Something for the Birds

by Fahey, Jacqueline

  I have just been reading William Faulkner: American Writer by Frederick R. Karl and was put out by Karl’s dismissive, in fact positively nasty, attitude to O’Hara. My response is an urge to read all O’Hara again. Anyone who makes Frederick Karl feel that defensive has got to have something going for him. Certainly in the early forties O’Hara helped my parents define themselves, helped them to not be intimidated by their own confusions about who they were. O’Hara had already been there, and my parents recognised the landmarks in his stories. They were still travelling in that same country, but O’Hara’s stories supplied some sort of map to guide them. My parents could not bear too much of their own historical past but could read about parallel lives in the present. They read about that avidly.

  But come on now, am I implying that at the age of, say, twelve or thirteen I understood what motivated my parents? Of course I didn’t, but I did have random intuitions about how important their reading was to them. Now I understand their reading was powerfully connected to their survival.

  In the meantime, while Mummy and Daddy were adapting to town living and the war, we sisters had to adapt to Teschemakers, the Dominican college and boarding school in Oamaru we attended after Marchwiel burned down. William Teschemaker was an English gentleman of Dutch descent, and the lovely homestead was built in 1863. Lord Teschemaker laid out and planted the grand garden – the biggest redwood in New Zealand, the biggest oak, the biggest this and the biggest that.

  It is not surprising that my mother should have chosen the Dominicans. They had educated her, and her mother. Teschemakers was, however, different from most Catholic schools for girls in that it was a college, not a convent. It had no noviciate. Young women at Teschemakers were not prepared for a marriage to Christ. There was a serious intention to shape our minds independently, to develop our conscience, to concentrate on our personal development.

  My own reading there was dictated by how much the book I was reading could be mistaken for a missal. My missal had a delicate mother-of-pearl cover and then a leather cover for the mother-of-pearl cover: protection. Perfect for deception. A defence against boredom, cold and hunger – or rather, Mass, cold, hunger and boredom. Small editions of the classics fitted perfectly into that leather cover. Mummy had various series of these classics and was happy to think I was so keen to take them back to Teschemakers. What betrayed me was my concentration. I mean even the nuns knew that what was inside those mother-of-pearl covers wasn’t liable to hold anyone’s absolute attention for a whole hour.

  If Mummy and Daddy recognised John O’Hara, I recognised Jane Eyre. After all, here I was in a pretty alarming boarding school, and there was Jane at Lowood School, a pretty alarming boarding school indeed. Like Jane I was consumed with yearning – yearning for a place that didn’t exist any more. Marchwiel. That house that took two weeks to burn to the ground, all gone. We drove up the steep hill and looked across to Marchwiel burning all black and red, and Daddy said something like, ‘Well, there it goes, it’s gone.’ Barbara and Terry were gambolling among the onlookers. They were in fancy dress because those clothes had been stored in an outhouse. Everything else was burnt. Cecil and I wanted to put on fancy dress too, and Mummy said to Daddy, ‘Let them.’

  Despite the crowd and the crackling fire, there was a great silence of a concrete consistency. Time stopped moving forward; it was held. And I knew that if I had been there the fire would never have happened. Daddy had taken us two big girls, Cecil and Jacqueline, up into the Mackenzie Country. On New Year’s Eve, at three in the morning, a call came through from Timaru and we headed home. If we had been in the house, we four girls would by that time have been dead – dead from smoke inhalation – because we normally slept at the end of the house where the fire started. However, as it was New Year’s Eve, Mummy had moved Terry and Barbara up close to her room for the night. Into her bed, perhaps? By the time the fire had taken hold, there was only enough time left to get the two little girls out on to the lawn. Mummy did go back into the living room. She had treasures there, sheet music from her family house, from Mother Genevieve at the Dominican convent, from Uncle Dennis in Melbourne. There were, I believe, some original Chopin sheets. Certainly they were valuable in themselves and also in terms of my mother’s memories. For weeks afterwards pages of music flew about and around the burning house, the text framed in a black scorched surround. Mummy also had all the family photographs and valuables. I remember as a small child fingering Grandpa Dennehy’s flute embedded in green velvet in an ebony case. Then there was my mother’s Bechstein piano; there were first illustrated editions of Shakespeare – huge books, these, with tissue paper protecting the illustrations. Were they from my grandmother’s house? Whether my parents wanted that sort of hell from the fates to forget about the past I don’t really know, but whether they wanted it or not the past was being effectively erased.

  How did it happen, the fire? Well, the firemen had asked if they could use the bottom paddock for a bonfire party for New Year’s Eve. The north-west winds carried sparks up the hill and into the roof of our house. It was no help at all that the firemen themselves were drunk and then that the war broke out. The war meant my parents couldn’t rebuild. They couldn’t find anywhere to rent in Timaru either: there was a war on. And that, of course, is why we girls ended up at Teschemakers.

  Do fathers who have been in borstal think it after all not such a bad place for their sons to go? Does he say to himself, I survived and I’m not going to think there is too much wrong with me, it could even be good for him? I must say that when I think about it now, it seems like it was a pretty brutal thing for Mummy and Daddy to have done. Was my youngest sister five? Six? Barbara would have be eight then, so I was nine, Cecil ten. We were far too young and so delicately nurtured, there was no preparation for the rigours of boarding school. Could Mummy and Daddy not cope with four little girls at home when there was no help and no decent house? I don’t think they could, but it’s never been something I have wanted to dwell on. I don’t want to have to blame my parents. Nevertheless, it was a violent wrench. Too much of a transition from pampered, half-wild little darlings to miserable and confused members of a herd. It was all far too abrupt.

  Word spread through the boarding school that four naked new girls were cavorting in a dormitory. They had apparently thrown all their clothes over the floor and were playing ball with their shoes. They were quite obviously possessed by the devil. We would have to learn that no child should be allowed free access to their natural instincts.

  When I told Mummy and Daddy about the nuns’ reaction to our bit of fun, Daddy said something about the nuns, that it was necessary to break our spirits before they could train us. Was he approving of this? Was he accepting, sadly, a fact of life? I decided I would not have my spirit broken – I would rather die.

  The first battleground was spelling. For a certain number of spelling mistakes you would get a whack with the five-tailed strap. I refused to learn under such conditions and the result was that I learnt nothing. I was the most strapped girl at Teschemakers. This continued for some time until I thought up the reading-in-Mass deception. I don’t mean I read novels in Mass to assist my reading and spelling skills. Far from it. I read novels in Mass to pass the time. However, often my attention on my reading was diverted by some demented priest. There was one in particular, and he was called Hurricane Harry because he raced through the Mass and kept his gumboots on. He had an obsession, a rather Hegel-type obsession, with heaven and hell, damnation or salvation. Right through the middle of all this there was that word blazoned: ‘Choose’, ‘Choose’. Is that where Sartre got his existential choosing from, and his ‘jump’ scenario? Whatever, this gave me one powerful recurring nightmare. I was still dreaming it when I went to university. I am submerged in some horror, struggling to escape. Unendurable, awful cosmic choice. Up or down? Heaven or hell? I knew if I chose hell I would then be allowed to wake up, but if I chose heaven then this terrible cosmic struggle must continue. I ju
st needed to wake up, and I always chose hell.

  About Hurricane Harry’s muddy gumboots was the most delicate, intricate lace. I know that lace had a special name but I can’t remember what it was. Clear in my mind’s eye, though, I can see those older nuns of Teschemakers lined up in a row, creating that lace. Dressed in costume and with that curiously vacant countenance emptied of all expression. This supposedly indicated peace of mind. Peace of mind acquired at what cost we do not know, because no one was inquiring except, hopefully, Jesus. There they were on a bench, arranged like starlings on a fence. In a glassed-in porch opposite the chapel, they sat bathed in the evening sun while they created this mystical lace that was later glimpsed inside the priests’ vestments or fringing the snowy altar cloths.

  Mass, over this period of novel-reading, was not too bad. I could identify with Jane Eyre at Lowood School – the dreadful cold, the awful food, the lash. In due course I moved on to all the Brontës and found the lot of them a glorious distraction. The cold and the hunger were forgotten. But how well I recall that tap on my shoulder, that humiliated walk out of the chapel in the middle of Mass. I was busted. What my punishment was for my heinous crime I don’t remember, and I may not have noticed much as life seemed like one long punishment anyway. I did, however, slowly establish myself as gang leader and that certainly had rewards.

  When I come to think of it, Sister Boniface, who taught us Christian doctrine, was also obsessed with opposites. (What a strange name, Boniface. Surely she could not have been named after that pernicious and sodomising pope of Dante’s?) But here’s Sister Boniface on a frosty Teschemakers morning, her fat chilblained fingers protruding like a bunch of cherries out of her black woollen mittens. Her bright blue eyes alight with fanatical fervour. She had – and the image is as clear as day – milky white skin and bright red cheeks, a nun’s complexion. Did celibacy dictate skin? Sister Boniface is expostulating on the sex of angels. They had none. They were above such gross torments. They were pure. Their given destiny was to forever attend upon God in an ecstasy of chilly rapture. Sister Boniface’s thinking was a perfect example of the principles of juxtaposition. Everything had an opposite. The opposite of timeless angels frozen in sublime worship had to be the inhabitants of the fiery depths, grovelling abjectly way down below. The slippery road to hell, or was it a rose-strewn path – whatever, they were both equally slippery and either way you gathered speed as you plunged, self-propelled faster and faster towards that fiery furnace.

  But then again you could choose to clamber up Jacob’s shining ladder to join those heavenly choirs singing for all eternity in that frigid world of outer space. To draw such a comparison for girls who were just about freezing to death in Central Otago was not a very bright idea. Most would have found any place warmer than the one they were in a good place to be. Boniface had lots of opposites. There was the God of Divine Love and the God of Just Rage. Saints and sinners, pure and defiled, black and white, right and wrong. There was no middle ground. It followed that angels were white, pure and a mystery.

  A mystery was something you couldn’t make any sense of at all. The mystery was that angels had taken the form of us ordinary mortals but, despite this, despite this human guise, angels were without … Here Boniface fumbled with her words; there was another very long pause. ‘Without boobs and cocks,’ softly sniggered Colleen, the rude country girl. ‘Without,’ continued Boniface, ‘the usual appendages which are indicative of our human condition.’ That was what I wanted to remember, those exact words that had formed my childhood.

  But what about original sin, that nasty idea out of the Mercy Convent in Timaru? Well, the Dominican nuns weren’t so stuck on it, but original sin was still about. As for me, nothing had changed. I still clung to my deep-seated conviction that sin did not exist. At Teschemakers this conviction could become a means of protest. To protest is to act, and this action manifested itself in a bad confession. My bad confessions were well thought out: I did not wish to arouse suspicion. Mostly I presented as a pious but not completely sin-free person. There were other times when I seemingly struggled with my conscience. I could not be sure that I was able to identify some particular misdemeanour as a sin. This flattered the priest because it called upon his diagnostic skills. He could talk happily for some time on the subject of sin. Once I got into the way of a bad confession I had the urge to spread this liberation. There was, however, always the danger that some weak girl of little brain might confess. Break down and say, ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, it is a week since my last confession but my last confession was a bad confession.’ There we were kneeling, examining our conscience, awaiting our turn and smelling to high heaven. Well, we couldn’t smell ourselves or each other, but surely our parents must have smelled us. Going from a bath every night to once a week (if you were lucky) was a real comedown. Pants and spencers were also changed once a week. Once a fortnight, again if you were lucky, there was the washing of the hair. Mum insisted that the green of the Teschemakers uniform was a much prettier green than the green of the uniform at Craighead, where she was teaching music. Maybe, but I am also sure our uniforms were a lot smellier.

  But whether they were smellier or not, it grieved me that my mother was casting her pearls before swine – foreign swine, that is. Wasting her love, her musical secrets, on Craighead girls, while we languished in desperate alien climes. Craighead was a private Anglican school in Timaru. The Governor-General sent his daughters there, but perhaps the best way to describe the difference between Craighead and the girls’ high school was how my sister Barbara put it. She noted that Timaru High School girls all shouted ‘Hip ray, hip ray!’, and Craighead girls cried ‘Hip rah, hip rah!’ Mum was persuaded to teach there because of the war; she had a first-class reputation and could negotiate a good deal. She had a personal contract with her pupils – in other words, she set her own terms as if they were her private pupils. The kids all loved her, of course. Years later in Christchurch whenever I met any old Craighead girls I only had to say that I was Mrs Fahey’s daughter to be greeted as ‘one of us’.

  Mummy said that at least we didn’t have to bath under a tarpaulin the way they had to when she was at the Dominican convent in Dunedin. It had a hole for your head to poke through. Was this because the sight of your naked body might tempt you to self-abuse? The priest who conducted our retreats called it self-abuse or, more delicately, self-love. For me, apart from being a lot of fun, it was good practice for true love. My role models for the leading man were, of course, the irresistible Heathcliff or the fabulous Rhett Butler with a bit of Tarzan mixed in. All, surely, far too old for me. But I didn’t have a lot to go on. I never met any boys, just men in novels and Tarzan in comics.

  Did I think it was a sin? Certainly not.

  And Teschemakers had its own peculiar rituals in store for us. Some local GP, appalled at our festering chilblains, came up with a treatment. It looked like scrambled eggs, but it smelt like rotting eggs, and under our coarse woollen mittens it made an odorous and sticky mess. Chilblains were the curse of Teschemakers. There were heavy frosts in winter; intake of vitamin C was minimal, and so was the heating. It was an ideal environment for chilblains to develop.

  Learning to play the piano was as much an important part of our curriculum as were fencing, elocution, cricket and aerobics. Playing the piano with chilblains swelling the fingers was difficult, especially as the nuns would smack us with a ruler to keep the fingers on the move. But with Rotten Eggs (our nickname) there was a new problem. Although we washed our hands before our lessons, we were not so careful before practice, so the piano keys became slippery, and the constant soapy wiping of the keys began to damage the instruments themselves. This was considered more important than the potential damage to our swollen joints, which was perhaps why the Rotten Eggs regime only lasted for one winter. But meantime imagine the smell. We smelt to high heaven anyway, but with the sulphurous smell of rotten eggs added to the mix we must have been p
retty potent.

  I was reading in bed last night and stumbled across this sentence: ‘A tall boy with a jutting chin, and wet, chilblained hands, hobbled out on wooden clogs whose clanking made it seem that he was moving faster than he really was.’ The book, The File on H, was written by Ismail Kadare. It was all happening in outer Albania in the 1930s, and it seems so were chilblains, though until I started writing about chilblains at Teschemakers I was not aware of having read about them in a novel before. Surely they must have featured in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, or in Jane Eyre? Perhaps I’d never taken them in before.

  I can’t imagine I’ve read about Lane’s Emulsion, though. This came to us through the good graces of Joanna’s family. She was in my class, and I don’t remember if we were grateful to her for her tonic or not. Lane’s Emulsion was invented by her grandfather, who looked strangely familiar to me in the poster that went with the product. Later I recognised why I thought I’d seen him before. In cowboys films there was Doc in the covered wagon selling patent medicine to the prairie town. Doc was played by a distinguished, aging actor with wired glasses and a small goatee. He had a twinkle in his eye, just like Joanna’s grandfather.