Something for the Birds

by Fahey, Jacqueline

  To the relief of all dentists and doctors I have abandoned this search for the place the pain is referred from. I don’t mean that I have accepted that it is all in my mind; I haven’t. I realise now, though, that finding out wouldn’t stop the pain. Whatever it is by now must be hopelessly chronic. I must accommodate this pain, live side by side with it, get on with it. I should just be glad I still have my top teeth.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Are These My Memories?

  Often when I start out remembering I’m obliged to understand that what I think I’m remembering may not be my own memories at all. My mother, out of pure muddle-headedness, would often give one daughter’s story to her sister. It could be my sisters’ sins that I carry around on my conscience, not my own. I do know it is true that my eldest sister did try first to bury me and then to drown me. Those stories had the vigour of truth. But do I really remember those traumatic experiences? I can never be sure, for they were repeated so often as some hilarious escapade that the way I felt about it all is obliterated in the shrieks of laughter around the kitchen table. Remember the day Cecil tried to murder Jacqueline or bury Jacqueline alive? The hole for my burial was already dug for trenching by Mr Gardner, our aptly named gardener. All Cecil had to do was to shovel in the earth. First, of course, she had to get me to lie down quietly, convince me that being buried alive was a good thing. Apparently that’s how it was until earth started getting into my mouth and eyes. My screaming saved me.

  The second attempt on my life was a long drawn-out affair. In the first scene I am in a critical condition in an upstairs bedroom, dangerously high temperature, it could go either way. Considering this desperate situation, how come my three-year- old sister could spirit me out of the house undetected? I suppose my mother couldn’t sit by my bedside every minute of the day, but still, where was she? Teaching piano in a downstairs room? Slipped out for the prescribed medicine? Cecil had plenty of time to dress me in raincoat and gumboots and head off down Waieti Road to Caroline Bay. All the way from Kitchener Square in Highfield – that is really quite a hike.

  There is one part of this saga I do remember, and that is that the sand was dark, black from the encroaching sea. That wet sand I remember clearly – a vast expanse scattered with shells and pieces of petrified wood. It was here that Cecil decided to dig a hole to hide our clothes while we were swimming. It made sense for anyone as hot as I was to take our clothes off, so that is what we did, went for a swim. We obviously somehow survived the wintry sea, but were pulled by the tide further down the beach. Our clothes were lost. I could not believe that there was no sign of their burial place. Now that is something else that is real – another long shot of the beach. I can retrieve that memory any time. Desolate, immense, black, that primal landscape. Night falling, we gave up the search and headed home. It seems extraordinary that we could have made it quite a distance up Waieti Road without attracting interest. Two wet, naked toddlers? An acquaintance of the family out to check her garden spotted us and rang Mum. An alarm had in fact been out for some time, but it had never occurred to the police that we would have got so far. Dr King, waiting at the ready, announced that such a turn of events would either kill me or cure me. It cured me.

  No sooner do I think about something like this than I am distracted by my mother and father’s reality. I mean, what were they doing in Timaru? Whatever made them decide to go back to live in their home town? Mum, a child prodigy, had been educated at the Dominican convent in Dunedin and gone on to the Conservatoire of Music in Melbourne, where she had three remarkable mentors: her Uncle Dennis, Professor Goll and Dion Boucicault. Did Maggie Gerity, my grandmother, when she was dying tell my mother to go to Melbourne? To study music at the Conservatoire and live with her brother Dennis? I think so.

  But how different from small-town life in Timaru this must have been. In Melbourne, living with Uncle Dennis and his two sons, she was queen of the household. According to the aunts, Uncle Dennis corrupted her faith in the Catholic Church, but Mum found him the kindest and most intelligent of men, and never stopped loving him. She believed him free of corruption. When I was five he visited us at Marchwiel. I remember climbing into the bus on a shining summer afternoon and choosing a seat next to a distinguished old man. I liked him because he had lovely hooded, clear blue eyes. We got to talking and he asked me where I was going. I said, ‘To Marchwiel,’ and he said, ‘Yes, that’s what I’d guessed,’ and then he got me talking. We had such fun getting to know each other I nearly missed my stop. I got up and said, ‘Goodbye,’ and he said, ‘It’s all right, this is my stop too,’ and we headed off up the hill to my house. When we got there he said, ‘I think I will just come in and say hello to your mother,’ and I said, ‘What a good idea because I would like you to meet her.’ Well, as it turned out, this was the famous Great-uncle Dennis and it was so good having him to stay. That we should have recognised each other, connected like that when there were lots of other children on the bus, had a magic quality. For most of his life, Uncle Dennis was banned from Timaru because he had given up his faith and had married out of the church. Now my mother made it possible for him to return to his home town and feel welcome.

  Great-uncle Dennis had left Timaru behind him a long time ago, but obviously had never forgotten his little sister Margaret Gerity, my mother’s mother. When he returned to Timaru after such a long absence, did he think about how it had been for him when he left for boarding school, the Jesuit college in Melbourne, left his mother for his own good? There was another sister too. She died in a convent in Sydney at just fourteen years old, calling for her mother who got there too late. It seems to me so sad they should have been wrenched away from home.

  Did Great-uncle Dennis think like this, or was it just part of the culture he emerged from, a culture that evolved to save the children from the enemy? This happened where Daniel O’Connell came from on the western seaboard of Ireland. Daniel O’Connell’s father was able to hold his lands by leaving them in the hands of his Protestant friend Hugh Falvey. As was true for much of the west of Ireland, most of their money came from smuggling. The smuggling smacks that brought illegal wines, brandies and velvets into the western bays carried away another cargo: the ‘Wild Geese’ students for the schools of Austria, Spain, Italy, Flanders and France. They sailed with Irish butter, hides, wool and slaucan – the seaweed that the Spanish loved. When I read how the women would go in their own smuggling smacks to the Spanish markets to sell their slaucan this seemed like a clue. My father had Basque blood. But that is not what I am following up here. I am suggesting that for my great-grandmother, sending children away to boarding school was part of her culture. That it was accepted in her family as a superior way to survive.

  Professor Goll, another of my mother’s mentors, had selected her as his special project. Goll had discovered and nurtured Eileen Joyce, so the future was looking pretty good for him until fate, or you could say bigotry, interfered. During the war, Goll had somehow escaped the attention of the bigots but now they were on his scent. Was it returned servicemen? Didn’t they want to work in the university with a German? The fact that Goll wasn’t a German didn’t really matter. He looked and talked like their idea of a German, and anyway Czechoslovakia was close enough. Before he left, he made Mum promise to wait for his return, and told her that his colleagues would ruin her technique.

  In the meantime, while she was waiting, she did some exploring round the city. One day she noted an advertisement for a pianist outside a grand theatre. After an interview, the famous producer Dion Boucicault took her under his wing. He appointed her his répétiteur.

  Trying to find out more about Boucicault, I discovered not one but two of these exotic, legendary creatures. My mother’s Dion of course had a daddy, but the daddy’s name was also Dion – full name Dionysus. Just too perfect. Dionysus senior lived up to his name, and married three times, the last time bigamously. Born in Ireland of an Irish mother and a French father, he was a hugely successful theatre prod
ucer. He produced Oscar Wilde’s first play in London, among many others (including his own). His son, born in 1859, must have been sixty-six when my mother met up with him in 1925. He had been in Melbourne in the 1880s, setting up a theatre there with his father; this second time around, his theatre supported the Dion Boucicault Drama Company, and it was here that Mum was hired by him. She was also official pianist with overseas companies visiting Boucicault’s theatre – Pavlova’s ballet company, Dame Nellie Melba’s opera company, and Gilbert & Sullivan productions. It was a life of achievement, excitement and glamour. My mother adored Boucicault, and I don’t doubt he was worthy of that adoration. We talk idly today of renaissance men, but Boucicault was truly one of them. He was also a Republican, hence his father’s close association with Oscar Wilde. Later, going to a film with Mum, she would often go back to her past. Brian Aherne, a Hollywood actor of the time, would turn up on screen and Mum would always refer to the fact Boucicault considered him a wooden actor. But Errol Flynn – that was different now. Errol had the holy fire, Errol was so charming.

  Mum would explain how Boucicault’s worldliness inspired the way he directed a play. How he understood the way working-class people behaved, and what dictated the behaviour of upper-class people. For example, his perception was crucial to the success of the Melbourne production of the Barrie play The Admirable Crichton. The Australian actress playing the heroine simply didn’t get it; she insisted on giving her butler special flirtatious attention. Boucicault explained that the whole point of the play is in the opening scene. Ladies did not know butlers were real people. Butlers existed to serve. Boucicault said, ‘When he pours you coffee, you do not see him, let alone look at him. You certainly do not smile at him. You do not speak to him except to give him orders. He is not real.’ The actress could not concentrate on this reality. Before he sacked her, he exploded into another lesson in social behaviour. ‘Another thing. You are a member of the aristocracy. You do not struggle out of your chair. With a straight back you rise and then walk out of your chair. Looking straight ahead, you glide to the door and wait for the butler to open it for you.’ Then, losing all control, he shrieked, ‘But you do not look at the butler!’

  Mum’s stories about those years with Boucicault were myriad. Dame Nellie Melba Mum presented as a woman of spirit and energy. In this scenario Mum’s mouth is open in shock and admiration as Nellie strides on stage for rehearsal. She is in night clothes, all silk, fur and diamonds. The conductor cries out, ‘You’re late!’ Then Nellie says something about stating the obvious, and, provoked, the conductor responds, ‘You are disgusting, Nellie Melba. All Melbourne is talking about you.’ And Nellie says, with a toss of her furs, ‘You worry, ducks, when they’re not talking about me.’

  And how about Chaliapin, the famous Russian opera singer? Just before he made his grand entrance on stage he’d shoot a great mouthful of half-chewed apple into the orchestra pit. No complaints could stop this disturbing practice. Cleansing his mouth before a performance had to be done at the very last moment, and it became almost like an obsessional good-luck gesture. If Mum ever got Chaliapin’s chewed apple in the face, she considered it an honour. Her greatest boast, after a few drinks, was to announce grandly, ‘I played for Chaliapin!’

  Years later, not long before the fall of the Soviet empire, I was to take up her cry. We were to meet a friend on a Russian cruise ship in Wellington harbour. For some reason best known to myself, I was rather drunk. It wasn’t until I was halfway through dinner that I understood that the cruise ship was called the Chaliapin. This information focused my resentment, specifically of the Russian crew’s sullen, critical observation of us. The dinner brought back memories of Teschemakers, the Catholic college I attended – the same dreary diet. After a particularly rude waiter dumped more dull, inedible food in front of me, I was compelled to give voice. I had to get across that deadly distance between us, get some response. Rising from my chair in the manner recommended by Boucicault for ladies of the aristocracy, I announced, in ringing tones, ‘My mother played for Chaliapin!’ I cried out twice, three times, and the silence just got thicker and more incomprehensible. About then, Fraser had an urge to go home, but as I wove down the gangplank, more like a drunken sailor than an aristocrat, I gave it one more go. ‘My mother played for Chaliapin!’ I cried.

  Mum toured Australia with Dion Boucicault’s company, and developed a powerful connection with the vast expanses of the interior. Its immense skies, its gold-red and raw umber colours. She had lots of money to buy gorgeous style and glamorous clothes, to enjoy the lavish entertainment. The theatre supplied food and wine of exquisite taste. After all, Pavlova or Dame Nellie Melba expected the very best.

  Mum worked in Australia through the twenties until she responded to Cecil Fahey’s plea to honour their pact and marry. But why did they decide to return to Timaru? Their families had dispersed throughout New Zealand, so back to the tribe certainly wasn’t the motivation. What, for heaven’s sake, were they doing, going back home where all their demons lurked? Perhaps memories of their happy childhood, their lyrical romance? The enduring image of Maggie Dennehy, twelve years old, flying reckless on her bicycle down Craigie Avenue? Already the ghetto queen, blessed by God to bring glory to her tribe, chosen?

  I used to boast about being, on my mother’s side, a direct descendant of Daniel O’Connell but now a degree of caution has crept into my boasting. I got cautious after an Irish taxi driver from the west of Ireland handed out a bit of reality. ‘You know what they would say in Cork? Throw a stone over the hedge and you’re sure to hit an O’Connell bastard.’ He got a kick out of telling me that. Serves me right, because it was O’Connell’s sister who was my great-great-grandparent anyway, so we weren’t bastards, that’s something. But I had to push it just that bit too far and ended up a bastard in his eyes.

  My parents inherited that mixture of pride and shame that was the inevitable consequence of being Irish in the British colonies in those days. They didn’t believe in God, but sent us to Catholic schools. My father would say, ‘Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.’ My sisters ended up at the Timaru Girls’ High School but I was educated entirely by the Catholic Church. Well, not entirely. When I was four I attended kindergarten at the Timaru Girls’ High School where Cecil, my older sister, must have started primary school. At lunchtime we got together to cause mischief when we emptied all the big girls’ shoes and socks into the kiddies’ pool. I was expelled, heralding a history of expulsions. The idea was that Cecil and I would be better off separated, so I was sent to the Timaru Convent of the Sisters of Mercy. Why me and not Cecil? Surely she must have been the ringleader? I suppose I must have been, generally speaking, a time-waster for the staff. For quite apart from the shoes and socks incident there was the case of the singlets and the pants.

  An obsessive teacher insisted I must put my singlet inside my pants. I explained that my mother always wore her singlet outside her pants and so did I. This became such a serious standoff in the lavatories that the headmistress was called. I demanded to know where Miss Barr’s singlet went, inside or outside her pants. She assured me inside her pants. I wanted to see. She said I had to take her word for it, that in polite society you did not show your pants. Well, she got around me and in time I put my singlet inside my pants. But now I know where my problem lay. I had been reared as a child of nature, running naked, wild and free, and schools seemed to me unreasonable places.

  Obviously, though, I felt real respect for Miss Barr, headmistress of the Timaru Girls’ High School. As a way of working out just how religiously inclined the Fahey household was, the Reverend Mother of my new school, the convent, gave me a tour of the place. We stopped in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary.

  ‘Now Jacqueline,’ the Reverend Mother inquired, ‘who is that?’

  After some thought, and no doubt inspired by my former headmistress’s cap and gown in assembly, I replied, ‘I’m not sure but I think it’s Miss Barr.’

/>   What’s interesting about this story is how quickly it got back to Miss Barr. As I was not aware that anything peculiar had been said, it certainly didn’t come from me. There must have been a lot more communication between the convent and the high school than one might have expected. Miss Barr herself was hugely flattered.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Index and Teschemakers

  At the beginning of the forties, my parents’ reading became an issue. When the nuns asked prying questions about our family life and Mum and Dad’s reading habits, I mentioned John O’Hara and Graham Greene as writers they talked about. This turned out to be a very bad idea. It seemed that both these writers were in ‘The Index’, a list which included the names of all the writers who might corrupt the vulnerable souls of the Catholic flock in New Zealand. Novels like Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock and The Power and the Glory were fascinating to my parents. In the holidays, around the dining-room table, as we absorbed our food we absorbed sin and redemption. That is, Graham Greene’s contemporary version of sin and redemption. Later, however, when The End of the Affair was published, my father dismissed that novel as plain muck.

  John O’Hara was another sort of disturbing revelation. Here was a guy of Catholic Irish background coming from America and daring to take an overall view of American society. He is this cool dude who has got the score. He’s an outsider, but then so is everybody else in his stories. When I was at art school I discovered Scott Fitzgerald, at that time largely forgotten, and he was the same sort of revelation as John O’Hara was for Daddy in the early war years. He read O’Hara compulsively and he struggled manfully with his own responses. O’Hara brought out the colonial prude, the narrow-minded Catholic, in him. Mostly he felt pretty superior to the locals in Timaru. In comparison, they made him feel quite broadminded – liberal, in fact. He could resent John O’Hara for exposing his gentility, for shocking him. Nevertheless, they were Cecil Fahey’s own experiences that O’Hara was enunciating. They were his own attitudes he was exposing. The Irish writers in Ireland whom Daddy admired were once removed from him. O’Hara had an immediacy that was indeed a revelation.