by Ian Wedde
What did I do with the terror? Folded it back under the story in which I was unafraid, confronting danger with my Grey Brother. And then, when we got back from the Rajah’s Palace, we were told that Tiddles had had to be killed because he’d caught distemper and was going mad. Grey Brother had succumbed to germs.
It’s about this time that I remember sensing something was going wrong in the first house we lived in, the one with the outside stairs and Bengali neighbours in the other half of the semi-detached. Whereas, for a time, Dave’s and my activities had been nervously monitored for germs, the dangerous river, snakes and whatever lurked in the jungly bush, we seemed all at once to have almost complete freedom – the sort we’d had back in Blenheim.
I remember sneaking out one night with Dave to meet up with the kids, Peter and Geraldine Bowers, who lived in a similar semi-detached concrete house on the hill across the valley from us. Their mother was a stately Burmese woman called Elsie, their father a Scots brigadier in the East Pakistan Rifles and head of security at the mill – Dave remembers that he was only ever called Brigadier. It was dark and hot, and there was a rustling pile of dead night insects under the light by the outside stairs. When we got to the Bowers’ house, we tried to throw pebbles against the kids’ bedroom window. I don’t remember if we met up with them – probably not; in any case, we made our way back across the valley on the dusty, dark, concrete road and returned to bed undetected. But in the morning we were told that a panther’s paw prints had been seen in the dust by the valley road, that it had probably been hunting goats or chickens among the riverside houses, and that we needed to be careful where we went. Of course we both believed the panther had been stalking us, which wasn’t improbable.
The panther scare didn’t stop us from expanding our territory. We watched featherless-necked vultures sticking their heads up the arses of dead cows and dragging their guts out. Once, running through the scrub, we saw what looked like two desirable club-shaped sticks standing up – but then we saw that they were cobras, and ran screaming for the road. There was construction work going on in the cleared valley below the houses, and railway tracks had been laid for heavy steel buggies to take out waste and bricks – we used to get the empty buggies rolling and then jump on.
We ran around the edge of the forbidden river and played on the huge rafts of bamboo that were floated down to the paper mill. The rafts had caretakers living on them in little bamboo shelters – sometimes the men tried to shoo us off, but we ignored them. Once we found a decayed corpse trapped in a raft. We were told that in the ‘cholera season’ bodies often turned up in them – it was probably a scare story, though there was a holding pen for the rafts where the rubbish they trapped could be removed and sent back out to the river channel. I saw all this again when I went back in 2005, though there was now very little bamboo coming down the river. I also met a very old man, a former night watchman at the mill, who remembered Dave and me running around the place fifty years earlier, ‘like two little goats with white hair’.
In photos from that time we’re often shirtless, with sun-bleached hair and dark tans – and Dave’s splendid teeth almost always bared in a broad grin. We made ourselves sick trying to smoke ‘beeries’, and we lit forbidden fires in the concrete monsoon drains at the back of the house. We picked our way through the messes of liquid human shit in the latrine gulley used by construction workers. We tried to fly fighting kites, made bamboo bows and arrows, and went pretty much feral. We took photographs with our Box Brownies.
We were meant to be doing Correspondence School lessons with our mother, and we did, up to a point – mostly art and reading, in my case; Dave remembers learning to write longhand – ‘joined-up writing’. There’s a photograph of us being supervised by Linda in the bare, sunny room with glaring, uncurtained windows where we worked at opposite ends of a table. Dave seems to be running his finger down a sheet of text, and his open mouth suggests he is reading from it. Linda has a similar sheet in front of her and might be following the same text. I seem to be ignoring them while trying to thread string through something. It all looks peaceful and organised. But along the way something changed, and it was in the schoolroom that I first became aware of this.
When Dave and I compare notes about our home in Blenheim, we mostly remembered the extent of our territory. At six and seven years old we biked all over the place – once as far as the Hastilows’ farm out at Tua Marina. They rang home to come and get us. We both remember the whey pipe from the dairy that fed the squealing Hastilow pigs; and the slaughter of the pigs and the way they were bled for black-pudding sausages. A pig’s bladder was blown up like a football – I can remember the smell of the thing we kicked around in the back paddock. We remember tossing live bootlace eels to the hysterical chickens which skewered them and gulped them down while they sprinted away from the pursuing flock.
Back in town, we tried to spear eels by the sewer outlet into the Taylor or Opawa River. We hung out at the aviary with its incongruous monkeys, went on regular schedules to the roller-skating rink, biked to the public baths where we had swimming lessons (Dave thinks it was the school baths), hurled acorns at the wooden clothespeg Jesus-and-Mary crèche at Sunday school, ate tar, sniffed shit, trooped around in a kind of gang.
We biked up into the Wither Hills where Dave was once ambushed by a rival gang, one of whom fired an arrow into his mouth – he pedalled home stoically, bleeding like a pig. There was Horton Park with its various attractions – the swings from which we leapt with optimistic parachutes, the dry storm-water ditch with its interesting experiments. Dave, tapping into his early passion for aircraft, remembers that we planned to make a boat out of discarded aeroplane fuel tanks from Woodbourne Air Force base, and we ran free during summers at Waikawa Bay.
Reminiscing about all this, we both agree that ‘home’ was more a territory with vague borders than the house we lived in. This territory was full of changing activities and events rather than fixed objects. What seems to have characterised ‘home’ for us was a persistent probing of its extent, a desire to move further and further from the house in Francis Street. We didn’t want a safe home-house – or we took that for granted; what we wanted was anything different and exciting, across the edge of the known world.
Were our parents negligent? I don’t think so – we were probably typical of small-town kids in the early 1950s, expected to be outside when not at school, nearly always unsupervised, occasionally getting told off or dobbed in by neighbours for some misdemeanour or other, but also well known to them, and looked out for. But Dave and I were also twin brothers, and we amplified each other’s opportunities to stretch our territory.
So when I think about the two white-haired little goats going feral in Chandraghona, it’s as though we simply began at some point to behave as we always had back in our expandable ‘home’ territory in Blenheim, which had only a provisional centre in the house where we lived, and where there were hazards other than snakes, germs and panthers; and as though our mother, in particular, either stopped worrying about us and left us to be at home in the way we always had – or she lost the will to worry.
The photographs of us leaving our first home in Blenheim are suffused with pride and happiness. Our mother and father are smiling broadly. We are quite dressed up, as if for a formal outing, Chick in a suit and Linda in a stylish camelhair coat. Dave and I seem to be in best clothes, as if in acknowledgement of the need to mark the occasion for posterity. But neither of us can remember being told anything about ‘East Pakistan’ where we were going. I don’t think our parents were any too clear either. Of course they knew where the country was, and must have located the city of Chittagong on a map; but I suspect they didn’t know anything about the reality of an in-development industrial location the best part of a day’s trip up the Karnaphuli River to the Rangamati district in a wild zone of giant bamboo forests close to the tribal Chittagong Hill Tracts on the borderland between Burma, India and what is now Bangladesh.
I remember (though Dave doesn’t) a moment when we were on holiday at Lake Wanaka, sitting by the lake and grizzling (me) about itchy ‘duck rash’, and a grinning Chick walked towards us waving a telegram. That was when he heard he’d got the job. That’s what they were dressed up for and smiling about next to the TEAL DC6 that would take us to Sydney; after that we flew to Darwin, then Singapore, then Calcutta, and finally to Chittagong. Dave vomited resignedly the whole way – his introduction to the motion-sickness problem that would plague his lifelong passion for flying. We both threw up into a gutter in Calcutta, watched by an interested crowd. We saw our first bandage-swathed leper when Chick herded us onto a crowded airport bus in Chittagong.
Then there are photos, taken by him, of us on the boat with Linda, heading upriver. The formal clothes have gone, Linda’s too – she looks incredibly happy in a sun frock and dark glasses. There was no lavatory on the boat, and it may have been on this trip that she impressed me by peeing into an empty biscuit tin and then hurling it over the side. But we went up and down to Chittagong quite a lot – once getting stranded on a sand-bar and finishing the home trip in a sampan – so this could have been another time.
Neither Dave nor I can be sure about the sequence of events around our departure from Blenheim. At some point we all flew to Wellington and stayed with Chick’s sister and Uncle Norman, on their farm at South Karori. This was probably to say goodbye, but may also have been where we caught the ferry to Christchurch, to get on the plane to East Pakistan.
Dave astonishes me by remembering that the plane to Wellington, which took off from the Bleinheim Aero Club, was a ‘Miles Gemini twin engine, low wing, with tail fins on the tail plane. Bulbous nose’. But then he also remembers the family car that took us on a picnic to Pelorus Bridge and on our South Island holiday that included Wanaka – it was a Ford V8 with running boards; and he remembers that the outboard motors for the clinker dinghy in Waikawa were, in succession, an Anzani, a Johnson (which leapt from the back of the dinghy and sank) and, finally, a Seagull.
At the South Karori farm, we both remember being shown how to tickle trout, and how to give a fiercely tugging lamb a bottle of milk. Only I remember being told off for whacking into a tree with a hatchet, so perhaps only I did that. It seems possible there was tension in the farewell, as it left Aunty Phyllis with the responsibility for our Wedde grandmother.
But what I remember most vividly is going to the pictures with Linda and Chick, and seeing the brand new 1954 release Three Coins in the Fountain, with Dorothy McGuire and Clifton Webb. I didn’t understand the story, but I thought Linda looked a bit like Dorothy McGuire, and Chick sang the theme song on the way home (a baritone with ‘rounded vowels’), though he didn’t look much like Clifton Webb, who had straight, rather thin lips and no moustache. In some way, even allowing for the possibility that subsequently I may have wanted it to be so, the film, with its exotic, incomprehensible romance, cast some kind of spell over my experience of leaving New Zealand. Not really understanding the film’s story was probably part of that.
Dave remembers the film trip differently. In his version, we went to town on the Karori tram with Nana Horne. He doesn’t remember Chick being there at all. So it’s also possible that I picked up something from our parents. I think leaving New Zealand was a romantic adventure for them, and for Chick a chance to return with his adored Lindy to a world he’d tasted in Egypt, Palestine and Italy during the war. In photographs early on at Chandraghona, or on the riverboat, Linda has a thrilled Dorothy McGuire look, and Chick looks resourceful and pleased.
But in a later Box Brownie snap of Linda on the untidy bank of the Karnaphuli River, her expression is introverted, her head tilted forward a little, her gaze fixed on something by her feet, or on nothing in particular; the ivory bracelet is loose on her thin left forearm. She was always slim, but now she looks drawn and unwell. She’s sitting on a driftwood log next to a picnic hamper and wearing the same patterned sun frock as in the happy riverboat picture. That frock appears in another photograph, also melancholy, of her standing in strongly dappled sunlight in a thicket of bamboo, with her twins gazing nervously in opposite directions, while she has that sad, not-seeing-anything-in-particular expression.
This was the patterned frock I remembered years later when the roadside smells of burning cow dung and hot dust entered the car window on the way out of Colombo. Is it possible that I remembered the pattern of my mother’s sun frock because it marked an important moment when her happiness left her; when the adventure of the journey to Chandraghona lost out to the loneliness and difficulty of her life there – when the Three Coins in the Fountain romance ended up on the germy, crappy banks of the Karnaphuli? Why would I so vividly remember that pattern, if not because I associated it with something memorable but incomprehensible, such as my mother’s uncharacteristic misery – because I wanted her to take it off and not wear it, because she was unhappy in it, in the same way I later wanted her to take off the ivory bracelet I associated with her dying?
In another sad photograph, this one taken by Dave’s Box Brownie, she, Chick and I are standing next to the bush swimming hole near the Baptist hospital and leper refuge run by Dr Bottoms. This time Linda’s wearing a swimsuit. Chick is wearing a T-shirt and shorts, I’m in togs, and we’re all barefoot. My Box Brownie hangs by its strap in my left hand. Both Linda and Chick look too thin. His resourceful, slightly leery grin is anxious in this photograph, even a little fierce. Once again, Linda has the same looking-at-nothing expression, her head turned slightly to one side and tilted downward, her eyelids lowered, what could almost have become a smile, if she’d wanted it to, stopped by a tightening or numbness around her mouth.
The controlled resignation and grief in her body language and expression is shocking to me now, but not surprising, because I remember that something changed around the time we came back from the Rajah’s palace, when our puppy died, when we got our cameras. Remembering this, I now see in the swimming-hole photograph taken by Dave how tenderly Chick’s hand is curled around Lindy’s bare left shoulder, how tentatively she’s touching mine, and how my father’s expression, which could almost seem peevish at first glance, reveals a deep unease. So does the way I’m standing – looking dolefully down, with both my parents appearing anxious to reassure me with their touches.
There are two other photographs from our time in the first house at Chandraghona, both of them featuring Linda’s attempts to bring a garden to life there. The photos are black-and-white, so it’s not easy to identify the flowers; but in one of them she, Dave and I are sitting on the front steps, next to a crestfallen bed of what look like parched marigolds. We have kites with the two-handled reels that skilful kite-fighters used to manipulate their weapons in blistering convections above the roofs of the houses. Linda’s keeping to the shade; next to her are some boxes of what look like gardening supplies, or seedlings. In the distance beyond a bamboo lattice, at the margin of our Bengali neighbour’s section, some kind of hedged, flowering shrubs stand out against the far, scorched hillside.
I remember the effort and anguish of her desire to make a garden in non-existent topsoil where, if the plants didn’t wither, they were eaten by hard-shelled, munching beetles. Later, when we moved to the second house on a hill above the first one, she established a wonderful garden and planted trees, including the plum tree whose fruit I ate when I came back fifty years later. But in the second plant photograph taken at the first house, what look like zinnias and some kind of thick-stemmed, orchid-like gladioli have been staked up in earthenware pots on the upstairs ver
anda. They look like Linda’s frustrated, last-ditch attempts to make a home she cared about there, or a home with some attribute that she’d made and cared for, that sustained the romance of her and Chick’s adventure. The pot plants at least look healthy, but their diminished scale seems to capture the sick frustration I sensed in her when I was a child.
We spent diligent time each day on the Correspondence School lessons sent from New Zealand. We practised writing, we read a lot, and painted pictures with the poster paints that came with the Correspondence kits. And then one day Linda suddenly got to her feet and rushed from the room. I heard her say, ‘I feel sick!’ in a funny voice. Then the sound of her vomiting. Then she pulled down the bamboo blinds in her and Chick’s room, and went to bed. I don’t remember what happened after that, except that she stayed in her darkened room for days. She probably had one of the tummy bugs that we all caught. But there was more to it than that. She was forty-five or forty-six – perhaps she was also menopausal.
It was around this time, when our mother was staying in her darkened room, that Dave and I were let go in a way that was at once confident and an admission of defeat. Leaving her home in small-town New Zealand was an enormous shift for Linda – far more than for us. Though she’d resented her mother, she no longer had Aggie to help with us. The social life she’d loved in Blenheim was gone. Her husband was off building his team at the mill – a time, as I discovered when I went back there, of huge challenges for him. She struggled with her restless boys during Correspondence School hours and, she told me later, confronted again her own curtailed education. After she died, I found notebooks recording her efforts to learn French, a postcard sent to a friend in which she despaired of keeping up with the exercises we were set by the German tutor later hired by the mill, and notes on the flowering plants and shrubs of South Asia – I still have her large botanical compendium for the region.
