by Fiona Kidman
… Only
when the distant lights of boats shone
through the shadow of the navy
sea burning beyond the granite
cliffs, the haunted clay,
was it cool enough to consider
your proposal;
in the end
I said yes, a strange
place to choose a life.
And here’s one of those odd inconsequential things: the book I was reading that week was Elizabeth Jane Howard’s novel, The Beautiful Visit, and the first book I picked off the crowded bookshelves here in this French apartment in Menton was a first edition of that same book; I read it again just recently. In a strange way, it’s connected to the events of my life as they flowed on from that week in Leigh.
For really there had been no contest.
The wedding was brought forward on account of a pregnancy scare that didn’t eventuate, but badly rattled my mother. My father remained remarkably calm. ‘What will I tell my brothers and sisters?’ my mother wailed. This was an indication to me of something I hadn’t really understood before: that in spite of all that had gone on between them, my mother needed to keep face with her family. And I was the prize.
‘Let them find out for themselves,’ my father said, apparently without flinching. As it turned out, there was no need to tell them anything, but it was a close call.
In August, instead of going to England with Jennifer, I married Ian at St Faith’s Church, the service taken by our friend Manu Bennett, later Bishop of Aotearoa. The date had been decided in consultation with Jean, whose husband Fred had died suddenly one Saturday afternoon the previous year. Although Jean and Fred’s lives had sometimes seemed stormy during the last year I lived with them, she was bereft without him. To complicate matters, Roberta had turned up on the day of the funeral with all her suitcases, and hadn’t left. We knew that Jean was considering abandoning the Studholme Street house in favour of something smaller, so that Roberta would be encouraged to move on. Jean didn’t want a wedding on the anniversary of Fred’s death, but it worked out in the end that we could get married on the first Saturday of the August school holidays.
On the morning of the wedding, I was due for a hair appointment. The main salon in town opened for ‘brides only’ on Saturdays, and that day I was the only bride. One of the uncles dropped me into town. The salon hadn’t opened and he offered to wait, but I said I would like some time to myself. It was a dull day with rain in the air. A lazy newspaper wrapped itself around a lamp post in the deserted street. In the distance, a friend appeared. Bob Harvey worked as the projectionist in the picture theatre next door to the library, a gangly nineteen-year-old with large eyes and an air of constant startled wonder.
When we had exchanged greetings, he said, ‘So what are you doing today?’
‘Getting married,’ I said, much as my mother must have said in the boarding house in Perth, nearly a quarter of a century earlier. Certainly, Bob looked surprised.
After a moment or two of reflection, he said, ‘But Fiona, you can’t get married in the hairdresser’s.’
Quite. I couldn’t really explain to him that I couldn’t get married without going to the hairdresser’s. This seemed like a significant difference in the way men and women thought. After all, my intended bridegroom had gone out on a Scout bottle drive that morning.
Jennifer helped me to dress, later in the afternoon. I wore a cream satin dress with piping down the front and ruched roses at the back — because, the dressmaker insisted, this was what Princess Margaret had worn at her wedding to Anthony Armstrong-Jones three months earlier. I am not sure why I agreed to this, but the dress was pretty and showed off my twenty-two-inch waist, about which I harboured a not so secret vanity.
All my mother’s family came, even Stewart, whom my mother hadn’t seen for years. Robert had recently married an English nurse called Agatha, whom we’ve always known as Mary. She had been a ballet dancer and studied with a career in mind, but the war intervened and although her direction changed, she brought a difference to the family with her love of dance and the arts. They all had their photograph taken at the small reception at the Kuirau Street house, the last time they were all together. If they were puzzled by the wedding in the Maori church, they said nothing. Upon meeting Ian, they had decided he was Spanish, a view from which they never deviated. Ian’s father and stepmother, Doll, came up from Wellington. Tom Kidman had met Doll during his sojourn in the sanatorium at Waipukurau. The old rift between Ian and his mother, brought about by many separations and Ian having spent his high school years with his father and Doll, had not healed, so there was nobody else from his side of the family.
The back of the church was crowded with library borrowers. Several older people had come in before the wedding to give me gifts of crocheted doilies and placemats, tea towels, tablecloths and kitchen appliances. I was overwhelmed by this unexpected affection for doing what was, after all, just my job. But, if I had not known it before, this was an affirmation of the importance of books and their accessibility in people’s lives, and I was part of it.
As we were married, an immense hail and thunder storm struck the church, drowning out our vows.
Unbeknown to us at the time, Ian’s mother stood outside to watch the wedding procession. Standing in the rain.
Our first address was 8 Lake Road, in a semi-detached less than a hundred metres from the edge of Lake Rotorua, facing Mokoia Island, where the legendary Hinemoa, strung with gourds, swam to her lover Tutanekai. I had arrived at that most desirable estate, the condition of marriage, not on 10,000 a year like the best of the Miss Bennets, but something like a combined income of £728. Never mind, marriage represented freedom and the right to sleep every night with the man of my choice. On blue days I watched the shining surface of the lake, a mirror of the sky, broken by fleets of black swans; in winter, the mists creeping over the lake, chill cruel waves slapping at its edge. Sometimes the rain was beautiful, as Elizabeth Hardwick wrote somewhere. For me, it was almost always beautiful. I liked winter better than summer in Rotorua. The purple light of rain over the lake appealed to me more than the sulphurous yellow landscape that intensified in the sun. You got used to it, as they say, but somehow the seeping yellow smell stained the senses.
Of course, most of us learn that, as freedom goes, marriage is a double-edged sword. Love on a permanent basis was an altogether sparkier, more demanding and labour-intensive undertaking than my friends and I had imagined. There had been an international nuclear scare some weeks before our marriage. Please God, I prayed, don’t let the world blow up before I become married. Sometimes I think that it happened afterwards. Learning to share a bed was enough, let alone a life and the ironing. That time is so intensely personal, so much about learning to live with each other’s differences, the hazards as well as the pleasures, that I find it hard to write about now. The story of the two of us. But we were deeply and irrevocably in love, and that saved us from disaster.
About ten years earlier, when Ian was just out of school himself, he had taught as an untrained sole charge teacher at the still operational whaling station on Arapawa Island in Cook Strait. At the time, it had been a young man’s great adventure. He had to leave the island in order to go to training college, but he had vowed to return. When a job there was advertised in the Education Gazette, shortly after our marriage, Ian asked me if I would consider going. I didn’t think much of the idea, and he understood, without much discussion, that it might not be the best place for us to begin a family, something we were both keen to do when we had some more savings. I don’t believe he regretted this decision in the long run, but it was an early test of wills. Yet his tales about that period in his life have followed me through the years. The story of the Guard family, whose forebears had founded the whaling station on Arapawa, and that of Betty Guard, who had gone there as a child bride and been captured by Maori on the Taranaki coastline, eventually found their way into my novel, The Captive Wife.
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Man first entered space a few weeks after my twenty-first birthday. For all it meant then, they might as well have shot an arrow in the air. But it was a transforming signal: the new Camelot burned brightly in America; I grew my hair in a bob and wore a pineapple straw pillbox hat that looked like an albino hedgehog to my cousin Louis’s wedding. ‘You can’t put that thing on your head,’ exclaimed one of my aunts; ‘you look like that dreadful Kennedy woman.’ That felt like success. At the weekend, I taught Sunday school at St Faith’s, and in the evenings Ian and I walked over to evensong, the service in Maori. When Christmas came round the children in my Sunday school dressed as angels, wearing their fathers’ white shirts turned back to front, with silver tinsel garlands in their hair. I made up stories as I went along which were about good and evil, although their biblical sources were pretty tenuous. That was just about my last serious brush with religion.
Soon it became clear that the demanding hours of my job didn’t fit easily with the three o’clock end to Ian’s day, even if preparation took up much of his so-called spare time. When a vacancy as a librarian at Rotorua Boys’ High School came up, I gave it serious thought. Jen was about to leave for England, and I asked for two days’ leave to travel to Auckland and say goodbye; it was the school holidays and I had little time to spend with Ian so the trip would serve two ends. Kit was furious, but I stood my ground, still smarting from her refusal of bereavement leave when Fred had died the year before.
At the wharves, Ian and I waved as the fluttering streamers linking shore with ship stretched and snapped. If I felt a twinge of regret, it was only because Europe was still a distant dream, and not at all because I had decided to get married. To farewell Jen on the wharf was her friend Peter Beck. Two years later, shortly after the birth of Ian’s and my first child, I was matron-of-honour at the Becks’ wedding.
On our way back to Rotorua, Ian and I talked over the situation at the library. It was clear that there would be more conflicts unless the library always came first. This was a huge decision for me. I would have to forgo the six-week course to complete my library certificate. All the same, on my first day back I handed in my resignation. In time, Kit and I would resume our friendship on a more equal footing, and I would work for her again. Later, Ian took up an invitation to join the high school staff, leaving primary teaching behind.
The high school was a curious experience. At the time it was a very wealthy establishment, but the library had been allowed to run down, or had never really existed. The new headmaster, a former All Black called Neville Thornton, gave me a free hand and as much money as I wanted to set up a proper library. He carried a suitcase of money in the boot of his car. Once he handed me £1000 from it to spend on books on a trip to Wellington.
During the holidays, Ian and I travelled south, staying with his father and Doll in the Evans Bay house where Ian had lived during his high school years at Wellington Technical College. It was the only permanent home he had known since his parents’ separation. His father had sent for Ian after he had married Doll and gone to live with her in a tumbledown house on the Wellington waterfront. Her mother lived there too, a sharp spidery woman who rejoiced in never having a good word for anyone; if she did it would have certainly been a mistake. Ian hadn’t relished his time there, often falling foul of the old lady. True to form, she didn’t take to me when I put in an appearance. It didn’t really matter; Ian and I spent a few happy days buying books and, with what we bought, I was able to establish the nucleus of an excellent library back at the school.
As we drove out of the city we stopped to buy petrol in Hataitai. It was a bleak windswept morning, with not a soul in sight. Four butcher shops, a post office, a Four Square, a hardware shop, some beauty salons — it looked like a country town on a wet day. ‘I’d hate to live here,’ I remember remarking to Ian, as rain lashed our windscreen.
In many ways, I had a great time at Rotorua Boys’ High. I was not much older than some of the students, and as one of only three women on a staff of forty, I was fussed over, quickly gaining a sense of my own power. Several writers on the staff took an interest in me. Frank Gee, head of English and author of Rotorua Trout, was one of them. Frank — with his powdery pale skin, hair like a blackbird’s wing, cigarette in a holder — was a man with a vast classical knowledge, and he loved to talk. He found fertile territory in me, talking through his spare periods at the back of the library about fly fishing and poetry, especially the Romantics.
Poetry!
I was like a greedy sponge. All this, from a man who wrote books about coloured feathers and fish. Phil Andrews, also in the English department, was toiling over his novel, Terese, published later by Blackwood and Janet Paul. And there was Nancy Ellison, the Latin teacher, a tragic figure in many respects, married to a disabled serviceman and working to provide a good education for her seven children. She wrote her life story in Whirinaki Valley.
But there was also a level of violence at the school that upset me, a relic of Dickensian attitudes of the past, and something Thornton had more trouble eradicating than an out-of-date library. The women’s toilets were adjacent to the ‘caning room’, and through the thin walls I often heard strapping big teachers beating boys who were only children, some of them quite small, until they screamed and pleaded for mercy. This brutality was endemic in the school and only a handful of teachers, like the legendary Tom Tague, had the courage not to participate. Tom became a friend to Ian, who was also sickened by this violence. In later years, after he left Rotorua, Ian was among the leading teachers in a successful campaign to eradicate caning in New Zealand schools, making it an illegal act.
One of the results of this mayhem in the caning room was that, as the new library developed, many of the more vulnerable boys, or those who simply wished to avoid violent playground behaviour, took refuge in my department, acting as assistant librarians. I like to think that many of them also discovered a love of books and reading. Some years ago I was invited to the school, now apparently very civilised, for a Writers in Schools visit. It was odd, all those years later, walking onto that stage again, looking down at a sea of faces from that familiar angle. I thought of some of the brightest and best students from those earlier assemblies, whom I had known well beyond their school days, and who had already died: Warwick Flaus, lawyer and fearless anti-apartheid campaigner; Glen Garlick, leading athlete and national health administrator; Jim Booth, the sparky young film producer who had given Peter Jackson his first break when they made Brain Dead and Meet the Feebles together. All of them gone, as if burned up by their brilliance.
I thought, too, of another young man for whom I had truly provided a haven. Jack was already a cross-dresser by the time he was in the fifth form. For a long time after I went to live in Wellington, Jack, known then as Lorena, would ring and tell me about life as a transsexual on Vivian Street’s red light strip. After a while, Lorena stopped calling. I find it hard to imagine that she would have survived long; that she survived Rotorua Boys’ High School at all was something of a miracle in itself.
Our social life blossomed in our two years at Lake Road. For a time we ran with a racy wealthier crowd, some of them seasonal summer workers, others locals, including Matt Le Gall, a good-looking man with smooth swarthy skin, who later disappeared in mysterious circumstances in one of the forests near town. They were too wild for us and we soon tired of each other, but that first summer there was a sense of adventure in streaking in fast motorboats over the dark lake at night, and dipping in the hot pool on Mokoia Island.
Bob Harvey, who was a frequent visitor among our stream of callers, was entrepreneurial in his manner of collecting friends. The theatre was owned by a Mr and Mrs Lightfoot, who used to dispense theatre tickets to worthy recipients, such as young librarians who saved them special books (while I was still at the public library). Bob took this a step further, and when the Light foots went home, opened the theatre to his friends for previews of upcoming films, starting around midnight. With
about a dozen other young people, Ian and I saw Butterfield Eight, with Elizabeth Taylor, Laurence Harvey and Eddie Fisher; Whistle Down the Wind, with Hayley Mills; Jean-Luc Godard’s A Woman is a Woman, with Jean Paul Belmondo and a crazy scene of a bicycle ride like a praying mantis mating dance inside an apartment; and a film about the Russian ballet. We would emerge bleary-eyed around two or three in the morning, stomping to keep warm in the deserted frosty streets. Of the Russian ballet escapade, my father muttered darkly that only communists would get caught at a film like that. Bob’s rise and rise to mayoral and national eminence has never surprised me. He has a walk-on part as a character in ‘At the Lake So Blue’.
Needing to cater for so many visitors, I was earnestly learning to cook. I made some of my mother’s recipes but I managed to mess up even the basics, with a bit of help from her. She had written out instructions about how to roast beef and lamb, and cook corned beef. ‘Put the corned beef in the pot, add a sliced onion and some carrots, barley [sic] cover with water.’ Dutifully I added a good portion of barley. Interesting. The simple route never appealed. I pored over fancy new recipes. Pasta that turned to glue. Iced coffee? An acquired taste, I murmured to surprised guests. Bombe Alaska? Nothing to it. So what if the flames were frantically lit in the kitchen with the aid of meths when brandy failed? This dessert features in one of my early stories called ‘The Torch’, as does a version of our friend Karel Pihera, a Czech refugee, in the guise of a restaurateur called Vlado.
Karel had opened a restaurant near the waterfront. The red gingham tablecloths, spluttering candles in bottles and basket-encased Chianti bottles hanging around the wall gave what we perceived as a Continental flavour. The bottles didn’t reflect the true picture. The sale of alcohol was illegal in restaurants, although sometimes, after closing, friends shared a bottle of wine with Karel. One day, one day, he would promise, we will drink like civilised people. His menus of filet mignon with asparagus and mushrooms, and beef stroganoff and coq au vin seemed sophisticated. We often ate on the house, and, in return, we actually did do the dishes when the doors had closed. We listened to his stories of persecution and escapes through icy European forests, drank rough red, watched the bright tropical silhouettes of aquarium fish on the wall. I felt bound to ask Karel and his English wife, Lynne, to come and eat with us. It felt like an ordeal, as I anticipated all the culinary disasters that might happen, but they were thrilled, going on and on about how nobody ever asked chefs to dinner, and praising the food lavishly. I stopped trying so hard after that, and just enjoyed sharing meals with friends.