Lucie, perfectly happy in her dark, dark corner, with her 20-watt bulb, eats nearly a litre of it.
A cliff somewhere on the Mediterranean. High above the sea. Our friend Jean, a scientist whom Robert befriended at a conference in Wellington, is showing us around, and this particular cliff is of interest because so many cars have conveniently found their way to the bottom of it. He speaks excellent English so Lucie is enthralled. I’m feeling like someone is outlining an episode of The Sopranos. The chief of police is the mayor’s brother. So—not too many questions asked! He gives a c’est la vie Gallic shrug. I’m left wondering what we in New Zealand would make of a similar situation in, say, Invercargill or Whanganui.
We go from Euston Station to Watford Junction, then on to a bus that takes us to Warner Brothers studio. This time we have bought our tickets to the studio online.
By the time we leave Watford Junction, most people on the train are going to the same place that we are. We’re going to Harry Potter World, or rather, the set that Warner Brothers has created to make the films based on J.K. Rowling’s books. Our fellow travellers are a mesmerising bunch. It’s true that it’s term time, and just like in Holland they lock you up and throw away the key if you take your child out of school in term time. But there are dozens of people sharing our carriage and only one or two of them are children. I’m thinking, What sort of adult would want to go to Harry Potter World without a child as an excuse?
The people on the train: Japanese tourists; retired Americans in matching leisure wear; introverted men on their own; young couples with guileless faces; and middle-aged couples, one balding, but both with ponytails. Anyway, we’re a quiet lot. You couldn’t say that the atmosphere on the packed train thrums with barely suppressed excitement.
2019. I WhatsApp Lucie. I ask, ‘What do you most remember about Harry Potter World?’
She replies, ‘Marble statue with the Muggles trapped underneath, green tiles and the butter beer being cold and tasting bad.’
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘That’s perfect. The butter beer being revolting. I remember! It was awful! Anything else?’
‘The guy at the beginning who worked for the studios taking credit for the series’ success. Basically saying the books were nothing before the movies came along lmao whack.’
‘Yes!!’ I say, remembering the first bit, but without knowing what the hell she’s on about. ‘That’s perfect!!’
You have to have a tour of sorts, and we have a guide. The set is, as expected, impressive. Rowling’s imaginary world has lent heavily on the late Middle Ages, which means it’s relatively easy for set designers. The tourist’s dollar is not neglected. You can pretend you’re playing Quidditch for £20, but basically it means sitting on a make-believe broomstick that does the odd dip and twist with a screen showing sweeping movement behind you. A bored person snaps your photo. It is not unlike the feeling of movement you can get standing on a bridge above fast-moving water. Except less exciting.
There are children there, but they’re in school uniforms, on class trips. They merge beautifully into the film sets.
At the shop at the end—exit through the gift shop—we say, ‘One thing. One. Well, two. One for you, and one for Max.’
Everything is ludicrously expensive. She wants the wand.
‘Thirty pounds?’ we say. ‘Your dad could make you one like that.’ He is, after all, a sculptor.
‘But it wouldn’t be real!’ she says. She buys a map.
But what has lasted for Lucie is truly satisfying: the gall of the tour guide who strongly implies that Rowling’s stories, which have been responsible for millions of children worldwide taking up reading, were nothing much until Warner Bros came along and made them … real.
We’ve been home a couple of years and on TV there’s the 2008 film Brideshead Revisited. I record it, even though it’s not a patch on the 1981 series and, without comment, play it to Lucie. She’s onto it. ‘That’s Castle Howard!’ she says. ‘Look! There’s those steps that we weren’t allowed to go up. Ohmigod,’ she says, ‘ohmigod. I’ve been there.’ Then she says, ‘That wall! That’s the one we went past in Oxford! OhmiGOD,’ she says, ‘I remember that wall.’
‘I liked Oxford,’ she says. She did. There are cousins there, much younger than her, one not much more than a baby, but she goes outside with the older one, Thomas, and plays on the trampoline. She’s waited her time. He’s quiet like her. They bond. Along the lane at the back of their house, she says, was a cemetery and in it’s the man who wrote the Narnia books.
We went to Jamie Oliver’s restaurant. We remember that so well, because we had high hopes and it’s so … ordinary. But as we eat our bad pasta, we’re looking at the menu blackboard and it says, ‘Try our lemonade’s!’
Robert says, ‘Go on. Before I count 10 and I’ll give you … 10 quid.’ She hesitates. ‘Five quid,’ we say, and she’s over there like a flash, finger wet, and she’s rubbing it out. At the next table a woman, eating alone, turns to us, aghast, and says, ‘Was that an apostrophe?’
‘We went on those punts,’ she says. ‘Me and Grandad.’
‘You were good at it,’ I say. ‘You’re like Grandad in that way.’ Then I say, ‘Whose hand is that? Go on. Whose hand?’ And she says, ‘You mean, whose hand isn’t it?’ Because Great-Uncle Michael and his wife Daphne, who we visit in North Yorkshire, both work showing people round Castle Howard, and they take us there, and he tells us that one day the people who’d just made Brideshead Revisited came back to film an extra few seconds. They need one more shot and it certainly isn’t worth paying Michael Gambon to come all the way back for it; they just need his hand on the sheet. So they ask for older men working at Castle Howard to show them their hands so they can pretend, just briefly, to be Michael Gambon’s hand pretending to be Lord Marchmain’s hand. Michael’s hand is auditioned.
We freeze the screen and look at the hand they chose.
We agree. Michael’s hand leaves that hand for dead.
20.
HOMESICKNESS
In which I remember the perfect places left behind
Home slowly expands. In Pahīatua it’s just our house: Dad puts blocks on the pedals of my chain-bike, it becomes our street. Waitara, when I’m five, we roam in a small pack, and wander to and from school: my world extends to the greater neighbourhood. I’m to stay overnight with a friend, but when we have tea and all the vegetables are white I, desperate with homesickness, ring Mum and Dad to take me home. Pātea, my world encompasses the distance I can ride on my red Raleigh, far further into the country than I’m officially allowed. Annually, our family starts to go on more ambitious holidays than the week at Foxton Beach. Gisborne, Wellington, Rotorua, Auckland. In Hunterville, a bus takes me to school in Marton. I sit a geography exam in which I’m asked to describe why New Zealand would appeal to tourists, and write one long enthusiastic cliché extolling the beauty of our landscape. I’ve moved from being a Taranakiite to being a New Zealander. Of sorts.
The Australian novelist Tim Winton, who lives in Perth, writes recognisably of living on the wrong side of the wrong country in the wrong hemisphere. Thanks to books I read in my childhood I share this opinion. First there are those featuring children of both sexes with identical bobbed haircuts and shoes with a buttoned strap, children going to school by train with a tuckbox, having adventures, and William being an hilarious ratbag. Around 11 I’m enthralled by murder in St Mary Mead and on the Orient Express, and entranced by Regency Rakes; unsettled by Anne Frank. Mid-teens, Stalag 13 and Mary Queen of Scots. By 20 it’s all about young mothers going quietly mad in Hampstead or sisters being hunted like foxes in the Home Counties. I’m not living in the right place. My mother takes pride in having been born in England, my father in his father being born in Scotland. Granny Todd was born here in 1875, but that’s an aberration: both her parents were Scots. No one in my family wanted our ancestors to have come here on one of the first ships.
When I start going to the UK
in my twenties, my flesh prickles with a sense of returning to where I belong. Drystone walls seem a more normal way to divide up land than barbed-wire fences, field and meadow much prettier words than paddock. The state house in which I spend my first five years, the small rented house we live in while my father’s on his way to becoming a bank manager, cannot be called cottages. Cottages have thatched roofs, not corrugated-iron ones, no lino on the floor nor blinds made out of black oilskin. Taranaki’s short on lanes and hedgerows, covered instead in vicious boxthorn hedges. The smell that permeates our nostrils isn’t wild roses and honeysuckle, but the odour of animals killed before their time. Even our local beach with its angry black iron sand, its semi-sunken concrete pillboxes stinking of briny rotting seaweed, where we go in our teens to kiss and grope, has little in common with the gentle pebbled bays where English children in rompersuits and cotton sunhats crouch with nets to search for crabs and cockleshells. Our cliffs aren’t even white; in Pātea they double as the rubbish tip where I go once or twice with my friend Alan to shoot rats.
I’m well on my way to becoming a baby Brexiteer with my attachment to those things which make England English. When I fly in to London the first time, and am driven in a cab from Heathrow to Primrose Hill, all I see are the things that books have told me are quintessentially English. There are still pillarboxes in January 1972, the IRA not having yet stepped up their bombing campaign in London. Policemen still look like bobbies, and some still ride on horseback. Taxis are black and their drivers have passed The Knowledge. Babies are being pushed around in big black prams and the Queen-is-indoors flag flies at Buckingham Palace, where, however hard you try, you can’t get the guards in their bearskin hats to crack a grin. Houses looked like houses are meant to: pebble-dashed, bow-windowed and semidetached, or tall, painted white, with glossy black doors, in beautiful curved Georgian streets. Children of all ages are in school uniform, people walk dogs, and it’s pretty much dark by 4 p.m. There’s honey still for tea. Quaintly named pubs with cheerful signs and misted-up windows are on every corner. England is now swinging like a pendulum do, but even the Beatles and Mary Quant are strangely just more of the same.
Back in New Zealand, my clearly ambivalent father has long ago decided to be a Kiwi bloke. He’s always been an avid sports supporter, most particularly of cricket and rugby. He’s obsessed from an early age; at 12 he hangs around outside a sports goods shop in Wellington after school. It’s owned by one of his cricketing heroes. My aunt tells me that one day he’s come home ecstatically happy; his idol has spoken to him. He’s said, ‘Get your grubby nose off my window, little boy.’ Dad’s keen on statistics, knows who’s batted for who and made how many runs. He’s played rugby to provincial level, never quite good enough to go further. He once gets into the reserves for a North Island trial, but a damaged knee puts a stop to that. His sporting career is a series of a miss-is-as-good-as-a-mile disappointments. But he gets satisfaction from the also-ran nature of his own story and tells it with rueful good humour.
He has, firmly in place, a series of fervent loyalties. He’s a proud Scot, though anti-Pom, with a real dislike of the Irish and Catholics: when we sing ‘Sweet Molly Malone’ in the primers, I fret that he’ll find out. He bickers with my mother, but would have killed for her. He’s a steadfast and intolerant Tory; nice people vote National. I remember my astonishment when I learn my best friend’s parents vote Labour. ‘Teachers tend to,’ says my father dismissively. ‘Oh God,’ says my mother. ‘To think how they must’ve felt at our election night party.’ Uncomfortable with the snobbishness of Keith Holyoake, Dad adores Muldoon, happy to equate his bullying, bombastic personality with strong leadership.
He’s passionately pro-tour and I do the cruellest thing to him: make his day by marrying an All Black, and then ruin everything when Robert refuses to play against South Africa. To Dad, it’s an unfathomable decision. Being involved in the anti-tour movement not only means that Robert is never going to play against the Springboks, but it also puts him off rugby. Through the seventies and eighties Robert simply stops even watching it on television. The possibility of him and Dad sharing a beer and a loathing of the ref fades.
My father’s combative, encouraging us to compete against each other. ‘Your mother,’ he says to me once, when I’m at home with two children under 18 months, ‘would never have had grubby cupboard doors like these.’ Mum smirks at the compliment. Half the senior officials in the New Zealand Rugby Union appear to have worked for him in some small town or other, and speak of him with real affection. But from the age of 15, when I watch a BBC drama on our new television set in which a white South African girl is reclassified as coloured, I know that I cannot be more different from him politically. Wendy and I weep and rage at him as he insists that apartheid is the best, the only possible system for South Africa. That our father can watch the closing scene in that drama—when the girl who no longer knows who she is can’t decide where to sit in a segregated bus shelter—and not be affected by it is unbearable. Where’s our mother on this issue? Never quite comfortable with the validity of her own opinions, keen on that unchallengeable general expert ‘they’, she would have been siding with Dad. Later she is surely quoting him when she describes Trevor Richards from HART as a traitor.
In his seventies Dad has an operation and shares a hospital room with a Sāmoan. ‘You think,’ he says triumphantly, ‘that I’m a racist.’ But the Sāmoan patient’s wife has come over to him as he’s leaving, and tells him that he’s made her husband’s stay in the hospital not only bearable but enjoyable. Of course he has: he’s nothing if not a kind racist.
Our family’s life is destined to be itinerant, with about five years in each place. Our mother wisely says we aren’t to look back to the town we’ve last lived in. We’re not, she says, when we change towns, to recall with wistfulness the perfect place that we have left behind. The children at our new school will despise us if we do. Her advice is easy to take because I’m not really moving. My imagined life remains unchanged. And there’s the joy of a new library.
Last posting is to Levin, where she’s not known, though Dad has two brothers there who are lawyers. My mother comes home from town—Levin’s too big to call a village—and tells us she finally got good service when she revealed that her husband is the new bank manager.
She grows to like moving, becoming unsettled even after retirement when the statutory five years have passed. When that five-year mark approaches, a certain restlessness pervades our lives. There’s no choice involved, no applying for a position. If you have the gall to turn down a move, your career is doomed. There’s a subtly punitive culture which my father accepts. My mother’s more inclined to wonder regretfully why the bank, surely aware that Dad has scholarly daughters, insists on sending us to small towns. But family’s never considered. What matters is Dad’s easy way with farmers.
Each new town gives Mum the opportunity to—modestly—reinvent herself. She’s always a bit of a chameleon, taking on the style of people who impress her. She’s been lonely in Pātea, coming to terms with her rise in status, living above the bank in the main street, after family-based Waitara where we live in a street packed with baby boomers. She likes the style of the farmers’ wives in Hunterville, and a new suite appears with cane sides and solid mahogany arms. She drives to Wellington to have her hair done at Kirks, coming back with it frosted. She looks so young and pretty I feel quite shy of her. She’s 45. She and Dad both like the company of the farmers—sheep farmers, not cow cockies. But wool prices are falling; Dad turns down a farmer. Mum comes home from ‘the village’, crushed. The farmer’s wife has blatantly snubbed her.
I go to a 6th Form seminar at the Māori Battalion Hall in Palmerston North. Keith Sinclair and Bill Oliver speak, both with clearly left-wing agendas. It’s ‘Sweet Molly Malone’ all over again. I’m standing with some girls from Nga Tawa when Prime Minister Keith Holyoake, who’s opened the three-day seminar, wanders over and asks which schools we’re f
rom. My Rangitikei College doesn’t cut the mustard; he turns his back to me and says with coquettish joviality, ‘Ah! Nag Tag!’
I leave home to go to university. We—four girls, mixed flatting not yet invented—answer an ad for a flat in Bourke Street, my first grown-up home. The owner’s a panel beater, his business jammed up against the back of our flat. If we’re home during the day, 2ZA’s rocking on the radio and there’s the cheerful din of a munted bumper being bashed back into shape. There’s a gravel-covered front yard, just enough room for a couple of small cars or motorscooters.
My mother visits, pulling insouciantly onto our front yard with a gentle gravelly skid. She’s brought a Sally Lunn with her. She sits at our Formica table, lights a cigarette, tips her head back to coolly expel the smoke through her nostrils, and with a brisk tap of her polished nail flicks the ash on our floor.
How dare she treat my house like a hotel.
Homesickness now seems so pointless: if home ever existed as you remember it, you can be sure that what you remember is no longer there. Mum and Dad have both died; Robert’s parents too, with only his mother there to see the arrival of great-grandchildren. All of the parents of my friends have gone, several school friends have gone. The freezing works of Taranaki are long gone; only the memory of the stench lingers. All but one of the banks Dad managed are gone. Kirks, where Mum bought her curtains with the BNZ’s chequebook, where she got her hair fashionably frosted, where Michael worked when he first came to Wellington, has gone. Other than in carefully casual photos of royal children, shoes with buttoned straps have gone. Soon, if we don’t get our act together, beaches and cliffs as we know them will have gone. The idealised Britain of the past has not only gone, it possibly only existed in the books of the Blytons and Christies. It exists now in the sentimental, dishonest recall of Brexiteers, who dream of things as they used to be before Britain let in the people whose countries they’d once colonialised. And the builders from Poland.
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