by Janet Frame
BETWEEN MY FATHER AND THE KING
OTHER TITLES BY JANET FRAME
For further information on Janet Frame’s work, visit www.janetframe.org.nz
Novels
Owls Do Cry (1957)
Faces in the Water (1961)
The Edge of the Alphabet (1962)
Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963)
The Adaptable Man (1965)
A State of Siege (1966)
The Rainbirds aka Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room (1968)
Intensive Care (1970)
Daughter Buffalo (1972)
Living in the Maniototo (1979)
The Carpathians (1988)
Towards Another Summer (2007)
Short stories
The Lagoon and Other Stories (1952)
Snowman Snowman: Fables and Fantasies (1963)
The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches (1963)
The Reservoir and Other Stories (1966)
You Are Now Entering the Human Heart (1983)
Prizes: Selected Short Stories aka The Daylight and the Dust:
Selected Short Stories (2009)
Poems
The Pocket Mirror (1967)
The Goose Bath (2006)
Storms Will Tell: Selected Poems (2008)
Children’s book
Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun (1969)
Non-fiction
To The Is-Land (1982)
An Angel at My Table (1984)
The Envoy from Mirror City (1985)
Janet Frame In Her Own Words (2011)
COUNTERPOINT
BERKELEY
BETWEEN MY FATHER AND THE KING
Copyright © Janet Frame Literary Trust, 2012
First published by Penguin Group (NZ), 2012, as GORSE IS NOT PEOPLE
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available
ISBN 978-1-61902-216-4
COUNTERPOINT
1919 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface
Between My Father and the King
The Plum Tree and the Hammock
Gavin Highly
The Birds of the Air
In Alco Hall
University Entrance
Dot
The Gravy Boat
I Got a Shoes
A Night at the Opera
Gorse is Not People
The Wind Brother
The Friday Night World
The Silkworms
An Electric Blanket
A Bone in the Throat
My Tailor is Not Rich
The Big Money
A Distance from Mrs Tiggy-winkle
Caring for the Flame
Letter from Mrs John Edward Harroway
Sew My Hood, Cut My Hair
The Atomiser
The Painter
The People of the Summer Valley
The Spider
A Night Visitor
I Do Not Love the Crickets
Notes
Preface
Between My Father and the King includes some of the best stories Janet Frame ever wrote. More than half of the twenty-eight stories in this volume have never been published before. Of the rest, seven were individually published in Janet Frame’s lifetime but were never included by her in a collection; and another five have been published since her death in 2004. The new stories span almost the entire breadth of Frame’s publishing career, from ‘University Entrance’ (1946), the very first story she published as an adult, to ‘A Distance from Mrs Tiggy-winkle’, written forty years later. They extend the themes and characters of the seventy-one stories that appear in the five previous collections: The Lagoon, The Reservoir, Snowman Snowman, You are Now Entering the Human Heart and Prizes (also known as The Daylight and the Dust).
There are several reasons why these stories have not previously been published. First, we know from Frame’s autobiography that the rejection of the story ‘Gorse is Not People’ by Charles Brasch in 1954 had crushed her: ‘I felt myself sinking into empty despair. What could I do if I couldn’t write? Writing was to be my rescue. I felt as if my hands had been uncurled from their clinging place on the rim of the lifeboat.’ Similarly, just one year later — when she had rallied from the previous year’s setback, had moved to Auckland and was making yet more headway in her career — she proudly showed her latest achievement, ‘An Electric Blanket’, to Frank Sargeson; but after his nitpicking criticism she never offered that story for publication. Taking the experience as a lesson in learning to trust her own judgement about her writing, she also never showed any further work to Sargeson.
Second, at times Frame was so prolific that she found she had a backlog of manuscripts. For instance in 1965 and 1966, when she held first an official and then an ‘unofficial’ Burns Fellowship, her working conditions were so favourable that as well as completing a book of poems, finishing one novel, writing another and starting a third, she also worked on a new collection of about thirty stories. In May 1966 she reported to Professor Horsman at the University of Otago: ‘I’m ahead of myself in publication of my work.’ The planned collection never appeared, but Frame did publish individual stories from it such as ‘The Bath’, ‘A Boy’s Will’ and ‘In Alco Hall’. She was scandalised by the knowledge that stories published in prestigious magazines such as The New Yorker, Vogue, Mademoiselle or Harper’s Bazaar earned her more than some of her publishers offered as an advance for a whole book.
Frame withheld other work because it was based too closely on living people. ‘The Silkworms’ is an example of a story she called back from an editor for fear of causing offence to its lampooned subject. Some recognisable events from Janet Frame’s life recur in her short fiction and her long fiction and even her poetry, and it’s interesting to have the opportunity now to compare the way she transforms the same source material for different literary ends. Several of the stories in this volume share their subject matter — and sometimes also their title — with a chapter or passage in her autobiography, although the material is always treated in a much different way. Frame distinguished clearly between writing fiction inspired by her life and writing autobiography: ‘It is harder to write in the autobiographical form. Actually it’s awful. All those sticky facts to work in. In fiction, one can just go to town.’ The story ‘Dot’ is a good example of the way Frame was able to start with a true life experience and shape and twist it to make fiction, so that it was impossible to tell what was fact and what was imagination.
Later in her life Frame occasionally drew up a proposed table of contents for a new selection of stories; and her lists included the abandoned older typescripts. But once she had moved on from earlier work, she was reluctant to revisit it. It is also true that once she had financial security she was less willing to subject herself to the rigours of publication and the inevitable public attention, for good or otherwise. She had been very disillusioned by the initially hostile reception to her last book The Carpathians (1988), even though the critical tide on that novel subsequent
ly turned so much in its favour that it won not only the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction but also the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book.
Whatever the motivation, we know that Frame deliberately left work unpublished during her lifetime. She often remarked of this decision, ‘. . . I think posthumous publication is the only form of literary decency left.’
Pamela Gordon & Denis Harold
Trustees
Janet Frame Literary Trust
Between My Father and the King
My father fought in the First World War that used to be called ‘Great’ until the truth of its greatness was questioned and the denial of its greatness accepted. My father came home from the war with a piece of shrapnel in his back, remnants of gas in his lungs, a soldier’s pay book, an identity disc, a gas mask, and a very important document which gave details of my father’s debt to the King and his promise before witnesses to repay the King the fifty pounds borrowed to buy furniture: a bed to sleep in with his new wife, a dining table to dine at, linoleum and a hearthrug to lay on the floor, two fireside chairs for man and wife to sit in when he wasn’t working and she wasn’t polishing the King’s linoleum and shaking the King’s hearthrug free of dust; and a wooden fireside kerb to protect the hearthrug, the linoleum and my father and his wife from sparks when they sat by the fire. All this furniture, the document said, cost fifty pounds, which had to be paid to the King in agreed instalments.
I found this document the other day, and the accompanying note of discharge from debt; and it was the first time I had known of my father’s dreadful responsibility. For besides promising to repay the loan he had sworn to keep the bed and mattress and fireside kerb and hearthrug and linoleum and dining table and chairs and fireside chairs in good order and on no account sell or exchange them and to be prepared at any time to allow the King’s Representative to inspect them.
If only I had known!
In our conscienceless childhood days we ripped the backs from the kitchen chairs and made sledges from them; we drove nails into the wooden kerb — the King’s Kerb! We pencilled and crayoned the dining table, scuffed the linoleum, bounced on the bed, split open and explored the mattress and the two fireside chairs, looking for money. Finally, the tomcat peed on and permanently impaired the hearthrug. And all this was the King’s property on gracious loan to my father and we never knew!
It is all so far away now. I have no means of discovering what my parents thought or talked about when they lay in the King’s bed and ate at his table and sat in his chairs and walked on his linoleum. When a knock sounded on the door did my father glance quickly around at the fifty pounds’ worth to make sure it was in good condition in case the King’s Representative happened to be passing?
‘I’m the King’s Representative. I happened to be passing through Richardson Street, Dunedin, and I thought I’d inspect your bed and mattress and chairs and linoleum and hearthrug and wooden fireside kerb.’
‘Do come in,’ I imagined my mother saying rather timidly.
And with my father leading the way and my mother following they conducted the King’s Representative on a tour of the far-flung colonial furniture. My mother nervously explained that there were young children in the house, and babies, and a certain amount of wear and tear . . .
‘Yes yes, of course,’ the King’s Representative said, taking out his notebook and writing, for example: wooden kerb, two dents in; linoleum, brown stain on; while my mother’s apprehension grew and my father looked more worried and when the Representative left my mother burst into tears.
Or so I imagined.
‘He’ll go straight to the King. I know he will!’
My father tried to comfort her. He glanced with hate at the King’s furniture. He wished he had never borrowed the fifty pounds.
And then perhaps he had one of his bright ideas and that evening as he and my mother sat in the King’s armchairs with their feet on the King’s cat-stained hearthrug and protected from sparks by the King’s wooden kerb, my father took out his own small notebook and pencil and carefully studying the Great War in all its Greatness and himself in it with his fellow soldiers in the trenches, he wrote, inspecting deeply the life and the death and the time and the torture,
Back, shrapnel in; lungs, remains of gas in; nights, nightmares in; days, memories in.
Dear King, the corresponding dents and stains and wear and tear in my life surely atone for the wear and tear of your precious kerb and hearthrug etc. Please wipe out the debt of fifty pounds or passing by Buckingham Palace I shall drop in to inspect you and claim settlement for your debt to me.
The Plum Tree and the Hammock
The plum tree had its roots in our place and therefore belonged to us but two thirds of it had chosen to grow into their place; and their side, as well as being free from blight, had the big outstretched branch from which they strung a canvas hammock where on weekends and in the summer evenings one or other of the Connollys would lie reading the paper or comics or doing nothing, eyes closed, arms in neck-rest position, in an enviable luxury of relaxation, enjoying, so to speak, the auxiliary fruits of our plum tree.
No one knew why so much of the tree leaned in their direction or why their side, grafted with big plums that hung like blue lamps from leaf-woven shades, had no blight while our small mean round plums oozed blobs of clear jelly between the stalk and the skin with the crevices sometimes webbed white to make believe a nunlike creature lived there; and with a dark lump of bitterness inside, lying against the stone, not always penetrating to the surface of the plum. When we ate the plums on our side we had to keep our eyes open whereas the Connollys could swing in their hammock and reach up for the plums and eat and relish them with their eyes closed.
Truly, they enjoyed a backyard Eden — one that few knew of, for we were the only neighbours who could see into their backyard and garden. We could see into their kitchen window, too, for the house was high and the window, curtainless, made a strange frame with the light as a natural theatre light revealing the Connollys whenever they sat down to meals at the kitchen table, their silhouettes sharp, their movements precise, economical. The sound effects were also dramatic, especially on Friday night when Mr Connolly came home drunk. Mrs Connolly’s laughter came across clearly too; that is, when she laughed. Her face was more often glum and long with a chin that waggled and had the appearance of being detachable. All the Connollys except the youngest had sandy-coloured hair, freckles, and a wrinkled skin, tinted yellow, like old reptilian armour.
Their life was primitive and violent with its recurring payday drunkenness; and their voices were often what my parents described in disapproving tones as ‘raised’. In our house the admonition, Don’t raise your voice, was severe, and when spoken by my father it was always completed by a reference to what had become our special landmark — Thames Street.
‘Don’t raise your voice. I don’t want to hear you all the way down Thames Street.’
‘All the lights in the house blazing. You can see them all the way down Thames Street.’
‘Get another shovel of coal on the fire. Look lively. I’m not asking you to traipse down Thames Street.’
Thames Street was the main street with an Italian fish and chip shop at one end and a Greek fish and chip shop at the other. I remember an inexplicable feeling of alarm and loss the day when I heard one of the Connollys use our landmark as if it were their property: ‘I could even race you down to Thames Street.’
When the Connollys first put up their hammock (just as the plums were beginning to emerge from the brown frayed leftover blossom) the action seemed so full of promise that we children could hardly contain our envy. Suddenly it seemed that we had no place, absolutely no place where we could lounge, really lounge. We grew restless, discontented. We asked our parents, ‘Why can’t we have a hammock like the Connollys?’ Our father’s reply, ‘What do you want a hammock for?’ proved that he had no understanding of the bliss-giving properties of hammocks.
; The plums swelled, their green darkened with streaks of blue. The Connollys lounged.
‘Waiting for the plums to get ripe,’ we said nastily, ‘when it’s our tree.’
Our sense of neighbourliness was not strong but then neither is that of adults who need complicated laws to prevent them from fighting over fences and hedges and overhanging trees. We children had profited from the neighbour on the other side of us, a Mr Smart, who kept a garden of fruit trees that did not overhang the macrocarpa hedge but grew near enough for us to juggle a length of drainpipe beneath the rosiest apples, jerk the pipe, and watch our prize separate from the tree and roll down the drainpipe into our possession. It seemed only fair that we should get a similar bounty from the Connollys who not only helped themselves to our blight-free plums but this season would do so in a manner more suited to the realms of myth and legend; and the Connollys were no gods to have the benefit of such paradisal pleasures!
The four boys were Alf, Dick, Len and Bob. They had both the individuality and the lack of it which a family of boys may present to outsiders. One moment they were general, the next they were particular Connollys. There were a number of identifying references that we used when thinking or talking of them. Alf was old and would soon be leaving school. My sister, looking through the gap in the fence one day, had seen him peeing among the potatoes. His thing, she said, was blue. Dick was the quiet one who always came when he was called. He looked most like his mother. Len was a wag, always in mischief, raiding orchards, leading tin-canning parties. Bob, the youngest, had brown hair and no freckles. He was known as a crybaby. He was the age of my youngest sister who, in our local tradition of matching the sexes by age, looked on him as her ‘boy’. They were both six. By this calculation my sister had several ‘boys’ in the neighbourhood. And by this ruling, Dick should have come into my possession but I was fussy and I did not like his red face and his crooked nose, and my heart as well as my age had got in tune with a pale boy up the road to whom I had never spoken. He was Ron Corbie, pale and straight, and every morning he cycled by in a flash of handsome pallor on his black and silver bicycle.
