I read something recently about Edwin Guinness, and how he often took his son Roland with him to the back-country stations on stock deals. His family then bought Glentanner, at the end of the wide expanse of the Mackenzie Country. Frank must have known Glentanner. Is that where he developed his love of native plants – native gentians, edelweiss, Mt Cook lilies? Is this also where Frank developed his attitude towards the Republican movement? Edwin’s brother Arthur was a lawyer, and later a Liberal politician, who ‘sprang into prominence at once by his brilliant and persistent advocacy on behalf of the Fenian prisoners for whom he was a junior Counsel’.*
Reading about these guys raises a possibility. Was it listening in on the talk of men of this sort that politicised Frank? Something or someone did. How come Frank’s thinking was so different from his brothers’ when war broke out? The eldest, Tom, couldn’t go to war – he had a broken arm which had been badly set – but he would have gone if he could. Dad was already in the Reserve, and I don’t doubt Milt would have gone if he was of age. As for Jim, he was too young as well, but he longed to be a pilot. In the 1930s he was flying about in his own plane, and in the Second World War, as dramatic Major Fahey, he was in charge of the Medical Corps at Burnham Camp outside Christchurch.
It’s odd that Frank was the intellectual who thought in truly philosophical terms, who inspired my father to view the Mackenzie in poetic transformations, who was analysing politics in terms of his own history, and yet he never went to secondary school. He made money from his stagecoaching business – money that sent my father and Jim to university – but he was obviously mixing with and listening to some pretty interesting guys.
If Frank had got to where he was going, I expect he would have met up with the father of the man I married. Fraser’s father rode with Lawrence of Arabia and had a camel called Daisy who was a heavy smoker and was shot from under him. Ivan McDonald, to his eternal anguish, lost his most loving companion. Anyway, Frank never got to North Africa. He wrote from Sierra Leone to say that he was fine, they had travelled up the coast from Cape Town; but from Sierra Leone he wrote, ‘God knows where to.’ I assume God knows where was with Fraser’s father’s camel corps in North Africa. It was a small world.
Frank contracted some awful tropical sickness in Sierra Leone and became seriously delirious as they left. There is a glimpse of him, passed down through time, balancing precariously on the railing of the ship, raving in the tropical heat, lurching and falling and clambering up again. Did he fall into the sea? Dad did suggest to me that he might have been shot. That, he said, could be the fate of a soldier who disrupted the troops, undermined morale. However he died, my father carried the memory of his eldest brother in his heart for ever. His love of the Mackenzie Country was like his memorial to Frank. The cerulean blue lakes, the golden tussock, the spiralling sky larks were the triggers for his memory of Frank.
Both Mum and Dad had great love and respect for Grandpa. If Timaru was like the Wild West, cowboy country, Grandpa was to become the sheriff who brought intelligent order to the town. But he hadn’t planned to be a policeman: fate forced that upon him. He owned his own farm, Silverstream, so believed he was in a position to run the risk and buy the first thrasher in New Zealand. But the Depression of 1880 happened and the bank foreclosed. They took everything. When he read in the paper there was a job in the police force in Timaru he decided to apply, but didn’t have the money for the train fare. He walked from Tokomairiro, near Milton, to Timaru and, perhaps surprisingly, got the job. The applicant had to be six foot two, so he was tall enough, but he was a Catholic – and the police force at that time was made up of Orange Irishmen and not Catholics. Grandpa would not have tried to deceive them – and any Orangeman would have known that Fahey was an Irish Catholic name. It was possibly just luck that he got the job, plus his suitable height.
His first posting was to Auckland, where he inspected the ships coming into the Auckland Harbour. Placed in a high spot in Parnell, Grandpa had an observation tower on top of a house. (The house is still there in Garfield Street, and my father died just round the corner from it, in Stanwell Street. My father came full circle.) The ships coming into the harbour dumped the fruit that had gone off on the voyage in a huge dumpster under the cliffs. The sea came in much further in those days. Frank, Tom and Dad would tie a tope around their brother Jim’s ankles and lower him into the dumpster to get the better oranges to take to school. If he’d slipped he’d have drowned in a bin of rotten fruit.
To get to the Marist school on the Parnell Road involved more hazards. The barrow boys on K’ Road guarded their territory like wild terrier dogs, Dad told me. They also harboured a special resentment toward upstart Catholic boys furthering their education. That’s something else that doesn’t fit in. If Dad’s family were living on Garfield Street, and the Marist school was on Parnell Road, how come they had to fight the barrow boys on K’ Road? I don’t get it. All the same, some Catholic boys must have had to come that way to school, so did the Fahey boys take another route to school to support their classmates? Tom, Frank, Cecil and Jim must have made a pretty formidable gang just on their own.
When Jim later ran away from home, he did the classic thing: he ran away to sea. That sailing ship toured the South Seas for a year and was on her return voyage to Timaru when she hit a cyclone. One of the masts partially snapped and began to drag the ship off balance. The concrete at its base cracked, and Jim decided that the concrete pieces needed to be dropped into the sea so that the mast could be jettisoned. He was strapped to the boom, and as it swept out over the raging sea he’d drop a lump of concrete. Some guys would be waiting with the next lump as he swept back. I imagine that the practice Jim had in Parnell, being lowered into the bin of discarded fruit by his brothers, stood him in good stead here. Anyway, he returned a Superman sort of hero and Grandpa was obliged to forgive him for running away. Jim finished his schooling and went down to Dunedin to do medicine. At that time the Dunedin university football team was the equivalent of the All Blacks, and Jim was invincible. The opposing team for one big game decided to stop Jim Fahey. During the scrum they ripped his pants off – but Jim went ahead anyway and scored. There was an hysterical roar of applause and standing ovations. Jim was a campus celebrity. Maybe with his wild nature he would have been better off at sea.
And then there was his eldest brother, Tom. He too had his stories of cowboy behaviour. Tom managed the Kerridges’ business in Gisborne and during the Depression the manager from Auckland attempted to sack him. Tom explained to him he wouldn’t be able to do that. He had, Tom said, a wife and two small children. The manager said nevertheless he was obliged to sack him. Tom explained that if the manager sacked him he would be obliged to kill him. It was clear to the manager that Tom meant what he said and Tom kept his job. He ended up an executive of General Motors, but that was not to my mind his true calling. He was so grand when he recited poetry with such a riveting certainty and power, and with his good looks would have made a superb Hollywood star. Acting was his natural calling.
But back to Grandad and Auckland. Was it here, completely out of his tribal area, that Grandpa gained his independence, his clairvoyant overview of society? I think so. All this time he was preparing himself to be the sheriff of Timaru, to bring humanity to the cowboy town as in High Noon. The idea of sending young people to prison appalled him and he did everything to see that this would never happen when he was in charge. Whether the child was a Methodist, a Catholic, a Presbyterian, a whatever, his procedure was always the same. He would order a meeting with the child’s parents, teacher and priest or minister, or anyone else who was relevant. It was a demonstration of his powerful personality that they saw their inclusion as a compliment rather than as a task. I wonder if that mentality wasn’t inherited from the culture of the west of Ireland. There is a description of Daniel O’Connell meeting with his tribesmen outside Parliament in London. It was just after he had been elected Member of Parliament for Clare and he was conferr
ing with his very large extended family, sitting on the ground in a circle, arms around each other. Afterwards some other English MPs tried to explain to him that he was not behaving with the dignity of a leader. I don’t know what O’Connell’s reply was, but I can well imagine it. Something about how he was only there while these guys wanted him to be. This was also true of the Highlands: you did not keep your position by oppression but by the value of your contribution to your immediate society.
But Grandpa wasn’t all sweetness and light. Some time between working on Mt Cook Burnett’s station and starting up his business, Frank was working on a large estate outside Timaru. It turned out to be a very temporary job. Frank had spent his day off in town. Outside a hotel – Great-grandma’s hotel, was it? – he saw his employer up in the front of his carriage. He approached him and politely asked if Mr Fairhaven could give him a lift back when he was leaving for his estate. Fairhaven, that’s what we will call him anyway, leapt down from his carriage, whipping Frank across his face with his horsewhip. He yelled something about impudent Irish upstarts and disappeared into the hotel. Frank told his father what had happened, and John David Fahey was enraged. He went in search of Fairhaven, and encountered him coming out of the hotel. My grandfather grabbed the whip from Fairhaven’s hand and slashed him across his face with it, calling out, ‘Don’t you ever touch a son of mine ever again’, and that was the end of it. Cowboy town? I think so. It could have been Destry Rides Again.
Then there was the problem of schooling. In those days if you were Catholic and not rich enough to send your child to boarding school, your child left school at twelve or thirteen. My mother’s family the Dennehys somehow got around it, but Grandpa Fahey was made an example of. He was told that if he sent his children to the Timaru Boys’ High School he would be excommunicated. And excommunicated he was. When the last of his four sons matriculated, Grandpa went back to Mass and took up where he had left off without twitching a muscle. But to have estranged himself from his tribal group meantime, to have faced eternal damnation – that was a brave thing to do.
Another time of intense feeling for the Fahey family was when the boys came back from the war, bringing the flu with them. Sling Camp was a good place to incubate that flu: a lot of not very healthy men crowded together, eating poor food, in worse conditions. I don’t know why they waited there for a year before they found the ships to bring them home. The suspicion was that now the war was won they didn’t matter any more. Dad was lucky to spend the year touring around the British Isles with a rich friend. Most had to stay put and add rage against the government to all their other problems. Everyone knows what happened when they got home. They gave the flu to so many of the hopeful young women who stood in line to welcome them home. The Dennehy women were lucky, but a number on their street did die, among them a beautiful young woman with red hair and white skin who had just become engaged to her returned soldier. Her death frightened them.
The only member of the Fahey or Dennehy household to contract the flu was Jim. By this time he was at medical school and handled himself in a very professional manner. It was a hot summer holidays and Jim ordered his family to stay away from him. With three big jugs of water he went out on to their back lawn. He took all his clothes off and settled himself under a tree. He spent the next twenty-four hours tormented with vomiting and diarrhoea – all pretty foul-looking black stuff. He was one of the few to survive. I expect the water helped.
It is interesting that the stories that sustained the Dennehys are about remarkable women but the stories about the Faheys are all about remarkable men. There was a very real love and respect, nevertheless, for Tessie, Lil and my grandmother Ellen Cavanagh, John David’s wife. Tessie, the last born and the only girl, needed company in a household of boys, so the old Irish fostering system was called upon. Lil Cavanagh, a little girl from way down south, joined their household. They stayed together, those three women, for the rest of their lives. Lil married the youngest son, her cousin Milton, and lived happily ever after with her extended family until Milt died.
My mother and my father loved John David, and I was his chosen, because as he lay dying he said to my mother, who was his chosen daughter-in-law, ‘If it’s a boy, it’s John David and if it’s a girl she will be Jacqueline.’ I had to learn to live up to Jacqueline, which is quite simply the female of Jack or John. In Galway, names could have as many different meanings as they have in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I could be Jacqueline, Jacque, Jack, John and Johnny. They were all used in the family for different situations. Johnny became my name of intimacy with my mother. Then there was Black Jack, Red Jack and White Jack. Grandpa was a Black Jack, as Jacqueline Kennedy’s father was a Black Jack. It was part of Galway’s connection for thousands of years with France. My mother made me understand how important my name was, how it was part of history. And that Grandpa had chosen me. No one in the family ever, ever called me Jackie. After Jackie Kennedy happened and every fifth child born in New Zealand was called Jackie, I had to learn not to cringe when I was called Jackie; Jackie Kennedy hated it too. This isn’t snobbery; it’s all about the reason why – respect. And remembering.
My mother always knew who to blame for the bad spelling of Irish names in New Zealand – the drunken remittance men. They had the task of writing down the details of the Irish immigrants. Mum was very proud of the fact that the name Dennehy had not been messed about with. That was all very well, but she was forgetting that all the other names in her own and Dad’s family had come to New Zealand much earlier. By the time her father, Michael Edmund Dennehy, got here, the drunken remittance men could have been redundant. Nevertheless, she would announce ‘No “e” before the “y” in Gaelic!’
Fahey should have rightly been inscribed Fahy; Cavanagh should have been Kavanagh. These things rankled, but the names had already been anglicised. The Ordinance Survey of Ireland had been ordered in 1824 to anglicise Irish names. This was carried out almost entirely by English personnel and was accompanied by what was in real terms a land grab. From that time on, the people of Ireland had no voice of their own; they were passive and spoken for. Not only had the boundaries of their land been redrawn, so too had the boundaries of their imaginations.
The Tuatha De Danaan, from whom the Faheys claimed descent, arrived in Ireland 4,000 years ago. To the Irish that is oral history; to the English it is legend. For empires, the only real history is their own. The Tuatha De Danaan were the children of the goddess Dana. They wrested Ireland from the Firbolg in a bloody battle. Sreng, the strongman of the Firbolg, cut off the hand of the King of the De Danaan. The King of the De Danaan must be without blemish, so he was thrown out. He languished in outer darkness for seven years, but he was not idle. He had his artificer make him a new silver hand to articulate. He then returned and regained his empire, his new appendage a perfectly lovely sleight of hand.
There is another important aspect of the De Danaan. In Ireland to this day they are believed to be necromancers. Perhaps what I am doing here in writing this memoir is part of the ancient preoccupations of those necromancers. I am attempting to predict the future by communicating with the dead, examining the corpses of the past for the signs, the secrets, of the lives they once lived.
When my grandfather, my namesake, died in 1929, just before I was born, he had the biggest funeral South Canterbury had ever seen. Ironically, he had bought back his beloved Silverstream that same year. Then the Depression set in, and he lost the property very soon after. It was as if Paradise was regained, then lost again. For twenty years he had been senior sergeant in Timaru, then inspector in Invercargill, but that was not why people were drawn to his graveside. Well, why did they come? Because John David stood his ground, and knew who he was and so, in the end, did his mourners.
All my life John David Fahey was a sort of spiritual mentor for me – an example of courageous intent. The stories of my grandfather, gifted to me by my father, helped to form me. But I have to understand that nothing in a family is as
simple as that. I have to remember that old Irish God, the one who looks three ways. Where you are looking from decides what it is you see. All memories are true, but within families they can be hopelessly at odds.
My cousin Desmond Fahey, the son of Lil Cavanagh and Milton Fahey, certainly views a very different, more fractured, grandfather from mine. Desmond has been so helpful with all the details about where the Faheys came from, their arrivals, their marriages, their children, their deaths, all those dates. I have not seen much of Desmond since we were children, so his viewpoint hasn’t influenced me, but I have to recognise that what he sees in his mind’s eye must be acknowledged. That his viewpoint is as real for him as my viewpoint is to me.
I think of it as starting with two little boys crossing the Parnell Road. Were they naughty little boys following their brothers to school? Jim was, say, eighteen months older than Milt, and in charge of him. Crossing the road, Jim let go of Milt’s hand and bolted off in front of the tram. Milt, chasing after him, was hit by the tram and badly injured. Next scenario: Grandpa is there. He picks up Milt and runs up Parnell Road into the Domain, running so fast and as the crow flies, to the Auckland Hospital, and Milt’s life was saved. There is no suggestion that Milt suffered permanent damage from the accident. He was a top athlete at Timaru Boys’ High School. He was a member of the First Fifteen and the First Eleven; he was also a champion swimmer. However, the fact that Jim let go of his hand was not to be forgotten.
Milt was the youngest, and perhaps it seemed to him that his father didn’t care so much, that time had made him indifferent. There is in Desmond’s account absolutely no mention of Silverstream, only of Grandpa buying a swampy bit of land in the Invercargill area. This was land for Milt to work and supposedly to inherit. It needed more development than had been anticipated and was, Desmond guessed, sold. All very different from the story my father told me. There is no Silverstream here, or courageous walk from Tokomairiro to join the police force in Timaru. No buying back of any lost paradise, no catastrophic slump. Desmond’s story is about John David Fahey giving his youngest son Milt a hard time.
Something for the Birds Page 4
