by Fiona Kidman
The masculine orthodox Kiwi is likely to be pleasant and friendly in speech and manner, but to have few graces, and to suspect that elegance and effeminacy go together. He may spend his week-end painting a boat but not painting a picture; fishing but not bird-watching. He may show uproarious excitement over a rugby match or a Peter Snell, but not over the Beatles or a ballet. He may read a novel, provided it has plenty of action and not much ‘psychology’ (and provided it’s not written by a woman), but he mustn’t read poetry or plays. He may get drunk, preferably on beer, but he mustn’t be a teetotaller.
I found myself wryly thinking, so this is why I chose a man who listened, and introduced me, to Chopin. Ian had ‘difference’ written all over him in more ways than one. I understood, in a moment of sharp recall, the way I had had to ‘choose’ between him and the rugby crowd. As she spoke, the level of discomfort in the theatre was palpable among the adults, although many of the boys were listening intently. They were hearing something that nobody had talked about in school. She continued:
… the standard male Kiwi has been trained from an early age to repress some of his deepest emotions, such as tenderness, remorse, pity and sympathy freely expressed, generous pride in the success of others, and joy in their well-being. And these are the very emotions we must develop, must educate instead of repressing, if we are to achieve good relationships with people …
I sat there quietly, hardly believing that a woman was standing there saying these things in public. It occurred to me that it was not just young men she was talking about, but men in positions of power, like the doctor I had recently encountered, and some of the teachers I had known as a child. The people who should have known better, but were conditioned to a ‘blokeish-ness’ that destroyed their empathy. I thought about my father and how unhappiness had blinded him, for a time, to the sensitive artistic side of his nature, how he had become so confused with notions of what a Kiwi bloke should be like that he had felt one way, and behaved in another. It would take me a long time to figure out that these divisions also occur among writers and artists. To be ‘artistic’ doesn’t necessarily guarantee empathy, particularly when it comes to women’s work.
At the end of Meikle’s speech, some women in the audience, and a few of the boys, stood up and clapped, while others sat in stony silence. After a moment of hesitation, I stood up and clapped too, aware of sidelong looks.
Despite some reading on the subject, this was the first speech I had heard about the role of men and women in a more equal society. The fact that Phoebe Meikle said these things aloud somehow made a difference. Between the covers of books, the ideas seemed vaguely fanciful in the society we lived in then. I learned afterwards that Meikle had made an earlier speech to the Goethe Institute (in Auckland, I think), in which she had talked about New Zealand not being a very friendly environment for women, and that thinking was considered:
… essentially an unfeminine practice; therefore women who indulge in it must be unfeminine. Thus all except the most fortunately placed intellectual women were accustomed to being patronized and considered unwomanly by many men (by some women also).
All of this made a great deal of sense to me, and explained some of my own uneasy feelings about the work I was trying to do, while living the life of a wife and mother in the suburbs.
Meikle definitely put some iron in my soul. When Joanna was a little over a year old, I read a newspaper advertisement inviting women writers to a week-long seminar at Auckland University, run under the auspices of the University Extension Department. The residential venue was O’Rorke Hall. I decided that nothing would stop me from going. I cajoled friends into minding my daughter during the day, and my mother into taking a day or so away from the china shop. Ian would come home early for that week. Nobody thought it was a good idea, but it was agreed that I needed a change.
I remember that week as one of intense excitement. About sixty women had gathered from all over New Zealand. Only two were published writers: the novelist Frances Keinzley and a children’s author called Joan Harland. The course director was John Reid, Professor of English at Auckland University. He was urbane, charming and erudite.
I could have listened to him all day. Reid was followed by a succession of speakers, all well known in their fields. I was taken aback when the poet Kendrick Smithyman glared around the room and greeted us with the words, ‘Lady writers. Lady writers, eh? Well, I guess you all need a little hobby.’ Some years later I met Kendrick and he told me about the years with his sick wife, the poet Mary Stanley, author of The Starveling Year. On that later occasion, Mary had been particularly ill all the previous week, and he was almost weeping with exhaustion, his hands grimly clutching the sides of his chair as he recounted nights of sleeplessness and unhappiness. I understood something of the frustration of his life then, but on the day when he made his comments to the seminar, I felt charged with righteous indignation.
But what mattered, from the moment the course began, was my sense of not being alone in my desire to be a writer. All these women shared my longing. I was by far the youngest person there and I was hungry for the ‘word’, the voices of wisdom and advice. I had my hand up often in question time and earned a sharp rebuke from Sarah Campion for asking if there was any limit to what one could write about. Illicit love, homosexuality, whatever … I was thinking about the reproach over the frankness of my play. Why would anyone want to write about things like that? she responded witheringly. So our tutors were a mixed bunch and some of them very self-opinionated, although I heard much that interested me and helped me make sense of what I wanted to do. Pat Booth offered practical advice about writing fiction, and journalist Cherry Raymond made useful suggestions about writing for the media, as an end in itself, or as a way to become known as a writer across genres.
And for a whole week I was totally independent. I could come and go as I pleased and walk around Auckland in the middle of the night if it suited me, talking, talking all the time to my new friends. I had never experienced this level of freedom before, this not accounting to anyone else.
I returned to Rotorua in a state of exaltation and with new determination. By this time, I had bought my first typewriter, a battered Remington that I practised on at night. My children have told me that some of their earliest memories are of going to sleep to the clatter of the keys. At the seminar, Raymond had suggested that if we had a special interest in a topic, our local newspapers might be interested in articles. It was, she sensibly pointed out, a way to get into print and put our names in front of editors. The following week, I bowled into the editor’s office at the Rotorua Daily Post, without an appointment, and offered myself as a book reviewer. The reviews in the paper were so few and far between as to be hardly noticed. Ian Thompson was a grey-haired old lion of a newsman with a reputation for gruffness. He asked me what credentials I had to be a reviewer. I reminded him I had been deputy at the library, and that I had been one of the book buyers there and at the high school. He looked at me for a long considering moment. ‘The job’s yours,’ he said.
‘You mean I can review some books?’
‘I mean I want you to run the book page. Once a fortnight.’
‘How much will you pay me?’
‘Twelve and six a page.’
‘Who else should I get to review books?’
He looked impatient for the first time. ‘You review all the books,’ he said.
Over the next six years I must have reviewed at least 500 books. I was in a happy state of innocence and ignorance. Apart from Keinzley, who had proved a remote and somewhat haughty figure, and Harland, whom I liked immensely, but who drowned soon after the writers’ seminar, I didn’t know any writers at all. As far as personalities were concerned I was truly impartial. At one stage, Maurice Gee was living in the town, but I didn’t know that and we didn’t meet for at least another twenty years. I commented, on his novel The Big Season, that his was a ‘dazzling’ new voice, and that he had ‘an authentic ear for di
alogue’. The quote was picked up on the dust jacket of his next book. I felt a touch of envy about The Big Season — it was about the world of rugby. I had begun to turn ‘The Orange-Scented Tide’ into a novel called ‘Club Litany’. Although it was never published, a later novel drew on similar aspects of my early life.
The more I reviewed, the more New Zealand books began piling through my letter box. I had come across Marilyn Duckworth’s work by then, and was impressed. When Jean Watson’s ‘roadie’ novel, Stand in the Rain, appeared in 1965, I was bowled over. Jean’s spare style packed a punch, and I thought her waif-like face in the dust jacket photo quite beautiful and wild. I could identify with the work of these women. When I learned that they were both mothers, I felt more certain that if they could write a novel, it was an attainable goal for me. I had formed a private ambition to have all my children, and to publish my first novel, by the time I was twenty-eight. I don’t know why this seemed such a magic age, but it did.
It was increasingly clear, however, that this might be unattainable because of my unexplained and frequent miscarrying. In 1965, Ian and I made one of the most momentous decisions of our lives. We sought approval as adoptive parents, and were quickly accepted, perceived by welfare authorities as an ‘ideal couple’. We thought we would like another daughter, and barely a few weeks had passed before a call came to say that a little girl who fitted our family profile was waiting for us in one of the St Mary’s Homes (for unmarried mothers) in Auckland. We travelled north by train, taking Joanna with us, clutching a carry-cot and some clothes for the new baby. The matron of the home greeted us with a long appraising look. She would bring the little girl out to meet us soon, she said, but she gave the appearance of being busy and bustled in a few minutes later carrying a baby boy, already more than three months old. ‘Would you mind holding him for a few minutes?’ she said.
She knew what she was doing. We looked into the face of a child who returned our gaze as if he had always known us. He had a mass of dark curly hair and his brown eyes and olive skin matched Ian and Joanna’s colouring so closely that he looked part of our family. As we were to learn shortly, his colouring was not due to Maori ancestry but was that of his Greek birth father. When the matron returned, the question forming on her lips as she walked in was already answered. This was our son, whom we decided to call Giles.
We stayed for a night or two with Jennifer and Peter while the paperwork was done. Already we didn’t want to be parted from our new baby. How does one explain such an instant and lifelong attachment? I can’t really; it just felt right from the beginning. On the morning we were to pick Giles up, Jen drove us to the home in her small elderly Renault and came with us while we signed some papers, before delivering us all to the railway station. On the way home, Giles seemed to smile all the way. The train had a brief stop at Morrinsville station, where my Aunt Jean sat waiting, the news of our new baby having preceded us.
By that stage, Jean had sold her house in Studholme Street, but Roberta moved to the new place with her. It appeared that they rarely spoke. Jean had got a job as the Morrinsville librarian and left the house first thing each morning. This was her lunch hour and she cut a lonely figure, sitting on a bench with her handbag upright in her lap. But when she jumped on the train and saw Giles in his bassinet, her face lit up with a damp-eyed smile. ‘Oh Fiona,’ she breathed, ‘he’s just beautiful.’
In Rotorua we climbed aboard the local bus and made our way home, Ian carrying Giles up Iles Road, Joanna and me trailing along with the carry-cot. From the outside, we must have seemed an ordinary enough family of four returning from a brief holiday. But even if we did not fully realise it then, we were a family that had just made an enormous cultural transition.
Clyde Olsen, a friend from Ian’s school days in Wellington, came up to act as Giles’s godfather, and this time the occasion went off smoothly. Clyde was a scientist, a warm-hearted delightful man who loved kids but hadn’t married because of severe hearing loss. It makes me sad remembering this, because when he was older, too late, he felt, to think about a family of his own, his condition was diagnosed as a minor defect, corrected by a simple procedure. He was passionate about life, raucous and opinionated with strong left-wing sympathies, smoked like a power plant, and died while his hair was still black.
I continued to work hard at my writing, but with two children my routines had to change. There was less time available in the day to write, however much I tried to create the space. I began to get up at three in the morning, while the house was totally quiet. I would sit in the still kitchen with the night pressing against the windows and pick away at my typewriter until dawn broke and the first of the children woke. That usually happened when the roosters crowed at the poultry farm beyond the macrocarpa trees.
I knew Ian was often dubious about these preoccupations of mine, but he tried hard not to show it. He sensed the gradual withdrawal that had begun among some of our neighbours. I wasn’t turning out like a conventional wife and although, if he’d had one, I doubt he would have been happy, I can see it must have been hard to have one who so increasingly turned her back on what was expected. I turned down an invitation to chair the local Plunket committee, and people started asking, ‘Who does she think she is?’ This came back to me via a well-meaning friend, and it hurt. But it was not just the time the position would have absorbed, I was uneasy about what I sensed as a ripple of racism running under the surface of the Plunket committee. I disliked the jumble sales that were held at a nearby pa on benefit day: it felt like the white Raj all over again. Later, our daughter learned the meaning of being ‘brown’ while we lived there.
I began sending short stories to literary periodicals, as well as a number of articles. The stories came back, but several of the articles were accepted. I was now drawing in a modest income. When I sold an article to the Woman’s Weekly for £20, Ian was impressed; in those day sit meant a lot. If I could keep this up, along with all the extra work that Ian had taken on, we could stop renting and buy the Lynmore house. I figured that if I really wanted to earn money, I would have to give up some of my household chores. I began to pay for my jam, and buy the children’s clothes ready-made. From time to time, I put Joanna and Giles in a nursery for an afternoon while I went off to do interviews. I could afford to dress more snappily. The Daily Post gave me more and more assignments and I had also a regular radio slot on books, although my voice was still considered unsuitable, and the monthly contributions were voiced by a local radio personality, Helen McConnochie.
In another year the house was ours. We quickly began to transform it from a grey square box into a place that was light and airy, in summer at least, with a cheerful pretty kitchen and a deck. Together, we laid down paths, and Ian built a ‘pit’ in the concrete floor of the garage, which every home mechanic aspired to — a hole where you could stand upright beneath your car when it needed repairs. All the necessary things of life.
Then I began having miscarriages again. Friends, those I was still seeing, thought I should get the message and settle down to a less ambitious life. After a while I stopped talking about what was happening. I had another new doctor but nothing much altered. I went into hospital a time or two for dilation and curettage, or D and C, as it was known. Cleaning out the nursery was another way it was put to me. A specialist I consulted said, ‘You’re a sparky young woman round town, you’ve got two children. Why don’t you just treat that womb of yours like an old handbag and throw it away?’ But that wasn’t what I wanted either.
Then one morning, out of the blue, we received a phone call from Ian’s father. A close relative had died, and the husband was left with four children under the age of six. I had never met this relative, but Tom asked if we could step in and take one of the children. Without really pausing to think, we said yes. It seemed like the right thing to do. Suddenly, we were about to become the ‘parents’ of another little girl called Christine. She was eighteen months old, just eight months younger than Giles.
Later that morning the matron at St Mary’s rang us to say that a little girl had been born who she thought would be ideal to complete our family. With very mixed feelings, we said it would not be possible for us to take her, as we already had another little girl.
We drove over to Napier, and I met Christine. She was a ragged little scrap of a girl, with wispy fair hair. Her mother had died of a brain tumour. Nobody had suspected that she was ill, although she probably had been for some time. Christine appeared to have spent most of her short life in her cot, for she was malnourished and could barely walk. But she had a sweet crooked little smile and she put up her arms to be held. When I picked her up, she buried her face in my shoulder and I was lost. Her father said, ‘She’s yours. What can I do with four children?’
Unfortunately, I believed him.
My life now entered a frantic stage. I had three pre-schoolers and no clear idea of what lay in the future. I wasn’t sure whether the arrangements for Christine were really permanent, or whether her father might recover enough to want his family back. Joanna was often sick, and the winter damp seemed to intensify as the trees across the road grew ever higher, blotting out still more sunlight. When we first rented the house, and again when we bought it, we had had an assurance that the trees on the Crown-owned land would be trimmed and kept under control, but that hadn’t happened. I was beginning to regret the purchase of the house.
There were so many napkins to deal with and I could never get enough dry. I stayed up at nights burning the wood-fired booster stove in the kitchen with the door open, holding up the napkins. Another test of good motherhood was having sparkling white napkins on the line but mine always looked a sullen shade of grey. The woman next door always had luminously white ones, but then she was in the habit of turning her two children loose at eight o’clock in the morning while she did her housework. They invariably ended up on our doorstep, and I didn’t have the heart to turn them away. The house teemed with toddlers. Of course the writing work fell away.