by Fiona Kidman
In the evenings, she put on dramatic dresses, velvet and richly coloured, to dine by the glow of specially lit candles. I think she behaved well enough towards my mother, although Flora didn’t warm to her, because Kraus brought her own cook. I’ve only recently learned that these were the years when she became a vegetarian. That would have seemed outlandish to my mother.
All of this came to an end when Shropshire House burned down in a spectacular fire. In the middle of the night a young woman who worked as a cleaner at the boarding house, and slept over, banged violently on the door just a few feet from where I lay asleep, shouting, ‘Mr Eakin, Mr Eakin, the big house is on fire!’
My parents sprang out of bed and raced to the scene, stopping on the way to leave me at a neighbour’s house so that I would not see the fire. Not see the fire? The house contained gunpowder and throughout that night it exploded like cannon. The fire leapt 100 feet in the air, the smell of burning penetrating every recess of the house where I waited. As flames stung the citrus trees that ringed Shropshire House, the night smelled like boiling lemon juice.
Thus, in Mandarin Summer, Emily Freeman wakes to find the house where she lives on fire:
The dry timber of the house was erupting, a fierce conflagration, brighter fireworks than I could ever have imagined. Already flames were leaping from the roof of the west wing of the house.’
Emily helps her father to rescue one of the characters, Lilian, from the flames:
Half-carrying, half-dragging her we made our way clumsily through the glassroom, and the glass had begun to shake with the heat and then, just as it seemed that we would be engulfed, we found the door, and when we opened it, the shaking glass started to explode behind us.
I wasn’t inside that house. I smelled and heard the fire, but it didn’t burn me. Or did it? I can’t tell you that exactly.
In another of my stories, ‘Paradise’, a child listens to a group of adults sitting and talking by a river; the women have all, at one time or another, lived in the same house, later burned to the ground. The child in this story is more forthright:
My mother did try to shield my view so that I wouldn’t see the leaping flames above the gum trees, the blinding arc of light reflected in the clouds, the sparks which showered the night with dazzling, ferocious gaiety. This was the house I had briefly known as home. She wanted to save me from the terror of watching it perish. But of course I saw. I felt the heat of the flames. I heard the confused birds waking as if night were day. Of course I remembered.
I’ve never been able to get away from this image. The sight of a burning house at night causes me a trauma I find hard to describe. I run about crying ‘Help’ in a small terrified voice, even when I’ve rung the fire brigade. Fire is the hidden, mysterious image in my life, both terrible and beautiful.
People ask me if, because I’ve described in my novel a real fire that happened, I’ve also described the lives of the people who lived in the real house. Well no, not exactly. None of them were in the house at the time and if there were motives for burning it down, which some believed, they were certainly not ones that could be attributed to the characters in Mandarin Summer. I might not have entered the burning house but it doesn’t take much to smell a fire; it takes little more to smell trouble.
But the women who sat and talked by the river in ‘Paradise’ were real enough. They are Laura, Nora and Cora. Or not. My mother Flora had morphed into Constance in the novel, then Laura in this new story; her friends, Nora and Cora, go shamelessly by their own names, although Norah loses her ‘h’: Flora, Nora and Cora. Their conversation happens some years after the fire. Norah had come back and built her house. Jack had gone for good. After the house was destroyed, the police had come up from Auckland because there were some unexplained circumstances about how the fire began. They stayed and asked questions for days. My mother was interviewed. Did she know where Jack and Cora were that night (for they were both out of town)? No, she did not. Then, when the police weren’t satisfied with the outcome of their inquiries, they sent an insurance assessor to try to dig up the truth. His name was Edward. He stayed and that was when Jack left. Edward and Cora now lived in a bungalow by the river, surrounded by leafy green bush, and we were all very happy when we met, the three women, Edward, my father and me.
Chapter 6
Darwin Road. The place where we lived. There was a hill beyond our land, no more than ten miles away at most, shaped like a long thumbprint, the way the thumb lies when holding a page open. I find it hard to describe that hill’s particular shade of blue, dark and distant.
The paddock beyond the house was planted with silk-tasselled maize and sweet corn, the swelling green ears stirring among the leaves. Food for the three cows we milked, food for us. The path along the house was flanked by banana passion fruit, the vines in summer were heavy with furry pale yellow erotic fruit. Snapdragons grew in clumps in our garden — electric pink, ruby red, shadowy lemon. The trees rustled and whispered to us.
While the exotic world of the Alderton settlers unfolded about us, and our piece of land was planted, I had of course begun school. Sooner or later it had had to happen. I was nearly six when I was put on a bus one day and packed off to Riverview School. Its motto, ‘Be Worthy’, loomed in large letters over the entrance. I started school on the same day as John Jurisich, Frank Zivkovich, Billie Smellie, Ngaire Bates, Lily Tango, Lovey Apiata, Bobbie Tucker and some of the Dixon girls, plus children with double-barrelled surnames. On the third day I wet my pants and cried. I got sent out by my teacher, Miss Templeton, a round-featured peach-complexioned woman with crisp grey curls, and pronounced facial pores. Her affair with a one-legged man was a source of interest in the town. When I had been dismissed, leaving the shameful puddle on the floor, I ran as far as I could, to the pine belt at the back of the school. There I concocted one of my fantasies. In the story, I was back in the Waikato with my aunts and uncles and grandparents, and they were sending a gunboat to rescue me.
‘The cat sat on the mat’ was not for me, and I couldn’t make sense of the letters. I stumbled through my lessons, considered not very bright. My mother had read to me a lot before I began school, but the first books I remember owning were A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, both given to me by Jean for Christmas of 1945, and opened in those first weeks at Shropshire House. It was certainly the world of Tigger and honeypots. I felt like Piglet on the outside but in my head I was pure Christopher Robin, the introverted outsider who lived a make-believe life, with reality nudging perilously close to my elbow. Pooh, as he was for millions of other kids, was the alter ego, the person who listened and forgave.
Two children joined the class, new neighbours in Darwin Road, Madeleine and Michael Gross. Their grandfather, Tom Graveson, who had grown citrus trees from pips in tubs since he was a child in the north of England, owned the property across the road from ours. He was a remarkable orchardist who developed techniques of grafting fruit trees, his experiments aimed at discovering which trifoliata stocks withstood local conditions and were resistant to drought and disease. His gorse-covered land very quickly became a flourishing orchard, and in time he transformed the economics of the citrus trade in the North.
Madeleine and Michael were exactly a year apart in age; I was roughly in the middle. They had a smaller brother, Peter. The family was from Dunedin, where their mother had recently been separated from Frank Grosz, a French/Viennese designer and artist who had emigrated to New Zealand in the 1930s. Madeleine already had exquisite copperplate handwriting, and a few days after their arrival she was moved ahead two classes.
‘She’s much too bright to be in this class,’ Miss Templeton told her mother. I felt envious and stupid.
The misery of life in Miss Templeton’s class ended when I developed abscessed glands in my throat. I was dispatched to Kawakawa Hospital, some thirty miles away, for an operation, but it was a month or so before I was able to go home, as pneumonia and other complications set in. A
few days after the operation I was visited by Miss Brown, the visiting hospital teacher.
‘Where are you up to in your reading?’ she asked.
Miserably I confessed that I couldn’t read at all.
‘Oh dear!’ She regarded me with concern. ‘I’d better show you how.’
We spent a busy afternoon. This is a word and it sounds like this. Yes? Yes, although sometimes there are tricks and some words sound the same but mean different things. Gosh, that’s like a jigsaw: you’ve got to work the bits out? Mmm, that’s right, and then you put all the words together and you get a sentence. But that’s a bit out of a story? Right, the words start to tell you things. Really? Yes, so they do, oh, oh … This is reading, isn’t it?
‘You should be all right now,’ she said as she left. She was confident and so was I. The hospital had a small library of books, mostly for adults. When Miss Brown came back the following week there was a stack of them beside me. If she was surprised that I had read them, she didn’t show it.
‘This afternoon I want to learn to write,’ I told her.
This took longer, but by the end of the afternoon I was ready to tackle the first project.
‘Dere Mum,’ I wrote. ‘Come and get me, I hat the fode hair.’ This was the first of a number of letters designed to cause misery and guilt at home. Eventually, they had the desired effect. I was pleased with myself. Writing worked.
Miss Brown may have accepted my learning curve without comment but Miss Templeton was incredulous. ‘We’ll have to start the child all over again,’ she told my mother, when I arrived back at school.
‘She can read,’ said my mother.
‘I doubt it,’ said Miss Templeton, rolling her eyes and sitting me down for one of the detested lessons. Later in the morning I was promoted to standard one. I was still a class behind Madeleine, but I was blissfully happy at this elevation. As it happened, I couldn’t do much else but read and write, and I continued to fail dismally in other subjects. But I had this trick — I had become literate, apparently on my own, and I wanted to show off my aptitude again and again. The following year saw a return to hospital and I was able to read even more. This apparent ‘cleverness’ didn’t make me a huge number of friends, and I was also developing a strange hybrid accent. My father insisted that I copy his classy, if stammering, tones. The deal was simple: if I didn’t speak as he thought I should, he didn’t answer.
Things weren’t all bad between us. He taught me how to fire a gun, although I missed whatever I was supposed to be firing at (often quail, which he shot for food although it was poaching), and how to float stamps off envelopes and mount them in an album, how to study birds and their nesting habits. He taught me how to hold my knife and fork at dinner, and how to address important people when I met them. Who knows, he said, one day you might meet the King and Queen, and you must know what to do. And, although winter was just a cooler time than summer, punctuated by days of fat flat grey rain, we sat by the wood stove with the door open and read to each other at night.
But he was decidedly Victorian in his view of how a child should be brought up. The first time I was strapped for disobedience was a dreadful shock. Lying down afterwards was a painful experience. When I was a small child, my life had generally revolved around rewards rather than punishment; this physical shift was frightening and humiliating.
I see now that my father was unhappy in ways I couldn’t have imagined then, that he had left behind some friends in the air force with whom he could tell jokes that my mother and I didn’t think funny. In particular, he had befriended a much younger man, who perhaps offered reminders of the youth he felt he had lost. All the same, I often felt I was meant to be born a ready-made grown-up, and a boy. Both my parents told me it had never occurred to them that I wouldn’t be a boy, whom they would call James.
Among their more recent regrets was a baby who slipped from my mother’s grasp before it took a breath, as she was hoeing rough ground. She worked on the land as a man would, not sparing her body at all. I was there when it happened, although I remember only her cries, and something I wasn’t allowed to see. I don’t know whether it was a boy or a girl, but the pregnancy must have been well advanced. I asked her once, when in a rare moment she spoke of the matter, trying to console me when yet another of my own babies eluded me. She merely looked vague. I think women were expected to turn their heads at times like this. I know this, actually — miscarriage has always been one of those things people prefer not to talk about. They will shrug and say things like, ‘Well it probably wasn’t meant to be’, ‘It might have been damaged’, ‘Nature’s way of dealing with it’ — all those platitudes that ignore the grief, the lost anticipation.
My mother began telling me stories that had as little to do with life as possible while I followed her around on the land they were breaking in. She was absorbed in Portia Faces Life and Doctor Paul, serials broadcast from the green radio in the kitchen. I listened too, in the school holidays, and during the polio epidemic, when we all stayed home for months and did lessons by correspondence. She and I began to live out some of the dramas in plays of our own. ‘You can pretend I’m Delia,’ she would say, and start vamping among the tree tomatoes. The fruit had drum-smooth red skin binding the rouge-coloured flesh and black seeds inside. She clipped and slid the fruit into a bulging apron with a big pocket. ‘You can kiss me if you’re quick, but nobody must know’ could be an opening line.
‘My wife no longer cares who I kiss,’ I might say.
‘Ah yes, but she does, that’s half the pleasure,’ my mother would breathe. ‘We have our little secrets.’
‘How about we sail away in a boat together?’
At which point she would snort, ‘Is that the best you can do?’ The question was meant for me, not the character. While we held these sultry improbable conversations, anyone glimpsing her at work in the orchards might have mistaken her for a man, with her overalls and close-cropped hair. I think my mother was in despair at this point in her life. I had reached an age when children know if things are not well in their house. These private fascinating role-play games made me endlessly inventive in my mother’s company, but I have wondered since how much of it was for herself, whether this fantasy world was what kept her together. When she met people she was shy in her manner.
The collection of people along Darwin Road became increasingly colourful, a neighbourhood of extreme personalities. As well as the Graveson and Gross ménage, there was an old Scotsman with an accent as thick as broth and his maiden daughter, who moved into a rough cottage along the road. Miss Stewart painted water colours and had an acid tongue reserved for children who interrupted. Then there was B, a man with a charming smile who invited me into his cottage one day and held me on his knee while he showed me photographs. I told my parents, with pride I suppose, that someone had taken a fancy to me. They were outraged. No doubt it was my good fortune to have boasted of the encounter, as I was never asked into his house again, nor, so far as I knew, did my parents speak to him after that. He turned his attention to adult females, although he remained a bachelor. Alongside the property adjoining ours was young Rod MacDiarmid’s orchard, where my mother and Madeleine’s picked lemons and oranges for a shilling a case. MacDiarmid had arrived earlier, a clever successful orchardist from the beginning. His brother Alan was later awarded the Nobel Prize for his work as a scientist.
My father was often irascible with other of our neighbours besides B. Mrs Starr and a man called Joe Johnson, who looked more Indian than Maori, tall and swarthy, with a scar on his face, given to wearing wide-brimmed dark hats, had moved in further along Darwin Road. When I read Robin Hyde’s Passport to Hell many years later, Starkie’s character reminded me of Joe. He began a campaign to castrate all the tomcats in the neighbourhood. When our black cat came home neutered, my father was beside himself with rage and an odd despair. I had begun to develop a temper of my own. If my father thought the world inherently unfair, I was beginning to agree.
The answer to life’s uncertainties seemed to lie in books. I read and re-read Arthur Ransome, whom I loved because kids got to do things on their own. And Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians, Rolf Boldrewod’s Robbery Under Arms, R. D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, which broke my heart, and Grey Owl’s Sajo and her Beaver People. I was especially excited by Pilgrims of the Wild, in which he described the process of writing adventure narrative. This was the first time I had read anything about how a writer wrote. I liked the way Grey Owl described wanting to ‘paint a picture in words’, the sense of excitement he brought to writing things down and ‘getting them off his chest’. I especially enjoyed his description of how, alone in the forest except for the company of a beaver called Jelly, he ‘often awoke from sleep to make alterations, made constant notes, and to get the effect of difficult passages, read them aloud to Jelly, who, pleased with the attention and the sounds of rattling papers, would twist and turn in contortions of queer delight’. I revisited the book recently, and it all came back, the way I too began writing with this in mind. Even now, I suppose that unconsciously, when I write, I practise versions of this process.
I had also met a ‘real writer’, a man called Eric Kingsbury. He and his wife Mary had moved in next door, on the rise slightly above our end of Darwin Road. They had come for peace and quiet, and to live off the land, so that ‘Mr Kingsbury’ could write books. His typewriter sat on the end of their kitchen table amid a confusion of papers, while he sat pecking away at the keys. Mary, a pink-cheeked woman with a short brush of grey hair, planned to grow vegetables and raise hens. They kept a milking cow, but Mary couldn’t master milking so her husband had to leave his work twice a day to perform this chore. Now and then I had to take messages to the Kingsburys because they didn’t have a phone and an arrangement had been made with my parents to allow people to send urgent messages on ours. Most of them were to do with medical appointments for ‘Mr Kingsbury’. When I entered the room where he worked, I was allowed to speak only in a very quiet voice, so as not to disturb him. It was clear, even to me, that he was sick: his face often had a glassy pallor that turned to a flush when he coughed. Nor did he seem to make money from his work. My mother sometimes sent gifts of food, even though we had little enough to spare. She produced astonishingly good meals from the wood stove’s tiny oven.