Something for the Birds

by Fahey, Jacqueline

  Did I purposely go out of my way to find one of the most desperate wards? It was certainly off the beaten track, so I must have. It was in fact a huge cage with a wooden shed running down the middle, like in Belsen. Along each side of the shed lay iron bedsteads occupied by gaunt, expressionless, masturbating men. A few grim figures lurched about in what was called the airing yard, and that was about it. I did a number of paintings about all this – in fact, they were collage and paint – but I never showed them. I felt they could be seen as exploitative. I think now I should have trusted myself more.

  The Autopsy was a painting that survived purely by chance. Nowadays my presence at an autopsy would be considered illegal, but the fact that I was there reflects all that was good and bad about things at Porirua. Death was very much present in that shed beside the bush on the fringes of the Porirua Hospital’s territory. No one went there who didn’t have to be there; no one was immune to the horror of interfering with the dead. An autopsy was not new to Fraser or to his charge nurse, but it was to the young nurse aide and of course to me. The young recruit and the charge nurse knocked back a very large brandy first. This didn’t help much, as the young recruit vomited after the first incisions. He hardly made it outside. Nevertheless, I could see that this sacred rite about the meaning of life brought those three men together. I was not part of that mateship, for I was not physically involved in the actual operation. My role as observer held fast. But that night I had a terrifying dream, and the corpse of the old woman was transformed. It was my father’s head, brain exposed, that turned around and confronted me.

  It is quite possible that other people might not approve of my enduring this dreadful experience. I can understand that. However, it did help me to know how doctors’ experiences of life are more like soldiers’. How they must confront dying and death every day. To their way of thinking, they are living in the real world.

  If parts of the hospital remained remote and forbidding, there was in those days a lot of socialising between the staff and many of the patients. A good example of this was the Picasso Dance, when Joan Clouston, wife of Dr Dave Clouston, and I painted lots of frolicking, Picasso-like figures from ancient times on the walls. Patients and staff, doctors and wives all had a very jolly time together. Fraser and I were often expected to show up in the wards too. Later, at Easter, Christmas and birthdays, we would be accompanied by our children. With the sixties this all changed. The drug culture brought about a transformation. Drugs were perceived as the controlling device for mental illness, and over the next ten years interaction between patients, staff and family became less and less.

  It will not surprise anyone to realise that at about this time I began to understand that we humans are a tragic lot – poor mutants on a planet that is hopelessly caught up in what we call the food chain, members of a curious urban tribe with bizarre customs and odd clothing. But there is something satisfying about knowing how dumb and complacent it is to imagine oneself as a normal human being. I had never been mistaken for a normal human being, so it was a relief for me to understand that there was absolutely no such thing. The fact that you were not standing out in an airing yard in a catatonic pose didn’t mean that you possessed sanity. Oh no. It meant your particular madness would have a different outcome.

  In the late fifties political events were bringing about a sly unveiling of our true natures. The mask of niceness was dissolving. It was obvious, of course, that the new mentality happening in the rest of the western world was bound eventually to change New Zealand. I remember for the first time meeting new young millionaires at smart parties. Up to that time there had been in New Zealand old money and a few rich families; now, per head of population, that was changing. I was reminded of a good old socialist quote: ‘If you have more than you need you have something that belongs to someone else.’ The new world mentality was transforming us into something else, into something coarse, crass and greedy. This is out in the open now, but in the mid fifties there was some confusion about it all. Oh, there shouldn’t be any confusion on this subject. I mean, why is it that when we get a whole lot more very rich people, inevitably we get more poor people? I also couldn’t see how feminist principles could apply to a capitalist society. Was equality going to apply only to the top caste – that is, to women who already had money and status, a status gifted to them by the family they were born into or by the man they married? The Women’s Movement belongs historically to a socialist feminist consciousness. I was well aware of that. It was not a career option for women with privilege – at least not to my mind.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Harry’s

  Before I met Fraser I would define my own political position as socialist. I believed that democracy could only exist by radical modification of capitalism. I was already aware that the Labour Party, which had achieved so much in the thirties, was having a real problem at the union level, getting their heads around change. It was a Pakeha male equality thing that they were obsessed about. They had forgotten that women and Maori also exist. It was over this time I painted the Suburban Neurosis paintings, and Artist as Warrior. These paintings were inspired by arguments I had had with fellow socialists. They felt the healthy thing for me to do was paint the working class. This meant men working. My interest was in the fate of women, how domestic circumstances dictated their lives. How men and women might start out together with the best of intentions but that the system would divide them. It was also clear from what male artists had to say that if I wanted to be an artist I would also have to be a fighter: hence Artist as Warrior. Some things were beginning to dawn on me.

  At Porirua Hospital, meantime all was going well and we started getting our hopes up. Having missed that boat to England in ’56, we felt confident about trying to get to there again. Espresso bars, I’d heard, were the big thing there, and I wanted to arrive qualified. My painting was developing, but I knew I would also need a survival skill. So getting the job at Harry’s was perfect, and the hours gave me some time to paint. Fraser, Quickly, Olga and I were very happy – then it all went wrong again. Fraser went back into Wellington Hospital and it didn’t look hopeful at all. Ben Hart let me stay on at the Porirua house, but the money I earned at Harry’s was now all I had to live on.

  So there I was working at Harry’s, the first espresso bar in Wellington, positioned above Parsons Bookshop, in Plischke’s new building at 126 Lambton Quay. Harry and Helen Seresin were the top end of Bohemia in Wellington. But who was Plischke? And for that matter who was Harry? Well, they were both Europeans – Harry originally from Russia and Plischke from Austria. Working at Harry’s I didn’t see a lot of Plischke, but the Massey Building, Plischke’s building, dictated how we lived. Nothing must be added, nothing hung on the walls; its proportions held us in his space, his mentality. It’s strange that I remember his wife more than I remember him. His wife guarded access to her husband with an iron control. She constantly announced his genius on every suitable occasion. Hers seemed to me an exotic voice.

  And what was Harry’s? Harry’s was open sandwiches, Russian meatballs, European sausages and of course espresso coffee. Harry was something else again, quite different from Plischke and his wife. Harry was lively, funny and ingratiating. The workers were Greek village girls, indentured labour, paying back their fare to New Zealand by working where no one else wanted to work – in our hospitals, cleaning in our eating places, scrubbing floors in our office buildings. Harry’s idea was that the Greek girls could work slowly, doggedly, from early morning to nightfall, but had to be forced to speed up. That was my job. Speed-up time was our rush hour. How did I get them to speed up? I did it by making friends with them. I tried to speak some Greek (I’m afraid all forgotten now), and I asked them out to Porirua. In our big comfortable house there I could give them the freedom to cook Greek food. There were Quickly’s vegetables in the garden, and I would supply the meat and the wine. I also promised them total discretion. Their dream was to marry a lovely Orthodox Greek boy, but
this meant they must be above suspicion. I must not allow the faintest rumour about the state of their womb to circulate. The Greek community in Wellington might be small, but it reverberated with gossip. Another thing I must not allow was lifting. Lifting any weight at all was liable to start the womb spinning. I had not known this. A spinning womb was a bad marriage prospect. So: ‘You don’t mind, you lift,’ they’d say. ‘What about my womb?’ I’d protest. That got a sly smile and: ‘You all right, you lift.’ Other than the lifting problem, they were just fine.

  The food was prepared by Harry’s wife, Harry’s mother and one or two aunts – or were they cousins? Helen was, in the nicest way possible, a woman of the world. She was a McCarthy. For those of you who know nothing about the Irish Catholic world in New Zealand, the McCarthys were a distinguished lot. Her father owned and edited the newspaper on the West Coast of the South Island and he was brave. His viewpoint was in fact plain common decency, but there is nothing like plain common decency to upset bigots. Harry and Helen were a great team, and their parties reflected that. They lived in a glamorous house in the bush above Oriental Bay. The house demonstrated the relatively new concept of bringing the outside inside. Great sliding doors, polished floors, oriental rugs, paintings and a very fine piano. Music was an integral part of these parties. Jazz predominantly – Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong – but also plenty of the great European classical composers. There was in the talk about politics a surge of faith. A belief that we were moving towards better times, enlightenment in fact.

  Anybody who enjoyed a good time and had something to say would be there at Harry’s parties. This was before Harry started Downstage and moved on to The Settlement, his well-known Willis Street restaurant, and I do believe this was their best time. This was their Voltaire time. When we are tripping lightly across Voltaire’s Bridge which swings over the abyss, we are not aware that these are indeed the best of times. We start to hanker for more – for more and different. We bring the Swing Bridge crashing down into the abyss.

  Back at Harry’s, above Parsons Bookshop in Plischke’s building, I served the poets, writers and painters: Lou Johnson, Fraser’s and my good mate; James K. Baxter and Alistair Campbell; Jacquie Sturm and the two Adcock sisters; Juliet and Roy Cowan; and anyone else who was attempting to write, paint or pot. At three o’clock I left Harry’s and drove to the Wellington Hospital. I would sneak Fraser a bit of alcohol, a bottle of beer perhaps, and we would settle down with a good book. I particularly remember On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I read it again lately, and it seemed like another book. When I was reading it to Fraser it had just been published, but now the point it made seems to have evaporated. Or possibly ceased to be relevant. Yet compare On the Road with Sacheverell Sitwell’s Spain, or Simone de Beauvoir’s America Day by Day, and it seems a remarkable book. Kerouac, working-class American, child of immigrants – his is a new take on travel. His hero is a working-class Irish Catholic daredevil, and his discovering America a view from the bottom looking up. For all de Beauvoir’s correct politics, her America is very much a privileged tour. Kerouac really started something which became a given, especially in film.

  We read all the Beats and Mailer; I had already done Sartre and Thomas Wolfe. What we were doing was finding our philosophical stance, and that was certainly a luxury. While our contemporaries had to struggle with children and careers, we had time out.

  Jim Baird, a remarkable surgeon, put an end to all that. He suggested to us that we consider the practicalities of our future. That Fraser would, under the present circumstances, always have episodes of breakdown in his tuberculosis. That scar tissue from an operation ten years before would act as a fresh source of infection. He could have another ten years or so, or he could have another operation. The operation would take at least seven hours and that entailed serious risk. He put the chances at fifty-fifty. However, he was confident he could remove all the scar tissue and that Fraser could be as good as new – if he survived the operation. We both had great faith in Jim and we decided to go for the operation.

  But in the months before the big event a new enemy appeared: that post-operative killer, the H bug. I knew from talking to the nurses what was going on in Fraser’s ward. Patients survived Jim’s surgery but died from the H bug. Fraser knew the bug didn’t like the sun, and he lay out in the sun every day over those months of waiting. He washed himself with a special soap; he tried to keep as fit as was humanly possible; but I was getting a bad feeling about it all. One night Jim asked me to drive him home and I felt obliged to broach the subject. What I had forgotten was that Jim was the surgeon, he was not the physician, and that he had somehow felt his responsibility ended with his usually successful operations. Medicine as such took over from then on. I doubt if it was just my words that catapulted him into action but his solution was very thorough. He closed the ward. I imagine everything in it had to be abandoned. Fraser had his operation, and survived.

  Over this stressful period I became pregnant. Well, recounting it now it seems stressful, but I don’t remember thinking about it like that at the time. It just seemed like real life. I don’t think either of us thought our story was going to end in disaster: that Fraser would die, that I would be a solo mother and a waitress for the rest of my life. We were young and secretly believed we would never die and would, some day, have a truly rewarding life. I realise that to other people we didn’t appear to have a future and that my bouncing around at Harry’s, pregnant and with a dying husband, seemed, well, inappropriate. I wasn’t very good at appropriate.

  A priest came to see me at Harry’s during rush hour. When at last I could speak to him I was in no mood to be messed around. It seemed that to his mind I was an embarrassment to my sisters. As doctors’ wives they didn’t need a sister who was waitressing. Surely I could find something else to do? I explained that, no, I could not find something else to do with the same hours. The hours at Harry’s gave me time with Fraser. The money was good and, anyway, if I had thought of doing something else I sure as hell wouldn’t be doing it now. I said that being told what to do with my life really pissed me off. Afterwards I wondered if he had been a little over-zealous with his priestly duties. Whether he was himself curious to have a look at Harry’s and the bohemian sister. Who knows? Luckily, I remained mostly unaware of criticism and felt as if Harry’s was my postgraduate degree in life.

  Upstairs, in Harry’s office, Bruce Mason was writing The Pohutukawa Tree. He would come downstairs for coffee and talk about the great Kiwi male. How if you weren’t one you must of course be gay. Much as I loved Lou Johnson and got on very well with Baxter and Campbell, it was clear that the arts, at that time, were a macho pursuit. No doubt this had its roots in the belief fostered in boys’ schools that being involved in the arts was a sissy thing to do. The natural reaction to this charge was therefore to behave like an out-of-control footballer. There was constant emphasis on their penises in their work and in their conversation. They also drank like drovers who had just hit town after six months in the back country. It was a difficult act to balance, as performing well in bed and drinking like a drover don’t work very well together. Another disturbing factor was Katherine Mansfield and Frances Hodgkins. The two most creative persons from New Zealand who had made it overseas were women.

  When I got pregnant a number of writers and painters explained to me that I would no longer paint. That my creativity would now reside in my womb, that only women who didn’t have children persisted in the arts. I would argue that maybe it was the circumstances of their marriage set-up that destroyed women’s creativity. Anyway, what about women like George Sand or Mary Wollstonecraft? Despite society’s expectations, they had persisted. I would also argue that browbeating women into believing in the inevitability of their hormones is one way of getting rid of the competition. An even better ploy is to see that, by the way society is structured, women’s time is hopelessly fragmented. Although I had already painted my Suburban Neurosis paintings, I
didn’t feel too good about my suspicions being so strongly confirmed. I was not so conceited as to imagine that where others had failed I must succeed. How could I be sure that the mateship that Fraser and I had built up over our peculiar circumstances would survive? That, subjected to society’s pressures, we might not fall into role-playing as the easiest solution to conflict. But come, I was nearly thirty, which would be nowadays like having a first baby at thirty-six. My passionate desire to have a child overrode everything.

  The paintings I hung in Harry’s at that time have vanished, but I now realise they were better than I thought they were. A strong cadmium red line connected all the shapes, gave then tension. The way the line was drawn emphasised what mattered and what didn’t. Woman in the Bath was one of the best of these paintings. In an old Victorian bath – it had clawed feet – the woman, quite obviously pregnant, was floating on a blissful raft of hormones.

  Knowing I was pregnant, my first concern was Olga. I understood that my baby would be confusing for her. Mr Quickly was determined that Olga must have puppies. Yes, I agreed, but not just any puppies: we needed a handsome, intelligent, young corgi to father them. Well, we did find handsome and intelligent but not young. Luckily Olga didn’t mind. She was entranced with Thomas the moment she caught sight of him. The day they met was a brisk spring afternoon when I was walking Olga along the waterfront at Island Bay. The Island Bay waterfront was my favourite walk. Wild, blowing, crashing waves; rushing skies: a hugely entertaining sort of place to walk a dog. So full of energy that when Olga was smaller and the wind came roaring up out of the south, waves crashed over the road and Olga went bowling, roly-poly, indignantly, over the road while I rushed after her. Well, it wasn’t that bad the day Olga met her true love, I’m just trying to set the scene for that fatal chance meeting. We saw him coming, determined, convinced; and Olga was immediately entranced. I liked the woman with Thomas, too; she was my favourite sort of English person. Well read, loved creatures, and her rural clothing was a true reflection of the county to which she belonged in England.