Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

  I’m writing sitting in an organic café where Sam used to work, eating a bacon and avocado salad, drinking pink grapefruit juice and reading a paperback of poetry by Jenny Bornholdt, just bought, in which I thumb to a poem dedicated ‘To Elizabeth’, set in the house in the South of France where they had supper together: ‘The inventive architecture / of mothers and / daughters. Days / are shorter now.’ I’ve never seen the alterations which Elizabeth and her mother made to this studio in Villefranche, which years ago I adored visiting, inherited from a Dutch great-aunt.

  Off after lunch to the City Gallery, where the poet’s husband, Greg O’Brien, works. His line drawings illustrate her collection, Summer the new book’s title. Their names and contact details were given me by Elizabeth, in the long phone call she made on the day before I left.

  Later I read another poem, very short, only three lines:

  French Gardens

  Cabbage trees, lemons.

  In something I have written,

  ‘rather’ is ‘father’.

  See two of the exhibitions at the City Gallery, the oil paintings, washes and drawings of Stanley Spencer and photographs by Wim Wenders. Spencer’s last known words, written not said to the Vicar of Cookham were: ‘I am weary, never bored. Why should you think I am? Sadness and sorrow is not me.’ Wenders’ photos, taken over a period of twenty years, disappoint. His wordy captions too. In attempting to explain, they reduce. Nothing, in my view, to compare with his early films, Alice in the Cities above all; and nothing either to compare with earlier quotes of his I’ve elsewhere noted:

  I was not so much attracted by distant things as repelled by here. Here there was a vacuum: that peculiar lack of past. You can’t convince a child not to look over its shoulder. But that was the feeling I grew up with: it was wrong to look back.

  Wenders’ London dealer, Haunch of Venison, is credited with several of the latest panoramic C-type prints, in particular those taken on 8 November 2001, of ranks of yellow bulldozers, their giant grabs reaching out to excavate the rubble of the Twin Towers.

  For coffee at the gallery’s connected café I met Greg, who is hard at work proofreading the catalogue he has written of an exhibition which opens to the public on 22 February. He’s a painter and a poet too, who earns his living teaching art history, curating shows and reviewing books on contemporary work. I like him. We’ll meet again, in a couple of weeks, for supper with his family at home in Ha Taitai, a suburb of Wellington. He plans to introduce me to artist colleagues.

  23 January

  From the nature books, gifts to the household which I bought yesterday on my walk into town to swim, I see that the birds I watched at Awaroa are not martins but welcome swallows, permanent residents of the coasts and marshes of New Zealand.

  Jenny’s verse is personal and direct, the subject of Summer the spending of her days in and around Menton, working at the Katherine Mansfield studio on a six month Memorial Fellowship in the summer of 2002, from where she visited Beth – Elizabeth – and her mother Henriette in Villefranche. She writes with deceptive simplicity, the rhythms complex, several poems illusively resonant of the work of favoured earlier poets.

  The country’s National Museum, Te Papa – Our Home, in Maori – dominates the downtown waterfront. Six storeys high, with balconies and restaurants and souvenir shops, it’s awash with children. The Lord of the Rings, filmed and premiered in NZ, is everywhere in Wellington, the Museum included. And yet, amongst the theme-park dross I find two interesting exhibitions containing Maori art, one called Signs and Wonders, the other Made in New Zealand.

  Loved the work in corrugated iron by Jeff Thomson, in particular his HQ Holden Station Wagon of 1991, out of which he lived for several years. Dorothea Rockburne, born in Canada in 1934, is a name new to me, creator of the Locus Series of six large panels of white paper etched and aquatinted in almost indiscernible off-white patterns and folded along pencil lines to take the stylised contours of low hills, precursor to recent work by Roni Horn which I saw in an exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in December.

  Notice that in the late nineteenth century the Maoris appropriated materials brought in by the white invaders, including red sealing wax, which they combined with their native sharks’ teeth to striking effect in jewellery. I was attracted also to the small record-sketches by army officers of Maori rebel flags of the 1860s, in red and blue watercolour, the borders cross-hatched in grey ink.

  The leak from the neighbour’s cesspit lengthens, seeping farther and farther down the sloping lawn towards Shenagh’s house.

  The family see lots of films, outings which I’m happy to join. The credits of the Lars von Trier film Dogville are accompanied by a Bowie song about America, played as the director pumps out onto the screen image after image of street-life degradation, showing the destructive poverty of the Depression and pioneer hardship in the Wild West.

  24 January

  At my last meeting with my father, in hospital in Southampton a month before his death, I assured him that he need have no worries about the future well-being of his children, that Shenagh and I would never make the misery of our lives he and Mother had of theirs. I was insistent on my ability to avoid his feelings of meaninglessness and despair, promising that, however alone I might feel, I would surround myself with things of interest. I did not tell my father that I never wanted to see a single aspect of him in me.

  Such arrogance, and insensitivity. Look at me now, recovering from confinement in mental hospital, my suicidal despair controlled, never defeated.

  25 January

  Finished reading the middle novel, Meg, of Maurice Gee’s trilogy, set in Nelson, where he lives and through which we drove on our way to Able Tasman. Noted in my folder of quotes, from the last chapter:

  The sentimentalist in me will not die. Once it had the shape of my whole life, but now it’s a dried-up thing, light as a bat, hanging upside down with its feet clawed tight on my ribs.

  The notebook of prayers which I made from Jonah’s letters to me included a quotation from Saint Augustine’s Confessions. I learnt it by heart:

  I am working hard in this field, and the field of my labours is my own self. I have become a problem to myself, like land which a farmer works only with difficulty and the cost of much sweat.

  26 January

  At John Gleisner’s property up the Mikimiki Valley I swam in the clear pools of the river running through his land, and watched a harrier hawk slowly circle, like a glider, above the firs in a plantation on the hill opposite. John is building himself a straw bale house, living at present in a caravan, planting trees which were eaten to shreds by cattle when he was away in Iraq, taking his place in the human shield. The valley is fertile, well-farmed by his neighbours. One side of John’s beehive, self-made, has collapsed. The bees are furious.

  27 January

  The copy of George Orwell’s Diaries which I picked out from the Oban Street shelves must have been left behind by John, a Quaker and a pacifist, genuine in his egalitarianism. This is John’s kind of reading, despite the contradictory mixture of ideas.

  An old Etonian, Orwell mentions his yearly interest in the result of the Eton and Harrow cricket match at Lords. And then, in this entry, notices the voices overheard in a sanatorium in the Cotswolds early in 1949:

  A sort of over-fedness, a fatuous self-confidence, a sort of bah-bahing of laughter about nothing … people who, one instinctively feels, without even being able to see them, are the enemies of anything intelligent, or sensitive or beautiful … No wonder everyone hates us so.

  Orwell apparently had a fixation on rats. Observations on rats litter his diaries. Commentators have suggested that the attack by rats on Winston Smith at the Ministry of Love links the radical author of Nineteen Eighty-Four directly with the public school educated egg collector and amateur naturalist.

  28 January

  Shenagh’s neighbours at the back are old and poor, amongst the few original house-owners of this area, unable to p
ay for the repair to their worn-out sewage system. They were forced to prevaricate, assured the council contractors that it had been mended.

  Janet White asked me, if I happened to travel to the top of North Island, to contact her special Maori friend, who still lived on the coast opposite the uninhabited island which Janet farmed alone in her early twenties. She told me that the woman’s son had become well-known in New Zealand for his enterprise, the first to bring summer-time visitors to bachs on his coast. Michael Aiutu is his name. What I did not know, until learning last night from a friend of Shenagh’s, is that Aiutu became a Member of Parliament but has recently fallen from grace, accused by enemies in the local community of under-age sex. Janet met Michael as a boisterous boy, already marked, she said, as the most ambitious child in the district.

  Janet Frame died this week, my favourite New Zealand author. Fourteen years ago, when I last visited my sister, then living on the Coromandel Peninsular, I read Frame’s autobiography Angel at My Table. At university in Dunedin, fearing failure in her exams, she simulated the symptoms of schizophrenia and managed to get herself consigned to hospital. Held there for the next eight years, Frame, who was regularly given electric shock treatment, was on the verge of an enforced lobotomy when one of the professors by chance read her single published short story. He came to the immediate rescue, pronounced her sane and helped find her a bach in which to live and write. Deluged – later – with success, she refused to publish a word in the last twenty years of her life, choosing instead to write solely for herself.

  30 January

  At midday this Friday morning the large Catholic Church off Willis Street in downtown Wellington, St Mary of the Angels, was surprisingly busy, the majority of the congregation women of Pacific origin, with a sprinkling of silver-haired old colonials. The columns are stone-built and painted cream, the roof of wood in the gothic manner, the original pews made from forest trees, like those at the nearby Wesleyan Chapel, where the seats are constructed on an egalitarian curve. A travelling man, gaunt and lame, was careful to be the last to take communion and bent to his knees low enough to receive wine from the chalice to the last drop.

  The nave of St Mary’s is lined in carved figures pastel-painted to depict the twelve Stations of the Cross.

  In construction of the motorway the state authorities destroyed not only Katherine Mansfield’s teenage home but also mausolea and tombs in part of the Anglican cemetery, stretching across the steep slopes of equatorial forest, a place of covert beauty. Wellington’s few Jews are buried there, alongside the Christians. I walked through the cemetery on my way home.

  Further along Tinakori Road I passed the Royal Victoria Bridge Club, close to the site of the second Mansfield villa. It is walking distance from my sister’s house, like my mother’s club is in Lymington, her home-from-home for the seventeen years since Father’s retirement. She’s a good bridge player, and reasonable golfer too, annoyed at being unable these days to fix same-age partners to accompany her around the full eighteen holes. My mother refused until last year to tell either me or my sister her date of birth, embarrassed at being older than my father. In August she will be eighty-five, I reckon.

  31 January

  Half-awake in the early mornings I imagine myself faced with insurmountable problems which, when I shake myself and think about them calmly, do not in actuality exist. This morning, at 5.30 a.m., I was fearful of my birthday celebrations next week, at which I was expected to play a flute solo that I did not know, had failed to prepare. In fact, my birthday is not until July and I’ve never played any musical instrument.

  At an enjoyable dinner last night with colleagues of Shenagh’s, in a cared-for house overlooking the sea, I participated with humour and passion. And yet I remain suspicious of myself, do not feel any closer to understanding what happened to me and have no conscious knowledge of how to stop despair again taking hold. Last night’s house overlooks Wellington Bay in much the same way that Elizabeth’s and her mother’s studio, tacked onto the cliff below the Corniche Basse and above the Vieux Port, surveys the harbour at Villefranche and on beyond to Cap Ferrat. Views can be brash, dominant. These two allow themselves to be discovered, appear and reappear at different angles through the trees. On holiday visits to Villefranche in the 1970s, alone in the last of the day’s sun, I used to dive off the highest point of the lighthouse wall at the entrance to the harbour, arching my body out into the blue water beyond the rocks.

  The blackbirds eat the strawberries in Shenagh’s garden as soon as they ripen.

  Drawn to think back, not long ago, to my six bouts of electroconvulsive therapy.

  Remember that two or three of us were driven, in a van, around the corner from the mental hospital to the secretive ECT unit. No food or liquid since the night before, to circumvent the threat of choking. Knocked out by an anaesthetist. Complete disorientation on coming round. Hours or minutes later? Didn’t know where I was, couldn’t recognize fellow patients, was uncertain of my own name. Memory gradually returned. I’ve never known what they actually did to me while unconscious.

  1 February

  Kitchen cupboard doors left open, sweaters strewn across the settee.

  Strange that visual details matter so little to my sister.

  Strange that they mean so much to me.

  3 February

  Reading a second Mansfield volume of short stories, Bliss, dedicated to her London husband John Middleton Murray and published in 1921, four years after her tuberculosis had been diagnosed. She died from the disease in 1923, at the age of thirty-five, on a curative stay with the Russian mystic Gurdjieff in his chateau at Fontainebleu. In the opening piece of this collection Mansfield writes:

  Linda looked up at the fat swelling plant with its cruel leaves and fleshy stem. High above them, as though becalmed in the air, and yet holding so fast to the earth it grew from, it might have had claws instead of roots. The curving leaves seemed to be hiding something; the blind stem cut into the air as if no wind could ever shake it.

  ‘That is an aloe, Kezia.’

  ‘Does it ever have flowers?’

  ‘Yes, Kezia,’ and Linda smiled, and half shut her eyes. ‘Once every hundred years.’

  4 February

  The doctor near Shenagh’s office, whom I have twice visited to monitor my heart, turns out to be a daughter of the Labour Prime Minister of New Zealand in the mid-1980s. In conversation she judged me, with a smile, to be a perfectionist, to my own cost!

  Read an acerbic entry by one of the richest of the first pioneers on this coast, Alfred Ludlam, in his essay of 1865 on local horticulture, quoted in a detailed National Museum catalogue I bought today, Wellington’s Heritage. Plants, Gardens and Landscape: ‘I have a few words to say to the destruction of that pest of all pests, sorrel, one which appears to flourish all the better for the attention it receives, in digging it up and carefully collecting the roots.’ My butterfly meadow!

  5 February

  Everybody makes music in my sister’s house, children and parents together. Shenagh and John met playing chamber music in Manchester. Both were married then, to others. She is an LRAM, and regularly plays the piano. Sad that John lives alone now in a caravan, approaching seventy, all seven of his children from his two marriages absent, separately involved in their individual worlds. His cello lies in its case on a bunk in the caravan. He still practises.

  Seen at a distance from home in Lower Terhill, it feels inexcusable that a man of my advantages, educationally, materially, physically, acted as I did.

  Unless suicidal depression is, in a significant part, chemical?

  6 February

  I swam this morning in the unruffled waters of Lake Taupo, formed by a volcanic eruption as recent as a hundred years after the birth of Christ, the bottom without rocks or weeds, ripple-bands of grey sand beneath my feet. On the esplanade of the town at the end of the lake tourists drive golf balls two and three hundred yards into the water, the deep basin so even and clear tha
t divers have no trouble collecting the balls every Monday afternoon.

  A giant mountain, a pure cone of snow and scree, overwhelms the view. Shenagh and I wander through a mature podocarpus forest, with dozens of the most enormous trees I’ve ever seen, all natives of New Zealand: rimu, matai, miro and a single totara. Some of the side branches of the totara are shaped into deep wedges, growing up and out like the buttresses of Wells Cathedral, or the dewlap of a Hereford bull.

  We arrive early evening at a remote farm of several thousand acres, near Piopio in Waitanguru District, up Leitch Road and several miles down a dirt track – in the heart of the King Country, as it is known, land defended in the nineteenth century by a Maori king for the exclusive use of his people. This high hill territory was acquired in 1906 by the present farmer’s grandfather, the entire terrain then covered in untamed bush and forest. A photograph taken in the 1920s shows the farmhouse perched on a stripped-bare mound framed by the skeletons of dead trees, today shaded by a luscious bloom of flower and fruit. Over barbecued ribs of home lamb, the sun setting through branches of a eucalyptus tree, we’re told of the three and a half thousand breeding ewes currently out there at pasture, together with fifteen hundred pregnant hoggets set to colonise an adjacent farm recently bought, and four hundred beef cows with their calves, not to mention dozens of dutiful rams and bulls. Patricia and Graeme McQuorcodale, who farm their land alone – with the assistance of seasonal part-timers and passing sons – have named each field: Meru’s, Folly, Watsons, Mangawhara, Donnelly’s, and the rest, several named after the labourers who felled and cleared the trees.