by Fiona Kidman
At other times, my mother’s health descended in sudden terrifying spirals: intolerable headaches, measles that turned to pneumonia and, worst, a carbuncle on her head that the local doctor, known for his drinking, lanced cold. It turned into a thirteen-headed creature that crawled across her head like a living thing. She was taken to hospital where they had just started using penicillin, and eventually recovered, despite heavy permanent scarring. While she was in hospital, I was sent south to live with Jean and for a time went to school in Morrinsville. I had spent many holidays at Jean and Fred’s, travelling on my own to Auckland since I was seven, my name on a label pinned to my coat. Jean would pick me up there and we would take the next train down to Frankton Junction. Robert or Fred, usually both of them, waited for us as the steam engine snorted under the bridges while we climbed down from our carriage, and drove us over the dark Waikato roads. Home again, the other home.
I loved my aunt’s house. There was a huge kitchen with varnished wooden doors and a refrigerator — an early Frigidaire, of which Jean was very proud. Deep inside the house was a wide passage with a recess, which was Jean’s special domain. A low seat made of plaited leather on a carved wooden frame sat beside a highly polished oak table. On this stood three objects: a brass box containing photographs of the family, several of her holding me as an infant; a swirling cloudy green Crown Devon jug, kept filled with flowers, either Michaelmas daisies or hydrangeas, according to the season; and the telephone. She would sit on the low seat for hours on end, talking to her best friend up the road, or to her older sister Margaret.
Although you had to go outside to it, they had a flush toilet, not the long drop across the paddock that I was used to. Jean and Fred had decorated it like a joke, with dozens of pictures of local football teams, and of racehorses, especially of the famous Phar Lap, whose heart, it was discovered when he died, weighed fourteen pounds. As well, there were cartoons cut out of the newspapers reflecting their enthusiasm for the right-wing politicians of the day, of whom they spoke in hushed tones of respect.
My grandmother now lived with Jean and Fred in the big and once too empty house. Jean was happy being busy, with several people to care for.
In earlier holidays, I had made some friends in Studholme Street, who now became classmates. My life seemed ordinary and regulated, nobody worried about money, and Jean did nothing except prepare dinner, bake, clean her already spotless house, and adore me. But I did rock the boat one Sunday afternoon. I had been reading Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and decided to try my hand at some poems in the same portentous Victorian style. When the aunts were gathered for one of their frequent get-togethers I announced a poetry reading. The first poem began along the lines of an ode to ‘love child of fair lady night’. Margaret was there. ‘Love child,’ she muttered into the silence. ‘Love child.’
I got the message.
Still, going home to Kerikeri was like returning to another country. Starting all over again, and getting into trouble along the way, often without knowing why. I developed a fear of heights, got stuck on a swingbridge and had to be rescued by another teacher I didn’t like, who turned out to be as frightened as I was. The lecture, delivered back in the classroom, seemed unjust.
Things improved when Strumpel left. He was replaced by an apparently more liberal schoolmaster. His name was Hal Maingay, a man with kinetic brows and cool grey eyes. My writing was shortly to get me into another different sort of disgrace with him when I was almost expelled for writing my first love letter to a pimply curly-headed boy called Eric. (Why did Erics figure so often in my life?)
‘I thought you were a decent girl,’ said the headmaster.
I was terrified. What was a decent girl? I didn’t know. I supposed that all the grown-up books and my secret conjectures, the tall and horrible tales I told other kids from time to time, were catching up with me. I felt particularly guilty because I had just read Warwick Deeping’s Sorrel and Son, which my father had made clear I was not to touch. ‘It’s about nasty sordid people,’ he said. Blissful. Just what I wanted, although when I read it, I couldn’t make head or tail of what was going on.
And I didn’t see myself reflected as a girl who wasn’t decent. I knew that Mother Starr, as we called our neighbour down the road, used to wave brooms at girls who came up the road after her handsome son. Fighting them off, my parents muttered to each other. But nobody had had to fight me off Eric. I was eleven and the note handed in to Maingay had said only: ‘I still like you. Do you like me?’
I ran away from school but was spotted by two maiden sisters, descended from missionaries (truly old Kerikeri), whom we called Flip and Flop as they trundled along on their bikes, with their skirts billowing around them. I took a short cut, running through their garden, shaking the wisteria and scattering Iceland poppies. I ran home into the waiting arms of my unhappy parents, who had already been phoned and told of my defection. After being delivered a lecture on not getting too friendly with boys, I returned to school the following day where Maingay told me he would be ‘keeping an eye on me’.
He did this in a way that was not altogether unkind. Perhaps my disappearance had shaken him into taking a closer look at me. He may have understood that, as well as a precocious interest in boys, I had a frustrated longing to express myself. One way or another I was getting a pretty fair idea of the power of the written word. It was not just other people’s words in books that made waves, but my own as well. I was awarded the New Zealand Herald’s annual essay prize for a story called ‘The Wrong Day’, about a girl who gets Christmas Day mixed up, and thinks she has been deprived of company and presents. My prize was a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. People were starting to take notice of what I was up to, and despite the occasional setback, it seemed worthwhile. It’s odd to look back and realise that, for almost all my life, the way out of anything has simply been to write, and when I don’t I’m not satisfied with myself. If there has been a driving incentive to keep going and produce more books, an urge to communicate, to put things down, it began in those years at primary school.
I certainly had an early view of myself as a writer, but it was the act of writing that mattered so much, and has gone on for so long. I am glad I discovered books in the random way I did, without an internal censor saying what is suitable and what is not. By the time adults noticed that my reading was an eclectic ragbag, it was too late to change my ways. I was becoming possessed by a knowledge of light and dark, and I was already learning that the undercurrents I saw in people’s lives were the kind of things people wrote books about, and not just an aberration of my own vision.
My school life entered a more tranquil phase as I became a senior at the school, and Hal Maingay began to offer me responsibility. As the school librarian, I kept order, in a dim little room at the end of the cloakroom, over the school’s motley collection of books. I was the school mail girl, and at eleven every morning I set off to collect letters from the Stone Store. I was the bell-ringer who signalled the two minutes’ silence we were required to observe on the day of King George VI’s funeral. When he died, the school bus went to all the stops and the driver told everyone to go home. Pleased to have a holiday, I went out into the paddock to chat to my father. He was weeping. ‘Don’t you understand,’ he said, ‘the King is dead.’
I raised calves for the school’s calf club, collected a number of red ribbons and began to travel round the Bay of Islands showing my charges and winning prizes for the school. At night I held their heads in my arms, as other children hold dogs and cats, and sat with them till they slept, often lying down beside them. In several of my stories, countrywomen lie with their faces near grass and earth — that is what I did.
Madeleine and I had grown closer at school, and began to assume independence. In the holidays, when we were not writing and drawing, we organised picnics at the river with her brothers, or went south to stay with relatives, both hers in Thames and mine in the Waikato. Madeleine suffered from travel sickness
, so the trips were an ordeal for her. I liked fussing over her, walking her briskly up and down country railway stations for fresh air when the train stopped. Because of her motion sickness, the prospect of high school became a dilemma. Northland College in Kaikohe, the nearest high school, was over twenty miles away, reached by a bus that wound its way over gravelled roads and took several detours to pick up students from remote villages. It was decided that she would stay on for a second standard six year, which meant that at school we were finally equals.
It was around this time that I became possessed by a concern for my mother. The idea took hold of me that I must take responsibility, if not for her, at least for myself, so that I wouldn’t be a financial burden. I lied about my age one summer holiday when I was twelve and got a job sweeping out one of the local grocery stores. When my age was discovered, I was given five minutes to get off the premises, but I did get paid for the two weeks’ work I had done. Twenty-five shillings.
The following year, I set off for Northland College, while Madeleine went south to live with her aunt in Thames and start high school. She and I wrote to each other that year, but I think I wrote more letters in my head than in fact. The night Eric Kingsbury died was one that never got written. Towards dusk one spring evening, Mary Kingsbury had come running across the paddocks calling out, ‘Mrs Eakin, Mrs Eakin’ — always this odd formality in moments of crisis. Her distraught face appeared at the door. ‘I can’t get my husband to move. I think he’s dead.’
Indeed he was. Earlier in the evening Mary had helped him across the paddock to milk the cow. He was very tired and seemed to have trouble walking. When he got back to the house he had lain down on the bed and closed his eyes.
My mother was gone a long time. My father made some phone calls to a doctor and others. When she came back my mother was pale and drawn. ‘I’ve laid him out,’ she said.
‘Why didn’t she get the doctor?
’My mother shrugged.
‘No money perhaps, but she must have known he was sick,’ my father persisted.
‘No,’ my mother said. ‘It just never occurred to her that he’d die.’ Her voice sounded flat, almost angry.
While she went back to the house to sit with Mary Kingsbury, I walked around in the moonlight, thinking about the dead body in the house on the hill, the not very romantic end to the life of a struggling writer. I had a vivid picture in my head of Eric Kingsbury stumbling across the paddock to milk the cow, a scene I had witnessed more than once. I remember being struck by the pity of it all — the surprised widow, the futile efforts to survive off the land. I wished Madeleine was there, but I couldn’t think of anything to write to her about. I was in the habit of embellishing my letters to her with fanciful detail. But death was real, not an entertainment, and for once I was at a loss. Around this time my letters to Madeleine began to drop away.
When I set out for Northland College, I was the first on and the last off on the longest school bus run in the country. I was still only twelve, and the journey began at six thirty in the morning, when I cycled to the pick-up point. I was dropped off around six in the evening.
At this school, my life was transformed and a new world opened before me. Under the guidance of an English teacher full of infectious enthusiasm, T. J. Buxton, I flowered, could see direction in what I was reading and writing. He encouraged me to read Shakespeare, which I had timidly begun in my earlier reading experiments. It didn’t turn me into a Shakespearean scholar — it was to be years before I turned back to what I learned then — but I began to understand the meaning of drama in a broader sense. Buxton had also been a friend and mentor of the Shakespearean actor, Ewen Solon, based in London, for whom I later wrote a television play.
I discovered at Northland College that I was good at mathematics after all, and also fell in love with Latin. ‘Amo, amas, amat,’ we chanted. I love, you love, he, she or it loves … indeed. I did. I was giving more serious attention to the subject of boys, as real people rather than romantic images. As if in a magic reaction, my straight hair suddenly curled, and I stopped being plump.
I went to my first school dance during that year. A new frock was out of the question, but my mother had a collection of dresses in a tin sea trunk. She wondered if I might find something in there that we could remake. Opening the trunk was like discovering a whole new dimension to my mother. I was used to seeing her at best in drab floral cotton dresses, but mostly in trousers tucked into her gumboots. There was a pale apple-green silk dress with a rippling skirt, a straight cream linen frock with drawn threadwork on the bodice, a form-fitting sheath made of satin in wide horizontal navy and red stripes. These were the dresses she had worn on board ship on her travels to and from Australia. Perhaps this was where her alter ego in the Portia dramas had been born. I chose the satin dress.
I stayed with a new friend called Glenis that night, so that I could go to the dance. She and her mother tried to persuade me to wear one of Glenis’s dresses, but I insisted on my choice. When I arrived at the dance, I could see it was a mistake.
‘Where did you get that dress?’ smirked several girls.
Seeing me sitting in a corner trying not to be noticed, T. J. came over to have a kindly word. But at the same moment a fair boy, with wide shoulders for his fifteen years, turned up. J was the son of the school caretaker, one of the Polish refugee children who had come via Russia and Persia to New Zealand, where his family was eventually reunited. My difference paid off that evening. J was foreign and exotic himself, from my point of view, and he thought I looked great, and much more grown up than the girls with wide petticoats and skirts. We danced every dance and for the rest of the year we wrote long letters to each other about our lives, although his was infinitely more dramatic than mine. Still, I had my first boyfriend, and one who caused some admiration and envy.
While this year was passing, changes were afoot at home. A year or so earlier both my Irish great-aunts, Poll and Sal O’Hara, had died in Bandon, County Cork, but it was some time before my father learned that he had come into money. In spite of the inheritance from my grandmother years earlier, my father had suffered the defeat of being the second son when it came to later estates. There had been some kind of falling out with his father’s family. The cousin, Fanny Thomson, who was at his mother’s deathbed, had distributed his father’s money between my uncle in Australia, herself and the housekeeper, Mrs Murphy. ‘The trouble is there being two sons,’ she had written in a frosty letter to my father. Some lawyer’s letters went backwards and forwards, but Fanny won.
In Bandon, Sal and Poll, who shared the family house where my grandmother grew up, had decided, after all, that both sons should receive an inheritance. When the sisters died within a few months of each other, there was money for a dairy farm, something my mother had long hoped for. My parents wanted, too, to move to a place where I could get to high school more easily.
At the end of the year I won the English prize, learning to curtsey for the prize-giving ceremony in my navy blue gym slip. My school report bore the exciting words, written by the principal, ‘We expect that Fiona will bring a University Scholarship to Northland College.’
That never happened.
The day after prize-giving, we shifted south to Waipu. I had left Kerikeri behind me, even as we drove out of town.
Do I regret this childhood of mine? There are parts of it I wouldn’t want to live again, but it has a certain curiosity value. All those remnants of the Raj, and the old China hands. Like a piece of cracked Ming at the back of the china cupboard. I wouldn’t give it away, even if I could.
A day or two later, Madeleine returned from Thames. She had had a happy school year, full of academic success, but she missed her family, and me. She had decided to brave bus travel the following year. When she arrived home, I had gone without leaving a forwarding address. Perhaps I had got used to sudden departures and absences, and thought little of it. To Madeleine, it seemed that I had vanished off the face of the earth. I
t was years before I learned how this trauma affected her, although from time to time we exchanged letters and photographs. Madeleine became a dental nurse after she left school, before turning to law and later a career as a lecturer in law at Auckland University.
In the early 1960s, she and I met briefly, when we were both newly married. But it was not until 1973, just twenty years after my sudden disappearance, that I visited her. I was given the loft bedroom to sleep in, overlooking the estuary beyond her house. About ten thirty, after her children had gone to bed, Madeleine’s head appeared through the loft door. She was carrying two mugs of tea. We talked until dawn about gaps in our lives, the great yawning stretches that only memory can comprehend and fill. Her eyes were still the same blazing navy blue they had been when she was a child.
I was beginning to make my way as a writer. Later, I would talk about my life in public, and the next time we talked she challenged accounts of my childhood in which she is missing. You and I shared a life, she has said, and we were happy.
Maybe, I said on that occasion, but I think now that I had two or three lives operating at that time; she was in one of them. She is not missing, she had just got into a different narrative. This is one of the writer’s dilemmas, of course, to tease out strands of truth and make them whole. In fiction, it is not so difficult because truth is what the writer decides it will be. Real life is not like that — exact truth is an individual’s personal nightmare and fantasy, which nobody else, however close, can really share.