by Janet Frame
‘You can never live your own life,’ they said to my sister the aspiring ballet dancer. ‘Practice, practice, practice.’
‘That’s a strange choice for a little chap like you,’ they told my brother, the future sea captain.
We found visitors tiresome when they spoke to us. Happily, they seemed satisfied once they found out whom we ‘took after’ and what we were going to ‘be’. Then they would pay less attention to us and talk of grown-up affairs, though sometimes they descended to us in an effort to reveal whom they took after and what they had become: they wanted us to know; and forever the first thing they wanted us to know was that they ‘got on well with’, ‘had a way with’ children.
‘Grandma will beat them all,’ my mother said. ‘She is such fun. She has never grown old. She has kept a bit of childhood in her heart.’
I hated school; it was so hard not to wriggle for so long and when the playtime bell rang everyone would spring up, and once outside, arms and legs would wave and wriggle and we became more like cast sheep and dropped centipedes or caterpillars than children; waving and wriggling and whirling. It was the time of life described mysteriously by the psychology books as ‘the latent period’ when things were happening but nobody was supposed to know they were happening and if you knew they happened you immediately forgot. It was a time of storing, of programming — so the psychology books told me, years later, when I studied ‘the child’.
And it may have been so: there were long spells of nothingness and then time would be measured by knees or a wart or a new way of doing sums or a National Day when fiercely, loyally, we saluted the flag and listened to speeches and sang o valiant hearts who to your glory came, ending with your memory hallowed in the land you loved.
That was New Zealand, Land of the Fern.
It was a clouded and a clear time, seen from here, in and then out of focus — my stern father with his passion for accuracy in everything from tying knots and bows to sweeping the dust; from skirting boards to handling cutlery and pronouncing words. His command was military; he was impatient yet painstaking. And, in Scottish fashion, he ordered my mother to clean his boots, scratch his back and (with our unwillingly given help) fetch the coal which was always in plentiful supply — ‘eggs’, lignite, Westport, Kaitangata, dull Ngapara — plenty of coal because my father was ‘on the railway’, as we described it when asked what our father ‘did’.
That was my father. And worried. Always worried over money. My passionately accurate father, my praising mother and in the wings God and the Pioneers and the Poets, President Garfield, Lord Shaftesbury, Katherine Mansfield, Mr Stocker the dentist, and, heroes of my father who was Union Sec., the Workers locked in battle with the Government.
And the huge shadow of my northern grandmother.
Oh but she’s small, how small she is, I thought as I pulled my face into a shy smile (‘She’s shy’) and said Hello for the first time to my northern grandmother. We had long exhausted our imaginings of her, ranging from witch to angel; for, we told ourselves, we had known both, and the populous parade in between. Yet my images had not included this small woman dressed in black warming her hands in front of the open grate of the kitchen range. Her face had a yellowish tint which may have been the reflection of the fire. Her eyes were big and dark and — I saw at once — disapproving. Adept as any visiting aunt or uncle at discerning family relationships, I could see that her chin was square like my mother’s with the same look of defiance, like the photograph I’d seen of an opera singer surrounded by enemies and singing at the top of her voice for help.
So this was my famous grandmother. I was still young enough to expect magic, and to be patient if it did not happen at once.
I waited.
‘She’s shy,’ my mother said again.
I frowned. Grandma had black lace-up old-woman shoes, like my own. I had never become used to not realising my dream of having button-up shoes; it stayed as an ache inside me. Oh, the passion that would overtake me in the middle of the night, just to have button-up shoes!
‘Say hello to your grandmother.’
It had started. It was strange and I did not like it.
‘Four girls ought to be a help with the housework, Lottie.
‘I suppose you make your bed in the morning and help with the dishes and are kind to your mother. Always be kind to your mother. You may not have her for long.’
I could never understand or appreciate this reasoning. I’d heard it before from other relatives and from my mother about her mother. It was, as my mother would say, like water off a duck’s back, with the difference that the duck does not resent the water as I resented this blackmailing homily.
‘Do they make their beds and tidy the bedroom, Lottie?’
‘Oh yes,’ my mother said loyally, while I saw in my mind our bedroom with its unmade bed and the mile-high dust and fluff and the full chamberpot like a punchbowl mixed with varying shades of amber, standing in the middle of the room, just waiting for someone to trip over it or trail an end of blanket or a dress in it.
I hated my mother for being a coward.
‘Of course they’re at school all day,’ my mother said, as if reading my thoughts.
‘That’s no excuse,’ Grandma said. ‘When you were young and when I was young and walking all the way down by the Maori pa to school, we had to do our hand’s turn at home.’
She turned impressively to me. ‘Thirteen in your mother’s family!’
‘Grandma’s going to take you for a walk along the gully tomorrow,’ Mother said.
I interpreted this as Don’t judge your grandmother until you’ve been out walking with her. She’ll call down the birds of the air, she’ll show you tricks with trees and grass, she’ll tell you stories, you’ll love her.
Implied in this was the certainty that our grandmother would love us, too.
I knew that Grandma’s other daughters and sons had married and bred enthusiastically and we’d heard many tales of our gentle religious cousins — ‘quiet’, ‘a help around the house’; of the girls ‘little mothers’; of the boys ‘gentlemanly’. I felt neither gentle nor motherly. I felt prickly and irritable and I didn’t like my tartan skirt with the bodice having to be hitched and hitched and not being able to get inside it to scratch, either ordinary scratchings or the fleas that Grandma, if she stayed long enough, would soon find out about. Oh, it was the ‘latent’ period all right but whatever was going on you could see it, just as they said you could tell someone was submerged and drowning by the bubbles that kept rising to the surface.
I do not think it was a case of our building up hopes and having them shattered. I do not think it was a ‘case’ of any kind. We decided that we felt neutral towards our grandma. The walk along the gully was not really a failure, as Grandma had no opportunity to charm the birds out of the sky and there were no reeds to make pipes from and no poisonous berries. She walked well but we were shy and had nothing to say and perhaps our shyness affected her because there were none of the wonderful stories my mother remembered, and though we did not expect our grandma to speak as they did on the films, saying, ‘I love you’, we thought she might show it somehow; but she kept judging and wanting to change us, making us better or neater or quieter; in our imaginings, when she came, we had stayed as we were; but then she had been as our mother, the liar, painted her. I had a feeling which developed into jealousy and resentment that Grandma cared more for our mother than she did for us: she looked on us as our mother’s enemies.
The gully walk ended; we met our mother’s questions with answers disappointing to her. I thought she was going to cry. No, the fantails had not perched on Grandma’s shoulder; there had been no fantails. As for whistles and pipes and divined underground springs . . .
Our father was home from his Saturday shift. It was teatime. Tempers flared.
‘I’d expect the girls to set the table at least. If you ask me they haven’t even made their beds and tidied their room.’
My
mother was in the scullery. There was a loud, clear, ‘Shut up, Mum,’ from my eldest sister.
Grandma’s dark eyes grew darker and bigger.
‘No grandchild is going to tell one of my daughters to shut up. I’ve never ever heard that expression in my household. What little monsters has your mother raised that they should use that expression! God forbid that a child should speak to her mother in that way. Her mother!’
My grandma’s face was flushed, her chin was held high, and we sitting in a row on the old kauri form that my father had sat on when he was a child and had turned upside down to make a canoe; we were now silent and afraid and sad and guilty because we knew that we did not love or even like our new grandma, especially not after her suddenly expressed threat:
‘If you were my children I’d take the belt off the sewing machine and whip you!’
She meant it. Had she whipped her own children, I wondered; and had my mother forgotten? Surely the birds of the air would never fly down to perch on the shoulder of someone so cruel? And the music would refuse to come readily through the tiny holes of the reed or bamboo pipe? And the secret water not announce its presence to the hazel twig?
Grandma’s threat was real. The belt around the wheel of the sewing machine was thin, with wire inside, and would sting and cut. Surely Grandma had never whipped her own children in this way? Grandma, who stood equal and sometimes above, in praise, the Pioneers, President Garfield, Lord Shaftesbury, Katherine Mansfield, Mr Stocker the dentist: between these and God, I reasoned that if Grandma did not deserve the praise, perhaps the others, including God, were equally undeserving. It was all inexplicable and strange. I did not like my grandmother; obviously, my mother loved her. I had thought my mother belonged to me, but how could she, looking through such different eyes at the world and the people. Even her daylight, her daylight and night did not seem to be mine anymore, and I thought they had been. Everything she said about Grandma must have been true but it was her truth and Grandma’s and it didn’t belong to any of us.
The clock ticked. It had a long face with dragons painted at the edges. The fire roared because the damper was pulled out. I felt very lonely, as if I lived under a separate sky.
We panicked. We showed our fear and hate. We used several words that could be described as ‘that expression’.
‘Don’t let me hear you use that expression again. None of my other grandchildren have ever used that expression in front of me.’
Our mother’s grief made our behaviour worse; we were helpless.
‘Get the forks from the kitchen drawer.’
‘Get them yourself.’
‘Put on a shovel of coal, there’s a good girl.’
‘I won’t.’
‘I won’t!’
This was called ‘outright’ or ‘downright refusal’ — a serious crime. Yes, I remember this as a bitter episode in the so-called ‘latent’ period of my life. It was a time of being judged and condemned. It was dramatically expressed by every grown-up who knew us that we had ‘broken our grandmother’s heart and our mother’s heart and brought disgrace on our father and the home’.
There were no photos taken in the Town Gardens, though we wore our dresses and Mother wore hers and my brother wore his new serge pants; but my father did not blow his nose on his birthday handkerchief, and we did not feel at home in our new clothes.
Grandma went home after two days and vowed never to return. My mother cried. My father talked of sending us to the Industrial School at Caversham.
Shut up, I won’t, bum, fart, fuck — we had said them all, happily and unhappily rejoicing in their power. Shut your gob. Gob!
Grandma kept her word: she never returned either in real life or in our mother’s spoken memory of her. Though we missed the stories we had loved and we wished it were as it used to be when we’d never met Grandma but had dreamed of her, we thought, in our turmoil, Good riddance, and buried our disgrace down a handy pocket in the ‘latent period’, and that was that.
A few years later Grandma died, and when her home was sold my mother received fifty pounds and a ‘keepsake’, a grey and white oil painting of a lighthouse and a storm at sea which she hung in the passage by the bathroom door. With the fifty pounds she paid the grocer’s bill and bought my father a new fishing bag and herself a set of bottom false teeth which she could not wear because the gooseberry seeds hurt; and we had new bright blue bathing togs.
We lay on the beach in the sun, half-closed our eyes, and looked up lazily at the remote birds of the air wild and free in the spinning blue sky.
In Alco Hall
One of the few people who gave comfort and advice to my eldest sister Joan was a middle-aged widow with a name like that of a bird — Gull or Sparrow or Robin. I think it was Gull, Mrs Emily Gull who lived alone in a corner house in front of a clay bank that, unlike other clay banks in the neighbourhood, had no pink-flowering iceplant growing on it. It was typical of Mrs Gull, people said, to leave her clay bank naked to the world! Mrs Gull smoked, too, in the days before smoking was accepted in a woman. She swore. She put on make-up. She committed the crime of speaking to my thirteen-year-old sister as to an equal, and insisting that Joan call her by her Christian name (her Christian name!), Emily. Emily Gull, living alone in a corner house in front of a naked clay bank on an unkempt section where tinker-tailor grass grew waist-high along the wire-netting fence and old cabbages of years ago rotted yellow in their unmade garden beds and a forest of hemlock surrounded the weathered grey boards of a long-untenanted fowl house.
Mrs Emily Gull. That Mrs Gull. Everyone knew what Emily Gull had been, and how she’d led young girls astray.
When I listened to the grown-ups talking about her I could not understand for I did not fathom where young girls could be led astray to, and I did not know, though I was curious about it, what Mrs Gull had been. My knowledge of her was so different from that of the grown-ups who talked about her that sometimes I believed they were speaking of another person, a wicked Emily Gull whom I had never met or known. The woman I knew, when Joan came crying to her place, taking me with her clinging to her hand, would invite us into the kitchen while she cooked a meal or baked cakes; and she would never speak an angry word to us.
‘Take a pew.’
When we had taken our pew and Joan had stopped sniffling, Emily Gull (peeling the potatoes or dropping the ‘dry’ ingredients into the bowl and mixing) would say,
‘Trouble at home?’
Joan would begin sniffling again.
‘It’s Dad. He won’t see reason.’
Emily Gull would smile and grunt, ‘My father never saw reason either.’
Seeing reason was a most admired gift which everyone claimed for himself and denied to others. Perhaps it was not so important to be able to see it, for when you’d seen it no one believed you and you had to keep telling people you’d seen it, and if there were no witnesses how could you prove it?
‘He said I’m too young to go to the dance, that he’ll lock me in the bedroom on the night so’s I can’t go.’
Now Joan had been given a long purple lacy dress by someone whose name was — strangely — Violet. It was a dress for dancing in. I was four years younger than Joan and had no thought of dancing, but I assumed that if you had a dress for dancing you must surely use it. If you had feet you walked, didn’t you? Or danced? If you had hands you waved and hit and clapped? If you had a dance dress you danced. And if our father hadn’t wanted Joan to go to a dance he should not have let Violet Jackson give her the dress. Violet Jackson had gone dancing in it. What did age matter? Joan was as grown-up as anyone could be and with a touch of powder and paint and mascara she could make herself look even more grown-up, so why the fuss?
‘My own father was a hard man,’ Emily Gull said.
We stared at Emily, thinking how strange it was that she’d ever had a father — or a mother. She must have got rid of them early, we thought. Perhaps killed them.
‘Dad’s awful. He’s the wo
rst father anyone had. And Mum’s too soft. If you ask her something she says, Ask Dad, because she’s scared to say. And when Dad says Yes she says Yes and when Dad says No she says No, so what’s the use of having a mother at all?’
I did not quite agree with Joan that our mother was no use. It might have been so with Joan, for it seemed that as soon as Joan became grown-up (and no one but her and me admitted she was grown-up) Dad took charge of her, to ‘train her’, as he said.
‘The girl must have training, discipline. She’s running wild.’
I wished sometimes that I could get on the other side of things to see the view other people had, especially of Joan, ‘running wild’. She bit and pinched, of course, as one sister to another, and she got excited and enjoyed herself. How, I wondered, was that ‘wild’? I myself found our mother useful chiefly because she was there. If she wasn’t in the dining room she was in the kitchen. If she wasn’t in the kitchen she was in the wash-house. She was always somewhere. She was also useful because if I asked persistently enough for the best biscuits she almost threw them at me,
‘There’s your whack! Now are you satisfied?’
Sitting in Emily Gull’s kitchen, talking about the dance dress, Joan forgot her sniffling. This day Emily Gull was baking a cake, and ash from her cigarette kept dropping into the bowl.
She screwed up her face.
‘Why worry?’
Her face was brown and wrinkled. Her hair, dyed blue-black, was really grey, and to me it seemed as if she camped rather than lived in her house, and this was proof that she was a gypsy and, when she chose, could take her place on the heath with Petulengro and Jasper and others whose story had been in our School Journal and who had impressed me with their earnest conversation and the way they kept saying, ‘Life is sweet, brother.’ I hadn’t thought about whether life was sweet: I merely tasted and swallowed it; but I knew that for some reason Joan wasn’t finding much sweetness in it; indeed, I could have said that for Joan at thirteen, life was sour.
