by Ian Wedde
The YHA hostel guide
I have an image of my brother Dave crouching on his knees at the edge of a low table, writing with his left hand while brushing the back of his right-hand thumb to and fro across his lips. I associate this image also with a mean-spirited Youth Hostel Association warden who’d jeered at our attempts to cook dinner, and who’d also made snide comments about Dave’s preferred way of writing his postcards. It’s an image that mirrors the sadness I rediscovered and comforted when I visited the old mill at Chandraghona in 2005.
But of course I’m only guessing that some of the sadness might belong to Dave. When we talk about the time we spent in England as kids, he’s mostly blithe, as I’d expect him to be. If he was ever sad about the life we led away from our mother and father, it can’t have amounted to much, or was at best transient. Or he managed to shove it down into a deep place it couldn’t get out of. Perhaps what I see when I look at the image of him writing a postcard to our mother and father is just my own sadness – which, too, was intermittent and, towards the end of our years in England, largely over and done with. But still, the image remains potent because of its sadness; and I can’t believe that some of that wasn’t Dave’s, though his equanimity overrode it in the end.
I guess that at some level my Bandarban blanket was an atavistic sign of comfort. Comfort was what I took from it as an adult, even as that made me grin; but it also tapped back into the place where powerful, transitional, ambiguous memories reside. The one that first rose up in the presence of the blanket was of Dave in the unfriendly youth hostel, which I think may have been at Bellever in the middle of Dartmoor, a conveniently bleak place for melancholy to gather, like the damp mist we’d ridden our bikes through to get there – melancholy not least because it was chilly and off-season, and we were the only ones to emerge from the mist and ask for a place to stay.
But before I run with this compelling memory – before I take the sentimental bait it offers – I have to ask myself Parveen’s and Justina’s merrily sceptical question, ‘How was your blanket today?’, because the pleasure I got from it was as much about acquisition as comfort. What I acquired when I bought the blanket from the Mru woman with the small, astonished baby wasn’t just a way to resolve my confused sadness; I also acquired an object I thought was beautiful, which I wanted to have; and which I got. And how to measure the gap, or the overlap, between desire and absence is never easy. Nor is it easy now to do so in respect of the poignant image I have of my ‘cack-handed’ brother in the common room of the chilly hostel, writing his postcard home (only it wasn’t), as the YHA guy passed with a sneer and Dave went ahead with an activity that had its own pleasure – a chance to show off, perhaps: ‘Look where we are!’ – while simulataneously comforting himself with the involuntary gesture that was only a short distance from sucking his thumb.
Whatever it was he felt then, it’s still clear to me that I felt defensive on his behalf, intimidated and humiliated by the YHA prick in the Boy Scoutish outfit – and, not too far under the surface of my own triumph at our adventure, uneasy with the thought that this was also a good way for our school-holiday minders to get shot of us for a week or two.
But this is how it was. The situation we were in, where we saw our parents at most every couple of years, and lived in the provisional homes of boarding school and school-holiday guardians – a couple called Reg and Peggy Markwell – was both desirable and lacking. As Dave reminds me when I get maudlin about our situation, Reg and Peggy took on ‘a couple of “different”, even misfit kids belonging to people they barely knew’, and gave them a home where he at least felt welcome and cared for. It delivered freedoms and adventures, and a kind of inverse Swiss Family Robinson narrative: Look, we could boast to our parents, how well we’re doing on our castaway island! But such satisfactions, and even the fun of riding around unsupervised from hostel to hostel, carried with them, like the shadows of us pedalling along, the implication of homelessness; sadness; loneliness; the absence of a place that amounted to more than a bed, food, shoe repairs.
‘How was your blanket today?’
It was fine, thank you. I got what I wanted.
As the gap closed between the satisfaction of desire (the pleasure of acquisition) and the lack or longing to which it was attached like a shadow, ‘home’ did just come to mean the place of bed, food and shoe repairs. So that, at a certain point, inferring sadness from my brother’s attitude as he wrote his postcard ‘home’ – or from any similar tableau – became pointless. Or, worse, morbid.
But the image of my brother writing his postcard won’t submit to this reasonable discipline. I still feel for him, and don’t believe it’s only self-pity I’m feeling. As if setting off on one of our bike rides, I need to take the map of this image – the YHA hostel guide, as it were – and follow our route through the years after we left the kind of home you have when you’re a child in a family, in a family home, whatever that might consist of. Which, in our case, wasn’t what we had.
But there’s another image to consider. Next to mine of Dave crouched writing his postcard at the YHA table on Dartmoor, I need to locate one that my brother, with gentle, smiling mockery, came up with when we were talking about our ‘homeless’ time in England. This image may be the parallel or companion of mine – Dave’s version of what I saw when I saw him writing, and imputed his gesture to homelessness. He remembers an occasion when Reg and Peggy Markwell collected us from the junior boarding school we’d recently been enrolled in, and took us for a picnic on a high, chalky, rabbit-warrened range of hills near Yeovil in Somerset. The hills overlooked the farmlands where our school, called Hazelgrove, was situated close to the little village of Sparkford. Sparkford had a thatched inn with low ceilings and creaky wooden floors; we’d stayed there with Linda and Chick when they were checking out the school. There were large stands of old oaks, fields, rustic brick farm buildings, and sunken lanes flanked by thickets of hazelnut. It was at once picturesque and homely.
Hazelgrove was the junior preparatory cousin of a public school called Kings School Bruton, where we went when we turned thirteen. The junior school was in a fine eighteenth-century manor house surrounded by formal gardens, parklands and sports fields, with various out-buildings. The combination of manor house, forelock-tugging rustic hamlet, thatched inns and stands of oak was clearly beguiling; in addition, the school made some big academic promises. It greatly impressed our father, in particular: his impossible dream of betterment, superior education, meritocratic social mobility and Masefieldian hearts-of-oakism, was about to come true. I have no doubt that both he and Linda were convinced they couldn’t possibly do better for their boys – they were vindicating all the hopes they’d fled Blenheim with; they were paying off four years hard up the Karnaphuli River; they were investing in a family future that could only improve; they were showing the family sceptics back home what could be done if you put your mind to it; they were repeating a multi-stranded family history of leaving one home in search of a better or more interesting one.
But what Dave remembers, with affectionate derision, is his twin brother standing on the windswept crest of the hill overlooking the plain, with Hazelgrove emitting homelessness signals in the far distance. With a plaintive quaver in my voice, I said, ‘That’s where mothers and fathers send the children they don’t love.’
Perhaps it’s just as well I don’t remember this – I would have to add it to the lamentable catalogue of performances that began with the ankle-dragging tantrum at Chandraghona. What’s interesting about it now, viewed through the amiable lens of Dave’s grin, is that he doesn’t for a moment see my gesture as in any way mirroring his own feelings. He doesn’t now; and he’s clear that he didn’t then. He remembers Reg Markwell, who had a scoffing sense of humour, enjoying the tragi-comic moment. But he doesn’t remember sharing my sense of abandonment. In fact, he’s even doubtful I felt that way at all. I think my melodramatic credentials were already well established; I’d cried wolf too
often; no one took these demonstrations seriously.
This complicates the YHA hostel guide. There’s a stretch between me seeing a mutual sadness in Dave writing his postcard and Dave not entirely believing my sadness on the hill overlooking Sparkford. I think he probably was sad on Dartmoor; he doesn’t think he was. I think I was sad on his behalf on Dartmoor, as well as on my own behalf on the hill above the place for unloved children; but he doesn’t entirely believe me, because he wasn’t.
It’s that pulling-together by pulling-apart thing again. What this elastic conundrum describes is Dave’s and my double act – left handed, right handed; sons, daughters. Apparently, he does happy and I do sad. In reality, we are something like a unity. It’s my knowledge of my brother that makes me whole: it’s as though I don’t always have to be happy because I know he’s more likely to be; as though I’m confident I have a happy counterpart, at once part of me and not part of me. It’s our knowledge of each other that makes us individuals. I have my own happiness, plenty of it, and have had it for most of my adult life; but I also have a larger concept of happiness, which I owe to my brother – a happiness that extends beyond what I feel in myself.
There it is: the big fish on its manuka stick, the prize that makes us pull away from each other; the trophy that pulls us together. And here it is again, the YHA guide to our journey through childhood homelessness, the map and narrative that we diverge from, that draws us together.
The Christmas card
We left Chittagong on 28 February 1958. I don’t remember very much about it, but Mr Qureshi wrote me a letter in January 2005, after I’d made contact through Lina Chowdhury, in which he recalled seeing the Wedde family off from Chittagong Port Jetty, where he’d been waging my father’s war against ticket-clipping miscreants. We were going on board a small Bay of Bengal coaster, the RMS (Royal Mail Steamship) Aronda; her destination was Colombo in what was then called Ceylon.
What Mr Qureshi also told me in his letter, and what caused a readjustment in my understanding of how things had proceeded from that moment of departure, was that Chick was already committed to another contract in East Pakistan – something we weren’t told about at the time, nor something Dave or I remember, not me in my melodramatic way, nor he in his factual one.
This contract was at the Khulna Newsprint Mills at Khalispur, Khulna. Khulna is to the west of Chittagong, at the head of the vast network of Gangetic waterways that descend to the Sundarban delta on the Bay of Bengal, the largest mangrove forest in the world – the place to which the plausible Hasan Mansur was dispatching tourists and film crews no more likely to see a royal Bengal tiger than I had been to get to the Hill Tracts on the strength of his permit alone.
When I went to the old Chandraghona mill in 2005, the one at Khulna had been closed for years as a result of corruption and mismanagement; this was said to be depressing the publishing industry and driving down writers’ royalties. Apparently, in 1958, as Qureshi would find out later, Chick was already plotting to get his goateed young offsider transferred to the Khulna mill, which was still one of the drivers of East Pakistan’s modernisation project. Like the mill at Chandraghona, the Khulna mill belonged to the Pakistan Development Corporation, but was managed in a joint venture by Sandwell & Co. of Vancouver. This relationship with Sandwells was to be the launching pad for Chick’s next Big Leap Forward. That didn’t include keeping his and Linda’s kids with them.
But back then, as we steamed out through the broad, muddy mouth of the Karnaphuli, with humid, green-brown hills shimmering in the heat, and the jumble of brick dockside buildings merging into the rattan-patterns of bamboo bushti along the river bank, all I knew – all Dave and I knew – was that we were going to England. Probably, Dave and I would go to school there. I don’t think the likelihood of us going to boarding school was ever mentioned; nor was the option of going back to New Zealand; nor was the fact that Chick would be returning to East Pakistan. Nor, for that matter, was the obvious corollary mentioned: that our mother would be going there with Chick – would be going there without us.
Arriving at this moment in both our childhood story and my adult investigation of the meaning of home, I realise the extent to which this account has become a palimpsest. Its layers, erasures and additions begin with the simplest one, in which memory laminates the present where it acts and the past that is memory’s resource. This laminate is paradoxical, ambiguous and unreliable. It may even be contradictory, as is the case with Dave’s and my versions of events. The palimpsest has layers that are at once temporal and spatial: memories can exist only in the present but will always refer to the past; and this paradoxical temporality moves forward along a spatial narrative track that goes from place to place, or resides in locations that themselves change, as homes and neighbourhoods do while children grow up in them.
In addition, this account has always been randomly cumulative. It didn’t proceed from a comprehensive body of research, nor from uncontested memories. Layers have been added to the palimpsest as I’ve gone along, much as they were in our lives as they went along. Disclosures and interventions have been either inserted into or pasted over what I’d already drafted – as was the case after I visited my cousin Norma, having already built a story around the photograph of my mother in a deerskin costume as the castaway Lady Mary Lasenby.
This accumulation itself has become a digressive, involuntary storyline. The project began in various texts before 2004, without any conscious intention to write about home. The question of home began to become purposeful after that, when I drove around New Zealand, talking to myself in a tape-recorder and wondering how to answer the question, ‘Where am I?’ This was overlaid by my time in Bangladesh, and by my attempts to find a viewpoint outside the compound of childhood memory. It was diverted somewhat by writing The Viewing Platform in 2005; but that, too, was a layer between the meanderings of 2004 and my first committed attempt to get this inquiry under way in 2009, in the opening section called ‘The Grass Catcher’, in which I tried out a strategy for ambushing memory.
What I’ve written since has been overlaid retrospectively by conversations with my patiently amiable brother, and his responses to what I was writing or had already written. It was overlaid by time spent with my cousin Norma in Blenheim; by letters that have arrived from relatives who got wind of what I was up to. In effect, this layering, this toing-and-froing, this backtracking and pushing forward, has been going on for ten years.
And now, about halfway through a final rewrite of what I’ve believed is a comprehensive first draft, I open for the first time a packet my brother found among our mother’s papers sometime after we’d started stirring up our collective memories. He hadn’t looked closely at the contents before and, if our conversations are anything to go by, hasn’t since. The items may have been returned to us when Linda died, as a gesture of sympathy and respect; or to Linda when their owners died. Who the owners were is not clear.
In the packet are a yellowing black-and-white studio photograph of our mother aged about three; her hair, which later became very dark, is blond and wavy; she’s wearing a pretty white dress with lace trimmings, holding a bunch of daffodils and sitting on what might be a prop bearskin. This would have been taken in Blenheim in about 1913. In chronological order, the next item is a homemade Christmas card with a black-and-white photograph of a sampan on the Karniphuli River glued to the front. It’s dated 1957, which my startled mind registers as forty-four years later – a temporal and spatial leap from the small-town photographic studio; a leap whose drama seems contrived, except that it expresses the sense I have of the bold trajectory of my mother’s life once she left Blenheim, which is at once bound to and distinct from the exigencies of my father’s work. This card was sent from Karnaphuli Paper Mills Ltd., Chandraghona, P.O., Chittagong, East Pakistan.
The third item is a similar Christmas card, this one with a colour photograph of Mount Kenchenjunga, taken near Darjeeling. The card is undated, but in it Linda writes that
‘we leave here on “Aronda” on Feb. 28th for Colombo’, so the card, which like the other one is a squared A4 sheet of heavy, now yellowed paper folded in quarters and covered densely with her tiny, neat handwriting, must have been sent before Christmas 1957, when Dave and I had just turned eleven.
The fourth item is a commercially produced Christmas card with a picture of thorn trees and roosting vultures silhouetted against a blazing ‘Sunset over Luangwa’, presumably sent from Zambia when Linda and Chick were there. It’s addressed to ‘Phyl, Ivan and family – Fondest love, Lin & Chick’, unlike the cards sent from Chandraghona, which are signed off ‘Lin, Albert & the Boys’. My mind lurches again – of course what my mother’s trajectory now implies is the fact that ‘the Boys’ are not there, and haven’t been since shortly after the card in which an embarkation from Chittagong to Colombo was announced. But this is hardly surprising, since by the time our parents were in Zambia both Dave and I had long since gone our own ways.
The fifth and final item in the packet is another Christmas card with a picture of lions in Zambia – but this one was sent from 47 Rarangi Rd, St Heliers, Auckland. This was where Linda’s trajectory set down. In the card, she reports that Dave and Sue’s first daughter, Sarah Jane, is ten months old (‘the apple of Grandad’s eye’); that Rose and I have bought a house in Wellington, and that Carlos (‘a dear wee chap’) is five. So it’s 1977.
