by Peter Wells
When Joan Didion tried to quantify ‘self-respect’ in relation to her own colonial ancestors (who lived in California), she said they were people who possessed ‘a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character’. ‘Self-respect,’ she continued, ‘is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled into them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts … it is a question of recognising that anything worth having has its price.’1
Your ancestors had this quality of toughness. They had to. There was no choice. In fact if there is one difference between our lives now and their lives then, it relates to the absence of choice. ‘One lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do.’ I doubt whether Betsy Bartlett as a very young girl dreamt of being a lady’s maid, at the beck and call of women who may have been even younger than she was and who spoke to her in a certain tone of voice. But this is what she did — and she did it with a professional zeal, an excellence so she could take pride in the work itself. She may have been a servant but she was a good servant. She kept her self-respect.
Your colonial ancestors were always having to weigh up painful options. In Britain, hunger was a real possibility. Poverty was just around the corner. And with poverty came complete loss of power. My mother had a phrase — ‘cold as charity’. I sometimes wonder if this concept travelled down through her family: the idea that charity was demeaning, chilling to the human heart, an affront to dignity. It was better to do almost anything than to end up in the ‘poorhouse’. The poorhouse was a charitable institution in which families were broken up, children separated from parents, brothers from sisters, husbands from wives. They were given demeaning work to do in return for a subsistence diet. The idea was to make the experience so unpleasant people would do anything rather than go ‘on welfare’.
Hence the desperate gamble of immigration. You are a descendant of people who shifted themselves from everything they had known, from a land their ancestors had lived in for so long nobody could remember any other world, from a place where relationships were so established that they seemed to come out of the Bible. They had to leave this all behind. They were projecting themselves forward into unknown places. This was a great gamble and, so far as any romance attaches itself to your colonial ancestors, it lies in this roll of the dice.
You will of course feel it is ridiculous to say that the tiny genetic inheritance from my family has anything to do with you. The wonderful thing about being young is the feeling of being a blank slate. You can be whoever you want to be. At least that is what people say on Facebook — that unreliable mirror. The strange thing about being alive for a long time is you continuously learn things about yourself. As you get tested more and more by life, you become defined — by your failures as much as your successes, oddly enough. Indeed, the way you meet a reversal can say a great deal about you. You have to reach deep down inside yourself. When ‘in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’ you reach right into the very depth of yourself — maybe back further, even into your genetic memory. Somehow at the back of you, receding behind you, are those tough survivors who gritted their teeth, turned their faces into the wind and moved — bleakly at times — forwards.
Māori acknowledge this all the time: you are not who you are, you are a collection of all your combined ancestors who live within you — and you must pay your respects to all the people who led to your existence. This seems to me entirely sensible.
But let’s talk more practically. It turns out the way you experience something as basic as food is a result of your genetic make-up. In other words, if your ancestors liked certain kinds of foods — fatty? salty? sweet? — you will have a disposition towards them. The very thing that seems to define you most intimately — the taste inside your mouth, your choice of food on a table (the way you ‘instinctively’ reach for something on a buffet) — turns out to be ghostwritten by ancestors you may not even know.
There are other things that are pre-written in your genes. Health is an obvious one, a predisposition to certain illnesses. But there’s something even more ghostly here. A woman who has been pregnant is likely to be a ‘microchimera’ (a person who carries the cells of another person). Fetal cells have the imprint of her child’s father and his ancestry.
What this is saying is we are all more composites than we thought. Interdependent even while being singular. Connected even when we are separate. Within each of us lies a ghostly trail of DNA which may point to the nature of our death, however far that is in the future.
Or this may all be bunk. We like to think of ourselves as free agents, unchained from the slavery of genes and social background.
BUT LET’S GO BACK NOW to that seemingly invisible force known as ‘history’. The root of history is the word story, and history in essence is the story, or rather stories, we tell ourselves to make sense of what happened to us in the past. It is an entirely human fabrication, a form of dreaming, perhaps even a form of rationalising the anarchic forces that constantly assail us.
Let me tell you this: I was always a weird little boy, looking backwards as much as I looked forwards. This was because I was baffled by the present — let alone the future. I was a little cissy, Oliver. This means an effeminate boy. I was born into a confusing world, at the end of a world war that had emphasised manliness as a way of surviving.
My father seemed to dislike me — or the parts of me that were effeminate. I couldn’t understand why; what I was appeared as natural to me as breathing or walking. It was how I was. But to my father it was perplexing and a source of shame. I had to learn how to cope with dislike. I grew up with a sense of not being as others were from a very early age. This either strengthens you or destroys you. Or it does both. I felt very insecure but I also noticed a lot. I was observant without being aware this was a characteristic to value. But I felt very unsure about the present. So I turned and looked to the past.
But what past? And what was the past?
The past often comes down to us through the stories our mothers tell us, murmur in our ears. Mothers tend to be the spinners of the threads of stories that bind us to the past. Hence the two matrilineal lines we are investigating here are my grandmother Northe (and her preference was for her own mother’s stories — those of the Bartletts — and the way she managed to transcend her background and leave it far behind), and my mother, whose family were the all-powerful Northes, as I conceived of them. I grew up with a vivid sense of the realities of these people who were really phantoms — all of them were dead. Yet when my mother and grandmother talked about them they leapt alive again, or they became so familiar it was just as if they had walked around the corner and could no longer be seen. They were still there.
This is how the past is sung to us, murmured drowsily into our ears just when we are on the point of plunging into sleep. This borderline somewhere between consciousness and sleep is where these legends lie, like huge Neolithic monsters. They bathe in the sleety waters of memory and come alive under the tongues of our mothers. They form mysteriously, returning to human form and dancing before our eyes. They cry, weep with misery or a sense of sudden victory. They tell moral fables. They tell us how to be.
This is why I am writing this long letter, Oliver, so I can pass on to you some of these stories. None of them is particularly glorious. You cannot boast of ancestors who were either generals at the head of victorious armies or revolutionaries who inchoately understood where time was heading and stepped forward to lead a benighted people to a promised land. My stories are the stories of very ordinary people. But then, of course, nobody is ordinary. Every human has a mystery inside them.
JUNE 2015
Bess asked me this afternoon to look in the phone book to see how many Northes were living in Napier now. It was an
astonishingly scanty list. Considering Robert Northe, my great-grandfather (himself one of five brothers and five sisters), had sired eight boys in the late nineteenth century, plus one daughter, the six names in the phone book were an almost melancholy diminution.2 ‘It was upon the population of variants that natural selection could act,’ Oliver Sacks writes, ‘preserving some lineages for posterity, condemning others to extinction.’3
My mother sighed and said, to the room, to me — to her past, certainly her future — something I thought I would never hear her say: ‘The Northes have had their day.’ (In her confusion in the downstairs lounge when I had come to interrupt her while slumbering through a film, she had introduced to me another old lady as ‘This is my son, Peter Northe …’ When I said, ‘Let’s go to your room and have a cup of tea,’ she looked suddenly shrewd and said, ‘If I still have a room.’) Now she was pontificating on the fact ‘the Northes have had their day’.
‘What about the Northeys?’ she asked suddenly. As if grabbing at a straw. (The Northeys were another branch of the same family.)
I looked in the phone book again. ‘There aren’t any,’ I said.
‘None at all?’
‘None,’ I said.
I myself did not find this melancholy. I had long lived with the fact I would not have children, and in my heart of hearts saw this as a selfless act. I could never quite suppress a sigh of irritation at those people who rattled on about vanishing resources but saw their right to have as many grandchildren as possible unquestioned. I realised the supposedly selfless desire to save the world from future destruction was actually based on the concept that their descendants would have a future to enjoy. Entirely understandable, but in its most basic form it is a variant of self-interest, a form of appropriation of the future. But then is the world worth continuing with if humans are not here to enjoy it? (Of course I would argue yes.)
Then I decided to have a bit of fun.
‘There’s a Robert Northe down in Christchurch who has been found guilty of breaking into the houses of earthquake victims and selling weed.’
My mother took quite some time to synthesise this. (After all, the other day she asked her eighty-nine-year-old cousin, quite sincerely, ‘And is your father still alive?’ Only moments before she had been scandalised when I said her own mother had been dead more than half a century. ‘But then you’re ninety-nine, Mum.’)
‘Who … what?’ she said of this recent piece of information.
‘He must be a relative. Someone called Robert Northe.’ (Robert Northe being the eponymous name of the family firm of coal and wood merchants of which my grandfather was the managing director.) ‘It’s online. He’s a thief and a drug dealer.’
She made a comic face of horror, a million miles away from the stringent, even stony face she had turned to my brother and me when she reproached us for our homosexuality, not least because we risked offending the spotless Northe name.
‘Yes,’ I said, enjoying myself. ‘Robert Northe to boot.’
She had nothing further to say, except to let out a small sigh.
Now, when asking whether a particular second cousin was married and had a family, and I replied he was gay, she just said thoughtfully, ‘I don’t understand it. So many Northes being gay.’
One could say life had defeated her. Or at her advanced age and state of deteriorating memory, she had come to accept what her conscious will and mind had always struggled to accept.
What more could be said? A shrug. A grimace intimating irony. ‘Life is like that.’ It delivers unacceptable news, or news you might never have expected. But this is why it is called ‘news’, after all. It is new.
THAT EVENING I SAW YOU, Oliver, on Facebook, that wonderfully shameless cupboard to which we retire to contemplate what fills the emptiness of the world: Pauline had put up a small video of you in your cot. The phone was held high above you and looked directly down at you. I gazed in wonderment — and also a degree of fascinated horror — as you pullulated in your cot, your arms squirming outwards, little bow legs continually moving, almost like fins trying to push through the air. You seemed neither happy nor unhappy. In fact what overwhelmed me was the sense of your beginning to wade through the oncoming textures of life. You were already sentient, a human with your own characteristics. Are you like Pauline’s side of the family or like your birth mother, Nicole?
I gazed at you, amazed at this newcomer to the world.
FEBRUARY 2016
Time takes up a lot of time with Bess. Establishing the time. As in, ‘It’s your hundredth birthday this year, Mum.’
An appalled look on her face.
‘Really?’ She looks at me. ‘What’s the date of my birthday?’
‘The twenty-first of April 1916—’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘— and this is 2016, so on April the twenty-first you’ll be one hundred.’
She smiles a little, almost in gratification.
‘Really.’
‘I’ll have an afternoon tea for you, Mum,’ I say, ‘up at the house.’
‘Don’t go to any fuss’ — the eternal mother’s code for please make a fuss.
‘There’s aren’t that many of us,’ she observes.
‘I’ve asked Philippa and Suzanne’ — my sole remaining cousins, aside from Geraldine, your grandmother — ‘and both of them have said they will come.’
Just before, she had asked not so much who they were as where did they fit in.
‘Your sister — Aunty Jean’s two daughters.’
‘Where do they live?’
‘They both have apartments on Oriental Parade,’ I say. ‘Our posh relatives.’
She laughs a little, liking that.
‘Good.’
‘And Geraldine is coming out soon for a visit. From Canada.’
‘Where does Geraldine live?’
Conversation is like this, a kind of waltz wherein the steps go back as much as forward.
‘Ottawa. In Canada. She is out for the summer. And …’ I draw in a breath, as this is the slightly difficult part, ‘Geraldine’s daughter Pauline is coming, too.’
Silence, almost a wary silence.
‘Geraldine has two children, remember? Simon and Pauline.’
‘What do they do?’
‘Simon has a very good job at a university in New York. And Pauline … Pauline has the Foot genes, she’s good at making money. Some kind of commerce,’ I add.
Bess likes this. She likes people who are good at making money. Geraldine’s father was an accountant with the surname of Foot, and he was clever at making money.
But I needed to familiarise my mother with some news. This was that Pauline was visiting New Zealand with her partner, Nicole, and they had brought with them the surprise package of … you, Oliver. And it was quite likely that Pauline, Nicole and you might come to Napier. There seemed an almost historic nicety in the member of the family who was oldest, at one hundred, meeting the member of the family who was youngest — only eight months old. Sort of one end of the family tree greeting the other.
When I first told Bess that Pauline had had a child, she had asked a single question: ‘What does her husband do?’
This had pretty much put an end to the conversation — easy enough when Bess’s concentration span is so reduced. But now I had to try to explain something that wasn’t actually very complicated in a modern sense at all.
‘Pauline is coming to Napier with Nicole, her partner.’
A lurch into silence.
‘Two females?’
I noticed her disparaging term ‘females’ — not ‘women’ or even ‘two friends’. It was the lightly veiled homophobia of a redoubtable heterosexual who, until she had had to come to terms with two sons who were homosexual, forthrightly paraded her small-town prejudices. She wore them as a badge of honour.
I let it lie for a second.
‘Yes,’ I took up as if nothing had been said, my tone consciously upbeat, ‘and Pa
uline and Nicole have had a child — a son — and they’re bringing him to Napier.’
She thought about this. A child is good news. A son.
‘What is his name?’
‘Oliver,’ I said. ‘He’s eight months old.’
‘Poor wee chap,’ she said when I explained he had come all the way from San Francisco and promptly got a stomach bug which had then been communicated to all the relatives.
‘I hope he doesn’t have it when you meet him.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m sure he’ll be all right by then …’
She sat in silence for a while, pondering it all.
‘Oh well, we’ll survive, I guess.’
There was in this the wisdom of a lifetime — the adjustments you had to make to come to terms with a world arranged differently from how you might have thought.
She pondered a bit further, shaking her head slightly, sighing ruefully.
‘It’s a funny old world.’
YOU ARE ALREADY SHAPED BY history without even being aware of it. So it is for every human born. We are born into history. Your history is to have two mothers who love one another. Once upon a time, and comparatively recently, it was impossible for two people of the same gender to produce a child. So you are the product of changes in society, not only of biological intervention but also of LGBT rights, a fight in which I took a small part.
Oliver, I hope this seems incredible to you, but in the past gay men and lesbians were regarded as evil creatures who should be punished for just existing. Men who were found to be lovers were imprisoned, even hanged. The most infamous case was the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in 1895. This brilliant man had to work on a treadmill that moved perpetually so that he never got anywhere. He was destroyed as a result — he lost the human part of him, the tender core of being human.
