The Infinite Air

by Fiona Kidman

  For there were still interviews to do when she came to New Zealand, and talks to be given to schools. One school had been named in her honour. Her dress style had toned down since her new beginning. More often she wore a white kid coat with a mink collar, and stylish, form-fitting dresses.

  She saw family, too, when she came to New Zealand. In the north, she had a niece and nephews, her brother Harold’s children, and they had children, too. ‘Fancy,’ she said. ‘Grown up, all grown up.’ She had hired a white chauffeur-driven limousine to drive her to their farms on her first visit back. Strange, she hadn’t meant to lose touch with them all, but that was the way it had happened. She was sorry she hadn’t seen Fred one last time, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave the place where Nellie was buried in Tenerife. She just couldn’t.

  The niece and nephews took her to see their father. Alma had died, but then so had the marriage, long before. Jean didn’t recognise Harold, shrunken and wizened, ranting at the people who took care of him in a hospital. But then he didn’t know her either, his eyes dulled with medication.

  ‘Our mother died, Harold. Did you know that? I put a blue scarf over her hair when she was in the coffin — you know how nice she always liked to look. I put some perfume in a little sachet in her pocket. And I got a great big spray of red roses. Ninety red roses, can you imagine that?’

  When he didn’t answer her, she put her hand briefly on his restless head. ‘I’m still here,’ she said. Something in him stilled for an instant, and then he moved away from her touch. Now Harold had died, too.

  And then there was John to think about, who had come back to New Zealand, then left again. For a long time, he had been a radio announcer in Auckland. People who had heard him on the radio said his voice was beautiful. So that was another lapse of time to contemplate, one she found difficult to dwell on. But yes, it was fifty years since they had seen one another. Why had they quarrelled? She didn’t really recall. She had thought they were at one with each other when they were children, but they turned out to be different. That was all she could really put her finger on. Perhaps she could have tried to understand more, at least when she grew older. But where would one begin after so long?

  THAT AFTERNOON, AS SHE SAT SIGNING BOOKS, a woman came up and presented her purchase.

  ‘Are you going to catch up with Freda?’ she asked.

  ‘Freda?’

  ‘You know, Freda Stark,’ the woman said with a touch of impatience. Her severely styled hair and black-rimmed spectacles suggested an academic. Jean glanced at the woman’s shoes and, sure enough, they were brogues. ‘You and she were friends, weren’t you? That’s what she told me.’

  ‘Oh yes, Freda. I do remember. She had some trouble, didn’t she?’

  ‘That was a long time ago.’ The woman’s voice sounded sharp. ‘You’ll know about her dancing of course? She was simply amazing.’

  ‘I thought she gave it up.’

  ‘But surely you know what she did in the war?’

  Jean shook her head. ‘I’ve been away a long time.’

  ‘Goodness, she was sensational. She entertained the troops at the Wintergarden cabaret every night. Our boys and the Americans. They called her the Fever of the Fleet. She used to be covered from head to foot in gold paint, just a G-string and a feather head-dress. You don’t know about that? Well, she was a breath of fresh air, absolutely famous in her own right.’ Again, there was a hint of rebuke as if to remind Jean that she was not the only person who had made a name for herself. ‘Freda shook New Zealanders up, they needed it.’

  ‘I had no idea. Where is she now?’

  ‘Oh, she works at the university. I’ll tell her I saw you.’

  Out of the corner of her eye, Jean saw an elderly man standing at the door, looking in.

  ‘Well, it was nice to meet you,’ Jean said, signalling that the encounter was over. The woman collected her book, raising her eyebrows as if in some disbelief at Jean’s ignorance.

  The man still stood at the door, frail-looking, nearly bald, just threads of hair springing from the back of his head. He wore a shirt and tie knotted under a pullover, and a heavy woollen zipped jacket. But she knew those eyes, the high cheekbones.

  The next woman in the queue noticed her distraction. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Batten,’ she said, ‘but I’ve got to pick up the kiddies after school, and the book’s for my dad’s birthday.’

  Jean picked up the pen, and wrote her name quickly, still in the round hand of her girlhood, with a slight flourish, an ornate round capital ‘J’, the top stroke missed off the first ‘t’ in ‘Batten’, a firm line beneath her surname.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you for coming today.’

  He would wait for her, surely he must.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said to the next person in the line, ‘I’m sorry, but there’s someone I have to catch.’

  She ran to the door of the big shop. ‘John,’ she called wildly down the street. But he had gone.

  One of the booksellers had been guarding the door, directing customers to the queue. ‘There was a man here,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, Miss Batten. He said he knew you from a long time ago.’

  ‘Did he tell you who he was?’

  ‘He said his name was John.’

  ‘Batten? Did he say his name was John Batten?’

  Recognition dawned on the bookseller’s face. ‘Of course, I thought I knew that voice. I’m sorry, I did suggest he wait a minute or two. But he said he was on a cruise ship and it was just in port for a few hours. He said it was a bit of a shock to see you, because he thought you were in Tenerife.’

  In the afternoon, when the shop had cleared, she walked along Queen Street to the port, the old ferry building, the wharves that she remembered, only everything was built up now, familiar but changed. A big liner was pulling away to sea. She stood and waved until it was out of sight.

  For a moment, she thought that she was back up there in the sky, and that while she was up there, the whole world had simply disappeared.

  POSTSCRIPT

  JEAN GARDNER BATTEN DIED IN PALMA, MAJORCA, IN 1982. She had shifted from Tenerife, to a modest serviced apartment in Palma not long before. Some time earlier, she had told a couple in England who had befriended her that she was ‘going to ground for a while’.

  There is no account of why Jean moved from Tenerife to Majorca, nor any real information about what she did there. Perhaps she returned to the ancient monastery at Valdemossa where Chopin had composed his music on a stormy night, and listened in her head to the scattering raindrops of his prelude, her fingers flexing over an imaginary keyboard. Or she may have sat under a large umbrella in the town of Palma, and watched the sun dropping and a dark red moon rise over the sea. Somewhere, on one of her walks, she may have caught sight of a shadow among the trees, and called out her mother’s name, listening for a voice to come back to her.

  But nobody knows any of these things.

  What we do know is that Jean had been ill in the days before her death. She had gone for a walk and been bitten by a dog. The wound had become infected. She declined medical assistance until the hour of her death when, it appeared from later reports, she became aware of the seriousness of her condition. The maid, who had gone for help, returned to the room and found Jean Batten lying dead, fully dressed, on her bed.

  The authorities, not knowing who she was, buried her under the name Gardner, in a paupers’ common grave.

  Because it had been her habit to disappear for long periods of time, five years would pass before anyone became seriously concerned about where she was. Nobody sought her until 1987. Two television documentary-makers, researching a film about her life, discovered her whereabouts that year.

  By then, it was impractical to disinter her remains from the common grave where many lay buried.

  Her body had disappeared, in a sense, as did those of so many of her fellow fliers: into infinity.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I WIS
H TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT SOME PHRASES USED to describe Jean Batten’s flights come from her own early writing as do her logbook entries. The final words attributed to Ellen (Nellie) Batten were quoted in Jean Batten: The Garbo of the Skies by Ian Mackersey (Macdonald, 1990). Copyright for letters written by Jean Batten is unclear. The letter on pages 230 and 321 are written in the spirit of her writing only. All the other letters are fiction.

  The poem ‘Tobacco is a Dirty Weed’ quoted on page 229 was written in 1915 by Graham Lee Hemminger.

  The names of some characters on the fringes of Jean Batten’s life, and their circumstances, have been changed.

  I thank many people who have given generous advice and information to assist me with writing The Infinite Air. In particular, I thank my research assistants Alice Janssens (London) and Oliver Peryman (Wellington), as well as the following: Dominic Alessio, Jean Anderson, Philip Andrews, Jim Batten, Jennifer Beck, Bev Brett, Anne Collett, David Colquhoun, the late Cherie Devliotis, Peter Downes, Anne Else, Billie Farnell, Lesley Gunson, Michael Harlow, Anna Hoffman, Simon Johnson, Ian Kidman, Joanna Kidman, Marie-Claude Lambotte, Des McLean, Lachie (Lachlan) McLean, James McNeish, Alison Morgan, Jill Nicholas, Vincent O’Malley, Vincent O’Sullivan, Noel T. Robinson, Jennifer Shennan, Allan Shields, Judy Siers, Peter Wells and Redmer Yska.

  I acknowledge a number of institutions that have made their material available to me, and whose staff have helped me. These include: Wellington Public Library; Rotorua Public Library; Dunedin Public Library; Invercargill Public Library (with special thanks to Linda Teau); National Archives of New Zealand; the Alexander Turnbull Library; Wellington College Archives; MOTAT (Museum of Transport and Technology, Auckland); Rotorua Museum (with thanks to Ann Somerville and Manaaki Pene); Croydon Aircraft Company at Old Mandeville Airfield (Gore); Department of Research & Information Services, Royal Air Force Museum (London).

  I am grateful for permission to reproduce the radio commentary in chapter 30: a transcription from archival recordings held by Sound Archives Nga Taonga Korero ID 31502, Jean Batten’s recordbreaking flight, 16 October 1936.

  The letter from the War Office (1939) on page 301 is reproduced with the kind permission of the RAF Museum, London.

  My editors Harriet Allan and Anna Rogers continue to give me support beyond the call of duty, and I can never thank them enough.

  Many thanks are due, too, to Kimberley Davis and Sarah Thornton.

  DURING MY RESEARCH THE FOLLOWING BOOKS AND TEXTS were invaluable:

  Batten, Jean, Solo Flight, Jackson & O’Sullivan, 1934

  Batten, Jean, My Life, George G. Harrap, 1938

  Batten, Jean, Alone in the Sky, The Airlife Publishing Company, 1979

  Bell, Elizabeth S., Sisters of the Wind: Voices of Early Women Aviators, Trilogy Books, 1994

  Churchill, Sarah, Keep on Dancing, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1981

  Civil Aviation Handbook, Air Department New Zealand, The Air Pilot, 1939 edition

  Collacott, Bertram A., ‘Memories of Stag Lane’, unpublished manuscript, RAF Museum, London

  Collett, Anne, Jean Batten and the ‘Accident of Sex’ (with Clive Gilson), Faculty of Arts — Papers (Archive), University of Wollongong, 2009

  Coward, Noël, Future Indefinite, Heinemann, 1954

  Devliotis, Cherie, Dancing with Delight, Footprints of the Past, Dance and Dancers in Early 20th Century Auckland, Polygraphia, 2005

  Everett, Susanne, London: the glamour years 1919–39, Bison Books, 1985

  Haworth, Dianne and Diane Miller, Freda Stark, Her Extraordinary Life, HarperCollins, 2000

  Horrocks, John, Something in the Waters, Steele Roberts, 2010

  Howgego, James, London in the Twenties and Thirties, B. T. Batsford London, 1978

  Hughes, Robert, Rome, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011

  Jillett, Leslie, Wings Across the Tasman, A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1953

  Lenart, Judith (selected and compiled), Yours Ever, Ian Fleming: Letters to and From Antony Terry, privately published, 1994

  Mackersey, Ian, Jean Batten: The Garbo of the Skies, Macdonald, 1990

  McNally, Ward, Smithy, The Kingsford Smith Story, Robert Hale, 1966

  McNeish, James, Lovelock, Hodder & Stoughton, 1986

  Mulgan, David, The Kiwi’s First Wings: The Story of the Walsh Brothers and the New Zealand Flying School, 1910–1924, Wingfield Press, 1960

  O’Malley, Vincent and David Armstrong, The Beating Heart: A Political and Socio-Economic History of Te Arawa, Huia, 2008

  O’Reilly, Bernard, Green Mountains, B. O’Reilly, 1940

  Pearson, John, Ian Fleming, Creator of James Bond, Jonathan Cape, 2007

  Simpson, Tony, The Sugar Bag Years: A People’s History of the 1930s Depression in New Zealand, Alister Taylor Publishing, 1974

  Verran, David, The North Shore: An Illustrated History, Random House, 2010

  OTHER TITLES BY THE AUTHOR

  FICTION

  The Book of Secrets

  A classic, prize-winning novel about an epic migration and a lone woman haunted by the past in frontier Waipu. In the 1850s, a group of settlers established a community in the northern part of New Zealand. They were led there by a stern preacher, Norman McLeod. The community had followed him from Scotland in 1817 to found a settlement in Nova Scotia, then subsequently to New Zealand via Australia. Their incredible journeys actually happened, and in this winner of the New Zealand Book Awards, Fiona Kidman breathes life and contemporary relevance into the facts by creating a remarkable fictional story of three women entangled in the migrations — Isabella, her daughter Annie and granddaughter Maria.

  McLeod’s harsh leadership meant that anyone who ran counter to him had to live a life of secrets. The ‘secrets’ encapsulated the spirit of these women in their varied reactions to McLeod’s strict edicts and connect the past to the present and future.

  The Captive Wife

  This prize-winning novel has become a New Zealand classic. When Betty Guard steps ashore in Sydney, in 1834, she meets with a heroine’s welcome. Her survival during a four-month kidnapping ordeal amongst Taranaki Maori is hailed as nothing short of a miracle. But questions about what really happened slowly surface within the élite governing circles of the raw new town of Sydney. Jacky Guard, ex-convict turned whaler, had taken Betty as his wife to his New Zealand whaling station when she was fourteen. After several years and two children, the family is returning from a visit to Sydney when their barque is wrecked near Mount Taranaki. A battle with local Maori follows, and Betty and her children are captured. Her husband goes to seek a ransom, but instead England engages in its first armed conflict with New Zealand Maori when he is persuaded to return with two naval ships. After her violent rescue, Betty’s life amongst the tribe comes under intense scrutiny. Based on real events, this is the compelling story of a marriage, of love and duty, and the quest for freedom in a pioneering age.

  The Trouble with Fire

  A beautiful collection of stories that was shortlisted for several major awards. Fiona Kidman has a genius for peeling back the lives of ordinary people to reveal their hidden passions and complexities. In this brilliant collection, she explores — with her customary subtlety and insight — how we are all touched and sometimes scarred by the flames of emotion, whether it be the impossible love of a pregnant woman for a married man, grief for a dead baby or loss of a young woman in mysterious circumstances. Ranging in time from the colonial period to the present day, these stories by one of New Zealand’s foremost writers are beautifully crafted, intriguing and evocative.

  Further fiction by Fiona Kidman available in ebook format:

  A Breed of Women

  A Needle in the Heart

  Paddy’s Puzzle

  Preservation

  Ricochet Baby

  The Best of Fiona Kidman’s Short Stories

  True Stars

  MEMOIR

  At the End of Darwin Road

  ‘What I have to tell is largely a personal narrative abou
t how I came to inhabit a fictional world’ This absorbing memoir explores the first half of writer Fiona Kidman’s life, notably in Kerikeri amid the ‘sharp citric scent of orange groves, bright heat and … the shadow of Asia’ — at the end of Darwin Road. From the distance of France, where Kidman spent time as the Katherine Mansfield Fellow in Menton, she reconsiders the past, weaving personal reflection and experience with the history of the places where she lived, particularly the fascinating northern settlements of Kerikeri and Waipu, and further south the cities of Rotorua and Wellington. Her story crosses paths with those of numerous different New Zealanders, from the Tuhoe prophet Rua Kenana, to descendants of the migration from Scotland led by a charismatic Presbyterian minister, to other writers and significant friends. We learn of Kidman’s struggles to establish herself as a writer and to become part of different communities, and how each worked their way into her fiction. At the End of Darwin Road is a vivid memoir of place and family, and of becoming a writer: ‘I was certain that … I would continue to write, if possible, every day of my life.’

  Beside the Dark Pool

  In her first acclaimed volume of memoir, Fiona Kidman described her background and childhood, evoking the places she lived in and the people she knew. It finished with the publication of her first, hugely successful novel. In this sequel, she explores further the influences that shaped her subsequent books, her championing of New Zealand writing and writers and the significant people she has met along the way. There are political protests, controversial stands, family quests and journeys overseas — to Europe, North America and the East — journeys that marked her hard-won independence. Beautifully written and thought-provoking, this is an important record of the last twenty-five years.