Anything That Burns You

by Terese Svoboda

  reflecting each other obliquely

  as in cracked mirrors…

  beheld in your luminous spirit

  their own reflection,

  transfigured as in a shining stream,

  and loved you for what they are not. (Sun-up 69)

  Ridge’s parents separated in Dublin when she was only a year old. Perhaps Joseph Henry Ridge had inherited his namesake’s tendency to get into trouble. An 1828 newspaper ran an account of a duel held between a Mr. Skerrett and the solicitor Mr. Ridge, who had asked questions of Skerret’s father in court that his son considered unnecessary. After the shots were fired, the two parties agreed that horsewhipping Mr. Ridge at the Loughrea racecourse the next day would be an amicable solution. Whatever the problem between Ridge’s mother and father, divorce was anathema in Catholic Ireland, and was not recognized as a legal remedy until 1996. Emma was living with her father when Lola was born. Most likely Joseph had left or was evicted. The few letters known to exist are not hostile but suggest that “fate” is all that kept them apart. But then Ridge’s grandfather died.

  Grandpa, grandpa…

  (Light all about you…

  ginger…pouring out of green jars…)

  You don’t believe he has gone away and left his great coat…

  so you pretend…you see his face up in the ceiling.

  When you clap your hands and cry, grandpa, grandpa, grandpa,

  Celia crosses herself. (Sun-up 4)

  As customs collector, Ridge’s grandfather must have afforded the services of at least one servant. Sarah Kinsella made an X on Ridge’s birth certificate beside her address, 28 Cole Alley, a less than desirable street eleven years earlier “with 915 persons who sleep in 294 beds, including 170 wads of straw.” In Sun-up and Other Poems, Celia is the servant who comforts her mother in a moment of extreme distress.

  …mama’s eyes stare out of the pillow

  as though she had gone away

  and the night had come in her place

  as it comes in empty rooms…

  you can’t bear it—

  the night threshing about

  and lashing its tail on its sides

  as bold as a wolf that isn’t afraid—

  and you scream at her face, that is white as a stone on a grave

  and pull it around to the light,

  till the night draws backward…the night that walks alone,

  and goes without end.

  Mama says, I’m cold, Betty, and shivers.

  Celia tucks the quilt about her feet,

  but I run for my little red cloak

  because red is hot like fire. (Sun-up 5-6)

  The mother seems inconsolable. What could a separated woman do to make a living in Ireland? The nunnery was out. Prostitution? Apparently joining the household of one of her siblings in Dublin was less appealing than emigrating halfway around the world. Perhaps her father had left her enough money for overseas passage to live with her oldest sister Maria, “Mysie,” who had sailed for Australia around 1876, with a second husband, Richard Alfred Penfold, “Fred.” The three Penfolds in the New South Wales Directory in 1867 suggest the possibility that Fred’s family might have greeted them, and on Mysie’s side, the Reilly family documents show an uncle William and a Reilly cousin emigrating even earlier to Australia. In 1877 Emma and four-year-old Lola followed Mysie and Fred, boarding the Duchess of Edinburgh that arrived in Melbourne August 4, 1877.

  Ridge kept one souvenir from the voyage: the down from the breast of an albatross “the sailor had caught and killed on the ship on our way from Dublin. He had skinned and cured it and [had] given the glossy plumage to Mama.” There usually wasn’t a lot of fraternizing between passengers and sailors. With or without children, unaccompanied women were kept in the locked “virgins’ cage” below decks. But romance in the larger sense attended the voyage, especially in the quest of beginning again.

  I wish Celia

  could see the sea climb up on the sky

  and slide off again…

  …Celia saying

  I’d beg the world with you….

  Celia…holding on to the cab…

  hands wrenched away…

  wind in the masts…like Celia crying….

  .…………………………………….

  It is cool by the port hole.

  The wet rags of the wind

  flap in your face. (Sun-Up 6)

  There would be no money for a nursemaid in Australia. Although factory and office work had just opened up for women in Sydney, Emma had a small child and needed help to even consider going to work. Logically this would have been Mysie, her big sister, but some animosity caused her to refuse to even keep them. Emma and her small daughter were forced to move to Redfern, a Sydney suburb of mostly immigrants and factories. “My mother said ‘Tomorrow we shall be going away—we shall live by ourselves. Just you and I.’” In her diary, Ridge remembers their new place in detail:

  A small bare room, lit by a gas jet, a bed, two chairs, a fireplace. There, in the fireplace a few chips, yet burning. We had our supper—of bread and milkless, sugarless tea…

  We had been living with Aunt Mysie and Uncle Fred and my two cousins Alfred and Eddie Penfold…

  Well fed and taken care of, petted by my cousins, especially by Eddie, I had been very happy there (I remember the big yard, my playfellow, the gentle furred mastiff Rover)…

  Emma took up sewing to support them, a trade she seemed to know nothing about, suggesting the family’s upper-class status in Dublin.

  A man carried a sewing machine into the room and Mama paid him with the money she had borrowed from Aunt Mysie…

  A little book came with the machine and mama [sic] read it for a long time…

  Then she took an old nightgown out of her trunk and tore it in several pieces (she wound thread on the bobbin, she had to look in her little book many times…

  Her mother caught her finger in the sewing machine and bled, and she dropped her head in her hands. “Why do you watch me, she cried, ‘go away from me—go away and play.’” Ridge describes her response: “I drew back away from her and sat down on the floor and watched the blood drip from her finger on the white cloth and trickle down the back of her hand onto the white frill of her sleeve.” In the silence, she retreated into her imagination: “I had often tried to hear the sunlight singing, but the air about us never seemed to be quiet enough…”

  The rift between family members remained. Ridge memorialized one miserable Christmas holiday in Sun-up and Other Poems, and at length in her diary. On Christmas Eve they were planning to go to Paddy’s Market, “an open air affair, a mixture of merry-go-rounds, sideshows, saveloy sellers, farmers with produce and animals for sale, second hand dealers, craftsmen and members of the rag trade.” Instead, her mother gave most of the shillings she had saved from her work to her sister, as payment on the sewing machine. “But, dear, are you sure you do not need it,” [her sister] asked. Her voice had taken on a plaintive, almost a wheedling note that I was to hear many times in future years.” Judging from her sister’s vindictiveness, Emma may have been the favored daughter back in Dublin, and pride compelled her to hand the money over to her sister. When Ridge discovered the money gone, the effect on her was indelible: “just under the ribs a small hot place, maybe size of a shilling, a live coal…to be with me my life long, even as my shadow.”

  With what little was left over, they went on to visit Paddy’s. “I asked for biscuits, nice coffee biscuits with scalloped edges. So Mama had some biscuits put in a paper bag and instead of the loaf, fine slices of bread.” After her mother gave most of the treat to a beggar woman and a child, Ridge managed not to cry. “My angel,” her mother called her. “She held my hand tightly as we walked along. For no reason I felt very happy.” The next day her mother refused her landlady’s offer of Christmas dinner. Was Emma waiting for a last-minute invitation from her sister? Even Ridge’s doll Janie was deprived.

  Chris
tmas dinner was green and white

  chicken and lettuce and peas

  and drops of oil on the salad

  smiley and full of light

  like the gold on the lady’s teeth.

  But mama said politely

  Thank you, we are dining out.

  She wouldn’t let you take one pea

  to put in the hole where the whistle was

  at the back of Janie’s head,

  so Janie should have some dinner

  So you went to the park with biscuits

  and black tea in a bottle. (Sun-up 9-10)

  The day was sweltering—Christmas in Australia! A woman who seemed to be Jewish wished them a Merry Christmas. Her mother admonished Ridge: “The Jews are good people—you must always be very nice to them,” an influential remark, given that the main subject of her first book is the Jewish ghetto. When a walk to the gardens in that part of Sydney proved to be too distant for Emma and her daughter, “we turned our faces to the sand hills…glancing back I saw the spire of the little church in which I sat with my mother on Sunday mornings and had to pretend not to notice the fleas.” They met a well-dressed man and his son, who whined for food. Her mother gave away the rest of their tea and biscuits and again Ridge said not a word. Ridge would inherit this compulsive generosity, but it would often leave her penniless, forcing her to beg at the last possible moment. She assumed that the wealthy, whom she considered her equal, given her aristocratic heritage and her gift of poetry, would always have the same compulsion to give. She was often very lucky.

  Based on the richness of detail in Ridge’s poems, Emma and her daughter may have spent several years in Sydney. Although the city was home to 7,000 more men than women, Emma could not hope to wed again—her relatives would have known she was still married to the Irishman. Perhaps the solution laid out in Jane Mander’s The Story of a New Zealand River was typical: “I took what money I had and came over to Australia…one woman, good kind soul, bought me a wedding ring and made me widow’s clothes, and told me to go to New Zealand as a widow, and never to tell anybody—and to marry, if I get the chance, for the sake of the child.” David Hastings in Over the Mountains of the Sea: Life on the Migrant Ships 1870-1885 mentions a similar ruse. Add to this the tales of New Zealand gold miners finding ore the size of a man’s palm, and rumors of a new gold strike, and Emma must have decided she had nothing to lose. At some point at the end of the 1870s or early in 1880, they set sail for New Zealand.

  Little Lola might have enjoyed this shorter voyage, with penguins and flying fish to spot, but her mother was leaving the last of her family behind. Had her husband, the young doctor-to-be back in Dublin, died? Probably not, since what would have seemed a tragedy didn’t inspire Ridge to mention him more than once in her entire oeuvre.

  Celia says my father

  will bring me a golden bowl.

  When I think of my father

  I cannot see him

  for the big yellow bowl

  like the moon with two handles

  he carries in front of him. (Sun-up 3-4)

  Unfortunately, the gold rush in Hokitika that rivaled California’s was over by the time they disembarked. Hokitika had always attracted risk-takers, not only in the laborious and often futile hunt for gold, but even in the earliest effort of the enterprise, getting ashore. As Eleanor Catton describes the situation in The Luminaries: “The river mouth itself was calm, a lakelet thick with masts and the fat stacks of steamers waiting for a clearer day; they knew better than to risk the bar that lay concealed beneath the water and shifted with each tide.” The town saw 32 ships go down between 1865 and 1867, the height of its gold rush. Beach-rakers working together by moonlight carried off some of the goods, and sometimes there was enough insurance money left over to refit a new boat and run it aground again.

  Regardless of the danger, five thousand people set up the town of Hokitika in a matter of months, with not only “sly-grog” shops of every kind, billiards rooms, a skating rink, waxworks, and a hundred hotels, but also an opera house with gas chandeliers and a cigar divan. It was the boomtown life. But fifteen years later, all the easy ore was gone, only half the hotels were still open, boys ran barefoot winter and summer to make a few pennies on errands, and the saloons, those that were left, were crowded with company miners. The goldfields had been picked over by the Chinese, a sign to others that the gold rush was finished, and the Maori, considered a dying race then, wandered through town.

  Life in post-boom Hokitika was still hazardous. In September 1880 alone, a young fisherman drowned in the river, a carter cut his throat with a razor, a cook disappeared between the wharf and a vessel, and a man murdered his wife and child. This was the month that Emma declared herself a widow and married again to the Scotsman Donald MacFarlane, a seaman who took up prospecting after he deserted his ship. They moved four miles inland to the much smaller Kanieri Forks—barely a bush town—where he had a working stake. Emma at last had a man with potential, and, given Hokitika’s shortage of females, MacFarlane probably felt blessed to snag even an older single mother. Whether the three-room shack they settled in was an improvement over their previous lodging, Ridge didn’t say. Jane Mander’s heroine moves to a new home in the bush and observes: “The first thing that struck Alice about it all was its appalling isolation.”

  Compounding the isolation was MacFarlane’s alcoholism. The Scots and the Irish who made up the majority of the miners in Kanieri Forks tended to drink. It was hard going out every day deep into the mud in search for the glint of gold. MacFarlane had been one of the first at the goldfields and by 1880 had been at it for a decade and a half. Like the stepfather in Mander’s book, who is admired for how hard he works yet disliked for what he does, Ridge’s appreciation for her stepfather was conflicted. She imagined that he had some education because he knew a bit of Shakespeare:

  I remember he impersonated Macbeth with a great deal of passion and power. He used, too, to tell me stories out of Homer and be crudely kind when he was not in one of those raging drunken sprees when he would smash every stick of furniture in the three-roomed shack—until we had to rely for seats on the big wooden boxes holding five gallon cans of kerosene we used in the tiny lamps with which we lit its mean rooms.

  Emma, so proud of her ancestry, must have been distraught over their poverty and her drunken husband. As Ridge writes much later in a proposal for a series of poems, the narrator’s mother

  is a member of an old and very proud Irish family, now financially and socially ruined….totally unfitted to cope with the conditions in which she finds herself. Her only escape, therefore, is into a strange dream existence by which she moves in secret and detached from the lives of all about her. Realization of reality is left to the child who is thrown almost entirely on her own resources for amusement and companionship.

  For Ridge, it was her stepfather, and not her mother, who inspired her first poem. In her diary she records that while he supervised her homework, she heard the creek murmuring and

  something stopped me like a touch on my heart. In the still…night, through the pressure of the silence reaching on and on through—the bush undulating, wave on wave—I heard the clear treble of the little creek, more than half a hundred feet below. The creek chirrups incessantly…This trickle of water—so long docile, unnoticed, less obtrusive than the cat, suddenly…separating itself from all the noises of the night, suddenly falling…for my ears alone.

  She looked at her mother but “the pure pale cameo of her face [remained] unmoved…She did not hear my waters trebling.” Ridge would have to wrestle with her perceptions alone. Then she noticed her brooding stepfather “staring at the log fire, he heard nothing…as though I touched him, he glanced up at me…” Ridge manages to calm the ire in her stepfather’s glance by “making [her] own sweeten.” This sweetening is reflected literally in her poem “Sun-up,” in what seems to be a cathartic moment, beating her doll, but instead becomes an occasion for the speaker to use literal
sugar to obtain forgiveness.

  I beat Janie

  and beat her…

  but still she smiled…

  so I scratched her between the eyes with a pin.

  Now she doesn’t love me anymore…

  she scowls…and scowls…

  though I’ve begged her to forgive me

  and poured sugar in the hole at the back of her head. (Sun-up 21)

  Lola, sitting with her stepfather at the fire, remained attuned to the force of inspiration from “the whistling water…the one sound that would not deplete itself, like the small erect fire in my stepfather’s eyes.” “Erect” labels the struggle incestuous but Ridge decides the outcome by asserting her dominance: “My stepfather’s gaze quieted under mine, [italics added], the blue small fire sinking. He said in a low grave voice, ‘I am thinking of my dead sister Jessie.’”

  I did not answer, myself listening, waiting…yet noting his unexpected speech, as a person pondering deeply, might yet notice a white [moth?] suddenly fluttering in a doorslit. He turned back to staring in the fire.

  The door closed.

  Then, without warning, my whole being shivered. I felt as though something had struck and passed through me, leaving behind it some of its terrific power. I turned back to my copybook as one picks himself up after an earthquake that had flung him on the ground.

  But I did no more arithmetic. Instead I wrote what I believe now was my first real poem—how I wish I had kept it…

  This poem erupted from her (“my whole being shivered”) as soon as her stepfather was defeated (“the blue small fire sinking”). It was as if only by subduing her stepfather and asserting her own independence could she harness poetic power. When her mother looked at the “scrambled lines,” she recognized them for what they were: “There is something in it dear—a poetic image.” “I thought,” wrote Ridge, “I am a poet, one of them.”

  Chapter 2

  Ambition in New Zealand

  Despite his alcoholism, MacFarlane cared enough for Ridge to pay for the best local education that could be had, at a Catholic girls’ school in Kanieri named St. Joseph’s. Ridge found the nuns lacking. “I was educated—or rather taught a few things, mostly useless—in a convent school,” she writes to a friend late in life. “The tone is much superior to that of schools founded by the state,” boasts the school’s centenary booklet. Ridge sat at desks with four or five other children, and did all her schoolwork on slates. But local attitudes toward literature and women (and perhaps anxiety over impending New Zealand suffrage) were not encouraging, as is evident in a speech given at Ridge’s convent school in the 1880s, complete with the audience’s response: