Dear Oliver

by Peter Wells

  But there is an interesting nano-detail relating to Bess going to Solway. Mr Burtenshaw, her godfather, had read about the free term offered in the newspaper. His role in her life as fairy godfather advanced when he took it upon himself to register her interest. Bess had been floundering at Wellington Girls’ College, still in such a state of shock from earthquake trauma that she could remember nothing of her favourite subject, algebra. Solway accepted Burtenshaw’s application and Bess was sent off to Hawke’s Bay.

  Jess and Ern were left with the impression that the tuition was free. Mr Burtenshaw himself paid for a further term, then Mrs T persuaded him that, on ethical grounds, it was wrong to leave ‘Mr & Mrs Northe’ in a state of ignorance. I am unsure what happened next. Did Ern at first refuse to pay? He was, after all, in the throes of trying to re-establish the family firm of R. Northe & Sons after the disaster of the quake. The outcome was that Bess attended the school on the lower rate of a ‘daughter of a clergyman’. It was essentially on a charitable basis, a fact of which Bess herself remained ignorant until she was in her eighties.

  Writing as a mature woman in a book that celebrated Solway’s Golden Jubilee, Bess noted, ‘We were indeed fortunate on our arrival at Solway to find awaiting us a Principal as sympathetic and understanding as Mrs Thompson, who was guide, philosopher, friend, and certainly always a mother to us all. Where else, but at Solway would you find the majority of the girls queuing up outside the study door at the end of the day for the Principal’s good-night kiss.’6 It was a small, even intimate school of one hundred girls with, unusually, a family at its core. As the prospectus described it, Solway provided ‘the happiness and comfort of a refined home’. Note that adjective: ‘refined’.

  Bessie’s time at Solway framed the rest of her life. Mrs T’s high ideals gave her something to aspire to: she kept the letters Mrs T sent to her, as you keep anything which amounts to a sacred text. I have them now. Their capable, strong handwriting, never varying, highly legible, driven by the broad nib of a fountain pen, is full of good advice: ‘I remember getting a letter from one of my professors at the end of my University days in which he wrote: “Keep learning, ever moving, don’t stand still!” and I have been glad to pass on that advice. Life is full of interest and always there is something to learn.’ This was sent to Bess just after she had left Solway. Again, when sending Bess’s fulsome testimonial: ‘Life is so much more interesting when you feel that you are making some contribution to the World’s work and its happiness.’ Bess was right to see in Mrs T a philosopher and guide.

  Of course Bess often failed to live up to such high ideals, most notably during her marriage. But Mrs T’s testimonial for Bess showed some insight into the positive aspects of her pupil’s character: ‘As a prefect here she was most helpful. Her invariable courtesy made her a delightful pupil. A girl of high ideals of life and conduct, of pleasing personality and dignified presence, Miss Northe will uphold the tone of any institution or firm with which she is connected.’

  Was this a coded way of saying that, because of her private education, she would lend ‘class’ to wherever she worked? Certainly when she applied to become a receptionist at the Masonic, Napier’s new luxury Art Deco hotel, Mr Chesney, the manager, thought so. She was even given privileges beyond those normally given to working women: time off when she wanted it. Part of the ambience of staying at the Masonic was that guests were greeted by a young woman educated at a private school, who spoke well and was, to boot, good-looking and courteous. This would have meant nothing if she was not efficient, but Bess brought her formidable memory to the task, always remembering customers even if they had not returned for quite some time.

  She made a conspicuous success of her new role, and was even offered a position at the ultimate glamour hotel in New Zealand at the time, the Grand Hotel in Auckland, where visiting celebrities like Noël Coward and opera singers stayed. (She did not take up the offer.) She was voted ‘the second best receptionist in New Zealand’ at this time. (I am unsure how this was administered and I am reliant on Bess’s own version of events here. She often paraded her glories before us children when she felt a little let down by the shrunken perimeter of her life as a ‘home maker’ in Point Chev in the 1950s.)

  When Mrs T sent her testimonial on 30 October 1934 she added a personal note: ‘Thank you for all the gracious courtesy you showed when you were our pupil. I love every thought of you and I know I am going to be proud of you and of the work you will do.’ It was a more than formulaic response.

  Did Bessie do work of which Mrs T, she of the high ideals, would be proud? Not really. She was a receptionist in a hotel and then in a dental surgery, and Mrs T had something higher in mind (in a moral sense) for her favourite pupil.7 But Bess only became a working woman after she revolted against the role she was consigned to when she came home from Solway. Three years after the quake, and possibly in a delayed response to it, Jess, Bess’s mother, developed a serious diabetic condition. ‘I’m sorry your Mother is not well, and I think your first duty is with her,’ Mrs T advised. ‘It is a good idea to go on with your Commercial work if you can find the time but I know that housework is exacting, and you will want to spare your Mother as much as possible. Give her my love.’

  Bess had earlier been handicapped by two elder sisters, Jean and Patti, who were scholastically high-achievers. They were successive duxes of Napier Girls’ High School, and Bessie trailed in their shadow, shrinking from having to over-achieve just to keep up. (The ‘Commercial’ stream was a low-ranking option in the hierarchy of a school.) Solway gave Bess the chance to recreate a self: she became a prefect and a popular student, a role model perhaps remarkable for a girl who had arrived traumatised by the quake. The complication was that she now expected the rest of her life to unroll with the same degree of success.

  Her marriage, of course, led to compromises and ever-deepening moral complexity. Did going to Solway help her there, or limit her understanding of the issues by exacerbating her snobbishness? But snobbishness flowed in both Bess’s and her mother’s veins, irrespective of the influence of Solway. Or rather, Bess and her mother thought so much alike it was as if they shared the same brain — just as I seemed to share the same consciousness with my mother, finding it difficult to establish my psychological independence. (Indeed the conjoined way we thought, spoke, saw the world was what made her approaching death so alarming and painful for me. It was as if part of my own brain was dying or going into darkness.)

  There is a final interesting reference in one of Mrs T’s rather moving letters: ‘I like to think Solway girls go home enriched by their experience,’ she wrote in December 1933, just after Bess had left the school. ‘I will not tell you how much I have appreciated your courtesy and helpfulness, and as you carry these into all relationships of life all must be well with you.’

  In the end, Bess became patron of the Solway Old Girls’ Association, meeting Mrs T’s high expectations of the ‘dignified’ and ‘gracious’ girl who left the school in 1933. Often, when coming into the lounge at the retirement village, I saw Bess struggle out of her seat to get a cup of tea for someone who might be decades younger but incapacitated. She kept that courtesy and helpfulness all her life, and it guarded her and gave her qualities that protected her, made her special in the eyes of the people around her, who in their turn looked out for her. Courtesy, after all, is one of the human virtues, or at least it was.

  Written references no longer have the validity they once had. Employers have a more Mephistophelean way of scrutinising possible employees. The web has wrapped itself around us as efficiently as a spider seeking to imprison then embalm the insect captured in its clasp. Yet the ordinary virtues still define us as human beings — how we speak to one another, how we offer sympathy, extend empathy. Even something as simple as a handwritten sympathy note has a power far beyond the gesture it makes. ‘What a sad world we have happened on!’ Mrs T wrote to Bessie in April 1942, in the depth of the Second World War. She end
ed the letter on a fond note: ‘Yours lovingly, Marion Thompson.’

  Notes

  1 Early duplication of typed material used a purple carbon paper, pigmented with ink and coated with wax. This was the only way to copy typed material before the invention of the Xerox. The carbon paper was placed under a blank sheet and carefully aligned. It was a messy and time-consuming process.

  2 I found a handwritten note among Bess’s papers in which she listed the stations as ‘Bluff Station & another at Te Pohue & possibly more’.

  3 In Bess’s note she wrote that Mr A. E. Renouf was known as ‘Granny Renouf’, a reference to his predilection for playing ‘dame’ roles in local dramatic productions, a harmless form of crossdressing.

  4 Dorothy Page, ‘Thompson, Marion Beatrice’, first published in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Vol. 3, 1996. Te Ara — the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/3t31/thompson-marion-beatrice (accessed 21 July 2017).

  5 Ibid.

  6 Anne Tregurtha, Remembrance of Things Past: Solway College Golden Jubilee (Masterton: Solway College, 1966), 121.

  7 A letter Bess kept from Mrs T traverses the fracture line in her marriage. On 16 April 1942, with Gordon called up, Mrs T wrote: ‘I am so sorry to hear that the war has broken up your home … Your Father & Mother will be so glad to have you in Napier.’ The letter was addressed to ‘Mrs Gordon Wells, Lawrence Road, Napier’. But the envelope has been re-addressed on 12 August 1942 to ‘512 Point Chevalier Road, Auckland’. Bessie had returned to her flat. When Mrs T commented, ‘We have been given very clearly the rules to live by in God’s word’, she was marking the dividing line between a teetotalling Presbyterian of high principles and a young woman who now enjoyed a drink and was about to savour her freedom.

  How to Write a Letter

  Jessie Northe was my grandmother, the daughter of Betsy Bartlett. Her photograph sits on the mantelpiece in a guest bedroom. It’s a kind of informal altar to the piety of family.

  THE PHOTOGRAPH WAS TAKEN ON my grandparents’ wedding day, 26 April 1910. What really takes my eye is her hat, a large Edwardian hat — the size of her social aspirations, I think. It’s like a galleon under full sail.

  My grandmother already has her uppity look. She’s definitely superior. She knows she’s good-looking. She has made a success of working in Thorp’s shoe shop in Napier. It might not be much, bending over, wedging new shoes onto smelly, puffed-up feet. But she is a good saleswoman, one of the best. She is a self-confident young woman, not exactly a New Woman, but she knows her own worth.

  But there are other things this portrait does not tell us so overtly. It is relatively small and so it required only a modest financial outlay. Moreover, there is a very important detail: Jessie did not marry in white, with bridesmaids. The wedding was very small, ‘private’, done after work. White weddings were not ‘for the likes of us’. For all the stylishness and handsomeness of my grandparents, this is a portrait of a lower-middle-class couple starting out in life.

  There it is — lower-middle-class — that terrible aspersion, an unlovable category, universally tainted and abused by those immediately below, and by those above. The coarse working class don’t aspire to or need such laughable fanciness, which of course is a comic parody to the secure middle class. To the middle- and upper-middle-class woman, a lower-middle-class lady is someone to be snide about, because she simply doesn’t get what these folk effortlessly get as part of their birth, breeding, understanding of the world.

  So while this photo is touching — here’s a young couple about to embark on a new life — also it displays the couple’s vulnerability to insult. Still, my grandmother shows her chutzpah — she will wear a magnificent, slightly mad tea-party hat, hoisting the flag of her aspirations even while she sits there quite modestly, in a tasteful civilian suit that will do for best. Let’s face it, a white wedding dress is an extravagance, an unnecessary coda for ‘people like us’. And ‘people like us’ is what we are, what we cannot quite escape, no matter how hard we try.

  Yet Jessie was also a master of disguise. In her own way she would escape. By the time she was an old woman, which is when I knew her, she was universally recognised — outside Hawke’s Bay — as a particular type, a Hawke’s Bay lady. But within Hawke’s Bay she was recognised in a different way: her parents were known, as was her husband’s occupation, where she went to school. If she ever did anything wrong, this was keenly remembered.

  For example, many years after her death I heard about her very first ‘at home’. This was part of an arcane ritual by which genteel women visited each other’s homes and left a visiting card. On your visiting card you wrote the particular afternoon you would be at home. Then you prepared an afternoon tea for an unknown number of women, and you sat and waited. A woman who knew of my grandmother reported to me, with a still-keen relish, how Jessie had prepared a magnificent afternoon tea for her first such occasion, but nobody came. How did she know then? There must have been someone who attended and couldn’t wait to get home to spread this tasty morsel of gossip.

  So while my grandmother was ‘a Hawke’s Bay lady’ in Auckland or Wellington, in Hawke’s Bay she would always be the woman whose very first ‘at home’ was a failure. In time she had her revenge: she was smart, had a good sense of humour, was nobody’s fool. A depression, an earthquake and a world war also dealt to the security of many of the women who regarded her as beyond the social pale. Coal and wood and property have a hardiness other more genteel occupations might lack during times of extremity. She was an ace bridge player, too, which gave her social reach. And after her husband died she had what was then called ‘a private income’ — the sine qua non of gentility in those days.

  She also wrote letters. She wrote letters in the way other people breathed. She was a beneficiary of the 1870 Education Act under which reading and writing were taught universally throughout New Zealand. And although she left school at fourteen, she had the basis of a supple literacy she never lost. She had been introduced to the pleasures of letter writing as a nine-year-old. One could almost say she was seduced.

  I know this because of the charmingly eccentric letters sent to Jessie by one Richard Mercer, a family friend. He worked as a clerk, and he lived right in the heart of Napier in Mrs Bird’s boarding house, wedged between the American Steam Coach Factory and Wilson’s Boot Factory.

  On a Sunday evening Mercer usually sat down with a steel-nibbed dip-in pen and a variety of coloured inks, and he created fantastical worlds in letter form which he posted to Jessie, then a child living with her parents some 17 kilometres away on the Frimley estate in Hastings, a semi-feudal domain of one of the Williams family. J. N. Williams was the third son of the missionary William Williams, the creator of the first Māori dictionary and a translator of the Treaty of Waitangi. For many missionaries, their intimacy with Māori and early arrival in New Zealand meant they could pick and choose the very best land when they decided to mix teaching of the gospel with a bit of upward mobilising. By the 1890s, the slightly ambiguous class background of the Williams family was replaced by a perception of them as landed grandees. (‘Top drawer’, as my mother would have said.)

  An astute nineteenth-century observer of Hawke’s Bay noted that families of straitened circumstances back in Britain often tried to reproduce the status of being ‘county families’— that is, leading families of great antiquity and status — in their new environment. The Williams family was an example of this. Jessie grew up in their shadow, imbued with notions of deference quite different from the egalitarian ideals we normally associate with New Zealand. But the fact was Jessie’s father worked for the Williamses, first as a coach driver, then as a manager of the orchards, until he accumulated enough capital to buy his own land and retire and live off the income, thus reproducing in miniature the gentrifying trajectory of the Williamses themselves.

  This is the framing of this series of artful letters, all beautifully written in copperplate handwrit
ing. The letters were carefully archived and placed in a writing box, and were among Grandma’s possessions when she died. The letters are in effect playful seductions, all aimed at attracting a child’s curiosity about written language. A form of education was silently taking place. Jessie was learning the art of letter writing. This was not a small thing, as letter writing was the basis of virtually all non-verbal communication between humans at this time. Letter writing also involved a kind of arcane etiquette. To those who learnt the etiquette in childhood it seems obvious and clear. Today, the internet has to inform people ‘how to write a letter’.1

  Jessie learnt this etiquette by receiving letters and — an integral part of the exchange — by writing letters in return. The first Mercer letter to survive is dated 26 June 1892, and is written in vivid green ink, using deliberate misspelling as a ruse. It is headed in telescoping order, ‘New Zealand, Hawke’s Bay, Napier’. Mercer drops immediately into the business at hand: ‘My Dear little Jessie, Your welcome note came to hand this day, and therefore Konsider it nothing but right to acknowledge it at once. I know you are all the tip toe of expectation wondering when you are to get an answer, and am afraid, you will be a little disappointed at getting it so soon. However try and bear up.’

  This teasing epistle was by way of educating her about the nature of letter writing. A letter sent is a letter requiring payment in kind. And payment in kind sets off long-term consequences. At the age of nine, Jessie was being broken into the habit — the sometimes delicious habit — of forming words that convey feelings and establish a personal view of events and people, part of an ongoing written conversation spanning space and time.

  ‘You also tell me you have red the Books through and also like them, you don’t tell me, what you thought of Alice, or any of the queer people mentioned in the house of Glass, or wonderful Alice. Have you learnt any of the funny poetry.’