by Lloyd Jones
I would have liked a tour of the house. I’m not shy about knocking on the door of strangers, so I mounted the steps. But through the front window I saw a woman on her bed reading a book, so I quietly retreated to the road.
The best I could do was to appreciate 88 Eden Street in relation to everything around it. I noticed those features that might have sprung memories were my mother to have stood where I did—the bullnose veranda on the villa across the road, a number of other rustic cottages of similar vintage, one lovely old place that sat on a knob of hill to the south, a very old and solid cabbage tree that shifted ever so slightly in a steady breeze that poured up the hill where the road dropped from view, and the pitch and roll of a landscape that never really settled into one thing or another.
I followed Eden Street down the steep incline, noting the number of ‘No Exit’ signs, and very quickly arrived at the Parade on the flat, to a number of two-storey timber shops. Across the Parade I noticed a pedestrian lane running through the back of the houses. The moment I started along it I realised I was following my mother’s route to Island Bay School. The lane came out beside a large timber house, possibly a boarding house in Mum’s day. On Clyde Street I looked across to the school, where a dad, dressed like an overgrown schoolboy, and his young son raced around the concrete play area on bikes. I crossed the road to read the school’s mission statement which was fixed to the fence:
We are a learning community growing children to be:
Skilled communicators
Deep thinkers
Superb managers of self
And confident about the future.
The word ‘confident’ was contained within a star. These are worthy values. But if I think of them as stars of alignment in my mother’s world of 1918 they begin to dim. Her launch pad into the world was altogether different.
The bastard is the godfather of the outsider. Filius nullius. A Nobody.
A bastard floats free of the normal constraints, but for that freedom a price is exacted—the bastard only ever occupies thresholds. In the Old Testament, the bastard is even more of an outcast: ‘He shall not enter the congregation of the Lord, and nor shall his offspring for ten generations.’ In the Old Testament the concern is less moral than an anxiety about the weakening of the tribal bond. A bastard in the context of the Old Testament was the offspring of a marriage between an Israelite and non-Israelite.
In King Lear, Edmund explains his aloofness from society on the grounds of an ‘irregular birth’:
Why bastard? Wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us
With base? With baseness? Bastardy? Base, base?
After I read Hawthorne’s account of Hester Prynne’s shame and the transcript of Maud’s divorce in the Supreme Court I felt the world begin to close around me. This is what a greater awareness of the past achieves. It finds a place for everything. Random occurrences—‘acts of God’—are exchanged for pattern and inevitability.
Of course the earthquake struck when and where it did, and to the naked eye of course the pattern of bad luck would seem random, unless of course you knew about the old city maps indicating ancient subterranean waterways, and of course I would find myself born into a world of silence because that is precisely what the shamed bestows upon the progeny—a wilful forgetting.
The bastard civilisation rises on its own conceit as ‘self-made’. It is as singular as a plant in the desert—luminously present and ducking all questions as to how it came to be there, apparently self-seeding and self-sustaining because there is no other clue to what sprouted it.
At 88 Eden Street, the bastard is delivered to a round of new people. There is a new Mum. There is a new Mr Nash. This one is called Mr Fairley. There is a new house, a new bedroom. The windows hold a different aspect.
She is into her fifth year and already there is a growing sense of a life lived and discarded.
The concrete has still to be laid, and when the nor-wester blows, dust rises off the streets. The world is delicate, light. Look how easily it shifts from place to place.
The streets off the Parade are named after rivers—the Derwent, Clyde, Thames, Liffey, Humber. Echoes of faraway places. Echoes of wishfulness.
Memory, in its unbidden way, will bring back the life she knew under Nash’s roof—of voices rising up the stairs at Manley Terrace, the sound of someone flung against the wall, Maud’s cries and protests. Perhaps a rogue thought—cabbage trees, a craving for something sweet, say ice cream—then the wind in the eaves scurrying the thought, and in the blank space she hears her own name hurled against the ceiling. And she wonders how it is that a name can sound so soiled and beaten about. The guarded inquiries of the neighbours down at the front door. The more forthright voice of the constable. There was that period at Maungahuia in the Wairarapa, where the wind whistled out of sinkholes in the hills and washing flew off the line, and there was the smell of freshly made earth. Perhaps she was just old enough to appreciate that her mother was not of that world.
Of course there are no documents that record the moment of the separation of the mother and her child.
But when the quake struck on 22 February 2011 the city’s inhabitants scrutinised themselves, directly, moment by moment. Time was stopped and put up on Facebook and YouTube. The ground shook, and it was recorded by closed circuit cameras, by mobiles switched to camera and whirled about in shaken hands, as well by cooler minds who calmly held up their phones to record the moment of destruction.
There is no footage of the events when my mother’s world dramatically changed, or a record of what Maud said to her that last morning. Perhaps it crossed Maud’s mind that this was the last time that she and her daughter would wake up under the same roof. This is the last time she will wash her child’s face and lace up her boots, or sit her up to the table with a spoon.
I remember taking the dog in its aged, blind state to the vet to be put down. It lay on the vet’s table, its tail flat and lifeless, one trusting eye cocked up at me, its muzzle on its paws. And there is another moment too—on the day my mother died. She is sitting in an armchair at home, frail, and every now and then doubling over with stomach pain, but rallying to smile politely up at the woman from the hospice. And just on the edge of my own hearing, so perhaps Mum didn’t hear, the woman from the hospice says, ‘I think we’ll give her another day.’ Mum looked interested, as ever wishing to be polite. As it happened she had another ‘event’ that afternoon. By evening she was hooked up to the morphine drip from which, I discovered, there is no return. Her child-like look of trust haunts me, as does the dog’s, and so, now, the terrible feeling of betrayal Maud must have felt as she put out her daughter’s breakfast, and later perhaps brushed her hair, and wet a fingertip to remove a crumb from her cheek is easily imagined.
People in Christchurch spoke of the plain everyday ordinariness that led up to the 22 February earthquake. Then, hours and days and months after the earth shook apart, the mind insisted on going back to when everything held together looking for a sign.
Perhaps a number of little warnings that passed my mother by at the time were later remembered.
Perhaps Maud packed a small suitcase with her things. So it is reasonable for my mother to think she is going somewhere. And then, in small bites, the new circumstances come clear. She is going somewhere. She is going to the Fairleys. And, there they are, standing at the door, smiling down from their adult heights. One tall, the other a pumpkin. The hall is strange too—a different grade of light and air from what she is used to. She follows Maud inside, perhaps to a room where she is invited to play. Time passes. She wonders where everyone is. She returns to the hall. Voices are coming from one of the rooms. She will go there. She pushes on the door, the Fairleys look up, and slowly smile. Her mother has gone.
At the zoo in Newtown she might notice those animals that appear t
o read our very thoughts and share our instincts. The white feathered cockatoo, for example, with its shifting pink eye. There are other animals that appear homesick or depressed. The baboon reaches up to an overhanging branch and with baffling grace moves off to a remembered corner of the forest. The lions are besieged with homesickness. They are a reminder of everything that is wrongly aligned or out of place.
From the front porch at 88 Eden Street the long view is broken up by stubbly hills and valleys. The fast-moving clouds suggest change afoot, perhaps some rearrangement of the dust at the door where her mother will show up.
She is somebody’s daughter. It is hard to say whose. She was Maud’s, but now there is another woman who acts like her mother: dresses her, feeds her, but then stares at her as if she ought to be someone else, and is disappointed to discover that she is not that person after all. So she must find a way of living with her failure to be what Mrs Fairley wishes her to be, as well as the failure of what she was in the Nash household.
Did Maud ever visit her daughter? Maud told the court she hadn’t set eyes on Betty since handing her on to the Fairleys, four years earlier.
In a letter to O.T. Maud mentions handling the adoption ‘through friends’. She doesn’t say the friends are adopting my mother. Her vagueness may be deliberate, to prevent Nash discovering Betty’s whereabouts. But then why would he care? Wouldn’t he be relieved to be rid of the child whom he regarded as a curse on his life, proof of Maud’s lying, and of a past of which he was never quite sure?
If the Fairleys were friends, did they cease to be the moment they adopted my mother? If such a friendship survived I imagine Mum would have remembered the bitter-sweet occasions of her mother visiting.
As long as there is memory a life is never fully discarded. It lingers on—a scratch on the ceiling, a corner of the wallpaper pulled away, a whisper, a laugh, a touch, the first lick of something delicious, a ride in a car. And other puzzling moments that make no sense on their own. Mr Nash, who used to cuddle her and at other times call her names, and spit in her food, and shout at her mother, shout at them both as they walked up the street, which made people stop and stare, while others walked on as if they had not heard a thing. And the silences that seem to mean something but she cannot say what it is. The silence building in the car, as they drove at the edge of the strait. Her mother, in the front. Mr Nash looking further up the road. They were on their way to somewhere, but that place has slipped her memory. Why does the mind produce such moments? Where is Mr Nash? Will he find her in his motor car? Perhaps she paints pictures—to reinstate the world she has lost. She puts in a boat, installs her mother as a pilot. The boat is at sea. She paints herself on the beach. Her mother cannot see her, and it seems impossible that the boat will ever turn to the shore where she stands waving. Has her mother lost her? Or is she busy, detained, preoccupied with the two boys. These are words she will learn to spell at Island Bay School. She is coming into the complexities of language that will help her establish the arrangement of the world and make sense of it. She is read to. She reads. She wonders where her mother is. What is taking her so long? She learns her mother is in England, which she discovers is on the other side of the world. She picks up a coin. On one side is the King of England. On the other, a tui. She clutches both in the palm of her hand. (As late as 1960, my mother referred to England, where she had never been, as ‘home’.)
She may find kinship in the emasculated hills—what once covered them has also gone. The old trees have been replaced. The wind rises to hysteria. People continue to smile. They are encouraged to.
She is awake. Daylight is breaking. It is time to get up, to wash, to eat breakfast, to brush her teeth, to go to school. There are things to attend to, teachers to listen to. Arcane bits of information to store away. Trees weep—a little-known fact. And farmers with an unsentimental eye slit the throats of fly-blown sheep. Beech, she will learn, are happiest in the company of other beech.
Solace.
Despondent over the departure of a good friend, Pliny the Younger writes to his correspondent who has offered sympathy, ‘Either say something that I have never read of before, or else hold thy peace.’
Cures for melancholia once included conserves of roses, violets, orange pills, condite. ‘Odoraments’ such as rose-water, balm, vinegar, ‘do much to recreate the brains and spirits.’
As an adult Mum swore by her daily tablespoon of cod-liver oil. She also loved to read about other lives, biographies.
Hawthorne introduced the W to his name to separate him from a Puritan forebear, Hathorne, who had been a judge at the Salem witch trials. A slight alteration of name might have succeeded in distancing him, but a writer’s works have a way of tracking back to his wellsprings.
Seneca spoke of Simon changing his name to Simonides and setting fire to the house of his birth so nobody should point to it.
In her reading Mum might have found solace in fables. Aesop, for example, telling off the fox and his companions who are complaining for want of tails—‘you complain for want of toys, but I am quite blind, be quiet; I say to thee, be thou satisfied.’
And, ‘It is recounted of the hares, that, with a general consent they were to drown themselves out of feelings of misery, but when they saw a company of frogs more fearful than they were, they began to take courage and comfort again.’
She loved the sea, found comfort in its moods and inconstancy, in its capacity to reflect and to absorb. As a young woman, she swam between the rafts moored out from Petone Beach. Her swimming course followed the Esplanade and a number of streets running up the valley, named after the ships—Aurora, Cuba, Tory, Oriental—that delivered the first white settlers to this same beach. She swam over ghosted moorings. Back and forth, said my father. He maintained she was a good swimmer. Years later, when I was a toddler, she would bring me to this same beach to splash in the shallows, even when the tide was red from the discharge at Ngauranga and the meatworks at the old p end of the beach. But I never saw her swim.
Krapp’s tragedy is that he is stuck with his life. Confined to his tapes, endless replays and outbursts of rage. Maud’s strategy was to forget, and to help the process she sought a physical solution. In 1919, some months after she gave up my mother, Maud approached a lawyer to begin separation proceedings. Nash talked her out of it, and persuaded her to spend some time ‘with her people’ back home.
Maud left in 1920 and returned to England. Two years later she sails back to New Zealand as if arriving for the first time. It is a retracing of an older journey, in the same way as my sister Lorraine would set out from the house after a fit of epilepsy, or, like the basilica on Barbadoes Street, a dismantling followed by a reassembling, so that with the crossing of oceans and the passing of time everything might be stitched back together as good as new. And on her return, Maud will learn to abide within herself.
But not quite yet. There is the tail-end of her marriage to Harry Nash to work through.
They had written to one another over the two years Maud was away. Harry Nash sent a letter off with each boat. Maud’s letters arrived regularly. ‘Some of Maud’s mail was nice enough,’ Harry Nash noted, but, ‘some of it could be nasty.’ In the one letter that survives, Maud calls Nash a liar and accuses him of backtracking on his promise to provide her and the children with a living income while in England. After Nash shows no willingness to pay for her return fare Maud marches off to the New Zealand High Commission in London to demand that the government take an interest in her domestic affairs. More unpleasantly, she threatens to tell Nash’s business colleagues in England of his ‘appalling treatment’ of her.
In England she lives in the house in Taunton where years later I would visit Mavis. Meat and fruit, she complains, are unaffordable, yet she takes herself off to the London theatre and treats herself to extravagant new clothes.
For her passage back to New Zealand she borrows from her brother, Bert. After their departure is delayed a fortnight following a collision in t
he Channel, Maud and the boys are handsomely compensated with an upgrade to a first-class passage. Six weeks later she passes through the familiar weather-beaten heads of Wellington Harbour.
Things don’t get off to the best of starts when Nash is late getting down to the wharf to meet Maud and the two boys off the SS Paparoa. Harry’s first conciliatory act was to take Maud and the boys to Kirkaldie & Stains department store for morning tea. In Nash’s account, within a short time Maud is nagging him.
The next day they make plans to go to the races. They squabble over some slight thing. Within three days of cohabitation Nash has moved out. There has been another incident.
In Maud’s absence Nash has employed a housekeeper, a Miss Andrews. I wonder if Maud sniffed the possibility of a dalliance between the housekeeper and Nash. If true, this has a certain poetic justice. If it isn’t true then there is no acceptable explanation for what follows.
Mr Nash: ‘Mrs Nash and myself had agreed to go to the races with a party. Miss Andrews came down to help and Mrs Nash chased her upstairs, and had Miss Andrews pinned on the bed…’
Miss Andrews: ‘Mrs Nash chased me up the stairs and into my bedroom and she tried to throttle me from behind and as I could not free myself I screamed for Mr Nash, and when he freed me I left the house without packing.’
And Nash files for a decree of separation.
The judge directs the all-male jury to find one party guilty of cruelty to the other. If it finds both Nash and Maud to be equally guilty of cruelty then he will not grant a decree of separation.
The jury returns in Nash’s favour.
Maud appeals on the grounds that the judge unfairly directed the jury, but also to clear her name of all the damaging things Nash said of her in court.
Nash mounts his own lawsuit against one of the Newtown neighbours, Harry Cobb, after he was seen acquainting himself with a number of jurors in a way that Nash felt was prejudicial to his case.
