by Ian Wedde
Along the track of these temporal and spatial grands jetés in my mother’s card narrative there’s a pause, for me at least, in which the trajectory stalls at an informative moment. In the card from 1957 in which the embarkation from Chittagong is announced, so is our parents’ plan for us. I have never seen this before and until now had no idea that their minds were made up. The most momentous decision in their lives together since leaving Blenheim in 1954 – and perhaps in Dave’s and mine too – was the one to leave us in England while they kept moving. In the card, whose addressees (‘Dear All’) may be the ‘Phyl, Ivan and Family’ mentioned in the thorn-tree-with-vultures one, Linda matter-of-factly spells out what is going to happen.
… we’ve decided to send the boys to school in Eng. and have booked them in as day boys at Kings School (Prep.) at Sparkford, Somerset, where they will then go as boarders in Sept. We feel that at their age it is too sudden to take them from a place like this and just dump them into boarding as they can’t play cricket or football & after life out here will have some awful shocks coming to them. We hope to get a house (or something) nearby so that for one term they can get used to the changed life with a home still there. During the August hols. the idea is to tour the Continent or rather ‘on’ it. Then I will continue to live in Eng., even tho’ Chick may come East again, until after their Xmas Hols. That should see them fairly well settled. We are sending them to Eng. because we can keep them there for a year on what it would cost to just get them back to N.Z. and also because special planes run out back with school children and we hope, wherever we are that they will fly out to us at least once in 2 years for 6 to 8 weeks. … The world is such a wide, wide place & we’ve all got awful itchy feet!
Halfway through a final rewrite, feeling my way through the layers of this erratic palimpsest, ten years after starting this search for home, or for viewpoints from which to see what home might be, I feel my impulse tipping across a kind of fulcrum. The fulcrum is the Christmas card with its pretty picture of grazing cattle, weathered sheds, a valley filled with roiling cloud, and distant mountains from which a long streamer of wind-blown snow has been stopped in time and place.
The absent-minded professor
In the palimpsest to which this late layer of the 1957 Christmas card hasn’t yet been added, there’s a Box Brownie photograph, taken by one or the other of us, in which an elegant Linda, wearing the familiar print frock and with a cigarette between the fingers of her right hand, is leaning on the rail of the Aronda. In her left hand she holds two sun-visored caps – ours. A dashing chap in whites and with a pipe clenched between his teeth is leaning on the rail near our mother. I think he was the ship’s captain. In the background, a load of suitcases swings aboard in a sling. In other snaps, the ship’s funnel smoke drifts across a vista of sailboats becalmed on the broad flood. The scene is languid – as though we’re making a leisurely departure on a Somerset Maughamish holiday.
Neither Dave nor I retained any clear sense of the place we’d come from before the Karnaphuli paper mill, and had no idea about where we were going. From the time the old Aronda pushed past the clutter of sampans and overloaded, nearly-sinking barges in the turgid roadstead, we’d begun to live in the time and place of the moment. This was a transitional zone of which nothing much could be expected except surprises. There was no routine, or none that fixed time and place for long. We steamed off into a pleasant vacuum, into which rushed the fantasies that thrive on rootlessness, interfactuality, random phenomena; on shifting, unstable contexts contaminated by chance and by the language of storytelling, and sometimes by the boredom of the always-new.
This was a perfect breeding ground for delusions masquerading as plausible conditions: for what, as a grown-up, I’d call ‘scenario-writing’. It was another new kind of home, different again from the one from which we’d just unsettled ourselves. It was a home fixed in transit; the world drifted past its windows; its horizon receded like an endless mirage.
I say ‘we’ and believe it’s fair to do so. There we are, Dave and I, with our Box Brownies, in all sorts of different places (but first of all on the deck of the Aronda, snapping the approaching sunset). But in respect of the other force that steamed into this vacuum, I will speak only of myself. That force was sex. From the time we sailed off into a fantastic future, sex engulfed my eleven-year-old body and imagination. Like a humid monsoon deluge, like the sticky air inside my mosquito net, this incomprehensible, delicious obsession became the atmosphere I inhabited; it transformed my introversion into a furtive frenzy.
There was something non-negotiable about our parents’ trajectory which, many years later, I measured with admiration. They were in transition too. Having shaken the dust of Blenheim from their feet, hardened up in the tough circumstances of the remote Karnaphuli mill, they were now moving further out, not retreating. We steamed across the Bay of Bengal (I remember that Dave was seasick; he denies it) and arrived in Colombo in time for a massive general strike. That, at least, is how it was described to us. Dave and I didn’t know what a ‘strike’ was – it just explained the stench of rotting, uncollected food garbage around the hotel we were staying in; the humid stink-mist from the deserted kitchens; the uncleaned lavatories and rooms; the strange, minimal snacks of biscuits and tinned Kraft cheese. I remember feeling bewildered by the extent to which we were dependent on our own resources. Now, I can measure how far we’d come from our grandmother’s no-nonsense kitchen at Francis Street; how privilege had begun to nurture our presumptions of entitlement. These would soon be thrown back in my face, in an incident I now think of as ‘the absent-minded professor’.
The hotel had easy access to a beach; there were changing rooms with cold-water showers nearby. This was where we hung out, away from the smell of rotting food and blocked sewers. There were waves we body-surfed on. One tore my togs off and dragged my cock through the sand – this had consequences later, also not unconnected with ‘the absent-minded professor’.
We caught a taxi into the tense city of Colombo. There were army or police posts, and more piles of rubbish. I remember Chick getting out of the taxi to go to a bank. While we waited in the car, he half-ran with his characteristic urgency towards the glass front of the bank, one arm extended to push the door open. But a security guard saw him coming and opened the door, so that his momentum shot him across the bank’s foyer with his arm stuck out in front. Linda laughed so much she ended up weeping and blowing her nose – perhaps Chick’s Chaplinesque performance marked the beginning of a new phase of optimism in their lives.
We went inland to Kandy to get away from the smelly strike in Colombo, but also because that was what Linda and Chick always did: they went looking. By now, Chick had his first 35mm Leica and had begun to take the thousands of colour slides I’d inherit in two large tin trunks when he died.
4.1 To the Tin Trunk of Images
To me the Fates have given scorn for the envious.
Time’s no flood, it bears nothing
Away, and only light catches it, shuttered on memory.
Let the heart rejoice in whatever it has right now.
What is this we hold up between us, my brother
And I? It’s our father’s satisfaction, it’s food
For the table, it’s a monument he never dreamed he’d see
In the Uffizi, it’s his wife in a camelhair coat
By a DC3, with a camel in the Wadi
Araba and among the weathered pyramids of Dashoon.
Now it’s a dhow, it’s a thousand sunsets on the Nile,
On the Bay of Bengal, on the waters of Lake Constance,
And he was never satisfied with them. Far horizons, blue
And made of rocks, are what he also saw.
Sometimes he was happy with the spired horizons of cities
But which cities? And what Gods are worshipped
Beneath these turquoise domes? What was sacrificed
On these basalt altars, tumbled in black ruins
Across what valleys foraged by goats, sheep
Or llamas? What tunes have faded away?
Where are we now? No longer in
The picture, which is now a picture of my father’s loneliness.
He survives in roguish snapshots taken in restaurants.
A plate of quail in Damascus. But never in the tin
Trunk of photographs, because he took them all.
But a more immediate record of Kandy is the Box Brownie one. The little black-and-white snaps show elephants being given a bath by their minders; the Temple of the Tooth; our family in various poses against monuments, coconut palms, sunsets, or the kinds of surroundings that time makes anonymous. What time also did was file the smell of smoke and spices that then re-entered the car window eleven years later as a hallucination of the pattern on my mother’s dress.
Back in Colombo in 1958, we boarded the P&O liner Arcadia 2 to go to England. This was a state-of-the-art vessel, built in 1954. Dave and I had a cabin in which I immediately locked myself to examine my sand-scraped dick – which, despite its condition, proved irresistible. The result was pain that made me howl and refuse to unlock the door when an anxious crowd gathered outside it. Finally a peeved Cockney steward used his master key to get in; he gave me a strident telling-off and then demanded to know what the matter was. I refused to tell him. Linda arrived – I think Dave had been sent to get her. She, too, demanded to know why I was making a fuss. I could feel her concern tipping into anger, so I told her about my raw dick.
‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Want me to have a look at willy?’
I didn’t. And then I saw my mother’s careful sympathy break apart. Her laughter came out first in a loud snort; soon she was weeping, as she had when Chick ran with his outstretched arm across the bank’s foyer in Colombo.
‘Sorry, darling,’ she managed to gasp. ‘I know it’s not funny.’
So why was she laughing?
As she laughed and cried, dabbing her eyes with the edge of the bunk’s sheet, I saw across her merrily shaking shoulders, framed in the cabin’s narrow doorway, my twin brother’s broad grin.
Nothing drives ambition as hard as humiliation, except the combination of vengeful humiliation and a sense of entitlement. I was set up for the catastrophe of ‘the absent-minded professor’.
It was about the time the Arcadia crossed the Equator that the kids on board were marshalled by the liner’s recreation staff to stage a fancy-dress competition. I got myself up as an absent-minded professor. I had total confidence in my winning concept. I ignored warning signs, the sniggers of the other kids. I remember a Tarzan I was jealous of but not threatened by. There were nurses, doctors, a policeman, and a cannibal chief with a blackened face. I saw the cannibal as a possible but remote threat. There was a ballet dancer who I didn’t think counted, since the girl who’d put on a tutu and pointes was in fact a real dancer, not a made-up one; I may even have lodged a complaint about her. I don’t remember what Dave went as: probably a pilot.
I was confident that my absent-minded professor concept would be strikingly original, obvious, but also hilarious. This would be my point of difference, my advantage. The laughter I anticipated would be a kind of applause, the opposite of derision; it would regain me the ground I’d lost to my mother’s mirth on the night I’d locked myself in Dave’s and my cabin.
One by one the kids stepped forward and paraded before the audience of dutifully proud parents and other passengers who, drinks in hand, were looking for any respite from the voyage’s implacable boredom. I listened to their applause with condescending resentment – soon they’d see! The cheating ballet dancer had won the most applause so far, spinning on the toes of one foot to admiring cheers; this had added resentment to my confidence. When my turn came, I stepped forward.
Wearing my own owlish glasses, a false goatee beard, a top hat, a white lab coat, shoes and socks with a pair of my father’s sock-suspenders, no trousers and an expectant grin, I paraded before an audience stunned into bewildered silence. No one got ‘absent-minded professor’, let alone that the absent-minded professor had forgotten to put his pants on. I might as well have been a cross between a steward and a flasher (but with a top hat). Linda and Chick were sitting at a table with bleak smiles on their faces. My own confident smile turned to ice.
‘Anyone getting it? No one?’ urged the on-board entertainment supervisor.
No one did.
And then the laughter built. I could still hear it after I’d retreated to the dress-up room, where the other kids took their hilarity cue from the grown-ups.
I learned then that when someone laughs at you, the best thing is to join in. That way you’ll at least become complicit in your own degradation. Do it convincingly enough, and you’ll persuade those laughing at you that you always meant them to: you made them do it. You yourself will become the best joke you could tell.
Thus began my short career as a clown: the fat kid who, panting last across the cross-country finishing line at Hazelgrove, had everybody in stitches, including the terrifying Indian sports instructor who could hit hockey balls the length of the pitch at waist height; the author of ruefully funny letters to my mother and father, as in one headed ‘Same old Place, 31st May, 1958 A.D.’, which ended:
I hope you keep well, and don’t catch typhoid. Good bye, lots of love,
Yours,
Ian
And the melodramatist who, gazing down at the distant site of his unloved-child torments, caused Reg Markwell to crack up. Of course, since I only have my brother’s word for it, I can’t really claim to remember Reg’s mirth. But I heard the laughter often enough over the next few years to be able to guess, now, that the occasion asked for it.
Reg’s nickname for me was ‘Fishface’. I see Fishface often in photos of us as a family during the last weeks when we were one in the conventional sense, which is to say when mother, father and kids were together. Wearing an English prep-school cap, blazer and pants, Fishface beams while Trafalgar Square pigeons perch on his shoulders and shit down the back of his brand-new uniform. Beside him his brother also grins amid the pigeons – but, even now, I can detect the difference. Dave is just grinning unselfconsciously and flinching back from the over-eager birds. But I am performing my comic happiness straight down the lens of Chick’s new Leica. Here we are on a trip around Scotland. Dave and Linda are gazing sideways at the misty vista of a loch, probably Loch Ness, but Fishface is registering the axis of his attention at ninety degrees to theirs, to camera, to my father as the keeper of records. See how happy I am? If my sadness isn’t credible enough to gain sympathy, then perhaps my performance of being really happy will redeem it.
Or my performance of some other significant emotion – anything but sadness. We were in a Gothic cathedral – Ely, I think – full of fresh, pale light, on what was probably the farewell trip around England and Scotland with Chick before he went to the mill at Khulna. I was awestruck by the architecture and brilliance of the place. But the tears I managed to pump from my ducts at the sight of so much beauty were every bit as much a lie as my blurted-out wish to die the time I crawled across the polished red plaster floor at Chandraghona and climbed into my mother’s lap. I was playing to the gallery of my mother and father, and making sure they had a good record of what they’d be leaving behind – what they’d see they’d left behind every time they looked at Chick’s photographs of our happy family, when it was one.
What they saw was the absent-minded professor, or Fishface the clown. I became the obscure metaphor of myself. Neither my sadness nor my happiness was credible. Why should they have believed either? It was in the secret poems I was writing that the truth was being told.
But the ‘poems’ – my feverish, trouserless cryptograms – were not what I was posting to my mother and father. What they received were letters whose cheerful, newsy fortitude had been scrutinised and sometimes censored by the staff at Hazelgrove. It didn’t occur to me back then that being asked to rewrite
my weekly letter was wrong; the teacher who made a reproving note in the margin of my letter simply became its core audience. I wrote for him, and hoped to be rewarded with a chuckle.
The rooks’ nests
My plan for this book has involved returning in memory and person to places where I’ve been, in one way or another, at home. And so now another physical return is necessary.
Montacute Park
Affective, affective. Also
my reactions to the place
were pre-shrunk. The cottage
had grown smaller, the great elms
spaced out like spokes across
the park were stuffed with ugly
clots of dead twigs. The rooks
had done that. Their dark
trajectories drew the eye back
& back to the trees they had ruined,
where they still lived. Their caws
tore the chill fabric of the air.
My feelings were cramped into a child’s
perspectives. I could have run
without effort the return distance
to the cottage: man’s legs, man’s lungs.
But I wanted to arrive breathless,
the dark at my back, & be warmed.
Down the park a dog turned, poised,
its owner hurled a stick, the rooks
crashed upward into dusk, I
walked off with the long strides
of a seasoned tourist. Behind me
the cantankerous birds settled back
among their families, the man
whistled his exuberant dog to heel.
I wrote this sometime in 1970. Rose and I had left Jordan in June, after the first phase of the civil war that would culminate in Black September, when King Hussein ordered his hard-liner Prime Minister Wasfi al-Tal to call up the Jordanian Army’s tank brigade to crush the Palestinian militias. We drove from Beirut to London in the old Commer van I’d bought in Amman. It was against the confused background of what I’d seen of the Palestinian diaspora during 1969 and 1970 that I returned to the place in England where, as a child a decade earlier, I’d believed for a time in my own exile. Though I wouldn’t have called it ‘exile’ back then, I might, had I known the word, have been drawn melodramatically to the Palestinian al-Nakba, the Catastrophe.
