by Ian Wedde
We had a delicious grilled squid salad and another bottle of nice pinot gris. The cats came back, attracted by the fish. Dave remembered some other stuff from those strange years we’d been talking about, but by now his memory had recast these memories as jokes – like the time I went to the toilet on the train from London to Yeovil and ended up in a carriage that had been uncoupled and re-routed to Exeter. I’d forgotten that. We had a good laugh about it. Watching my brother tip wine into his smiling mouth, I remembered the incident as funny, whether it had been at the time or not. That’s how memory works.
Somewhere just to the side of our laughter, though, was the silence that had slid out of our conversation into Dave’s hot garden that resembled the one at 47 Rarangi Road, St Heliers, back in 1962, where a neighbour had peered at me through a peppery-smelling hedge and said, ‘Welcome home.’
I hear that silence on the recording which I turned off just as Dave is saying ‘Welcome home sweetie,’ when Sue comes around the corner of their house with salad for lunch and some seedlings for the garden. We’re all about ten years older than Linda and Chick were when they collected their tongue-tied, Pommified twins from mown-grass-scented Whenuapai in the purple and grey Vauxhall Cresta. We’re about the same age they were when they finally came home and didn’t leave again, a date neither Dave nor I can remember exactly, but around 1973. This time they came back with a white Mercedes. Sometimes Dave looks a lot like our father, especially when he’s having a glass of wine with his lunch and glancing adoringly at his wife. At such moments he reminds me of Chick.
Of course such reminders are not memories; I’m not even sure what functional relationship they have to memory itself. They seem to slide like filters – or like my father’s 35mm colour slides in which Lindy so often features – across those blank, uneasy spaces where memory has failed or been infected.
It’s paradoxical to suppose the past exists; I know that. I know that memory, whose job it is to make sense of that paradox, to make the palimpsest transparent, or to present slide shows from a parallel time, may sometimes seem to fail. Sometimes it fails as if to protect us, sometimes to give us a fright. Perhaps reminders like my brother’s affectionate glance at his wife are there to tell us to let the past go; if any of it matters, it’s in the present, anyway.
‘So,’ said Sue with a hint of mockery in her tone, ‘have you boys been having a nice chat?’
‘Pretty fucked up, really,’ said my brother cheerfully, filling our glasses.
The transit lounge
Following that conversation with Dave, I’m left with a question for which an answer appears so smartly it’s like the flipside of the aphasia that made us both lose the plot the day we had lunch at his place. The question is: So where were we when we went to be with our mother and father in those places they’d made their temporary homes after leaving us?
The answer that appears quickly isn’t the obvious, factual one – the house at the paper mill in Khulna, the house on the corner of Glover Road and Rarangi Road in Auckland, the house on a hill above Seoul. Yes, those are the places we stayed in for a short while: where I sang ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ in a cracking soprano voice and got an ear infection from the mill’s swimming pool; where Dave and I helped to scrape and paint the weatherboard back wall at number 47 Rarangi Road and daringly mowed the steep bank with a Masport; where we prowled the PX Store strip mall in Seoul, went to the bowling alley in the vast USFK Army base at Yongsan-gu, and threw a necking party on a night when our parents were out of town.
But the real answer to my question, Where were we when we went to Linda and Chick’s homes? is: Going there, and then coming back. That’s what first comes to mind – the transits, not the homes. I remember how my infected ear hurt on the way back to England from Khulna, especially during the plane’s take-off and landing. A stewardess gave me aspirins; next to me, Dave was throwing up expertly into successive sick-bags. Typically, Dave’s memory is taxonomically exact: he remembers ‘being utterly entranced by the sight of the methane-blue exhaust flames from the Wright R3350 Turbo Compound engine nearest to me on a night-time leg’.
For me, this memory of transit has a strong, connecting, satisfying narrative feel to it. It’s a type of memory – it connects up with little black-and-white snapshots of Dave and me asleep with teddy bears in our seats on the DC6 when we first left Blenheim in 1954; with Dave’s resigned, wan grin as he reached yet again for his sick-bag on the flight to Khulna at the end of 1959; with our blasé stocktake of the in-flight facilities, colognes, hand creams, snacks and drinks on the flight to Vancouver when we were coming to be with Linda and Chick in Auckland at the end of 1961; with us lighting up duty-free cigarettes immediately after take-off on the flight to Sydney en route to Seoul at the end of 1963; with our memorable excursions to the Tokyo Onsen bath-house and a bar in the Ginza during a stopover on our way back from Seoul to Auckland.
I notice how the word ‘memory’ seems once again capable of eliding the object of memory with the function of consciousness – how the uneasy gap between them has closed up.
We were together on the planes, coming and going. We became seasoned travellers together, or thought we were – we were twinned in our adjacent seats and in our joint progress through check-in and passport control; we were with each other in ways that no longer applied once we’d arrived. Once there, either side of the transit, more and more we got on with our own lives, had our own friends, did our own thing. But the coming and going was different. The transits were our joint home. We were at home in those interstices – suspended between ambiguities, liberated from uncertain loyalties, sealed off; secure; in adjacent seats.
On the way back to New Zealand from England in the northern winter of 1961, we stopped over in Vancouver and spent New Year with a Canadian family called Locke. Mr Locke had been the director of the paper mill at Khulna, which was run by the giant Canadian firm Sandwell. The Lockes’ blond daughters had suave high-school boyfriends who smoked filter-tip cigarettes and drove their own cars; they had hip-flasks of strong liquor. There was a rumpus room under the house, with a bar, a record player and a table-tennis table. The atmosphere was friendly, casual and utterly foreign. We had no idea what to do. We didn’t even know why we were there and not spending New Year with our parents.
We had burgers and shakes in a diner with booths, and were told by Mr Locke that this was the quintessential Canadian and American meal. It, too, was completely foreign. I don’t think either of us had said a word up to this point other than ‘Please’ or ‘Thank you’. We munched on our burgers. Dave was bent over the straw of his shake – his silence was as thick as the beverage he was politely sucking up. I remember the deference of his pale profile beside me as I drew on the sensational, malty flavour of my drink. We were both struck dumb by shyness, by the family’s hospitality and friendliness, and most of all by their questions. What had it been like back in England? Were we glad to be going home to our mother and father? How long had it been? Did we remember New Zealand? Did we like the burgers?
We spent New Year in a resort hotel with them. They danced and kissed; we sat. We went skiing on Mount Seymour outside Vancouver, where I tore a cartilage in my knee – we’d never skied before and I didn’t know how to turn once I’d launched myself down a slope. Our hosts’ generous patience wore out. The last days of my stay passed in a haze of pain and embarrassment.
Then we were back on the plane, back in the familiar zone of transit – together again, having neither left home nor got there.
Sometimes I think that transit is where I’d like to be; to be there with Dave again. It’s not going to happen, because we’re both glad to be at home where we’ve landed. But still. And sometimes, in this odd longing for the transit, I recognise the narrative flicker, like a succession of Chick’s 35mm colour slides, of our mother’s and father’s happiness, which we seldom saw but which I know about because of the expression on Linda’s face when she decided, after Chick had died,
that there were better things to do with the last years of her life than run up a set of new drapes.
Acknowledgements
Although this book isn’t a family history it contains information (and probably misinformation) about my family. Of those who helped with this (not the misinformation), my first debt is to my patient and sweet-natured brother Dave who even seemed to enjoy the time we spent together trying to get our family’s perplexing story straight.
A number of relatives I don’t know personally have compiled narratives and records I’ve used, and I thank them all, in particular Alan Stephens and Bill Whitmore. Some of these resources arrived speedily when word got out that I was writing this book; they include an amazing 66-page ‘Ahnentafel Report for Ian Wedde’ and a giant Reepen family tree dating back to 1775. I don’t pretend to have done justice to these gifts – perhaps next time. This book is more about what I haven’t known than what I’ve learned late in the game. For now, my thanks to the generous and friendly members of a family whose extent suddenly seemed to expand.
I’ve had to learn to count family relationship interstices on my fingers. My second cousin Sam Robinson has been a committed researcher and writer for many years, and I’m indebted to the materials he’s made available. His mother, my cousin Norma Robinson, whose bridal train Dave and I appeared to be holding up when we were little pageboys, was a charming and informative host. She also introduced me to Terence Burtenshaw, who opened the Blenheim archives of the town’s amateur theatre productions and released the ghosts of my mother and father in various get-ups.
Another second cousin, the redoubtable pacifist Reverend Peter Wedde, has been generous with information, photographs and memories – for example, of our great-uncle Reinhold (Ren) Wedde, a bankrupted backblocks lawyer who lived out his last years with Peter’s family in Mangere, arriving with complete sets of the German philosophers Kant and Fichte in his luggage, as well as a Cremona violin and a first edition of Oliver Twist. Such anecdotes, even if they don’t appear in this book, greatly enriched my sense of what Clifford Geertz might have called a ‘thick description’ of home.
In the context of this book’s main preoccupation with home, I’m especially grateful to Mr R.D. Qureshi and his niece Lina Chowdhury for their help with my slightly dodgy 2005 return to Dave’s and my childhood home at Chandraghona in Bangladesh. In many ways, this event gave my intention the narrative shape it needed to go somewhere.
My wife Donna read an early draft of the book and said she thought it was pretty good. At the time I wasn’t so sure, and her opinion meant I finished the job.
I’m grateful to many people, like Reg and Peggy Markwell in England, who provided the provisional homes that sustained me as a child. They died many years ago, which leaves me as an adult thanking their ghosts for the kindness I didn’t always perceive back then.
In the same spirit I want to thank my mother and father, Linda and Chick Wedde, whose extraordinary lives deprived me of a conventional home – whatever that is – for much of my young life, but gave me a rich if sometimes delusional expectation of unpredictable possibility as a good way to be at home in the world.
I’m grateful to my publisher Fergus Barrowman at Victoria University Press for his continuing support, to Jane Parkin for her scrupulous and sympathetic editing, Philip Kelly for the cover design, and Adrian Young at Auckland’s Museum of Art and Technology for the cover photograph of the lawnmower with its wire and canvas grass catcher which, not surprisingly, has become an historical artefact. I saw it in a social history exhibition about home while visiting MOTAT with my grandson Sebo. He had no idea why his grandfather was trying to take his glasses off and blow his nose at the same time.
Much of the groundwork for this book was made possible by a Creative New Zealand Investment Grant in 2010, for which I am grateful.
Photographs
Cover image courtesy of Adrian Young © Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT), Auckland.
p. 5: Ian and Dave, Menton, 2005. Photograph: Donna Malane.
p. 51: Linda as Lady Mary Lasenby in The Admirable Crighton, Blenheim Operatic Society, 1939. Gordon McCusker Studios, Blenheim.
p. 78: Chick and Linda, Karnaphuli River, East Pakistan, c.1954. Unknown photographer.
p. 103: The house at Chandraghona, February 2005. Photograph: Ian Wedde.
p. 112: Karnaphuli Paper Mill, Chandraghona, Rangamati, February 2005. Photograph: Ian Wedde.
p. 129: Heinrich August Wedde and Maria Josephine Caterina Wedde, with six of their eight children. Left to right from the front: Reinhold Henry (Ren), William Frederick, Elisabeth Frederika (Freda), Albert Augustus, Bertha Mary, Frederick Alexander (Fritz). Herman Conrad and Herbert Edward still to come. Wrigglesworth & Binns, Wellington, 1880s.
p. 160: Chittagong, February 2005. Photograph: Ian Wedde.
p. 175: Bandarban, February 2005. Photograph: Ian Wedde.
p. 189: Photograph of Mount Kenchenjunga glued to folded A4 sheet, 1957. Unknown photographer.
p. 199: Image-capture from company archives, Karnaphuli Paper Mill, Chandraghona, February 2005. Photograph: Ian Wedde.
p. 284: Dave and Ian with fish, Waikawa Bay, c.1950. Unknown photographer.
Quotations
p. 31: ‘4.5 To My Sons’, from Ian Wedde, The Commonplace Odes, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2001, p. 37.
p. 34: ‘1.4 To My Twin Brother’, from The Commonplace Odes, p. 10.
p. 35: from ‘1.5 To Donna’s Young Dogs’, from The Commonplace Odes, p. 11.
p. 41: from John Masefield, ‘Cargoes’.
p. 46: from Ian Wedde, ‘Inside Job’, in Figuring the Pacific: Aotearoa and Pacific Cultural Studies, eds. Howard McNaughton and John Newton. Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2005, pp. 107ff.
p. 61: from Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Les Poètes de septs ans’, in Arthur Rimbaud – Selected Poems and Letters, trans. Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock, Penguin Classics, 2004, p. 58.
p. 98: William Shakespeare, Moth’s soliloquy from Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act III, Sc 1.
p. 110: from Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘Maud’.
p. 134: Frederick Alexander Wedde, ‘A New Hypothesis or Theory of the Universe’, typed pages, June 1957.
p. 193: ‘4.1 To the Tin Trunk of Images’, from The Commonplace Odes, p. 33.
p. 200: ‘Montacute Park’, from Ian Wedde, Made Over, Auckland: Stephen Chan, 1974, p. 72.
