by Ian Wedde
But what we’re also reading is the record of the grown Rimbaud’s desire that it should have been like this. And so my memory of what my brother’s word ‘Glenys’ summoned up is likely to be a mixture of what did happen and what I now want to have happened. And what I want to have happened is likely to be coloured by my adult relish of the fact that it was illicit.
Instead of Glenys (or Bobby) Moss, there appears before me a small, wiry, pungent girl with short, black, curly hair and a narrow white face. She was energetic and bony, and the smell I remember is of sweat, and dirt from the summer places we played in, such as the dry, grassed-over storm drain at the back of Horton Park (though there’s another more important smell). I don’t know who she was but I think she was a year or two older than us. How old were Dave and I then? Younger than Rimbaud’s child poet – young enough to have been running around in the fascinating wake of kids a bit older than us.
I remember that her house had an outside dunny – it was behind a door of green-painted vertical tongue-and-groove timber, and it had a latch with a scalloped thumb-piece. It opened off a back veranda by the wash-house. Her mother scolded us when we clustered outside the door while the girl took a shit: she’d be reporting on the shit’s progress (‘It’s coming now!’); we’d be pressing close to the door, and one of us would be trying to open it. Dave and I were hangers-on to some big kids’ game, but I for one was enchanted by the sharp stink of shit, which was exciting because it was dirty and forbidden, and because it made the girl’s mother angry. I seem to remember (but can’t be sure) that she caught us at it more than once; I think she reported the game to our mother and (as seems likely) that we got a few whacks with the back of Linda’s tortoiseshell hairbrush as a consequence.
I haven’t talked to Dave about this yet, but he, grinning, remembers the pong of piss-wet woollen shorts drying on the radiator at kindergarten. He remembers a kid who habitually pissed himself. I can’t remember either of these things, and perhaps he won’t remember the shitting game when I tell him about it; but we both remember what – or that something – happened in the dry ditch at the back of Horton Park. With matter-of-fact good humour, Dave refers to the activities in the dry ditch as ‘doctors and nurses’. His equanimity is both sensible and unconvincing. Though I didn’t know what the bigger kids were up to, I sensed then (and remember now) that it involved a particular kind and degree of danger and fascination for them, and that this was somehow conveyed to us, the childish voyeurs of whatever it was they were so intently clustered around, whatever it was that involved dry, hollow stalks of grass, funny noises and exclamations and, once, a jet of pee that squirted up into the faces of those watching.
Of course my adult brother and I both dismiss these memories as ordinary, even trivial, and certainly typical of most kids. And yet, like the Rimbaud of ‘Les Poètes de sept ans’, I also want to recover the ignorant thrill of those moments when I knew I’d entered forbidden territory. I also want to (but can’t) have some of Dave’s memories, such as the time the fish and chip caravan that parked by the Taylor River levee next to Blenheim Primary School caught fire, or a peeper’s knothole in the changing sheds behind the school swimming pool.
The thrill of those moments is stretched between the ignorantly sensual childhood home I left when I grew up, full of alluring dangers and sensations, and the knowing home of the senses I inhabit as an adult. I look back from this adult home with a certain kind of longing for the brief, ephemeral, carnal innocence of childhood – and sometimes get, instead, a premonition that has had to wait until now to make sense.
The ball gown
I hesitate to address the question that immediately comes to mind after those memories, at once comical and profound, of the artesian well outside my father’s workshop, the shitting game by the green door of a neighbour’s dunny, and the obscure experiments in the dry ditch at the back of Horton Park. I hesitate because of the answer that makes the question difficult to ask. Also, the question of my mother’s ball gown feels inappropriate, or tasteless, in the context of the infantile scatology of those other memories.
But those pungent memories, infused with alluring hints of transgression, are about the moving home of the imagination, and the enduring agency of childhood sensations – especially smell. They are about how the imagination’s home travels and relocates with us through time and place, furnished with the sensations of childhood that never quite leave that home. But the memories also tell us about the way we leave the undiscriminating home of childhood sensation for the selective one of adult retrospection.
Why is it that I now suddenly remember the aroma of my mother’s ball gown? My question is shaped by the imaginative home we don’t leave and the home of childhood sensation that we do. It’s trivial to flinch from remembering my mother’s Masonic Ball perfume in the company of a polluted well, fresh shit and the piss-reek at the back of the park. Childhood memories don’t obey taste prescriptions, and what we learn from them through the distorting lenses of adult perspective won’t be about taste either, though it may well be about the idea that knowledge and understanding ‘are coeval with Sensation’, as John Locke believed.
The three centuries from Locke to contemporary cognitive psychology are littered with arguments reconciling the cultural and the phenomenal. For me it’s not an issue – I don’t see how what I know and what I understand could fail to be shaped by how I perceive and how I sense; how what I perceive and sense could not, in turn, be shaped by what I already know and understand; and how this virtuous circle could not be articulated by memory, not least the life-script-writing memories of childhood.
As I try to write down what I remember, think and feel about the perfume that accompanied the rustle of our mother’s gown into Dave’s and my bedroom as she and Chick prepared to leave for the ball, none of the words at my disposal seem to belong in that moment. They don’t grasp the space, colour, scale or sound of the moment. It’s as though the language I had then and what I have now were divided at that point. There’s a kind of silence between then and now, the silence of shock, perhaps.
The language I have now is estranged from the room where our mother and father came in to kiss us goodnight, where we heard the stiffened-fabric sound of the gown, the click of our father’s dress shoes; where we smelled the fresh nugget on the shoe leather and, especially, the different perfume our mother wore on such occasions. The language is no longer embodied in my sensibility then, on the far side of that silence; nor can I rediscover the words in my memory of the bedroom whose door had creaked open, framing our glamorous mother and father against the light in the hall.
The moment was impressive, I remember that much, and so does my brother. It was he who remembered that they were going out to the Masonic Ball – I remembered only the awe-inspiring sumptuousness of Linda’s gown and the grandness of Chick’s long-tailed suit, with his war medals and Masonic regalia. Or perhaps I’ve back-loaded the regalia from another time and place. Dave remembers that Linda’s gown was a purple colour, and was off-the-shoulder. He remembers Chick’s ‘tails’. When we talked about them, we simultaneously chose the word ‘glamorous’.
Why is it that I now remember the aroma of my mother’s ball gown?
I have a strong, almost devastating sense of loss, remembering it. Like Dave, I remember being enchanted by the theatrical moment of the farewell. I remember, as he may too, a sense of awe at the transformation that had made our mother and father into those fabulous, dimly lit people. What I also remember, or think I do, is the sense that they had left themselves.
And in doing so had left us. They weren’t just ‘going out’ – they’d gone. The mother and father I knew didn’t look or smell like this. If I was upset that they were going and leaving me (with Nana Horne, and my brother, after all), I was more upset that they’d become strangers. The bedroom I’d been asleep in before the door creaked open and they came in with their sounds and aromas of exotic foreigners was no longer the same. The mother and
father who’d always presided over the comforting sameness of our bedroom had gone.
Now, the bedroom was strange, too. It was in a home whose familiar, immutable layout and location had been made strange by the different perfume of Linda’s ball gown. These were not the people who lived there, wore the clothes I was familiar with, did the things I understood, spoke the words I was accustomed to hearing; who smelled of cigarettes, perming fluid, workshop farts, two-stroke outboard-motor fuel, corned beef, Veet depilatory, thermette wood smoke, car upholstery, mown grass, Flit insecticide, toothpaste, the compost heap, pikelets, sweat, sawdust, coal briquettes, talcum powder, fried fish, Paine’s ice cream, Rawleigh’s ointment, oil-of-wintergreen inhaler, the sudsy washing tub, the piece of mutton fat my father rubbed over the tines of the garden fork I rammed through my foot, the hot fabric and steam of ironing in the kitchen, blue-bags, the crusty gluepot, furniture polish, my Plasticine, my bedtime pillow.
There was a time when I began to be aware that I was at home in and with myself – counterweighted with my twin brother; another time when I felt that self might be most at home in what I now call my imagination; and another when vivid sensation furnished the home of imagination and connected it to a world of seductive risks and mysteries. All this was safely enclosed in the wider world-home that had our house, Francis Street, Horton Park, my brother, our Nana, and our mother and father in it.
And then a door closed on all that, leaving a bewildering perfume behind.
‘Bye bye. Nighty night. Sweet dreams.’
The missing Taits
Because we saw our parents sporadically after we were ten, and only briefly lived with them again as a family when we were fifteen, there are large gaps in my knowledge of family history. We had cousins in Blenheim, but our uncle Paul Wedde’s three children, John, Peter and Margaret, were younger than us and I didn’t get to know them until we ended up living in the same street in Wellington in the 1970s. Both Dave and I vaguely remember a combined family picnic at Pelorus Bridge, where either our cousin John sconed me with a rock, or I threw one at him and connected. An alternative scenario is that I scalped Uncle Keele with an inexpertly hurled river stone.
I vividly remember the smell of the bush and the river, and the sounds of birds – but not people. Much of what I can record now comes from what I learned later. Uncle Paul was ten years younger than Chick, and their sister, our Aunty Phyllis, was the oldest. Her daughter, our cousin Norma, whose wedding-dress train we’d lifted as pageboys, was much older than us. Linda’s younger brother Keele had one daughter, our cousin Jocelyn, about five years younger than us; we didn’t meet her until the 1960s.
There was a middle Wedde brother, Hugh Lancelot, three years younger than Chick, whom the family never talked about. Towards the end of his life, my father owned up to an old guilt – that he hadn’t looked out for his younger brother, whose catastrophic infatuation with a woman drove him to suicide. Hugh was only twenty-two when he shot himself in the back room of the office where he worked with the woman. I got the impression the family had shelved Hugh Lancelot under disgrace as well as grief, but his Tennysonian middle name retains the wistful trace of his father Albert Augustus Wedde’s hopes for him – A.A. Wedde was a respected school principal as well as a composer and excellent cricketer who, it’s said, once clouted a six out of the Basin Reserve in Wellington, smashing the stained-glass window of a church over the road.
These disparities and disconnects reflect the fact that we were born when our mother and father were thirty-six and forty-one respectively. We grew up in a thinly stretched-out family within which we had little or no contact that I can remember. And then we left when Dave and I were seven.
Linda and Chick used to say that their leaving Blenheim, the two grandmothers and (eventually) their twins was frowned on by the rest of the family, some of whom also thought the escapees had given themselves airs. That distanced us, too. We were taken on a meet-the-family tour of New Zealand when we came back from England in 1961. Tongue-tied, under-socialised, with Pommie accents, used to being on our best behaviour and in our best clothes when we stayed with people, we struck pity into the heart of one some-kind-of-cousin called, I think, Geraldine, whom I remember as gangling and racy (she smoked), whose summary of our situation was probably accurate: ‘Jesus – you poor little buggers!’ That’s all I remember, but Dave’s recall is more substantial, so ‘Geraldine’ obviously made an impression on us. He thinks she may not have been a cousin, but the daughter of a family friend, Lewis Fitch, who worked for the Christchurch Press, and that she later became a psychiatrist in the Royal New Zealand Navy – where, no doubt, the diagnostic ‘poor little buggers’ came in handy.
We weren’t poor in any practical sense, but that’s not what she meant. Though Chick had earlier ‘lost everything’ in a West Indian banking collapse, he’d subsequently worked at the highest levels of United Nations Development Corporation secondments for long enough to have bought a modest two-bedroom house in Auckland and kept us in private schools in England for five years. In terms of the ‘betterment’ only dreamed of by his contemporaries in Blenheim, he’d done well by his twins. Footloose as a young man, he had begun to gain professional accounting qualifications as a soldier only during the war. For him, education was his personal near-miss, and he equated it strongly with social and professional standing; he never saw the estrangement of his children from the rich narratives of family as anything other than a gainful trade-off.
In his last years Chick tried to tell me family stories, or to remember them – for example, his memories of old Heinrich August drinking schnapps and reciting Goethe’s Faust in bed – but his heart wasn’t really in it, and my own interest came too late. And I think my mother concurred, though in her old age she confessed to having had guilty doubts from time to time about the dislocated life she’d agreed for her children.
We didn’t get to know family, or much about them, when we were little, though I remember a vague sense of connections in Marlborough – out at Spring Creek and Tua Marina, where a family known as the Hastilows farmed; the big house with banisters and a grandfather clock where our cousin Norma Robinson lived up under the eroded, sheep-nibbled hills at Lake Timara in the Waihopai Valley; the backyard at Uncle Paul’s where I seem to remember he cooled bottles of home brew in covered laundry tubs.
The gap between the dissociated, diasporic life I’d been given when we left Blenheim, and the congenial narrative of family life and history, was also one that I cultivated, somewhat resentfully, for some years. I blamed my mother and father for the dislocation. By the time I wanted to close the gap, which was about the time I stopped feeling deprived of family and started to admire what my parents had done, it was almost too late. Having grown up without stories, the effort to find them was more ethnographic than social.
What the sorrowful future psychiatrist saw as ‘poor’ was probably her tongue-tied, Pommie-ish, maybe-cousins’ estrangement from the give-and-take, yarn-swapping, leg-pulling entanglement of family; and this was what I immediately envied when in 1975 I met up with my cousins John, Peter and Margaret in Maidavale Road, Wellington. They were, briefly, sharing a house there, and this magnified the sense I got from them of continuity and connection through their lives. They knew relatives, and school and university friends, and they had stories to tell about the family’s comings and goings, the scandals, the business and love affairs; they’d played sport with team-mates they still partied with; they spoke in joking code about an inner circle of relatives I barely knew and couldn’t place anywhere in the social geography of my own life. I was torn between envy of that richly social milieu, with its stories, its ability to cultivate humour and extroversion, its mixture of tolerance and piss-taking, and grateful relief for the escape hatch our mother and father had opened.
Looking back across that broad but (for me) thinly peopled expanse of family, with here and there a familiar face and here and there a story or object (the Hornes’ black iron kettle
) and here and there a romantic figure I’d apotheosised (my great-grandfather, the sailor Heinrich August), I encounter a large vacant space. This is where my maternal grandmother Aggie Horne’s maiden name resides. The fact that I know almost nothing about the Scottish Taits – even less than I know about any other limb of the family tree – seems to stand for that dislocation from the larger home of family that I’ve both celebrated and mourned most of my life.
And so I spend a pleasantly vicarious morning browsing the Tait genealogy forum online. A few minimal threads tracking the Tait name and family reveals that it had three historical entrepôts from which its members spread promiscuously around the globe. One was in the north-east of England in what was called Northumbria, a much fought-over territory on the border of Scotland and England, which was part of the Danelaw Viking expansion in the ninth century. Reverse migrations to Finland produced Taits, Teits, Teetts, Trittis and Teittinen families there; but the name’s Viking origin was probably a combination of the given or nickname from Norse ‘titr’, meaning cheerful (I am suspicious of the convenient phonetic resemblance of ‘titr’ to ‘titter’), and the word for a certain kind of mercenary soldier (which is more convincing).
A second major entrepôt was also on the Borders along the River Tweed, where ‘Red’ Taits owned lands around Pirn and Tweeddale in Innerleithen; this was perhaps where my ancestors came from, having moved to Dundee on the Firth of Tay. There’s a Tait Lane in Dundee, and the name has often been associated with medicine, as well as with fishing and seafaring.
