by Fiona Kidman
The following year we made a family trip up there so that I could show the children where I had grown up. I don’t think the reality of the ‘house’ sank in; I wondered if they thought it was my playhouse. We were heading over to the Hokianga to join up with our old friends from Naenae, the Bernstones, and their children, and we didn’t talk about it again. Russell wasn’t well that summer. He had begun a long decline into terminal cancer.
When I sat down to write Mandarin Summer, it was time to draw on this stored material about the North that I had carried around in my head for more than twenty years. I wrote about a child who goes north with her parents at the end of the war, to a strange household of old China hands who torment each other in various ways, until the house goes up in flames. There is a beautiful pianist and a distraught wife and an overbearing decorated soldier. Yes, all of those. The words fell onto the typewriter in a white heat, as if the story was burning me up as I wrote. It took less than a fortnight to get it all down.
I left it with Chris and Simon one Friday afternoon, feeling as if a load had been lifted from me. I didn’t really care what they thought about it. On the Monday morning, there was a new sense of respect in the air. Simon had written a glowing report, except for a comment about a few passages of ‘vile lyricism’. He was right and they could be fixed. We all went across the road to the 1860s pub to celebrate. The 1860s, facing onto Lambton Quay, was another red-velvet haunt, so beloved of the 1970s. The drama department often met there for liquid lunches.
Some days, Leigh would come down the road and meet me there. Long after, I wrote a story about her called ‘Nasturtium’, only I called the character Vree. It began:
‘Life is better than death. Well at least it is more alive,’ Vree would say, and order a gin.
Vree had hair like nasturtiums. When Tess went out to meet her she’d be waiting for her somewhere in the street, always in a place where the light struck her amazing shock of hair. It stood out in a shining halo, and it was so full of electricity Tess could feel it bristling in the air between them when they went inside the pub and took off their coats.
Usually Vree would have her dog Malcolm X with her. He was as dark as a seal. He looked at her all the time with strong intelligent eyes, his body fretful. When she went into the pub he would sit outside and wait for her.
‘It’s Vre-ee here,’ she would say when she rang. She was one of those friends who you waited for to ring first, or she was at the beginning. Later, if you loved her, you had to call across spaces.
I had guessed for some time that she and David had trouble in their lives. They had been at Golden Bay, where they owned a holiday house, when David had taken ill one stormy night. He was able to diagnose himself as having had a heart attack, and Leigh got him into the car and drove him across flooded streams to Nelson Hospital, where he stayed for some weeks until he was well enough to return to Wellington for open heart surgery. She wrote to me often from his bedside, a more sombre Leigh, not knowing what the future held.
I wrote a fictional version of this letter in my story ‘Nasturtium’. It says some of the things she had written to me, but also reflects how I saw the character of Vree.
It’s hard for people to understand about us. I know they think he’s a father substitute and it’s true, I’m afraid of my life without him. He gives me space to do the things I want. I think I can change the world, which of course is silly, but at least I can try … I sit here in the hospital, and outside the trees are dark red and the air is cold and I know that there is the smell of snow around the mountains. It’s there at nights when I walk the dog, and I watch him sleeping and know that I don’t want to do these things alone. I don’t know whether this is good feminist philosophy, but if we cannot find someone to love, what’s the point, why do it, and for whom?
She was right to be concerned. After his surgery, David changed. His manner at the surgery became abrupt and a consultation with him could be difficult. He had shown me extreme kindness on occasion, even if, looking back, I don’t think his medication regimes did me much good. I began to wish for a change of doctor but I didn’t follow through because it all seemed too awkward. Then one lunch hour at the 1860s, Leigh asked me to go into the women’s toilets with her. There, she showed me bruising on her body, dark purple welts administered by a belt. David. I was shocked and made all the obvious suggestions about leaving him. Her eyes filled with tears. She still loved him, she said. In time, she was sure things would improve.
‘You can’t love him,’ Tess said, when they had ordered another drink.
‘Love, what’s love?’ she said, dropping her head. She was on her fourth gin and it was half past twelve …‘Don’t you see,’ she said, her eyes haggard, ‘he needs someone to look after him.’
I had begun my job in the Concert Programme as producer of the Writing programme, at first broadcast monthly. I was working under the direction of the departmental head, David Delaney, who sent me on some production and voice training courses. Soon it was time for my first programme.
I was dispatched on assignment to a hui for the first Maori Writers Conference, held at Lake Rotoiti, near Rotorua, over Queen’s Birthday Weekend 1975. My attendance had been negotiated by the Maori Programmes Department, which included Bill Kerekere and Hirini Melbourne. Bill was planning to go and said he would give me whatever support I needed. I drove up in a second-hand car I’d bought the week before, and stayed with my parents.
The weekend started badly. My mother’s health was deteriorating and she was miserable with joint pain. I had brought Giles with me, and although they were delighted to see him, it was mid-winter and there was little they could do by way of outings while I was out at the marae. When I announced proudly that I had joined the Labour Party there was a frozen silence in the room. My mother turned away. ‘I suppose it was to be expected,’ she said, ‘marrying into the family you did.’ My father-in-law had worked for the Labour Party for many years.
But this had had nothing to do with it. I knew hardly anyone in Wellington who was not inclined to the left, and my parents’ and relatives’ politics had become anathema to me. This, apart from marrying Ian, was my biggest act of rebellion. It meant something then. I’m not sure that it does now. At any rate, my mother and I had one of the few quarrels, and certainly the worst, we ever had.
I don’t remember as much of the hui at Rotoiti as I should. I had expensive new microphones and equipment to operate, and I was distracted by the technology. Bill Kerekere was sick and couldn’t come, so I was on my own. Hone Tuwhare was there, but a lot of writers, including Witi, who was Burns Fellow at Otago that year, were absent. There were several Pakeha there, however, people on the fringe of writing and the arts. A group of them told me that they had come to give support to Maori writers in their struggle with people like me who wanted to steal their voices.
If I was taken aback by this direct attack, it was not a total surprise. I was aware that criticism was growing of Pakeha writers who spoke with a Maori voice, and had been considering my position for some time. I had started to write in a state of innocence about the things I knew, as writers are so often advised to do. So much of my early life had been associated with the Maori world, and I had married someone of Maori descent, that the criticism didn’t seem to be about me. But lately I had begun to wonder if it was, and I had simply chosen not to hear what I didn’t like.
Already Michael King and I had talked about the issues. By then he had edited Te Ao Hurihiri, a collection of essays by Maori writers, and, with photographer Marti Friedlander, published Moko: Maori Tattooing in the 20th Century. But already he was feeling some chill winds of disapproval. Michael spoke Maori and, through his time covering the Maori round on the Waikato Times and, later, his relationship with Irihapeti Ramsden, he had close links with Maori royalty. He and Irihapeti had lived in our street together during a brief and sadly fated affair. They lived with Irihapeti’s children in a brown box-like apartment with low ceilings, at the edge of
‘The Zigzag’ steps that linked Hataitai and Rakau roads. We visited each other frequently. Things didn’t go well for long, and Irihapeti returned with the children to their father, although she and Michael maintained an affection for each other until the end of her life. Michael would call on us on his way to visit her in Hataitai, during the last months of her life.
I was willing to listen to those who criticised, but what I didn’t like that wintry weekend, was that Pakeha people were pointing their fingers at me. Nor was that the reason I had come to the hui at Rotoiti. Even as their attacks began, I was being greeted by familiar Maori faces from Rotorua days, embraced and exclaimed over as if I’d never been away. I stood my ground but I was shaken, especially when one of the opposing group hissed at me: ‘How can you can call yourself Maori? A honky with a tape recorder.’
Of course I had never called myself Maori, nonetheless I felt angry and humiliated. As I left, I knew I would have to address the problem eventually. Later, when I did begin to explore the matter in a calmer light, I started to consider the implications of writing as if Maori didn’t exist, and that seemed as big a problem as the one I stood accused of. If I left Maori voices out of my work altogether, surely I would present the face of a monoculture that was, in its way, a form of reverse racism? This was something I wasn’t prepared to contemplate. I would have to learn to do it differently. But, as a first step, I decided never to adopt a first person Maori voice in my work again; rather, I would regard the relationship from a Pakeha perspective, in which the characters had equal weight. After all these years, it interests me that none of my friends in the Maori or Pacific Island writing communities ever appeared to waver in their friendship. Witi, Pat Grace, whom I have known for thirty years now, Albert Wendt — they have all been constant. If they had private views on the matter, they did not express them; I think they understood some of my inner conflict, and trusted me to find my way through it.
As I drove away from Rotorua, I was feeling troubled on several other counts. Before I left, my father had taken me aside and asked me what I could do to help them leave Rotorua. He and my mother were lonely in the Hannah’s Bay house, and my father had never been good at coping with other people’s illness. My mother’s frequent extended trips to Queen Elizabeth Hospital were taking their toll on both of them. Nearly every time I left them, he would say, ‘This may the last time you see me.’ It never made departure easy. This time, he said, ‘Get me out of here.’
I drove down the Desert Road, the landscape bitter in the rain. Giles and I were both pleased to be on our way home. Every tyre on the car punctured before we got back to Wellington. At first it was something of an adventure for Giles, who already had a handy knack with everything practical and helped me to change the tyres. About ten o’clock, the last one to go blew out on the Mangaweka hills with an explosive bang. ‘I’m frightened, Mum,’ he said, as we sat in the black night air, swirling with mist.
‘So am I,’ I said. We were picked up by some passers-by and given shelter for the night in their farmhouse at Hunterville.
The first Writing programme went to air and received a mixed reception. Some writers down south were outraged that a nationwide programme was being run from Wellington, declaring that it should appear on a province by province basis. A critic wrote that I had a curious, hollow voice, or words to that effect, and should let someone else voice the programmme. Delaney took me off air, and although I produced the programme for five years, I never voiced anything again. This meant that the programme carried the cost of bringing in other presenters and interviewers. These included Michael King, who returned to Wellington from time to time, and, for the most part, Elizabeth Alley, who had had a high profile career in broadcasting before having children. At the time, she was out of the permanent workforce. The Concert Programme position was one of those situations I should probably have walked away from, but ten hours’ work a week was better than nothing. I had hoped that the position in the drama department would lead to something permanent, but although I loved the work and was good at it, Tony Groser’s plan to rotate writers was firmly in place. I couldn’t argue with that.
I tried to compensate for my shortcomings on air by being super efficient and by drawing in a wide diversity of writers for the programme. My desk, which I occupied for two afternoons a week, was on the second floor of Aurora House. There, I quickly discovered a new friend. Sharon Crosbie’s office was next door to mine. She was to be found there in the afternoons, after she had finished her Nine to Noon morning programme, planning the following day’s stint with her producer, Maree Corbett. Sharon was one of the most vibrant human beings I had ever met. At first, I was totally in awe of her, as was the whole country. There was no competition from talkback then and she had the airwaves to herself. If Europe stops for a siesta, in those days you could say that New Zealand took its daily break while Sharon was on air. Witty, sharp, relentless in her probing interviews, and ferocious with politicians from either side of the House if they tried to lie to her, Sharon was one of the most influential women in New Zealand. Yet underneath this ran a beguiling warmth, a sweetness in her nature, that kept her in touch with real people. These are the qualities that I still find irresistible in her company. She has always been an insatiable reader, and although she had guest critics, she read everything that was reviewed on her show. Having a favourable review on her programme was the New Zealand equivalent of appearing on Oprah.
Soon after my arrival on the second floor, she invited me in for a cup of tea. Her office was a scene of organised chaos — two phones ringing all the time, piles of paper everywhere, people banging on her door. After our first few afternoon teas, the callers would often be told, ‘Go away, I’m having tea with Fiona.’ Sometimes I wondered why. Perhaps it was just that I wasn’t given to prolonged bouts of awe. Sharon wanted to be a person as well as a star and we began talking about our lives as other women do. When I introduced Sharon to Keith during one of his visits to Wellington there was an instant rapport between them. The three of us started having late lunches together when he was in town, which helped to dispel some of the slight awkwardness I had felt after my abrupt departure from the Book Council.
My hours for the Writing programme increased the following year but I was still working on part-time contract when more work on Close to Home came up. I hadn’t entirely given up the hope that I would be offered the once promised staff contract, which would have solved my employment worries. The work didn’t last long and ended in a deeply shaming episode. The commissioning script editor decided to hit on me, often asking ask me to lunch in the cafeteria at the new Avalon studios, where Close to Home was shot, when I delivered my scripts. There was something creepy and unctuous about this man. I didn’t want to be rude to someone who was employing me but I made excuses to hurry away. One day he asked if I could drop by his house with my script, as he would be working from home.
When I arrived, he opened the door and invited me inside. Straight away I felt uncomfortable about this, but we were work colleagues and it seemed churlish to refuse. And anyway he stood inside so that I had to step in and hand him the script. Immediately, the door was slammed behind me as he pushed me against a wall, hands under my dress. As I tried to fight him off, his phone began to ring, and kept on until he decided to knock it from its cradle, allowing me to make my escape.
The next time, I was asked to deliver the script to the studio on a Sunday morning. Guessing there wouldn’t be many people around, I asked Ian to go with me. He sat in the car park below and waited. I told him that if I didn’t come back within ten minutes he was to follow me. In those days there were no security guards on duty. There wasn’t a soul to be seen in the building, except the editor. Straight away he jumped me, only this time I was ready for him. I told him that Ian would be here in a minute or so if he didn’t let me go.
In the 1980s, I would work in the screen industry with a private company, but as I left Avalon that morning I felt pretty much finished w
ith television. I learned shortly after these disgusting episodes that some of my scripts had been found in the department with obscenities scribbled all over them. As women often do in situations like this, I felt guilty and ashamed. I knew that the man had abused his position but there were no other women working in drama, nobody I could tell. I couldn’t see any recourse. This man is long dead. Although I have never, once, hated men in any general sense, I hated this man.
I had had enough. I was exhausted by the years of piecemeal work, erratic hours, frustrated ambitions. I decided that, whatever the cost, I would write a novel. Nothing else would save my sanity.
I took a chance and sent off an application to the State Literary Fund, asking for a thousand dollars. I didn’t expect to get it but in one of those miraculous serendipitous moments, a letter came to say that my application had been successful.
One thousand dollars was exactly the price of a new roof. And when a reporter phoned to ask me what I would do with the money that was what, in a state of euphoria, I said I would be buying with my grant. Some letters of indignation appeared in the newspapers, demanding what the state was doing handing out money to a writer to spend on a roof. In hindsight, they were hilarious.
The contretemps more or less passed me by. I was a writer who was going to write a novel without water dripping down the back of my neck. I was pretty happy.
I had come to the point of writing this novel by a long and difficult road. It was not the first one I had attempted, but this time I knew it had to work, or else I needed to get on with my life, find a steady job, stop looking back over my shoulder and yearning. I had decided to write about the lives of the women I knew who had somehow muddled their way through the past decade or so, and survived. I had the title in my head as I shoved the first piece of paper into my typewriter. I was ready to begin A Breed of Women.