The Villa at the Edge of the Empire

by Farrell, Fiona

  Today, that frugal squirrel is quite likely to have discovered that all his nuts have been nicked by some dodgy finance company and transferred to some tax-free, tree-trunk haven on the Gold Coast.

  Even before the quakes, we had lost faith in our homes, or at least those homes built since the deregulation of the building industry in the neo-liberal revolution of the 1990s. Builders, some qualified, some not, promptly set about erecting houses using untreated pine for framing, made permissible by a legislation change in 1995, and then they clad that vulnerable frame in fibre cement panels which cracked, permitting moisture in, then trapping it in a near airless, warm environment perfect for the growing of mould. Combined with a vogue for ‘Mediterranean-style’ housing, aping, in rainy New Zealand, the flat roofs and minimal eaves of stone housing designed for a drier climate, the result was inevitable: a plague of ‘leaky homes’, houses rotten to the core, 89,000 of them around the country, not to mention 157 schools, and a bill estimated to be as much as $23 billion for repair over which government, city councils and insurers have been arguing for years.

  In spring 2014, there is an election in progress. A book has been published recording a sustained campaign of dirty tricks orchestrated from the office of the prime minister himself. He is a PR construct, product of the same company, Crosby Textor, which delivered the ruffled and roguish Boris Johnson to be lord mayor of London. For months now the media of this country have joined in the sales pitch with photographs of John Key holding someone’s baby, or lined up with All Blacks, and in one especially memorable piece of product placement, sharing the cover of the Woman’s Weekly with Kate and William and their adorable Labrador. John and Bronagh pick up on the feel-good factor with an armful of guide-dog puppies.

  But Nicky Hager’s book, in meticulous detail, exposes the mould that has lain beneath the veneer. Hager is, without a doubt, this country’s most courageous and articulate political commentator. New Zealand’s Woodward, New Zealand’s Bernstein, except that their revelations so shocked a nation that they brought down a president. My nation is less concerned. Lulled by the hypnotic mantra of being relaxed, being comfortable, diverted by the sexual peccadilloes of prominent people and a globalised goody-bag of bloody crimes, all we do is shrug. Ah well. That’s politicians for you. What do you expect?

  I drive through Avonside where deep holes opened up in the road into which cars nose-dived on that afternoon in February 2011, and friends poked a broom handle into a crack in the ground where it waggled about not finding solid ground, and it feels like metaphor.

  It feels to me as if we are poised upon a void. The finance company with the solid Doric columns and the robust prospectus is thin air, your home can rot about you unseen, the politician is just a brand of puff and nothing. This is a city, this is a whole country, filled with good and creative and decent people, but right now I feel that there is a hollow — ‘Nihil’ as the Press photographer recorded it — at the heart.

  That word was taken from a text in which a man was trying to come to terms with living in a difficult political environment. We are a long way here from sticking pins in tongues, but there remains the business of deciding how to live in a country in which I feel increasingly alien. How can I be a good citizen? In that same treatise, De Officiis, Cicero advised thinking of ourselves as belonging to a wide world.

  We are not born for ourselves alone, but our

  country claims a share of our being, and our

  friends a share … We ought to follow Nature

  as our guide, to contribute to the general

  good by an interchange of acts of kindness,

  by giving and receiving, and thus by our skill,

  our industry and our talent cementing human

  society more closely, man to man.

  And, I add, as I always have to — because it is only in my own infinitesimally minute lifespan that people like Cicero have counted people like me — ‘woman to woman, and woman to man’. I can try to be a good citizen not just of the city state, but as kosmopolites, a citizen of the whole expansive world inhabited by gods and humans, united in rationality.

  I AM NOT ALWAYS VERY RATIONAL. In fact, I am more often markedly irrational. I am not a philosopher. Nor am I an economist, a historian or a journalist. I am a novelist. I like stories. I like devising patterns from random human experience. And I am a citizen. Not a client. Not a consumer. Not an asset. I am a citizen. I am driving through my city, looking out the window and trying to understand how it came to be as it is, what happened when it was destroyed and how it is currently being reconfigured. I am trying to think it through, using just those things available to any citizen: a chat with neighbours on a city street, talking with friends over a dinner table, the books I borrow from a library, the magazines I buy at a newsagent, a daily newspaper, the internet, my own experience.

  I am following the river because the map isn’t much use right now. The grid laid down on swamp and rough ground 150 years ago has broken in pieces like the tiles on a bathroom floor. It was devised by people with flaws and shortcomings, because that is how people are. They expressed land grab, invasion and political theory in a geometric little Utopia, for as the seventeenth-century painter Samuel van Hoogstraten wrote, and is quoted in Brotton’s study of maps, ‘a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail.’

  And now another map is taking shape, also the work of flawed humanity, and I’m in it. I am trying to figure out, as Brotton says anyone looking at a map tries to do, whether they are surveying a Babylonian clay tablet of the known world or the little blue circle inching from A to B on Google Maps, ‘an answer to that enduring existential question, “Where am I?”’

  I drive across the city trying to compose a narrative out of bits and pieces. It has been common here to make things out of broken pieces. Soon after the quakes, a friend set up a little business making wall mosaics from broken cups and plates for people who wanted to keep the pieces. Another business creates tables and other furniture from timber from demolished houses. Across the road from Alice in Videoland, with its stock of movies, and C1 where the EPIC innovators gather, at the corner of Tuam and High streets, where the old façades stand supported by scaffolding and walls of shipping containers, there is that grove of cabbage trees, ti kouka, created from dado and trim. They stand tall on cleared space, marking, as all great art does, a way home.

  I feel minuscule on the face of this map. I feel temporary driving along River Road. Just a twig caught up in a surge of history that is fast sweeping me and all this broken stuff down to the sea. It would be easier, I’m sure, to contemplate decline and fall and the advent of new theories of social organisation from the quiet of a book-lined study, centuries distant from the mess and upheaval. Then perhaps I could get my head above water and perceive a pattern. But for now, I flail and look around.

  In cleared spaces I try to make out the patterns left by postholes. I try to understand this place. I think for the first time in forty years about a villa and its buried mosaic.

  I AM NOT THE FIRST to be prompted into thinking about evanescence. Darwin, for example, was prompted by the sight of just such a mosaic pavement to consider worms.

  In 1881, twenty-two years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, he published his last book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Actions of Worms, with Observations on their Habits. It’s a wonderful book, miles more accessible than the great opus, and filled with a kind of whimsy blended with rock-solid, tabulated science. The first book had followed an extensive voyage to exotic isles. The second was written when Darwin was old and suffering from an agoraphobic unwillingness to venture from home. Travel induced such episodes of panic that he insisted on blacking out the windows of his carriage. More comfortable was the intense observation of his immediate environment. He took
to gathering data in the gardens and fields around his home. Accompanied by his sons, he made his observations beneath the shrubberies of Down House, and along a sand walk he had created as a place to stroll up and down and think away from the clatter of a house filled by his children. (He had fathered ten little Darwins so there was a lot of clatter.)

  He observed the habits of worms, watching how they emerged after dark waving about like little fingers testing the air while keeping their tails firmly planted in the entrances to their burrows. He excavated those burrows, finding them lined with torn leaves leading to a chamber lined with pear pips or ‘little pebbles about as large as mustard seeds’, where the worm curled up for the winter. In his laboratory he conducted experiments, testing their hearing by playing a penny whistle, followed by the deepest and loudest notes of a bassoon. He shouted at them and concluded they must be deaf. He fed them cabbage, which they liked, and sage and meat and thyme, which they didn’t. He dissected them, examining their gizzards and the tiny stones they swallowed as birds do, to triturate their food. He drew detailed images of the Baroque buckled castings they left upon the surface of the ground. He concluded that they possessed a kind of intelligence.

  And he devoted an entire section of his book to their role ‘in the Burial of Ancient Buildings’. His thinking was prompted by observations in a neighbouring field where, twenty-nine years earlier, a layer of white chalk had been laid down as fertiliser on the surface. He noted that the chalk was now a discernible white layer, 7 inches down. It had been carried there in the gizzards of worms, millions of them, in a constant cycle of digestion and excretion. On a single acre of land, Darwin calculated that a weight of more than 10 tons of dry earth would pass annually through the bodies of worms before being deposited on the surface in those ornate castings from which, eventually, rich vegetable mould was created.

  This process was universal. Among other experts, Darwin quotes Julius von Haast, then director of the Canterbury Museum, who had made a similar study of an area on the New Zealand coast that consisted of mica-schist covered in 5 or 6 feet of loess above which 12 inches of vegetable soil had accumulated. Between the loess and the mould there was a layer from 3 to 6 inches in thickness, consisting of ‘cores, implements, flakes and chips, all manufactured from hard basaltic rock. It is therefore probable that the aborigines at some former period had left these objects on the surface, and that they had afterwards been slowly covered up by the castings of worms.’

  Darwin himself had been present when the floor of a Roman villa had first been excavated at Abinger in Surrey in 1876. It was an era of increasingly intense cultivation, and deeper ploughshares were turning up previously unsuspected remains. Darwin was fascinated. He examined the tiled floors, not so much for their imagery or manufacture as for the manner in which worms had managed to find their way through the gaps between the tesserae, leaving ‘little cakes’ overnight. He dispatched his sons to sites further afield, where they recorded the actions of worms penetrating Roman concrete, brick and tile and, at Wroxeter, the evidence of a massacre: in the chaos that followed the break-up of the Roman Empire, the prosperous city of Uriconium had been sacked. The skeletons of women were discovered, dumped in the hypocausts where worms had set about concealing the evidence, century after century, in the great cycle of rebuilding the earth.

  There he is: the old man, the scientist, looking out at an English field, considering all those ‘small fragments of tiles or bricks or concrete in the castings thrown up where ancient buildings once stood’. He surveys the green expanse and sees it not as still and unchanging, but in perpetual motion: ‘all the mould covering a field passes through the bodies of worms’ and in this process, inevitably, ‘the same small fragments will probably be swallowed and brought to the surface many times in this course of centuries’.

  It’s an extraordinary vision. When I first came upon it back in 1999, it took my breath away. That was the year I had decided to read the Big Books, the ones I’d known about all my life but never got round to reading. I might know the title, I might even be able to quote a line or two, but I’d never read them right through. The turn of the millennium seemed like the time to attend to that. So I read the Bible cover to cover, placing all those familiar stories in their correct context: who knew that Adam and Eve and Noah and the rest sat alongside rules about what to do when you come upon a nest with a sitting bird (take the eggs, but let the mother go) and dealing with a bride who pretends to be a virgin (bring her to the door of her father’s house and the men of the city shall stone her with stones that she die). I read Das Kapital in lumbering translation, or at least the parts without too many numbers, and On the Origin of Species, which was a very solid meal indeed of beaks and claws, culminating in that wonderful visionary amazement at the leafy bank teeming with life:

  It is interesting to contemplate an entangled

  bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds,

  with birds singing on the bushes, with various

  insects flitting about, and with worms crawling

  through the damp earth, and to reflect that

  these elaborately constructed forms, so different

  from each other, and dependent on each other

  in so complex a manner, have all been produced

  by laws acting around us … Thus, from the

  war of nature, from famine and death, the

  most exalted object which we are capable of

  conceiving, namely, the production of the higher

  animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in

  this view of life, with its several powers, having

  been originally breathed into a few forms or

  into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone

  cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity,

  from so simple a beginning endless forms most

  beautiful and most wonderful have been, and

  are being, evolved.

  And then I turned to the worms. That book was shorter and less demanding. It was slim, an elegant first edition from the stacks in the Christchurch Public Library, with Darwin’s beautifully executed engravings of guts and nerves. I haven’t consulted it while writing this book: it had vanished into a container or storage facility while the library moved about the city, from its original premises on Gloucester Street, to a double site, one next a bathroom shop on Peterborough Street and one by the bus exchange on Tuam Street, until that site was required to make way for the Justice and Emergency Precinct and it had to move once more a few hundred metres down the road to Manchester Street. Books packed, reshelved, packed again.

  I bought a copy instead, published by a company that advertises its General Knowledge series as ‘one of the most admired book for the improvement and learning purpose’ and sold by an online billion-dollar empire of round-the-clock sweated labour and low, low wages. My copy has a shiny cover and the paper is white, though clearly copied from a library edition as the underlinings of a former reader are still visible, and Darwin’s drawings have disappeared, along with the foxing and that delicious old-paper smell. I could have read about the worms online, I suppose, but I like paper and adding my own underlinings and folding down the edges to mark my place and jotting down phone numbers and recipes on the end papers. I’m too old for the shiny screen.

  But the writing still astonishes me as it did when I first came upon it as the millennium clicked over and the spectre of Y2K and digital meltdown threatened to plunge the world into babble. It triggered the complicated mix of feelings great books always release: amusement, at the old man playing the piccolo to a worm, fascination at the habits of scientific inquiry, delight in the warm breadth of observations conducted before the divorce of arts and science and the dreadful narrowing of focus that leads to autistic analysis devoid of whimsy, of empathy. I liked the artistry of Darwin’s worms, decorating their burrows with pear pips. I liked the curiosity that shifted so readily from the detail of a gut to a Roman villa. And m
ost of all I liked the way Darwin altered my own view. I looked up from his book to the view of a Canterbury paddock, tawny brown at the end of a dry summer, and saw it afresh: this was no static pastoral idyll, but an endlessly shifting, repeating cycle of burial and renewal.

  AND NOW HERE HE IS AGAIN, returning as great writers do at intervals throughout a life, offering another point of view as I drive along River Road and across Fitzgerald Avenue past the Avon Loop and with turns and diversions through the central city to the flat with its boarded-up windows and smoke stain and the little forest of seedlings in its spouting.

  I am going to dig up the roses and take them home for safekeeping. The flat is to be demolished. It will be rebuilt. I’ve seen the plans. It is to be constructed ‘on a like for like basis’ to the original dimensions and on its original footprint, but it will have different foundations. The engineers have drilled and it’s a long way down — thirty metres or so — to solid ground, so the new flat is to be built upon a raft. A ‘concrete rib raft’, with a frame of steel reinforcing rods containing concrete poured about a sandwich filling of polystyrene pods that look exactly like the stuff used for boogie boards.