by Fiona Kidman
On a more positive note, we had another assurance that Christine was ours to keep, and we began adoption proceedings. As the months and nearly a year passed, she had grown into a plump healthy little girl whom we regarded as a daughter, and the children thought of as their sister. Friends rallied with support when they saw that I was finding it hard to cope. They understood that acquiring a less than robust addition to the family at such short notice wasn’t easy; the age difference between our youngest two was close but not close enough to think of them as twins. Time out was offered more generously than when I needed time to write. This was a side to living in the suburbs that I could appreciate.
It all crashed to an end when an old family animosity, which I hadn’t really understood, reared its head, but then I barely knew Ian’s family. Christine’s father had been reproached for not gathering his children back together. He appeared unannounced one morning and said he had come to collect his daughter. Twenty minutes later she was gone.
Nearly ten years passed before we saw Christine again. What angers me still is that although I didn’t discover it then, she didn’t return to her father’s home for several more years, but was sent to another family, unrelated to her. When she was thirteen she was taken out of school to care for a half-brother by her father’s second marriage; this non-consensual truancy was never followed up. In time, we would resume a relationship with her, which we still maintain. Her father died long ago. Although she is a person whose courage I admire, her life has been unnecessarily harsh, and it’s hard not to think how much easier it might have been.
When she left my world collapsed. Thinking back to the little girl who had been chosen for us at St Mary’s, I felt that I had lost not one daughter, but two, even though I had never met the second. There was a night when I cried hysterically for hours. Ian became afraid for me, and I tried to pull myself together. But in the days that followed everything around me seemed dull and disconnected. I sought to establish a routine that I could follow day by day. In the mornings I moved like an automaton through the house, picking things up and putting them away. I counted the rooms that still had to be tidied — three more to go, two more, one — and then it would be time to start putting things away again in room number one. In the afternoons, while Joanna and Giles took naps, I sat and looked into space or at my hands lying in my lap. I didn’t always understand my hands; they didn’t seem part of me. As they lay there I could see that later in the evening they would appear somewhere else, round a child or a teapot, or sitting outside me on the covers of the bed. Just anywhere.
I need hardly say that this was a very bad time in my life. Joanna was old enough for me to talk to her about Christine’s disappearance, but Giles was agitated. He told the mother of a kindergarten friend that I had a baby I kept in a cupboard and only took her out to feed at nights. It was something of a neighbourhood joke, but not to me. When Christine left, the supportive friends melted into the distance again. After all, Christine was alive; it wasn’t as if she had died. But I had reached a point where I didn’t really want to see people anyway.
My mother was concerned, but there was little she could do. Her life at the china shop was busy. People flocked from all over the Bay of Plenty to buy from her. She had been offered the opportunity to buy the shop, but my father was totally opposed to this idea. He wanted his wife at home with him. He had retired the day he turned sixty because, he said, most of his relatives had died young, and he was likely to do so too. This might have been true but as I knew very little about his family either, there was no way of knowing. The older I got, the less I felt I knew him. Sometimes he said odd things that left me confused. I was nearly thirty when he mentioned some uncles I had never heard of before, called Abraham and Isaac, and I discovered that my great-grandfather’s name was Nathaniel. As he often expressed strong anti-Jewish sentiments, I began to wonder if he had some closet connections of his own. Later, when I was older and began exploring my family’s history, I realised this wasn’t so. What I think now is that he wasn’t so much anti-Jewish as pro-Palestinian. He became increasingly passionate about his conviction that the Palestinians had been wronged by the establishment of Israel.
What I did learn was that he had nurtured a desire to paint. In retirement he began producing water colours, painstakingly executed over long periods of time, delicate studies of flowers and landscape. There were never people in them. He started to exhibit and sell some of the work. Some are in private collections, but I have a few. When I look at them, I see how misplaced had been his ambitions to farm when he was a young man.
In a 1985 collection called Going to the Chathams, I published a poem for my father, which included these lines:
At mother’s house your pictures
of this place hang on the walls colours
soft as tissue the wash of the water
in the paint reflecting these
mists and oh the sky over the water
is darkening the waves on the lake
sharpen like tousled lace the hem
of my shift
… it’s impossible not to think of you (here) old
man now that you’re dead and your
late drawings oh yes the light
on the wind shifting
the tops of the waves and the night
leaning in on me it’s been
a bright day beneath the mountains.
Now his ambition was to move around the countryside looking for subjects to paint. My mother was to be part of these expeditions and he was adamant that she give up the shop. My father would visit me on Tuesday afternoons, and talk enthusiastically about his plans, then become irritated with what he saw as my lack of interest. I don’t think either of my parents realised how close to the edge I was at that time. Neither of them had thought it a good idea for me to look after Christine, and they were pleased she was gone. They had been certain from the beginning that it would all come to tears.
On a trip to town, I went into one of the bookshops I used to haunt in better times. The bookseller was someone I liked very much, a plain man with blunt black hair and a pitted face. He loved a man with sculptured features and a theatrical manner, who was about to betray him. I understood more about gay men’s lives then than I had in the courthouse some years earlier, though not much. I did know that these sorrows had to be secrets and that they were shared only with people who could be trusted, and that day he confided in me. Perhaps he thought I needed someone else’s trouble to take me out of myself. After we had talked for a time, he offered me a book that had been around for a while but he wondered if I had read it. The book was Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water. I think he had worked out what was becoming apparent to only a few, that I might be moving towards some irretrievable point, that I was staring a total breakdown in the face.
Reading had become almost too great an effort. I still reviewed a few books, but the book page was in decline. After a few days, on one of my listless afternoons, I picked up Faces in the Water and began to read. I read it straight through and then started again, this time taking the book apart in my head and examining it piece by piece. I thought about the character of Istina Mavet, and her long banishment from the world into that place of chaos and madness, where the sun never shone. A paragraph that struck me with great force was one where Istina runs away. ‘I rely so much on the sun; I think it is the sunflowers with their ebony hearts and their ragged searing corona and their heads turned to the sun. I think it is the removal of the sun’s influence that made us mad … ’
I don’t remember how many times I read the book altogether. I’m not suggesting that, in some smug way, I had responded to a warning to ‘pull myself together’ — people do what they can. But I do know that I saw my own face in the deep water, the infinite dark lake, and that it became possible to think through what, before, had been unthinkable. One day I got up and left the rooms untidy. I took the children by the hand and marched up the road, a piece of paper and a pen in my bag.
I knocked on the door of each of the twelve houses beneath the line of trees.
‘This is a petition,’ I said. ‘I want you to sign it, so that we can do something about getting the trees taken down.’
‘You’re mad,’ some said, or words to that effect.
I smiled to myself. I wasn’t, that was the point. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘perhaps it seems like that, but our kids are getting sick, and the paint isn’t lasting on the houses. We were promised that the trees would be kept under control, but they aren’t and it’s not good enough.’
In the end, they all agreed to sign, except for a policeman who thought he might jeopardise his job if he put his name to a public petition. The trees were cut down, and our houses were flooded with sunlight. Without trying very hard, I had become a successful activist.
Chapter 12
I may not have been mad, but I had certainly been ill. A nervous breakdown of some kind, I have supposed since, triggered by my body’s erratic disposal of babies, and the loss of Christine. I’m not sure why the illness passed. Perhaps it didn’t pass as quickly as I thought. Afterwards I embarked on a period of perpetual restless activity that lasted well into the 1970s, punctuated by bursts of depression, regret and, later, too much to drink during bad patches.
In the meantime, we resumed some semblance of normality. The books page recovered. Joanna started school along the road. We upgraded from the Fiat to a Mini, although the cat had become irritable and didn’t want to be driven any more. We would head for the seaside, or one of the lake beaches, and we came home plastered in sand, sticky with ice creams, and sometimes quarrelsome, but this was family life. One sultry Sunday afternoon, an odd thing happened. We had driven through an area of forest towards one of the sawmilling towns. The area felt remote, trees pressing close against the roadside, no houses or shops for miles. Eventually we came to a ramshackle store where we could buy cold drinks. Inside, a woman emerged through a fly-speckled strip screen. As she took our order at the long counter, a man wearing a filthy singlet, rough and unshaved with an unlit cigarette drooping from his mouth, appeared behind her. She turned and shoved him roughly back the same way. ‘Get yourself out of here,’ she snarled. By then I had started reading Katherine Mansfield; ‘The Woman at the Store’ immediately came to mind. I found myself shivering as we returned to the car.
On other Sunday nights we would head for the hot spa pools at the Government Gardens, and take a private pool, all four of us together, soaking up the spirited stenchy water, drying off and heading home dressed in our pyjamas. The house was stacked with children’s books — lots by Dr Seuss — and Joanna and Giles were raised according to Dr Spock. We had television, and watched David Frost, the Seekers and Julie Felix. As well as ‘Beautiful Brown Eyes’ and ‘Goodnight Irene’ and ‘Frankie and Johnny’, I added ‘Going to the Zoo’ to my repertoire of songs to sing to the kids at night, then Peter, Paul and Mary brought us ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’. The last thing the children would ask me every night was ‘Mummy, sing Puff.’ The song made me cry: it reminded me of Christopher Robin and the end of childhood, and how our own family innocence had come unstuck.
I began to write again and was rewarded with the acceptance of a short story. Noel Hoggard, who operated a small hand press to produce his literary journal Arena, had taken ‘Murphy’s Cow’, about the slow and painful death of a cow as mirrored through the eyes of a young farmer up north. Arena was smaller than Landfall, but it was a prestigious publication nonetheless, and I knew the story would be noticed.
I wanted to go away to more University Extension classes but for the time being I was needed at home. I contacted the department in Auckland and asked if they would fund some courses in Rotorua if I organised them. To my delight they agreed to send Pat Booth, whom I had first heard in Auckland. I liked his novel, Long Night Among the Stars, and because he was first a journalist, he was a very good communicator.(Years later, his work in overturning Arthur Allan Thomas’s convictions for the murder of Harvey and Jeanette Crewe made him a national figure.) The seminar was held over a weekend in the Boys’ High library, and more than sixty people turned up, including my father, who, it turned out, also had a secret yearning to write. One person who enrolled but later had to withdraw was a sixteen-year-old high school student called Ngahuia, with an open friendly face and long plaits. Her teachers said I would be a bad influence on a young girl and had forbidden her to attend. Ngahuia Te Awekotuku and I have been regularly in touch over many years since that early encounter. She is a more radical activist than I have ever been, but she managed that without any help from me.
The tutor at the next course was playwright Isabel Andrews, an older woman who wrote for stage and radio. Again, the University Extension department was willing to help, but thought the audience would be more specialised. It was decided to hire the Shambles Theatre. A group of about twenty spent a weekend improvising plays and writing dialogue. Isabel and I found an instant rapport. She encouraged me to start writing plays again and urged me to try for a place on a workshop for emerging playwrights that Bruce Mason was running in Wellington the following month. The organiser was Playmarket, an agency for stage writers that encouraged new work. Out of town writers were being offered billets with Wellington writers. I hadn’t figured how I would get away, but I sent a play off anyway, which was a pre-selection requirement.
Not only was the play accepted but Bruce chose it for the rehearsed reading on the last night of the workshop in Stagecraft Theatre. This was beyond my expectations. In my mind Bruce, already famous for The End of the Golden Weather, was truly distinguished. Of course I had to get there. Again there were complicated child minding arrangements to be made, but nothing was going to stand in my way.
I have never forgotten that weekend. Not only was I in the thick of greasepaint and make-up, but all the dreams and longing to be acknowledged as a writer, to be recognised, seemed on the brink of being realised. Bruce’s trademark was his wonderful fluting voice, a voice that could soar with anguish, evoke loneliness, make you laugh, paint landscapes with words and people them with characters both Maori and Pakeha — in other words, transport you to wherever he wanted to take you. He was a consummate actor and writer, and he turned his full attention on me. At times I felt mildly uncomfortable, because there were other, more experienced people, who had also travelled long distances to the workshop, but I was clearly a new young protégée. There were a few mutterings, and one man said, in forthright terms, that it was because I was young and pretty. I’ve thought of that when I hear young writers being dismissed because they are attractive, and I know it’s almost always unfair. I didn’t think of myself as pretty but I had bought new clothes and they made me feel confident. The Beatles and Mary Quant had hit New Zealand by then. I was into short short skirts and dramatic make-up. Besides, Bruce wasn’t like that; he was interested only in talent. True, he was surprised to learn that I had two young children at home. He felt I should be working in Wellington.
I was billeted with a woman called Marjorie Brooke-White who, along with her ex-army colonel husband John, became a friend for life. Marjorie had grown up in the select Day’s Bay area across the water from Wellington, Katherine Mansfield territory through and through. The Brooke-Whites also had a connection with Kerikeri. John’s mother had owned a bookshop there, and although she had a slightly prickly exterior, she knew books and allowed children who liked them to come into her shop and browse. But the Brooke-White family seemed different from the colonial crowd I had known up north. Their apartment on The Terrace was stylishly furnished and crammed with artworks, a salon for people from the theatre and the arts. They welcomed me as a young artist in my own right, and that weekend I met a number of their circle, including Constance and Max Kirkcaldie. In my memory, some of the meetings I had with their friends run into each other, but at various times I met George Webby, Peter Bland, Nola Millar, who later came up and took a workshop at the Shambles in Rotorua, David Tinkham and others. Marjorie and Joh
n’s apartment would become my base for several trips south over the next two years.
I was falling in love with Wellington. Some nights we would watch old movies on television, with the lights turned off, and the city lights glowing beneath us, Marjorie sipping a brandy in milk, John and I drinking gin and tonic. One night we watched The Red Shoes, with Moira Shearer and Marius Goring playing the romantic leads. Shearer (Victoria Page in the movie) is a dancer who owns a pair of red shoes that want to dance even when her body says it’s time to stop, even though her husband begs her not to go on. But she is in the grip of a compulsion. ‘Why do you want to dance?’ asks her autocratic ballet impresario, whose spell she is under. ‘Why do you want to live?’ the dancer responds. And one night, faced with a choice between love and art, the shoes dance her to her death. I found myself crying. I knew that I wanted to write as much as I wanted to live, but I wanted equally to be a wife and mother. I both craved and rejected an ordinary domestic life. ‘No more gins,’ John scolded, seeing my tears.
But it was more than that. I suspected that I was wearing my own brand of red shoes. Not for the first time, I was frightened of the course I had chosen.
After these interludes, I travelled back on the bus, over the long Desert Road and watched the mountains unfolding before me. On these journeys, everything looked different. Jessie Sandle makes that same trip when she arrives in a mid-island town in Songs from the Violet Café: