Dear Oliver

by Peter Wells

  Aunty Margaret could be funny and generous, but when the booze went sour on her she became querulous and serpent-tongued. I do not know why she made the occasion of my brother’s coming of age into a truth-telling moment. But it could not have been worse timing. I still remember the shock. The whiteness of a wound before blood starts seeping.

  I don’t remember my father’s reaction, or indeed my mother’s. (Aunty Margaret was ushered out stage left by her husband.) Nor do I remember Dad ever overtly referring to the incident again. But it is hard not to think it was a source of his roiling unhappiness, the bitterness which marked his character. It might have been better if he had not loved my mother: but this was a stark fact.

  What did I think about my mother’s American lover, her sexual experimentation during the war? The new information demanded a difficult revision of her persona. I had assumed she went into marriage a virgin and had stayed monogamous since — a confinement I would now regard as punishing and monotonous. But at nineteen I was a prude, a repressed homosexual. I was having trouble coming to terms with the explosive force of sexuality in myself, let alone in the family, with a volatile older brother who was also homosexual. To have a mother as a fraught, uncontrolled sexual force was too much to take on. I felt betrayed. I felt disillusioned. I felt I had been sold a pup.

  As I got older and understood more about the complexity of a sexual persona, I was much more empathetic. I understood more about the power of social mores and how, at times, an individual has to explore his or her sexuality, even if it is directly against the norms and laws of the time. I now saw those wartime years as the one period in Bess’s life when she was free to act as she wished. She herself told me later that she thanked God (a strange being to thank in the circumstances) she had this period to look back on. I understood it to be a time of romance and sexual fulfilment. If she never ever used the word ‘love’ in connection with my father, it was because she had experienced the bewilderment and enchantment of love with another man.

  She did lie. That is how you live when you’re cornered in a relationship. She did tell ‘different kinds of truth’. But I have lied in similar situations, as have probably most people on earth. I would be a hypocrite to make any censorious comment.

  IT WAS ONLY AFTER MY father died that Bess returned to being her own woman. She could talk freely now. But Gordon’s death was followed swiftly — too swiftly — by Russell’s dying. This led to a complete collapse. Yet once Bess recovered, she could talk frankly about the moral dilemma that had underlain her married life.

  According to Bess’s version of events, when Gordon had his final leave before going overseas, he deliberately left her on her own. He went off, played golf, partied and turned his back to her. And he said: ‘If I return, it will not be to you. You are free.’

  Some instinct made her stay in Auckland. It was the one time in her life when she lacked a male authority figure — she was not a daughter living with a father or a wife living with a husband. She was working and she could make her own decisions. She had resisted going home to live with her parents in Napier.

  At some point she volunteered to serve food at the American canteen set up in the old ballroom at Government House. It was only a matter of time, I imagine, before she, an attractive young woman, caught the attention of a lonely — randy? — American. His name was Dr Taylor Wallace Barker. He was from Ohio. She referred to him as ‘Doc Barker’ — a name I became familiar with after both my father and brother died, and Bess and I would settle down for several hallucinatory-strength gin and tonics and talk about life. He was, she said, ‘the love of my life’ and ‘thank God I had had that to think of’, presumably during the long and difficult marriage with Gordon.

  Forty-five thousand American servicemen came to New Zealand between 1942 and 1944, when the country served as the base for the American war effort in the wider Pacific. Auckland was a major supply base. But it was also a rest and recreation centre (and hospital) for the ever-increasing number of young men being fed into a brutal killing machine. The Pacific War was infamous for its ferocity: the Japanese fought till death and gave no quarter. Wounded flesh was also vulnerable to tropical diseases. Boys off the farm went insane under pressure. It was not all Glen Miller and moonlight.

  Barker was a medical doctor and it was his job to attend to the wounded, the sick and, possibly, those driven mad by the horrors of the Pacific War. If he found comfort in a warm and passionate young woman who possessed a wry sense of humour and a thirst for life, it is understandable. That both of them were married may have just been part of the problematic landscape of war. Certainly the fact he was an officer would have soothed my mother’s social anxieties. The officers had more select clubs and access to better goods, and were keenly sought after by young New Zealand women. Yet this intense love affair — at least on my mother’s part — was relatively brief. The Americans were in New Zealand for only about two years. But when can intensity of feeling be measured by a clock? She was, on the other hand, married to Gordon for forty-eight years. It is a long time to hold a secret.

  Later when I did some online investigation into Dr Barker, I found out he already had two children by the time he was in New Zealand. Whether Bess was the love of his life, I do not know. He sent her nylon stockings for a long time after the war. (I imagine Bess had to watch the post very carefully on a Saturday, when Gordon was home.) He lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was a Roman Catholic, and when his own son died in February 2014 Taylor Wallace Barker Jr. was described as ‘a devout christian [sic] man, following the Catholic faith, and was a Pro-Life advocate’. This does not point to an especially liberal background.

  My mother never forgot him. Even in her eighties, still a vibrant and lively woman, she tried to find out what had happened to Dr Barker. One day at the bridge club (at which she reigned supreme) she played a game with some Americans from Cincinnati who were on a Pacific cruise. She gave these sympathetic Americans her address, the name she used with Doc Barker (Betsy) and asked them to look him up in the phone book. They wrote in turn — it was still a time of letters as precious disseminators of personal information — that he had died.

  But if Doc Barker had been the love of my mother’s life, Aunty Margaret intimated with her serpent’s tongue on that long-ago night that there had been others. Many others. Perhaps once Barker left, Bess did not refrain from taking other American lovers. Aunty Margaret talked of Paddy’s Puzzle, a notorious house in Parnell (and not far away from where Bess worked), where rooms could be rented by the hour.

  It was possibly at this very worldly period of her life that Bess plucked off all her eyebrows so she could paint on the high cynical raised eyebrows of a Marlene Dietrich or any of the other ‘love goddesses’ from cinema. Maybe she was mourning the loss of a man she had fallen deeply in love with. It’s not uncommon to try to bury loss in the arms of another man or men. Who am I to point a finger? But ever since that signal moment when she eviscerated that natural growth of hair, so she stayed for all time — a woman without eyebrows. Even at age one hundred there was no sign of them. Their absence gave her face a curiously puritanical look, naked, slightly gaunt.

  What Gordon thought when he saw her without her eyebrows I do not know. This is the thing. I have no knowledge of what happened when they met. After Dad died, she told me that she had had trouble going down to the railway station to face him, but that her women friends had said she had no choice. Even the newspapers of the time, briefing wives on the incoming difficulties of men damaged by years of war and killing, advised: ‘You are in their debt. You must pay that debt in a form they can accept … time, patience and tact are needed … If with understanding in your mind and sympathy in your heart — and not forgetting due gratitude on your part for what he has done for us all — you may make an appeal to his sense of fair play, he will seldom let you down. His behaviour may have temporarily changed, but his heart is sound.’8

  So perhaps she packed away her thoughts and cares an
d erotic daydreams — the burden of her past — and turned to face the future, ironically in the form of the past, a man she had married six years before, during three of which she had had neither sight nor sound of him.

  Yet the photos we have of them on their second honeymoon — and this is the conundrum — show a radiant couple. Clearly the honeymoon was a success. It was what came after that was more gruelling.

  MANY YEARS LATER, WHEN I was packing up Bess’s house — she had the beginnings of dementia and could no longer give me any answers to the questions I still wanted to ask (had my formidable grandmother ever known about Doc Barker? How much did Dad know of Barker or the other men my mother had known?) — I happened to look inside her sewing box. By this time I knew enough about my mother’s obsessive hiding of things to search for them forensically. My fingers slithered inside a small pocket on the right-hand side of the interior of the sewing box. My finger pads felt the coolness of metal. I took out a small rectangular object. For a moment I was nonplussed. Then I looked at it more closely. The name Taylor Wallace Barker was stamped into it, followed by a long series of numbers, then a letter (his blood type). It was Doc Barker’s dog tag. It had been hidden in a place my father would never have thought to look, and she had kept it all her life.

  Notes

  1 Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (London and Australia: Picador, 1994), 135.

  2 W. E. Murphy, The 2nd NZ Divisional Artillery (Wellington: Historical Publications Branch, 1966), 734.

  3 Ibid., 739. The official war history of the Medical Corps notes wryly that ‘in May–June and July [of 1945] 695 fresh cases of VD were reported, the worst rate experienced during the entire war’. In Tony Simpson, Ambiguity and Innocence, The New Zealand Division and the Occupation of Trieste May 1945 (Wellington: Silver Owl Press, 2013), 38.

  4 Quoted in Joanna Biggs, ‘Short Cuts’, London Review of Books, 6 October 2016, 26.

  5 Doug Flett, service number 23123, Lance Sergeant, 24 Infantry Battalion. Died 10 August 2006. Born 29 March 1917.

  6 Bess and Gordon had come to live in Point Chevalier through a form of chain migration. Gordon had been engaged to Nora, a young woman from Thames where Gordon grew up. The engagement did not work out, but when Nora (as mentioned in the letter) and her mother came to live in Point Chevalier, near the beach, Gordon and Bess followed.

  7 Murphy, The 2nd NZ Divisonal Artillery, 736.

  8 ‘Medical Man’s Advice: The Ex-Soldier’s Home Life’, Evening Post, 29 October 1945. ‘It is found on a man’s return that his standard of values has altered. After he has lived “in big business” most jobs appear petty and trifling and not worthwhile, and with restlessness and lack of concentration added, it became difficult to stay the course.’

  The Coming Out Letter

  Just before Christmas 1977 I decided I had to send a letter to my parents to bring them up to date with a significant development in my life. I was gay.

  IT WAS ONE OF THE most difficult letters I have written in my life. And yet it is, in its raw basis, a letter that hundreds of thousands of young women and men — perhaps by now millions of young and not so young people — have written to their parents.

  ‘London

  ‘5/12/77

  ‘Dear Mum and Dad,

  ‘I don’t know why I’ve found this letter difficult to get down to write when all it contains is good news. But there it is. I have found it difficult to write.

  ‘Partly this is due to the fact that I have found it difficult to keep you up to date with other developments in my life, and this fact is due primarily to my being gay, and we three, between ourselves, never acknowledging it. This means that things which are important to me — like finding someone I am happy living with — I cannot share with you. Or haven’t been able to, up to the present. This seems silly to let the world and the world’s way of thinking about things stand in the way.

  ‘I do hope you can see in this letter my respect for you, my wish for you to keep up with my life, and not drift apart. I want to include you in my life, so you know what I am doing, and so we can feel friendly with each other and not as strangers.

  ‘Probably all this comes as a shock to you, but I will continue on.

  ‘Part of the happiness of finding someone to live with has been that it has made me more aware of what I want to do. I can imagine you will say that it is perfectly obvious what I want to do. Complete my thesis and start lecturing or teaching. Well, it’s not true. And it’s a long story …’

  This does require a bit of backstory. In 1974 I had won a postgraduate scholarship to attend the University of Warwick’s celebrated School of Social History. (Celebrated because this is where E. P. Thompson wrote The Making of the English Working Class, a work of history as passionate and imaginative as a novel, reinventing a libertarian working class for a socialist Britain.) But I was actually more attracted to Warwick by the fact that Germaine Greer, the charismatic author of The Female Eunuch, had lectured there. Greer had toured New Zealand in 1972, stirring up a nascent feminist movement. Gay Liberation (‘The Gay Liberation Front’) had swiftly followed. I joined, and I came out to my friends, my brother — but not to my parents. We lived, as many did then, in mutually exclusive or parallel realities.

  By the end of 1975, I’d been at Warwick University long enough to get over my first sharp culture shock; I had been to Paris with an Auckland friend, Tim Blanks, then Morocco with a new English friend, Bruce; and in the summer Bess and Gordon had come to visit, and this was a qualified success. Then two important events happened at Warwick: signposts pointing in diametrically opposite directions.

  One of them was a paper I gave at the School of Social History. This looked at the press reactions to a sexual scandal which occurred in 1870, when two female prostitutes were arrested at a theatre and were found to be upper-middle-class men in drag. Their names were Boulton and Park. One of them lived as the wife of an aristocrat closely associated with the royal family. The revelation led to a moral panic about British masculinity, with effeminacy seen as a symptom of imperial decadence. Like all moral panics, it says more about the society in which it occurs than the incident that sparked it. But the panic was sufficiently explosive for a new word — drag — to enter the global vocabulary.

  Writing to my brother Russell, I said, ‘I suppose it might look like some anecdotal piece of joke-pulling; but it’s not. I regard it as a really fundamental piece of history, Victorian history, shedding great wads of light onto sexual roles, expectations from what is male, female; things very important in an incipiently imperialist Britain.’

  It was, I said, ‘rather like a proclamation of existence of an historian doing work in a serious area of historical investigation (no small thing, it seems to me, in the field of homosexuality which is usually consigned to dull books by unreadable authors: or irrelevant books by dull authors — take your pick).’1

  Explaining to my brother by way of explaining it to myself: ‘Perhaps I should explain how good I’ve found it being at Warwick academically — that’s to say at the Centre for the Study of Social History: which is like a mini-School in the French sense of the word, extremely professional in its method; in fact above all, strict in its historical method, religious.’

  I was responding to the intellectual stimulus of a new ‘scientific’ way of looking at history, as well as the intensity with which social history was regarded. In its own way I was also feeling towards something that became, twenty years later, queer studies. ‘I feel I’ve grasped so much more clearly what history is all about, in its doing, and because laboriously, with utterings of agony and groans of pain, frustration, I’ve at long last started my own doing, I value this very highly.

  ‘As you can see I feel on the very brink of things — perhaps an illusion — but I don’t want to traipse back to NZ midsentence —’

  This was the crux of the situation, even in 1975. My scholarship was negotiated year by year, and ahead of me loomed the poss
ibility of having to go home. ‘I can only see going back to NZ as 1) cutting me off from sources I will need to refer to … 2) returning to a peaceful pond atmosphere, where the stimulus is very minor and the perils of intellectual isolation (not to sound too snobbish — but it’s true for all sorts of reasons — mainly NZ’s undeveloped colonial rawness) very great …’

  The fact was I was loving Britain with ‘its free atmosphere, its largeness … England fairly vibrates, or shakes at the moment; it’s like an ancient machine whose inner workings are working up into a tumult, out of sight.’2 In fact, it was not the anticipated socialist revolution that lay ahead but Thatcher’s neoliberal Britain and, as ominously, AIDs. At the time, however, there seemed to be momentum towards social change. ‘There seems a real surfacing of films about gay people,’ I wrote in October ’75. (I was thinking of Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends, The Naked Civil Servant, A Bigger Splash, Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane.) And I was starting to register as part of the new English intellectual establishment. ‘Jeffrey Weekes, a lecturer at the London School of Economics [and a mentor], has just published an article on the historiographical problems of studying sexuality, especially homosexuality. He mentions my work, which is nice of him. I think I’m the only person in England doing work in this specific area.’3

  So this was one signpost — pointing in the direction of an academic career as a lecturer or historian, working in a pioneering area of what would later be conceptualised as queer studies.