Dear Oliver

by Peter Wells

  At first I found it hard to comprehend what they were saying. (‘Sick leave without pay’. ‘Reverts to ranks at own request’. ‘Battle casualty and accidentally wounded’ struck out and ‘Sick’ left in. ‘Nil abnormal seen’.) But gradually I began to understand the pattern behind Dad’s behaviour. One thing was that he was offered promotion at least three times when away overseas, but each time he either took the promotion momentarily and then asked for it to be rescinded (one time the night before a battle), or he refused the promotion completely.

  Why was this? As a bank officer and an intelligent man, he was probably considered potential officer material. But instead he stayed back in the ranks, as a grunt. He became a gunner, part of a small team of men whose job it was to load the weapons, fire them: he was a human attached to an infernal machine. (This led to a premature deafness that added to our communication problems. He could never hear.)

  But there was something else, something much more troubling. I began to work out that Dad, rather than being a macho male who responded to army life, had the record of a malingerer. He was sometimes ill immediately before a battle (as at Cassino), and during battles he suffered forms of diarrhoea — the shits, not to put too fine a point on it. Was he frightened?

  It is only human to be terrified at sites of mass slaughter. He was often sent away from the front with unspecified medical problems which may have been as much psychological as physical. (‘This man looked rather pale & drawn’; he is ‘a walking case’.) He was constantly being screened for ‘Sandfly fever’, a common ‘vector-borne febrile arboviral infection’ for men fighting in the desert. (This also led to diarrhoea, but often no evidence of sandfly fever was found.) It is also notable that Dad asked to revert to the ranks two days before his first experience of battle (at Medenine, in Tunisia). Medical problems which plagued his later life — a bad back, pleurisy — manifested themselves during the war.

  Dad had a hair-trigger sensibility. He was a champion sprinter whose attention was pinpointed to the explosion of a gun: instantly, he accelerated, and in a short brilliant spurt passed through the ribbon. A winner. But here, in battle after battle, year after year, he was surrounded by gunshots, bombs, explosions, strafings. The analogy is of a racehorse in a war zone. I believe the experience really disturbed his entire psychological mechanism. His war service was not glorious, was not macho — indeed, could almost be characterised as cowardly. (I find it very hard to write that word down. I feel my father’s presence freezing in dismay that I would so betray him.) But this is the thing: I don’t think any of my father’s comrades saw it like that. If he had tried to portray himself as a hero, or falsely claimed some similar status, yes, he would have been heavily stigmatised. But it was perhaps the humanity of shared loss, of a communal experience of horror and death and constant killing, that broadened an understanding of the varieties of human response.

  Dad, I think, was gathered into the bosom of the army, was accepted for what he’d contributed. Hence the army, long after the war had ended, remained the one irrefutable refuge for this man who had been changed forever by his experience in the war.

  So what did this mean for my mother and my father’s deeply troubled relationship? What worse fate could a man who wondered if he was a malingerer, even a coward, have than to be presented by his wife with two ‘unmanly’ sons — sons who are not even men according to his understanding? To his generation, a homosexual man could not be brave, manly or true. He’d have preferred anything rather than accept he had fathered, or was the father of, two sons who were homosexual. It was like a ghastly revenance from his wartime experiences.

  You can see how difficult it was for my mother and father to read the letter I was sending them. It was impossible.

  This is one of the reasons I feel a deep sadness when I read this letter now. There is my own bright shiny naivety, my lack of knowledge of what troubled them both. I did not understand. I did not know the wounds each of them carried. On the other hand, I was young enough to believe in the malleability of human nature. I thought we could break through the caul of secrecy and untruth, and get to know one another as we humanly were. ‘Surely a family should be based on understanding each other rather than just pure familial links,’ as I wrote to Russell.

  THIS WASN’T TO HAPPEN TILL the implosion and collapse of the family. This was all clustered, significantly enough, around Dad’s death in November 1987. Fortunately, he and I had a rapprochement before then. In a notebook a week before he died, I wrote: ‘Then I realised there was no time left. I either had to begin talking or it would end with both of us silent till the end. And as soon as I launched out I realised it didn’t matter what I talked about … the stock market crash, the cat, the weather — what mattered was that we were looking at each other and our bodies were near. And I thought of all the years, the decades really, when we simply hadn’t been able to talk. The fact that I was gay lay between us like a huge wall, almost as if one or the other of us was in prison and the other person was the visitor: we were forced to communicate thru’ a small gap in the wall. And the strange thing is — once I began talking — he began answering in a way he wouldn’t have before. (Which one of us was in prison, I wonder?)’

  A year later, in October 1988, I wrote: ‘I thought the saddest day in my life was telling Bess Russell was antibody positive. The second saddest day is acknowledging, no, saying yes to Bess having ECT.’ Bess had tried to commit suicide, then she had a breakdown. ‘It all takes the pathetically Freudian form,’ I wrote to a confidante, Jude Henderson, in an undated letter, ‘of an obsession with the drains in her house, which she is convinced are blocked up … she foresees landslides, eruptions, demolition and complete poverty. It is truly awful and very pathetic. What makes it worse is she is aware of how pathetic she is being. Naturally it all relates to Russell (and her complete conviction I’m also dying of AIDS) … I am totally overwrought.’ I added: ‘Part of her problem has been not being able to tell her bridge-playing friends what is obviously obsessing her and upsetting her enormously.’

  It is difficult these days, when HIV has become a treatable condition, to comprehend what it was like when AIDS first appeared in the 1980s. As the Broadway producer of a revival of Angels in America said recently, ‘It’s hard to remember now just how frightening and how all-engulfing AIDS was,’ especially for gay men.7 ‘A society’s attitude to disease reveals more than its state of medical knowledge,’ A. N. Wilson has rightly said, and the aggressive homophobia AIDS whipped up — just when gay men were at their most vulnerable — was horrifying.8 In the longer term, gay men and their allies learnt to advocate for advances in medical treatment, laying the groundwork for other people to confront political conservatism disguised as medical inertia. But at the time it was a dark, confusing period in which friend after friend, acquaintance after acquaintance, first got sick, then died. In my diary at the time I acknowledged the dramatic changes we were living through: ‘The whole gay world has collapsed — inwards … It is no longer possible to be “gay” in this world. We have to retreat into being homosexuals again.’

  Russell died in September 1989. The loss of a child is one of the greatest wounds life can deliver to a parent. But once Bess came to terms with it — that is, if one can ever come to terms with such a terrible blow — it deepened her compassion and understanding of life, including her own. She became an integrated person. She acknowledged publicly she was the mother of two gay sons and at HIV events spoke, sometimes with tears running down her face, as the mother of a son who had died of AIDS. I still cry when I think of this period in my life — not only for the pathos of it, but also for the way we were all forced by events towards that rapprochement I had wanted so much as a twenty-seven-year-old.

  In the aftermath, when Dad had gone and Russell had gone and Bess had recovered, I really got to know Bess as a human. I would go to her place for dinner, which was always preceded by dynamite G & Ts. (Bess: ‘Pete, you do know how to pour a good gin.’) It wa
s at this time in her life she told me about her American lover. She levelled, as we once would have said. One evening after a few gins she said she’d ‘run upstairs’ to show me something. (In her eighties she still cleaned a three-bedroom, three-bathroom house and did the garden, without any ‘help’.)

  She brought down a piece of paper and handed it over to me. It was what she now called ‘your wonderful letter’. All those years — for thirty years I had believed she had destroyed that letter. But no, she had kept it safe, hidden away in the house of secrets. ‘The deliciousness of a letter had to do, in part, with its ability to hold a spiritual or physical portion of the self,’ Deborah Lutz has written in The Brontë Cabinet.9 Bess had kept that part of my soul safe all those years and cherished what was true in its sentiments — its wish that we would know each other as we were.

  I didn’t re-read the letter when she showed it to me. I felt a kind of shame for what I assumed would be its false tone, its meretriciousness. It was only when I was once again sorting through Bess’s possessions, to shift her from her townhouse to the retirement village, that I came across it. As I sat down to read it I felt many things, but one of them was a particular feeling — you might call it a sense of farewell ‘… as in the rearview mirror, you glimpse a familiar figure who is your younger self passing into history’.10

  Notes

  1 The letter is dated 11 June 1975.

  2 The letter is dated June 1976.

  3 The letter is dated 31 January 1976.

  4 My first piece of published fiction came out in Islands 5, no. 4 (Summer 1976). Islands was edited by Robin Dudding, and the piece was ‘Five Political Memories: Made in New Zealand’.

  5 ‘It was not until the late 1980s and 1990s that scholars recognised a need for study in the field of sexuality.’ www.wikipedia.org/wiki/gender-studies (accessed 2 September 2017).

  6 NZ Defence Force 2nd NZ Divisional Artillery, NZDF Personnel Archives and Medals, copy of Records for Gordon Ladner Wells Service #472930.

  7 Matt Trueman, ‘How Taking Flight in London Helped “Angels in America” Soar’, New York Times, 7 May 2017, Theatre Section, AR 14.

  8 A. N. Wilson, The Victorians (London: Random House, 2005), 21.

  9 Deborah Lutz, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2015), 127.

  10 Rosemary Hill, ‘Preface, Unicorn’, London Review of Books, 3 November 2016, 127

  To Whom It May Concern

  The reference letter was a staple of the letter-writing genre and arose from a time when information on an individual was difficult to access. (A digital trail, courtesy of Google and Facebook, with its potential for whiplash, did not exist.)

  SUPPLYING WRITTEN REFERENCES WAS A necessary preliminary to obtaining a job, and employers took them seriously as a basis on which to make a judgment call. At the same time, everyone knew they were artificial puffs which routinely excluded any negative comment.

  But a reference had to have some correspondence with truth, otherwise the referee, the person who wrote the reference, brought themselves into disrepute as an unreliable source. A reference could also be deepened by its writer’s insight, giving the document a more rounded, even novelistic quality.

  When I was sorting out material for this book, I came across Bess’s references from the 1930s, kept as part of her overall inclination to ‘save everything’. The first of them, stiff and thin in its cadence, did not offer much insight. It commended ‘Miss Northe’ as having ‘the highest character and … the advantage of an excellent Education and Home Training’. But then there was the give-away: ‘I have known her Parents for many years. They are highly esteemed Residents of Napier — her Father … being the Managing Director of R Northe & Sons Ltd of this Town.’ It was typed in the vivid purple of a carbon copy, signed by A. E. Renouf, JP.1 The date was 16 October 1936.

  The Renoufs were family friends. I knew Mr Renouf from the decorated handwritten verses from the 1930s that my grandmother had saved. (She seems to have had the hoarding gene Bess inherited, but then she lived in the same house all her life so it was easy to just tuck something away.) Mr Renouf wrote doggerel to mark birthdays, gifts of a cake (one delivered on the same day the reference was written, as quid pro quo), and even the breaking of a vase. One, addressed to ‘Mr & Mrs W E. Northe, Lawrence Road, Napier’, marked the occasion of my grandparents’ silver wedding anniversary, 27 April 1935. (Jess and Ern’s wedding date coincided with King George V becoming king, hence the royalist sentiments):

  The King preserves our Empire fair,

  Across the far flung waters;

  But Ern and Jess have done their share,

  To wit — three bonny daughters.

  From then, King George has ruled the State,

  While Ernie ruled his Wife,

  Each possessed a loving mate,

  And spent a happy life.

  If anything, this pointed to the way the British Empire, with a royal family at its apex, formed a pyramid made up of ‘similar’ families of all sorts of different classes and races throughout its many lands. In the 1930s, people like the Northes and Renoufs did not see the Empire as a racist construct: they were still insulated inside the belief systems they had inherited. The weakness of the British Empire lay ahead, when the Japanese inflicted the biggest defeat on the British Army in history, in Singapore in 1942. As Lee Kuan Yew, later prime minister of Singapore, said, this was the day the British Empire ended. The defeat of ‘the white man’ by a ‘coloured people’ had profound ramifications for the future.

  Mr Renouf’s doggerel depicts a smaller, more intimate provincial world, more humble in a way, more connected. It was of course entirely Pākehā. The women, who are called ‘Balquhidder Belles’ in one of his poems, dressed in long evening gowns and met every Saturday night to play bridge. Their husbands (‘Ruddenclau Roughs’) dressed in suits and ties to play snooker. But since it was the Depression, the men all paid one shilling a head for electricity and my grandfather brought along the milk. Later there might be a supper of various home-made delights baked by the women. My mother commented in a handwritten note I found among her effects: ‘They were a lovely group of friends and we young ones would often call in for supper after the Sat. night pictures’.

  The venue was ‘Balquhidder’, a large house belonging to the Ruddenclaus, who had at one time owned a number of sheep farms.2 By the time of the Great Depression these farms were all mortgaged to the hilt and the Ruddenclaus had withdrawn to their large house in Napier, which was, in fact, one of those grand houses built by the gentry in the nineteenth century so their wives could ‘come to town’, enjoy a little urban life — and escape the monotony and isolation of their 40,000-acre spreads.

  This is the tightly interwoven provincial context, then, of a reference supplied by a family friend during the Depression.3

  ANOTHER REFERENCE WHICH DREW MY attention, partly because of the elegance of its script and the impressive embossed letterhead, came from a hallowed source: Solway College. Solway often cropped up in my mother’s reminiscences. Her tone made it clear that the school was virtually sacred. Everything to do with it was good, fine, fun and also, on another level, inspirational. It is not too much to say that Solway College was an enduring inspiration to Bess throughout her life.

  And because Bess’s influence on Russell and me was so strong, Solway had an effect on us, too — on how we saw her, and hence how we saw ourselves. The school gave her, in the context of the egalitarian blue-collar suburb of Point Chevalier in which we grew up, a distinction, an air of exclusivity we craved. It also gave her a kind of confidence, a breeze of assurance, something almost quietly distinguished — as good, in its way, as marrying into a family with an ancient ancestry. Because that is what a private school offers: an illustrious genealogy which you adopt just by paying a fee. That’s the theory anyway. But I think what made Bess’s experience of Solway College exceptional was its first headmistress, Marion Thompson.

 
; Marion Thompson was ‘one of a distinguished group of University of Otago women graduates of the 1890s, most of them former pupils of Otago Girls High School and many with strong Presbyterian connections, who combined high academic achievement with a sense of Christian vocation’.4 ‘Mrs T’, as Bess always referred to her, was actually a proto-feminist. Obtaining an MA with First Class Honours as early as 1898 (and, in the process, supporting herself by private coaching and teaching), she could not help but be anything else. Later, she had also to slip into the role of the main wage-earner when her husband, a Presbyterian minister, had a serious heart attack and had to give up the ministry.

  The offer to become headmistress of a new Presbyterian boarding school in the Wairarapa in 1916 was ‘not wholeheartedly welcomed by the Thompsons who held that fee-charging schools were incompatible with the democratic principles of the Presbyterian Church’.5 This is the crux: earnest Presbyterianism mixed its love of education and core democratic values with a sense that one existed in the world to make it better. This gave Bess’s private school experience a particular set of values, broader than the purely aspirational aspect that is the normal part of a snobbish ‘private school education’.

  Bess went to Solway under exceptional circumstances. After the quake, the school took in educationally displaced girls from the private schools of Hawke’s Bay, and offered them the first term free. In one way this displayed Mrs T’s characteristic shrewdness: the roll was dropping so dramatically thanks to the Depression that Solway came close to closing. The influx of Hawke’s Bay girls (sufficient for them to have their own railway carriage when they returned at the end of term) saved the school.