Dear Oliver

by Peter Wells

  Let me just say this. The past lies inside me. (Just as the past lies inside you, although you will not be aware of this yet.) My grandmother Jessie Northe — she was born in the nineteenth century, in 1883 — is inside me as I sit here writing. This grandmother was a snob. You may not know what a snob is. A snob is a socially anxious person who is constantly on guard to cover over what they feel are their inferior origins. Snobs can be quite difficult people to be around, as they are judgmental and nearly always observant. This is because they are always minding what was called their p’s and q’s. (This means being overly polite, careful of what you say and do. In my childhood, repression was seen as a form of good manners. If you blurted out something it was seen as a failure in self-restraint, rather than ‘being honest’.)

  Snobbery was particularly potent among the British, because Britain had experienced the industrial revolution — that thing that changed the planet, possibly wrecking it — before any other country on earth. It did two things: it changed an established class system by pushing up people who suddenly had to learn manners and ways of dressing and eating and sitting they had never known before, and this made them very anxious; and it made Britain, which today may no longer even be a united kingdom, into a ferociously powerful dynamo of a nation, spilling out from itself vast floods of ‘waste’ population who spurted all around the globe.

  This is how your New Zealand ancestors got to be in a place about as far from Britain as you could get. They were poor people who needed to leave an overpopulated tiny island and set out to find … anything, really, that might be better than the straitened lives they left behind. And when they set sail, they did leave the past behind. In the 1840s, very few people went back. Once you sailed off in a tiny boat, usually crowded below decks like cattle, nauseous and seasick, it was forever.

  But to go back to my grandmother, Jessie Isobel Purvis, as she was christened. (Christening meant you were introduced to the Christian church as a baby in a ceremony attended by family and friends. You became a Christian.) She is your great-great-grandmother, hence so distant to you as to seem a fantasy, a person of no possible importance in who you are. You are right. And wrong. Some tiny part of you will be informed by her, just because Geraldine, your own grandmother, carries part of her own grandmother’s dynamic personality, her wry sense of humour and pleasure in the absurdities of life. Why is life absurd? Because we all live with contradictions and have to make sense of them. That is part of being human — matching up things that don’t seem to match.

  Jessie was born in Hastings, in Hawke’s Bay in New Zealand. She was the daughter of a man born in Scotland, on the very border between England and Scotland. It was said he could stand with one foot in England and the other foot in Scotland. When my mother was small she thought this made her much-loved grandfather into a kind of giant, a figure of marvellous intrigue.

  His name was William Purvis, and when Jessie was born he was a coachman. A coachman was in a way like a chauffeur, but different from a chauffeur in that he personally attended to the horses which were harnessed to pull a carriage along. A coachman needed knowledge of horses, how to groom them, how to look after them when they were sick. But a good coachman also had to look rather magnificent on a carriage. He was the personification of his employers. They could be miserable, misshapen people. But it mattered that their servants were fair-formed, handsome and capable. That was your great-great-great-grandfather William — a handsome, capable, even dandyish young man with a love of jewellery, tending to his magnificent auburn hair, which he wore in a wave high on his head.

  He was born in 1850. He met his future wife Betsy in the fashionable town of Bath in England. Betsy was New Zealand-born. She was born in 1845, so was a very early New Zealander, or, to put it another way, a very early colonial child. She was born with the mud of Titahi Bay under her toenails. She could walk for miles and miles and miles. She knew no other land than New Zealand. And in fact my own mother told a story about her grandmother, Betsy, and her annual childhood outing. This was when the family walked the 25 kilometres into Wellington, which was ‘town’.

  There they attended a Sunday School picnic — probably with running races, juggling and some sort of sweet. It was the high point of a hard-working year. But at the end of a long day, Betsy had to turn into a beast of burden. She had to carry on her back a heavy sack of flour. Bowed down with the weight of flour, she would walk along the shore, climb hills, skid down banks until finally, exhausted and in the gloaming dark, the family would arrive back at their tiny wooden cottage, open the door and seek out their beds.

  Betsy Bartlett was resourceful. There was very little work for poorer girls when she came of age — probably at ten or eleven — other than ‘going into service’. Going into service meant becoming a servant for someone better off. You started off at the very lowest level, washing floors on your hands and knees, cleaning out fire grates, which was filthy work. You did this at dawn so that your rich employers could come into a room warmed by a fire that you had also set. You yourself got up in the cold. You did not have a fire. Only after a long apprenticeship did you graduate to other levels of labour. You also left home when you became a servant.

  You lived life as a kind of indentured labourer, with only a few hours off on a Sunday — and then you might be expected to go to church. (In a way it is like the immigrants you probably see all around you — people used to working very hard for very little, but capable and taking it in their stride that this is the card that life has dealt them — but also these migrants have the expectation that they might, at a certain point, be able to deal their own hand. In other words, change their lives for the better.)

  This early history of childhood labour formed Betsy into a hard-working young woman, capable. In fact, when she met William the coachman in Bath she had ascended the rungs of servantdom to the extent that she had become the personal maid of the wealthiest family in Hawke’s Bay. You will hear of this place often in my story, so I will describe Hawke’s Bay to you.

  Hawke’s Bay is both a physical place and a state of mind. As a physical space it is a rather grand wild area on the East Coast of the North Island (Te Ika-a-Māui). It is hidden behind mountain ranges and runs towards a ragged cut of coastline that then drops into the sea.

  It is beautiful and wild. The land from a plane looks like a blanket dragged together in pleats. This is because earthquakes often occur in the area. (And in fact the great Hawke’s Bay earthquake of 1931 changed the lives of your Northe ancestors forever. We will come to that.) It is a dramatic and eloquent landscape, as vast as a Western and in some ways as mythic.

  Very early on in colonisation it was judged to have very good land for sheep grazing and large sheep stations were established. Most of New Zealand’s colonial settlements grew like topsy, unformed and anarchic. But society in Hawke’s Bay was skewered early on by the creation of these large sheep farms. It allowed certain families to ape the aristocracy in England and see themselves as very grand. They often built big wooden houses in the country and then came into ‘town’, which was Napier, and there on the hill they built other large houses as kind of ‘townhouses’. They were members of the Hawke’s Bay Club. This class consciousness was unusual in New Zealand at the time.

  Betsy was the maid for the Tanner family, who were by way of being nouveaux riche. When the Governor of New Zealand — who himself personified the Queen — came to stay with the Tanners they did up their already large house and, tellingly, the taps were lacquered with gold leaf. This says something about their lust for status. When the Tanners — such an unglamorous name — went to England they took Betsy along with them. She was a trusted servant, almost ‘one of the family’ although definitely of not ‘of the family’.

  Betsy Bartlett regarded this as the pinnacle of her career as a working woman. I have a photograph taken of her by a fashionable photographer in London — it is a carte de visite, which was the cheapest form of photography, like a small card you could p
ut in an envelope. In this photograph she looks severe and proud and serene. She is someone who knows who she is. She does not wear a hat. Her clothing is fashionably tight-fitting, because it was probably important to the Tanners that their maid servant should look ‘smart’ — it reflected on them.

  There is the small cross by her side, showing her pious Christianity, and her hands are large, the hands of a capable working woman. But there is something else. Betsy is verging on being a spinster. She is quite severe in this photograph, with her damped-down curled hair and simple faith of a face. There is a story here.

  I don’t know how she met her future husband, William, who was quite a few years younger than her, in Bath. But I would say they exchanged cheap little carte de visite photographs, as I now have this matching duet of images. In the one which I assume William gave to Betsy he appears without the beard that established his serious credentials — almost his manliness. In fact, with his high, slightly ridiculous curl on the top of his head, he looks effete, like a footman in one of Tenniel’s drawings for Charles Dickens, as if he might lisp and be slightly dishonest. Which he wasn’t. He was a god-fearing Scot who read the Bible on Sunday and refused adamantly to do any ‘labour’ on the day of God’s rest. (God was resting on the seventh day from creating the world. People believed this.)

  After this exchange of photographs, Betsy vanished back to New Zealand with her employers. The two probably thought they would never see one another again.

  To get some idea of the constriction of Betsy’s life we can look at her travelling trunk: the space she had to put all her clothes and worldly possessions in while she travelled from New Zealand to Britain and back again, a two-month journey by steamship. The trunk is no more than 75 centimetres long, 35 centimetres wide and 30 centimetres deep.

  The fact I have it today is a comment on Betsy’s pride in her attainment. Although born in a rural area outside Wellington, she had managed to make the return trip ‘home’ to England. (All the early colonists called England ‘home’ because that is where they or their parents had come from.) Travel for New Zealanders, as for any isolated people, has a weight, a gravitas — a heightened meaning, almost a magic. You who have travelled so much even as a baby cannot comprehend how fiercely isolated New Zealand was, nor how magical movement beyond its shores seemed.

  Betsy kept the box, which is a simple enough kauri box with stout iron handles, because a box is always handy. It travelled out into her daughter’s kitchen in a similarly ambiguous way — both as something practical but also a memento mori, a memory of both the constriction and attainment of her mother’s past. It was fascinating, this box — as if you could have measured, quantified, weighed someone’s social space. (For a servant, that box was their total private world, all they had.)

  Typically, my snobbish grandmother — the daughter of a lady’s maid — had the plain wooden box covered with a flowery slub linen. The linen was of a Jacobean flower design and expertly tailored with a roll. In other words, it was tasteful and the kind of thing my grandmother would have observed in the drawing rooms of the gentry. The box was kept in Grandma’s kitchen and when she died, my mother — cautious, economical, indebted to the past — took the box up to Auckland. And when my mother’s house was broken up I in turn took the box to look after it. I do not know what will happen to it in future. To the younger members of my extended family, its story is probably inert. It can no longer tell its rimes. Its song reaches the final note.

  Betsy’s story does not end here. She returned with the Tanner family to Hastings — a town Mr Tanner had effectively created. He had helped promote the town, sold off a large number of sections, and when the railway rode right through its heart, bisecting the long main street, he knew he had struck gold. Hastings grew to be a service town for the rural hinterland. Napier, 17 kilometres away and right by the coast, was the port and administrative centre of Hawke’s Bay.

  Hastings was Thomas Tanner’s invention, one might almost say, his personal fiefdom. He and his family lived in an estate called Riverslea on its distant outskirts. It was antiseptically removed from the dirt and coal dust and sweat of working Hastings, and it mimicked a great estate in England, with elaborate gardens, tennis courts, carriages and, later, large motor cars. They aspired to be like the great county families of England, living in rural splendour. My ancestor was a very small cog in the machine of their pretention. I am sure, however, Betsy Bartlett did not see it like this. She probably saw the Tanners as good employers to whom she was emotionally bonded.

  Here is what happened, according to my mother (who may have drawn her storytelling skills from Hollywood movies of the 1940s). ‘Betsy was riding along in the carriage with the Tanners when she looked out the window and said’ — intake of breath — ‘“There’s William!”’ Here, suddenly, was the young man she had fallen in love with — no longer in the streets of Bath surrounded by stone buildings, but in the dusty streets of Hastings, New Zealand.

  There is something improbable about this story, however. Did a servant ride around inside a carriage with her employers? Betsy’s position seemed to change according to my mother Bessie’s versions. Sometimes she was that erstwhile figure of ambiguity — somewhere between the poor and the rich — ‘a governess’ like Jane Eyre. Other times she was ‘a lady’s maid’. Both imply she was a superior servant, which is an arcane distinction, but one of great moment to those cramped inside a rigid, competitive hierarchy.

  But once again, in my mind’s eye, I see this as a scene realised by one of the great Hollywood directors of the 1940s, when the Victorian era came back into vogue, and film directors looked back at their childhoods with loving regret. They celebrated — and mourned — its passing by making any number of films set in the Victorian period: Gone with the Wind, Jezebel, The Magnificent Ambersons, Meet Me in St Louis, The Heiress. These films were very artificial but powerful, often shot inside studio sets, with sumptuous costuming, expert lighting, make-up.

  I can see the shot, inside the carriage, with one of the Tanner ladies’ blonde ringlets swaying with the buck of the coach, while my ancestor sits closer to the door, lower in her seat than the ladies but more sharply observant of the outside world. And there, walking along, not even looking around him — lost in thought, as is someone who is suddenly plunged into an entirely new world — is William Purvis. He is dazed. In this memory-film Betsy calls out — her cry is like a stumbled inward drawing of breath — she is shocked — but the impact reaches him quickly, he feels it as a soft wind across his face. He isn’t even listening or looking, but he looks up. It’s as if he’s heard a voice he recognises, or more than this, sensed a presence, the smell of someone, their physical essence. The carriage keeps moving, but for a split second their eyes meet, then the carriage draws the two lovers apart.

  The next scene is the local church at Havelock North. Thomas Tanner, as befits a faux lordling, has donated money for the erection of the church, which is small, wooden and Gothic. It is the marriage day of William Purvis and Betsy Bartlett. And she is now on the arm of her employer, Thomas Tanner. He is giving her away. Her actual father, a one-time labourer in distant Lower Hutt, is too far away to be present. Perhaps anyway she doesn’t want him there on her wedding day. This is much neater. It has a storybook neatness about it, like two small figures in a weather vane — male and female, eternal. Betsy Bartlett walks in on the arm of a grandee condescending to be her ‘protector’ and to give her away. She emerges on the arm of the man with whom she will live for the rest of her life.

  Interestingly, inside the scrapbooks that William Purvis keeps — amid horse lotions and hair remedies and jam recipes (he is quite a flexible man) — is a small scrap of a newspaper announcing the wedding. But what is especially significant to me is that Betsy is described in the public announcement as ‘Bessie’. Bessie is my mother’s name, and it always seemed a mystery where it had come from. It was already old-fashioned by 1916 when my mother was born. But Bessie is a good servant�
��s name, reliable — a brown name somehow, sheeny as the flanks of a good-natured horse. I never knew its origins, but once I saw this small strip of newsprint I became convinced she shared the name of her own grandmother.

  ‘Bessie’ Bartlett, as perhaps she was known familiarly by the Tanner family — a name to call out down a hallway, summon from another room, order to pick up clothes thrown on the floor, or find a hair tidy or locate a missing handkerchief, arrange for a carriage to be at the front door, quickly mend a rip on a silk dress, comfort, listen, manage the awkward silences — be present — be there — be a wall, a window to look out of, a door to walk through. Bessie, reliable, ever present — Bessie without bad temper, who kept her opinions to herself, who worked hard and finally, almost on the point of being an old maid, was released into the fecundity of marriage with a handsome man who was actually (secretly or not) five years younger than she was.

  What a catch. What a lucky release.

  But how did William happen to be walking down that dusty street in the same town as the maidservant he had fallen in love with? He had come to New Zealand as indentured labour. This meant his voyage out was paid for but he had to work for nothing until the sum was paid off. This is a tale of cautious lives, of lives lived with a fixed determination. We are not lordlings or great criminals or bastards. We’re the people in the background of Dickens’ tumultuous novels — small people, they were once called. Not physically, but called small for the space they took up on the social and political and economic stage. ‘Of modest background’ was a phrase often seen in nineteenth-century novels, and what it meant was a portion of respectability, of cleanliness, of hope. It also meant straitened. Straitened means made tense by the effort of making ends meet. To be always alert as to the value of money. To be watchful, even perhaps to be mean.