by Fiona Kidman
The person who did earn a little money in the Kingsbury household was Mary, who sent ‘pars’ (paragraphs) about country life to the Woman’s Weekly, for which she received five shillings or so. This would be reported with shy excitement to my mother. It was hard to tell who was the ‘real’ writer between them, but there was no doubt that her husband was the one to whom the deference was offered. I have sometimes wondered what Eric Kingsbury’s novel in progress was about. My father tried to discuss books with him once or twice, but whereas his tastes ran to adventure stories, or H. E. Bates — The Darling Buds of May was his favourite — or Leo Walmsley’s Sally Lunn, which my mother spent a precious shilling buying him for Christmas one year, the writer thought these unworthy of his attention. Although the Kingsbury novel never saw the light of day, I glimpsed a world where writing was considered important work, something for which sacrifices were made.
My mother, meanwhile, had taken over running the small local library that opened one afternoon a week. There she met a man called Lawrence Donald, who wrote plays for radio and had published a book. She spoke of him with some awe, although my father dismissed him as a conscientious objector, and refused to meet him. Donald’s book was a strange prose poem called Towards the Dawn, with a foreword by educationalist Professor James Shelley. In his own preface, Donald wrote of the island where he lived, just off the coastline of the area known as The Inlet, reached by the road that passed Darwin Road. It was:
… an existence of utter simplicity: eight shore miles, by rugged road and track, from the nearest store or established post-office; the only conveyance along these miles — the legs which Nature provided for that purpose. Sans electricity; sans telephone; sans wireless; sans stove; sans carpet; sans newspaper; evening illuminated by the soft, amber beam of a kerosene lamp or candle …
It was not too far removed from the lives of many of us, although, after our first year or so in the army hut, our family had acquired all these seeming essentials except for the carpet. And we had bikes so we didn’t have to walk everywhere. But along the road, although Madeleine’s mother and her children lived in a Spartan three-roomed cottage, Tom Graveson had built a handsome brick house, luxurious by local standards, and very soon a swimming pool was added.
Madeleine’s and my friendship had developed into one of the most important aspects of my life. Separated only by a hakea hedge and passion fruit vines, we had become children apart from our other lives. My father, increasingly hostile to outsiders, didn’t welcome Madeleine’s visits. She appeared not to notice. A small girl for her age, with a voice just above a whisper, and large navy blue eyes, she seemed insulated from anger and disapproval. When things went wrong at home — and they did, because her mother was a divorced woman, and that mattered then — she managed to glide over them as if they hadn’t happened.
I wrote an essay called ‘Caught by the Tide’ (oh, the originality, but I think it was a set title), which was entered in the school essay section of the Bay of Islands Agriculture Show. It won, and was published in the Bay of Islands newspaper. In response to this, I received a ‘fan’ letter — or at least a letter of encouragement. ‘One day,’ wrote this unknown woman, ‘you may grow up to be a journalist or a librarian or a famous writer.’
A famous writer. I wonder if that woman had any idea what a glimpse of heaven she offered. I still have her letter, written in green ink on paper that has worn so thin it has holes in it, one of the most crucial letters I have ever received. I was nine years old, and now I knew, covertly at first, what I was going to do. I would write books that people read, and I would perhaps live on an island. (I don’t think the idea of living like the Kingsburys interested me a lot but there was definitely something romantic about life on an island of my own.)
I did tell Madeleine that I wanted to be a writer. In fact, we both wanted to write stories, and she wanted to be an artist as well. We became regular contributors to Anne Shirley’s children’s pages in the New Zealand Herald.
My Aunt Roberta, the delicate one, began to take an interest in my work. She sent me a battered copy of a favourite book from her girlhood, Dorothy’s Little Tribe, by Joan White. It begins:
It was Dick who decided that one of us must keep a diary of our summer holidays …
Billy (a girl) is one of a family of rather toffee-nosed children who for a summer acquire a down-to-earth governess called Irene. I warmed to Irene, who seemed to know what was what about life. But it was her idea of a magazine that really caught my fancy:
The magazine proved to be a far greater success than we had dared to hope. Lawrence had been reading some of it aloud to us. He had contributed two nice little poems entitled ‘Our Lady of the Bow’ and ‘The Wreckers Paradise’. The former was awfully sentimental; he didn’t read that one aloud, I am thankful to say, but the latter was very realistic. Charlie had written criticisms of two imaginary novels, crying up the one and slating the other. He began by sketching the plot and then reviewing it. Helen’s contribution consisted of a few riddles and acrostics … and I did a short story about the Civil War in the time of Charles.
I showed this to Madeleine and we decided to spend the summer holidays writing our own magazine. For some time it became an annual event. I wrote several of the stories, and Madeleine copied them out in her beautiful handwriting, and drew the pictures. At best, they were punctuated with Radio Times and Fun Times humour, papers on which I spent my pocket money. But most of my efforts were daffy, silly stories that pandered to the prevailing atmosphere of Kerikeri, with white adventurers chasing bad brown guys. Yet, in Madeleine’s hands, the magazines became small objects of art in themselves. She still has copies, written mostly from within our ‘office’, a hut woven from gum tree branches.
For a time I was in demand to act in school plays. My brash manner and odd exaggerated accent had their uses. I was also a sharp mimic. But at some stage, there was a change. Miss Templeton still hovered in the background, supported by the headmaster, a tiny scrunched up man called Frederic Strumpel, who had a will of iron and played blatantly to the Shanghai set and their children. Strumpel appeared to deliberately set me aside from these children, perhaps to ensure that I didn’t get ideas above my station, the impression that I was equal. I didn’t need his reminders: I suffered enough longing over exclusion from birthday parties run along class lines. Jillian Brady, a gentle, self-effacing girl, was the only real friend I ever had from the China crowd.
If Strumpel saw me as an exhibitionist, it’s true I had begun to draw attention to myself in a different way, although it wasn’t intentional. It was around this time that I began to divine water. The North Auckland Land Development Corporation had had a significant success when they installed the first power station north of Whangarei, harnessing electricity and pumping water from the rapid river with its many waterfalls. But reticulation was not widespread, and people depended on water tanks, which filled with rainwater during the winter, and were refilled with water trucked in during the summer, or the building of reservoirs, or sinking bores. My parents built a reservoir at the back of the house, but the water was brackish and unfit for drinking. I swam in it a bit, and floated like a log so that frogs could hop on me, which they often did. When my parents considered putting down a bore, they went along to see a man who did this work, and I went with them.
First, he said, you had to find the water. This was what a dowser did. He showed us how you took a forked live twig and trimmed it, and then, holding it on either side, bent it towards the earth. If there was water below, the twig would turn in your hands. He walked around showing us, and the twig quivered half-heartedly. ‘I reckon,’ he said, ‘there’s water on this property, but I’m buggered if I can find it.’ My parents tried, and then when nothing happened, they looked bothered and said perhaps if he found water he could let them know. The whole thing seemed risky.
And then I tried, although nobody had offered me the twig, and soon I felt the wood move, like an electric shock in my hand.
I thought water, water as if I was thirsty and the twig curled down towards the earth. It’s almost impossible to tell how something as insistent as this feels in your hands: bucking, stronger than the kick of a gun. I think now that it was more like a sexual tension, not something children are supposed to have. By the time I was grown and married, this ability to locate underground springs had all but vanished.
There was water where I said, and a bore was laid on that farm, and later on another. But my mother put a stop to it, realising that this talent was adding to the view of me as different or in some way odd. And, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find deep water on our property.
Whether it was anything to do with the water divining or not, Strumpel and Miss Templeton decided they didn’t want me to eat lunch with the children in my class. I was dismissed from the area and sent to eat with the ‘big children’ (intermediate level) on the bottom playground, ‘seeing I thought I was like them’. The children of the Shanghai families were sent away to boarding school as soon as possible so the older school consisted mostly of Dalmatian and Maori children. Many of them would never go to high school at all. ‘Janet Gray says she’s going to marry a Maori,’ I reported to my mother. ‘Oh, does she just,’ my mother said, grim-lipped. She had become more withdrawn on the subject of her own childhood companions.
At first, inhabiting an odd in-between world, I entertained these older children with mimicry and tall tales, peculiar stories that hinted of sexuality, based on my reading of adult books and my keyhole habits. Eventually they got bored with these stories that led nowhere — because the outcome of sex was unclear to me — and fed up with being imitated. Bitten, they bit back and imitated me. I quickly became ashamed and tearful and shouted at them. These outbursts were fuelled by the daughter of a rumoured remittance man, the third son of an earl, who hadn’t yet managed to send her away to school. The truth was, I suppose, that she and I were both smart, both out of place, but she was older and held her own. Getting me in trouble, riling me up, gave her an authority that I had temporarily displaced.
Strumpel swooped and open warfare developed between us, his aim to silence me, mine to maintain a voice. I was constantly stormy. Strumpel called in his ‘big boys’ to deal with me. I spent many lunch hours locked in a toolshed in the school grounds, where I had been thrown bodily by these boys. ‘Take her away and let her cool down,’ Strumpel would cry, his tiny malevolent frame dancing up and down in the playground.
I still remember the cool earth floor where I subsided at the end of these screaming outbursts. People write to me now, others who felt like misfits. ‘You were brave to stick at it, to be different,’ they say. But no, I wasn’t. I was foolhardy and desperate and I didn’t know any better. I wanted to be a famous writer, and I was getting my first real taste of the critics. Anyone who could survive Strumpel’s ‘big boys’ didn’t have to learn bravery at some later date.
Days of heat and shame. On 1 January 1950 my father said, ‘Well, I hope the next ten years are better than the last. They couldn’t be any worse.’
Around this time I noticed that whenever anyone asked him how he was, in even the most casual manner, he would say he was feeling dreadful and begin a detailed medical bulletin about the state of his health. His hypochondria was of the purest form and would lift only when he was dying of cancer thirty years later; then it appeared almost as a relief, the burden of dreadful possibilities lifted. His health was the reason given for his frequent trips away to the south, where he met up with his ‘cobbers’ from the air force, and stayed in Auckland to see musicals.
He decided it was time I did a bit of work around the place, and offered some incentives. I bought Pride and Prejudice on the proceeds of learning to milk a cow. I have always been fond of the dreadful Lydia Bennet, who ran away and got married to the wrong kind of man. Elizabeth and Jane are very fine, suffering for Lydia’s misdeeds, and winning happiness of their own the hard way, not to mention fortunes, but they are not, as Lydia is, on her return from her elopement, ‘still untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy and fearless’. Now that seemed like living to me.
It was a short step from the Bennets to Becky Sharp, whose lack of scruples and effrontery captivated me, even if she did come to a sticky end. I reread Vanity Fair several times, and for a while it became my favourite book. The Victorians now took hold of me as I started on Dickens, and it was only much later I learned that the books I enjoyed had so troubled their prudish readers when they were published — they did not seem shocking to me. I wanted to know about good and bad, actions and consequences. And love, of course, there was always that, the great unknown, and I was considered far too young to know anything about it.
Chapter 7
A boy came to work with us. He must have been just doing odd jobs, because when I was ten or so he wasn’t a lot older — perhaps in his early teens. He was Maori, with sleek brilliantined hair and a thin face. His name was David. One day he didn’t do any work. He and I sat together on the camp stretcher in the lean-to and read comics. I don’t know where my parents were. Perhaps they were around somewhere, or had biked into town; children were often left to their own devices. This boy and I may have leant on each other’s shoulders as we read. I had forgotten about David until, on a trip north, when the gums first began to be cut down, I saw the stand on the property where he and his parents lived back then, dense and inky blue, the way I remembered them, and it came back to me. The next day, after we read the comics, he disappeared. He would never return, my parents said, because he had stolen something. They wouldn’t say what it was. I recall nothing at all except sitting on the camp stretcher, reading comics, David’s black hair and being hot.
This is not confessional stuff. There was nothing to confess. This was no older man sitting a child upon his knee in secret, it was two kids who laughed at the same jokes and liked comics. I’m sure of that.
But later I had a friend who I used to meet in the weekends and she was a secret. I think now that it was because of David that I kept this friendship to myself. Topsy Witihera was a girl with a wide concealing smile and a thick lustrous plait that hung below her waist. She was being brought up by her grandmother, and felt different, as I did, only more so. If my mother knew I met her she didn’t say anything. But by now I was old enough to understand difference and I seemed to cause my parents problems enough. The poignancy of Topsy’s name in a town like that was inescapable. She was called a lot of other names, too, that reflected her dark skin and lack of a father.
We sat on the doorstep at her grandmother’s house and talked while the thick blue gums rippled and whispered in the background. In Topsy’s presence it was possible to speak of unhappiness, to give sorrow a name. Our world was not make-believe and bullshit, it was about real things. And at school she saved me more than once from the physical attacks of older children. She would emerge as if from nowhere, her fists flying with a precision that left the opponents doubled over in agony. I got more peace after she took on the bullies. At some stage she disappeared, passed on to another family when her grandmother died. It took me thirty-six years to rediscover her.
This life with Topsy was far from the bookish fantasy world I inhabited with Madeleine. In fact, Madeleine doesn’t figure much in this existence. She was still a class ahead of me and our school lives didn’t cross much, although we walked to the bus each day, and if one of us was late we waited for the other, walking along Hone Heke Road where the yellow-green bamboos were packed so close together you couldn’t see light between them, only above. The air stung with cicadas in summer; the scent of citrus flowers seeped through the hedges. Sometimes there was a sweet rottenness in the air.
Madeleine’s own life seemed complicated in some respects — I was never sure whether her family was happy or not — but in this respect Madeleine remained loyal, close and inscrutable. Tom Graveson’s fame as a horticulturalist was spreading and for many of the orchardists who had endured the 1946 drought, his new methods of raising
trees were the salvation of their orchards. His swimming pool was a great luxury: in the summer I used to join the family and their many guests there almost every weekend.
Things continued to go from bad to worse for my parents. My father worked where he could but he found manual labour difficult and his job hopes were being constantly dashed. My mother had turned her hand to everything she could think of after Shropshire House burned down: the lemon picking, the library, growing vegetables for sale and raising chickens and ducks for the table — which I plucked for days on end over kerosene tins of hot water, round Christmas time. At times she glittered with a brave optimism, illuminated by small satisfactions in her garden. Her sunflowers were tall, strong and golden; her cut flowers won first prize at the flower show — a five-shilling prize was worth having. There were the picnics with Cora and Edward and dinners with Norah. One evening after dinner at her cottage there was singing round the table. My father loved this: his personality changed, he could hold a tune better than any of them. Then Norah sang ‘I get along without you very well — of course I do’, and when she cried we all looked the other way until conversation was restored.