Auto Da Fay

Auto Da Fay Fay Weldon The one and only Fay Weldon tells the story of her turbulent and controversial life.From the 1930s to the 2000s, Fay Weldon has seen and lived our times. As a child in New Zealand, young and poor in London, unmarried mother, wife, lover, playwright, novelist, feminist, anti-feminist, spag-bol-cook, winer-and-diner, there are few waterfronts that she hasn’t covered, few battles she hasn’t fought. An icon to many, a thorn-in-the-flesh to others, she has never failed to excite, madden, or interest. Her life and times cover love, sex, babies, blokes, poverty, work, politics, and not a few Very Famous Names.Moving from New Zealand to London to Scotland, from the UK to points east and west, Weldon has sipped, gulped, and sometimes spat out the things that make us what we are today.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version. Auto Da Fay Fay Weldon Table of Contents Cover Page (#u7da346ee-896f-50ec-b937-4a071fe82b35) Title Page (#ufc1e7d95-5384-5fd0-931f-6eb9542ca170) Pre-name (#u191c2bc7-2c1e-5fd2-9102-092ef366e839) Franklin Fay (#uf3a27cb3-9d2a-50ee-b393-899c0fde2432) The House That Once Was (#u3f1203cc-6c0a-5219-a166-f2361bfdee07) Fay Franklin (#ued83d605-0815-515b-9715-20651392db76) Second Chances (#ube428dee-bc19-5772-b398-bcfb7f7b8f1e) Patterns (#u26642105-e48d-5ac2-972e-e901ea81de92) Missing Mothers (#u1295ba63-91a2-58e7-8e67-7ced902d178d) Cranmer Square (#ub9788c76-aa45-5ba2-a617-293441c0cedc) Via Panama (#u4c7ea73e-536d-5924-a4d3-32be05059bed) Margaret, Jane’nFay (#uf3648ebf-832e-538a-89ca-78f3e20d222d) Convent Girl (#u78e3cfca-21ce-5b35-bfce-3d5371a015ab) Sin and Guilt (#u4b0b3d81-ad98-56b0-8064-144d9ed8702d) Convalescent (#uf39d4b16-80bc-5f7d-adf1-64b240152dee) Jane and Fay (#ua0f9b7f8-e65b-5018-8993-396a3ad458b4) The Doctor’s Daughters (#ue9ef053d-9617-509d-be58-b9a42c75c5ea) Wartime (#u315690a8-9661-5bb0-b6fa-dac3b8644dfc) Playground Narrative (#ua428ada0-4922-5e2c-97f0-e23797f889aa) A Burning Bush in Hagley Park (#u47e487c6-a64e-551b-992c-2bfa47d811e4) Granddaughter (#litres_trial_promo) Home Truths and Great Writers (#litres_trial_promo) Family Scandal (#litres_trial_promo) The Inheritors (#litres_trial_promo) Stepdaughter (#litres_trial_promo) Schoolgirl (#litres_trial_promo) Chicken-Licken (#litres_trial_promo) Refugee (#litres_trial_promo) Immigrant (#litres_trial_promo) Frozen (#litres_trial_promo) Servant Girl (#litres_trial_promo) Scholarship Girl (#litres_trial_promo) Sister-in-law (#litres_trial_promo) Rejected (#litres_trial_promo) Among the Dispossessed (#litres_trial_promo) Orphan (#litres_trial_promo) Student (#litres_trial_promo) Men with Feet of Gold (#litres_trial_promo) In Another Part of Town (#litres_trial_promo) A Sentimental Education (#litres_trial_promo) Dreams, Ghosts, Places and Terrors (#litres_trial_promo) Love, Money and Other Practicalities (#litres_trial_promo) The Real World (#litres_trial_promo) Lost Girl (#litres_trial_promo) Security Risk (#litres_trial_promo) Pregnant (#litres_trial_promo) Flight (#litres_trial_promo) Fay Davies (#litres_trial_promo) New Mothers (#litres_trial_promo) Haunted (#litres_trial_promo) Out of the Frying-pan (#litres_trial_promo) Davies/Bateman (#litres_trial_promo) Mrs Bateman (#litres_trial_promo) Sent Out (#litres_trial_promo) Running Away (#litres_trial_promo) Fay Bateman (#litres_trial_promo) Hopeless in Love (#litres_trial_promo) Work Among the Poets (#litres_trial_promo) Juggling (#litres_trial_promo) Stepping Over the Cook (#litres_trial_promo) Doubt and Destiny (#litres_trial_promo) Love at First Sight (#litres_trial_promo) At Sea (#litres_trial_promo) Moving In (#litres_trial_promo) A Career is Born (#litres_trial_promo) Change (#litres_trial_promo) Clutter (#litres_trial_promo) Making Good (#litres_trial_promo) Fay Weldon (#litres_trial_promo) Fay Weldon (#litres_trial_promo) From the reviews for Auto Da Fay: (#litres_trial_promo) By the same author (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Pre-name (#ulink_9c14d3f7-23df-516e-8103-da08a4e9c4f5) I long for a day of judgment when the plot lines of our lives will be neatly tied, and all puzzles explained, and the meaning of events made clear. We take to fiction, I suppose, because no such thing is going to happen, and at least on the printed page we can observe beginnings, middles and ends, and can find out where morality resides. Real life tends to fade out into entropy, all loose ends, and grief for what should have been, could have been, had things turned out just a little differently. Yet probably the life that was lived was the best that could be done: even, to the outsider, better than could have been expected. This is an attempt to narrate a real life, my own, and to find the pattern within it. The pattern can’t really be completed, of course, until death, when autobiography so rudely turns into biography, but so far as I can do it, I will. There seems to be a general overall pattern in most lives, that nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then all of a sudden everything happens. You are swimming out to sea, you’re rocking gently in the wake of a wave, all seems tranquil, but water is mounting beneath you, unstoppable, and suddenly you are the wave, breaking and crashing, sucking back into a maelstrom – and then all is tranquil again. When I was three months in the womb, in a period no doubt of nothing happening and nothing happening except a general warm all-pervasive dullness, an earthquake in Napier, New Zealand, had my mother Margaret running from the house with my two-year-old sister Jane in her arms. The year was 1931. My mother was twenty-three. Our house stayed upright but the grammar school opposite and the hospital down the road, both made of brick and not New Zealand’s usual wood, collapsed. Everything else seemed made of matchsticks. My mother, in search of my father, one of the town’s few doctors, ran past the grammar school and saw arms and legs sticking out of the rubble. But with a small child in your arms, what can you do for others? Everyone else was running too, some one way, some another: the ground was still shaking and changing and whether you were running into more danger or less how could you be sure? But still she ran. All the water swept out of Napier harbour that day and never came back: the town had to be entirely rebuilt, and became the Art Deco gem it is today. Dr Frank Birkinshaw, my father, was too busy with the injured to take care of his young wife. He was a man of great charm, tall, well built, blue-eyed, adventurous and impetuous – at the time in his mid-thirties. Margaret was small, dark, fastidious and very, very pretty, with high cheekbones, big brown eyes and a gentle manner. The Birkinshaws were recent immigrants from England. He was from the North, had joined the army when he was sixteen, been invalided out of the trenches, and qualified as a doctor in the face of many obstacles. She was a bohemian from the softer South, an intellectual by birth, breeding, and temperament: her father a novelist, her mother a musician. She kept the company of Evelyn Waugh and his gang of friends, she was at home in literary soir?es and in fashionable nightclubs, not in this harsh pioneering land. But she was also clever, determined and tough and failing to find my father, she left word for him, and by nightfall she and Jane had taken refuge in the tented city that went up overnight on the hills above Napier. The town was uninhabitable. The stars had never seemed so bright, my mother said, as if nature were showing off its beauty to make amends for the terrible thing it had just done. But the lice, she added, were very active. I have met others who mention these two things about the tented town, the brightness of the stars and the liveliness of the lice. And they smile and seem to prefer not to go into detail. Perhaps licentiousness reigned: it would not be surprising; the ordinary answer to death is to create new life, and the normal inhibitions of small town life had been suddenly and drastically removed. My mother was rescued from her makeshift tent by a sheep farmer and his wife, grateful patients of my father. They took her and little Jane to their homestead, where there was, my mother said, mutton for breakfast, mutton for dinner and mutton for tea. She helped around the farm, and cooked and ate the mutton with gratitude. I inherit this gift from her, I daresay, in that I do what is under my nose to be done, without too much lamentation. Although the ground shook and trembled for weeks after the initial quake, meals continued to be served in the cookhouse, which had a tall brick chimney. My mother lived in fear of it collapsing and killing everyone inside, but no one would listen to her. She was dismissed as an alarmist. She was right, of course. There was another bad shock. ‘I felt the trembling begin beneath my feet. I snatched Jane from her cot on the veranda and ran for open space but I was flung to the ground by what seemed a wave of dry land. I saw the hedge flick first one way and then the other. And then I watched the chimney fall into the cookhouse and destroy it. I always knew it would. I had already seen it happen.’ As it fell out, dinner had finished just minutes before, and no one was killed, though for a time meals had to be eaten in the open air. I have not inherited my mother’s gift for prophecy: true, as you grow older you may begin to know what is going to happen next, but this can be put down to experience, not second sight. It is not a happy gift to have: because of it, for one thing, my mother never learned to drive, seeing too many scenarios of disaster ahead for comfort, too conscious of what might be going on over the brow of the hill. My father was very different: he was over-confident: he saw to the pleasures of the here-and-now and let the future go hang. I was born more like him than her, in this respect. She prophesied that it would land us both in trouble, and she was right. There was no word from Frank for three months. My mother became alarmed. He knew where she was. It was true that, post-earthquake, communications were near-impossible: civil structures had broken down, there was no working telephone system for a time and no post – but surely in three months he could have managed some kind of message? Perhaps in the second big shock the earth had swallowed him up? Perhaps he’d run off with another woman? Women were always after him. Perhaps he had amnesia, and didn’t remember he was married? Or perhaps this was just the way men were? She had no friends of her own age to talk to. The Birkinshaws had not been long in Napier: she’d been too busy adjusting to pioneer manners to make friends: in London people left calling-cards in the front hall: not here, where luxuries like hall-stands were rare. The truth was hard to avoid: that here she was alone, penniless, on the wrong side of the globe, with no past, no future, just the shaky earth beneath her feet and two children, one born, one yet unborn, and no one to look after them but herself. Pregnant, she must for the time being be dependent upon the comfort of strangers. But once I was born, somehow, she would get us back to London. There were advantages to having no husband – at least you could make your own decisions. In the meanwhile she had better make herself useful and help in the kitchens and try to hold her tongue when her hosts started rebuilding the cookhouse chimney just where it had been before. It did not do for ‘homies’ – immigrants – to put on airs or offer advice. She made mutton stew for the farmhands. Trim and cut the meat, brown in beef dripping – better than mutton fat – add onions and carrots, stew till the meat is on the point of disintegration, thicken with flour and serve. She learned to make the basic cake which accompanied my childhood. The weight of an egg in sugar, the same in butter, a cup of liquid, a cup of flour, and never close the oven with a bang or it sinks. This is the same sensible basic cake which she now has every evening for supper in her retirement home seventy years on. Sometimes, for variety, they put sultanas in it, sometimes not. She looks at it and shakes her head. How can they make something which ought to be so light, so solid? She would write home, of course, though it hurt her pride. Margaret had married, at nineteen, in the face of a great deal of advice to the contrary. A letter could go no faster than the ship which carried it: five or six weeks to get to London – via Panama or Suez – and the same for a reply to come back, and supposing Frank turned up in the meantime? Her parents would send her money if they could, but supposing they couldn’t, all she would succeed in doing was worry them. Because back home in London, needing no earthquake to achieve it, or only those of the emotional kind, the Jepson family too had collapsed in disarray. Her father Edgar, at the age of sixty-nine, had made his mistress Lois pregnant. Her mother Frieda, unable to bear it any longer, had fled the marital home and gone to be with her own mother, Mary Francis Holmes, widowed and in San Francisco. Frieda, now in her early fifties, had no income of her own and lived by her mother’s courtesy, and anything Edgar could afford. It was not much. Edgar was a prolific writer: he wrote seventy-three novels in all – light but popular: Lady Noggs Assists, The Reluctant Footman, The Cuirass of Diamonds and so on – but hard as he worked, his age was beginning to tell against him, public taste was changing, and the financial depression of the times affected everyone. Now he must do the decent thing and marry Lois, and he would have another child to keep. Nor could there be any support, either financial or moral, from my mother’s elder sister Faith, whom Margaret had loved dearly and greatly depended upon during her childhood. Faith had gone ‘mad’, and was now locked up in the lunatic asylum where she was to live out the rest of her short days. Only their big brother Selwyn, then a fashionable young man about town, already making a good living selling articles and short stories, was prosperous enough to offer any help. But it seemed doubtful that he would. He had been very much against Margaret marrying Frank and it was his general principle that if people made their own beds, they should lie in them. I have a photograph of Selwyn at this period. A wraith of cigarette smoke curls from an elegant ivory holder. He does not look the kind of young man to see earthquakes as an excuse for failure. In the Second World War he was to become a major in the SOE, in charge of recruitment, his task to find and send agents to a likely death in occupied France. I think he became kinder then: certainly he was to develop an air of benign consideration, and to be of great help to us, until my mother quarrelled with him over a matter of principle. But as it was, my mother chose to write to Edgar. No sooner had she done so, of course, than through the post came a letter from Frank. He was apologetic: he had been looking for work and hadn’t liked to write until he had something good to report. Now he had. This was the Thirties, the depression had hit New Zealand badly: there was massive unemployment, and the professions were not immune. But he had finally found a job as houseman in the hospital at Palmerston North, a township further inland. True, it was a live-in job, there were no married quarters, and he had had to pretend he was single, but he had found her and Jane lodgings in a nearby boarding-house. My poor mother: out of the frying-pan into the fire. She had her husband back, at least when he could slip out unnoticed from the hospital, and all the energy and exhilaration that accompanied his presence, but it wasn’t enough. She was lonely, traumatized, uncomfortable because I kicked a lot, unable to sleep at night because of the trains which in those days ran through the middle of the town, Jane’s crying and the landlady’s suspicions about her respectability. When a letter finally arrived from Edgar telling her to come back home, no matter what, and enclosing money for the fare, she took ship back to England. She did not stay in London because now Lois was installed in the family home as Edgar’s new wife, and Margaret saw it as an act of disloyalty to her mother to stay there. It would upset Frieda too much when she heard of it, which she would undoubtedly do. Instead my mother went to Frank’s parents, Herbert and Isabel Birkinshaw, then living in Barnt Green, outside Birmingham. And that’s how I happened to be born, on 22 September, 1931, in a nursing home in the village of Alvechurch, Worcestershire, and not in Napier, New Zealand, as everyone had expected. Franklin Fay (#ulink_5f8006da-b5c2-53cb-a636-4e2e8bc6cf11) Before I was so much as named Edgar had drawn up my horoscope. I was never to meet him, other than for a few weeks when I was newly born. He was a Balliol man, a classicist, a collector of Chinese antiquities, something of a dandy, neat, small of build and a favourite of the ladies, as the euphemism went. Like many of the literati of the time, he was greatly interested in the occult; a fashion, or habit, or curse, kick-started by Annie Besant and the Theosophists, side-winding into the Cabbala and diabolism and ending with Aleister Crowley, Number 666, the Beast, with whom the movement expired from its own excesses. Edgar was a good friend of Arthur Machen, writer of ‘stories of horror and evil’ and a member, with W. B. Yeats and Crowley, of the Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society dedicated to cabalistic magic. I do not think Edgar was very serious about any of this. In his autobiography (Memories of a Victorian, written in 1933, and dedicated to ‘his wife’, by whom – poor Frieda! – he must mean Lois) he complains that ‘in these degenerate and sinister days few are at pains to learn how they stand with the stars’ but notes that he himself is pleased to be born under the sign of Libra – ‘for they have fine hair, and a beard less bristly to have than the beards of any of the other children of the universe, and write a more lucid prose’. I was born at 5.30 in the afternoon, when the sun was just moving out of Virgo into Libra, and it was hoped I too would have the gift for lucid prose, though according to Edgar the position of the stars made this marginal. I certainly have fine hair, which has proved very difficult and costly over the years. It was Arthur Machen who introduced my grandfather to the practice of astrology. Edgar taught my mother, my mother taught Jane, and Jane declined to teach me. But my mother had Teach Yourself Astrology on her shelves, in a bright yellow jacket, next to The Cloud of Unknowing and The Writings of St Teresa of Avila, and I have a clear vision of myself, at the age of twelve, sitting on the lawn of the Christchurch Girls’ High School on a sunny day, with an ephemeris of the planets’ places and some blank horoscope forms, successfully drawing up the chart of a school-friend. I did a handful of these for my classmates and then no more. They seemed to offer a fair enough representation of the temperament of my subjects but what was the point, since they themselves were sitting next to me? And casting horoscopes – or even reading palms, another party trick – left me with a strangely unpleasant feeling of remoteness and passivity: as if (a contemporary simile) one had taken too many painkillers in order to get rid of toothache, and one’s liver was affected. In other words I got to feel ‘spooked’ – a teenage word but the only one available – which is the normal punishment for dabbling in the occult, and a sure sign one should stop. I do not watch horror films on my own in the house. To acknowledge the devil is to bring him nearer; best to ignore him. I read Machen’s novel The Hill of Dreams around that time, and still carry in my mind its feeling-tone; and the description of the aura of evil which sweeps one evening over an English landscape which has a terrifying past of cruelty and massacre, centred on a Roman fort. That novel was published in 1907, a year later than Kipling’s collection of stories and poems, Puck of Pook’s Hill, very much on the same theme, but seeing evil and horror where Kipling saw good and the human capacity for renewal. I wish it had been the other way round: it is not right for evil to have the last word. My sister Jane had a ‘blessing’ by Arthur Machen in a frame upon the wall until my mother took it down. She never liked it. The blessing, given to baby Jane on the occasion of her christening, consisted of a sheet of parchment, in the middle of which was a paragraph in tiny writing in a language and script no one recognized. I was probably fortunate I did not receive one too. In my father’s absence my mother named me Franklin. The registrar wrote ‘boy’ in the ‘sex’ column, and then had to cross it out and write ‘girl’. I was to feel vaguely apologetic about this later; my parents had a girl already and would obviously want a boy and I had failed them. My mother – Mrs Bored of Barnt Green, no doubt – had been studying numerology, a way of divining the future through the relationship of names to numbers, while she waited for the birth. Franklin Birkinshaw, she discovered, ‘came out the same’ as William Shakespeare. My being born a girl had left her unprepared. But Franklin was a most auspicious name. And was not ‘lin’ the female diminutive, and was not Frank my father? Franklin still made perfect sense to her, and she hoped to others. Alas, it did not, no doubt least of all to my father when she first showed him the new baby. It was going to be, he reckoned, citing the registrar as evidence, too confusing for others. They took in time to calling me Fay, I hope not after Fay Wray, the screaming heroine of so many horror films, but you never know. If it was, I grew up to be a sunny enough child, if only in defiance, though there were to be King Kongs enough in my life. I was left with the name Franklin on official documents, while being Fay at school. But it was Franklin only at the Christchurch Public Library. They would not recognize Fay, though I pleaded. I had to sign my full name, Franklin Birkinshaw, every time I took out a book, while the Beryls and the Dulcies, the Meryls and the Aprils, looked on askance, and the librarians shook their heads and took pleasure in wondering aloud what kind of parents I must have. Thus I started out in a state of ambivalence. I took out library books as Franklin and read them as Fay. Names are important. I was only to become a writer when I added Weldon to the Fay. Other names had intervened, leaving me stranded, if often entertained, and occasionally scared. But Weldon was the one which best suited. It lengthens with the years, of course. This morning I signed a document under the name Fay Franklin Weldon Fox. With every change of name comes a change in fortune. I never took to numerology, all the same. No change in fortune should be seen as magic, only as a function of altering views of the self. As babies, of course, we are helpless, dependent upon our mothers’ expectations, and in my case these were perhaps too high. Edgar and Selwyn, father and brother, did not want Margaret to go back to New Zealand. It was too far away: the ends of the earth: things had not gone well for her there. If she went back to Frank, who was to say how she would ever afford to get home again? It was not as if her husband was particularly good at keeping even a roof over her head. They were quite right, of course. In March, 1938, shortly before he died, Edgar wrote a brief note to Frieda in California. He has moved house to spare himself the stairs. He gives his new address. ‘There is nothing else in the way of news,’ he writes. ‘Margaret seems stuck in New Zealand, and I wish she wasn’t…’ He hopes that Frieda’s giddiness has stopped. ‘Perhaps the spring will be helpful.’ And then – ‘I have sold some sword guards to a North American and I send you the cheque. You must buy a spring frock with it.’ He finishes, ‘With best love, E.’ It is a poignant letter. He would do better for her if only he could, one reads between the lines, and perhaps even still loves her, only Lois and her pregnancy came between. His obituary in the Telegraph, found yellowed between the pages of his second volume of autobiography, Memories of an Edwardian, reads ‘He was a distinctive craftsman of remarkable personality, whose many friends included practically all the literary men of any note during the past half-century.’ My mother cried when a letter came to us in Christchurch to say he had died, and Jane and I cried to keep her company, though we did not know what we had lost. But my mother, back in 1931, was not to be dissuaded by family advice. It was her duty to go back to her husband; she had promised to go back and besides, she loved him. ‘You have no idea,’ she said to me once, ‘what fun your father was in the early days. What light he brought with him into a room.’ She had not given the new land a fair chance, she told Edgar and Selwyn. New Zealand was a better place to bring up children than foggy, smoky London. And besides, things had changed. Her father, old enough to be great-grandfather not father to a new baby, was with a woman not her mother. The good days were over. And as Margaret embarked on the liner which was to carry her back to her unchancy husband, with little Jane clutching her hand and myself at five weeks held against her, and appreciative porters buzzing around with her trunks and cases, she must have felt a certain relief. At least she would not have to stay around to witness the sorry state to which two generations of Free Love and the Life Force had brought her family. To see the shadow of itself which 120 Adelaide Road, once so full of wit, energy and creativity, music and laughter, had become. The House That Once Was (#ulink_c304b902-1ca3-5db0-8b77-3d1a05cac82d) Terrible things had happened at Adelaide Road in the past, of course they had. It was not in anyone’s nature to play safe – neither in the Jepsons’, nor the Holmeses’. Where there are angels there are devils as well, and sometimes they both take up residence in the one person. At one time Edgar had installed Lois in the house over the way, and Frieda had been summoned in the middle of the night to help her rival through a miscarriage. It would be a rare wife these days who would put up with such a thing, but wives were more helpless then, and besides, the doctrine of Free Love was offered by the bohemians of the time as an excuse for a great deal of hurtful activity. It was in its name that my seventeen-year-old Aunt Faith was seduced by her mother’s brother, to the destruction of her life but with no apparent difference to his. Men are great theorists and when in full pursuit of ends which to them seem noble but are simply not, it’s an unwise woman who allows herself to be persuaded. Body blows can be dealt to family life, and a family seem to reel and recover, but not for long. The next soft tap can bring it tumbling down. But while it stood how well it stood. Houses have heydays, just as people do, and that of 120 Adelaide Road ran for twenty years, from 1910 to 1930. In the good days Edgar would write in his study, Frieda play the piano, the nanny look after the three children, and the cook and maid who lived and worked in the basement in times of plenty, looked after everything else. There were literary parties to give and attend, nightclubs to go to, and the talk was of socialism, Free Love, eugenics, and Fabianism. The household income was erratic, and entirely dependent on the skill of Edgar’s pen. The carpets might stop at the first landing, yesterday’s cold rice pudding turn up in today’s soup (a habit of Frieda’s, my mother would complain) but there was comfort and conversation and good cheer. It was true that at one time Edgar tried to forbid talking at meals, following the example of Joseph Conard, but the attempt was doomed to failure. ‘Joseph Conard was a very bad-tempered man,’ said Frieda, ‘and hated his children. He said it was they who had driven him mad. Edgar could be moody and difficult, but at least he liked his children, and when it came to it, liked to hear what they had to say.’ There were twelve bedrooms in the house and the children could take their pick of them. All were unheated, all contained a bed, a rug, a mirror and a wardrobe and that was all, so it made very little difference which one they chose. They moved on every night, trying not to hurt the feelings of particular rooms by leaving them out. During the four years of World War I, from 1914 to 1918, Londoners went cold and hungry and were bombed by German Zeppelins and that was the end of the cook and the maid. They left to take up war-work, which was better paid than domestic service. ‘I am not surprised,’ my mother said. ‘They lived in and had one afternoon a week off and were at our beck and call night or day.’ Frieda took over the cleaning and cooking and Edgar’s life continued easily enough. He was able to write of that time, in his Memories of an Edwardian, published in 1937, that ‘the war was the chief thing in one’s mind but it made little change in the routine life of a civilian past the age of active service. Bacon and eggs came to my breakfast: beef or mutton to my dinner with quiet punctuality; I did my day’s writing; I went down to Central London to play bridge at the Omega, or poker at the Savage.’ But presently he and his friend the poet Walter de la Mare were seconded to work for the Ministry of Food. Walter was put in charge of sugar rationing and Edgar produced The Win the War Cookery Book and a notable advertising poster, carrying a picture of a loaf of bread and the simple slogan, ‘Eat less bread’. Many years later I tried to persuade the Smirnoff client to run the slogan, ‘Vodka makes you drunker quicker’, but they wouldn’t go with it. Too simple and to the point, though research had shown that people choose vodka rather than other spirits because it does indeed make them drunker quicker. Advertising must be seen to work, but not at the expense of the dignity of the client. Effectiveness and profit come a long way down a client’s list of requirements. In his Memories Edgar speaks of Frieda thus. ‘I fell desperately in love with a lady in London…she had a greater natural charm and a better figure than any other woman I ever met. When we met she had just finished her training for the concert stage and had given one concert in Paris…Her father was Henry Holmes, the only English violist who ever enjoyed a European reputation, and her mother was a daughter of William Gale, a Royal Academician so old he must have been a contemporary of Benjamin West. As a child she had been used to go to tea at Holman Hunt’s.’ In fact Frieda and her sister Sylvia had as young girls sat as models for the painter, having the strong, rather noble features and the plentiful hair the Pre-Raphaelites so admired. I was not to meet my grandmother Frieda until 1941, when after her mother’s death at the age of ninety-nine, she travelled from California to New Zealand, to join Margaret and ‘help with the children’. At her own request she was known to us all as Nona, that being Italian for grandmother. And this is what I shall call her from now on, because this is how I think of her. She too suffered many changes of name: born Frieda Holmes, she became Frieda Jepson on marriage: Susan Jepson at her children’s request (Frieda being too Northern and too bleak for her, according to Edgar), and then she became Nona, because she couldn’t bear – as many women can’t – to be addressed as ‘Granny’ by her descendants. I think she was happiest as Frieda Holmes. My mother was Margaret Jepson, and then Birkinshaw, and that was that. She had a clearer personality than Nona or myself. The run-up from Holmes to Jepson, for my poor grandmother, and no doubt for my great-grandmother, Mary Francis Holmes, was troubled, indeed traumatic. Edgar puts it like this in his Memories of an Edwardian. ‘We had been engaged but a little while when her father grew tired of England. It irked him to be at loggerheads, owing to his advanced views, which were almost those of Shelley, but rather more erotically practical, with the Council of the Royal College of Music, in those days a very stuffy and hypocritical band. It was said of them that they pooled the female students. He betook himself therefore to the city of Berkeley in California, and became its Musical Dictator, and when he died the inhabitants set up his statue in one of their public places.’ Which was all very well for Henry Holmes. Men have one name and stick to it. They go their own way, not having to absorb others on the way. Henry Holmes and Havelock Ellis, the sexologist, had seen fit to circulate a pamphlet extolling the virtues of Free Love and the dangers of standing in the way of the Life Force, and had included the Archbishop of Canterbury in their circulation list. Unfortunately, the Archbishop actually read it. The ensuing scandal was such that Henry had lost his post at the Royal College, and was obliged to flee to California, dragging poor Mary Francis and her teenage twins, Herriot and Hjalmar, with him. Nona, at the time a young concert pianist in Paris, a pupil of Clara Schumann and with one concert already under her belt, smeared by the scandal, was offered no more work. She married Edgar instead. He had to persuade her. ‘She had a theory that we were happier as we were,’ he writes, ‘but I did persuade her.’ I fear she was easily persuaded. She no longer had a home and what alternative was there? So from the age of six to the age of ninety-six she played the piano for between six and eight hours every day, but seldom to an audience. This was the first of the three great blows that the Life Force, that male conceit, was to deal Nona during the course of her life. The second was when her daughter Faith was discovered in love and in bed with her Uncle Hjalmar. Free Love was for the paterfamilias, on the whole, not for the rest of the family. The ensuing mayhem was to drive Faith into a mental home, where she died some fifteen years later. Edgar visited her weekly, but Nona went into a denial so profound that she blotted Faith, poor Faith, out of her consciousness entirely. When she was in her eighties, and I showed her a photograph of her three extraordinarily beautiful children, taken in about 1912, she could still see only two of them. And the third blow from the Life Force was when Edgar made Lois pregnant, and Nona was back to where she began, living with her mother. It was hard for the family to see what Edgar saw in Lois. She was conventional and without any noticeable grace or talent, at least compared to Nona. She was a great complainer, about everything from her marriage, to the weather, to the state of her electric blanket. But perhaps her very difference from Nona was a relief to Edgar. She could look after herself. She made demands. ‘We never quarrelled,’ wrote Edgar of Nona, in 1937, by which time he was married to Lois, and their daughter Jennifer was six, ‘I do not believe that she could quarrel…When we were young we were always hard up, and she had but a poor time of it. She never complained, not once. Sometimes she would look wistfully at a frock or a hat in a shop window, or at a hansom when she was tired, and that wistfulness I do not forget.’ Perhaps that passage was written as a subtle reproach to Lois, as a suggestion that she mend her ways, and do as well in this respect as his first wife. Writers are not above sending coded messages to their spouses in their books. In my teenage I went to the same school as Jennifer, but she was my aunt and the same age as me, though in a junior year, so it seemed prudent for us to ignore each other’s presence, and no one ever knew we were related. We both still live within a mile of Adelaide Road, and these days enjoy a cordial relationship. Nona’s home collapsed when she was eighteen, thanks to her father Henry’s behaviour, and so, homeless, she married Edgar. Her daughter Margaret’s home collapsed when she was eighteen, thanks to her father Edgar’s behaviour, and so, homeless, she married Frank. My mother collapsed her own house the month I turned eighteen, and left me homeless, and had there been a suitor around I’m sure I would have married him, but there wasn’t. I just hung around for a couple of years, rendered myself pregnant and thereby drew my mother back to me, and Jane did the same. I made a real effort to break the run of compulsive behaviour – doing unto others as you have been done – and desist from rendering my own children homeless just at the wrong moment, but did not altogether succeed. Jane did it to hers by dying. The Life Force, once it’s set going, runs through families for generations, and causes terrible havoc. ‘I blame Arthur Machen,’ said Nona to me one day. ‘He cast too many spells.’ But I daresay Freud could have produced a more rational answer, and Arthur Machen frightened himself by his own necromancy, my mother said, and though he never lost his allegiance to the Old Gods of his native Wales, concluded that they had lost their powers in the new world, and there was no point in dabbling. My mother was not sent to school. That is to say when she was five they tried to take her and she refused. Her father came downstairs from his study wearing his silk dressing-gown and smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder, and said, ‘What can be the matter with little Margaret. She’s making such a noise!’ ‘She won’t go to school,’ Nona said. ‘Do you not want to go to school?’ Edgar asked his daughter. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Then don’t send her,’ he said and turned and went up the stairs again. And that was the end of my mother’s formal education, apart from a couple of terms at the Slade School of Art when she was fifteen. She told me she knew at the time it was a major life decision and she had chosen wrongly. Her failure to go to school made her over-respectful of authority, I think, and she never felt permitted to lie when she filled in a form, though brave enough in other respects, and she never learned to deal with what she didn’t like: all the important things one learns at school. They tried her again at the age of nine, but after a week of lessons she refused to go any more. She already knew everything they were trying to teach her. Edgar’s account of it runs thus: ‘My daughter Margaret at the age of nine refused to go to school because it bored her, and it proved to be the wise course. Neither Susan or I [alas, for the poor forgotten Frieda, now subsumed into wife and mother ‘Susan’] could conceive of any reason why she should go to school, and we raised no objection to her staying away from it. I do not know whether she regrets it…but she writes better if gloomier novels than Selwyn or I, both of whom suffered seven years’ schooling apiece, and if you doubt my judgement, read her Via Panama.’ In the three weeks after my birth, after Margaret had succumbed and gone to stay at Adelaide Road with her father and her new stepmother, and before she took the ship back to my father, Edgar and she managed to write a book between them, Miss Amagee in Africa. ‘I shouldn’t have gone to stay with them,’ my mother said later. ‘It hurt Nona very much.’ But her own attitude to her mother was ambiguous. Her sister Faith had been betrayed by Nona, she sometimes hinted that Nona had been too fond of Frank: the clamour for emotional justice and the need to love battled it out. Miss Amagee in Africa, of course, shows no sign of emotional stress: it is a stirring adventure tale about a brave American woman outfacing lions in Africa, written on the hoof, as it were, with wonderful descriptions of a landscape which neither writer had ever seen. I can only imagine that Lois was left to look after Jane and myself, and Jennifer too, while Edgar and Margaret worked. If so much was to get written in so short a time, someone had to look after the children. And then it was time for Margaret to go home, though no one wanted her to go – except, I daresay, Lois. Frank was waiting impatiently for his wife and children to return. He had found a practice in the South Island, inland from Christchurch, at a township called Amberley, in the heart of the flat wheatlands of the Canterbury Plain. It was going to be all right, he assured her in his letter. He was starting a radio station. And he was standing for parliament as the socialist candidate. Fay Franklin (#ulink_3c4d9bc1-87d0-516d-9f97-44e45ac0ce0b) Of Amberley, I remember the hot wind blowing off the mountains, day after day, and a bare flat landscape, and a lot of sheep there was no escaping. I remember being dressed up as Little Miss Bo Peep for a fancy-dress party. I remember the creaking of the windmill which pumped our water, and the hot dust beneath the macrocarpa hedge which you had to wriggle through to get to play with the children next door. I remember the milk being warm when it came from the cow, and wishing it wasn’t. I remember the day I learned to read – I was three – and the way the letters suddenly made sense, and the excitement of that. I remember thinking now I could catch up with Jane but of course I never could. I remember my father coming home with a big new gold car, and how proud he was of it. It was a Voisin, imported from France; it had a starting handle and running boards on which we were allowed to stand. It was a magic car: I was sure it could fly, one day it would take off into the sky. But my father had a trick which I hated: he would stop the car in the middle of a dry river bed and tell us how we had to beware them, how people would camp the night in them, and be swept away in the darkness as the flood swept down from the melting mountain snows. I was frightened, he knew I was frightened, why did he want to make it worse? Even today I still get panicky when driven through even the shallowest ford in the soft English countryside. ‘Can’t we go the long way round?’ I plead, but we never can. My experience of men in cars has always been that if you don’t want them to do something, they will. It is when they are behind a wheel that they most fear the control of women and children. I remember my mother turning cartwheels on the lawn, white legs flashing, short skirt whirling, and being overwhelmed with admiration. None of my friends’ mothers turned cartwheels. They wore pinnies and made apple pies. We were different. I became aware that we were homies. We came from a far-off place called England, and didn’t really belong here. This made you both better and worse, before you even began. Sometimes people didn’t even understand what you said. Then you felt stupid. You wanted to speak like your friends, but your mother wanted you to speak as she did and was quite cross when you didn’t. You wanted to say ‘yiss’ but she wanted you to say ‘yes’. So you learned to speak two different languages, one for home, and the other for your friends. The picture books came from England, though, and showed children and their parents who were more like you than the other families around. You could read the stories to your friends and they liked that. People were like the pages of books. There were more and more of them, a page behind every page, and everyone with something new to say, and you never wanted it to stop. In retrospect it is clear that my father took to life in the outback with enthusiasm, my mother decidedly less so. She had escaped the emotional stress of her family circumstances but at some cost, though at least there weren’t any earthquakes down here in the South. The earth stayed steady beneath her feet and my father and she did indeed have a radio station to play with, or at least several hours’ a week broadcasting time. My mother wrote radio plays, and even in these benighted parts found people enough to perform them, and an appreciative audience, and made friends: my father lectured on socialism and lost quite a few. New Zealand was an advanced country in social terms – first in the world with votes for women, first with an embryo national health service – and always, like my father, hungry for improvement, but actual socialism was viewed askance, particularly in rural areas. My father was tireless and energetic: he wrote a detective serial for the local newspaper which went on for more than a hundred episodes. He wanted to stop but he couldn’t because he didn’t know who had done the murder. He was like a hotel guest who wants to leave but can’t because he has no money to pay the bill. The longer he stays the worse things get. In the end my father offered a five-pound prize for anyone who could solve the puzzle, and someone turned up who did. There is always a reader out there who knows better than the writer, and just as well. In my father’s footsteps, I wrote a serial for a woman’s magazine in the Eighties: The Hearts and Lives of Men. It was meant to go on for twelve episodes but ran for forty-nine before the editor called enough, other writers wanted their space on the page back. I was happy to finish: I had already had to divorce and remarry my hero and heroine once so that the eventual ending would stay feasible. To do it again would be absurd. The serial was about a lost child, little Nell, who must in the end be reunited with her parents and bring them to their senses. This endeavour went on for nearly a year. A courier would call at the door at one o’clock every Thursday to collect the latest instalment, which I had most likely written on the train that morning. In those days I lived in Somerset but had an office in London. I marvelled at how trusting the editor was: had there been a train strike, had I been ill, he would not have been able to collect his instalment. I think he had a vague idea that the story was already written and all I was doing was cutting it up into bits and handing it to him section by section, out of meanness. Even editors don’t seem to understand the make-it-up-as-you-go-along school of writing which I inhabit. But I am responsible in my own way: I couldn’t be ill or have a holiday for forty-nine weeks, and I wasn’t and didn’t. The episodes, restructured, were eventually published in novel form, and when it was I was quite pleased with it, though I missed the ‘story so far’ sections, which I had loved writing. As you move through a story it is interesting to see how your own view of it changes, and how you see fit to describe those who inhabit it. But the central premise of the story held, that like calls to like and most of us are given second chances, and that virtue is more often rewarded than we think. Second Chances (#ulink_49c6b5dd-8749-5e2d-a573-2bdf394d7f3c) New Zealand, for my father, was a second chance, and perhaps that was why he took to the new land with such joyful ease. Its very air suited him. He had contracted rheumatic fever in the trenches of World War I and nearly died from it. The smogs and fogs of London were no good for him. He had run away from home in 1914 to join the army, in response to Lord Kitchener’s pointing finger and ‘Your country needs you!’ He was sixteen but pretended to be eighteen. In those days it was possible to lie about your age: now we are all so closely monitored and registered it is near-impossible. Life is much duller as a consequence. One’s instinct is to hide from the state. I was always taken aback by the way schools asked to see my children’s birth certificates – supposing there was something there that I wanted them not to know? What business of theirs was my offspring’s parentage? Bad enough that school was compulsory – one could overlook that, because the children evidently so badly wanted to go – but what did they hope to find out? And where was I meant to find these bits of paper anyway, four or five years after the birth? As it happened I managed on all four occasions to fail to provide the required documentation, and no one ever followed up the initial request, but just assumed the children had the names and ages they said they had. My father came from yeoman stock: his mother Isabel was a Garbutt, from a family who had farmed sheep in Northumbria for generations. His father Herbert was a Henderson on his mother’s side: the family had been ‘in wool’ for as long as anyone could remember, but had diversified into carpets, and were ‘in trade’ which was not quite the thing. The Garbutts, who now included bishops among their ranks, saw Isabel as a cut above Herbert. He was spoken of as a bully, and Isabel as a saint for putting up with him. And she was indeed the sweetest, gentlest thing. My half-sister Barbara takes after her, and her daughter Naomi, though sweetness seems to have by-passed the rest of us, become too diluted in the genes. On the one occasion I met Herbert, in 1946, he seemed perfectly pleasant and gave me half-a-crown so I will not add to the slurs. But he did seem to be anxious that his four children would not succeed, and almost to spite him, they all did. He took Frank away from St Edward’s Grammar School in Birmingham and apprenticed him to an engineer, when that was what he specifically didn’t want to be. Sheona, the oldest, was given away in infancy to be brought up by an aunt, and grew up to marry her cousin, an eye surgeon, and to became a poet. For fifty years, until her death in her late Nineties, a poem by Sheona Lodge, delicate and lyrical, appeared regularly in the American Fly Fisher’s Journal. The second daughter, Mary, was active in politics, married Michael Stewart, later to be Foreign Secretary in Harold Wilson’s government, and both ended up on the Labour benches in the House of Lords. Bill became a much respected dentist in the Midlands: once mysteriously married to someone who ‘ran off’, and whose name he would not have mentioned in the house. That was not so unusual a response at the time; the world was full of things too painful to be mentioned, because there was nothing to be done about them. Infidelity, illegitimate children, insanity, cancer – it seemed impolite to God to mention them, pointing the finger because he had failed to make a perfect universe. As cures became available, of course, one by one, they could be talked about, and now are, almost to exhaustion, as if we are making up for lost time. So my father ran away from his apprenticeship and my not very pleasant grandfather, and was sent to the front line in France, but within the year was invalided out of the mud and slime of the trenches. Next he was posted to Arabia, where the air was all too dry. But he became T. E. Lawrence’s driver: he had a Rolls-Royce to play with, adapted to desert use and armed with a machine gun, which he coaxed up and down impossible sand hills. I think he enjoyed himself very much. He once showed me a battered leather-bound copy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, inscribed to him by Lawrence himself. He told me he was captured by Bedouin but saved himself by offering them jam labels, which he told them was money and they believed him. It just so happened that he collected jam labels, there being lots to collect in a desert filled with soldiery who had to eat. They blew about the sand hills. This part of The War he talked about: he would never speak about the trenches. Perhaps the time spent there was too traumatic: too full of exploding bodies for words to encompass. It made him neurotic. Those who have been soldiers often are: from time to time they behave compulsively. Those who are damaged feel the need to pass it on: those who are hardened try to harden others. Soldiers who emerge from wars are often cheery enough: they have learned the art of living in the present: they’re good at that – today’s friend can be tomorrow’s corpse. Just sometimes they shake and shiver and are cruel to others, and want them to suffer too. Ron Weldon, my second husband, was an ex-soldier, like so many of the generation after my father’s. He had spent time clearing bloated bodies from streams in Burma: he didn’t mention this for a good twenty-five years into the marriage, when he started getting nightmares and handing them on. After the Armistice Frank went to London and with the aid of demob money and contributions from his maiden aunts in Newcastle, studied medicine at University College Hospital. In 1922 he visited a nightclub and there met and charmed Edgar and Susan Jepson, who took him under their wing. Before long he was sleeping on their sofa, and had begun his assiduous courtship of their daughter Margaret, then a girl of sixteen. Doors opened to my father. It was a life he had not known before. Those who have a natural and spontaneous response to books, paintings, music and the life of the mind are lucky: the gift of their enthusiasm strikes through class barriers: they find mentors. ‘He was rather rough at the time,’ my mother said of him. ‘He’d been a soldier for years: he’d had no education. He swore dreadfully. He had no money: he slept on other people’s floors and ended up on ours. His aunts came down to visit him and threw up their hands in horror at what they found.’ Perhaps the gift for standing in front of the right door runs in families? When Edgar gravitated to Nona, back in the 1890s, a new world opened up for him, and it suited him down to the ground. Here was the gossipy bohemia of the day: forget the waspish writers and intellectuals, here were painters and musicians, and another kind of delinquency. ‘Through Frieda,’ he wrote in his Memories, ‘I came into the Bloomsbury Group of the day.’ He picked up the ball and ran with it. Thirty years later Frank was to find himself in the same situation. All he had to date was the copy of Romeo and Juliet from T. E. Lawrence; now Edgar and Nona offered him the culture he was starved of, and he realized he had finally come home. When that home collapsed, he carried the daughter off as a trophy. Another generation on and history repeats itself. My mother’s world, by the virtue of war, divorce, poverty and circumstance had shrunk to subsistence level, and my world with it. Forget the arts and the life of the mind, what about the rent? But go to a party one night, just as Frank had been to a nightclub, and all of a sudden, there you are, back in your natural place: in my case Primrose Hill in the Sixties, the abode of the writers and painters. Go down to the launderette and run into the kind of people who hung out in these parts. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Patrick Caulfield, Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, Adrian Mitchell, R. D. Laing and the George Mellys, Tom Maschler the publisher, Mel Calman and Michael Ffolkes, cartoonists, Alan Sharp and Lukas Heller, screenwriters, ANC activists by the handful, Bernice Rubens and David Mercer, and down in Gloucester Crescent Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller, and as many names as you care to drop, rising young artists and writers all. And the parties we gave were many and wild, and not so different from those at Adelaide Road, except the beer was made in the bath, and the bath was lidded and in the kitchen, and I don’t think Nona would have stood for that. With a permanent place in the lover’s bed, comes a permanent place in their circle. Actual marriage cements it. Patterns (#ulink_a916867a-b08d-57a2-99bf-cb2aacb9749d) I am very conscious of the patterns our lives make: of interconnecting cogs and wheels, of coincidence which is no coincidence but fate, of the quiet sources of our energy. All things connect. The lost wedding ring turns up on the day of the divorce; the person you happen to sit next to on the Tube happens to be your new boss. Destiny intervenes. We assume we are playing the lead, but turn out to be bit-part players in someone else’s drama. Nothing is without result. Even the maiden aunts, Madge and Augusta, who helped Frank become a doctor, were major players in his story, for all the quiet seclusion of their lives. They lived in Newcastle, in a house in which almost nothing had changed since the beginning of the century. Antimacassars protected the armchairs: oil lamps provided the only lighting. In my student days, when I would hitchhike down from St Andrews in Scotland to St Ives in Cornwall, their house made a useful stopping-off point. The Aunts, who by then were in their nineties, provided a fine refuge from the hunger and tribulations of the open road, especially in winter time. Their ancient maid May lived with them. Most social inequalities had been evened out by the passage of the years, but not all. They would share the warmth of the fire but if more coal were needed it would be May who went to fetch it, and she was the one who got up to make the tea, though she was even more doddery than they. There would be a candle to light you to the unheated spare room, where the bed was so high you had to climb up into it. A flowered china chamber pot was placed beneath it. Springs would creak if you moved: the mattress sagged. The sheets were linen and cold, and the pillow was stiff, but the weight of the many blankets was reassuring. After you had been a little while in the bed it would begin to steam with damp, which was oddly pleasant. In the morning ice crystals would have formed on the inside of the windows. You would put bare feet out onto cold lino, dress as fast as you could and make for the kitchen, where a purple-knuckled May would be making breakfast. The tea would be hot and sweet. The aunts would give you some money to help you on your way, and wave goodbye from the door as you set out on the road, and you would worry that this was the last time you would ever see them. It seemed a miracle that they existed at all: this was the stuff of fairy-stories, as if they came into existence only to facilitate your journey. When you ceased to see them, they would cease to be. Missing Mothers (#ulink_efbce4d1-8fc9-5e48-930e-9192a4d70bf5) It was when we left Amberley and moved to Christchurch that things fell apart. It could not have been expected. Christchurch was, and still is, a quiet, orderly town, the most English of all the New Zealand cities, the respectable face of the original New Zealand Company, which sold off land it did not own to the pioneers. The streets are laid out in rectangles around a central cathedral square, and rather grudging allowances made for the unreasonable curve of the green-banked River Avon. The flat Canterbury plains stretch off to the west to meet the white peaks of the Southern Alps: and to the north, neatly separated off by a soft ridge of hills, is the port of Lyttelton, in what was once a volcanic crater. But all that natural violence and upheaval was long, long ago. In Amberley we were part of the old original land: the ground was soft beneath bare feet: in Christchurch people wore hats and gloves to go shopping. The sky felt too huge, arched over a city which did not take up enough room. The sense that we were perched at the end of the world, that real life went on somewhere else was very great. Even I felt it, and I was only four, nearly five. My father was to set up his practice in a good part of town. We had a house which was not a bungalow. It had a staircase, and you could look out onto the trams in the front of the house, and a garden with walnut trees and a washing-line at the back. I had a theory that I could fly like an angel and had to be stopped from jumping from the top windows. And I don’t know why it happened, or what exactly the move to the town precipitated, but I began to be conscious of a kind of trouble that ran through the house. I would wake in the night to sounds of discord. Jane frowned a lot. One day my mother put on her hat and gloves to go shopping and came back crying, with an empty basket. We owed money and it was my father’s fault. She’d had no idea. The King (that was my father) was in his counting house, Counting out his money. (But there wasn’t enough of it) The Queen (that was my mother) was in the parlour Eating bread and honey. (If she was lucky) The maid was in the garden, Hanging out the clothes, Along came a blackbird and pecked off her nose. The words haunted me. It seemed all too possible. Jane and I had a nursemaid who hung out the clothes and I beseeched her to be careful. Sudden and disagreeable things could happen. I knew that by now. Had we not moved from Amberley to Christchurch? And were there not blackbirds in the walnut tree? I had seen them. I met her fifty years on when I was visiting New Zealand, and I was glad to see she still had her nose. She remembered me more clearly than I remembered her. She said I’d say the oddest things. She’d offered to tell me a story and I said, ‘How can you? You haven’t got a book.’ She said she’d make the story up in her head, and I’d replied, ‘Then your head must be made of paper.’ The sudden and disagreeable things might have had something to do with Ina. Ina was the daughter of my mother’s friend Winifred. Winifred had come to New Zealand as an immigrant foundling at the age of sixteen and been apprenticed to a milliner. She’d met and married a man forty years older than herself, on the understanding that she would nurse him through his terminal illness. This she had done, conceiving Ina on the way. Now she was free, with her husband’s money in the bank. She was plain, practical and very kind. Her daughter Ina was always a trouble to her: beautiful, nervy, arty and spendthrift, running up debts her mother had to pay. She had a long neck and often wore a turban, and when my father read Aristophanes to us, and in one of the plays there was a bird called a Hoopoe, I thought he was probably describing Ina. She would turn up quite a lot at the house and when she did my mother would look baleful. But nobody, surely, could compete with my beautiful mother? She was so special. She wrote a masque: I was not sure how that could be done, but whatever it was everyone dressed up in flowing robes and did what she told them to do. She spoke from the balcony of the Bishop’s Palace, which looked over green lawns and the River Avon, and everyone clapped. Then there was strawberries for tea. I was very proud of her. But I was proud of my father too. He took Jane and me to Hagley Park, to watch a man with a parachute drift out of the sky. The world was full of marvels. But the marvels and the nightmares had begun to run side by side, racing to see which would win. There was a night of bangings and crashings, shrieks and slamming doors, during the course of which I was told to go back to bed. In the morning my mother was not there to get me up. My father did it instead and said she’d gone home, for a time. That was strange. Surely where someone lived was their home? On further enquiry home turned out to be another country, up at the top to the right on a page of the atlas. Home was England. We came from England which was why we were called homies. But if the world was round like an orange, as people tried to tell me, why was it flat on the map? The orange theory did not make sense. Half the people in the world would be going round upside-down if it were true. I did not much like being tucked away at the bottom of the flat page, so far from anywhere else, tiny little lengths of red, set in a pale blue sea, so far from my mother on her way to the top of the page, but it was better than being on some huge orange. And at least now I had my father to myself. But why had she gone and when would she be back? I couldn’t get much sense out of Jane: all anyone said, including her, was that I was too young to understand. Without my mother in it, the house seemed curiously light and free, as if we could all now just have a good time. But within days, my father, Jane and I had moved out of the house, said goodbye to our nursemaid, and were living in a private hotel near Cranmer Square. Cranmer Square (#ulink_360ff732-885a-5004-b0d5-2175c28588a4) Cranmer Square was not actually a square but an oblong, its grass intersected by paths in the pattern of the Union Jack. In this city of boxy bungalows set in neat gardens it seemed to me a significant place, if sloppily named. Nearly all the buildings which lined it had stairs: that is to say they were more than one storey high. There was the Girls’ High School at the north end, and St Margaret’s to the west and the Normal School to the south. In between were boarding-houses and hotels. On wet days, when heavy rain drummed on the ground and made the corrugated-iron roofs rattle, slugs and snails would come out in enormous number to cover the stripes of the Union Jack, making walking hazardous. The crack of a snail beneath the shoe or the sight of a squashed worm strikes horror into the little-girl heart. There were few wet days, of course: winter in Christchurch was an eight-week affair and then it was over. The nor’wester was a worse affliction; wake up to see the arch of cloud in a heavy sky, and know that within hours the hard, hot, strong wind would get up and blow for days, making everyone cross and tired. Our winter was England’s summer: that was strange. In the conservatory of the private hotel which was now our home the apples and the oranges would come out as my father and his friends tried to prove to me that the earth was round, not flat, and circled the sun, like this, and the moon went round the earth, like that, and why night happened and so on. It still did not seem convincing. As well claim we were all living in the fruit bowl. Jane and I shared a high damp steamy bed in the front ground-floor room. The bedspread was made of bright green artificial silk which was chilly and slippery to the touch. I cried a little on the first night we slept in it, and was proud of Jane, who didn’t cry at all. There wasn’t a pot under the bed and we didn’t know where the lavatory was, so that night Jane wee-ed on the round Chinese carpet. She said it was their fault, not hers, and I wondered as I have often wondered all my life, who ‘they’ were. I didn’t like to witness her desperation, but marvelled at her pride and determination. We ate our meals in the dining room with the other guests. I could see there were advantages to this situation. There was no one to fuss about washing your hands or combing your hair or worrying what you were doing. If there was anything you didn’t know Jane probably would, and at least in an emergency she could be relied upon to tell you. My father took much more notice of us now my mother was out of the way, and I resolved to look after him properly, and make him happier than she had. I would never go off and leave him the way she did: I could see I was too small to take her place but I would do my best. But my father had other ideas. I was not allowed into his bed, for one thing. Ina came in and out, wearing her absurd silk turbans and heavy strings of wooden beads, hooting and chirping away. Rita Angus the painter would drift palely in, look sad and drift out again. Then there was Jean Stephenson and Helen Shaw. Jean was thin and clever and edited the New Zealand Listener. How on earth did you edit a person and what was he listening for, I wondered. It sounded very important, like being Prime Minister. Helen was rounded and creamy skinned: I thought she was like Helen of Troy, in the Walter de la Mare poem my mother used to murmur. Helen of Troy was beautiful, As all the flowers of May: Her loveliness from the walls looked down, Over the towers of Troy town, Hundreds of miles away. But my mother was beginning to feel very far away, and wherever she was, had taken herself there without much reference to me. Why should I care? Jane and I were both going to St Margaret’s school now. We wore green uniforms and panama hats. I liked school, but could wish for more from home. It wasn’t the kind that other children had. Other children didn’t live in hotels and had a mother to collect them: we had a different lady friend to do it practically every day. They all seemed to want us to like them, mind you, and were forever giving us things. At Easter I was given so much chocolate I was sick. I asked for a car for my birthday and was given a toy one, not a real one, and then they wondered why I was crying: if I’d had a proper mother she could have explained. Why on earth would I want a toy car? I was a girl. I was Fay. No one ever called me Franklin now. Rita Angus, or Rita Cook, as we knew her, one of my father’s friends, took it into her head to paint a portrait of Jane and myself. Rita was to be reckoned as one of New Zealand’s finest painters, but at the time was seen as a rather eccentric dabbler in the arts. The portrait now hangs in New Zealand’s National Gallery. We were put in our matching check dresses and told to sit still. Jane managed this very well but I couldn’t. I kept running off to get a drink of water. I somehow lost the belt of my green cardigan and Rita had to paint it out. She sat our dolls in a row above us but dressed them up first in a rather formal way which in my opinion didn’t suit their personalities at all. She put in some of the hotel teacups, and painted them to give us a rest from sitting still. She was very nice, though we didn’t think we looked at all the way she had painted us. We were more real and lasting on the canvas than we were in real life. But we were very polite. We knew instinctively from an early age that the artist’s sensibilities are to be protected, lest they give up altogether and walk off into the night. I got up one morning and my legs wouldn’t work. I had poliomyelitis, or infantile paralysis. It could kill you or lame you: I knew about that. Everyone was terrified of it all over the map, or up and down the orange. I was a map person, Jane was an orange person. I could see by now that she was right but I wasn’t going to admit it. I was given a bed in the conservatory and Jane wasn’t allowed to come near me. The waitress would put my food down and run away. My father cried, but I knew it was all right: he was the best doctor in the world and would see to it. And nothing bad could happen to me: fate was on my side. And so it was. Today, when I’m tired my right ankle tends to turn my foot in a little, but that’s all. There was some talk at the time about callipers, which happily soon went away. By now Jane and I were so close I hardly noticed any difference between her and me. We seemed one body. Even our names were bracketed together. We were called Jane’nFay. My father was standing for parliament: I watched to see if he stood up more than usual but no, he sat down just as much as ever. What were they all talking about? One day at school, as I lay sleepless on my mat on the floor, a woman I didn’t know bent over me. It was afternoon-nap time, a torment if ever there was one. You had to lie in rows on the floor for what seemed forever, when all you wanted to do was run about. This still quietness, this ‘rest’, seemed such a waste of life. The stranger wore a scarlet pillbox hat with a little black veil, so her face seemed covered with small black dots. She kissed me and said she was my mother and I was to get up now. That was a relief. Jane confirmed that she was who she said she was and she took us out of school for the day. I asked her what her name was and she said it was Margaret. I seemed to remember that. We sat in Cranmer Square for a bit and I told her about the worms. She said that at home it had rained a lot. I asked her whether the ship had had to climb up the sea to get to the equator, and she said no, and dropped a stone and explained the theory of gravity. Jane said she knew that already. Then my mother took us back to the private hotel but did not stay. Nor did my father ask her to. It was amazing how the lady friends seemed to melt away, and how quiet everything suddenly was. Via Panama (#ulink_832c2394-d77b-552d-9f69-7374b15ac7d1) In his Memories Edgar remarks that my mother was a better writer than either he or Selwyn, and that her novel Via Panama was proof of it. He complained that it was gloomy, and it is perhaps not surprising if it was. It was written on her journey back to Christchurch, whence she had fled so impetuously from Frank’s infidelities and his embarrassing failure to keep out of debt. She had been trying to establish a life for herself in London, and had found a flat and, miraculously, a job on the News Chronicle as a journalist. This would pay just about enough to enable her to support herself and her two daughters. She would return to New Zealand to fetch us as soon as she had got the money together. The first letter she received from Frank said that if she did not come back at once he would take Jane’nFay to South America and she would never see us again. Rightly, she did not believe him. She did not reply. But his second letter was brief and to the point. Fay had polio and Margaret must come home at once before it was ‘too late’. Overwhelmed by anxiety and guilt, she took the next boat home, giving up both the flat and her job. Trapped on shipboard for six weeks, without news of her younger daughter, not knowing what she would find when she disembarked, she spent the time writing a novel. Via Panama was about the shipboard voyage out; and contained a thinly disguised portrait of my father, whom she clearly still loved, and of her fellow-passengers, mostly New Zealanders, whom she affected to despise for their drunken and provincial ways. The novel was published both in England and the US to critical acclaim – and for a thirty-year-old young woman it was a triumph – but when it reached New Zealand there was uproar. She had insulted her hosts: she was an ingrate, the worst kind of homie. She put on airs: she thought herself too good for New Zealand. She was not Public Enemy Number One – that role was preserved for my father, who was standing for election as a socialist candidate – but she was Public Enemy Number Two. Frank lost the election because of Via Panama – or so he believed – and my mother was so shaken and upset by its reception that she resolved – as her father had once done before her – never to write a ‘serious’ book again. From henceforth she would write only to entertain. (Edgar’s first novel, The Passion for Romance, written when he was at Oxford, had been ‘serious’, had taken him three years to write and earned him only ?6.19s. It was on financial grounds that he came to the same decision. Or so he said. Forget art, forget literature, forget enlightening his readers as to the ways of the world, and the state of their souls, the rent must be paid.) In my mother’s footsteps, some forty years later, I was to write a television play about an English husband going home with his new second wife to the New Zealand outback – affectionately known as the boondocks – to an uneasy welcome which included Pavlova cake and separate beds. That got me into trouble, too. I was accused of stereotyping New Zealand women, portraying them as backward in their attitudes, cake bakers all. Useless to say but I’m not writing documentary, I am under no obligation to produce a fair and balanced view, this is a particular story about particular people – such arguments never convince those predisposed to take offence. But I was older than my mother was when she wrote Via Panama, and tougher, I daresay, and others came to my defence and I was soon forgiven. But for my poor mother, alone and far from home, the uproar was definitive. Had she been to school, I daresay, she would have been better able to cope. For a time my mother was able to support us, just about, by her pen. Over the next few years, under the name Pearl Bellairs or Bentley Ridge, she was to write a run of romantic serials – Velvet and Steel, The Cups of Alexander – which were published in London by Herbert Jenkins, then Edgar’s publisher. Her editor wrote in enthusiasm to say she had readers queuing up for them in the bookstores as they came out. She’d write by hand in bed, in tiny script, with a fountain pen; and then get up and type it all out on a clattery typewriter. My contribution was to pick out the ink which clogged up the keys. I used a pin. The o’s and the e’s, the most frequent of the letters in the alphabet closely followed by the t’s, were always most in need of cleaning. I loved doing it. Typescripts, in the days of the typewriter, always had an individuality of their own. Microsoft produces a clean, uniform print, for which we should be grateful, but something’s lost as something’s gained. My mother borrowed the name Pearl Bellairs from the vapid romantic novelist in Aldous Huxley’s novel Crome Yellow – she was saying, I suppose, to anyone who might happen to make the connection: ‘I can do better than this, I am worth more than this, it’s just I have to make a living.’ She worried greatly about the morality of writing romance: she thought it was wrong to put false ideas into the heads of young women: better that they understood that marriage was not necessarily a happy end, and that poor helpless girl catches strong handsome rich man was simply not the way the world went. And she had a point: Velvet and Steel – with its overtones of Pride and Prejudice – the helpless shop girl wooed by her wealthy employer, bringing him to heel by virtue of charm, wit and personality, would today, alas, read as a sorry case of sexual harassment. Then the war came, and forget principle, the sea-lanes became impassable. Ships were torpedoed, manuscripts went down with everything else: there was a shortage of paper, and none to be spared for frivolities like fiction: that was the end of that, for four or five years. My mother took advantage of the impossibility of earning a living from these problematic works, and started what she called her magnum opus: a book of philosophy, which dealt with the relationship between morality and aesthetics. She did not type this out: it remained in handwriting: thousands of overwritten pages, which would get in a hopeless muddle on the kitchen table. I wished she would not; I knew even when small how important it was to keep papers collated and in moderate order. The eighty per cent behind you had to be more or less finished and complete, if it was not to distract you and make you restless as you moved ahead into the unknown. What you were working on currently required chaos, what was behind must be orderly, or you would be overwhelmed by confusion. After the war, my mother said to me, when she thought once again of aspiring to be a ‘proper’ writer, styles of writing had changed. Novels ceased to be discursive, writers could not hide behind their anonymity; politics and social comment began to enter in. The novel was becoming a confessional, and readers demanded that the writer speak the truth as he or she knew it, and my mother’s truths were difficult enough to live through, she said, let alone writing about them as well. Margaret, Jane’nFay (#ulink_5367514a-3e48-5bc3-9378-50354569a44d) There were various to-ings and fro-ings between my parents and then it was Frank’s turn to walk off into the mist. This was a literal mist, more than just the usual cloud of childhood unknowing. I was growing up. I was six. We stood upon a beach on a rainy day, my father, my mother, Jane and I, and my father walked off along the shore without us, saying, ‘Don’t ever leave the children with friends. Have them properly adopted.’ And then the mist swallowed him up; the tall, dark, consoling figure faded away, without so much as a glance behind. My mother was crying, which is not surprising. He was divorcing her for infidelity. She had only thirty pounds in the world, we had nowhere to live, and my father had gone to catch a ship to England, ‘home’, which was due to leave within the hour. Once the gangplank was up he changed his mind but it was too late then. Matters had come to a head between them. To demonstrate to him just how upsetting she found his persistent adultery she had spent a night with a passing stranger, and told him that she had. But instead of showing remorse for his own behaviour he had been outraged by hers, and had started divorce proceedings within the hour. It was different for a man than a woman, as common wisdom had it then. Even now women will do this kind of thing, believing tit for tat will somehow cure matters but of course it never does. I have never known a confession of infidelity work anything but harm. The couple who ‘tell the truth to each other’ after their first visit to the marriage-guidance counsellor seldom enjoy many more nights together. My mother left us with friends, naturally, while she found us somewhere to live. This was to be two rooms in a boarding-house in Cranmer Square. Jane and I no longer went to St Margaret’s across the way: it was a private school, there was no money to pay the fees. My mother, unlike my father, as she pointed out, would not spend money she didn’t have. The green uniforms were sold. The rest of our clothes were brought round in a small suitcase from the luxury of the private hotel. We were to go to a state school, St Mary’s Convent, to be taught by nuns. They would teach us manners, said my mother: we had been running wild. They would be very religious, but we were to take no notice of that. The boarding-house was shabby and basic. There were no shiny green quilts upon the beds to hate, or round Chinese rugs to spoil. Now they were gone we missed them. The landlady was a harridan who wore curlers in her hair, did not like children, and had only taken us in out of pity. My mother was in disgrace, her name linked in the newspapers with a named co-respondent: guilty party in the divorce. She had not fought her corner: she did not have the money to do so, or the will. (My father was required to send us a meagre sum for our maintenance every month, but it was often late, if it came at all.) The worst thing about the boarding-house was the magpie which guarded the backyard. It lived in a kennel like a dog, its wings were clipped, and it had a long rattling chain attached to its scrawny leg. When you opened the back gate it would run at you to peck your ankles, screeching ‘Go on out, go on out!’ in a flurry of black and white raised wings and gaping orange mouth. It was what the landlady would shriek as she swept the atrocious bird from her path with the garden broom, the flesh of her ankles falling in folds over her shoes: the bird had learned the phrase from her and now mimicked it to its own ends. I had no broom with which to defend myself: I would try to sneak in the front door in Cranmer Square, but this was forbidden to children, who must use the back yard and face the bird. My ankles were covered in peck marks and sometimes even bled, but I didn’t complain: my mother had enough to be getting on with, so much was obvious, and would get us out of there as soon as she could. I was so closely aligned to Jane that I had no vision of her as a separate being. She did not count as a sister, as a companion, rather she was an extension of me, and my mother soon became the same. We went round in a survival unit of three: Margaret, Jane’nFay. My mother decided to paint wooden powder boxes for a living. Pretty women bought face-powder by the ounce, and transferred it to a decorated round box upon their dressingtable, and placed a powder puff on top of it, and a lid on top of that. It needed to look feminine. She would do the decorating. Alas, the pretty women did not want painted powder boxes in sufficient number for us to make any kind of a living: powder was for special occasions only. It lay on the top of the face in a floury film; Max Factor pancake foundation had not yet been invented. The limit of my mother’s skin care was a pot of Pond’s cold cream, to be applied at night. I still have one of the powder boxes we failed to sell: pale glazed wood, with stylized flowers painted elegantly upon its lid. My mother’s training at the Slade School of Art was paying off, though not perhaps in the way her tutors had envisaged. I love it and hate it, and as for using it, that’s out of the question. Powder flies all over the room. I keep buttons in it, on the theory that one day or another I shall take up a needle and sew. Letters came from my father. He made a book for us out of firm paper, and glued photographs and drawings to it, and scraps of poetry, and tales of things he had done and seen, and people he had met. He had taken a lot of time over it: I thought perhaps he missed us. I assumed he would be back soon and we would all live together again. (No one had mentioned the divorce.) He seemed to be quite rich: he sent a photograph of himself leaning against a KLM aircraft, in Amsterdam. He sent a book, Ferdinand the Bull. Ferdinand was stung by a bee and picked for the bullring because of it. When it came to the point he just sat down and smelled the flowers in the ladies’ hats and lived happily ever after. A good pacifist book: even my mother admired it. My father was going back to school in London to get some more medical letters after his name. Yes, said my mother, your father always has money to do what he wants. But he’s a very good doctor, never forget that. I looked for Holland on the map. I could accept by now that the world was round. Europe took precedence in the scheme of things. They were on top, we were underneath. If anyone were to fall off it would be us. I learned anxiety and fear. I was out playing sevens in Cranmer Square – you threw a tennis ball against a wall and caught it in a progressively difficult way – so many bounces, overarm, underarm, a group of seven to be completed before you could move on to the next stage; as solitary and obsessive an occupation as any computer game today – when I was interrupted by a boy. I didn’t know him. My concentration went: I dropped the ball and complained. He told me he had been in an earthquake, and how the earth yawned in front of you and if you weren’t careful you fell down into the cracks, and even as you scrabbled to climb out the earth would close again, and squash you. It had happened to a friend of his. He told me about how erupting volcanoes could suddenly rise up out the ground, and how the boiling lava would frizzle you alive, and he hoped it would happen to me. If you felt the earth shake beneath your feet it meant earthquake or volcano was about to happen. Then he walked off. I was petrified. Every now and then I did feel the earth shake but I was never sure if it was in my head or outside. How would one know? You could look to see if the ceiling light was swaying, and sometimes it was, but your eyes must be deceiving you, because everyone said there were no earthquakes in the South Island, only in the North, and all the volcanoes were extinct. I don’t know whether Jane shared my fear: I assumed she did, but I may have been wrong. We were separate enough for her to love St Mary’s Convent and me to hate it. The nuns liked her and were suspicious of me. Jane was good and quiet and looked holy: I was noisy and giggly and looked frivolous. Convent Girl (#ulink_80695f9f-55e4-520a-a3b0-1aef78724da9) The Convent was a tall building with gothic towers. Behind barred windows lived scores of women who wore black robes and white wimples. When they were angry, which they often were, they were like the magpie; they’d come screeching at you in a flurry of black and white, though rapping your knuckles or pinching you instead of pecking your ankles, and much more painfully. Fortunately most of them stayed in their cells in the towers: just a handful came out to teach in the school wing. Mother Teresa was nice and motherly, and would hug you and give you sticky sweets: all the others, from Sister Katherine to Sister Dorothy, ruled by sarcasm and violence. I liked their names, but that was about all. The children, all Catholic except for a handful of heathen, which group included Jane and I, were on the whole cowed and snivelly. Their noses tended to run. I was a worse case of pious dereliction than Jane, who had at least been christened, albeit as a Protestant not a Catholic, but I had not even been that. My parents were freethinkers, rationalists, humanists – which was why I was spared Arthur Machen’s blessing. Jane was allowed to stay in the classroom while the rest of the class said their prayers and told their rosaries – some six times a day – but I had to leave the room, and stand outside the door with my spelling book, and learn the hard words. I became very good at spelling. I did not mind the exclusion much: prayers were boring and rosaries were peculiar, but I could see it was more comfortable to belong. But belonging was already beginning to seem unlikely. I was a homie, I spoke with a fancy accent, lived in a boarding-house and not a bungalow, didn’t get pocket money, and my mother put on airs. I was the youngest in my class by more than a year. I struggled to keep up. The nuns decided that I had to be baptized. Otherwise, being unchristened, my fate was to go to limbo when I died. Limbo was the place, in their rather primitive theology, where all those born after Jesus’s time but who weren’t Catholics were doomed to go. It was a flat, featureless, grey landscape where nothing ever happened. The face of the Lord had been turned away. In retrospect it seems a fair description of a depression, and perhaps that’s all depression is, limbo leaked over in life: but the prospect certainly terrified me. There was no getting out of it: limbo was everlasting, and my certain fate, so I had better start learning my catechism and sign up for baptism now. I asked my mother if I could be christened as a Catholic but she said certainly not. She did not seem to realize the full implications of what she had said or what she was letting me in for. I could see that the only way I would ever be able to save myself was if she were dead – but that would be bad for her because she would be going to purgatory, and I was ashamed of myself for wishing it. Purgatory was where she and Jane were going: they had been christened but didn’t go to Mass, so they would be put into this kind of holding pen for heaven and tortured there until they were purified. If people prayed for you after you were dead you could sometimes get out early. Then the gates of heaven would open and you would spend your time praising God. I told them at school I wasn’t allowed to be a Catholic and they were shocked at a mother who would condemn her own daughter to limbo. It was probably a mortal sin. If you committed a mortal sin you went to hell. I could see the only thing to do was to stay alive, and when my mother died of old age, I would be free to be a Catholic. I sat next to an etching of St Anthony being tortured in hell by demons, and tried to concentrate on mental arithmetic, and pronouns. I could not get the knack of the latter, so in a test I copied the answers of the girl in front of me, taking care to change one so as not to be charged with the sin. That was the only one I got right. I realized the imprudence of copying. Better to rely on yourself than others. I had my knuckles rapped for doing so badly in the test. A nun seized your hand, turned it over and banged your knuckles sharply against the desk. For some reason the girl I had copied from did not get her knuckles rapped, but then she was a devout girl who even at the age of seven wanted to be a nun. Knucklerapping hurt: anything to get out of it, but I did not want to join the magpies in their high tower, or even promise to. How they lied and swore and cheated, all the little convent girls, to get out of trouble or make money. I had never known anything like it. My friend Colleen borrowed twopence from the newsagent telling him her father had just died. Then she went into the butcher and borrowed threepence saying she had to take it back to her father or he’d beat her terribly. Then she went to the newsagent and spent the lot on colour balls which she shared with me. I thought I ought to refuse but the sweets changed colour as you rolled them round in your mouth and I couldn’t resist. You had to keep taking them out of your mouth to see whether the pink had turned to violet, the magenta to mauve. It was a sticky process and the dye stayed round your mouth for days. I was hungry most of the time. The boarding-house breakfast was meagre and my mother gave Jane and me sixpence between us to buy lunch every day. You could have a small hot meat pie or a cold apple pie or half a pound of broken biscuits from the biscuit factory down the road. The meat pie was nicest but it was also smallest. The biscuits were dry and dusty and hard to swallow. Drink came from the water tap. There was a girl in my class called Beverley whom everyone hated. She had cross-eyes and spots, and was smelly. She crouched in a corner and whimpered, and the more they bullied the more bulliable she became. I thought it was outrageous. I played with her on principle: if I played with her the others would. I made her wash out her knickers. If her mother didn’t she’d have to do it herself. She cheered up a bit. Presently the other children asked to join in: Colleen, Mary, Teresa, Marjorie, all the big wild popular girls. The nuns were firm creationists: I was taught that the world began with the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve. I was annoyed to discover that Eve was created out of Adam’s rib as an afterthought, because God thought Adam needed company, and puzzled as to how Cain and Abel managed to have children without marrying their own sisters, which I knew was forbidden. My mother said that Genesis was not necessarily the only truth, but I knew her witness was not sound. I took to reading the psalms in bed at night under the bedclothes. The nuns did not encourage us to read the Bible: on the contrary, they thought it should be mediated through a priest. It has always been my impulse to read what I am not meant to read and not to read what I am encouraged to. I fell in love with language, in what I can now see was in itself a kind of sub-erotic experience. I wrestled with the notion of the hills lifting themselves up and the valleys being exalted, and like Daniel wrestling with the lion, I won. If I could not understand, I osmosed. I do not think the Good News Bible could ever have done as well as this little, leather-bound, thin-papered Authorised Version we happened to have in the house. I wrestled with Ecclesiastes and the Book of Job, and came to the conclusion that the nuns were only telling half the story. What the nuns gave us to read was Little Lives of All the Saints, a Victorian tract describing the tortures that young women of long ago endured preserving their virtue in the name of Jesus. Their breasts were chopped off, bits of them sliced up and fried, but they would not give up their virginity. They were beautiful and they were good, and pain was their reward. I was fascinated and horrified: I knew there was something wrong in my response but not quite what. Tremors, halfway between pain and pleasure, affected me as I read. Sex was a mystery to me, let alone the finer pleasures of masochism. I had no idea what virginity was, or what men did, or how babies were conceived. No one talked about these things at the convent for fear of knuckle-rapping or ear-tweaking: nuns slid about the corridors overhearing what was said, invisible until suddenly you saw them. All you knew about sex was that it was exciting and forbidden, and very secret. On the way home from school one day a little boy with no clothes on ran out of his house. When I got home I asked my mother if there was something wrong with him, since he had this little bit hanging out in front. She said no but was too embarrassed to elaborate. I thought he was probably malformed. Sin and Guilt (#ulink_f7910abd-a21e-5e33-b1a5-5a3ae85dac49) The main problem with the convent was that you never knew what would get you into trouble. It seemed to have so little to do with common sense. It shrieked at you out of a clear sky. If your mother made you meat sandwiches on a Friday there was terrible trouble, though it was not your fault. You would be lining up at playtime to go back into the classroom, jostling as ever, called into silence. ‘You are touching one another. Never, never touch another person if you can possibly help it!’ I stretched out my hand and touched the person in front of me, in defiance. I was seen. Deliberate disobedience! My punishment was the worst they could think of: I was not to be allowed to stand and clap and wave flags when the cardinal from Rome came to bless us, dressed in his scarlet robes with gold binding. I was to stay in and learn more spelling. I learned to spell ‘theatre’, I remember, though my mother had to explain to me what it was. I didn’t mind at all not seeing the cardinal, which merely proved to the nuns how hardened in sin I was. But things were getting worse: I could not explain it: limbo was creeping round the outskirts, with occasional glimpses of hell showing through. The nuns liked Jane and she liked them. She was quiet and clever and good at art and never got her ears tweaked. She embroidered exquisite flowers and made a little cloth book to contain them: it had a white vellum cover, on which she painted bluebells: it seemed something out of the past, from long ago. If I tried to do anything like that it got covered with ink and was tatty within minutes. Jane also painted an entire set of the Tarot pack: small, fine, perfect replicas of those sinister cards. I don’t suppose she did this in the school art class, and where she got the originals or whose idea it was I do not know. My mother half admired them and half hated them. I thought they were very spooky, especially the one she did of the Tower, the edifice splitting apart beneath the black hammer blow of a bolt of lightning. A nun slammed open a window in the gothic tower of the convent as I ran up and down shrieking and splashing in the mud and called out to the world that I was a wicked girl and a heathen and the ringleader, and she would let my form teacher know in the morning. I spent a night of terror so abject nothing has been as bad since, not even the night in the haunted house in Saffron Walden years later. Nameless horrors, scrabbling to get in, the worse for being un-named. In the morning nothing happened. There was no hammer blow. I did not tell my mother because her life was hard enough. I got a bad sore throat and lay with my pecked ankles in bed and couldn’t go to school and was tremendously happy. The doctor came and said I might have scarlet fever and if so I would have to go to an isolation hospital. I prayed to God that I could go, and to the Cardinal in his wonderful sweeping scarlet gown, all the way from Rome, the Holy City, to intercede for me with God. My prayers were answered, which was gratifying. I had begun to doubt the deity. I thought it said in the Bible that if you threw your bread upon the water it would be returned threefold: I’d throw some of the stale biscuits into the Avon but nothing ever came back, though rather more ducks than usual would come by. The ducks seemed so happy and free, though sometimes they too would turn on one of their number, a Beverley duck, as it were, and peck it to bits. I loved the fever hospital. The nurses were kind and the other children were friendly. My ankles healed and fears of limbo receded. My confidence in the deity was restored. Invalid food, the like of which is not known in today’s hospitals or sick-rooms, food to tempt the reluctant appetite, was cooked and served. A little pale and white, it’s true – clear beef broth, steamed fish and mashed potatoes, and vanilla blancmange – followed by hot sweet milk and white-iced biscuits – but every spoonful you got down you was applauded. Anything parents brought in had to be sterilized in great steam cupboards, and if they visited us, which they were only allowed to do once a week, they had to sit the other side of a thick glass partition. I had a fit of neurosis which I remember to this day: a girl in the bed opposite had a bag of sweets: she threw me one and missed and it went under the bed, but I chose to believe she had not thrown it, and had treated me badly, and wept and wept until a nurse came to comfort me. I knew perfectly well it was an accident but preferred to be miserable, for the sheer drama of it. Later in life I would treat lovers and husbands in this way. Taking offence and suffering because of it, knowing in your heart they are not in the least to blame, you just want a drama, and your turn at being a victim. One day unannounced, it was not my mother sitting the other side of the glass screen when I was led in for the family visit, but my father. At least that was what the nurse said he was, and I had no reason to mistrust the nurse. I didn’t know what to say to him. He seemed tall and handsome and I was immensely flattered that he had come to see me, and to think that I was his daughter, which gave me some kind of right to him. He talked about his plans: they did not seem to include living in the same house as us. That was fair enough, I could see he would hate the magpie. He gave me two shillings, and then he disappeared again. Convalescent (#ulink_e54b564c-3700-5b5e-a7e6-04d7e665c722) When I came out of hospital my mother said my father had gone to the North Island to look for a job. North! The island I had never seen. That was where the excitement and energy lay, I was convinced. It was the land which contained my father, where the weather got warmer with every mile you travelled, where I had never been. Further south and all was bleak and next stop the South Pole, where there was nothing but penguins. I was increasingly awed by the map. How vast the globe was, and how proud I was to be British: why, a whole third of the nations were coloured red, which meant we governed it. The disgrace of being a homie was balanced by the specialness of being English. But how far away we were from the rest of the world! I knew only too well, because of the time that lay between my parents’ coming and going, what distance meant. You measured it in days and weeks, not miles. School was on hold for me, while I recuperated. I managed to forget about it. One Sunday afternoon Jane and I were sent out to play in Cranmer Square. Frank had come south. He was to take us out for the afternoon; we were to drive to visit the black swans which lived on a lake outside the city. No, he was not coming into the house, the landlady would not like it, we were to wait for him outside. We had ribbons put in our hair. I had the check dress Jane had worn for the Rita Angus portrait, which fitted me by now. There was no choice. We were given no option as to what to wear. There wasn’t much to choose from, anyway. School uniform and Sunday best and that was about all. Jane’nFay went out to play. She skipped and I played sevens. We didn’t speak much. We improved our skills while we waited. I could read what was in most people’s heads but seldom these days what was in hers. I thought it might be something to do with the colour of her eyes. She had dark, dark brown eyes like my mother’s, and mine were bright blue like my father’s. I adored her and felt apologetic, the cuckoo chick in her nest, growing larger and larger, wearing her cast-offs, and resented for something I couldn’t help, for being there. I daresay most younger siblings feel like this. Time was getting on. No sign of a father. I wanted Jane to go back inside to ask what the time was, but she wouldn’t. I went. It was three o’clock. I played more sevens but kept dropping the ball: Jane kept stepping on the rope. In the next hour hope and disappointment fought it out, and minute by minute disappointment gained ground until there was no hope left. The sun sank lower across Cranmer Square: I came to the understanding that I was not central to the universe, and that no amount of wishing and hoping would twist it to my convenience, and the sun would just go on sinking. Around four-thirty my mother called us in and said, ‘Well, he’s not coming, is he?’ in the tone of one who was disappointed but not surprised. I sat down to read Ferdinand the Bull yet again, practising insouciance. I did not like people being sorry for me. Just sit down and smell the flowers, like Ferdinand. I have, and I date it to that day, become expert at receiving bad news. I keep my face still, gain time to reassess my situation, to retreat or advance as required. Grit the teeth, face a changed world, go back afterwards to mop up the emotion. I was more like a New Zealander than a homie in this, and have stayed so. New Zealanders go into danger gear at the drop of a hat: you don’t see them emoting all over the place. That’s why they run Aid Agencies and such like: they don’t panic. Later my mother said he’d had flu and hadn’t been able to come. I didn’t quite believe her. I thought it was probably something to do with Ina, or Jean, or Helen. Be that as it may, he had gone back to the North without stopping by. We left the boarding-house. I was so pleased I tried to set the magpie free of its chain: my mother said it only attacked because it was unhappy. But it preferred its imprisonment: it wouldn’t let me near it. I had rather hoped for a bungalow like other people had but my mother had found us rooms above a disused stable in an old mews on the road out to Papanui. Poverty is a stubborn thing: you seldom escape it with one bound. But the great thing was that I no longer had to go to the Convent. I was to go to a school called Elmwood instead. Jane and Fay (#ulink_3e3e3158-506c-5c37-bb16-e17e9725c81e) There had been some upturn in the powder-box trade, and my mother had sold a novel to her publishers, and received a cheque for fifty pounds. She seemed to have changed her mind about the desirability of a convent education for me, though Jane was to stay at St Mary’s for another year. Now I was at a school of my own our names began to separate out. Elmwood was run on progressive lines: there were no turrets and towers, it was just a great space of green grass interrupted by low, airy custom-built classrooms. There was a swimmingpool. Nobody lied or stole or cringed. Teachers read us stories. Lessons were out of doors on the verandas. We sang English folksongs about nightingales and strawberry fairs: we English-country-danced. ‘Home’ was respected and I was a homie. We practised the Alexander Technique once a week, and learned how to stand properly, and no one did anything dreadful or sudden. It was observable that education was meant to prepare you for adult life, not terrify you into submission. The headmaster did for a time instead of a father. Mr Eggleton was a plain, kind, dull man with a face as long as his legs: I could see the advantage of dullness: it went along with reliability. If Mr Eggleton said he’d be at a certain place at a certain time he would be. He taught us calligraphy: joined-up writing was not enough: now you must make the words look graceful. We used his name to practise on because of all the above the line and below the line loops, and when my handwriting becomes indecipherable I will practise it the sooner to return to legibility. He would let me hold his hand. There were boys at this school, which was thrilling, but the girls didn’t play with them. My only social problem at Elmwood was the march into school when the bell rang for the end of playtime. It was 1937. Militarism was beginning to infiltrate even here on this grassy slope at the back of beyond. Ferdinand the Bull might prefer to sit and smell the flowers than fight, but he was increasingly on his own. We marched into school in pairs, heads held high, in step, swinging arms. I was the new girl, arrived mid-term. I had to walk on my own, unpartnered. I hated that. I did not want to be despised, to find myself in the wrong place in the pecking order. I was beginning to read other people’s thoughts: it was quite painful. It was not for many years that I realized other people tended not to be able to do this. They heard what people said, not what they meant. They did not interpret silences. No wonder they went round so confident and bullish. But soon the marching-in problem was solved, when a new girl turned up to walk in with me. She didn’t have the gift of marching: she was too languid for that, but at least we were a pair. Her name was Aliz: she was a refugee, she said, a runaway from Germany. Like me, she didn’t have a resident father. She slept in a feather bed and was always ill. I had to defend Aliz against accusations of being peculiar, of which being ‘delicate’ was evidence, as was coming from a country you had heard about in geography but certainly couldn’t place on a map. Then she changed her name to Alicia which suggested to my other friends that she was getting worse, not better. She was affected. I tried to get her to desist but she said Alicia sounded less like a servant than Aliz. I was always amazed how fancy people could be. She’d tell me stories of people walking along roads carrying suitcases and being machine-gunned by aircraft, but seemed to worry most about her name. I tried to find out why her family had had to run away. She didn’t seem to know the answer either, other than that she was Jewish. When I asked what that meant she said she wasn’t supposed to turn on the light on Saturdays, which seemed much the same as not eating meat on Fridays. The adult world baffled her as much as me: but she was inclined to shrug and comb her hair in the mirror, while I bounced up and down in indignation or curiosity. In retrospect it is remarkable how little the adult world at that time confided in its children, even when it came to explaining why others were trying to kill them. Reticence and decorum seemed almost more valuable than personal survival. I developed my playground skills. I became knucklebone champion of the playground – knucklebones is the same as five-stones: only we played it with scrubbed sheep’s knuckles from the butcher, not metal crosses. You toss the bones in the air, catch all five on the flattened back of your hand, and then perform deft scooping and collecting tricks with your fingers. I was good at that, having a wide hand, and also at spelling, for which I was famous, thanks to the St Mary’s passion for excluding me from prayer, and the spelling book. I could walk on my hands, do back-bends and touch the back of my head with my foot. Such are the accomplishments of young girl children. At home things were looking up. My mother stopped painting powder boxes and we moved into a proper house at the end of the tramline. We had a garden with a stream running through it and a walnut tree which we could climb. Jane and I shared a room. We even had the luxury of a bedside table each: plywood apple boxes up-ended – the partition making a convenient shelf – and covered with a piece of curtain stretched on a wire: a bit splintery compared to Alicia’s smooth maplewood, but bedside tables nonetheless. There was an outside loo, as was normal enough in a mild climate, before the advent of indoor plumbing. Sit out there at night and see the Southern Cross rising, that bold four-pointed constellation, somewhat skew-whiff, totem of the southern hemisphere. Even my mother was obliged to admire the Southern Cross, though she sorely missed the northern skies of her youth. There seemed no way she could ever get back to England now. She was trapped. Some points of light in the heavens were shared, she explained to me. She taught me to distinguish Betelgeuse from Mars – the former trembles in its redness, the latter stays steady – to recognize the cool splendour of Venus, to find the North Star and its pointer the Plough. A telegram came to say that Edgar had died, and I remember weeping to keep her company, but she was weeping for someone I had never met and a world I didn’t know. I felt oddly out of sympathy with her, knowing that the more she regarded the old world, the less she regarded mine. I saw the big burnished Southern Cross as belonging to me and my vanished father: my mother could have the little point of the North Star, and all it stood for, as her part of the heavens. I realized that my mother was a remarkably good person. She got off the tram home to rescue an injured dog, which she’d seen lying in a gutter. No one else took any notice of it, but just walked by. She taught us to love our enemies – or better still, avoid making any. She stayed in bed every morning and wrote her magnum opus, and I would rather she made our breakfast and got us to school but I held my tongue. I no longer wanted to be a Catholic but I still had ambitions of sainthood. I learned the art of reading while I walked. There wasn’t much traffic, though I do remember being nearly run over by a van, and the outrage of its driver. I was allowed to read at meals: Alicia never was. At the end of every month money from my father was expected in. Then my mother waited for the post. It seldom turned up, or if it did it wasn’t for the right amount. I didn’t like to ask where he was and when he was coming back, it seemed impolite. But I was sure he was doing the best he could. The Doctor’s Daughters (#ulink_7e5a74fd-e23b-574d-b305-1e4fdb8fbb1f) My father had a proper job. He was to be medical superintendent of the whole Coromandel Peninsula. Even my mother was impressed. We were to visit him: we were to stay for the summer, for a whole eight weeks. No, she wasn’t coming, she didn’t have the time. We were to go on our own. It seemed good news could come as well as bad, and as suddenly. Out came the map: Jane already knew where Coromandel was. She knew so much I didn’t, though she seldom bothered to pass the knowledge on. The North Island stretched up into the Pacific as if groping for the rest of the world: it divided like a hand up near the top, we were to go onto the thumb. My mother packed our clothes and everything we would need into one small thin brown leather suitcase which Jane was able to carry. She was nine, I was seven. How neatly and carefully my mother folded and packed: even so, one of us always had to sit on the case to close it. That same suitcase did us for the six years during which summer-with-my-father became ritual. We were the first of the shuttle children. Who else’s parents, in those days, lived in different places? (No one used the word divorce: like insanity and cancer, these tragedies were too irrevocable for words to lightly describe, and mercifully, were rarer then than now.) The journey in itself was excitement enough. It would take two days. Overnight on the ferry from Lyttelton to Wellington: our mother came thus far. Seagulls, a tiny cabin with bunks and portholes – why do ships have round windows? – the smell of oil, the great brass-edged pumping machinery of the engine, pounding through the night, breakfast in company, the kind of food other people ate, not us. Bacon and eggs, and a fried slice. Then we’d spend the day in Wellington, the capital city, bigger and busier than Christchurch, whipped by wind and with ground that trembled, go to the zoo to see the lion and the kiwi, to the Botanical Gardens to look at rare ferns. Disloyal to be too happy and excited, too ready to leave my mother for the eternity of two months, to be the doctor’s daughters. In the evening she put us on the overnight train to Auckland and went back home on the ferry. Jane and I had a sleeper, a delight: seats which turned into bunks, hidden lights, little tables which pulled out, miniature shelves for fob-watches, a tiny basin and tap and cut-glass tooth mugs. I was in Jane’s care. In those days children travelled alone: Jane was nine and I was seven, sixteen years between us, old enough added together to meet all eventualities. The train hooted and whistled out of Wellington: the sky was red and orange against hills, night fell, the whole future spread out in front of us, secret black, shot by moonlight. The train took its time, edging its way up through the centre of the North Island, the crevices between hills opening out into farmland and closing back in again: at five in the morning it began to get light, mist wreathed the landscape as it declared itself, a rising sun replaced the moon and the bush turned slowly from black to green. Farmhouses built before the railway had their WCs at the end of the garden. They had been built without doors and so they stayed, though now they looked out on to passing trains. If you looked, you could see people sitting there, unabashed. We were hungry: we’d eaten our breakfast sandwiches the night before, of course we had, thinking hunger could get no worse. The guard bought us grown-up tea and biscuits. But would our father be there to meet us? He hadn’t managed Cranmer Square, would he manage Auckland Station? What would we do if he didn’t? But he was there, large and dark among pale, streaming passengers and friends, cigarette sticking to his bottom lip: we were too stiff and self-conscious to hug – people touched so much less, once upon a time, even in families – though he sniffed a bit and I thought he was crying. He took the suitcase and admired the way we travelled light. He was taller than I remembered. I was instantly in love with him. He strode off through milling crowds and we ran after. He assumed, in his lordly way, that we would and so we did. The journey was not finished yet: now there was a six-hour drive to Coromandel, out of the quiet limbo of Christchurch, through the eventful purgatory of places in between, to arrive at the unknown. My father owned a Ford V8 imported from America, solid and black, and the newest thing in engines. People stared after it as we passed. Cars till then had been square and upright: this one was curved; ‘streamlined’, my father described it. This made it go faster, apparently: the shape offered no resistance to the air, which would stream away on either side as we went. I loved the importance of it. With my father, going north, we were on the top of everything, looking down. Not, as with my mother, peering cautiously upwards, fearing the descent of the untoward. The road was flat and straight at the base of the thumb of land and we travelled fast: too fast for my liking – I am easily frightened in cars – but after the mangrove swamps outside the little town of Thames the hills began and progress was slow. As we went further north the landscape changed: now we were in sub-tropical bush, and soon the only way forward was along the winding, unmade-up road which skirted the coast. Red pohutukawa trees leaned down from the cliffs to meet the rocky sea-line, where cormorants shrieked and dived, past rough shacks where Maoris, brown, beautiful, glistening, lived and fished, and on to Coromandel bay, and the ghost town of Coromandel itself. And even then as a child I knew how privileged I was, to be in that place, at that time, in the Golden Age. The real gold had gone, the seams exhausted, but the memory of it remained. The Coromandel Peninsula saw a gold rush at the beginning of the century – there were rumours that you could pick up nuggets on the hill tracks, or just sitting there on the stream beds – but the seams were soon exhausted and a population which had suddenly swelled to hundreds of thousands, as suddenly dwindled again to be reckoned in thousands. The goldminers were long gone – other than a few reddish hairy old men who stumbled out of the hills from time to time to consult my father, like survivors of some forgotten war. But they had left behind not anger, disappointment and despair, which you might have expected, but a benign ambience of hopeful exhilaration. The High Street was like something out of the Wild West: wide enough for a gunfight or so and the Wells Fargo coach to rattle through, lined by wooden shops: the general store, the outfitter, the bank, the lawyer, the chandler, drinking-houses by the dozen and a couple of wooden churches, and a little further on, on the dirt road out of town, was the wooden hospital and opposite it the doctor’s house. All are still there, largely unchanged. The hippies have moved in, and marihuana floats through the air, the tourists come and go, but the coast road is much as it was and keeps the bus parties away. My father was medical superintendent to the whole sparsely populated peninsula. He was not just a GP, but his own specialist surgeon, physician, obstetrician and consultant. He had to be, since there was no one else to do it. He held his morning surgery in the cottage hospital across the road. The hospital was grand and pillared, with a wide sweep of lawn and drive in front, and had been originally built by a mineowner for his own use: the doctor’s house had housed his chief of staff. There were seldom more than a handful of patients and a ward sister and some four or five live-in nurses to help. There was an operating theatre, and I pleased my father by being able to spell the word without trouble. Every summer for the next five years Jane and I were to go to Coromandel. One year when my mother was ill we stayed on and went to the village school. I loved it: it was such a casual affair. You could go barefoot, and sit in a class with others younger and older than you. They gave the cane – the thwack of a stick on the hand for misdemeanours – but it was seldom used: the only time I can remember is when one of the big boys held the headmaster’s head under the school cold-water tap and kept it there. And after the caning he got expelled as well. It would not happen to us: we were children of status now, we were the doctor’s daughters, no longer Margaret, Jane’nFay, on the wrong side of things. I made friends, Dulcie Strongman in particular: she was the shipwright’s daughter. We ran wild. We’d go up into the bush where we weren’t meant to go, because it was pocked with mine shafts, and slid down the hills on the great green bucket leaves of palm trees. We looked in the streams for little frogs which were said to date back to dinosaur times, and for gold nuggets which might still be lurking there. Deep in the bush everything was quiet and you didn’t like to shriek or make a noise. It was dark, dark green, except for a scatter of white clematis hanging from the kauri trees, which stood like the masts of ships, piercing up through the forest roof to get to the light of the sky. These secret parts of the forest were the temples of unknown Maori Gods; we went quietly through them, following streams, not wanting to stir up things we didn’t understand. It was unusual for a man to be in charge of children, and not a mother in sight. The nurses took us under their wing. For food we relied mostly upon morning and afternoon tea served up at the hospital. Morning tea was meat or fish-paste sandwiches and scones and strawberry jam. Afternoon tea was the same but with potato scones, Afghans, brandy snaps, sponge cake filled with jam and cream, and lamingtons – pink or yellow sponge squares rolled in desiccated coconut – added. Those were the great days of New Zealand bakery, a cold-climate, carbohydrate-rich habit of cooking brought to the antipodes by Scottish pioneers, refined and developed in days of warmth and plenty into something inspiring, if fattening. But mostly we were out of sight and out of mind. We played in the orchard behind the house; it had an orange tree and lemon tree and a banana grove: cherries, apples, plums, figs and apricots. We carved out rooms in the bamboo grove and lived in those for a time; we moved our beds out into the veranda and slept there. On Wednesdays we’d drive over the peninsula with my father to the cottage hospital at Mercury Bay – where Captain Cook first observed the transit of Mercury, as everyone kept telling us – and if there was an emergency there and he had to stay over we’d go to the village school there, and show off our mental arithmetic and our pronouns, but subtly – noblesse oblige. We were the doctor’s daughters, and wherever we went we were welcomed. Out of term it was the beach, the surf and paradise. We looked after animals on first principles. They had to eat, to drink, to sleep like you did, and you combed out the fleas to do them a favour. We had a pen for the livestock the grateful patients who couldn’t pay would leave in lieu. Usually hens or ducks but sometimes a sheep and once a pig. Sometimes the old men from the hills would pay with gold nuggets. They sat in a row along the mantelpiece, greyish, disappointing lumps of stone. They needed polishing, my father said. On wet days we learned poetry. My father paid sixpence for every Shakespeare sonnet. Jane learned all the Ancient Mariner but that was at a lower rate and I gave up after the first two pages. Soon I could recite all The Lady of Shalott, and poetry extending into prose, could deliver the first page of John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty. That was my party-piece. We were the cow in the Christmas pantomime which my father put on. Jane was the front legs, I was the back. We sold programmes for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, which he directed and the whole town out of loyalty turned up to see in the tiny Town Hall. They were baffled – what had Norway’s mountain trolls to do with them? – but they were receptive. He loved them as they loved him. He is still remembered. They wear his appendix scars to this day, some with pride and some with alarm. I think he was quite innovative when it came to operations. His clock is in the tiny town museum along with what I’ll swear is the laundry wringer we never used. These Coromandelians were not people turned out by the button-maker, they were sharply individualistic. If my father were called out in the night he’d take us with him. We’d take our pillows and blankets to the car and settle in and go back to sleep. I woke once in the early dawn and found my father gone and the car parked on a hillside. Along the ridge of the hill above us was a row of horsemen, looking down at us. They were very haughty, Maoris in ceremonial dress. We were intruders. I woke Jane. She was as frightened as I was. They galloped down the hill towards us: horses milled around the car in a flurry of cloaks and feathers. An angry tattooed face hung upside-down to stare in at us. Then the mouth broke into a smile the wrong way up, and someone whooped something, and they galloped off to where, as the sun rose, I could see the carved roof of a Maori meeting-house. Presently my father came back. ‘It was a boy,’ he said. ‘It was difficult but it’s okay now,’ and we drove back home. The second year we left to go back south to Christchurch on the morning of 4 September 1939. We were up at five to be at the Thames airstrip by eight. We went up to the hospital for breakfast and found everyone in a state of alarm. War with Germany had been declared. Wartime (#ulink_a91cad3c-4538-523e-8dc3-3b91065e589d) Germany was a long way away and it was hard to understand what the quarrel was about. But Hitler had ‘walked into Poland’ with tanks and guns and couldn’t be allowed to get away with it. We were shown maps. All the young men were to leave New Zealand to fight for ‘home’. This they would do with bayonets, guns and in hand-to-hand combat. They were to be put in the way of the Germans and meant to kill any they came across, unless the German said ‘I surrender’, in which case the German was put in a prison camp to stop him cheating and continuing to fight, until the end of the war. The end came when one side said ‘pax’. In the meantime it was permitted to kill German women and children by dropping bombs on them otherwise the German men would drop bombs on you. The rules of engagement seemed strange, and rather like a lot of playground games except people got killed. We children were set to knitting balaclavas in khaki wool. We sang as we knitted. Knitting, knitting, knitting, with a prayer in every row, That the ones we love, By God above, Shall be guarded as they go. It was exciting to wonder about the young man who would actually wear this strange garment, and stare out of the holes we had left for the eyes. He would never know us, but we would know him. It was quite an erotic feeling, though we didn’t know the word or what it meant. I think we rather wondered, as we looked at the knubbly, crooked, khaki piles we had created, whether anyone would actually ever wear them, or what good it would do them if they did. Jane knitted perfect balaclavas, and was even allowed loose on the socks, but the rest of us weren’t. We were sent out into the wheat fields at harvest time to look for ergot, a black fungus which would cause madness if you ate it, but which also made a blood-clotting substance useful on the battlefront. We were told not to lick our fingers if we found any. I found some, forgot and licked my fingers, but I stayed sane. We marched about a lot in parades, waving little Union Jacks on sticks. I wished I was a boy, and not doomed to knit and wave flags: I longed to march off with the men. I was proud to be English: it was as if everyone was coming to my defence. It turned out to be true that if you didn’t bomb them they would bomb you – there were photographs in the newspapers of London burning. I felt with my mother then that it was my true home, and I wanted to be there if only for the excitement. But death was real, not a playground game. I went into a corner shop to buy colour balls and the woman who ran it came out of her door crying. She had a telegram to say her son had been killed in action. I cried as well and held her hand and went home without the sweets. I felt the earth shake beneath my feet and knew that this time it was in my head: I could see that earthquakes and volcanoes were just an outer and visible sign of an inner state, what happened to you as you lived your life. Omens and presages, geological convulsions and emotional shiftings, sudden eruptions; everything inside and outside made the same patterns. There was a shortage of tender young Canterbury lamb; New Zealanders were left with tough old mutton scrag. All the best cuts were shipped off to Britain. There was not a banana to be seen for five years. Oranges were a rarity. My mother’s copies of the New Statesman and Nation, which used to come in clusters of six, every six weeks, now came in clusters of thirty-six. Ships still braved the torpedoes and got through, but cargo space was booked for essentials. In 1941 the Japanese entered the war and things took a turn for the worse. Singapore fell. Darwin was bombed. Japanese submarines were seen in Sydney Harbour. There seemed no stopping them. It was believed that they would swoop down and take New Zealand and use it as a base to capture Australia. New Zealand was defenceless: a nation of women, children and old men. The warrior caste was away fighting other people’s wars. The Japanese looted, raped, tortured, killed, everyone knew. Friends told my mother she must be prepared to kill her daughters to save us from a fate worse than death at the hands of the enemy. Instead she taught us to smile courteously and if spoken to by a Japanese man to reply – what was it, ‘konichiwa’? – I think so. What those troops could possibly want of us girls remained a mystery. There were air-raid shelters in the school playground. Then suddenly US troops were everywhere. Their ships were in the harbour, handsome men in swanky green uniforms strolled up and down the streets. They had got to New Zealand with a week to spare. The Japanese called the invasion off. We were saved. But now we had to stay indoors after dark, for fear of marauding GIs, of whom everyone seemed to be unreasonably frightened. If you spoke to them they gave you chewing gum, which you were not allowed to have at home. It was one of the vulgar things from which good girls were protected: chewing gum, comics, jazz music on the radio, the company of rough soldiery. We might be poor, the enemy might be at the door, but we were cultured and would not give in to populism. Elmwood acquired two new men teachers, Mr Stuart and Mr Reid. They were communists, conscientious objectors, and had chosen teaching as an alternative to prison. Mr Eggleton seemed not noticeably grateful for their arrival. Mr Stuart was flamboyant, large and hairy, and Mr Reid was small, angry and hollow-eyed. They took it in turns to give us blow-byblow accounts of the siege of Stalingrad: for five months the city fought off the German invader, prepared to starve rather than surrender. How innocent the times were: later it emerged that the citizens were forcibly kept inside the city by their own army, to score a propaganda point. I quite fell in love with Mr Stuart, his descriptions were so vivid and his ideas so strange and complicated. But teachers were always far more impressed by Jane than they ever were with me. Indeed, Mr Reid mortified me by complaining about my untidiness, and asking me why I couldn’t be more like my sister Jane, who was always so neat. I felt as bad as did Helen Burns in Jane Eyre, wearing the nameboard, with ‘slattern’ written upon it for all to see. But Mr Stuart did look me up and down once and observe that I was quite a clever little girl for my age. I have a feeling that Mr Stuart was a Trotskyist and Mr Reid a Leninist. We sent food parcels to my grandmother Isobel in England and she sent us clothes parcels in return. Jane and I viewed these with trepidation. She’d send combinations, cast-offs from nameless cousins, scratchy all-in-one flannel undergarments with flaps for personal functions, which fastened with little rubber buttons. If my mother decided the day was cold, we were obliged to wear them. The ship on which my mother sent her latest manuscript was torpedoed. Her publisher’s offices in London were bombed. There was no spare newsprint for fiction anyway. That was the end of another dream. Now how were we to make our living? But the men were at war: women were able to take the jobs. They ran the farms and the industries: Mary Glover, wife of poet Dennis Glover, who ran the Caxton Press in peacetime but killed men in time of war, delivered our daily milk from an electrified float. My mother, who had been working as a typist in the Albion Wright advertising agency, took over when her boss was called up. She wore a little grey business suit, functioned perfectly if anxiously, kept the agency in profit, earned seven pounds a week – and once actually spent four pounds on a new suit. In 1944 we had a special assembly in the Girls’ High School to celebrate the end of the war in Europe, VE Day. Some 400 of us were crammed into the assembly hall on the first floor. The building began to tremble and the floor to tilt. Earthquakes were not meant to happen in Christchurch but this quite definitely was one, and a bad one too. We continued with Henry Vaughan’s hymn to peace: My soul, there is a country, Far beyond the stars, Where stands a wing?d sentry, All skilful in the wars… But we sang shakily, an inch away from panic…The earthquake calmed, the building steadied. We were lucky. People trusted far more to luck then than they do today. Still the young men did not come back from the wars: they were moved on to the Japanese front. The Japanese were not playing the same game as we were, or else the goalposts had moved. The enemy just would not say ‘pax’. One day that same year my mother came home from work white faced. The Allies had dropped an atom bomb on Japan. It had destroyed a whole city, women, children, everyone. It didn’t seem the kind of thing our side did, but we’d done it. No one knew much about the effects of radiation: it was just a very big bomb. Simple loss of civilian life was enough to horrify. But at least very soon after that the Japanese said they were giving in, war stopped, and we celebrated VJ Day in school assembly, concluding with hymnody in proper spirit of vigour and triumph. ‘And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace…’ The great day came and the men came back from the war. Albion Wright took over the reins of the advertising agency: my mother was demoted to typing and making the coffee once again, and her wages were cut by half. Indignant at her treatment she handed in her notice, and took a job in the biscuit factory whose broken products I had eaten while at the convent. This earned her a couple of shillings more than had she stayed at the agency. She would come home from work with blistered fingers: her job was to lift hot biscuits from the oiled conveyer belt and place them on wire racks to cool. I was sorry that hostilities had ended. And that was the course of the war for Margaret, Jane and Fay. After that flags went out of fashion, and we no longer marched in from school playgrounds but simply took our places at our desks when the bell went. Playground Narrative (#ulink_8506bb53-d149-5d28-b20e-4f04b99a1210) When Jane and I returned from Coromandel in the autumn of 1938 we found that our mother had moved house again. Turn your back for a moment and she was off. Mostly we lived in furnished houses, so moving was not a big deal. She has always believed there is somewhere better round the corner, and by and large she was right. This little house was surrounded by green trees and was dark and damp, but I could walk to school and I liked that. We were not there long because my mother became ill with jaundice, and Jane and I were sent to stay with friends in Sumner, a seaside town a few miles out of Christchurch. It was thought we would enjoy being on the beach but we had been spoiled by Coromandel and were not grateful. It was a flat dull beach, its only feature a large rock with a tunnel cut through its middle for the fun of it, but it always smelt of pee. So did the school we were now sent to: Jane hated it, I didn’t mind it, but I was shaky on past participles and you got the strap if your homework had too many mistakes in it. The trouble with moving schools was that some things you knew too well and other things you didn’t know well enough: but at least your past had no time to catch up with you. The strap was a leather thong: it did your hand less damage than the cane, but the hurt went on for days, or so they said. At least it was not the paddy, which was a flattish long-handled wooden spoon with a hole in the shallow bowl, to raise a blister in the palm of the hand. Only the boys got that: girls were spared. There were some advantages, I could see, to being female. Once my mother was better Jane and I became ill. We caught whooping cough, quite badly, and were taken to recuperate on a farm at a little place called Kowai Bush. We collected pails full of warm milk from the cows and warm eggs from the hens. By day I read and by night I coughed. I read all the Hans Andersen stories and as many of Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books as I could. I began on E. Nesbit and Rider Haggard. The cough kept coming back at night, and was frightening, because sometimes I felt I would never breathe again, and die, like the Little Mermaid. When we were ill my mother was really attentive. She would get up in the night and bring us honey and lemon drinks. Jane and I became adept at presenting her with short intensive illnesses. I try to do as much for my children, but after three days’ nursing I begin to lose patience, and the flow of tender loving care becomes erratic, and they by some miracle, or instinct for self-preservation, get better at once. Jean Stephenson and Helen Shaw came to visit us, forgiven by my mother for any sins they might or might not have committed. They seemed to want to please. Jean took pride in knitting us Fair-Isle jumpers, made in lengths of different coloured wool to a traditional Scottish pattern. They were scratchy and ugly. If you chose the right place, snipped a single strand with the scissors or with your teeth, and pulled, the garment would fall in half. This seemed to me immeasurably funny and I took pleasure in doing it. Jean would patiently knit the pieces together again, I would snip, she would knit, until she finally gave up. This is the only piece of gratuitous naughtiness I can remember having committed through my entire childhood. Life was too precarious: we lived on a knife-edge, financially and socially: we knew better than to rock the boat. We were two very good, very polite and docile little girls. I was discovered weeping over The Snow Queen. It was the sliver of ice in Kay’s heart that frightened me, which stopped him loving Gerda. I foresaw a life full of Ice Queens swooping down with the wind and freezing my beloved’s heart towards me. I was not far wrong. In the summer of 1940 Jane and I found our father’s Coromandel bed filled by a tall, elegant, rather brusque woman called Dr Edna Mackenzie. She was the school doctor in Hamilton, a hundred miles or so down country. I had nothing against her personally: indeed, she was an extremely kind and helpful person who laid the table and sat us down to proper cooked meals, instead of the sandwiches my father favoured. I was not sure why she was in my father’s bed at night: there was a perfectly good spare room: it was wives who shared beds with husbands and by lying close together, I had worked out, they had babies. I got up early one morning and slammed and slammed the kitchen door to get them out of their bed and my father called out in annoyance and I cried. I stood on the tap of the rainwater tank. But it was rusty and broke and all the water ran out and away, and I cried and cried. My father was irritated but Edna said, ‘She misses her mother, poor little thing,’ and I cried some more, full of self-pity. That was the first year of the war, my mother was ill again and we stayed on in Coromandel and went to school there. When we got back to Christchurch six months later there were nits in our hair. My mother said, pulling and tugging with the nit comb, ‘Fine school doctor she turns out to be!’ and I decided that you didn’t speak about the South Island when in the North, or about the North Island when in the South, there was too much antagonism around. I had tropical sores on my shins, too, which came, or so my mother said, from walking barefoot to school. I was quite proud of them. They ate deeply into the flesh, right down to the bone. I have the scars to this day. On our ritual journey up to Coromandel the following year, when we were walking in the Wellington Botanical Gardens looking for rare ferns, my mother told us that Edna and Frank were married. The sky darkened and the ground seemed to open up. The weather had been dry and the lawns were sparse and networked by myriad little cracks where the earth showed through. Now these seemed to deepen and widen, and I had to stand very still for fear of being swallowed up by nothingness. I was not sure whether this was a real earthquake or one of the ones in my head. I kept my face still and said that was bigamy, since he was married to my mother. She said that she and Frank were divorced and had been for two years. She explained what divorce was. It was the first I had heard of such a thing. And why would anyone want Edna, when he could have had my mother? What a strange family we were, and unhappy, judging from the look on my mother’s face, and things had so nearly gone well. And how stupid I was not to have realized. I could tell that nothing was ever going to be right again. The pattern of my life was establishing itself, and it was not good, and there was never to be any curing it. Jane said nothing and stared at her shoes. They were well polished. Mine were scruffy. We were too embarrassed to look at one another, or indeed at my mother. The ground reverted to normal though it was some time before I felt safe enough to move. I did not discuss the matter with Jane. We both kept our own counsel. Nor did I speak freely or easily to my father thereafter: I thought he must take me for such a fool. I was taken to the Botanical Gardens in Wellington a couple of years back, while on a book tour. It seemed rather a pleasant place and the lawns were well watered: nor did the earth yawn. But I still had the feeling that it was a place where the devil had once flown by, and we’d got caught up in the dark wind of his wings, because we just happened to be standing there, the three of us, Margaret, Jane’nFay, in his path. It was shortly after that that Jane got bored with my tagging along. She’d tell me to go away and stop following her: she turned and looked at me once with an expression so dangerous and manic that I was frightened: I never trusted her with a confidence again, or my mother, let alone my father. Life, I could see, had to be borne on one’s own. I smiled and skipped about as expected but I had learned to be wary. Being sociable, I put my trust in friends and learned to turn my family life into playground narrative, the better to entertain them. I knew it was a kind of disloyalty, even then. I have never stopped. I put it on paper now, elaborating further and further away from the original tale, with a succession of what ifs, what ifs, but the source, the riverhead, is the playground narrative. A Burning Bush in Hagley Park (#ulink_cf47587e-bf48-592e-80d9-09fc1530310f) My mother was losing interest in worldly matters. She had seen angels in Hagley Park: where once I had held my father’s hand and seen a parachutist floating down from a clear sky, now she saw, floating down, pillars of light: the light spoke to her, reassured her; she was in despair at the time, she said, as to what her life had come to, and ill, and anxious as to how to keep us, but they told her all would be well in the end. She was special to them. I read a description in C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra of just such pillars of light: he too described them as angels. They too appeared at a time of crisis. Such visions are both transfiguring and dangerous: the Church is suspicious of them (Joan of Arc ended burned at the stake) and psychiatrists spend a lot of time and energy trying to explain them away, as they do point-of-death-experience. Some neural disturbance, some hormonal imbalance, they claim. But I don’t think so, I think she did see angels: and after that nothing that happened, nothing she did or saw, seemed quite real to her again, as if she was living in shadow, waiting for the sun to return. Visions came to her from time to time, as if the sun came briefly out from behind the clouds. She described a vase of flowers to me, once, as it suffered a sea change into its proper self, floating with an intensity of being and beauty, before returning to its everyday self. She had glimpsed what Plato would describe as the perfect form, of which all mundane things are the shadow: it was the heaven even the nuns had spoken of, when it is enough just to gaze and adore in the Light of the Lord. For all my bouncy practicality I was the one she talked to about these things. Others were embarrassed. Angels! Mystical experiences! In Hagley Park of all places! Floating vases of flowers? You’re joking! Jane would walk out of the room if my mother tried to talk about it: her friends thought she was a little touched; the local vicar didn’t want to know. I was perfectly prepared to believe in them: I was well aware by now there was more to our existence than meets the eye. My mother wrote to Gerald Heard, a religious leader who lived in a community in California, where later Aldous Huxley was to take mescalin and write The Doors of Perception. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». 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