by Ian Wedde
The third entrepôt was in the Shetland and Orkney Islands, where the Norse or Viking connection has been well documented in records of land ownership. The Shetland Taits divided into two rival factions according to hair colour, the Black Taits and the Red Taits (the Reds moved to mainland Scotland) – which caused some confusion among Tait genealogy forum members, since there are also black Taits in Alabama descended from emancipated slaves who took the name of their former slave-owner, himself probably descended from one Colonel Tait, stationed on the Coosa in 1778.
There are many pretenders to a Tait family crest, but my favourite is one with blue birds on it and the travel-weary motto ‘Toujours le même’ – which hardly does justice to the diversification of Scottish Taits across the globe along sea routes opened up by mercantilism, main-chance enterprise, lack or loss of opportunity at home, Industrial Revolution skill sets, mercenary willingness, British empire-building and, it would seem, a perverse (and cheerful) desire to be anywhere else.
I feel at home here – as I do when browsing the stories of restless Weddes and Hornes. The ones I’m descended from were the ones who left. It’s an impulse I recognise as I sample the stories of these people who may or may not have been directly connected to me.
Some Tait men sought their fortunes in the fur trade with or in competition with the Hudson’s Bay Company in what became Canada, a nation replete with Scots-descended Taits. Many had wives back in Scotland but took First Nation wives while trapping and trading. The resulting Metis children included Taits who, as well as enriching and extending the meaning of ‘Red’ Tait, subsequently complicated things by marrying French Metis.
Taits went to Ireland (one became a famous bishop there), and some came back again; others moved on from Ireland to Auckland, New Zealand, along the familiar narrative track of a Catholic–Protestant marriage that was unacceptable to relatives in the old country. I don’t know what became of those ones, though they are ‘closer to home’ than some prosperous Taits in Oporto, Portugal – the ‘Casa Tait’ is still there.
I found a Tait family in Argentina whose origins were in Inverness, and so perhaps remotely connected to the Taits that came to New Zealand. I can’t reasonably claim the (Black) Shetland Taits whose descendants, including Sir Frank Tait, were theatre impresarios in Melbourne. They promoted Dame Nellie Melba, and made and acted in Australia’s first feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), written and directed by Charles Tait. Producers included John and Nevin Tait; the film starred Elizabeth and John Tait, and is recorded in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register as the first full-length feature ever made.
Another Australian Tait, whether ‘Red’ or ‘Black’ I don’t know, was the Sydney cartoonist William Tait, whose work I know. Nor can I claim Robert G. Tait, captain of the Duchess of Argyle, which sailed from Greenock in 1842 with emigrants for New Zealand, or his brother William Tait, a master mariner of London, because they were English, not Scottish. However, William’s son Alex emigrated to Auckland in 1861 and died there in 1923 aged ninety-four, leaving behind five daughters and contributing to the great Tait narrative mash-up.
Along this irresponsible digression I note the ubiquity of my grandmother’s name, Agnes. No doubt it was a commonplace Caledonian favourite, but the Taits were especially fond of it and often seem to have grafted it through their family trees from grandmother to granddaughter and quite often from great-grandmother to great-granddaughter – which gives the impression they preferred the long view to the homely one, and stretched-out, far-horizon narratives to domestic ones. The markers of their world views seem to have been receding horizons and improbable fortunes, not neighbourhood fences and pensions. Despite the energetic participation of a few Tait genealogists in the online forum, most of the traces they’re looking for seem to have faded without regretful backward glances; most of the wandering, cheerfully mercenary Taits, whether Red or Black, seem to have been content to disappear without trace into their unpredictable futures.
A few achieved historical notoriety and survive in sensational stories. My favourite is David Tait, to whom I feel an instant brotherly attraction. This David was involved in the notorious Fort Mims Massacre on 30 August 1813 during the Creek Civil War in Alabama. At the start of this conflict, frightened settlers, including mixed-blood Creeks north of Mobile, sought refuge in Fort Mims on the Alabama River. Led by one Peter McQueen and his cousin by marriage William ‘Red Eagle’ Weatherford, the Red Sticks faction of Creeks had been armed by the Spanish in Florida. They were successfully ambushed at the Battle of Burnt Corn by a force whose leader, the mixed-race Creek captain Dixon Bailey, thereby lined himself up for return-bout vengeance. ‘Red Eagle’ Weatherford was especially keen to have Bailey’s scalp. Unfortunately, given the complicated intermarriages that had taken place between Creek and settlers along the Alabama, Tensaw and Mobile rivers, Red Eagle’s brother and several of his sisters, as well as his half-brother David Tait, were among those taking shelter in Fort Mims. Red Eagle’s sister, Hannah McNac, and her sons were with his war party, but her Scots husband, described in John Simpson Graham’s 1923 History of Clarke County as ‘a true friend of the Americans’, was among the 500 massacred at Fort Mims, though it’s not recorded if his scalp was one of the 250 taken that day. Nor do we know if David Tait lost his – but in any case, the Tait blood as well as the Tait name adopted by emancipated slaves had already flowed into complex tributaries from David’s father, the soldier adventurer Colonel Tait, who had been stationed at the Hickory Ground on the Coosa in 1778.
There’s something feverish and over-complicated about this narrative (which I would like to be part of my own story – which I feel at home in) with its meandering, swampy tributaries the Coosa, Alabama, Mobile and Tenshaw rivers, and its entangled bloodlines and conflicts. I’m drawn to its narrative chaos and ambiguous, transgressive, melodramatic storylines much as I was to the stories that enmeshed me when I was seven. I’m reminded again of Rimbaud’s skulking seven-year-old poet, ‘writing romances about life in the great desert where ravished Liberty shone, forests, suns, riverbanks, savannas’ – or reading ‘his endlessly absorbing romance full of heavy ochre skies and flooded forests, flowers of flesh deployed in star-pitted woods, vertigo, collapse, disarray and pity!’ No wonder Bobby and Glenys Moss and my own brother sometimes left me to my convoluted play-acting in the Francis Street asparagus patch – but that’s not what I now remember with a familiar thrill.
What I remember is the ecstasy of being inside stories, and especially of reading them, which both Dave and I began to do early. I remember that what I didn’t understand in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Treasure Island was part of their fascination. Linda read us The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling – I’ve lost my copy of Book One with a ‘love from’ inscription by her on the inside cover. Only a few years ago, I guiltily returned to my brother his similarly inscribed Book Two, which I must have pinched fifty years ago. Mowgli was a bigger force in my childhood than any cousin. Only Dave was more important.
Perhaps our rootless childhood deprived us of family stories. Perhaps my brief, enjoyable excursion into the dispersed Tait narrative has involved a hedged bet – it almost involved family, but did so from a distance, and via improbable stories. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed it as much as I did.
It seems to me that I was more than compensated for any family deprivation by the stories I read, and by the fact that I would soon be reading them not in Francis Street, Blenheim, in the familiar family home within its perimeter of park, school, town baths, Paine’s ice cream and the Sounds, but in a small, bare, concrete house above the cholera-infected Karnaphuli River, where snakes came in through the bathroom drains during the monsoon, and where Mowgli was if anything more plausible than the cousins we’d left behind, at least to my mind.
It’s possible, too, that this narrative and its successors replaced family – or that imagination replaced intimacy. It seems both disenchanted and accurate to propose, as Do
nna does, that I like the idea of home because it’s a place I come back to, rather than a place I stay in. The shadow that falls from this gentle admonition is that perhaps I like the idea of family in the same way.
The distempered pup
We came back down the Karnaphuli River from the Rajah’s palace above Kaptai to find our little puppy Tiddles was dead. My brother’s memory is that we came back from an overnight stay in Chittagong, where we’d probably gone while the puppy he remembers as Tweedles was put down.
‘Rajah’s Palace’ was what we called the place I remember as a sprawling compound of rain-stained buildings with a rectangular ornamental water tank the size of a swimming pool in the interior courtyard. The pool was full of pea-soupy, turbid water and dead leaves. I think we’d been led to expect more, because I was disappointed by the un-splendid nature of the place. But my disappointment was dispelled when the ‘Rajah’ gave Dave and me Box Brownie cameras.
I remember him as an urbane man with nicely combed hair. It’s possible, however, that this person belongs somewhere else in the story of our time in East Pakistan. I think we had tea and very sweet cakes, served next to the scummy pool by an elderly woman in a white sari edged with blue. She, too, may have drifted into this episode from elsewhere. I do remember the taste and smell of rose petals – I think the cakes had rose petals scattered on them, and rosewater as well.
I have no idea why this man and his old palace were up the river there, a long boat trip from the nearest city, Chittagong. Nor do I know why we were visiting him and his family, or with whom, aside from our mother. I don’t remember my father being there, so it must have been Linda, taken there for a day trip by one of her new friends from the mill.
Dave remembers that Linda collected epiphyte orchids on the way, and that the driver of the Willy’s jeep, whose name was Jan, climbed up a tree to get them. Perhaps we stayed longer than a day – I can’t remember. Perhaps the Rajah’s compound has gone now, submerged by the lake created by the Kaptai dam, built by an American company whose commissariat dispensed luxuries such as the peanut butter which Dave remembers Tiddles, or Tweedles, was fond of; work began on the dam a year or two before we left Chandraghona. It’s also possible that the Rajah wasn’t Bengali, but a member of the old Hill Tribe aristocracy, probably Chakma, in the Rangamati region. An ethnography of the Hill Tracts published in 2001 documents the submersion of the old rajbari or mansion in the newly created Kaptai reservoir in 1961 – perhaps this was the one we’d visited.
When I went back up the Karnaphuli in 2005, I stopped at a tea and picnic garden a few kilometres upriver from the mill, crossed the river in one of the oar-creaking sampans I remembered from my childhood, and went for a walk in an old, rustling tea plantation there. Perhaps that’s what the Rajah was doing up the river – growing tea. Or perhaps he was harvesting the introduced plantation teak over towards the Hill Tracts; it has now mostly gone, along with the vast forests of bamboo where wild elephants and tigers used to live – the bamboo was taken out to make paper at the Chandraghona mill where Chick had come to work. Or perhaps the ‘palace’ was a jungle hunting lodge – another anachronism now, since the animals have all gone as well.
From the time of our visit to the Rajah, whichever of us wasn’t taking the snap usually appears in it, holding their camera. The Box Brownie had a strap on top which your fingers fitted under, and a small round window in which a number appeared when you wound the film on for your next shot. When a roll of film finished, it was satisfying to hear its tail-end tear free of the winding-on sprockets inside – I could imagine it tucking itself away inside the yellow and black cylinder in which the negative film was delivered to Studio Mohib at Chandraghona.
The viewfinder was on the top and you peered down into it – to my mind, the world of the printed photographs was always disconcertingly upright, whereas the world I viewed with my Box Brownie was read like a book, as if what was out there could be transposed into a story with pictures. Often, these picture-stories had animals and pets in them – the doomed puppy Tiddles, a dead snake with our flinching feet standing back from it, a ferocious turkey-gobbler viewed from a safe distance, a baby leopard cub that we had as a pet for a mysteriously short time, a monkey on a long leash whose chattering grimace I was scared of, and which used to piss on us when it got agitated – there’s a picture of our friend Billy McKenzie holding the monkey on his knee while it pulls his nose.
There are numerous photographs of us riding on elephants. There we are at Sitapahar in Kaptai – Dave’s almost very correctly punctuated caption on the back of the photograph reads, ‘Peter, Geraldine, Ian, and I riding an elephant at Sitapahar. (all the children are not visible.)’; at Kaziranga in Assam, where the elephant is almost submerged in a lotus swamp; in various anonymous, scrubby landscapes; later, at Kandy in Ceylon.
My mental viewfinder to this tilting world also had the black-and-white illustrations from Kipling’s Jungle Books in it. The menacing tiger Shere Khan, known as Lungri or the Lame One, thrust his huge snarling head into the cave where the infant Mowgli was playing with his new wolf brothers, and Raksha, Mowgli’s adoptive wolf mother (or was it Father Wolf?) bared her teeth at him and drove him away. Later, the grown boy Mowgli drove the tiger off with a burning branch. Later still, he conspired with Grey Brother, his wolf sibling from the Seonee Pack, to trap Shere Khan in a narrow gorge, where he was trampled to death by the buffalos herded by Mowgli – I loved the picture of Mowgli skinning the dead tiger while Grey Brother pinned the terrified village hunter, Buldeo, to the ground.
I longed to have a knife like Mowgli’s (we did get sheath-knives), and to speak to and understand animals. Also, Mowgli was fearless, and he knew better than the village grown-ups, especially Buldeo. These were powerful fantasies, and I think they probably went upriver with me the day we visited the Rajah’s old palace. Perhaps the narrative of Mowgli’s comings and goings from wolf and village homes, his exiles, abductions and returns, was also beginning to grow in my imagination. It certainly took up residence there later on.
One reason I was disappointed by the decaying, water-stained palace was because it fell short of the Cold Lairs, the mighty ruins Mowgli was abducted to by the chattering Bandar-log monkeys. I loved it when Mowgli placated the hissing cobras in the Cold Lairs’ ruined summer house by uttering the snakes’ Master Word. I loved even more the scene in which the great python Kaa smashed through into the summer house and rescued Mowgli, and then hypnotised the Bandar-log with his hunger dance – but not Mowgli, who was immune to it. I loved that he was immune, and could get his protectors, the bear Baloo and the panther Bagheera, away from Kaa’s weaving spell.
There’s a before and after the Rajah’s Palace. In the before, Dave and I don’t have our cameras, so it must have been our father who took the photographs of us with our new pet puppy Tiddles. I remember the sour smell of the puppy’s peed-on tummy, which was soft and almost hairless. Dave and I are sitting with our mother on the outside steps of the bare, semi-detached, two-storey concrete house on a hill above the river – our first home at Chandraghona. You got to it along a river-bank road that crossed tributary streams on hair-raising twin-track bridges. The plastered steps and ground-floor veranda were painted red and polished frequently by the mysterious man known as the ‘bearer’, who lived in a cubby under the stairs to the upper floor of the house where the bedrooms opened on to a balcony. The stairs went up from the lower veranda and so the bedrooms were accessible from the road outside the house.
Dave and I are wearing identical striped T-shirts in one of the puppy photographs, and short-sleeved shirts in two others, so our time with Tiddles must have gone on for several days or even weeks before the trip upriver to the palace. Linda has a precautionary look as the puppy tries to nip us – I imagine she’d have been worried about germs, which were a major preoccupation early on in our years by the brown river.
I thought about germs while listening to Linda read us the story of ‘Mowgli’s
Brothers’, imagining that the wolf cave was full of them – but that Mowgli was impervious to germs much as he was to Kaa’s hypnotic hunger dance. I guess what appealed were Mowgli’s special powers, as well as his fearlessness. I also liked his scornful attitude to the village people who were both afraid of the jungle and prone to germs, like the cholera victims we were warned about during the yearly ‘cholera season’. Mowgli didn’t get cholera, even though he drank the same water and ate the same food as the wolves. And though the puppy Dave and I shared as a pet was barely weaned when we got him, I’m sure I cast him as my own personal Grey Brother and built myself asparagus-patch-type stories in which we conquered the fearful forces of the jungle around us.
There are also two photographs of Dave and me on the upper balcony of the house with the bedroom doors opening behind us and the outside stairs in the background. In one, we’re sitting at a cane table with our crookedly smiling father. I’m holding a book and have my finger marking where I’ve got to. In the second photo we’re sitting with our mother, but in this one I’ve gone back to reading the book.
Perhaps it was my fantasy of impervious power, Mowgli-scorn for stupid humans, and a blurring of boundaries between adventures in books and others in the jungly bush along the river that led me to chuck clods of dry clay at the bearded loony who passed below Dave’s and my lair above the river road. He was dressed in rags, and walked along muttering and gesticulating. He yelled at us when the clods connected, and we fled home with the puppy.
At night we slept with the doors to the upper veranda open, to let the cool air in. The yapping puppy woke me up, and I saw the loony we’d chucked clods at silhouetted in the open door of the bedroom. He moved quickly towards us with a large stick. But the puppy flew at him, yelping furiously, and grabbed him by the arm. Then the bearer appeared and collared the man. I think he pretty much threw him down the outside stairs – in any case, we never saw the madman again. The puppy was the hero of the night, but I woke up the next morning with the guilty secret of the clod-chucking, and worse, with my terror at the sight of the man rushing into our room.
