At the End of Darwin Road

by Fiona Kidman

She fed all sixteen of the family and their guests. They were served with golden syrup sponge for dessert. I don’t know what happened to the choccy shape.

  It took me a long time to go to sleep. At some time in the night I heard banging and a woman’s scream. The sound was further away than the room next door where my parents slept. Rather, it was muffled and, over the months that followed, I came to recognise it as an insistent pleading cry. I never knew for sure where it was coming from.

  One person who wouldn’t have done any screaming was my mother. It’s been suggested that I write as if my mother was a saint. She was nothing of the kind and could be as armed and dangerous as the next person. Her weapon was silence, a familiar trait among her and her siblings, as painful as loud words in others. I rarely felt the weight of this displeasure, which is not to say that it didn’t cause grief in our household. My father folded in its presence. When my mother woke me, that first morning in Kerikeri, her face was paler than usual, set and still.

  ‘You’re invited to breakfast. The colonel says you must go,’ she said.

  I understood, without being told, that she and my father wouldn’t be there.

  I was startled to see Colonel Voelcker, the man in the cream suit at the railway station, seated at the head of a long table, where I must now take my place. Also seated at the table were his two daughters, both older than me by several years, and an elderly man, totally deaf and unable to speak, who, I learned, was a permanent resident. His name was Schroeder. I know nothing about him, or why he lived at Shropshire House. He communicated by grunts and pointing.

  The dining room had sliding doors that opened out onto another huge balcony so that the room could be used for dancing when the furniture was pushed back. This furniture, made mostly from dark wood, included chairs ornamented with carvings, desks scrolled with illustrations of dragons, silk screens mounted in elaborate frames, pictures of women in Chinese robes on the walls, statues made of silky green jade. I didn’t know the word Oriental but I soon would.

  ‘Those are Daddy’s,’ said the older of the girls, following my gaze. She was in her late teens.

  Soon my mother came in bearing a tray set with boiled eggs, toast, butter and marmalade. She didn’t look at me, and I knew I must be silent.

  When she had withdrawn from the room, the older girl said, ‘You have to do the victory sign.’ She held up the first two fingers of her left hand in a ‘V’.

  I studied this for a moment.

  ‘Daddy, she doesn’t know how to do the victory sign.’

  I raised my hand and imitated her.

  ‘You do that every time you see Daddy, doesn’t she?’

  The colonel nodded in agreement, as he placed a linen napkin across his chest to guard the lovely cream clothes. I remember that he liked his eggs soft boiled.

  Breakfast seemed to go on forever, punctuated by grunts from Schroeder, until at last I was allowed to leave the room. I wandered outside, not knowing which direction to take. Before long I found myself in the orchard. Orange and mandarin trees stretched on either side of me, late windfalls on the ground. I gathered a mandarin up and began to eat it, dropping the peel on the ground.

  ‘Ah,’ said a voice behind me, ‘so you’re going to eat all my fruit as well as eat me out of house and home.’ It was the colonel. Perhaps it was meant as a joke; all the same, I pulled myself back into the shadow of the trees, with a feeling of helpless dread.

  The colonel put his hand up in the victory salute. When I did nothing but stare back wordlessly, he sighed. ‘So the servant’s little girl has forgotten already, eh?’

  I turned and ran. Happily, I wasn’t asked to breakfast again.

  The early months at Shropshire House, before I went to school, passed somehow or other. Odd things happened. Schroeder spent most of his time in a steamy conservatory that formed part of the house; I saw glimpses of Norah, her hair growing stragglier by the day, flitting through the house from time to time, followed by a piquant herbal scent. Tobacco was scarce in those days and when cigarettes were unobtainable the women of Kerikeri rolled fat purple lasiandra buds to smoke.

  Some of them had hand bells on ropes to ring for toast from the cook. Some wore long silk scarves tied in bands around their hair with the ends trailing behind them. They tinkled when they laughed.

  Some years ago, I launched Women of Kerikeri, a book recording accounts of those days by some of the old women who had lived there when they were young. Their lives don’t make easy reading. One acknowledged that the biggest battle of her life was alcoholism, and she wanted other women who shared this problem to know that hers had been overcome. It seemed a brave and defiant statement.

  You can’t always see across these divides, not at the time.

  Chapter 5

  What was this place my father had brought us to? The Stone Store, established as a mission station in 1814, stands on the waterfront tucked into a tidal estuary, with Kemp House alongside it, the first European dwelling to be built in New Zealand. These are the tourist places that make Kerikeri famous. But the town has an odd other story.

  George Edward Alderton was a Whangarei journalist with a commitment to developing the North. He was instrumental in obtaining road and rail services in the area, early in the twentieth century. His other great interest was horticulture, and he considered Kerikeri’s unusual subtropical microclimate ideal for a large-scale horticultural experiment. Shelter belts of gorse already existed, planted by the missionaries for protection and as supplementary animal feed.

  Alderton had developed his concept of a citrus settlement from the Riverside Scheme in California. Once the land was bought, he went to Australia and returned with 10,000 citrus trees. From Australia, he also brought the idea of planting gum trees as shelter in place of the gorse, which was fast turning into a pest. By this time he had a vision of a ‘garden city’ with each plantation being turned into a miniature park. His dream was to turn a part of Northland, an area of wasted potential, into a national showplace. One of the obstacles in the way of this plan was the length of time it would take for the citrus to bear fruit. He needed a fast-growing, quick-yielding crop to plant between the maturing citrus trees. His answer was passion fruit, which looks at first glance like a purple plum until its carapace is broken to reveal seeds floating in sacs of sweet amber juice.

  Having got the plan this far off the ground, there was still something lacking — the right people to become the residents of the settlement. The North Auckland Land Development Corporation already had its eye on the increasing number of the country’s unemployed for development projects in the North. A few of these people did find their way to Kerikeri, but clearly they didn’t have the means to become part of the dream. And then there was the gum diggers’ encampment at Waipapa but, at the time, they were seen more as labourers than as orchardists, although later many did become successful horticulturalists. Maori were not considered at all.

  Instead of drawing on New Zealanders to fulfil his dream of a town based on orchard wealth, Alderton looked to expatriate British living in China, and wanting a place to settle as the Sino-Japanese wars, and Russian communism, advanced upon them in the late 1920s. The only account I’ve found that puts the Kerikeri story in context is a Massey master’s thesis called ‘Kerikeri Gold’, written in 1971 by Christine Elson-White. It’s a little known work that deserves a wider audience than the book stacks where it shelters at Kerikeri Library and at Massey University. As she points out, ‘British stationed personnel found themselves in an unenviable situation. They were seeking to retire, preferably in one of the English speaking former colonies, free from political troubles — and one that provided an attractive pest free climate!’ Alderton hurried to advise these potential settlers about Kerikeri’s charms.

  He wrote newspaper articles for the North China Daily Mail and the North China Daily News, published a book called Income Homes That Grow in Trees (1925), and, in 1927, issued the company’s prospectus. Soon he received over 400
replies. That same year, he formed the Alderton Group Settlement Scheme under the direction of the North Auckland Land Development Corporation, purchasing a large block of land in partnership with five other directors, of whom Voelcker was one.

  Intending settlers arrived to inspect the place. After the riots and open street battles, the snakes, insects and diseases such as malaria and the plague, Kerikeri presented an idyllic spectacle. There were no vermin or wild animals, and the surrounding water, including numerous splendid waterfalls, was unpolluted. Not only could they escape city life, but they could become involved in a ‘back to the land’ movement.

  A man named Edward Little, a respected expert on fertilisers who knew how to evaluate soil and its potential fertility, became Alderton’s agent in China. He had soil samples brought to China for testing by ICI (China) Limited, and the results encouraged him sufficiently to buy 160 hectares of Kerikeri land. Next, he established the Shanghai Club, a group of people from Shanghai and Tsientin who planned to settle in Kerikeri.

  Before long the exodus from China began, along with a handful of the Indian Raj. In all, about 100 arrived, although more had been expected. These settlers brought to Kerikeri a way of life that they had enjoyed in their heyday in the East, including sentimental imitations of the style of housing they had left behind. Little himself established an estate known as Kingston, distinctive for the rows of palms planted along the driveway. Kingston was encircled by a broad brilliantly coloured belt of scarlet gums, golden wattles and wisterias. In addition he planted an imposing forest of redwoods and gums, and filled the gardens with Oriental flowers and shrubs brought from his home in Shanghai.

  Another settler, Daniel Fergusson, formerly a civil engineer with the Hankow Railway in China, decided to create a ‘little China’ at the end of Pah Road. He landscaped an Oriental garden with hundreds of exotic plants such as Chinese lanterns and Japanese anemones, moss roses, a Chinese silk tree, mulberries, custard apples, bougainvillea, frangipani, avocado pears, crepe myrtles and fragrant ginger trees.

  Some new arrivals built pagoda houses in which to store their treasures, before they had kitchens or running water. Massive stone pillars were erected and beasts of Chinese mythology were installed. In the township the Cathay Picture Theatre was built. Tobacco fields and a tung oil nursery were planted. Tung oil trees are indigenous to the Yangtze Kiang River Basin; oil extracted from the richly saturated seeds was used in the manufacture of paints and varnishes, and was an ingredient of ‘India ink’, used for lustrous finishes on wood. The Australian hakea plant, with its distinctive pale red tips, was introduced as a faster and bushier shelter belt than the gum trees.

  Soon the newly made roads rattled with horses’ hooves as galloping majors surveyed their new kingdom, issuing orders as if they expected coolies to come running. They and their wives drank gin and boogied and, if later accounts are to be believed, spent much of their time wondering how to escape back to civilisation. Pioneering orchard country was more rugged than they had anticipated. In their wake came believers in the unusual — Zen Buddhists, Scientologists, Anthroposophists and Theosophists — and dreamers like my father.

  My father’s habit of buying land unseen had again led him to make an unfortunate mistake. If he had done his homework more thoroughly, he might have noted letters from earlier settlers writing back to China which warned that ‘bare land could not be cultivated without adequate capital to pay for extra labour’. One resident, writing to a prospective settler in 1930, said:

  Naturally the ideal condition would be to have a small income, of say two hundred pounds per annum to ensure any contingency that might arise … It has been demonstrated that a woman interested in poultry or special gardening can earn sufficient to meet her housekeeping service expense and requisite pin money.

  Most of the people from the East did come sufficiently well equipped to survive through bad times — and there were plenty of those. The passion fruit failed owing to mismanagement, and citrus canker had earlier forced the destruction of many of the first plantations. The pukka sahibs and their ilk carried on, seemingly regardless of fate, surrounded by their fabulous Oriental collections. They sang all the songs that would one day feature in Pennies from Heaven. Once, when we’d been in Kerikeri for some years, we were on a picnic arranged by Norah who, after an absence, had resurfaced in our lives. We came to a beach where the Kerikeri Cruising Club was holding a regatta and the crowd was singing, ‘Cruisin’ down the river, on a Sunday afternoon …’ How very apt. Norah stood there, humming to herself, watching them all, without making a move to join them, for by that stage she no longer belonged. They drank their gin slings and jitterbugged at dusk, and ignored upstarts and servants. For us, on the outside looking in, theirs was the life.

  Darwin Road was really a grass strip with a layer of gravel sprinkled roughly over the centre line. The small holding at the end that my father had purchased was a dry paddock lined by blue gum trees on the far boundary. We were under capitalised for orcharding, and water supply was a constant problem; we depended on rainwater collected in tanks. The planting of a small orchard of passion fruit, tamarillos and kiwi fruit — the last two were called tree tomatoes and Chinese gooseberries then — was started. A few cows were bought, which my parents milked by hand. All three of us took turns at the Alfa Laval hand separator that divided the milk into cream and whey. A truck came past the other end of Darwin Road each morning to collect billies of cream to take to the dairy factory. But in 1946, our first year in Kerikeri, the North was experiencing the worst drought in its history, then or since. It was an inauspicious beginning and some things, such as the water supply, were never resolved, even though, when I was older, I developed the odd talent of being able to divine water. There was none to be found at our place, except in a shallow area of swamp bed that yielded nothing but brackish surface water.

  The house transported to the land was a medical army hut, to which lean-tos were added as funds allowed. It arrived in two halves on the back of trucks and was set down a short way from the gum trees. For the first two years we had no electricity, our illumination at night coming from candlelight and a Coleman lamp, our hot water from pots boiled on the stove, or in the copper for our laundry and baths. The front lean-to housed a bath and copper, partitioned off from a porch where a canvas camp stretcher stood. Two steps led from the lean-to up to the kitchen that I describe in my story ‘All the Way to Summer’, which is about that time, my father’s secret lives and the Walter Mitty-ishness of his character.

  The room in which we ate was narrow, not more than six feet (or perhaps eight) across by about fifteen long, a bench at one end and a coal range on one wall, our gate-legged dining table, oval when it was folded out, creating a barrier between the kitchen and the other end of the room, where a wooden-backed sofa stood. Seeing it like this, it is not a beautiful room, ugly in fact, its cream walls stained with smoke, red congoleum on the floor. But consider our table, laid with an Irish linen cloth, heavy silver cutlery, the knives bone-handled, the plates willow pattern. This was my mother’s dowry, the remnants of some other life.

  The kitchen was always dim and full of smoke. The coal range smoked. My parents smoked. They rolled their cigarettes from loose tobacco. Acrid little butts collected on saucers. Letters and bills and requests for payment of bills were stacked on the kitchen table. When the power was at last installed, Uncle Robert sent my mother a radio encased in green bakelite, which stood on a shelf above the sink. My mother and I listened to it constantly.

  A window, covered by a curtain, linked the kitchen and the bathing area in the lean-to. I peeked through it once and saw my father naked. In ‘All the Way to Summer’, the narrator thinks of Oliver Reed in the movie version of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love:

  I raised the curtain and he was rubbing himself dry in the dark room, lit only by a single bulb and the reflection of the flames from the copper fire … that same pale English flesh, the colour of potato flesh. He was long an
d spindly, his chest slightly concave, and yet in the flickering light I found him mysterious and oddly beautiful.

  By this time, the Voelcker household had been abandoned for some years. The colonel had returned to Western Samoa in his administrator role, while the United Nations thrashed out the future direction of self-government for the territory. Norah went away for some years for an undisclosed ‘treatment’. Later she returned alone, to build herself a small house along Hone Heke Road, doing most of the labour herself. Shropshire House was sold as a boarding establishment to a couple called Jack and Cora.

  Cora was a blonde merry woman, who acted in local drama productions, and got dressed up once to play the part of Fame in a play. I don’t know what it was called, but I do know she wore a white sheet draped around her like a toga, and held a trumpet with a long handle — actually a broomstick with a petrol pourer stuck to the top of it, painted silver. Jack, who was an older man, once took me to a country fair where I was allowed to ride all morning on the Ferris wheel at sixpence a ride, which was fifteen times round. Fifteen times around on the Ferris wheel, and each time I could see the countryside as far as my eye could follow, every time a little closer to flying.

  My mother returned to work at Shropshire House, in a happier environment, observing with amusement the foibles and affectations of some of the guests. The town had its reputation for the off-beat, so there was a steady flow of guests, all in their own way different, all vying for attention. The pianist Lili Kraus visited from time to time. Considered one of the world’s leading interpreters of Mozart’s work, she had escaped with her husband Otto Mandl from Nazi Germany and spent the war in the Dutch East Indies, before coming to settle for a few years in New Zealand. (Afterwards she moved to the United States where she became celebrated anew.) She toured the country for the CAS (Community Arts Service), giving scores of concerts on dilapidated pianos in little country halls. There was no doubting her charm and vitality. As soon as she arrived the household brimmed with her presence. As well as a base for performances, her visits to Kerikeri were for holidays and respites from touring. She often took me swimming to one of the nearby river holes beneath a waterfall. I remember her white shoulders in the sunlight, and the torrent of black hair released from its plaits, floating on the water. I would sit on a rock until she put out her arms and said, ‘Come on, little girl, come here to me.’ At that point I would entrust myself to the water and the certainty that she would catch me.