by Fiona Kidman
Dedicated to Hugh and Flora Eakin, who lived with me
at the end of Darwin Road
I could not endure to keep so many large classes of facts all floating loose in my mind without some thread of connection to tie them together …
Charles Darwin, More Letters
Preface
Over the years I have been accumulating stories about my life in a fragmentary way, through dozens of short essays and articles written for magazines and periodicals. When I reread some of them, I realised that, put together, they began to form a narrative.
Some of my earlier journalism was published in a collection called Palm Prints. By way of introduction, I wrote a clutch of personal essays, ending them at my twenty-third birthday, when I had just become a mother and was starting to think of myself as a writer. At the time, I decided that was as far as I wanted to explore my life in public. But I have changed my mind. To be a woman writing in this country for forty-five years has been a mixed experience, but one I decided I wanted to tell people about, after all. Besides that, my life as a writer has yielded me the good fortune of meeting some fascinating people. You have only one life to draw on. Those who have read Palm Prints may find some of the early chapters in this book familiar — but different, too.
My year in Menton, as the 2006 Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Fellow, offered me a unique opportunity to view my life from a distance, perhaps more so than if I had written about it here in New Zealand, to see myself more as a character and, more importantly perhaps, to see others as characters. At heart, I remain a novelist.
A few names have been changed or abbreviated. None of this alters the main narrative. There are quite enough recognisable people in it as it is.
This is the first of two books that give an account of my life.
Fiona Kidman
2007
Chapter 1
Last summer I went north to Kerikeri, where I lived when I was a child, after the end of the Second World War. I drove along Darwin Road to the patch of land my parents once owned. As I looked beyond the luxuriant tropical growth of the orchards, towards the stand of blue gum trees in the distance that formed the boundary, I heard voices of the past reaching out to me. I was overwhelmed with such a feeling of loss, and yet such a vivid sensation of memory, of the exact way things were in that odd little place, and how they shaped me as a person, that I turned away. This is all too much, I said to myself. This will be the last time I come here.
For much of my early life, I grew up surrounded by the sharp citric scent of orange groves, bright heat and, however curiously detached, the shadow of Asia. Kerikeri is a small town, so different from the rest of New Zealand, that it astonishes me how few people are aware of its post-missionary story. They see the Old Stone Store, which symbolises New Zealand’s early colonial history, and the rich new town centre, in stark contrast to other less prosperous towns in the North, but nothing of what came in between: the ‘ideal city’, which a group of expatriate British people who had been stationed in the Far East set out to establish in the 1920s. They came, bristling with military titles, laden with jade and precious artefacts from China, and built their houses. Some of them were little more than shacks in the dust; a few of them were grand and based on Oriental influences. Around them, they planted citrus trees and passion fruit, shaded by rapidly growing belts of gum trees and red-tipped hakea hedges. The ones who had money found servants, by one means or another.
It was to one of the larger houses that my family first moved. My father had gone ahead to find a place for my mother and me to stay while he worked on a house for us on land he had bought from one of the earlier settlers. My mother thought we would be paying board and lodgings. Much to her surprise, she discovered, on the night of her arrival, that she was to be the cook.
Thus began my life as ‘the servant’s girl’, at least until my father had fashioned a home out of a converted army hut on the piece of land he had bought at the end of Darwin Road. Some of that story forms the basis of my early novel called Mandarin Summer. A later short fiction, called ‘All the Way to Summer’, explores my life in the town.
There have been times when I have wanted to put all of this behind me. Like the day I went up Darwin Road and stood looking back towards the trees. On the spot where I stood, a green wooden gate once hung between strainer posts and a wire fence. The words ‘Goathland Farm’ were painted on the gate in white letters.
‘What for you call your place Goatland?’ one of the Dalmatian men of the neighbourhood once asked my father. (The Dalmatian gum diggers had arrived before the orchardists.) My father tried in vain to explain that it was Goathland, named for some place in Yorkshire dear to his heart. But of course that’s what our place did become known as — Goatland.
That evening, I lay in the dark in the Abilene Motel, which is down and along the road a bit, and listened to summer rain on the roof, and heard the rustle of gum trees, and it occurred to me that however many times I left Kerikeri, the place would never leave me. Of course I would go back. And I did, but it’s surprising how things can change in a very short time. A few weeks ago, before I left New Zealand, I went north again, and the gum trees had gone.
I am writing this story of mine from Menton, in the South of France, where I am in residence as the Katherine Mansfield Fellow. This honour, bestowed annually, allows a New Zealand writer to live in Menton and work at Villa Isola Bella, where Katherine Mansfield lived in 1920, and wrote a number of her most renowned short stories. In just three years she would be dead from tuberculosis, at the age of thirty-four. I have come here in the springtime, with my husband Ian Kidman. We live in an apartment block on a hill called Montée du Lutetia. Our apartment is shabbily genteel, with large rooms, red tiled floors, rickety white French furniture, and three balconies facing down avenue de Verdun towards the Mediterranean Sea. This town is famous for its citrus. Beneath us stands a large grove of orange trees that are just being harvested for their late crop; the streets are full of windfalls. And the air is full of the dizzying perfume of new citrus blossom; when I walk down the streets I feel as if I have been drinking quantities of Cointreau, the scent is so intense. It’s like being in Crete in the springtime: you come down from the mountains into warm sun-filled valleys, and you are overpowered and languidly drowsy from its impact. Or in Kerikeri when I was a child.
If it was Mansfield who brought me to this French sojourn, it was a variety of French writers who first drew my interest towards France. Marguerite Duras, a writer I have long admired, was one. I remember hearing her on the South Bank Show — she died in 1992 — saying that what has happened to us by the time we are sixteen or so is what will shape our impressions of the world for ever after. In essence, I think she is right, even if the age is somewhat arbitrary — it depends on what kind of a person you are, what you have already learnt about the world. I had known of Duras since I was a young woman myself when I saw her film Hiroshima Mon Amour, the devastation of love among the ruins, the way a shadow on a man’s back makes a woman both momentarily forget barbarism, and embrace it. Not long after that, I began to read her novels about growing up young and illicitly in love in Vietnam. You would have to be French to write like that, I thought. Since then, I have followed the path of Duras’s girlhood through the teeming oleander-lined streets of Ho Chi Minh City, as it is now, although hardly anybody calls it that; to those who know the city, it will always be Saigon. I have sailed along the vast coffee-brown waters of the Mekong River, on leaky barges with canopies to protect travellers from the sun, Duras’s novels clutched in my travel bag, and understood how that early landscape, and what happened to her there, might have shaped the way she lived her life. However various her invent
ion, the heat, the river, the violence and the sensuousness of a liaison behind Saigon’s shuttered windows lie behind every literary decision she made. She did not say that we cannot change, or learn, or perceive the world from different angles. But there, lying at the heart of us, is the unshakeable truth of how we were made.
What I have to tell is largely a personal narrative about how I came to inhabit a fictional world, where the lines constantly blur between what happened, or people say happened, and what I think happened. Another way of putting it is to acknowledge the ‘dark other’ who walks beside writers, reminding us that things are never quite the way they seem. Writers have been doing this kind of explaining of themselves for a very long time, of course. In one of her essays, called ‘The Black Block’, Duras wrote, in effect, that when the writer sits down to write it’s not translation that is going on; nor is it a matter of passing from one state to another. Rather it’s deciphering something already there, something you have done ‘in the sleep of your life’. Margaret Atwood comes at it another way, when she speaks of ‘negotiating with the dead’. She suggests that all narrative writing is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and fascination with mortality — by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead. Still another approach comes from my friend, the poet and analyst Michael Harlow, who speaks of ‘the sacred history’, by which I understand him to be saying that each of us is entrusted with the story of who we are and where we came from. What we make of it as writers is over to us, yet it informs our every literary judgement, and a good many other judgements too.
The images I describe in my own life are as near as I can come to a kind of truth telling; the most recurring ones, like dreams, are deeply linked with real events in my life, the ones that began in childhood. It was because of Duras, not Mansfield, that I wanted to come to France. Yet Mansfield has delivered me into a landscape drenched in one of the most central sensory perceptions of my childhood: the scent of oranges.
Chapter 2
The more I think about it, the more my history has come to seem like a classy whodunit to me. I feel that I knew my parents before I was born, although I know that is a delusion based on the stories I was told. But I study photographs looking for clues. On a wall of my house in New Zealand hang heavy framed portraits of my forebears, my great-grandparents Margaret and Neil Small, whose families came to New Zealand in the 1840s. My great-grandmother was a Sutherland, the daughter of Elizabeth and Alexander Sutherland, from the village of Badbea, on the east coast of Caithness in Scotland. There is a story about my great-great-grandmother leaving Scotland that hits my heart like a hammer blow. According to the legend, her family made its way from Badbea to Brora, some eighteen miles south, accompanied by relatives who were going to bid them farewell. At Brora they would board a boat heading south to connect with ships leaving for New Zealand.
Amid a great keening as they said their goodbyes, the men folk boarded the boat. Then Elizabeth had a sudden change of mind. She stood on the shore, clutching her youngest daughter, and refused to embark. Alexander, his face stormy, swept down the gangway and seized the baby from her arms, taking it aboard. She followed her child, as women do.
Alexander Sutherland had responded to Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s call to take up land in New Zealand. Each lot comprised 100 acres of country and one town acre, and the price was £100. The site of the town was undisclosed, but it turned out to be Wellington. Elizabeth was already pregnant again when she tried to resist the journey; her next child, Katrean, was born on the Oriental as it sailed through the heads into Wellington Harbour, exactly one week before the Treaty of Waitangi was signed. Margaret, my great-grandmother, Elizabeth’s sixth child, was born in New Zealand.
In her picture, my great-grandmother wears a gigantic hat like that of a Royal Guard, a long dress that is probably taffeta, and expensive jewellery. I often wear one of her rings. The look in her eyes is distant: perhaps she is thinking of some other home, the one her mother had found so hard to leave.
Beside these portraits are those of my grandparents, Robert Small and his wife Lizzie. They are a serious, responsible-looking Scots pair, although I am always struck by the sweet expression around my grandfather’s eyes. They were not as strict a couple as many of their contemporaries. If they had been, they would never have put up with my mother’s antics. In the family photographs, Flora is the hoyden, the tomboy of the family, appearing among her well-dressed and well-educated older brothers and sisters, with her tongue poking out and her mother placing a remonstrating hand on her arm.
Hold the snapshot still for a moment, and this is what I see: Margaret is the fair one with ascetic looks and glasses perched halfway down her nose, the blunt one who laughs easily, but her hidden tongue can be sharp. Roberta has a dark mop of curls and skin so transparent you could swear her blood glowed through it in the dark. The truly stylish one is Jean, her suits tailor-made, her hats perky. I see her as something of the wild card in the family; in an early photograph she wears her dark hair long and loosely scooped up, looking like a dusky Madonna, a woman who might as easily have been my mother as Flora, the enfant terrible, and often, it seems, wished she was.
Behind these young women stands the older brother Stewart, a dark, brooding young man, with the shadow of a clipped moustache. At the edge of the picture is Robert, the younger brother, who would try harder than anyone to please. Just a couple of years older than my mother, he shared a room with her when they were small, and at nights she heard him counting his money beneath his pillow. Most of the family had middle names reflecting their Scots ancestry — Sutherland, McKay, Cameron (my mother’s), Kirkpatrick. Roberta bore this last name, with what always seemed like a mixture of pride and embarrassment. Empress Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III, was, I believe, a distant cousin. William Kirkpatrick of Closeburn emigrated to Spain, where he earned a living as a trader and married a Spanish noblewoman. It was his granddaughter Eugenie who became the empress. Alexander Kirkpatrick, whom I understand to be William’s brother, moved to Argyllshire and married into my grandmother’s family. My cousin Catherine owns the portrait of Eugenie as a young woman which has been handed down through the family.
When this photograph was taken, the family had a farm with tennis courts in the garden, and a billiard room, and good motorcars. They took holidays at the spa resorts in the central North Island, places like Rotorua and Taupo where my grandmother ‘took thermal waters’ for her various ailments. When they were small, the children had a plump elderly governess called Miss Adie Malcolm, who stayed on after her charges grew older. My mother caught the tail end of this bountiful life in her childhood. All my aunts went as boarders to St Cuthbert’s School for Girls in Auckland, but by the time my mother’s turn came, the Great Depression was making inroads into the family fortunes. So she stayed at home, on the family’s sheep station, Ruakaka, in the Waiotahi Valley in the eastern Bay of Plenty. While my mother rode long distances on horseback to high school, my aunts were turning into gorgeous flappers, when they were off duty from their nursing training.
Before long my mother decided to take her place on the farm as a rouse about in the shearing sheds, and as cook for the men who worked there. My grandmother’s health was failing so, at sixteen, Flora cooked for up to a dozen people each day. My grandparents had always been generous hosts, often to those with hard luck stories, and no change in circumstance would stop the steady flow of guests who had to be catered for. Even on the farm, the woolsheds were full of passers-by at night. The Tuhoe prophet Rua Kenana was a frequent visitor at the farm, accompanied by large groups of his wives and children. Kenana was in the process of founding an independent Maori community at Maungapohatu in the Urewera bush, which would end in grief and bloodshed.
In those days, my mother spoke Maori, although only in the shearing sheds and not at the house, where it was met with family disapproval. Yet all her life my mother retained some Maori, or a form of the language
, for I doubt that by the time she was an old woman she had a real memory of what it meant. All the same, she spoke a kind of seamless and rhythmically flowing patois, always to a secret audience of children: first me, then my children — her grandchildren — and the first of her great-grandchildren. Some might say this was disrespectful of the language, not a proper way to use it. My mother would outgrow her hoyden ways as real life kicked in. She never danced, as far as I know, I rarely heard her sing, and overall she was a quiet almost shy woman, but this secret melodic hum of words in her head, this otherness from the rest of her family, was one of the things that carried her through her life. It didn’t entirely protect her from her family’s innate conservatism and later she sometimes found it hard to accept some of my different choices, but without those ‘voices’ I think she would have lacked the imaginative flair that emerged when she and I built a secret life during my childhood.
For a long time, I think, my grandparents saw themselves at the centre of their world, their prosperity beyond question. But they were not above sharing it, and their house was one to which people turned in time of trouble. I come from generations of people who expected to flourish and multiply across the land; the twist in the story is that my children and I are almost the sole survivors. I have three cousins: Stewart’s daughter, born when I was almost an adult, and the two stepchildren of Margaret. Beyond us, there is no future generation except my descendants. These aunts and uncles are in my story because they have no way out of it. In time I would become the focus of all their hopes for a future on the land. That didn’t happen but at least I would give them heirs. As I look back, I see there was little escape from their expectations, at least not until I grew up. For a long time, some of them would consider me ‘beyond the pale’ — an expression they used often — as I entered the world of a writer, so different from theirs. Some of them loved me for it, perhaps seeing in me a difference they had yearned for themselves. Others never understood what my life was about, in the same way that they did not understand my mother. But during my childhood they were important companions, in the way that brothers and sisters are — just older than me by thirty or forty years. There is, I grant, something missing from this account of my grandparents. My experience of them was delightful but certain events unfolded that suggest hardness, even ruthlessness. My grandfather was known as unflinching, not afraid of pain, a man who would cut out his own teeth with a pocket-knife when he had toothache. I have a fragment of their history that troubles me. It is my grandmother’s silver teapot, fluted halfway up the sides, which I keep polished on my sideboard. On one side, it is inscribed with the words: ‘To Mr and Mrs A. R. Small, A Token of Regard From Members of Lower Moawhango Farmers’ Union,1907’. Moawhango, site of an earlier property, was a remote farming district from where, six years later, the first wave of Prime Minister Bill Massey’s ‘Cossacks’ rode on horseback to Wellington, farmers armed with pitchforks and guns to break the waterfront strike that had locked up the ships taking produce abroad. They broke more than the strike, they broke heads and bones.
