At the End of Darwin Road

by Fiona Kidman

  I dedicated Mandarin Summer to Madeleine.

  Everywhere you look in Menton there are flowers. A blaze of red poppies covers the bank beneath the fig tree outside the apartment window. Down the avenue de Verdun the beds are full of tall snapdragons that bring a lump to the back of my throat. They are just like the ones my mother won prizes for.

  And yesterday the orange trees were being harvested for thousands of late fruit, the trees pruned by shearing off huge branches. Mountains of leaves, sparkling with the jewel-like fruit, lay on the sidewalks. The scent took me back, as it does here over and again, to that other place, the hot, dry place of my childhood, where the trees, heavy with fruit, or blossom, overpowered me with their perfume.

  I am waiting for Madeleine. She will come any day. We are into the seventh decade of our friendship, but there is still much to be said. It seems to me now that Madeleine had another life too. We were talking in a Wellington restaurant one day, and she said, ‘I don’t feel like a New Zealander. I’ve always felt as if I was truly European.’ I was surprised when she said that, wanted to repudiate it. But I thought of her father, Frank Grosz, that Austrian artist whose vivid paintings were to contribute to a significant corner of New Zealand’s artistic legacy of the 1940s and 1950s, and I could see why she might feel like that. All along, unbeknown to me, she had had this separate existence too. ‘You were a fine one to talk,’ I said, or words to that effect. Besides, I have always felt like a New Zealander, not tied to the countries our forebears left behind.

  Now, quite late in my own story, I have a long-resisted British passport, thanks to my father’s place of birth. It makes it easier to live in Europe, a territory without boundaries if you have this magic red booklet. ‘Fiona,’ a friend said gently to me, ‘it’s only a travel document, it’s not who you are.’

  But yes, in a sense, it is. I am the daughter of someone who never went ‘home’ after I was born, and yet in his head, in his heart, that is often where he was, and I missed him, more than I knew or understood at the time.

  Anyway, that is the way it was. Other lives.

  And, any day, any day now, Madeleine will be here in Menton.

  Chapter 8

  We arrived in Waipu just weeks before Christmas 1953, in the season of Advent. Seven Christmases had passed since our family had gone north. Now we were turning south again. I had seen Waipu, on earlier journeys. After the long climb up Brynderwyn Hill, I am still never prepared for what lies beneath its crest. For there, the blue floor of the world is stretched beneath the traveller, as it was for the Lotus Eaters coming upon a land of water ‘along the cliff to fall and pause and fall’. The whole of Bream Bay stretches from Bream Tail to far-off Bream Head over beyond Whangarei. There are the Hen and Chicken Islands squatting on the sea and Sail Rock in the bright distance. When I arrive at that point it is a homecoming. It is only a short run down the northern slope of Brynderwyn to the flat plains of the Braigh, on the outskirts of Waipu.

  But the day we arrived at the farm, we came in by a back road from the north. All our belongings, including three cows, two wire-haired fox terriers called Penny and Gay, and the cat, were loaded on three trucks hired for the journey. One showed signs of giving up by the time we wended our way in a trail of red dust down North River into the valley that would become home. Neither my mother nor I had seen the farm before we set off from Kerikeri. My mother had put her faith in my father’s judgement again, and this time, it seemed, he had got it right.

  The little house was square, with four exactly proportioned rooms and a lean-to bathroom and laundry. It seemed beautiful to me, after what we had left behind. It looked like a real house. Outside what would be my bedroom stood a plum tree. The long drop dunny, instead of being across the paddock, was in the back yard, separated from the living quarters only by another spreading plum tree. It became a favourite place for my father to read; he took his .22 out there as well as a book, so he could sit and shoot possums in the tree.

  ‘It’s not bad, Mum,’ I said. ‘It’s not bad, is it?’

  In fact, it remained wonderful to me, as was North River Valley and the people who lived there. Before we left Kerikeri, people said to us, ‘You’ll never get on with the Novies [Nova Scotians]. They’re a clannish bunch, they don’t like outsiders.’ Which seems a bit rich when I think back on it. And it didn’t turn out to be the case.

  Perhaps an element of curiosity about our odd little procession brought the neighbours over that first day. Whatever it was, they came bearing gifts: scones, whipped cream, jam, a stew for our dinner, some homemade ginger beer. Their interest and concern for our well-being never failed. It might have helped that my mother was a Sutherland, descended from Sutherland County, the same as they were, even if she was off a different ‘boat’. These new neighbours were, almost without exception, descendants of a migration that had occurred just over a century before our arrival, led by a charismatic Presbyterian minister called Norman McLeod. It was impossible to live in Waipu without being aware of the town’s history; it was so central to living there in 1953, and it is even now.

  In 1817 McLeod had led a breakaway group from the Church of Scotland to settle what became known as Nova Scotia on the eastern seaboard of Canada. He and his followers travelled from Ullapool, in the north-west Highlands, in a leaky ship called the Frances Ann, which would have turned back had McLeod’s navigational knowledge not informed him that the vessel was closer to North America than it was to Scotland. He encouraged the passengers, in what would have been a mutiny had he been wrong, to persuade the captain to continue. His feats as a seaman, and in settling new lands, the manner in which he protected his followers from persecution by the lairds in Scotland, and the compelling rhetoric of his sermons are legendary. But he was also remembered as a harsh disciplinarian who had a repressive attitude towards women. He was said, too, to have cut off a boy’s ear for stealing, although the child was later found innocent. Whether McLeod really did this or not is still disputed. In court records I later found in Halifax’s Public Archives, it appears that although he didn’t perform the deed in person, he did order someone else to do it. My fate, when I was a girl, seemed to be landing in places were history had happened.

  After nearly forty years, a biblical amount of time you might think, famine struck Nova Scotia. McLeod decided to look further afield for a haven for his people. One of his sons had gone to Australia and he wrote to his father telling of prosperous farming land. At this point, one of the most extraordinary migrations in British Commonwealth history began. Virtually in their back yards, the Nova Scotians built six ships to carry them and their belongings to Australia. Many elected not to go and there were pitiful scenes as families divided for and against the migration. Some escaped on the day the first ship left, just as my own great-great-grandmother had tried to do at Brora, in Scotland. One of them was McLeod’s favoured daughter, Margaret, for whom the ship was named.

  McLeod was disappointed by what he found in Australia. By the time the ships arrived the goldrush had begun and many of the formerly law-abiding followers succumbed to easy money and the rousing life of the goldfields. While the settlers were camped under canvas, typhoid struck, and within six weeks three of McLeod’s sons had died. Humbled, McLeod saw these events as a sign that he had offended God. He gathered together those still prepared to follow him and sailed for Auckland, where the settlers successfully petitioned Governor George Grey for land at Waipu. The green forests sweeping to the edge of the sea had attracted the voyagers as they travelled down the coastline: they saw the tall trees as potential masts in future shipbuilding ventures. Northland looked like a warmer version of Nova Scotia, a lotus land indeed.

  Of course I didn’t know all this when we arrived. What I did know was that everyone’s names seemed to begin with Mac. There were eighty Macs in the two pages of the phone directory devoted to Waipu. To add to the confusion, people added the names of ancestors as nicknames to differentiate between generations. So a boy who
was called Ian might have his father’s name John added to it, and his grandfather’s name as well. Jack’s son might be Johnny Jack and Johnny Jack’s son Ian Johnny Jack. Almost everyone had a nickname. A man might be known as ‘Cave’; or as ‘Bear’, because his father had once shot a bear in Nova Scotia. A lot of them were just Mac.

  They were solid, droll people in our valley. There was an unwritten but implicitly understood rule about being a good neighbour — you never locked your door, lest someone from along the road needed something they had run out of. A cup of flour perhaps, some sugar, or golden syrup, an item that couldn’t be obtained without a journey into town, before the next weekly delivery of groceries came out from the Four Square.

  Our dairy farm was just a pocket handkerchief in size compared with the ones around us, and we had no tractor, no plough, no cowshed, no haymaking equipment, not even a vehicle of our own, and we were five miles from the township, known always as The Centre. In a word, we were under capitalised. I think the locals saw a kind of valour in it all, a bit like that of their own not so distant forebears.

  Nobody had lived at the farm for some time, and when we arrived a thick crop of hay lay waiting to be cut. My father rang up Colin Russell, who cut hay, and asked if he could fit us in before Christmas. Colin had a vacancy the following week. When he came to cut the grass, my father asked how many men he would need to employ for bringing in the hay. That won’t be necessary, Colin said curtly, it would be taken care of. This was puzzling, because there was a lot of hay. But on the appointed day, as if on signal, at least a dozen men appeared, wearing their trademark black singlets and gumboots. In the afternoons the women appeared with food baskets and scalding billies of tea, to picnic by the winding banks of North River. At the end of each day, I would lie beside the river and inhale the rich hot scent of newly mown grass. The river formed a natural boundary on our home paddock. On the banks grew massed willow trees, hawthorn and wild briar roses. Brown ducks nested there, a rare variety apparently, about which my father wrote to the naturalist Peter Scott. He replied, saying he might come and see us when he was in New Zealand, but in the end he didn’t.

  On Christmas morning, my mother appeared in the garden, her voice harsh with grief. There had been an accident, she said, at a place called Tangiwai. A train had been swept off a bridge and many people, perhaps hundreds, had died. It was difficult to absorb the dark cloud that had fallen on the country. The train had been derailed by a lahar from Mount Ruapehu, near Ohakune. The final death toll was 151. It wasn’t long before news trickled back to us of people we knew, or who were touched in some close personal way by the tragedy. We felt overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster.

  Like most, we ‘did’ Christmas, but the lustre was gone from that first celebration. As we did every year, we ate roast chicken and hot steamed pudding, and a special chocolate biscuit fudge my mother made called Oriental Chocolate Chew. The table was set under the plum tree and, as always, there was just the three of us, sitting in the wilderness, singing carols.

  I was about to enter a period of family happiness I hadn’t experienced before. My father’s bookish ways and the years of herd testing in Western Australia now began to pay off. Although the farm was small, he had read a lot about managing pasture, and for a time he put this knowledge to good use. He would surprise everyone by prising a high butterfat yield from the small herd. In the beginning, a kind of idyll descended upon us. My mother was reunited with her Scots background, and my father became the true provider.

  The neighbours helped to lay concrete for a cowshed, and a few days later, the building was erected. Then an uncle, Margaret’s husband, came up and installed milking machines. My cousins by this late marriage of Margaret’s came with them, and I finally got to know Louis and Elizabeth West. Lou played the accordion and knew all the hit tunes. Down south, my Uncle Stewart had also had a daughter, Catherine, when he was in his fifties. I felt less solitary, no longer the total focus of the older generation, and it came as something of a relief, although I doubt if I recognised it for that at the time.

  My parents usually milked in the mornings, though sometimes I was rostered on at daybreak too. My father and I did the evening shift. We sang in the cowshed, his pleasant tenor voice, which had won him a place in musicals in Middlesbrough and San Francisco, in full flight. As well as the songs he remembered from those days we also sang ‘Davy Crockett’ and ‘She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain’ (‘when she comes, when she comes’), ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’ and our favourite, ‘The Jones Boy’ (‘the whole town’s talking about the Jones boy’). We could have been singing my father’s own song. I relished this new and joyful family life. And, when life was quiet on the farm, I skillfully joined the local pastime of listener-in to the party line. The trick was to lift the phone without being heard, then cover the receiver to mask your breathing, and stand very still. Some did better than others. One elderly matriarch was often caught out by her clock chiming during her neighbours’ conversations. I didn’t make mistakes like that.

  On pale turquoise summer evenings after milking, my father and I would sometimes go off with the McAulay brothers from across the road to gather scallops at Ruakaka Beach, where a mothballed oil refinery now stands. The scallops were so big and plentiful that the leftovers were fed to the farm dogs. The McAulays were our closest neighbours, their farmhouse over the paddock from ours. When night closed in, we could see the lights of their house, and one other, far back in the hills. The rest was a friendly darkness. Murdoch McAulay, weather-beaten, autocratic, yet still a very kind and funny man, would speak to his cows with a voice of thunder that I could hear from our place. ‘You might as well speak to Jesus,’ he grumbled, as he prodded them along. I was thinking of Murdoch when I wrote the character of a farmer in Ricochet Baby, a novel I wrote some forty years later:

  This land has been in [the] family for four generations. The farm lies among rolling country burned out of the bush a century or more ago … He stands on the crest of the hill, holding his gun at his side. In the circle of light that surrounds the farm, all the trembling knee-high grass, the beautiful clover and rye, the cocksfoot and timothy lying before him is his. It is rich and luscious and soon it will be ready to cut for hay; it ripples and shimmers and billows; it surges with the day’s early light, now purple and lavender in the shadow of a cloud, now flickering green like the feathers of a parrot. There will be a good crop of hay this year.

  Murdoch. Or my grandfather. Or my father, if he could have just put his hand out and held fast to the dream. I knew these men, I knew what they loved, and it was not all beer and rugby, although they were rugged. With it, went a tenderness for the land, and what it stood for.

  Nancy, the youngest McAulay daughter and the only one still at home, was sixteen and engaged to be married. She and I spent hours catching eels at the river, beneath the shed where the curds, left after the milk was separated, were thrown.

  It was at North River that I began my habit, which lasted many years, of walking in the dark. On summer nights when the roof was still hot from the sun, and ripe plums reeked against the windowpane, I would get out of bed and steal out of the house to walk along the riverbank, often climbing a half-fallen poplar tree that stretched over the stream. I would lie in a comfortable crook in the trunk, watching moonlight play on the surface of the river and listening for moreporks. The scents of paddocks and animals and foliage are different in the dark — cooler, sharper, crisper. One night I could have sworn I heard God’s voice, saying, ‘Too late, too late’. Too late for what? To tell it all, I told myself years afterwards. There was something romantic about the idea of being spoken to by God, although I’m not a believer now. Towards dawn I would return to the house, feeling refreshed and whole, rather than tired. Something would have shifted in me. Being on my own didn’t mean that I was lonely. The solitariness that had dogged me for so long was becoming a friend; I wasn’t afraid of it any more.

  Not everything was perfect. When
the old and the new came into conflict some bad things happened. When people stepped outside the codes that operated within the Nova Scotian group they could be ostracised. A ‘bad’ marriage might mean a life on the outside looking in. And I was fascinated by a woman who lived in a tumbledown house at the edge of the village, in the first years I was in Waipu. She was referred to by some of the people in our valley as ‘the witch’. I never knew much about the real life of Miss Kitty Slick, but it certainly appeared reclusive. She did not, it was said, receive visitors, nor had she left the house for many years, because of some transgression within the community. When the school bus passed her house, we could see her, wearing long dark skirts, sweeping down her verandah. It wasn’t difficult to see why the label ‘witch’ was applied to her.

  But these things didn’t affect me in my new life. The worst that happened was that once again school and I didn’t agree with each other. There had been an inauspicious start during my second week at Waipu District High. I was assigned to a school house that was rostered on to do school duties for a week. The house captain had noted my unusual accent and I was asked to give the reading at school assembly. The reading I was as signed was the Twenty-third Psalm, ‘The Lord is my shepherd’.

  ‘Who does she sound like?’ the headmaster asked the school at the end of the reading.

  ‘The Queen,’ roared back the school in unison. Queen Elizabeth had just made her first tour of New Zealand. I vowed inwardly that it was time to lengthen a few vowels.

  What the house captain had omitted to tell me was that I was also supposed to clean hand basins each day of duty. At the end of the week I was summoned to the office of Miss Lucy Black, a gingery woman with an acid tongue.

  ‘You gave the best reading this school has ever heard,’ she said, ‘so I suppose there must be some good in you. But I warn you, we have decent students at this school.’