by John Clarke
Neva was an encouraging and very amusing mother. She could talk about anything, and if there was nothing much happening she would help us to remember or imagine. ‘Who is this man?’ she would ask about a bloke walking up the street as we sat in the car. ‘And what is he carrying in that bag? Onions? Fish? Has he murdered his wife and cut her up into very small pieces? And is that a limp or has he just got new shoes, and, if so, should he take them back and get some the right size?’ She also took us to the A&P Show, to musical events, to visit her friends, to other towns and to shows by visiting artists. We went to the Opera House where we saw Joyce Grenfell, who was very funny and John Gielgud, who was very serious.
Neva also bought a typewriter and she began to write short stories. There were other writers doing this in the Manawatu and they met regularly. They were often women and they sent their stories away to magazine publishers. Before the arrival of television, magazines were king and some of the best writing anywhere in the world made its first appearance in periodicals. I remember Alice Glenday who became a novelist and Joy Cowley, who lived on a farm on the way to Ashurst and had a husband who could do somersaults on the lawn. I was deeply impressed.
Neva was sometimes ill in Palmerston North in the 1950s with various conditions we might these days see as at least partly psychological. The house was always clean and there was good food on the table but in emotional terms she was running on empty. She and Ted were drifting apart. Ted’s business was expanding and he was at work a great deal of the time. There are photographs from this period in which we look like a dust-bowl family who have just lost everything in a tornado.
In 1960 Ted was promoted to head office and the family moved to Wellington. He had a senior position with the company and was going well. Neva loved Wellington and her illnesses disappeared immediately. There was quite an active arts community and she joined the Wellington theatre groups. She also joined the radio drama cohort and appeared in plays for broadcast. She took singing lessons from George Scott Morrison. But mostly she continued with her writing. She sold a great many stories to magazines and for the next fifty years she published stories, memoirs, wrote book reviews, appeared in theatre productions and on radio. She published a novel, she wrote histories and she still had a weekly newspaper column in her eighties.
During the 1960s, the sound we heard when we came in from school was the clackety clack of the typewriter. Neva would be perched somewhere in the house, often near a window where the light was good, and her fingers would be flying across the keys. She could type while looking at notes sitting on another chair or while saying, ‘Hello boy who needs a haircut. How was school and why don’t you put the kettle on?’
There would sometimes be a small gathering of writers in the house. I came home one afternoon and had quite an interesting chat with a man in the kitchen. He’d been working as a teacher in Malaya when he was diagnosed with a brain tumour. He was given a year to live and he’d always wanted to write a novel, so he set about it without delay. He finished it, got it published and when he didn’t die, he wrote another one. He’d done this several times and had recently published a novel called A Clockwork Orange. His name was Anthony Burgess and he would live for another thirty years.
Another man called John A. Lee had published a memoir called Simple on a Soapbox. John had won a DCM in the First World War and had lost an arm. He’d been thrown out of the Labour Party for his socialist views and I gathered this had been a great scandal. He was a big genial fellow in a suit and he spoke in ringing tones in our small hallway as if he were addressing a large crowd in rather blustery conditions in open parkland.
For a while our postman was James Baxter, who had a beautiful voice and would often come in for a cup of tea and a chat with Neva about what was going on in the writing world. I also remember going to Barry Crump’s house one day with Neva. I must have been about twelve and Barry was a hero of mine. I had first encountered him on radio, reading his early novels A Good Keen Man and Hang on a Minute Mate. It was the first time I’d heard fiction which caught the rhythm and tone of the New Zealand voice. Barry had overslept and was dressing as we arrived. He put a shirt on and pulled it down very firmly all around, which he referred to as doing the ironing. ‘Come in Neva,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you’ve met my new dragon.’ And we peered into the gloom where a slightly horrified young woman named Helen Smith was gathered among the bedclothes. My admiration for Barry was tempered by my recognition that Helen would possibly rather be in Philadelphia.
In 1965 Neva became the New Zealand president of PEN, the international organisation of writers, and which over the next few years was instrumental in introducing public lending rights into New Zealand.
In 1971 Neva and Ted were divorced. Neva got a job running an employment agency, bought a small house and got on with her life. Within a couple of years both she and Ted remarried. Neva moved to the far north and settled at Coopers Beach with her second husband Len McKenna, an American ex-Lockheed executive who adored the bays and beaches of the far north of New Zealand as much as she did. They drove all the roads, walked all the beaches and swam all the waters of the place they called ‘paradise’. Neva became the unofficial historian of the entire region and published books which are still among the best research ever compiled about the early days and places and people of the far north. Neva was awarded the Queen’s Service Medal for this work, and if you go to Mangonui you’ll see the boardwalk named after her along the beautiful foreshore.
Neva achieved a great deal in her life. She was creative, convivial, active and well organised. She had a strong personality and wherever she lived she was surrounded by friends and admirers. She travelled extensively overseas and established strong contacts with her father’s family in Northern Ireland. She was interested in everything and she gave everything a go. She took up painting in her sixties. She was involved in a film in her seventies. She and the other participants went to Hollywood, met all sorts of people, had lunch with Phyllis Diller and enjoyed every minute of it.
Neva insisted she wasn’t a feminist. Perhaps she thought feminism was inconsistent with motherhood and good housekeeping. Perhaps there were other reasons she didn’t like the label. It sometimes seemed to us that, if she could see her personal history in terms of ideas rather than as narrative drama, she might have recognised the inequities she wanted addressed as those at the core of the feminist project. She fought some of them very early and some of them were very tough. Her grandmother had been a suffragist who lobbied for women to get the vote and had served on local bodies in the 1890s. Neva’s determination to exist and succeed as an individual while providing life and support to others is a powerful legacy. Perhaps she inherited this determination. She has certainly passed it on.
In the last few years of her life, Neva lived in Hamilton, where Anna paid close attention to her needs as her capacities and her driving energy began to wane. In that time she loved receiving visits from her grandchildren, her great-grandchildren and her friends.
Until that time, Neva had an excellent memory and she always wrote things down. There were notes all over the house. Among some diary notes she made when she was in Wellington, she records a visit from Tom Seddon who lived up the road and was the son of Richard Seddon, who is still New Zealand’s longest serving Prime Minister. The Seddons had been great friends of the Beauchamps and as a young man Tom had travelled from Wellington to Rotorua one day and had bumped into Katherine Beauchamp, who is better known by her middle name, Katherine Mansfield. When Tom saw her in Rotorua, she was sitting in a park in the rain, under a weeping willow. She had come up to Rotorua with a man and it hadn’t worked out very well, which is why she was in a park. ‘But…’ she said to Tom. ‘I’ve written a marvellous story.’ The story was called ‘The Woman at the Store’ and Katherine said it was about a woman she had encountered on the way up to Rotorua.
‘The Woman at the Store’ is a well-known story and was published some years later in London. Kather
ine Mansfield scholar Lydia Wevers is interested in Katherine’s conversation with Tom because it was not previously known. It suggests that the work was taking shape in Katherine’s mind, and was possibly written in some form, years before it was published. It is typical of Neva to have written down what Tom had told her, and to have caught even in a diary entry the drama and value of a good story.
Neva Morrison Clarke McKenna (1920–2015)
Ted
Ted is our father. He and I had a few problems, but we’ll let that pass.
Ted was born in Wellington in December 1914. His mother had just arrived from Ulster. Ted used to say he was designed in Northern Ireland and assembled in New Zealand. Like many children of migrant parents, Ted was keen to fit into the culture of the new place. His father’s instinct was to hang on to the old place. He thought nothing in New Zealand was good enough; the culture was no good, the politics were no good, the rugby wasn’t a patch on British football. But as a boy, Ted wanted to be like the other kids. Ted played rugby. Ted was a New Zealander.
Quite early in his life, Ted developed a self which he presented to the world, partly as a way of fitting in and partly to put some distance between who he was and who he aspired to be. One characteristic of this developed self was a carefully edited history. Even people who met Ted in his eighties and nineties thought he was the product of an educated and rather comfortable English family.
The real story is considerably better.
In 1914, in the far north of Ulster, around Coleraine and Portrush, his mother Margot Hamilton, twenty-six, unmarried and working as a nurse, discovered she was pregnant and, with the First World War approaching, she left Northern Ireland and travelled alone on the long sea voyage to New Zealand. There is no evidence that any member of her family ever communicated with her again. When she arrived in Wellington she had little money, no work and she knew no one. When the time came she was admitted to the Alexandra Hospital for unmarried mothers, where she had an emergency C-section and was delivered of twin boys. The first boy was named after the father, whose name was Edward Clarke. The second boy was named Stewart, after the matron of the hospital, Miss Stewart. The births were not registered, a procedural slip which may have been finessed by Miss Stewart, and while the babies got a decent start and Margot recovered, Miss Stewart took the little family in. She had boarders at her house and she installed Margot as a housekeeper.
In 1919 there was a flu epidemic that killed more people than had just died in the First World War, and Margot caught it. The doctors told her to leave Wellington and move north, where she could get some sea air. So she moved slightly up the west coast of the North Island, the world capital of sea air, and Eddie and Stewart were brought up in and around Karehana Bay and Plimmerton.
After the First World War, when Ted was six, he was sitting on the verandah one day when a man came in the gate and Ted looked up as he approached the house. Ted always remembered seeing his father for the first time, from the shoes up. Edward and Margot were married at Miss Stewart’s brother’s house in Hawker Street, the births were registered, Edward got work as a carpenter and the semblance of respectability began to be constructed.
The boys went to the local school, the beach was only a few yards away and the family had a succession of dogs and cats. They didn’t have any money but life was good. Ted’s father was a fine fiddle player and people would often stop outside the house on their way home to listen to him. Ted had only a small repertoire of stories of his birth and childhood and they created only very general impressions. He spoke of his mother’s family in England as if they were all close, despite the fact that they were neither close, nor in England. The facts were not the point. The point with Ted was always fitting in. Having the right effect. Creating the right impression.
Ted felt less in common with his father and he certainly looked like his mother and although he argued with her about politics (she was a socialist and he was pretending to be a free market capitalist) he never stopped admiring her determination, her stoicism and her dignity. No one knows where the boys’ father was between 1914 and 1920. Ted always said he was fighting in the war but he couldn’t remember where, and there’s no record of him in any of the services. Stewart thought he was jailed for his involvement with the Ulster Volunteers in the sectarian violence of 1913–19 but there’s no record of him either in prison records or in those of the Ulster Volunteers.
Margot and her boys and their friend Mary Stewart remained close and there are photographs of the boys with Miss Stewart until she died. When they were young they would sometimes go into town by train and stay with her for a few days and she would make a fuss of them and take them to see things around the city. For forty years Margot worked for the Red Cross and other charities which helped people in trouble. It had been tough but she knew she’d done well to bring herself and her boys to a new life in New Zealand.
The boys were bright, keen and talented, Ted was a good schoolboy sprinter and a very handy tennis and badminton player. Stewart, who had inherited his father’s gift for music, wanted to be a concert pianist. But when they were fourteen, the world was hit by the Great Depression and, unless their families had money, teenagers had to leave school and get a job. Ted got a job at McKenzies, a retail company with branches all over the country. Stewart got work with Ballantynes, a large retail outlet in Christchurch where he worked for some years until after the war when Ballantynes burnt down, at which point he also got a job at McKenzies.
Ted was good at his job and during the 1930s he became a manager and began to climb from branch to bigger branch; Nelson, Timaru, Napier, New Plymouth, Gisborne and Auckland, before he was called up for military service in the Second World War. After training in Trentham and drafting into the 7th Anti-Tank Regiment, 66394 Clarke left New Zealand and arrived in the Middle East during one the great crises in the war. The North African campaign was beginning and the New Zealand Division was sent up through Palestine, Syria and Lebanon to defend the oilfields against a possible attack through Turkey, and then they were pulled back to defend Cairo from the German advance from the west which was occurring at speed under Rommel, and there followed, throughout late 1941 and 1942, some of the most significant battles of the war. Ted was in all of them: Sidi Rezegh, Mersa Matruh, Minqar Qaim, Ruweisat Ridge, El Alamein, the Libyan and Tunisian campaigns and then up through Italy, the Sangro River and Monte Cassino. In the lives of anyone in the New Zealand Division in the Second World War, these years remained vivid. In his nineties, Ted could still describe in detail these events, his own actions, his feelings and his love and high regard for those who shared those experiences with him, Tony Ballard, Keith Garland, Maurice Spence.
Except when he was at home, where he often looked like a pantomime lunatic, Ted was always well turned out. He wore good suits, brogues and a shirt and tie. He knew the prestige brands and he understood the value of a gesture which signified class and breeding. Eric Townley, another of his army friends, told me that all through the war, Ted was always clean-shaven, even in battle. ‘Your father,’ said Eric, ‘was the cleanest man in the Western Desert.’ One of the things Ted had with him during the desert campaign was a small book of poetry he’d bought in Cairo, and like a lot of the men he read and committed to memory large tracts of English verse. His standard greeting in the morning for the rest of his life was from the Rubaiyat:
Awake for morning in the bowl of night
Has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight
And lo, the hunter of the east has caught
The Sultan’s turret in a noose of light.
He also loved Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’:
Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert-
That from heaven or near it
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
(He loved that last line).
He also learnt, either from his father’s repertoire or from troop entertainer
s, great slabs of British music hall and he could recite all that too. He had a good singing voice, kept perfect time and loved entertaining people. He knew bits of Sid Field, Flanagan and Allen, Arthur Askey and the Western Brothers. He sang ‘Beautiful as a Butterfly’ very well. He also recited a silly sales pitch he’d got from somewhere: ‘All wool and a yard wide, this product is wiff-waffed on both sides and bevelled all around, has hot and cold folding doors, two kinds of water, clean and dirty, it’s guaranteed not to rip, tear or bust. Recommended not by me; recommended by a better man than me. Recommended by the maker.’
On the way back to New Zealand after the war, the troop ship Ted was on stopped at Melbourne for supplies and anyone who wanted to go the theatre was invited to attend a performance free of charge. Ted put his hand up and that night he went to one of the big nineteenth-century theatres in the city. He couldn’t remember what the entertainment was but, before it began, a man in a suit came out in front of the curtain and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen. We’re fortunate to have in the audience tonight a party of New Zealand soldiers, returning from the war in Europe and the Middle East. You men are very welcome here, we hope you enjoy the evening with us and we wish you a safe trip home.’ The audience then spontaneously stood and applauded.
