However, the most memorable medical interference in our lives was a ghastly substance which we girls called Black Jack. It was, in consistency, like melted tar with an oily overtone. Its smell was reminiscent of ancient laboratories of the pit. We were expected to drink it three times a term, a sort of medieval purge. I imagine this ghastly concoction as having originated in some early Lutheran orphanage. After all, it was Luther who was so obsessed with bodily functions. He was your original anally retentive male. The lay nuns who were in charge of Black Jack may have come from some desperately oppressed peasant society in Galway. They could have adopted Black Jack as a means of identifying with their aggressor. That’s about all I can come up with to explain its use at Teschemakers. Certainly I don’t remember Catholics as such showing a great interest in bowel movements. My mother considered this an English obsession. According to her, this impulse motivated English humour – lavatory humour, she called it. I rather think there is something in this. I don’t think Catholics ever considered going to the lavatory as particularly witty or amusing. After all, if you consider it as something natural, like going to sleep, it’s difficult to see the shocking humour in it. In the minds of Protestants, however, it seemed to share the same fate as sex. To be cleansed of faeces as one is cleansed of sin certainly smacks of obsession and guilt, the roots of anorexia, a manifestation of self-loathing. We were delivered this puritanical punishment to cleanse our bodies, for our bodies were the temples of our souls.
But if I can only guess how Black Jack, administered at bedtime, became part of Teschemakers law, believe me it was a law that was non-negotiable. The nausea, then the desperate need to find a lavatory, kicked in at about two o’clock in the morning. The closest lavatories to my dormitory were part of the original homestead, and they were an early Victorian design. The flooring was made up of wide kauri slats so that the rain could pour away under them, through some antique drainage system. This was necessary because the area was open to the sky. The lavatories were placed around the circumference of that area, and they fortunately were covered and had heavy doors.
There has always been something about this memory that has bothered me. How come I could sit groaning in agony with the door wide open? I mean, wouldn’t the other girls in my dormitory be similarly afflicted? Then I realised that of course they must have dosed us on different nights. They wouldn’t have wanted us all racing down freezing corridors in an anguished mob.
And there was something else about those open doors. It was because I was half unhinged by Black Jack that I discovered the realm of the owls. The call and response under the magnificent sweep of the starry skies, the pale powerful pull of the moon – that night time belonged to the owls. This was their celestial kingdom. My eyes and ears were opened. Sitting there on the lavatory, a victim of Black Jack, I was gifted with that vision of owls. The grove of ancient trees outside my dormitory windows was their home and I often heard them in the night, though I wasn’t especially listening. But as I sat all alone in the Victorian lavatories, freezing, with painful spasms and desperate thoughts, I heard them as the voice of sanity. The knowledge that there were separate universes, parallel but separate, gave me balance, gave me hope.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Dove, the Hawk and Mother Francis
Above the great black pines at the end of the playing field, they flew so fast. So fast, they were smeared into a ribbon whipped across the sky. A ribbon that curled around itself, driven by terror. The hawk soaring above the doves waits, plunges, strikes. Mother Francis screams, running so fast across the tussock, her starched white headdress like great wings that refused to fly, falling to her knees in her black and white robes. One of her babies is dead, its pure white body smeared with sticky scarlet, clutched in the ruthless talons of the hawk.
Her namesake, St Francis of Assisi, would have loved both the doves and the hawk. It was different at Teschemakers. Never more would the hawk swing above the great black pines at the end of the playing fields. Mother Francis shot him with her arrow. Wherever did she get her lethal bow and arrow from? We were certainly taught fencing; perhaps at Teschemakers they had once taught archery. I saw the hawk crucified, nailed to the big tree next to the dovecote. In the next paddock, the big black brooding bull lurched about with a ring through his nose. His paddock formed the backdrop to the dovecote and ran parallel to the cricket pitch. After that came the tennis courts and then, at the very end of the playing fields, was the playhouse for the little ones. The ground here housed countless trapdoor spiders. Lying on the earth at playtime we watched them, mesmerised, enchanted. It must have been about this time I included spiders in my ideal paradise.
Those playing fields, though, are dominated in my memory by Mother Francis. I wonder what Sister Agatha, Mistress of Schools, made of her? I expect Sister Agatha was no more than thirty at that time, and already a most compassionate intellectual. That Mother Francis could murder the hawk for doing what hawks do must have shocked her. Her own favourite pastime was to read aloud Herrick’s poems of brooks, blossoms, birds and bowers. She was exiled at Teschemakers as much as we were, although she did have a cause to live for – the worker nun movement. After that was dismantled by fearful bishops in Rome, she died.
In the second half of the thirties, the worker nun idea seemed like a good one. The nuns and priests of the movement lived the life of the worker in the factory, in the food industry, on the building site. There was one catch: the communists were already there working among the people. During the war, being a worker nun or a communist comrade became a very serious business. A matter of life and death. Many of the worker nuns and priests found common cause with the communists, and the Pope took fright and withdrew his support. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? The beginnings of the movement at Teschemakers were crushed, references erased; the nuns left, obviously confused. What a powerful influence the worker nun movement had on my life. I can see now that so many decisions I made were influenced by those few years when I was exposed to its ideas. Ideas that nurtured empathy. That suggested you can’t help the desperate and the oppressed if you don’t know who they are, where they live and what they do.
Although the Dominican Order’s structure within Teschemakers was socialist, that socialism was hobbled by the bishops who were in fact not Dominicans. And they had the final say. Power in the Dominican Order was rotated. Through five years, maybe seven, I don’t quite remember now, you could be a Reverend Mother or Mistress of Schools, and then you started at the bottom all over again. How well the worker nun movement had suited its aspirations. The Dominican Order had been founded in 1215 as a preaching order. They had that urge to get out there amongst the people, get their finger on the pulse. They were now, however, incarcerated in Teschemakers and suffering all the traumas of the victims of revisionist thinking.
I don’t know whether Mother Francis was part of the fallout from the worker nun movement, but I have to admire anyone who was prepared to make a spectacle of herself. In the battle of the birds she took sides: she capitulated to the immediate, to the temporal.
And Mother Francis continued to act out. It happened in the dormitory. Some nun was bullying my youngest sister as we prepared for our beds. We slept in different dormitories, Terry and I, so other children must have alerted me to the crisis. My only memory of the front-up was the sensation of leaping – leaping across a series of beds, wrenching the whip out of the nun’s hands and whipping her. Poised on a bed gave me the elevation I needed, and I had the element of surprise on my side. However, the nun’s thick clothing muffled my efforts. I went for her head and got in a few good whacks but then she recovered her senses and overpowered me. I can only remember the exhilaration and inspired purpose of the leaping over the beds. I then remember the frustration with her protective clothing. I recall climbing the stairs to the attic, dragging some of my bedding with me. Mother Francis, who had been called in to take over, furious as doom, turned the key in the attic lock.
Following thi
s incident I ran a very high temperature and remained in the attic with the commode – a large carved wooden chair with a heavy wooden lid, inside of which was the potty. Outside the attic windows the Japanese cherry trees waited, tense, for the spring. They encircled the beautifully manicured lawn that was enclosed by the drive. At the bottom of the lawn was the Virgin Mary’s grotto, wallpapered with paua shell, bedecked with fairy ferns, deep and secret. That underground spring was reminiscent of more ancient times when the Trinity was all female. The maiden, the matron and the hag, renewable in their manifestations, forever changing like the seasons, one into the other. No wonder I hid out in the grotto during difficult times.
Teschemakers itself was a very big building, and so was the attic. While the rheumatic fever flourished it became the sick bay. In my delirium, I took to sleepwalking. This lasted off and on for the next five years. On one occasion I remember waking from this walking fantasy to be confronted by a much worse reality: a nun screaming that I was possessed by the devil, that I was the devil’s handmaiden, that I was mouthing heresy, that I was in no way a God and how dare I say so. Sanity must be whipped back into my soul.
My last memory of the attic is of a sweet nun giving me paper and watercolours so that I could paint the Japanese cheery trees in bloom. So spring must have arrived. The cherry trees were my first proper working-from-life paintings. They possessed something of the vigour and innocence of the Van Gogh blossom trees, and my troubles were forgotten in the process of painting them. It was over this time that I understood that painting was about the magic of looking. That consciousness of time was transcended in that surrendering to looking. Trusting the eyes and switching off the calculating, rational part of the brain.
Did I need the trauma of the attic to trigger this process? Would I have discovered this escape route if I had had nothing to escape from? Well, I suppose sooner or later something pretty bad was bound to happen to me. After all, I was inhabiting this valley of tears and none of us were to survive undamaged.
Mother Francis didn’t survive undamaged. Her behaviour became more and more erratic and I think involved a lot of noise. The older girls said she was carried away kicking and screaming in the middle of the night. Certainly one morning she wasn’t there any more.
Thinking of nuns in full regalia, I understand much better now what purpose the habit served. It was excellent psychology. It came as a shock when, after I had been at Teschemakers for some years, I heard an older girl refer to a nun as ‘that awful woman’. I had not been aware she was a woman. I’d thought she was a nun.
The habit was quite grand. Getting dressed must have been a matter of putting on layers for their coming theatre. There was a full under-dress in light cream wool (make that cotton in summer); there was a black piece draping the back and the front, a scapula. The hair was shaved and the head enclosed in a sort of bonnet attached to the chest shield. A lovely stiff garment this, covering the neck and shoulders. Did the white wings that curved away from the face come next? No, I think the stiff, tall square that covered the forehead came before the wings; then the wings elevated by that stiff square could be placed like a verandah over the face. The eyes, the nose and the mouth were the only things on view. Encircling the waist was a thick leather belt that was necessary for hanging things on – things like wooden clappers, Victorian-style iron keys, rosary beads, a very large crucifix and various other religious emblems. And I mustn’t forget the big black veil. The big black veil was attached to that headdress and billowed out from behind the white starched wings that so dramatically framed the face. When I come to think of it, I suppose that this must have been the outfit for upper-class women in Spain in 1215. Well, one thing is for sure: the nuns were not going to get skin cancer supervising games at Teschemakers in 1940.
Thinking of ancient times, I don’t expect that the ritual of the evening meal in the refectory had changed much either. The Reverend Mother was ensconced on a platform at the end of the refectory. Our supervising nun clapped her clappers, and in we filed. One by one we curtsied to the Reverend Mother and took our place at table. The Reverend Mother would often then ring a bell. This was permission to talk. After, say, ten minutes, the bell would sound again and silence fall. This was the signal for the reading of spiritually improving literature. Teresa of Avila was my favourite. Sister Agatha told me she was a great friend of the King of Spain, which was interesting as it implied that she at least had been allowed to get about. That’s often how you learn something – inadvertently.
‘You bold girl, cast down your eyes,’ the Reverend Mother hissed at me as I curtsied, as I bowed.
I muttered as I turned away.
‘What?’ she said. ‘What did you say?’
She got it out of me. I said, ‘A cat can look at a queen.’
CHAPTER NINE
Finding Out About Myself
I’d known nothing about sin until I went to the Mercy Convent in Timaru. I was five at the time, and this devastating information was imparted to me at our first Christian doctrine lesson. This was original sin they were talking about, and we were all infected with it. I believed that the nun who told us about original sin was passing the infection on to us by way of her warped mind and her warped tongue. My conviction that my mother was without sin was total and pure, and I informed the nun of this fact as irrefutable proof of her own wrong thinking. When she told me my mother was also infected with original sin I walked out of her class, vowing that I would never return.
Back home I remember very clearly what my mother was doing. She was lifting a huge roast out of the oven. I don’t know why she would be doing this when she had lots of help in the house. She actually earned more money than my father, and help in the house was cheap in those days: 1935 was the depths of the Depression. The word servant, however, never passed our family’s lips: it was help in the house. Anyway, this is my clearest memory of that traumatic episode. She lifted the heavy roast out of the oven, looking stressed. Later I put this down to her newly acquired sinful state. I confronted my mother about her sinless condition, and to my consternation her answer was evasive. I saw that a change had come over her: she was no longer perfect, she was inhabited by original sin.
At this point, it must be said, I had no idea what original sin was. It took me at least another sixteen years to get a clue about that. It happened while I was at art school in Christchurch. I had been invited to an At Home. It was something pretty tribal, the At Home. It was a way of keeping a finger on the pulse of the next generation. The unsuitable partners were kept out and the suitable partners kept in. By the time of this particular event I was well aware that my background did not make me a dream bride for a socially aware matron’s beloved son. However, sons who wished to give their mothers a nasty fright really enjoyed escorting me to special occasions. Nevertheless, on this special occasion, after the pre-party drinks, I was dropped back to Connon Hall. I was told that, sadly, one of the three matrons hosting this particular At Home did not wish me to attend. She had this thing, you see, about Roman Catholics, especially Irish Roman Catholics. My best friend and her escort were very sorry, but there you are, that’s how it was.
It took a while but it turned out to be about the best thing that could have happened to me. I realised I was in the wrong crowd. I understood that I could not be something I was not – that is, a Christchurch debutante. But I was still angry at being misrepresented. I did not believe in a God and never had. My mother and father imagined they were New Zealanders and yet this other identity was being foisted upon me. I was being punished, it seemed to me, for my original sin.
I was also determined to find out just exactly where this original sin came from. If I could do that, I could turn it into an advantage. Knowledge is power. I started with Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer, a black and desperate novel reeking of poverty and despair. O’Flaherty was a Galway name, and my name was a Galway name and an Aran Islands name. I knew my father’s people had come from there in 1860, knew al
l our connections with the O’Flahertys. These old tribes had inhabited the recesses of my father’s mind in an organic, unselfconscious way. I only had to ask, and in the most natural response possible he would have the answer.
Most evenings when I was at home, Dad walked around Timaru after dinner, usually in the direction of the sea, where the warehouses and factories clustered, then heading north and past the fishing boats and down into Caroline Bay. Boss, our bulldog, took off then, flat out across the beach. He looked just like Churchill, our dog, and he personified our loyalty to King and Country. He was a visual indicator of our fitting in, part of the war effort. When we lived in the country, lovely Marchwiel, we had only Irish dogs – Tipsy, the tragic Irish wolfhound; the Irish terrier Fifty Legs; and a Kerry Blue. Then the house burned down, war broke out, and in town there was Boss. Just the spitting image of the picture in our dining room of Churchill as a bulldog.
On the walks it was as if Dad was talking to himself. I said I asked questions but that wasn’t really necessary. His childhood recalls were spontaneous. He wasn’t in search of original sin; he wasn’t looking for revelations, just adjustments. However, deeply imbedded in that stream of consciousness were clues for me in my pursuit of original sin. I was finding out what sort of evil I had come from.
Usually by the time we got to Caroline Bay it was dark, and in winter it was pitch dark. Only the sound of the incessant pulling backwards and forwards of the sea let us know where we were. Dad felt it necessary when the O’Flaherty name came up to preach caution. Stuff about how tribes could hold you back. I didn’t get it. We were surely Fahey, Fahy, Fie, Foe, Fum, Fey, Fairy. Yes, I had ancestors all right.
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