Frank and Jim running away from home seems to back Desmond’s take on things. (Tom, the eldest, also ran away, but by that time he was seventeen and had matriculated, so that wasn’t quite the same thing.) Later in life, ‘running away from home’ was a joke among the partying brothers, but it can’t have been a joke at the time. A lot of jokes about their growing up sounded like the sorts of stories men bring back from the war, full of risk, gore and harsh laughter. However, I do think Silverstream was true. There was always that story of Dad’s, about the three little boys who went running down to see the first train to run through Southland. Tom, Frank and Cecil were waiting, and saw it coming, their first train. They went rushing down the paddocks of Silverstream to intercept it, this magic dragon that got bigger and bigger as it swept towards them. The guy driving the train saw the little boys racing down the hill and gave a great pull on the train’s whistle. The boys fell instantaneously on to their backs, petrified that the monster had spoken.
I cannot write about myself as a painter as if I just jumped up out of the concrete fully formed. I am the result of pure chance, of other desperate lives and decisions made way back in time. Nothing makes any sense if I don’t examine all that. This thinking back into time is not about conceit but about survival, mine and that of the people I came from. All the Faheys’ stories are about survival.
And this takes me on to my father. There is something about Dad, something that bothered him. I was reading somewhere recently an entry in an essay on the Easter Rising and I remembered what it was that bothered him. The entry went like this:
24th April, 1916, Easter Rising by Volunteers and Citizen Army in Central Dublin.
29th April. Police order insurgents to surrender 3–12th May. Execution of fifteen leaders of the rising, including Pearse and Connolly.
My father had been in Sling Camp, England before he ended up in the Army hospital in Dublin, on 13 or 14 May 1916, literally days after the Easter Rising. Why was he in hospital in Dublin? I just don’t know. I rather think he must have become sick in Sling Camp. My father obviously hit it off with the Irish nurses in his ward. His name, Cecil Alphonsus Fahey, was the trigger for their confidences. The name Fahey, or more correctly Fahy, was important to these Gaelic League-educated young nurses. After they had translated his name into the old Gaelic they started on his mentality. They had something they wanted to show him, something down in the basement. (If he could get out of bed and go under the hospital he can’t have been very sick, or badly wounded.) What they showed him was a blood-soaked wall and a floor stained with blood. The blood of the heroes of the Easter rebellion.
These nurses had refused to clean up the blood. They said they wanted it left as a memorial for the gallant young soldiers of Ireland, and as evidence. When the English soldiers dragged the dying and the wounded young men from their hospital beds, the nurses had clung to their countrymen, screaming, furious. Some of their patients had had to sit in chairs to be executed because they couldn’t stand. These young idealistic women were not going to recover from that trauma easily, and they took it out on Dad.
From their point of view, once he had absorbed the facts, he must leave the company of murdering oppressors. Over the years he recounted some horrendous details of his first visit to Ireland factually, as if all this was something he was still coming to terms with and he was still, what, twenty-one? As if the Timaru Boys’ High School and the Easter Rising were the divide. He always remained equivocal, uncertain of his response to being there just after the Easter Rising.
They didn’t end there, his painful surprises. Dad and his friend did a tour of Scotland and Ireland that year after the war, financed by the friend’s father as a reward for being alive. Dad was a Catholic, his friend was Protestant. In the Highlands and in Ulster they both passed themselves off as Protestants, and in Southern Ireland they were Catholics. I doubt very much if this ruse worked. These were desperate sectarian times, and if Dad could pass I don’t think his friend could. Catholic antennae would be working at a time when Sinn Fein leaders were being arrested. Two soldiers on leave from the British Army? Were they innocents abroad?
On their last stop, Galway, they stayed with Dad’s relations, Gaelic-speaking fisher folk in a nearby village – a decision I can’t help but think was influenced by Dad’s friendship with the Irish nurses in 1916. Their first nasty surprise was to be informed that they should have stayed with Dad’s rich relations in Galway City first. Now that he had gone about things the wrong way, they would not want to see him. Dad was amazed that the Galway Faheys could indulge in such snobbery at such a desperate time in history. This was at the end of 1919. Ireland had just declared itself a Republic. The Republican representatives had assembled in Dublin and founded Dail Eireann, the Irish Assembly. At the beginning of the following year the Black and Tans were unleashed on Ireland. They were Dad’s fellow soldiers who had just finished fighting Germany, and their brutality became notorious. It surely must have been clear to my father’s relations in Galway, whether middle class or fisher folk, that their very survival was at stake. That here they had the proverbial powder keg, and the matches were going to be put to it any time.
The next nasty surprise was the poverty in the fishing village. Dad and his friend had the wit to pay their way, but that wasn’t easy. Their hosts resisted any contribution to the kitty, and it took a great deal of manoeuvring to get around that resistance. They were heartbreakingly generous with what little they had. Dad, having been in the Medical Corps at Sling Camp, recognised their major health problems, like the scabs that formed on the heads of the children. No doubt he had seen them on the heads of men who survived the trenches. But his relations believed they were a healthy thing, that once the scabs had formed and hardened, the children usually lived. Malnutrition and its attendant ills – rickets, various eye diseases, and so on – were all on show.
But those Irish still managed to have a good time. Dad and his mate were invited to a dance at the crossroads. Some of the best fiddlers in the west of Ireland would be there, and the prettiest girls in all of Ireland would be dancing. Sounds amazing – and so it was, until the priest turned up. He was in a towering rage at this pagan rite, and with a big leather whip started lashing at the girls. Dad leapt to the defence of the girls and grabbed the whip from the priest. He got in a few powerful whips of his own before the girls, en masse, fell upon him, hitting and punching. They’d had their suspicions, but now they were sure these young visitors were Protestants. No Catholic would assault a priest. Very possibly they knew all along that Dad’s friend was a Protestant. They were, however, convinced those Faheys from New Zealand had become turncoats. Dad and his friend were expelled forthwith.
My father did not care for the rock from whence he was hewn. He found it a dark and desperate place, and not one tree in sight. I expect he never understood that the English had got rid of all the forests on the same principle that jungles were napalmed in Vietnam. Give the natives nowhere to hide. Did he visit Annaghdown, Galway, where his grandfather Thomas Fahey had married Sabine Boyle in 1858, before leaving for Southland, New Zealand, in 1860? If he did, he never said so.
When Dad returned to Sling Camp, did he continue working in the Medical Corps? The end of the war wouldn’t have been the end of his duties. They were busy at Sling Camp, busy incubating the flu that they would transport back to New Zealand. Dad had Matric, and had written in his application for the Medical Corps that he intended to do medicine after the war. (Desmond Fahey says he had started medicine before the war.) As a returned serviceman of Irish Catholic background, he was offered a scholarship to study at Trinity College, Dublin. It seemed too good to be true, and so it was. You didn’t need just Matric to get into Trinity, you needed a BA. So Dad was booked back on that boat again, headed for home.
When that boat turned up, the returning soldiers were in bad health and bad temper. Just totally pissed off with each other, and with the year-long wait and nothing to do. The return journey w
as a nightmare, and Dad’s visit to Galway had been a debacle.
But there was, for my father, a strange culmination to his experiences in Ireland. When he and Mum visited there in 1948 they felt they could live in Dublin, and that we children could all commute to university in London. After all, my youngest sister Terry was already there, studying music at Trinity College. Dad, a dentist, was appalled at the standard of dentistry in both Ireland and England, and was sure he could make a good living there. It never happened. He was uncertain of his health and lost courage. How different our lives would have been if they had made that decision.
While they were exploring Ireland with a view to living there, Mum went about searching faces, looking for resemblances that would show where we came from. She didn’t find it there. They found that likeness where they least expected it – in Trinidad, where they were obliged to spend two weeks because there were pirates cruising the Caribbean. One morning they were attracted to a magnificent storefront displaying luxury goods, including a white Bechstein piano. Over the lintel of the entrance was inscribed Fahẽy, a Spanish adaptation of Dad’s name. Mum, deprived of a piano for months, could not resist. She entered and proceeded to become deeply involved with Beethoven.
A crowd collected, then down the back stairwell came a man. Mum, in amazement, stopped playing. He was the image of Cecil Alphonsus Fahey. They stayed with this Fahẽy for their last few days in Trinidad and heard his story. As Mum and Dad related it, after Cromwell’s brutal march through Ireland, Galway finally was defeated. Most of the mothers and fathers were killed and the children shipped into slavery in the West Indies. The slave trade was big business in Ireland. When Daniel O’Connell talked about the Irish being the Blacks of Europe, I did not realise that slavery was included. Prendergast, in his Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, names four Bristol merchants who were the most active of the slave-trading agents. For illustrating the formal, legal way in which the horror was commercialised, Prendergast quotes ‘one instance out of many the case of Captain John Vernon who as agent of the English Commissioner (who then governed Ireland), contracted “under his hand, of date 14th September 1653” with Messrs Sellick and Leader of Bristol to supply them with two hundred and fifty women of the Irish nation above twelve and under forty-five years of age. Also three hundred men between twelve years and forty-five years of age.’ Following the conquest of Jamaica in 1655, the Governor of that island asked for a thousand girls from Ireland to be shipped there – to the most appalling kind of slavery. Secretary Thurloe’s Correspondence Vol. 4 gives Henry Cromwell’s reply to this modest request in his letter of 11 September 1655. Briefly, he explains that they have to use force in taking these girls. That he is eager to supply as many girls as the governor needs for his purposes, and he ends his letter: ‘Blessed be God, I do not finde many discouragements in my work, and hope I shall not, soe longe as the Lord is pleased to keep my harte uprighte before him.’ Jesus! Give us a break, Mr Henry Cromwell of the uprighte harte.
In Ireland, over this terrifying time, five out of six people perished. Ireland lay void as a wilderness.
The boat sailed from Trinidad and I don’t think my parents really wanted to know more about Ireland and her history of enslavement. Mr Fahẽy had to have known that it wasn’t just the children who survived the siege of Galway City who were sent into slavery. But perhaps he had developed the same sort of mentality as my parents. If you wanted to survive, it wasn’t something you could afford to dwell on. You could end up having no heart for the business of living.
* In 1867 John Manning had set up the New Zealand Celt newspaper. With Father W. J. Larkin he expressed support for a group of Irish nationalists called the Fenians. When the news reached the West Coast that three Fenians had been hanged in Manchester, there were funeral processions in Charlestown and Hokitika, where some 1000 people broke into the cemetery and planted a wooden Celtic cross. Soon after, the attempted assassination in Australia of Prince Albert by a suspected Fenian triggered a minor panic on the West Coast. Special constables were sworn in, the 18th Regiment was sent south, and Larkin, Manning and five others were arrested. Both men received one month in jail and a fine of £20 for seditious libel. Thanks to Dean Parker for this information.
CHAPTER FOUR
Marchwiel
I must have been about four when we moved to Marchwiel. We were four small girls with about eighteen months between us – only just enough time for my mother to recover from her previous pregnancy. There was Cecil, Jacqueline, Barbara and Terry. We were born in Timaru, in Kitchener Square, a select enclave at the top of Highfield. Moving to Marchwiel was Mummy and Daddy’s dream come true. It was, as it turned out, also my dream come true.
The truth is that nothing since has lived up to Marchwiel. I have never loved a place so much ever again. A long wide hall ran from one end of the house to the other. The large kitchen at the back of the house was parallel to the hall. When the kitchen doors were open you could glimpse the green of the kitchen garden in the distance. The walls of this house were quite remarkable. They were kauri, then a thick mud wall, then a gap of six feet, and then mud wall and kauri wall again. That dead air trapped between those thick walls was later to conduct the raging flames around my house and consume it. But I think I can now claim Marchwiel as my own because I have held it in my imagination all my life, protected, safe and loved. To do that has been painful, but I can’t let it go. There is only before and after Marchwiel.
The original settlers who built Marchwiel were English but of Dutch origin. I rather think they built the house about 1865, hence the name Marchwiel, which means the mark of the wheel in the muddy ground. Is it reminiscent of the great trek of the Boers out of the Cape into Africa? But there is something else. When I was young we saw as a family the first film of Dickens’ David Copperfield. In the opening sequence there is a loving take on, of all places, Marchwiel: the camera zooms in under the verandah and through the open French doors. The delicate trellis-work of the verandah’s supporting beams is a feature of this house too, and it is in Cornwall. It is the idyllic house where David Copperfield is born. If I should chance upon Marchwiel now, I know what I would immediately think. That it was built by an English lady and gentleman who had lived for many years in India. That they retired to New Zealand and built their dream home. The perfect site is outside the Timaru boundary, up on a hill from where they can see the Alps. The verandah is wide enough and strong enough to drive a carriage around. The French doors are elegant, narrow and high. So open, and yet so enclosing. To my mind, it is the house that makes the most sense of any house I have ever seen.
The drive swept from the back gate, past a long grove of flourishing oak trees. The acorns fed the pigs who lived behind the oak trees. On the left-hand side were the stables and the outhouses. In front of the kitchen was a big vegetable garden. The drive widened in front of the house, then plunged away again down a wooded hill. There was a big padlocked gate at the bottom of the drive. In the paddock in front of the house various horses stood about, brooding. In the background there were some giant redwoods and Norfolk pines, blocking a view of the sea away in the distance.
New Zealand is a small place and it was smaller in the thirties, but that doesn’t mean children led similar lives. Ruth Park, in A Fence Around the Cuckoo, describes her New Zealand childhood with the simplicity of a Pushkin story. But though we had a Catholic background in common, our experiences of the Depression years in New Zealand were very different. This was a time of prosperity and ease in my family, and the closest I can come to it would be some of Turgenev’s descriptions of country life in Russia.
Next to the stables there was a long bunk room, a refuge for men on the road, though mostly they moved on. Some stayed for a while doing odd jobs around what was a small farm. The pigs didn’t spend much time in the pig pens, and in my memory are forever rummaging around under the oak trees. Then there were the hens in a big hen run, the horses in the front paddock and the cows in the botto
m paddock. Some sheep and Rammy, who serviced the ewes; numerous dogs; cats under the house; and tortoises mostly hibernating in the garden. The house was overflowing with what Mummy called ‘help in the house’ – young women who did everything. They had a bed, food and a bit of cash. There was also a boss woman who was in charge generally. I did not like this woman, who ran away with the man I loved.
In my memory he is always on a big horse, staring down at me, willing me to be the best child rider in New Zealand. Apparently he was so confident of my ability to ride a horse he put me on Digger. Normally this guy in charge of the place had me riding on the property. The day of the accident he obviously decided to try something new. I only remember, like a film clip, when Digger panicked. We were at the bottom of the steep hill and maybe a car approached. I only remember losing control and my hero shouting instructions at me. Digger took off at a full gallop, running parallel with the bottom paddock. When he turned into our gate he abruptly stopped and I shot over his head. My left leg has carried the scar from that fall ever since, but that was nothing compared with my mental anguish, the shame of having betrayed my hero with my hysterical sobbing. Six weeks later, when I was allowed out of bed, he was gone. Run away with that woman.
There is another film clip from this episode. My mother is driving up a muddy road to a remote cottage. But I can’t have been there, so I must have heard Mummy telling Daddy. She asked my hero to come back – not the woman, just him. He said no. She, that woman, was naked – half naked? – on the porch. He was astride a horse. Was the horse Digger?
Something for the Birds Page 5
