by Fiona Kidman
The meetings carried on in Willis Street pubs like the Abel Tasman for hours after the business was completed. We were often joined by the poet Louis Johnson who, with Rarotongan-born Campbell, had been part of a major 1950s movement of Wellington writers that included James K. Baxter. Marilyn Duckworth and Jean Watson, writers who had inspired me in the past, frequently dropped by for a drink. Scratch the surface, we were all human. There was never enough time to tell each other all the stories of the moment, over jugs of beer and bottles of wine.
Lauris Edmond and I were each other’s great discoveries in PEN. Lauris was a tall bony woman, with a mop of blonde curls that she insisted on having permed and coloured until she was an old woman. She could have been a bit of a blue-stocking in her appearance, except for the hair and a full sensual mouth with a subtle curve that made her face instantly charming when she smiled. When we met, she was forty-eight, had a recently completed MA, spoke fluent French and was the mother of six children, five girls and a son.
Despite the difference in our ages, we had a lot in common, although Lauris’s accomplishments were different from mine, in several ways. I had now been publishing in one way or another for some years, while she was just beginning to publish poems in journals and magazines. She was the recently appointed editor of the PPTA Journal, the magazine of the Post Primary Teachers Association. Her husband, Trevor, had been chairman of the organisation a few years before, so we both had schoolteacher husbands, committed to their work. While Ian was making his mark in the world of special education, and was often away from home, either taking part in or conducting professional workshops, Trevor had been a school principal at a number of rural schools, where he was revered by students for his radical teaching methods. Lauris and I were more familiar with small town New Zealand than the city, so, in each other’s company, that experience began to seem like an adventure to share. For a long time our desire to become recognised writers, and our absorption in common histories of rural life, children and marriage, outweighed our differences.
Lauris and Trevor lived in Upper Hutt, nearly an hour’s drive from town, so we would meet at the Western Park Tavern in Thorndon, to drink gin and tonic or brandy and soda at two o’clock in the afternoon; we felt it sophisticated. We were hugely preoccupied by the nature of love. We talked incessantly about our futures as writers, about publication, about the women’s movement that was beginning to powerfully engage us. I had had close friendships before, but nothing like this in its intensity. Some days we linked arms in the street, and said things like ‘What would we do without each other?’ All in all, we were on the brink of a friendship that would last for twenty-eight years, one that would rage up and down, come apart and be stitched together again, but that held fast until Lauris died.
And, just writing that made me stop what I was doing as a shiver passed through me, although it is such a blue Mediterranean day. Even though I’m living the past, in order to write about it, it has nudged me so hard today, that for the moment it is as if it is happening now, here in the Katherine Mansfield Room at Villa Isola Bella, where I come so often to work. Lauris actually lived here in this room.
After Luc Lanlo gave me the keys to the room in April, we came round here and I saw it for the first time. This house where Mansfield lived in 1920 is in Garavan, right on the Italian border. If you come by train, you walk down Rue Webb Ellis (William Webb Ellis was the man said to have invented rugby), turn left under the bridge, then hard right up Chemin Fleuri. Or, from the bus route, get off and walk up rue Katherine Mansfield. And here it is. Mansfield lived in the top two storeys of the house, which are owned separately from this room down below. I haven’t met the mysterious residents above, who enter by a separate gate.
The room faces the railway lines, and beyond it you see the sea. In order to enter the white courtyard that separates the room from the road, I open a big wrought-iron gate, then pass through a second heavy door. I have to jiggle the key around a bit — the lock is not always easy to undo — then I’m inside the room. The walls are pale and creamy; there is silvery fluorescent lighting that flickers beneath the ceiling. Above the desk where I am sitting hangs a portrait of Katherine Mansfield and, alongside that, a sculpture of her head. There is nothing much else on the walls. A big red divan takes up one side of the room. It is very comfortable — you could sleep on it if you wished — and around at the back there is a bathroom, although living in the room is not encouraged, as the locals don’t care for it. On your right, as you enter, stands a cabinet with drawers. Inside these is an assortment of odds and ends that show traces of those who have bedded down here: a blanket, a tiny gas burner, a frying pan with a folding handle, a bicycle pump. There is a table with a basket for fruit and some wine glasses.
On the left stands a big bookcase containing books by all of the thirty-five writers who have been here before me. It is a tradition to leave your books here, as well as ones you have been reading, because it’s not easy getting your hands on English language books in Menton. They provide clues and links. Don De Lillo’s Underworld — that had to be Ian Wedde last year. But who was reading Updike’s S, and where did this or that collection of poems come from? Lauris’s collection, The Pear Tree, is here, along with some other of her works. Fitting, I think, because these poems, mostly for her daughter Rachel, who died soon after I met Lauris, are to do with the central drama of her life, and how it was played out over all the years we knew each other.
When she wrote about the room, as almost everyone who comes here does, she noted in her diary, ‘leaves across the windows — flax, good green New Zealand flax, at one, palm leaves like green fingers spread out at the other’.
I’ve never been able to find any flax; I guess the Menton summers, the heat waves like the one we are experiencing now, have burnt up any New Zealand plants that might have been here. It was a long time ago that Lauris reported on the flax bushes, but the rest is all as it was then.
She also wrote of the room: ‘There is no past and no future, only this island in time, light as a bubble and shining with rainbow colours’. She was right about this. How did I get so far from my own history, and when did I begin to reinvent myself?
Back in Wellington, perhaps, in the early 1970s, when I still had energy to burn, and at that time when she and I saw the adventures of our lives still unfurling before us.
Anyway, she was here this morning, saying my name with the breathy inflection on the second syllable that always meant she had some important piece of information to impart.
And it was from this room that Lauris would write me letters that began the process of mending a breach that had occurred between us some years before.
Chapter 14
So much work in all directions, I hardly knew which way to turn. Ian and I were leading erratic unpredictable lives. We would be flush with money one week and broke the next. But the house was beginning to take shape and we could start inviting friends to visit. And there were plenty of those. We were rapidly becoming party animals. Like me, Ian was developing his own trendy look: long sideburns, a white polo-neck jersey worn with a burgundy-coloured suit with flared trousers. We thought we were pretty hot.
Naenae College had its own circle, and soon we became part of their crowd as Ian’s career flourished. His approach to teaching was strongly influenced by Beeb and Jack Shallcrass; now he had access to them and they were willing mentors. His community approach had won him friends and support from parents. Before long, he was invited up and down the country to give talks and lead seminars on the methods he was developing. A young film producer called Dave Gibson made a short documentary film, his first ever, about Ian. The school’s guidance counsellor, Russell Bernstone, and his wife became close friends. They had children close in age to ours, which was a bonus, because we could do things together that included the kids.
We were also hanging out with the Little fairs. Gordon was a Richard Burton-like character, in both voice and appearance, who claimed to be Welsh,
although there was some doubt about where he really came from. His younger wife, Alison, was slim, prematurely grey, with a vibrant personality, and a great hostess. The Little fairs’ parties swarmed with trade union people, seamen like Bill ‘Pincer’ Martin, Bill Anderson, Gerry Evans and Press Gallery journalists. Some nights we put the children to bed there and stayed until the dawn came up. I remember us sitting looking out over the harbour as the first fingers of light touched the sky, and Gordon played Finlandia at full blast, the music rolling and billowing around us. We were all drunk (except for Ian), elated, emotional.
Another night there was a party at our house when Robin Dudding left Landfall, after an unhappy split with Caxton Press in Christchurch, and gathered up his family of six children, taking them up to Auckland to live. En route, he and Lois stayed over at our house, children asleep on mattresses in every available corner of the house. Witi and Jane, some of the Listener crowd and other writers who had grown close to Robin, gathered round.
I had particular reason to thank Robin. He had now published several of my stories, including the first in the long Bethany Dixon sequence. Bethany was a kind of alter ego of mine, an earthy disorganised woman who lived in a provincial town, separated from her husband, reading books, randomly falling in love and pleasing herself about what she did, something like the existence I had had in that last strange summer in Rotorua. She grew out of an image that had flashed before me as I drove away from the town with Ian, on our way south: Bethany, in the first story, sits on a verandah, breast-feeding a baby, surrounded by the leaves of a grapevine, her face turned to the sun. It was hard to explain where that came from, even to myself, but I think she represented a time of having children, being an ordinary young mother, not someone always pressuring herself to be this other person, this writer. Over the years, I came to recognise Bethany as the woman I might have been had I stayed. What I had yearned to leave, I sometimes wanted to go back to.
Now I did have some friends around town, although they didn’t resolve all my problems. In the weekends, when Ian was home, if we weren’t going out somewhere, or working on the house, I hung out with Rena, drinking her sherry, or with Carole. I wasn’t surprised to learn that Carole’s marriage was breaking up. Her husband had found the pressure of an autistic child difficult to cope with, and left her with the three boys. Our friendship seemed to be based on comforting each other, and helping with each other’s children. And there might have been a hint of Carole in Bethany Dixon too. I followed Bethany’s life through fiction for more than a quarter of a century until her own book, The House Within, was published in 1997 and I was finally able to let her go. But, unlike Carole, Bethany was a survivor.
My mental health seemed to be on a permanent knife edge so I sought help for depression from David Minnitt, the local Hataitai doctor. He was a tall solidly built and quite plain man, yet he had a presence. He had come to medicine late, after a life in which hunting and shooting featured a lot, although, as I would later learn, he also had a deep love of good paintings and antique Oriental artefacts. David listened sympathetically, then prescribed tranquillisers. I was grateful at the time. I had no idea how addictive they were. Booze and pills — you could live a pretty high life on those. I met his wife Leigh, thirty years David’s junior. She sometimes worked at the practice rooms, but at the time she was finishing her degree, so she was at university most of the time. Leigh’s brown eyes held a wicked gleam; she had pale creamy skin and a brilliant thick mane of nasturtium-coloured hair. I’ve written about it more than once. She dressed with care, in the crisp linen style that made you wonder if she carried an iron in her handbag. Some days, under the careful make-up I detected smudgy shadows of tiredness. She danced attendance on her husband, ensuring that his life was comfortable, more like a servant than a wife, which was surprising, given that she was such a feisty woman in other aspects of her life.
Later, Leigh began work at the NZCER, so we came to see a lot of each other when I attended the PEN meetings. We would have a sly gin and tonic before I went off to take notes. She and David were well known in liberal circles, particularly supporting abortion law reform. Abortions were so nearly unobtainable in New Zealand that women travelled to Australia for them.
Leigh was one of a group of women who formed the Wellington group Sisters Over Seas (SOS), to help poor and desperate women from rural areas get to Australia. As well as helping with finance, SOS provided beds before and after their flights to Sydney. The pregnant women went out on the 6 a.m. flight and returned at midnight, red-eyed and exhausted, minus their babies. I was drawn into this group and for a time had women to stay on their way back and forth across the Tasman. Various women were associated with the pro-abortion movement in some way, people like Di Cleary, Dr Carol Shand and Adrienne Morgan-Lynch, who became a close friend of mine, and of Leigh.
Around this time I was with Ian and the children at Wellington Railway Station seeing off a friend on the overnight train to Auckland. I saw a Maori girl asleep on a bench, her feet drawn up under her knees, shoes off, one hand clutching her bushy hair. She reminded me of my childhood friend Topsy, though it wasn’t her. As we stood on the platform, the train ready to leave, a young man leaned out of a carriage door. He called out, ‘Queenie, Queenie,’ and, in response, the sleeping girl woke and rushed along the platform. She stopped by the carriage door and a conversation took place. They looked like brother and sister. I watched the young man encouraging her to board the train. For a moment she considered it, then, undecided, she stepped back. He stretched forward to take her hand, the doors closed, she leapt at them but it was too late. She rolled over on the platform and picked herself up. Then a group of young people strolled along towards her, as the train pulled away. The girl didn’t look back, but there was something lost in her face.
Immediately I got home, I sat down and wrote a short story called ‘New Shoes for Old’, about a young man from the Far North who comes looking for his missing sister in Wellington: Bernard Gadd published the story in an anthology called My New Zealand in 1972 and, the same year, I dramatised it as a radio play for Arthur, this time calling it Search for Sister Blue.
My name is Heta Rakete, me and my family are from up north … I knew Mum would not be singing today. Every day this thing would happen between me and my father. At half past eleven we would finish work for the morning and go up to the house real slow, pretending to each other that we weren’t waiting for anything special, like say, Abe, in the rural delivery van, but when you’re like us, a real family living close to each other, you know when people are pretending. And this is how it had been since my sister Queenie went away to the big city. In the first few months, there’d been some letters now and then, so it didn’t matter when we said, very casual, ‘Any mail today Mum?’ because there just might have been. But that seemed a long time ago …
Heta finds Queenie only as he is about to leave, and the scene between them is played out much as I had witnessed the encounter at the railway station.
This is another of those stories where the narrator watches people as they leave on a journey. Sometimes when people ask me how to find ideas for their writing, I tell them they could do worse that spending time observing people saying hello and goodbye. One of the pictures I carry in my head is of a girl at the international airport, here in Wellington, clutching a huge heart-shaped balloon inscribed with the words ‘I LOVE YOU’ floating on a string above her head, and a red rose in her hand. After about a half-hour wait, her young man emerged from customs, and they threw themselves into each other’s arms. The whole crowd waiting in the concourse burst into applause. The couple blinked and smiled. It was pure Hollywood.
Search for Sister Blue drew strongly on my time in the North, which still exerted a powerful hold over me. I often found myself in those early years in Wellington yearning for what now appeared the simple, more idyllic life I had grown up with. Of course, for the most part, it had been little of the kind. But the play brought together elements
of those settings, my friendship with Topsy, with whom I had lost touch long ago, as well as the hours spent at St Faith’s church in Ohinemutu.
I hoped to get scriptwriting work on the second series of a television drama series called Pukemanu. A year or so had passed since my prize for Green Apples and a Jug, which was, in fact, never produced. Pukemanu, devised by Julian Dickon, was set in a fictitious milling town in the Central North Island; the hub of the town’s social life was the pub. The idea of writing about rural life, and characters who were mainly Maori, appealed to me. Actor Tama (aka Tom) Poata, whom I had met and was encouraging of my work, played a lead role in Pukemanu. The first series had been a major critical success, and seemingly set Julian on his feet.
All the scripts on the first series of Pukemanu were written, produced and directed by men and I sensed a growing culture of big money and male control in the industry. There didn’t seem to be much room for women in the dawning new age of television drama in New Zealand. Nor, after his initial success, did it seem to have much room for Julian, who still lived in the country.
Word filtered back to me that I was considered Bill and Arthur’s ‘pet’, who got all the work in radio drama. I heard, in a roundabout way, that I needn’t expect to get a slice of the television pie. It probably didn’t help that I was a television critic, although Ian Cross had by then moved me to radio reviewing. Arthur’s view was that my writing worked for radio, and I kept to deadlines, which made his life simpler. I picked up a fair bit of work finishing projects which other of his writers had failed to complete. I was quick at adaptation work and turned a number of New Zealand novels into serial plays, including Noel Hilliard’s A Piece of Land and Karl Stead’s Smith’s Dream. The latter, I turned into a four-part serial. I wanted to change the ending because it would have been difficult on radio to follow Smith’s interior monologue without having someone else in the scene. When I contacted Karl to see if he minded, he said it didn’t bother him at all. This was the second of the three endings the book had, as Roger Donaldson came up against similar problems when he turned the book into the movie Sleeping Dogs, although he came up with a different solution again.