by Ian Wedde
Having expressed a dislike of drilling and running around the surrounding countryside with a heavy pack and a compass, I was given a battered euphonium and taught to play a rhythmical pattern of three or four farting notes. Then we marched about in poorly coordinated, discordant formations, with a small percentage of able musicians playing real music. On occasions when the whole corps paraded, led by the ludicrous band, Headmaster Davy, dressed in perfunctory khakis, would stand on a raised plinth to take the eyes-right salute with an inscrutably deadpan expression on his face. Thus he fulfilled what was no doubt obligatory within the school’s charter while at the same time encouraging us to work around it.
Classes were organised in two streams – what was known as the academic one, and the practical one. This too may have been inherent in the school’s charter, or in its traditions. The academic stream was directed towards gaining entry to universities, the practical one towards getting work. But Davy mixed them up in interesting ways. He had academic maths classes conducted in the woodwork shop, where calculations were applied to drawing up plans, working out ratios and extrapolating to three dimensions using algebra. He introduced us to Ovid’s Metamorphoses by encouraging butterfly-collecting expeditions (he was a keen lepidopterologist), which he then cross-referenced to natural history classes and systems of Latin taxonomy.
There was no compulsory attendance at classes in the academic stream, and students marked one another’s work. When he caught our German class involved in mass test cheats, in the course of which we’d worked out a system for rationalising our collectively higher marks, he punished no one, withheld no privileges, made no comment, but spent an entire class gravely, even woodenly pointing out the computational flaws in our system and what had made its scam ridiculously easy to detect; we’d shamed ourselves not just by cheating but by making fools of ourselves doing it. When he left the room after that session, we all sat in silence for a while. The dread and fear I felt may have been exacerbated by the fragment of one-sided conversation about poetry which I was still carrying around like an instruction on how to evolve, but I think my classmates all felt something similar. Davy let our marks stand as we’d awarded them to each other, but we didn’t cheat again.
He conducted sex education classes in which he explained in simple language what even the boastful rural dandies hadn’t been able to get across to me (what went where); he pointed out that no one in the school seemed to be going blind, and so masturbation wasn’t as dangerous as some people would have you believe. He himself had a large animal presence and a beautiful wife, and we didn’t doubt that they had lots of sex in the headmaster’s modest house, which had a vegetable garden at the back where Davy could be seen at weekends staking up his tomatoes and beans, and forking over a large compost heap.
He’d also established a film society at the school. To join, you had to pay a small levy and get a letter of permission from your parents. This was because Davy, who operated the projector himself, showed films classified above the age range of his pupils. Thus it was that I saw (in French) Roger Vadim’s Sait-on jamais, Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle, Claude Chabrol’s Le beau Serge and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon Amour. We saw John Huston’s Maltese Falcon and Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly. We saw Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Davy ran the movies and changed the reels; he quite often smoked during the screenings, and his pipe smoke used to drift across the projection light shaft. At the end, he would usually say a word or two about the film. He had a standard answer for anyone who protested they hadn’t understood what it was about: ‘See it again.’
Above all, he screened Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. I was completely swept away by this film. Though I’ve seen it several times since, I still remember that first viewing. The film seemed to have a large, rhythmical shape – to be composed of tremendous material blocks or masses that presented themselves front-on, surging into chaotic close-ups, or that gathered at the sides of the screen and then rushed laterally across it. The rain that swept across the screen both darkened it and gave it a kind of harsh diagonal grain. The light appeared to be organised in sheets or planes, rather than diffused through the film’s depth of field. The story seemed to dodge and thread its way through these great, counterpoised compositions; it was delicate, even minimal, so simple that you could almost forget about it – it seemed to be telling itself in spite of or oblivious to the big visual structures of the film.
At one point early on, the simple story and the large, blocked masses of movement came together – this is what I remember most vividly – or seemed to be still, like a clearing in a mighty landscape, or a silence in the middle of an ongoing tumult. It was also a silence or clearing in the mind. This was the moment when Kikuchiyo, the young wannabe Samurai whose humble origins enabled him to empathise with the poor farmers of the embattled village, paused by a mountain stream and caught a fish for food.
The delight of this small event, which established Kikuchiyo as resourceful rather than a hapless clown, had a lot to do with my own sense of inferiority. Unlike the rural dandies who went home to holidays of drunkenness, finger-fucking and fox hunting, Dave and I amused ourselves in the rook-cluttered elms of Montacute Park or pedalled our way staunchly through the YHA hostel guide. We didn’t go and stay at friends’ houses. We seemed to have less cash than the others, who bought sausages, toast-making supplies, cocoa and vomit-inducing scrumpy in the village; I scrounged these things from them.
Also, Kikuchiyo somehow reached across to our visit to the Chittagong Hill Tracts a few years back, to the time I fell down the waterfall and disturbed the monster that was waiting to emerge as the Gill-man of the Black Lagoon. The villagers of Seven Samurai reminded me of the people we’d seen at Chimbuk, including a group of women catching minute fish in the river that became the waterfall.
That secret moment – the horribly swarming waterfall-pond and the creature of the black lagoon – which had in some way inaugurated the furtiveness of my writing activity as an antidote to fear and the portal to another reality, now seemed to have been laid open. The stillness or lightness of the fish-catching moment in the film was like a window opening in my mind. I remember walking out of the screening with a sense of physical and atmospheric lightness. The Kikuchiyo I identified with planted himself resourcefully in the film’s tremendous structure, its masses of movement, sheets of light, cross-currents of rain. He made himself entirely visible. He declared what he wanted, and was eventually accepted on his own terms. His personal triumph was notable not just in itself, but because it was contained – housed, homed – in forms that were all about the drama of making emotion visible. My excitement was at once personal and abstract.
Of course such moments are seldom the epiphanies we subsequently remember them to have been. My emergence from writing as a secret activity almost certainly took place over time. But I do remember very clearly that, at the end of the Seven Samurai screening, Davy made some kind comment about the film being more like a poem than a story.
I emerged cautiously from my poetry closet. The school magazine published some of my poems, and I was given a book of poetry recently published by an old boy of the school. I no longer have the old boy’s book, and can’t remember the poems I was being encouraged to emulate. In the summer of 1961, I won the school’s German prize – a copy of the 1960 Oxford edition of the collected poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, chosen by Davy. That oblique good judgement was typical of him. As a bonus, though without the signed prize-label on the inside cover, he also gave me a copy of Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal in French. Of both he said mildly that I’d find them difficult. He obviously thought that was a good thing.
He once delivered a sermon in the school chapel on some occasion when it was full of the kids’ families. He based his talk on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, from which he quoted at length. The congregation began to rustle and there was an outbreak of coughing. Davy was unperturbed. Somewhere out there, in one of those clearings or moments of mental stillness, someone �
�� a Kikuchiyo – would be catching the bony little fish of difficulty and feeding his hunger to be part of something larger than himself. I think of this Kurosawa episode as a kind of homecoming – when the where and the who of me lined up, or rhymed, I want to say ‘for the first time’.
Peggy Markwell’s back
As we came in to Odcombe Lodge that winter holiday when Linda appeared out of the blue to pick us up from Bruton, the first thing I noticed was Peggy Markwell’s back. She had it turned to us while she was doing something at the kitchen sink. My memory of the layout of the house is that the kitchen was at one end of the ground floor, with a door opening to the outside facing the park, and another into the bathroom and lavatory. The small dining room and parlour were to your right as you came in from outside, the kitchen to your left.
Linda ushered us to the right, away from Peggy, who didn’t turn to greet us. There was something about her back that disturbed me. Leaving aside what appeared to be the unfriendliness of her stance, she appeared stiff, her head bowed towards the kitchen sink, as if oblivious to anything but what she was doing there. But then I noticed that she wasn’t doing anything. She was just standing there with her head a little bowed and her back straight, her hands hidden in front of her on the edge of the sink, quite motionless.
Having come this far along my story of home, on a narrative track at once chronological and diverted into digressions where I’ve returned to places where I had homes in the past, I now confront a memory that is banal where the others have been dramatic.
The grass catcher whose talismanic ambiguity presides over my entire effort here; the smell of darkness that I encountered in the artesian well at Francis Street when I was a child, and its reprise that I encountered as a sixty-four-year-old’s dream of death by the Vaikuna chasm; the illicit stink of the little white-faced girl’s shit, and the desolating aroma of my mother’s ball-gown perfume; the wedge that Robert Lübker’s pedantic explanation of ‘penthouse-like’ drove into my mind, and the creature from the Black Lagoon that entered through that opening; the plums from my mother’s tree at Chandraghona, and my father’s ghost scuttled upon by silverfish in the paper-mill archive there; my brother’s thumb stroking back and forth across his lips in the dreary YHA hostel lounge; the Italian water pitcher that still gives off a dull, metallic ring, and reminds me of the time when Dave and I parted company with our mother and father – when our home ceased to be with them; the liberating stillness in Kikuchiyo’s fish-catching moment in the poem that was Seven Samurai – this catalogue of significance isn’t one I’ve chosen in advance so much as a kind of guidance system that has lit up in front of me as I’ve groped forward without ever knowing what would come next.
I’ve been moving ahead and looping back through a layered reality that has been at once internal, composed of memories or the talismanic objects that seem to produce memory as their affect, and external, composed of facts such as the pebbly beach across the bay at Waikawa. The truth values of such hard, material facts are their own, in their own present; but they also may endorse the intangible truths of memories.
In On Dreams, Freud reminded us that we dream in pictures – in fact, in moving pictures with sound – but not in language. Understanding dreams involves looking at a collage, in which different times and places will be mixed up, and in which (Freud suggested) something like allegory makes the dream’s meaning accessible. The dream-narrative is a jostle of symbols pointing away from themselves. The world of dreams is often filled with the visual babble of signs clamouring to be spoken or written of otherwise.
The key moments in the memories that have been my dream-like guidance system often resemble what Freud called symbols. There’s an inherent paradox in this analogy. What Freud characterised as visual is implicitly aligned with allegory, a mode of annotation, and therefore of reveals. This insistence that, in dreams and memories, something must always mean something else is inherently dramatic. It anticipates a revelation, even a catharsis. The analysis of dreams and memories is theatrical, and often sensational.
What, then, do we make of memories that are banal? That seem to point nowhere else? That are without suspense, mystery, drama? That are mute? That is how my memory of Peggy Markwell’s back appears. Though her behaviour was soon glossed dramatically in Linda’s hushed explanation, my memory of its appearance remains flat, as if the emotion had been ironed out of it, as if it had been drained of narrative. This remains so even when its tragic circumstances are explained.
The home we entered when we went to live with Reg and Peggy in the holidays was ‘childless’. Thus, by default, we became the children in it when we were there. But we weren’t their children. Reg was an aeronautical engineer who worked at the big Westland helicopter factory near Yeovil. He was a dashing, swarthy man, with a Greek mother who came to stay sometimes. He wore his black hair swept back with a shine of Brylcreem in it; there were a few streaks of grey at his temples. I’d guess he was in his early forties when we went to live with him and Peggy. Peggy was a bit younger, in her mid- to late thirties. I remember her as a compact, attractive woman. They sometimes took us to the seaside at Chesil Bank on the Dorset coast, where they’d sunbathe on the steep shingle beach – they were a good-looking couple.
I suspect that one of the reasons we were moved out of the bedroom next to theirs in the top of the lodge was that they were trying to have a baby. And eventually we noticed, and were told with great delight by both of them, that Peggy was pregnant. And then Linda appeared suddenly from Khulna and picked us up from school. I didn’t understand much of what she told us, but gathered that Peggy’s baby had been born with a deformity and had either died or been allowed to die.
I saw Linda with Peggy a lot – she seemed to be supporting and comforting her. My guess now is that she was asked to come back to England for the holidays because it would have been too hard for Reg and Peggy to handle these children who in a sense represented what they’d irrevocably lost. And so Linda was there for a few weeks before we went back to school and she to Khulna.
Peggy’s manner towards us had always been brisk and friendly. Her kindness was practical rather than warm. Reg, I understood early, had found me irritating; he mostly kept this in check, with the exception of the occasional ‘Fishface’ taunt early on, and his one furious assault when Dave and I were play-fighting in the double bed next to their room. But from the moment of Peggy’s stiff, still back turned towards us at the kitchen sink, her manner changed. I don’t remember how many more holidays we spent at Odcombe Lodge and in the adjacent Montacute Park, but I do remember that she became withdrawn towards us: practical and organised as before, but of necessity. I don’t think she disliked us. But I’ve no doubt she was glad when we left.
It was an especially bitter, black-frost winter when that happened. Reg was driving us to London to catch the plane back to New Zealand. For some reason, I remember the drive taking place overnight, in the dark, through driving rain, sleet and snow, which the Austin A35’s headlamps could barely penetrate. But that’s unlikely. Probably the weather was grim and dark, with heavy snow clouds; we probably left before dawn to get to Heathrow on time. I remember the grimness of that drive, with Reg silent and concentrating on the black road ahead. I felt as though we were escaping. Later, in a long conversation with Dave about the time we left England and came back to New Zealand, he reminded me that we drove to London and spent the night with Reg’s sister May (of course he remembers her name) and their mother, that Reg took us to the airport the following morning.
Almost certainly, we wouldn’t be seeing Reg and Peggy again. We’d been the occasional children in their home for five years. Then their own child had died and we’d become the children they couldn’t have. I remember Peggy’s perfunctory hug when we left to get in the car; and the back she turned again to go inside out of the cold. She was a good, kind woman, and I can’t blame her for the ways her grief made her turn her back on the kids she’d made a home for but couldn’t ha
ve been expected to love. I’ve been back to England many times over the years, and to Montacute Park when I lived in London in 1970 and ’71. But I never tried to get back in touch with the Markwells. I probably should have; I wish I had. My brother Dave did, as you’d expect – he went to see them a couple of times after they moved north. It’s he who is able to fill in the details – that they went first to Preston for Reg to work ‘on the BAE Tornado Multi Role Aircraft’, then into retirement in Falmouth, Cornwall. That would have been where Linda visited them on her last trip.
They’re both dead now. The clearest memory I have of them is also the least sensational, an image that seems entirely factual and, because of that, almost emptied of meaning, a kind of abstraction: it’s Peggy’s back turned not against us, but against the childless home we haplessly rebuked with our presence.
The punnet of strawberries
And then we were returning to be in a home again with our own mother and father. I remembered this when Donna and I drove north to Auckland from the big old house in Wellington where we’d lived and worked for twenty years, where our kids had lived, and come and gone, and come back again; where we’d all sat down together at meals to celebrate yet another return, another embarkation. (… It’s great to be home/ Again, say our wandering sons, as they wave goodbye.)
