casing and took out the copper, and patiently scoured it clean for her. She had a wrought-iron stand made for it, to display her indoor plants. When I visited her in Wellington I sat and looked at that gleaming copper full of dark foliage in her lounge, and I thought of the hundreds of Mondays on the farm I’d stood in the lean-to and stirred clothes in that copper with a broom handle. There it was, after all that time, among Ruth’s polished furniture and crystal. I admired the burnished curve of the copper in its stand, and the fronds she cleaned with milk which hung over the sides in green contrast. What’s all that in the process of time passing, I wonder?
‘I’d forgotten coming down the Showground hill into Timaru like this,’ says Ruth. ‘I’ve always had a soft spot for Timaru. Let’s have our lunch on Caroline Bay and see what changes there’s been.’ She sees it all as Donald drives on down and parks by a wooden table on the grass. Recognition mixed with small shocks of change, arouse her recollections.
A lot’s still the same. The phoenix palms on the median strip — pineapples we used to call them. The way Donald and Andrew sit waiting while I set out lunch is the same too. The same as Dad used to wait for Mum to provide his food.
The Benvenue Cliffs are still hung with ice-plant and its glassy flowers. There used to be sand dunes between the lawn and the sea, and unpainted, wooden changing sheds. There used to be lupins, marram grass, gorse even, ridges in the dunes and hollows where sunbathers and lovers lay. And in the carnival afternoons there were acts in the sound shell. You sat high on the concrete steps built in the cliff while some local boy sang, ‘How much is that doggie in the window’.
‘We used to come here often in the long holidays,’ she tells Nigel, but it’s Donald who answers.
‘People don’t come the same now. They head inland more, to the lakes.’
‘Well, there’s no surf here,’ says Andrew. ‘You need a beach with a good surf, or lakes for water-skiing to get young people today.’
‘Young people today!’ Donald says. He improves his posture to address a topic that provokes him. ‘I’m sick of hearing about young people today, as if they’ve grown another head. Listen, young people today are the same as young people yesterday, except they’ve been allowed to get away with too much. After a boot up the jacksie young people today behave a good deal more like the rest of us.’
‘Perhaps it would work in reverse,’ said Nigel, mumbling, his head turned away to watch the swimmers. ‘A boot up the jacksie to make everyone more like young people. A neat experiment, eh.’
‘What’s that?’ says Donald, but Nigel’s said all he wants to, and gets up and wanders off over the sand.
‘Don’t go far,’ his mother calls. She starts to tidy up and remembers being on the bay as a girl. We had our last family holiday in Timaru when I was seventeen: Nigel’s age now, but I was so much older surely. Girls are, though. For New Year’s Eve I wore a full-patterned cotton skirt with a stiff petticoat — they were all in then — and stockings, not pantyhose. And clip-on earrings. I’d met Selwyn Holdaway who had an ivy league shirt which looked great. He used to fold the sleeves up to his elbows, and his brown skin, the muscles moving, the silver watch strap on his wrist, made me think of sex.
You can trust your body at seventeen. The back of your neck isn’t wrinkled, your legs don’t have swollen veins, and your togs don’t ride up over a second crease in your bum. My friend Barbara and I used to wear togs under our dresses to walk down from the motel, and we’d stand in the warm, white-grey sand to undress.
Selwyn Holdaway could talk — he was a great talker. He was fun to be with, and if his legs were slightly bandy it didn’t matter because they were brown, muscular legs. He was deputy head boy, or proxime accessit I think, one or the other, and he was going to Canterbury to be a lawyer he told me. On New Year’s Eve at the top of the Benvenue Cliffs we stood with a soft bush between us and Barbara and her boy, for privacy. There were still people swimming as the New Year came in, some couples on the anchored raft, the ships’ hooters, and a lot of noise from the other side of the bush as Barbara got shirty with her boy.
Between kisses Selwyn talked
of going to Canterbury. We agreed to write to each other. He sent me one letter early that year, after he’d started varsity, and I wrote back, but that’s all I heard. I blamed still being a schoolgirl. I remember that in his letter he said he’d found great freedom in being away from his family.
If the others weren’t here I could walk up the track on the cliffs and look out over the bay again, though it was dark then, of course, that New Year night, and Selwyn Holdaway told me how he was going to write to me about all the things that happened afterwards. He didn’t, but all the things happened afterwards just the same.
Nigel has taken off his shirt: his shoulders are red with acne but he doesn’t care. Ruth should have him using some of that antiseptic soap, and no chocolate. It’s been a long time since Ruth and the boys have been on Caroline Bay, and Andrew is wondering where the years have gone. ‘I still feel the same as these young people around us,’ he says. ‘I could stand up and join in, receive the same quick glances from the girls, but then I see my old, white feet on the sand, or pass my hand over my head and find I’ve grown bald. “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”’
‘You’re old, but you never act your age,’ says Donald. ‘Never had to work hard enough, that’s what.’
‘Don’t start with the bullshit, Donald.’
‘Oh, come on you two,’ says Ruth.
There they are with the glitter of the sea behind them and the noise of the summer beach around them. The four of them in bright sunshine, which is only a memory of warmth for me now. They wouldn’t find it flattering, but they’re precious to me because they carry something of Ralph with them as much as for what they are themselves. Donald walks like his dad, and his large, oval thumbs with white moons on the nails are just the same. His shoulders are adopting the same slump of habitual labour. Andrew and Ruth have Ralph’s eyes: the blue irises oddly small so that a full circle of white can often be seen. But Ruth has my skin. The women in my family had wonderful skin.
Owen Marshall Selected Stories Page 44