by Ian Wedde
When Linda met us at the bus stop in Yeovil, we’d occasionally go to a basement cafeteria near the town square and have spaghetti on toast; they did a double portion which we both liked. It was here, one day, she announced that in the summer holidays we were going to drive to Rome to meet up with Daddy from Khulna, and then we’d have a holiday together, after which we’d be coming back to Yeovil without him – and then she’d be going to East Pakistan. She’d be going by herself. We were going to stay here, in England. We were going to be boarders at Hazelgrove, which would be much more fun than catching the bus every day. Before long, we’d be able to come and visit them in East Pakistan, and that would be fun too. In the holidays, we were going to stay with Reg and Peggy in the lodge. That would be fun – they were really nice people and there was lots to do in the park.
God knows what kind of effort it cost Linda to break the news to us, or how often she rehearsed the various approaches she might take. The fact that she fell back on the implausibly accommodating concept of fun was probably a good indication of her apprehension and perhaps grief. I don’t doubt that she longed to be with Chick – to be getting on with the life they’d gone past the point of no return with. But where did that leave us? Was she as convinced as her husband that this was the best they could hope to do by their children? I doubt it.
Many years later, after Chick had died, she told me she’d worried; but she made this admission hesitantly, not as if she’d largely forgotten the doubts, but as though she was unwilling to imply any fault on Chick’s part. I thought, fair enough – it doesn’t matter any more. It hadn’t really mattered for thirty years.
Thinking back now, I remember a kind of beseeching anxiety in her manner – though whether then or later I can’t be sure. At the time she broke the news, I was scoffing my double helping of spaghetti on toast, and the pleasure of that took over my first reaction to the announcement. It was later, when the news sank in, that I committed my reprise of the egregious life-isn’t-worth-living lie I’d inaugurated that day back in Chandraghona, when she’d scooped me up and murmured ‘There, there’ into my sobs.
Linda came into our bedroom and found me sitting on the edge of my bed, contemplating a pair of open scissors with a meaningful look. It was true, I told her when she asked – I wanted to be dead. And was that because Mummy was going to Khulna? She removed the scissors from my hand. I don’t think for a moment she believed my intention, or my answer, but that suited both of us. By giving me an admiring, sympathetic hug when I lied that I wanted to die because I couldn’t stand the thought of all the unhappy children in the world, she handed me the Pyrrhic victory of an honourable discharge. Years later, I asked her about this incident. I did so as one adult to another, hoping to share a rueful joke. But she didn’t remember it. Just as well.
The boy soprano
I don’t remember the transition period – which must have been around May 1958, if my typhoid letter is anything to go by – when Dave and I were first boarding at Hazelgrove while Linda packed up the rented brick house on the mole-infested hill near Odcombe village and prepared to go to Khulna. Nor do I remember her leaving; or saying goodbye and then leaving – presumably in the Vauxhall in which she’d earlier driven us to Rome to see Chick, and back again to go to boarding school. Or perhaps she’d already sold the car, and went to London on the train, having packed up the house? Sold our stuff? All Dave and I had would fit in our regulation Hazelgrove suitcases.
On the morning I wrote the sentence, ‘Nor do I remember her leaving,’ I paused and went for a walk. My writing task for the day was to be a chapter in which I returned to the time Dave and I spent at Hazelgrove and, as a kind of lamination, the time I spent in London in 1970 and ’71. But I encountered a blank and so went out for a walk.
As I climbed through the wet trees and birdsong on the hill above Donna’s and my home on Mount Victoria, Wellington, a lone black man singing ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ in a gorgeous, syrupy, bass strolled into the blank space where my thoughts had stalled. The footprints he left in the snow that had covered Brixton Road in London were evenly spaced and paced, with a turned-out duck-walk shape that somehow expressed the large, overcoat-draped belly and chest that rested above his saunter; his saunter kept time with the song.
There was no one else around in the street, so it must have been early in the morning, and Brixton Road must have been closed to traffic because of the snow. I watched him from the first-floor window of the flat we were living in. It was too cold to open the windows, whose draughty edges we’d stuffed with newspaper, but I could hear that he kept singing the carol after he’d passed out of sight. This was in the severe winter of 1970, but the beautiful singing is what I remembered, not the discomfort.
Remembering this, I understood that, before going for my walk on Mount Victoria, I’d been about to follow a default track; to start writing along lines I’d already taken for granted. I planned to write about the sad impact of Linda’s unwitnessed departure, about what Dave and I did about it in our different ways, about a morbid consistency in my narrative of home and homelessness.
But the default would not play.
Even now, I can remember the quality of happiness I felt hearing the black singer’s beautiful voice, and seeing him walk along the snow-covered street that only the day before would have been grimy and bleak. What was so special about it? The moment was special enough in itself – unique, memorable, strange, uplifting – but in a way it just confirmed what I already knew: that I was happy then, despite conditions. The flat was cold and infested with mice; Rose, Kevin Cunningham and I shared a pissy toilet with the sullen Italian barbers on the ground floor; we were scraping by – but we were happy. The singer’s small margin of strange bliss told me so. If you are pretty happy, an extra measure of it doesn’t feel like a reprieve: it feels like a blessing.
Linda had been right a decade earlier – boarding school was fun and I was pretty happy. The conditions were bleak: the health-obsessed headmaster had us taking cold baths in the morning and doing physical jerks outside in the snow before breakfast; breakfast sometimes consisted of hot-water cocoa and slices of toast on which Marmite had been baked (some years after we left, the school was investigated for malnourishment of children); the Indian sports master was a martinet; slightly bullying sex cabals gathered in the dormitories and changing rooms; some of the schoolwork was hard. But I was mostly having fun. Some of the boys cried at night when the lights were turned off, but I never did.
And I think the reason I have no recollection at all of Linda’s departure to join Chick in East Pakistan, a place two weeks away by airmail, was because it didn’t matter in the end. In fact, it was probably a relief when she went. And now, it’s a relief to be able to admit that. At school, we got on with our lives in an environment like the territories Dave and I had always occupied away from the family home. I no longer had to perform my doleful masquerade of separation anxiety for which there was, anyway, no longer an audience.
Instead, I became a boy soprano. My introversion was pulled inside out. Here is my connection with the black caroller in Brixton. As I walked through the trees on Mount Victoria that day, he signalled to me that I’d been happy back then when our mother left us; and then I remembered why. Singing in the chapel choir provided the margin of bliss that told me I was already happy. I became one of two soprano leads and, one Christmas, got to sing the solo ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ as the choir processed down the nave of the chapel towards the choir-stalls. This performance was not a lie; its audience was appreciative, not complicit; it made me feel good, not guilty; it was a blessing, not a reprieve. It was also only good while it lasted.
As part of our father’s contract at Khulna, we were flown out once to visit in the summer holidays. There was a compound-type arrangement of houses there, also a swimming pool. Some other expat kids were visiting as well and most days we all played at the pool. Word of my boy soprano performance reached Chick, and he asked me
to sing ‘Once in Royal David’s City’. I knew in my bones that this was the wrong place and the wrong time. Perhaps I sensed that this would be too much like those other performances, the ones I no longer needed to do, the Fishface ones. Perhaps I was just shy.
I agreed to sing on condition that I could do so in an adjoining room. My voice was cracking and strained. When I came back into the one where my parents were sitting, they were holding hands, and Chick was weeping. ‘That was lovely, darling,’ said my mother. But I was sullen again. It would have been different if they’d heard me sing in the Christmas procession with the choir, and the huge candle, and all the parents of the other kids. But they hadn’t been there; singing in a room next to them in Khulna was stupid, and my father’s tears were embarrassing. Also, I sensed that he was moved by his own achievement, not mine; he was proud, but of the opportunity he’d been able to give me.
The next time I saw him cry was worse. We were getting on the plane in Khulna to go back to England, and Chick began to weep again. When I asked Linda if it was because he was sad to see us go, she replied, No, it was because we weren’t as hairy as he’d thought we’d be. He’d expected us to be older. Again, the tears were not about what I was; they were about what Chick had hoped I’d be. I took that peculiar disappointment with me on to the plane, along with an ear infection from some bug in the pool. I got off at the other end dripping green pus, as if the ‘family home’ had become poisonous; it had, anyway, become foreign – as foreign as the murky Sundarban mangroves we went to on an overnight boat trip without seeing a tiger, only the rotting remnant of a skull with teeth, whose stink was like the one that came out of my throbbing ear. School was better.
Of course I know now that my father’s emotion was genuine enough, even if it did include a measure of self-satisfaction, and that Linda was making a joke about the disappointing lack of hairiness. Like many jokes made by parents to defuse emotional situations, its aim was wrong. It lodged in my child’s mind as a nasty infection, and remained there as evidence that the family home had been poisoned.
But this also freed me. And then my voice began to break – the sign of another liberation. I grew quickly, shed my fat and became good at sport. The wonky bones in my heels had mended. Fishface was no more. I was booted out of the choir, but trained with the school swimming squad and was captain of the senior rugby team. This was partly because I was the coach’s favourite – he was the school’s French teacher. Thanks to crazy Herzig and the scrupulous Robert Lübker, I was his star pupil.
As well as happy, I was fortunate. Linda and Chick were far away; I missed them dutifully when we stayed with the Markwells in the holidays; I missed the idea of home rather than the reality. The twinges of sadness I felt at the YHA hostel on Dartmoor, for example, began to be redundant, as if the homeless sadness I’d become accustomed to feeling, or the fear of it, hadn’t yet been flushed completely out of my system.
As I walked along familiar tracks in the Town Belt on Mount Victoria, the black caroller in Brixton in 1970 made the connection between that liberation and my brief time as a boy soprano. All these unpredictable, unprogrammed things made happiness possible: made it possible to be at home within a kind of Epicurean zone of fortune.
The departure of my mother and father, and the absence of the kind of home we had when we all lived together, also opened up a space in which happiness could ambush the dire scenarios I’d become accustomed to taking for granted back then. Like my mother and father risking their happiness and the happiness of their children when they left Blenheim and embarked on a life where home had no fixed address but was rather the place where fortunate circumstances converged, I was given the opportunity to find happiness where contingency was its agent. The boy soprano moment, and its liberating sequel, marked a time not only when home left me but also when I let it go. Thus began a new chapter in the story of home.
The Italian water pitcher
The story of the Italian water pitcher focuses the last substantial memories I have of being with my mother and father, and is therefore my story of leaving them and the kind of home they represented. But before telling the story of the pitcher, I find I have to backtrack to the photographs of Linda as Lady Mary Lasenby in The Admirable Crichton, and especially the one in which she’s wearing deerskins and bending a bow: an image that has fascinated and haunted me since I found it after her death in 1986.
Along with a black cast-iron Korean pug-dog which my mother got when she and Chick lived in Seoul, and which was definitely hers, the brass and copper Italian water pitcher which is definitely mine stood by the front door of our house in Mount Victoria. The iron pug-dog sometimes doubled as a doorstop, and the pitcher as an umbrella stand. I walked between and past these useful but talismanic objects whenever I left or entered what had been my family home for twenty years. This wasn’t a repetition I thought about – it wasn’t meaningful – though sometimes a pang of responsibility or chagrin made me pick up the dog and apologise when he’d fallen over, and sometimes I straightened the umbrellas (and the feather duster) in the pitcher because it seemed respectful to do so.
But after getting out the photograph of my mother bending her bow as a youthful, somewhat Artemis-like Lady Mary Lasenby, and trying to figure out when the performance would have taken place and what it told me about the quality of my mother’s life when she was as young as she appears in the photo, I walked out of our Wellington house between the dog and the pitcher – between her talisman and mine – and felt a charge pass between them.
The home we’re accustomed to is the one we’re least aware of; the pug-dog and the pitcher, like electrodes, shocked me with a sudden awareness of how little I knew about my mother’s life at Francis Street, and how much I’d elaborated that meagre knowledge with my own assumptions. When I looked back at what I’d written, I saw I’d built a narrative of dissatisfaction and boredom in my mother’s life, from which such episodes as her role in The Admirable Crichton – along with the social life that took place in the Sounds, with boat trips, beach parties and the occasional jazz dance on the Cook Strait ferry (Tamahine, adds my brother) at Picton – were an occasional relief. I’d assumed that my mother, at forty-four, had chivvied my father into getting her the hell out of there because she was suffocating in the narrow confines of a house and home that had defined her whole life.
And even if this was halfway true, it played too conveniently to my own agenda, the self-pitying contours of which I was beginning to doubt more and more. The story I’d found myself defaulting to was all about the necessity for an imaginative life that could compensate for a home life characterised by absences, shortcomings or failures, and therefore by dissatisfactions and desires. My default narrative had begun to construct a likely reality that was neither unhappy nor a fantasy, but something original: a metaphorical home in which I (or my mother) could be happy in a way that was never going to be possible in a world of inevitable limitations.
But now I began to mistrust this model, and the extent to which I’d let it shape my understanding of why Linda had needed to leave her home in Blenheim. Now, I wanted her desire to be unshackled from dissatisfaction – I wanted it to be something like the free-flowing, transforming energy that Deleuze and Guatarri celebrated with such brilliant longing in Anti-Oedipus.
Hoping to find out more about Linda’s life as hinted at tantalisingly in the Artemis photograph, I phoned my cousin Norma Robinson at her home near Spring Creek outside Blenheim. While hunting at the National Library for information about the amateur theatre scene in Blenheim, I’d already encountered Norma as a glamorous young star in several Blenheim Repertory Society productions, and I thought she might know when The Admirable Crichton had been staged. Maybe she’d be able to fill me in on that part of her aunt’s, my mother’s, life.
Norma was eighty-four when I phoned her, and could still easily pass for a woman in her alert early sixties. She laughs a lot, tells a good story, has a sharp memory, is the vigilant matriarch o
f extended family businesses and leads a resolutely independent social life. She could, she says, have had a life as an actor, and her husband Gordon as an All Black, but children and farming took over. She had a lot to tell me on the phone, but couldn’t remember when The Admirable Crichton was staged. We agreed that I’d come over for a couple of days and she’d introduce me to Terence Burtenshaw, a local actor, theatre and film nut, veteran of amateur productions in the province, and one of the keepers of the Operatic Society archives.
So, four days later, I caught the Picton ferry with the Artemis/Lady Mary Lasenby photograph in my bag. From the sun deck of the ferry, I squinted at Dieffenbach Point through a significant end-of-year-parties hangover, and then drove a rental car across the Wairau Plains to Norma’s place. Since her husband Gordon’s death, she’s lived in a fine modern house surrounded by a landscape that bears no relationship whatsoever to the one I grew up with. In all directions the Marlborough vineyards stretch out in orderly rows; wine tourists pose for photo opportunities next to famous brand signage such as Cloudy Bay. There’s a luxury hand-made chocolate business just up the road. The vineyards compete for the best chefs, and as the Christmas holiday season approaches the lunch bookings begin to logjam into weeks.
The hills across the Wairau River towards Nelson were almost familiar, and so were the blond mounds of the Wither Hills on the other side of Blenheim, with little white clouds suspended above them in a hot blue sky. Missing was the kind of ad hoc orderly pastoral landscape with cows and sheep that I associated with the Hastilow farm we used to visit at Tua Marina; and, most of all, the plumes of dust from shingle roads like those that mostly seemed to end at the broad, shingly, braided river of my childhood, whose water was always warmer than expected, and smelled of leaves and stone.
