The Grass Catcher

by Ian Wedde

  I don’t renounce my sceptical inner brat – what would be the point? – and anyway, he has his critical uses. But what I really confront at those moments when the brat gets in my ear is the fact that I’ve doomed myself to look askance at most of what I write, in case it’s a reprise of the moment I was helped on to my mother’s lap and knew I’d betrayed her.

  Great Uncle Fritz

  How does memory lie? Or rather, what kind of truth does memory promise? Does it make any sense to treat one of my ancestors, my great-uncle Frederic Alexander Wedde, known by the family as Fritz, as the divining rod through which some kind of memory is recovered or encouraged to flow into the present where I’m thinking about home? What ‘home’ could Fritz possibly tell me about? Almost nothing is known about his own, though the family has generated a collective romance about him ending up in Mexico. I know I’ve hopelessly romanced several of my forebears about whom I know little outside of the sketchy family record – my great-grandfather Heinrich August and his wife Maria Josephine Catharina Reepen (or Riepen, or Repen), for example.

  My father actually remembered his grandfather Heinrich August, but he never mentioned his grandmother Maria, whom he would only have met when he was an infant. On the face of it, Maria seems an unlikely match for a low-ranking, runaway merchant mariner. For that matter, it’s not clear why she was emigrating to New Zealand where, as far as I know, she had no family or other connections. It seems her parents had died, and two of her sisters, Charlotte and Dora, also emigrated, though to Australia not New Zealand.

  According to her descendant Bill Whitmore, whose mother was Freda Whitmore (née Wedde), and who of course also has Heinrich August as his great-grandfather, the Reepens can be traced back to Cordt Reepen (1613–1700), who lived in Wedehorn in the Bremen district of north-west Germany. Maria’s father Peter was a master joiner in Kiel, Schleswig Holstein. He and his wife Elisabeth had ten children; Maria was the eighth. It seems that the Reepens were well connected in musical circles – Brahms was a distant relative, Maria’s sister Sophie ‘cut some ice as a soprano in the operatic world’ and, reports Bill, ‘a cousin Klaus Groth was a poet, who is commemorated by a bronze statue in Kiel’. It seems Groth (1819–99) reawakened interest in ‘Plattdüütsch’ (Low German) dialect poetry.

  Heinrich August and Maria married in 1876, had eight children and lived in Bute Street in Wellington. Maria left in 1910 to live with two sons and a daughter on a land settlement farm at Kaitieke in the Ruapehu district. In 1896 Maria seems to have been living in Maarama Crescent, Wellington, and in 1901 Heinrich seems to have been living in Nairn Street, but whether they had parted before 1910 isn’t clear – probably not. Maria’s address is in the Electoral Rolls, which may show a ‘live-in’ employment and does show she’d registered to vote after the 1893 Electoral Bill was passed. Heinrich moved to Blenheim to live with his son Albert Augustus and daughter-in-law Mabel (née Thwaites) in York Terrace sometime between 1910 and 1915, when he died of pneumonia after falling into a river – there’s a suggestion he was pushed by someone who didn’t like the German surname.

  My father was born in Wellington in 1906 and would have been about four when his grandfather, the old seaman, came to live with them in Blenheim. He would have been seven when Heinrich died. The memory I have of Heinrich is my father’s childish one – the old man getting shickered and reciting poetry in German – as well as the collective family one – Heinrich jumping ship in Wellington, in pursuit of Maria Reepen – both of which I’ve embellished and written about from time to time.

  The few records I’ve subsequently found or been sent suggest that his arrival may not have been as romantic as this, but was no less dramatic. It seems likely that Heinrich, aged twenty-eight, arrived in Sydney as a cook-steward on the brig Robin Hood from one of the French ports of Poitou-Charentes. He later deserted from the Lammershagen, which arrived in Wellington in July 1875, presumably having shipped from Sydney. The fact that he turned up again in Wellington on 7 February 1876 on the passenger list of the Stormbird from Whanganui suggests that he made himself scarce up-country between July 1875 and February 1876. In August 1876 he married Maria Reepen in Wellington – she had sailed from Hamburg to Wellington on the Shakespeare, arriving on 23 January that year.

  This amalgam of inherited memory, romance and fact-checking has become one of those ambiguous mental and language objects that drift somewhere between wilful fiction and the sparse record upon which fiction thrives. But about Great Uncle Fritz, the most enigmatic of all the Weddes, nothing is tied even that loosely to what any member of the family can say with certainty. The portal that opens from the family’s story of Fritz leads into a territory almost devoid of factual armature.

  But of course this is why Fritz is a powerful talisman. He represents what no one will know for certain and therefore what stories will grow from, as if from a rich host of what-might-have-been – from unreliable liking – like the missing Taits, those not-quite ancestors who populated the steaming, exotic narratives of half-caste ‘Red’ Taits involved in the Creek Civil War in Alabama, that place where my imagination is at home even if my genes are not. Except that Fritz’s story is marginally less a fiction than the ‘Red’ Taits’ seductive digression, and it’s in the tantalising scraps of information about him that the cells of narrative begin to split and multiply.

  In February 1970, when Rose and I were living in Amman, Jordan, and where my father was posted with the UNDP, civil war broke out between Jordanian Hashemite forces and Palestinian fedayeen. Many foreigners left the city; the Red Cross evacuated the women and children of foreign workers. Rose and my mother were flown to Cyprus. Chick and I stayed behind – in my case because I had a job and badly needed to get the money I was owed, and because I’d illegally bought a Commer van registered in the UK, and needed to get it out of the country before it was commandeered by the fedayeen or impounded by Jordanian authorities.

  While the fighting continued, Chick and I barricaded ourselves on the ground floor of the apartment building he and Linda lived in. We had some basic food supplies, limited amounts of bottled water and gas for cooking, and a case of whisky. It was under these enforced conditions, and with no good reason not to pour a nerve-calming drink whenever we felt like it, that my father and I talked to each other at length for the first time in our lives. We were in a kind of theatrical, staged condition; the power went on and off; the crack and rattle of automatic gunfire echoed ambiguously around the hills and valleys of the city; the bigger explosions of artillery and mortars intermittently shook the window panes behind their closed drapes.

  Perhaps not surprisingly given these prompts, Chick talked about his experiences in Egypt and Palestine during the war. He’d never done so before and never did again. Now, I can connect the relish and affection with which he reminisced in 1970 to the photograph I have of him in uniform on the eve of his embarkation thirty years earlier. In the photograph, a lean, tanned Chick with sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve is sitting on the veranda balustrade at 32 Francis Street. He’s got that hard stare that often seems to have spooked people, but also a suppressed grin. His booted feet are dangling above the ground, as if he’s already left. Like many men of his generation, he was about to go overseas for the first time. In general he seems to have had what was called a ‘good war’. He saw minimal action and was mostly involved in quarter-mastering at training camps – Camp Maadi near Cairo, and in Italy – resource management work that was a kind of pre-echo of what he would go on to do in the travelling years to come.

  The little black-and-white snaps of Maadi, Cairo and Jerusalem that he annotated meticulously in a photo album I now have, as well his collection of hand-coloured postcards of Italy, seemed to segue into the thousands of 35mm colour slides he went on to take during the years when he and Linda travelled from job to job. He and I were in a kind of time warp for the few days we talked and drank in the dim concrete room on Jebel Amman – Chick seemed to be half there, and half back in kha
ki in a black-and-white snapshot landscape with tents, desert dugouts and his ‘corner of Cubicle N.Z.S. of I.’, with what looks like a double photo-portrait of my mother next to his camp stretcher. This may be the one I now have, a diptych pocketbook leather folder with photographs of Linda in a high-necked, striped costume. Her handwritten note on the back of one reads, ‘This should remind you of the Sounds, dear. Look at the mouth – just like a cod!’

  But Chick’s snaps are also of fine modernist buildings in tree-lined streets at Maadi, the Barrage Gardens in Cairo, Heliopolis, the Cheops pyramid at sunset, feluccas on the Nile at sunset, the golf links and racecourse at Gezira, the Dead Sea, street scenes in Bethlehem, the Damascus Gate in Old Jerusalem, archaeological sites at Memphis and Sakkara, camels and camel-herders on the way to Alexandria, the French Gardens at Ismailia, and King Farouk’s private yacht at anchor.

  My father appears in many of the snaps, presumably taken to be sent home. Often, too, he’s been photographed with his brothers-in-arms. In August and September 1942, Chick was photographed with three of his mates astride motorbikes in a desert landscape – the airy caption reads ‘cycle trip’. In another, he’s been photographed with the ‘Marlborough Sgts.’, N. Waters, R. Gee, J. Best, G. Robinson, B. Harrison and ‘yours truly’. There are pyramids in the background.

  Listening to my father reminisce, I got the impression that when he returned from the war to the stone balustrade at Francis Street, his feet never quite found the ground again; his attention to the present was redirected towards a possible future by memories of his years away at the war. It was as though memory became the subversive agent that relocated him in the bunkered room of the apartment building on Jebel Amman thirty-five years later. It was in this theatrical space of gunfire, reminiscence and a few drinks too many that Chick first mentioned his Uncle Fritz – as if Fritz was, at that moment of ambiguously layered time, the ideal character through which to utter an unreliable narrative, an unstable but tantalising kind of truth.

  Fritz, he told me, had been believed by some in the family to be missing presumed dead in World War I, though his name never showed up on the rolls of honour. Somehow, despite having a distinctly German name, it was thought that he’d managed to go to the war in Europe with the New Zealand Expeditionary Forces. Once there, some members of the family believed, he’d deserted with a quantity of valuable matériel and joined the other side. Then, he’d repeated the manoeuvre and disappeared for something like forty years, until he re-emerged in Mexico, where (the story continued) he’d been a mercenary soldier in the Mexican Revolution and subsequently the Mexican Civil War, was pensioned off, accumulated substantial wealth, and spent his last years living in an observatory across the Rio Grande border from the town of Eagle Pass, Texas; his cosmological and astronomical interests were apparently complemented by an orphanage he maintained on the ground floor of his observatory.

  Accompanied by the intermittent gunfire of the Jordanian–Palestinian civil war, my father’s memory default to the first great adventure of his own wandering life, and tumblers of frugally watered Scotch, the ripping yarn of Fritz easily overrode my scepticism and lodged in my adult imagination as tenaciously as Mowgli once had in my childish one. It was a story I could both believe enough and incorporate in another narrative, the one in which my father and I were at home together in a shared history of wanderlust and adventure.

  When Linda and Chick had finally returned to New Zealand and my father was no longer working, I used to go up to Auckland from Wellington as often as I could, sometimes with Carlos when he was little, and sometimes by myself. Chick would often come to meet me at the airport. He seemed to be in good shape, and had begun to respond to my questions about the family – which I was asking less out of real curiosity than because I sensed that time was running out, that my mother’s and father’s memory time was getting short. Chick drove extremely slowly from the airport; an increasingly impatient queue of cars would bank up behind him. Among the stories he told me as grimacing, honking drivers tore past his oblivious profile, two stood out: the romance of Heinrich August and Maria Reepen jumping ship together in Wellington Harbour; and the story of ‘Great Uncle Fritz’, which I’d first heard fragments of during the time Chick and I were holed up in Amman.

  As it turns out, the romantic story of Heinrich and Maria coming ashore together is highly contestable, but the likely facts make little difference to the big salients of their narrative. One way or another, they came ashore together or separately in 1875 (Heinrich certainly jumped ship), married in 1876 and raised a large family in Wellington. He was employed by the Wellington Harbour Board as pilot for sailing ships, but made himself scarce when ships under German flag entered the port. His and Maria’s children were exceptionally successful at school, the boys (Herman, Fritz, Herbert, Wilhelm, Reinhold and Albert) at Wellington College and the girls (Bertha and Freda) at Wellington Girls’ College; five of the eight won school scholarships and were duxes. The sisters were among the first women in New Zealand to go to university. Freda went on to teach in Napier, Pahiatua and Whangarei.

  The story of Fritz is another matter. The basic factual record disappeared or dissolved into family myth early, not long after 1905, and was recovered only in fragments when the missing-presumed-dead prodigal made contact with the family in the mid-1950s from somewhere within administrative reach of Torreon, Coahuila, Mexico. Fritz is described as a surveyor, civil engineer, mining engineer and astronomer; the last attribute begins to shift him towards improbability.

  I have a copy of a photograph of the Wedde siblings. The oldest, Reinhold (known as Ren or Dick), was born in 1877, the youngest, Herbert, in 1889. My grandfather Albert, and Fritz, were numbers five and six respectively. In the photograph, Reinhold’s hair has begun to recede a little; the youngest, Herbert, looks to be in his mid- to late teens; my grandfather looks strikingly like my father in his twenties. I’d say the photograph was taken somewhere around 1905 when my grandfather was in his mid-twenties. My father would have been a year old. Fritz would have been about twenty-one.

  This rough and ready exercise in genealogical geometry inaugurates a seductive opportunity, an opening between minimal facts and the beginnings of a narrative veering already into fiction. Though Fritz is only, let’s say, twenty-one in this photograph, four years younger than my grandfather and seven or eight years younger than Ren, there’s a sternness and implacability in his expression that set him apart – he looks older than the others not so much in years as in temperament. This isn’t easy for him to do – all the siblings have the direct look and wry expression I’ve come to think of as typical Wedde, and they are all handsome and well turned out. But Fritz alone has a resisting look, an impatience – his mouth has a faintly derisive or mocking twist; he alone looks as if he’d just as soon be elsewhere, and will be, once the photographer’s finished with them all. It’s like the expression I see on my father’s face in the snapshot taken when he swung his feet above the ground while sitting on the balustrade at the front of Aggie Horne’s house in Francis Street just days before he left for Egypt in 1940.

  I don’t know which member of the family Fritz dropped his bombshell letter on in the 1950s, when he announced that he was still alive, living in Mexico, was intestate, and looking to find out the names and locations of his relations, the likely inheritors of his estate. Some family members seem to have begun a disordered quest for what soon became a fabled fortune. When my father died, I found among his papers a file of correspondence with lawyers in San Francisco and Dunedin, and a bank in Eagle Pass, Texas, which showed that in the 1960s he’d taken on the apparently thankless task of coordinating the family’s quest, tracking down and arranging for the distribution of the by-then-deceased Fritz’s assets.

  Fritz’s initial letter, which doesn’t survive as far as I know, seems to have been addressed to his relatives in the King Country. Dorothy Bennett, a granddaughter of Fritz’s sister Bertha, subsequently began a correspondence with the
British Vice-Consul in Torreon. Chick’s file, filled mostly with his own patient, meticulous and economical letters to the various agents involved, also contained one to Dorothy from S. Dutton-Pegram, the British Vice-Consul who, with rueful asperity, included the following aside in his letter: ‘It appears that I am, under an Anglo-American Treaty, the person who has to try and administer the estates of British subjects who die intestate and I can only say that, as far as I am concerned, I most assuredly hope that I never have another.’ This letter, dated 3 November 1958, also contains a P.S. in which the dry, and to my ear Conradian, Dutton-Pegram adds a killer last paragraph: ‘As regards the Will, two or three friends of his have told me that he mentioned to them his intention of making a Will, but on being informed that it would cost about $10.00 Dls., he replied:- “I think I’ll let it go!”’

  Over the years that Chick managed the affair, some of the proceeds from the sale of Fritz’s assorted stocks and shares were distributed, in dribs and drabs, to his nephews and nieces – but clearly the agents in Eagle Pass, Texas, in Torreon, Mexico, and in San Francisco didn’t or couldn’t clean out the safe, except perhaps (it was hinted) into their own pockets. My father’s efforts, increasingly irritated though never impolite, petered out in the early 1970s soon after he’d left Lusaka, Zambia, having not had his UN contract there renewed; he stayed on for a while working for the Zambia Printing Company until about 1968 and had, I think, begun to lose heart in general, not just in respect of the quest for Fritz’s silver ingots. Dave went on a South Island trip with Chick in late 1968 – he’d ‘retired’ but was restless. The fabled fortune didn’t amount to much, but the thought that it might yet produce a surprise jackpot still lingers here and there among Fritz’s great-nieces and -nephews.