Dear Oliver

by Peter Wells

  ‘This is my hymn of burial to you … I want to place you parallel to the child which has become the man, I want to place your image, your reality beside the man I have become. I want you to see me as I am …’

  WHAT CAN I SAY NOW about this vituperative letter, written forty-two years ago? My grandmother was an intelligent woman who wrestled against the confines of her ambiguous social position: her parents Betsy Bartlett and William Purvis began life as upper servants and suffered from the bound-foot nature of that world. The fact that she was a coal merchant’s wife exacerbated her anxieties. As Karl Ove Knausgaard, the autobiographical Norwegian novelist, has written: ‘It is not the case that we are born equal and that the conditions of life make our lives unequal, it is the opposite, we are born unequal, and the conditions of life make our lives more equal.’12 At the time, this colonial world, obsessed by class and based on a racist paradigm, seemed fixed and powerful, amplified as it was by a global empire at its zenith. Now it has all but vanished. Nearly every ‘great house’ in Hawke’s Bay stands empty of its original occupants, turned into a boutique accommodation or similar. Ngāti Kahungunu have been given back lands and wealth stolen during this same colonial period. Everything has changed.

  Grandma’s very final letters were written just before she died in 1967. By then she was almost blind. She had to feel her way towards the paper, and her writing moves across the paper like an unstable mosaic, liable at any moment to fragment. She was in hospital and she had had to say goodbye to her garden. I was humbled by the pathos inherent in these letters: ‘I do hope I can shop next year or else die one or the other I am so tired of everything. I have very great trouble seeing as well … It is giving myself Insulin I hate … I cannot eat the food … Mr Ellis [a specialist] cannot do anything more for my toes … Dad died in a room opposite … I feel very tired.’ In the final letter, she no longer writes the date but just the day, ‘Wednesday’, and the words ‘Royston Ward’: ‘I will be glad to get home.’ This was the end of a paper trail that had begun when she was a nine-year-old in 1892 and had gone on, a forthright road of words, till 1967 when she was eighty-four and still trying to write letters as a way of staying in touch.

  She had introduced me to the delight of language, pulled me into the world of words, soothed me into the very real pleasures of creating a self through letter writing. The fact I am a writer is due, at least partly, to her redoubtable example. The thought forms in my mind, delivered in her emphatic accent: You ungrateful little shit. She has given me so much, not least her love but also her example of a woman full of energy and brio, who expressed herself confidently in written language. It is not an inconsequential gift.

  Notes

  1 ‘How to Write a Letter’, www.google.co.nz/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=how+to+write+a+letter&* (accessed 19 July 2017).

  2 ‘A Member of the Aristocracy’, Manners and Rules of Good Society — Or Solecisms to be Avoided, 43rd edition (London: Frederick Warne & Co. Ltd, 1922).

  3 Ibid., 25.

  4 I found the Sheaffer fountain pen given as a gift from her parents among Bess’s possessions after her death. It was in its original presentation box and included the ‘Directions for Using Self-Filling Type Swan Pens’. On the front she had written ‘Bessie P Northe, Lawrence Rd’ in unformed handwriting. Along the back she had written a man’s name and address, ‘Frank Fordham, 11 Cliff Street, Wgt.’

  5 The family all had pet names. W. E. Northe, Bess’s father, was always called ‘Ern’, but his pet name was ‘Cook’. (He was cook on the Seabird, a yacht he had as a young man.) Jessie Northe was called ‘Mrs Kutz’, the derivation of which I no longer know. There is an idea it related to a film character. Jean Northe, the eldest daughter, was called ‘Bill’, Patti was ‘Little Patti’, and Bess was ‘Chick’ or ‘Chicken’, a small fluffy bird to be adored. Pet names seemed part of the texture of a close affectionate family.

  6 Cousin Suzanne Blumhardt writes: ‘One protection for Grandma in case of a diabetic event was that [her sister-in-law] Doris [Northe, née Northey], living next door, could see the big sash window in the kitchen from her house. If the blind on this window did not go up at the usual time each morning, Doris was to check.’ It was a small and interwoven world geographically and in familial terms. Email from Suzanne Blumhardt, 26 May 2016.

  7 In a letter written from Napier Hospital towards the end of her life, Jessie commented she was near the room ‘where Dad died’.

  8 Jessie was known as ‘The Duchess’ to the workmen of R. Northe & Sons. It was not a fond attribution.

  9 Sectarianism was alive and well in 1950s New Zealand. When Walter Foot, Jessie’s Catholic son-in-law, died of a heart attack, his and Patti’s baby daughter, Geraldine, became a focus for religious tensions, though she was only six weeks old. Suzanne Blumhardt writes: ‘After Walter died, Patti [his wife] travelled to Auckland with Geraldine in the company of Pat Foot [an uncle on the Catholic side] and others. I was told that Pat’s mission on that trip was to persuade [Patti] to bring Geraldine up as a Catholic — hence your mother’s [Bess’s] hurried arrangement of the christening [in the Point Chevalier Anglican church].’ It was a Protestant triumph. Bessie felt that she had been fighting for Geraldine’s very soul. Suzanne noted: ‘I can remember nuns coming to the house in Lyall Bay [where Walter and Patti lived] to see Geraldine soon after Walter died.’ They were just as intent on recruiting Geraldine to what Bess always called, pejoratively, Roman Catholicism, inferring its foreign status as against the English church.

  10 Nancy Eisenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016), 1.

  11 Mrs Renouf was the wife of A. P. Renouf, who supplied the testimonial, and a ‘Balquhidder Belle’ (that is, a friend), but, as was common at the time, the women called each other by their surnames, never by their Christian names. This would have been regarded as overly familiar.

  12 Karl Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book 2: A Man in Love, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2014), 17.

  The Business Letter

  Seventeen years after the Hawke’s Bay earthquake, my grandfather Ern Northe lay dying. His three daughters and their offspring came back to Napier to say their goodbyes. It was Christmas 1948.

  A PHOTO OF THE TIME shows Ern, clearly ailing, holding Russell in his arms. Russell, nine months old, looks curious, lively. Grandma looks nervy and wracked with anxiety. Grandpa’s face is pinched with pain. The next time Bess saw her father, just before he died, she was pregnant with me, but in the custom of the time — suppressing emotion — she did not tell him. I was born seven months after he died. I grew up in an environment conspicuously lacking in male role models. Dad was diffident and not really interested. In the absence of anyone else, a grandfather I never knew took on this role. He was, anyway, so vividly alive in my mother’s mind it was as if he had just stepped outside to have a cigarette.

  My father, Gordon, never mentioned his own father. In fact, Dad’s almost complete absence of commentary about his past — compared with Mum’s ever-present evocation of hers — seemed to imply that he had none. Or that his past was immaterial and impoverished compared with Bess’s richly detailed narratives, epiphanies and remembered sayings.

  Bess’s father’s full name was Walter Ernest Northe, and he was born in Napier on 1 August 1879. He was the second of eight sons and known in the family as Ern. There was only one sister, Grace. I knew him via my mother’s constant praise, as a kind man, a good provider, a hard worker, an intelligent man, a smoker of roll-your-owns, a book reader, a brooder in cemeteries where he often went for an evening walk. A wealthy man by his death, he still rode a bicycle. He maintained a modesty of profile that stood in contrast to his material accomplishments and his widow’s more showy presence.

  My grandfather, my mother told me, had worn himself out running the Northe family business, R. Northe & Sons, Coal and Wood Merchants. Th
is was a thankless task, since Robert Northe, the father, had decreed that all the eight sons were to work in the family business and get exactly the same wages, regardless of the work they did. It was the recognition that he would never ‘get ahead’ in the firm that spurred my grandfather to branch out and create his own wealth from rental property.

  Two remarks illustrate my problem in trying to adjust to his reality. His funeral, my mother told me, was ‘one of the largest funerals ever seen in Napier’. By contrast she also reported to me a comment my father had heard in the pub the evening of the funeral: ‘There died one of the meanest men in Napier.’

  How could this be? The disparity between someone apparently liked and honoured, and one who was miserable, penny-pinching — worst of all, mean. At the same time, I knew the answer. My mother shared some of these characteristics. She showed a caution this side of obsession about saving money, and a slightly masochistic denial of spending money on herself. But alongside this was a generosity of spirit which saw her giving money to her children when required, when it was important to advance their careers.

  What, too, was the reality of the woman who said at Ern’s funeral, ‘The poor of Napier would miss Mr Northe’, as reported by my mother. (Bess always pronounced poor with two syllables — poo-ar — as if to emphasise how far she was from this detested state.) Was this arse-licking by a crafty person (note the curtsey dropped before Mr Northe), or was the woman saying something genuinely felt? Was my grandfather a slum landlord, or did he provide low-cost housing for the needy? Who was he, this mysterious man who shone a benevolent light over my boyhood, seemingly kind and generous, never making me feel diminished, as my father did, so that my own feelings seemed strange to me, false and frightening? He was as unreal as a plaster saint in some senses, a man whose example I tried to live up to. But a man, for all that, whom I never touched, never talked to, never knew.

  Here’s a story about Ern’s modesty — and pride. When he goes into the post office to fill in papers to do with ownership of property, the clerk, who is new to Napier and doesn’t know who he is, reprimands him for using post office paper as scrap paper. Ern takes all the filled-in documents up to the clerk for him to register that he is actually the owner of a large amount of property. The clerk falls silent.

  When I look at photographs of him taken right up to his death I am not sure that he isn’t wearing the suit he wore in his wedding photograph in 1910. Even in the late 1930s he seems to be wearing the same suit. It has ridden up his arms over time, and appears to be too short in the sleeves. Mean? ‘Economical,’ as Bessie would say.

  I HAD IN MY HANDS a book that was as close, in one way, as I would ever get to him. It wasn’t a diary, full of personal feelings. There was nothing like that among his papers. (His letters, as we shall see, express his character in pithy, unselfconscious ways.) The book I was looking at was the minute book of R. Northe & Sons. My grandfather was the company secretary as well as managing director, and it had been his job to write the minutes from 22 May 1911 (the year of his father’s shocking death), through the 1931 earthquake when the family business faced a crisis of almost unparalleled proportion, to the tensions of the Second World War, until 1949, when he died, worn out, according to my mother, by the trials of looking after his extended family.

  I hesitated before opening the book. First of all, its modesty struck me. It was small, not much larger than a hard-backed school exercise book. Typical of the family firm, it was not fancy. Just like the registered sign for the company itself: you would be hard put to find plainer lettering, or a sign more lacking in flourish, gilt, panache. It was what it was. A sign. But then their business was modest in scale and nature. Wood and coal are very basic materials, grubby and utilitarian. In the nineteenth century they were also necessities. When the firm was set up in 1894, all houses were heated by wood and coal and, as importantly, food was cooked on a coal range. (Gas was used for lighting, but gas ovens were a novelty.)

  Robert Northe’s idea was that, having founded the business, his ability to sire eight sons could be put to good use. The sons would become tradesmen in the family firm. One was a carpenter, another a builder, another a yard hand; another walked around Napier collecting rents and looked after the horses; and my grandfather, because of his educational qualifications (two years at Napier Boys’ High School on a scholarship), was company secretary and managed the office.1 My cousin Philippa said he was to be the plumber of the firm, but this did not happen.2 Crawling around under buildings to deal with sewerage was not, I think, his idea of a job. He dreamt of being an architect, according to Bess. But the notional word here is dreamt. I could add in here Joan Didion’s understanding of colonial character: you did things you didn’t particularly want to do because that is what you did. The area for manoeuvre was as pinched and narrow as a tunnel.

  There were other employees who were not family — eight drivers, quarrymen at the firm’s two quarries, and ‘powder men’, who extracted clay for bricks. An elderly crippled man worked as the office clerk.

  The coal, coke, firewood and timber depot was in Raffles Street. The yard took up an entire city block on the urban fringes. There was a large corrugated-iron two-storey warehouse, typical of the pragmatic colonial period, with the pretence of a wooden front facing Raffles Street. The advertising on the front read: ‘Wood, Coal & Grain Depot. R. NORTHE & SONS LTD. Contracts Of All Kinds Undertaken — Estimates Given. Stocks on Hand — Oats, Chaff, Wheat, Maize, Barley, Drain Pipes, Bricks’. The front was the office where my grandfather worked. The back was used to store the wheat, corn, bran and hay, as well as oats, potatoes and swedes imported from the South Island.

  Upstairs, up to 3000 sacks of chaff were stored. Along with grain, the company sold coal (from Newcastle in Australia and Westport in the South Island), coke, charcoal, firewood, cement, shingle, sand, brick and drainpipes. They made the pipes and bricks themselves, all signed with an ‘N’. As builders they had a large supply of timber — ‘Best Matai’ — stacked in the yard.

  There was another large two-storey wooden building on the site facing Raffles Street. This carried the legend ‘BUILDERS, CONTRACTORS & GENERAL CARRIERS’. Inside this building was a swing sawbench and a gas engine. The gas engine was used to smash wheat into meal for bakers, maize into meal for poultry, and oats into horse feed. At the back of the building and extending to Vautier Street were twenty stables and a feed room. The company also leased a large area on Hospital Hill for their horses. A dray and horses was in perpetual motion between the seafront and the yard, collecting stone and sand used for building materials.

  I have a panorama ‘landscape’ photograph of the kind popular with Edwardians that displays the family business. I found it at Grandma’s, stored (or hidden?) on top of a wardrobe where it gathered dust. It was definitely not on display. It shows the yard, the buildings, and nine carts lined up with their drivers, two carts with two Clydesdale horses, seven with single shire horses. There is some horse shit on the ground, not cleared away for the photograph, and the drivers all look grimy with coal dust. Ern can be seen standing outside the office, wearing a white shirt, his sleeves rolled up, a gold watch chain across his waistcoat. He is also wearing a strange, almost comical hat. He looks work-ready and relaxed. But alongside him is the contrast that blighted his whole life. His older brother Alf (‘Darky’), who worked in the yard, is in black workman’s clothes. Alf has a rough, challenging look in his face, as if he’s been interrupted in his work and is there unwillingly. He lives rent-free in a house right by the yard, and though he is the eldest it is his younger brother who runs the firm. Alf is like a brooding manual labourer. Sardonic.

  Whatever sense of achievement is shown in the display of horses and vehicles and staff is somewhat undercut by the broken windows in one of the warehouses: it looks as if street kids have aimed rocks at the glass and it hasn’t been replaced. The horse shit makes it all seem very down home. Nevertheless, the panorama photo is a statement of pride in t
he family firm. It was taken after Robert Northe had died in an industrial accident in 1911. The surviving Northes are essentially a fatherless family. Or rather, my grandfather acts as father in loco parentis. At age thirty-two, it had fallen to him to steer the company on which his siblings — and four families — depended. So too did his widowed mother, Polly Northe, who had been left in difficult financial straits by her husband.

  It’s hard to get a sense of the scale of the firm. (There were at least two other competing wood and coal companies in Napier.) People ordered fuel for their stoves and fireplaces on account, and the nine horse-led carts (and, by the 1920s, lorries) delivered around Napier. A phone was installed relatively early, in 1894: ‘Telephone 195’. There was also contract work on offer. For example, the company contracted to supply 200,000 bricks in Lyttelton in 1913. It also provided coal on contract to the major infrastructural bodies in Napier, like the pumping station, Port Ahuriri and the breakwater, as well as to visiting ships. It was very much a going concern.

  All this was backed up by a careful deployment of capital. Rental properties were owned all over Napier, including several inner-city shops. There were acres of land in outlying suburban areas (five acres by Taradale Road) that would eventually be subdivided into sections. And surplus capital was lent out on mortgages — often second mortgages at relatively high interest rates. The company lent to people who were having trouble finding finance to build houses, as well as to farmers wanting to increase their stock. This was the reality that undercut the hoity-toity view that the Northes dealt in grubby coal and weren’t the equals of white-collar folk. Recession, depression and quake tended to destabilise where people belonged in a hierarchy of class: in the end, it was whoever had cash in desperate situations who came out on top.