by Fiona Kidman
Eventually the marks were removed, and although I had pale pink scarring until I was ten or twelve, my only tangible reminder of the birthmarks is a nose that peels in both summer and winter.
Throughout these various trials, my father waited with my mother, but there were other matters on his mind. The pickings were lean in insurance: he was selling on commission. The Second World War had broken out and was well under way by the time I was considered strong enough for him to think about enlisting. Conservative as he was, my father endorsed Michael Savage’s words, spoken in 1939: ‘Where Britain goes, we go’. At thirty-eight, my father need not have gone to war at all. But he did. He joined the air force as an armourer, and we left Hawera.
It would be more than fifty years before I returned. It was not an intentional absence, the timing was just never right. People often ask me about Hawera because it is the place where my birth is recorded, but there has been nothing much to tell. Only this: Hawera is a town where I almost lost my life and my mother nearly lost her mind.
Although she did not know it then, my mother was also saying goodbye to another part of her life. At the end of my novel Mandarin Summer, a woman and her mother sit reminiscing after a funeral:
I met a woman years after I left the north, a large sad woman who as if in some desperate acknowledgement of the past had borne many children to a man brain damaged in the war, and she said this to me, that some women’s men never came home. But for her it had been different. The man she knew never came home. That was the difference she said.
It was not like that with Luke, not exactly, but the war came between him and a wider vision, and my mother was caught in the wake of that fact.
That is a version of what happened in our family. When my father joined the air force, he expected to be sent abroad, but it didn’t happen. The reason seemed ignominious to him: after his embarkation date was set it was discovered that he had flat feet. A succession of chest ailments, worsened by sleeping in tents, put his health under strain. There was no way out so he served for the entire war, being shifted from one air force station to another.
My mother, still in love with him, followed him from city to city, living in boarding houses to be near him. Sometimes we travelled on trains at night, and when he was on leave, he joined us wherever we were. Once we went south on the night express in a carriage full of American soldiers. My father was wearing his blue air force uniform and the Americans offered candy for me, which he took. They were hard round sweets like small white moons. When my parents thought I was asleep, I saw their hands steal towards each other in the dimmed glow of the carriage light. This is the first exact memory of my life, the first thing that wasn’t told to me, about this period during the war.
Because it was often difficult to get rooms with a baby in tow, we ended up in a variety of unsavoury places. As always, funds were low, and there was growing pressure for women to work in factories and on farms as part of the war effort. But it was clear that I might well be an only child, and my mother didn’t want to be parted from me after so nearly losing me. In one place, she barricaded herself in at nights with wardrobes pushed against the door to keep out American Marines visiting other women; her engagement ring was stolen in another rooming house, and in yet another she was called upon to retrieve the dead body of a pregnant woman from a bath in the flat below.
In the Waikato my grandparents and my mother’s brother Robert had taken up a new piece of land at Morrinsville. My grandfather had developed Alzheimer’s disease, just as his mother had, although in those days it didn’t have a name. Robert was working the farm single-handed. He made an offer to my mother she couldn’t refuse, especially as women with one child were now being compulsorily called up for war work. In return for a two-roomed cottage on the property and a wage, my mother would join the family and milk cows. It wasn’t the first time she had done farm work, although she had no experience of dairying. Before long, we were installed on the farm.
This is the point at which my memory actively and continuously begins to record. An enchanted life had begun. I became absorbed into a household of grandparents, uncles and aunts. Jean’s husband, Fred Dickinson, was a bluff kindly builder, who practised his Masonic pledges in the bathroom behind closed doors. He had built her a handsome house in town and took her to the races often. He called me ‘the little tart’, which made me very happy. Jean would come to the farm during the week to help with the wash in the steaming laundry along the kitchen path. If I close my eyes, I can still hear the clothes bubbling in the copper tub, feel the heat of the fire beneath, smell the table linen being blued and starched.
Roberta had retired from nursing. Her last position was matron of the YWCA in Wellington. Before that she had nursed for several years at Te Puea Hospital north of Gisborne. She never married, although it was hinted she had a lifelong attachment, a mysterious doctor with whom she kept in contact for many years. In middle life she was becoming a professional invalid, moving from house to house to stay with various relatives; she followed royal tours, kept a drawer full of expensive kid gloves and a wardrobe crammed with silk dresses. Margaret, now forty-four, was on the brink of a new life after years of being matron of a hospital in Samoa. One evening she arrived at the farm, sparkling eyed and accompanied by a saw miller from Waiuku. He was a widower with two small children, and they were about to be married. The room glowed with laughter and excitement, and firelight reflected in the crystal sherry glasses. I was to have cousins at last although, as it turned out, I didn’t meet them for several years. I am the flower-girl in the wedding photograph, a pudgy child with straight hair, wearing an organdie dress, a wreath of flowers slipping over my eye.
Without the company of other children, I lived in an adult world, which I proceeded to recreate on my own account. I had an imaginary husband called Eric McKay, who was serving in Egypt. As it happened, my uncle’s middle name was McKay and my father’s Eric. I’ve always been interested in where names for characters come from; I guess this invention was pretty simple but my aunts called me a clever little thing. I sat under the hedge beside the vegetable garden having endless conversations with this ‘husband’ of mine. I watched cats stalk mice and captured their prey from them so that I could study them; I misbehaved and ran away to hide in a wool press from which I was unable to escape and went missing for half a day; I hunted for eggs with Robert, who called them cackle berries. Robert belonged to the Highland pipe band and often in the evenings after milking he donned his McKay kilt and strode around the hilltops playing Scots laments. But, more importantly for the family, I had become a warning beacon for my forgetful but beloved and delightful grandfather, whom I followed on his ramblings on the farm. The day began with breakfast in the sunny farmhouse dining room, while Father, as I called him, spread his porridge with honey and butter and planned the day’s ‘work’ with me, before we set off. Wherever he went, the sound of our voices located us, and spared the family from having to keep watch over him.
My father came and went from the farm during leaves, but by now bitterness was seeping through him. The family didn’t appear to welcome his visits. Perhaps my father felt like an outsider, or perhaps the disappointment over the war had soured him. He was no longer the devilish, slightly foppish man who would have a go at things. During the war, he became a different kind of person from the one my mother married. I think the lost castles, the lost estates, took on a new meaning in my parents’ lives.
When the war was finally over, my father returned to live with us. Life must have looked bleak: he had given five years of his life to the war effort, but because he had been unable to fight overseas, at that time he was ineligible for a rehabilitation loan. I get angry when I think about that, it was so absurdly unjust. The flat feet had certainly cost him. Although he had loaded bombs and made armaments, he wasn’t a returned serviceman at all; he was a sick man turned loose with little or nothing to show for it. It was not until 1954 that retrospective legislation was passed to cor
rect this situation, but by then there had been some changes in his fortune that perhaps rendered him ineligible again. At any rate, after the war, we had very hard times.
I don’t think I was particularly welcoming either. I had a glorious band of acolytes in the form of my grandparents, aunts and uncles. And until then I had shared my mother’s bed; each night in the smoky little cabin she read to me before I settled down. I was resentful of the stranger who had turned me out to sleep on the kitchen couch. My father had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, although this later proved incorrect. Whatever it was, the damp Waikato air made him cough until he was nearly sick every night.
But plans were afoot. During the war he had become friendly with a man from Kerikeri in the Bay of Islands. He had heard such engaging reports of the climate and the lifestyle that he was determined we would up stakes as soon as possible and live there. My mother had accumulated some money from her wages while working on the farm, and through saving my father’s air force pay, and this was used as a deposit for a piece of land in Kerikeri. Again, this land was bought unseen. Towards the end of 1945, he left ahead of us to prepare somewhere for us to live. Shortly before Christmas, my presents were placed in the suitcases my mother was packing.
Mandarin Summer is essentially a work of fiction, and so are most of the characters, but I have long ago given up the pretence that Constance and Luke Freeman are not based on my parents, nor Emily on myself.
When we left the south my grandmother and my aunts and uncles all came to the railway station and wept over me, as if I was going to a far country. My grandmother wore black, presumably to suit the occasion. My mother wore her best clothes with a cherry-red pudding bowl hat over her short-cropped greying brown hair as if to say, well, it’s going to be all right, it’s going to be fun up there amongst the orchards and the hibiscus, the pukka sahibs and tea on the lawn.
My mother’s hair was jet black, and she didn’t have a red pudding bowl hat. This is a fiction, an example of the writer’s dilemma when drawing upon life, about what to put in, what to leave out and what to invent. There’s no mention of a grandfather, but in real life he was there, weeping a perplexed old man’s tears. I never saw him again. After I left, he wandered the farm calling for me. ‘Oh, where is the little girl?’ he would ask my aunts.
I did see my aunts and uncles again, many times. But as time passed, like a gypsy whose palm is crossed with silver, I often felt that I was different in some indefinable way from my mother’s staunch Presbyterian pioneering stock. I loved them fiercely, and that love possibly divided me from my father in a way that makes me look back with sadness, although the difficulties were not all about them.
As I grew older I sometimes displeased these relations. I wasn’t so much a ‘clever little thing’ as ‘a funny little thing’, said with an edge in their voices. In the last photograph in which all the brothers and sisters are together, indeed the last time that they were all to meet, I stand among them dressed in white bridal satin. They are a solid, respectable bunch, some more prosperous than others, hiding disappointments well. They do not show, on that day, the slight wariness some of them had developed towards me. I wasn’t turning out to be quite what they expected, and no doubt they believed that I would have been better off had I stayed in the south with them.
I see their faces on the railway station at Frankton Junction, the steam from the engine billowing up through the railings of the overbridge, blurring my last view of them, waving to the child I had been. All my life I will be shaped by that separation, and the journey to the north, taken in a slow train, in the company of my mother.
Chapter 4
When my parents and I first went north, we lived at Shropshire House with a military family called Voelcker. Colonel Frank Voelcker was a decorated military hero, who commanded a retinue of servants that would include my parents, ordering life around him in much the same way that he had done in the East. His family was typical of people who lived in the area.
My first introduction to the colonel was at Auckland Railway Station at the end of the first leg of our journey to the north. He was wearing beautifully laundered tropical kit. It was an uneasy meeting. My mother wanted to be gracious in accepting this enforced hospitality, but there was something in his manner that suggested a misunderstanding. He can’t have stayed long, not more than a few minutes, but I remember the feeling of disquiet he left in his wake. Although of course I didn’t know this at the time, Voelcker had been appointed the resident Administrator of Western Samoa by Prime Minister Peter Fraser in October of that year. Apparently, he was on his way home for Christmas.
I must have still been upset when we set off again the next morning, on another train. My mother said, ‘Look at you, you’re nearly six. You’ve never been to school. Now that we’re going north, that’s what you’ll do, you’ll go to school and play with other children and learn to read and write. This’ll be an adventure.’
So the train lumbered on through the little stations — Warkworth, Wellsford, Kaiwaka, Maungaturoto; the names slip like music from my tongue. How many times I would pass through them again, backwards and forwards to the farm at Morrinsville, the other home that beckoned from the south.
My father was waiting for us at Otiria Junction. He showed us from the train to an elderly green Morris Eight. I recall it clearly, because it was the only car I ever saw him drive. Soon after, he stopped driving and refused to do so again. I never found out why. With him was Norah Voelcker, the wife of the man we had met the previous evening. Norah had fly-away grey hair, a thin face, lined and tanned. She wore a yellow blouse and green slacks, and I would learn that she was Irish. My mother and I climbed into the back of the car while my father and Norah talked in a voluble easy manner in the front. Later, Norah and my mother became close friends, but that all lay ahead, beyond a good deal of grief. In the meantime, it was clear that a friendship had sprung up between her and my father, from which my mother and I were excluded.
My father showed signs of being nervous about our arrival. There are unanswered questions from my adult perspective. It was never explained to me why we had had to leave for the north so suddenly, just before Christmas, and before the house at the end of Darwin Road was ready for us. Perhaps I am naïve, even now, but my father’s nature was such that an improper friendship with a woman seems unlikely. But I’m sure he would have found a confidante in a lonely Irish woman. There were some things I did discover as time passed, and one of them was that Norah’s husband was anxious to divorce her. The novelist in me wonders if my father, innocent or not, was about to be used as an excuse. With the colonel’s return for the summer, did he urgently need to be a married man with a family? Voelcker had some kind of hold over my parents. But, who knows, it may have been the obvious tedious business of money, as it was so often in my family. My mother preferred never to speak about these events.
That afternoon, as we drove through the countryside, we saw how it was burnt with the sun’s fierce heat. The grass was bleached and fallen tree trunks were like the bones of long dead cattle. We travelled for some distance through this landscape and then, suddenly and dramatically, it changed. We entered a world full of green and shifting liquid light. Avenues upon avenues of hedges lined the perimeters of orange orchards. The foliage was pale green and light red at the tips, and at every turn the skyline beyond was etched with the branches of blue gum trees, their trunks white beneath slender inky leaves. The car swept past a row of them, along a white gravel driveway, and we were at Shropshire House, an imposing building set in the grounds of a large garden.
Through a hedge, I heard the thunk, thunk of tennis balls being hit backwards and forwards, and scores called. I’m not certain now if there was a tennis court at Shropshire House, or whether people were just playing ball, but in my head there is one. The house doesn’t exist now, hasn’t done for nearly sixty years, but I do know it was raised high off the ground and surrounded by balconies and luxuriant gardens. Behind it stood a pla
ce known as The Bunkhouse, also slung about with long verandahs, used to accommodate people coming to settle in Kerikeri before their new houses were built. This was where my father had been living, although my parents and I were being elevated to Shropshire House itself.
Norah showed us to our bedrooms, reached by one of the verandahs at the side of the house. Whatever explanation lay behind our early arrival, and Norah’s part in it, if any, she was clearly not the mistress of her own house. After that day, I wouldn’t see her face to face for a long time, although I knew she still lived there, and from time to time I caught glimpses of her, in the shadows of a dimly lit bedroom.
Soon after we put our suitcases down, my mother was shown to the kitchen door, with me following close behind, then Norah disappeared. The kitchen was large, the matchwood timber walls painted cream, with wooden benches running right around them. A middle-aged woman, her face lined by the sun, stood in the middle of the room, her hands resting on her hips.
‘Ah, you’re here,’ she said, and took off the apron she was wearing. ‘I’d heard the new cook was on her way.’
My mother stepped back.
‘You’ll be needing this,’ said the woman, handing over the apron. She introduced herself as Mrs Starr. (She was Mrs Starr, in the years that we knew her. I think her first name was Agnes.) ‘They’ve got sixteen in for dinner tonight. I’m off.’
My mother shook her head in disbelief.
Mrs Starr paused long enough to say, ‘You won’t have to do it all tonight. The daughter’s made choccy shape for dessert. She’s good at choccy shape.’
And then she was gone. My mother stood there and took in what there was to cook — a roast of mutton, some potatoes and silver beet. She lifted the cover on a basin. ‘How disgusting,’ she said. It was the dessert.