Dear Oliver

by Peter Wells

  WHAT DID SERGEANT JOHN NORTHE look like? His enrolment papers tell us he was five feet nine inches (1.75 metres) tall, three inches above average height at the time; that his hair was black and his eyes were grey. But in a portrait taken by the notable photographer Samuel Carnell (who specialised in images of Māori rangatira) John Northe is already an old man. In the quick of his condition he had probably been handsome; even as an old man he has residual good looks. But who was he?

  One of the complicated aspects of working out who actually wrote the four letters signed ‘John and Ann Northe’ is that Sergeant Northe is referred to in both the first and third person in the letters: in June 1871, in the middle of winter, he writes about ‘my being so unwell and the cold weather nipping up I have no heart to do anything’. But in the first lines of the letter we read that everyone is well ‘except poor father he is very unwell’. Later in August the letter says, again, all are well, ‘except poor Father, he is very unwell, the cold weather cuts him up’.

  Is it possible the letters were partially dictated by Nancy and written by John? The same hand, sober and copybook neat, wrote all the letters. (John Northe’s will is written and signed by him in the same stately hand.) The letters establish that by his early seventies his health was beginning to give out. He had already lived nearly thirty years longer than the average age for a man in the nineteenth century. As an ex-miner and soldier he had had a tough life. He had crisscrossed the world on several occasions, and at a time when ocean voyaging was demanding and often perilous.

  By 1870 John Northe had only five more years to live. Perhaps awareness of his advancing years was the nudge to get a photo taken. He is cast as a pater familias, almost self-consciously proud. His military cap sits beside him on the table, although no identifiable badge seems to adorn it. He holds in his large thick-fingered hand a handsome walking stick which still survives, with its killer-whalebone head and Australian cedar stem. This would have had practical uses — to fend off the wild dogs that roamed the Napier streets, and as a weapon if push came to shove. It had elements of panache; it nodded back to the swagger sticks of the officer class to which he aspired.

  John Northe appears distinguished, and the silk topcoat he is wearing is perhaps borrowed — photographers kept flash clothing for their clients so they could appear better dressed than was usual. But it is also possible that Dolly ran up the frockcoat as well as the waistcoat for her father. The two pieces of clothing belong together. They add to the impression of him as an ‘elder’. The photo also exists as a rather gaudily hand-tinted version, and this may have assumed the gravitas of a family icon on a wall after John Northe died. (It’s interesting that so many of his possessions were kept, compared with those of later Northe generations. There was a real sense of him as the founding patriarch.)

  In a way John Northe is the most enigmatic personality in this book. We know little of his relations with his brood of sons and daughters, except that he selected two of his sons to have property. (They become the first members of the Northe family to own any property at all in New Zealand.) Other contextual information we can work out from his letters. It is through his drive and determination (or desperation) to leave the old world that so many people like me find ourselves placed — rooted, one could say — in a world far away from our genetic root stock. He was part of one of the great tidal movements in history in that sense. At the same time there is an inherent conservatism which runs like a stain or a ribbon through the family personality: he stepped out into the new world, but under the protection of one of the most conservative and constricting bodies imaginable — the British imperial army.

  To John Northe we could apportion an enduring conservatism but also a strong work ethic, as well as an element of intuition and cunning. He ended up in what could be considered a ‘cushy’ job: by his middle to late career we find him indoors, in the relatively powerful position of apportioning food, drink and living quarters, but also in the deeply ambiguous position of being between a caretaker and a landlord’s representative. This ambiguity, this uncertainty about where exactly the family belonged, echoes down the family tree, with its ghostly impulse of deference sitting alongside something much tougher and livelier, more entrepreneurial.

  Edward Said’s notion of exile as ‘an … essential sadness [that] can never be surmounted’ is not apparent in John Northe’s prosaic letters.31 His view of the world was entirely practical and pragmatic. He probably had no concept of letter writing as a way of expressing the innermost essence of his soul. He may have even despised that sort of introspection. But its absence from overt expression in his letters does not mean a melancholy sense of loss did not exist. He would never see his sisters again. By 1869 his brother Sam was already dead. His homeland — his ‘true home’ — was as if dead to him, except in memory.

  ANOTHER WAY OF SEEING THIS, however, is that Napier — Mataruahou — has a ghostly likeness to parts of Cornwall. It, too, is on an extremity, far away from the centre. It is coastal and it has a primal relationship to the sea. Perhaps there was some kind of echo of place that answered to him when he finally got here. William Colenso, a fellow Cornishman, also selected Napier Hill as tūrangawaewae and final resting place. He said the sea gods of the Cornish world echoed those of the tangata whenua. Perhaps by going so far John Northe had, in a sense, come home — to a new place.

  ‘We carry the genes and culture of our ancestors,’ writes Hilary Mantel, ‘and what we think about them shapes what we think about ourselves and how we make sense of our time and place.’32 Meaning in a family emerges in a cascade of generations, both in what joins and what separates. Who am I today — Elizabeth Ereaux, London survivalist and ‘cat in a tripe shop’? Sam Northey, exile and lost in the wilderness? John Northe, a trustworthy soldier who, on arriving in a place, turns around and buys a burial plot? Or Nancy O’Donnell, the girl who leapt on a runaway horse and signed a cross on paper as if with a scimitar while someone else wrote her ‘mark’?

  Notes

  1 David Andrew Roberts, ‘“A Sort of Inland Norfolk Island?”: Isolation, Coercion and Resistance on the Wellington Valley Convict Station 1823–26’, Journal of Australian Colonial History 2, no. 1 (April 2000), 55.

  2 Ibid.

  3 State Archives NSW; Series; NRS 12202; Item: (4/4097), Reel 922.

  4 Convict Registers of Conditional and Absolute Pardons, 1788–1870, State Archives NSW, Australia, 1850, Reel 794, A/s1818 CP 50/625.

  5 NSW Colonial Secretary Letters Relating to Moreton Bay and Queensland 1822–1860, 31/04386, A2.6, 081-084.

  6 NSW Colonial Secretary Letters Relating to Moreton Bay and Queensland 1822–1860, 31/04386, A2.6, 077-079.

  7 Robert Percy Northe (1896–1961) was one of the three younger brothers my grandfather Ern pushed out of the family firm into white-collar work. He and his brother Gordon worked for the Guardian Assurance. (R. Northe & Sons was, incidentally, an agent for Guardian Assurance: it was a close and interconnected world.) Percy, as he was known, enlisted in the army on 8 January 1916. He won the Military Medal for ‘exceptional gallantry’ at La Basse-Ville in Belgium. On returning to Napier the handsome young hero became secretary to the Napier Hospital Board, a position he kept for the rest of his life. (The head of the board had been in the same unit.) In the 1950s he wrote to all existing Northe relatives, asking for information. He located the four letters from ‘John and Ann Northe’, plus the two letters from Elizabeth Ereaux, which form the basis for this part of the book.

  8 Will of John Northe, AAOW W3864 22760, Box 735, A, Archives New Zealand. Cotterill, Solicitor of the Supreme Court of New Zealand, noted that ‘this affidavit was read and explained by myself to the deponent [Ann Northe] and that the deponent appeared perfectly to understand the same and that made her mark therefore in my presence’.

  9 Nancy’s brother Thomas accompanied the celebrated botanist, Alan Cunningham, on an 1823 exploration in which Cunningham discovered ‘the great route of communication between Bathu
rst and Hunter River and the Liverpool Plains’. Cunningham’s accounts of these two journeys from Bathurst, ‘A Specimen of the Indigenous Botany … between Port Jackson and Bathurst’, and ‘Journal of a Route from Bathurst to Liverpool Plains’, were published in Barron Field (ed.), Geographical Memoirs on New South Wales; by Various Hands (London: John Murray, 1825); The Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cunningham-allan-1941 (accessed 14 August 2017).

  10 Form 11, No. of application 45905/51. No. 597. Vol. 75, Registrar General Office of New South Wales., State Archives & Records of the NSW Government, NRS 12937, Reels 5001-5048.

  11 Cartes de visites of Eliza Green and Mary O’Donnell, housemaid to Governor Darling, show them stylishly dressed in a showy Australian fashion. Mary may be wearing a cast-off from Lady Darling, as her dress is both rich and exceedingly fashionable.

  12 Correspondence of William Colenso, MS-Copy-Micro-0485-4, Alexander Turnbull Library. ‘We have still more of sickness and death than we could wish,’ Colenso wrote to his friend, the land agent Andrew Luff.

  13 Correspondence of William Colenso, MS-Copy-Micro-0485-4. Her death notice in the Daily Telegraph on 11 July 1890 noted Nancy died after ‘a painful illness’.

  14 Hilary Mantel, ‘Why I Became a Historical Novelist’, Reith Lecture, The Guardian, 3 June 2017, www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/03/hilary-mantel-why-i-became-a-historical-novelist (accessed 21 July 2017).

  15 Daily Southern Cross, 26 January 1875. It is possible his death notice was in an Auckland newspaper because his army acquaintances would be scattered across the North Island. There was no death notice in Hawke’s Bay newspapers.

  16 It’s noteworthy that John Northe never voted, even though he seems to have been politically conscious and interested in contemporary affairs. In 1853 the prerequisite for voting in New Zealand was that you owned land worth £50. His individual piece of land was worth £30, though as we have seen he spent £60 on land overall.

  17 William Colenso to Mantell, 24 October 1870. Correspondence of William Colenso, MS-Copy-Micro-0485-4.

  18 Ibid.

  19 ‘Hauhau’ or ‘Houhou’ was a generic name given by Pākehā to Māori religious movements of many different kinds. Based on an opposition to British colonisation, one version was Pai Mārire which originated in Taranaki and spread to the Bay of Plenty and Gisborne before finally coming to Napier in 1866. Another version was led by Te Kooti Arikirangi who, exiled to the Chatham Islands, saw Gabriel in a vision and set up what has been described as a liberationist theology, whose followers also practised guerrilla warfare against their Pākehā and Māori enemies. This often meant surprise attacks.

  20 James Cowan, The New Zealand Wars: A History of the Maori Campaigns and the Pioneering Period: Volume II: The Hauhau Wars (1864–72) (Chapter 31: ‘Te Kooti’s Attack on Mohaka’), www.nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Cow02NewZ-c31.html (accessed 21 July 2017).

  21 Judith Binney, Redemption Songs: A Life of Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki (Wellington and Auckland: Bridget Williams Books and Auckland University Press, 1995), 161.

  22 Ibid.

  23 An ‘old Drom boy’ referred to the British troops who rode dromedaries in the Middle Eastern and Indian parts of the Empire. It seems to imply old-fashioned, stuck in old ways.

  24 Waitangi Tribunal, ‘The Mohaka ki Ahuriri Report’ (Wellington: Waitangi Tribunal, 2004), 174, https://forms.justice.govt.nz/search/Documents/WT/wt_DOC_68598011/Wai201.pdf (accessed 5 September 2017); Hinuera Deed of Settlement 2014, http://ngatihineuru.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Hineuru-Deed-of-Settlement-for-initialling.DOCX.pdf (accessed 5 September 2017).

  25 Ibid., 174–76.

  26 The above report posits the view that McLean was an evil man and Pai Mārire innocents walking into a trap. Whether human nature is more complicated than this, I leave up to the reader.

  27 The parallel to the Vietnam War is notable — there too a highly mobile indigenous force was arrayed against an army, loaded down with heavy equipment, which could move only with laborious slowness.

  28 Hawke’s Bay Herald, 20 April 1869.

  29 Cowan, The New Zealand Wars, Volume II, Chapter 31.

  30 Ibid.

  31 Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). Quoted in James Wood, ‘On Not Going Home’, London Review of Books, 20 February 2014, 3.

  32 Mantel, ‘Why I Became a Historical Novelist’.

  The Failure of Language

  My cellphone rings. It’s Anabel, the nurse at Princess Alexandra Retirement Village. Her tone is careful. There’s a faint underlay of weariness, too. Since her job is looking after the elderly and smoothing their path towards death, it’s no wonder her voice has a compressed quality.

  ‘IT’S BESSIE.’

  What else could it be? I enter strange space, feel an almost delicious apprehension that Bess could be near death; it’s followed quickly by a sense of fright. Is she going to vanish from my life?

  Bess versus Bessie. Bess is my preferred name: it’s classy, infers a connection with ‘Good Queen Bess’; it was also what her family called her. Bessie is what the name plate says on her studio door. (A name plate that can be easily removed and replaced with another name, from a similar era: Hilda. Mollie. Thelma. Maggie.)

  ‘I’m afraid Bessie is starting to behave inappropriately.’

  I can’t remember if these were the exact words. Nurses, people in public life, have to be so careful of terminology. But the basic tenet was — trouble ahead.

  A sense of panic overtakes me.

  ‘What’s she been doing?’

  ‘She took her clothes off in the lounge downstairs.’

  I feel appalled. Deeply appalled. I also feel pity. Most of all I feel mortification. Shame.

  This is what comes from pretending she is Bess rather than Bessie. Bessie is who she really is. ‘Bess the Mess’, as I used to call her, only partly humorously — chagrin stuck in my craw — when I was looking after her seven years earlier and she had the episode which announced her dementia. I was trapped in her townhouse for Easter weekend, trying to answer her psychotic trajectories with reason, as if by simply reducing everything to rationality it would diminish the chaos. After three or four days I was the one who was going insane.

  Then she stabilised and slowly returned to her recognisable self. I’m not so sure now if this ‘recognisable self’ isn’t a fiction I have created. I am not sure my mother isn’t in fact an entirely fictional being who I have spent my life creating. I can’t explain this strangely powerful connection of a son to his mother — a homosexual son to his mother. Barthes said ‘my mother is my inner law’. Proust’s idea was that his mother spent her entire life preparing him for her death, readying him for that moment when he found himself ‘motherless’. Alone. (This was foreshadowed by that crisis that opens In Search of Lost Time, where Marcel calls out for his mother while lying in bed.)1 Barthes talks in terms of abandonitis.2 It is no respecter of intellectual status, this harrowing, constant need, interwoven as it is with hate and a deep desire to escape. Shut up, Freud, we’re not really interested in your tidy cul-de-sac. We’re in the wide, open prairie here.

  But I’m also unwaveringly aware Bessie is only herself, and I attend her and watch her, much as a zoo keeper might attend to an animal he has bonded with, come to love, whose sickness he watches with a queasy feeling in his stomach. There’s complicity, a realisation that he has spent his life caring for the animal but it could not care less. The animal is demanding its own wairua, is maintaining its own obdurate independence, by deconstructing, by manifesting the deep irrationality which is sickness and death.

  ‘What exactly has she been doing?”

  I’m aware my voice is filled with an almost reverent horror. But there’s also something else, a spark of hilarity, even pleasure in knowing that she is making a mess of herself. This is quickly cancelled by a deep sense of pity that she is betraying herself,
her presentation of a self. Bessie, who is courteous, almost innately well mannered, who even now tries to introduce me, again and again, to other inhabitants at the home: ‘This is my son, Pete.’

  ‘You’re all I’ve got,’ she says to me at times when we’re alone. I hate this. Or when I leave, and I bend down to kiss her cheek, she grabs hold of my hand and holds on tightly. ‘Thank you, Pete, for all you do for me. I’m so grateful.’ But when I relax and feel pleased, she adds, ‘Look after yourself. You’re all I’ve got.’

  There it is, the toxic mixture of pity, love, blackmail, need.

  ‘Poor Mum.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I hate to see your mother like that. She would hate it.’

  I recede further into shock. Deep shock. My mother. Taking her clothes off in public. Her old body. Exhibitionism.

  ‘We got her into her room. She couldn’t make sense of what she wanted to say. She thought she was constipated.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  This was the beginning of another stage of her deterioration. I came home and couldn’t tell Douglas. I couldn’t bear to put it into words. I was frightened he might laugh — not cruelly, but because it is horribly funny. Bess, the daughter of Jess, Gestapo officer of the manners police, taking her clothes off in public.

  How bad was it going to get? What could I say when people asked, ‘And how’s your mother?’ I couldn’t articulate what was happening to her. All I could say was, ‘Not good. She’s not so good now.’

  I dreamt up fantastic solutions. Sedating her. Keeping her in her room. I thought very clearly about suffocating her with a pillow. I went through how I would do it — visit her in her room as I always did. Nobody else was ever there. But I always came up against the snag: I would be observed entering her room and I would be the last person to see her alive. Besides, when I got down to it, I could not live with myself. I also knew she would fight. That incredible willpower that dominated her life, that sped her on, recklessly almost, to her one hundred and first year — she would fight against me stifling her. I could almost feel, in premonition, the slim column of her neck rising up against the pillow. She would kick, maybe even bite. (This is what she does when she starts to undress again during the drinks session a few days later. Has she become a figure of fun? Do they all shrug and laugh about her? Or is it a horrific presentiment of what is to come for them, too? Is it her ‘raging against the dark’?)