by Fiona Kidman
Once again I was being chastised for not being ‘decent’. I made a mental note not to put up with too much of this.
Waipu District High only went up to the fifth form, and there were just eighty high-school students. A district high school started from new entrants in the primary division, and went right through to the sixth form (today it would be the seventh, or year thirteen), where University Entrance classes were available, but ours fell short of that so pupils usually left at about fifteen. As in other country areas, those families who could afford to sent promising children away to board and attend city schools.
Nevertheless, we were blessed with a sprinkling of outstanding teachers. There was Roger Shaw, for geography, who showed me that the world was a bigger place than North Auckland; Alick, his small pre-schooler son, ran riot through the classroom as both his parents taught. History teacher Judith Bird, an elegant pale woman who reminded me of my Aunt Roberta, taught me to argue constructively; later she became a passionate street demonstrator in Wellington, an early anti-apartheid protester. And flame-haired Eileen O’Shea, my English teacher, introduced me to poetry. She was engaged to one of the primary teachers, Fred Larkin, and they walked the playground together in the lunch hour, she in wide full skirts, nipped in at her tiny waist. She told us that we would understand Francis Thompson’s ‘The Hound of Heaven’ when we were older, and read us Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Pied Beauty’, with its wonderful opening line, ‘Glory be to God for dappled things’. I wrote this in my English notebook, and some years ago, when asked to speak on a panel at Wellington’s Readers and Writers Week on ‘First Loves’ about the first poem that had made an impact on me, I chose the Hopkins poem, speaking of it and of Eileen. I hoped, I said, that somewhere out there Eileen O’Shea still walked with her own first love, forgetting that the panel was being recorded for broadcast on National Radio. The following year, I spoke at a lunch in Hawke’s Bay; as if on This Is Your Life, Eileen appeared as a surprise for me, and yes, she had spent her life with Fred and they had been happy. Fred has died since then. Eileen gave me a beautiful green and white garden pot she had made, as if she had always known that these are the colours I love best. It sits in a corner of my garden beneath a miniature kowhai tree.
In spite of these teachers, whom I remember with affection and gratitude, the school didn’t have much breadth in the education it offered. Latin was out of the question, I soon lost my hold on mathematics, and French was taught in a cloakroom, and later in the boys’ woodwork room. There were five students in the French class; we had an elderly part-time teacher with some unfortunate personal mannerisms, such as losing her teeth when she was teaching us verbs, reducing us to endless hysterical laughter, the kind you can’t stop once you’ve begun, which earned us daily dismissals from class.
In spite of this, I think poor Miss Hislop not only had a very good command of French, but a fierce love for France, and that she was a better teacher than we gave her credit for. I surprise myself here in Menton with the amount of French I know when I have no option but to speak the language, albeit in a shy and unpractised way. Somewhere between the faded board covers of our textbook, En Route, and our teacher’s exhortations, I felt the first stir of longing that some day I would go to Provence and see fields of sunflowers for myself. And now I have.
But my thoughts of being a writer faded — that was something silly, a part of childhood. I was glad to be in Waipu but after Northland College the school felt like a let-down.
I had two close friends at school, Jennifer (Jen) Gates, now the children’s writer Jennifer Beck, and Marina Markotich. I loved Jen’s sense of humour and delight in practical jokes. She was the third of five children, and her family were generous in their hospitality. The Gates’ farmhouse, up Finlayson’s Brook, was a rambling many-roomed place where everybody read books and talked about them. Well, most of them — after some coercion, Jen’s older brother lent me Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury which I read propped behind Plain Sailing, my English textbook. I don’t recall any family discussions about that one. Jim Gates had a pitted face and a wide slow smile. The children were encouraged to say what they thought on a variety of issues, and to listen to each other with respect. Inmany ways, the Gates family came to represent the brothers and sisters I never had. The worst disgrace Jen and I brought upon ourselves came after seeing Edith Campion play Joan of Arc with the New Zealand Players, on a school trip to Whangarei. Afterwards, in a highly charged response, we went to the nearest hairdresser and had our heads virtually shorn in Eton crops. We earned rebukes at school assembly the following day and had to live with the consequences until our hair grew back.
I continued my night rambles. If there was a touch of religious fervour in them, it was possibly prompted by living in Waipu. Surprisingly, given the settlement’s Presbyterian ardour, I was confirmed in to the Church of England. The visiting minister at the tiny church on the northern boundary of the township was touting for young people to bring into the church.
Religion had remained a sore point in my family. Although my parents had been married in a Presbyterian church in Western Australia, the trade-off was my Anglican christening. Now my father wanted the job finished, and he was keen that I should go ahead with confirmation. My mother didn’t seem to mind. Perhaps, here at home among Presbyterians, it didn’t matter so much to her what I was, as long as she was free to be herself.
But it wasn’t the anticipated Church of England, for the vicar was an Anglo-Catholic, known as Father F, all smells and bells, as my mother said when she found out. I think my father was a bit rattled too. Although he had grown up High Church, even he could see that in New Zealand it was viewed differently. But it seemed too late to change my mind. The girls up the road were being confirmed and I had thrown in my lot with them. All the confessing and kneeling and praying did bring out some rather phony exaltation, which kept us going to our instruction classes. My mother made me a white confirmation dress with intricate tucks in the bodice. She made me a brassiere as well, much to my shame. ‘That will hold you in,’ she said in no uncertain terms, and it certainly did, flattening me out like a pancake.
I didn’t much like Father F. He elicited confessions from us girls, even when we had nothing to confess, and paraded through the dances in the church hall, looking for things to criticise about our appearance. When he saw me wearing gold hoop earrings, he warned me that I was headed for a life of sin, and threatened to tell my parents.
Not that my father needed any convincing. ‘Don’t come crying to me when you get yourself in trouble,’ he said, the first time he saw me with lipstick. If only someone would tell me what trouble was. I convinced my mother to get me Madame Bovary from the Country Library Service van, in French, because the English version was banned in New Zealand at the time. She was doubtful, but when I insisted that I needed it to improve my French she relented. I think it did help the French along, but I didn’t learn any more about the act of sex than I had from anything else I’d read.
I set aside this brief bout of religious mysticism as I grew older and became absorbed into Waipu’s social life. This included square dancing, with a set of Scottish lancers thrown in, when we gathered at the local hall every month. We stamped and sang, circling to our left and to our right, ‘and you choose your girl from the valley/oh you choose your Red River girl …’ I used to go with H from a neighbouring farm, on whom I had a girlish crush. He was thirteen years my senior, and he started taking me only because I asked him, and because he was at a loose end after the collapse of a long relationship with a girl he had hoped to marry:
He was a dark nuggety man with a sinewy throat rising from his black bush singlet. His hair was crinkly beneath the battered grey felt hat he wore. Nests of hair covered his short strong forearms. When he lit a cigarette he balanced it for an instant with a delicate flick between the tip of his tongue and his top lip before drawing it down into his mouth.
He and I began to grow closer, but he was still unhap
py about his life. He wouldn’t be the last man I encountered who had failed to get a woman out of his system when he met me. He decided to join the Special Armed Services (SAS) and go away to fight in the Malayan jungle, to have an adventure that took him beyond Waipu. Before he left he said that perhaps, when he came back, we could think about the future. I knew even then what that would mean to my parents. A match made in heaven. He treated me as if I was grown up and yet he understood that he must take care of me. For a while I would have done anything for him, but he did nothing more than ask me to wait for him. I was too young for either. The last time I saw him, he was dressed in his olive green uniform with a brown-green shirt and tie. On his head he wore a maroon beret with a winged dagger, and the motto ‘Who Dares Wins’.
Around this time, we stopped seeing Miss Slick out on her verandah. Nobody thought much of it. But then we learned that she had been found dead in her house, apparently, somebody said, three weeks after the event. You could feel a collective unease in the community. Nobody spoke of her as a ‘witch’ any more. But by this time, I had become drawn to the mythology of her life. When some months had passed, Jennifer and I were attracted to the swinging door, and the emptiness glimpsed through the windows. The house had been cleared of whatever furniture might have been there. One Saturday afternoon, we simply went in. The rooms were bare and plain. A ladder-like staircase led up to the second storey and we climbed it, clutching each other, suddenly afraid of the sound of our own breaths. At the top of the stairs were two bedrooms, facing out across the paddocks to an estuary. The branches of the big macrocarpa tree that stood beside the house were very close, almost touching the walls.
But what was remarkable to me was that these rooms were wallpapered with newspapers, brown and brittle with age, bearing the date 1898. Fifty-seven years had passed since this rough attempt to make the place homely, or perhaps just to paper over the cracks in the walls so the wind couldn’t whistle through.
Over decades, I visited this house several times, watching its slow collapse, until its demolition ten years or so ago. I have a little piece of kauri timber stamped with the words ‘Kitty Slick’s House Timber, Waipu’: these were sold as souvenirs when the place was finally pulled down. That house would later play a huge role in my own life. The kernel of a novel called The Book of Secrets, written thirty years later, appeared that afternoon. For a long time after its publication I would be ‘expelled’ from Waipu town myself. But then, all I knew was that a bleak sorrow had entered me, and that I could not get out of the house fast enough.
Soon came long summer holidays with the Gates girls, Lynette, Jennifer and Julie, and their younger brother Philip, without any parents present, at Waipu Cove, the long gleaming white beach that has been the haunt of surfies for decades. The Gates’ parents rented a cottage for us that stood almost upon the sand. I swear they don’t make summers the way they used to — the blue quilt of the mornings spread across each day, spilling over the edges of afternoon and folding into the saffron evening light. And beginning all over again the next day. We accidentally swam too close to sharks, looking back with a shudder at their fins slicing through early morning water. We resolved to be more careful. Apart from that, our holidays rolled past in a seamless pattern of scorching days.
The major event on the local calendar was New Year’s Day, when the Caledonian Games took place. Some years, important visitors from Scotland arrived. Much of old Waipu still stands as it was: the Caledonian hall, the stone gates at the entrance to the park, a trickle of shops and a garage on one side of the road; on the other, a white rectangular church without ornamentation, a parish hall and a manse, the Waipu Heritage Centre, a stone building that houses an excellent museum, and, standing right beside the road, a tall monument topped by the heraldic Lion of Scotland. This road used to be State Highway One, but now a deviation passes behind the town. You have to go looking for Waipu. The monument is six-sided, each bearing the name of one of the ships: the Margaret, the Highland Lass, the Gertrude, the Spray, the Breadalbane and the Ellen Lewis. The pioneers’ motto is written in Gaelic around the base: ‘Cuimhinigh a nis do Cruithfear Ann an laithibh t’oice’, the opening words of Ecclesiastes XII — ‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth’.
I left Waipu, and effectively the days of my own youth, when I was not quite sixteen. I sat School Certificate in the church hall, supervised by Mr McKay, a man known as ‘Danny Ferry’, an institution in the town, who had supervised the examination for as long as it had existed. For the occasion, he wore a suit and a gold watch chain across his waistcoat. He was known as a man with a big heart but it failed him that year. He went out of the hall, the day after I had sat my last paper in geography, while Marina was sitting home science, and died beneath the magnolia tree outside the church. ‘I cannot go on today, children,’ he is reported to have said, as he left.
At the end of school, my teachers urged me, and my parents, that I should go teaching. Although I was still only fifteen at the time, I was assured that with good School Certificate marks a way round the age requirements could be found. Nothing was further from my mind than teaching. For a start, I wanted to earn some money. I had had enough of making do and was fascinated by clothes. Miss Mary McKay, who ran the drapery shop, gave me a job the last summer I was there. I thought of her as quite old, although I don’t think she was. She had a great deal of hair wound up in coils and loops. Like me, she was an only child, and I understood her to have worked all her life, since she was thirteen, in one or other of the Waipu shops. Pride of the Lion, an historical work produced by the people of Waipu to commemorate 150 years of settlement, recorded that the drapery:
… stocked a large range of items — men’s women’s and children’s wear. Footwear was included — slippers, tennis shoes and sandshoes, which were then considered to be poor man’s shoes, not like the high fashion sneakers of today. If a new suit was required, the measuring up was done at the shop, samples chosen, and the order sent away.
All of these were things I learned to do and Miss McKay said that I was ‘a good girl at my work’. When things were quiet I would phone local farmers’ wives and describe the latest dresses in stock with such verve that I was frequently invited to send a sample by rural delivery mail. None of the dresses were ever returned. Such aggressive selling seemed to appeal to the Scots. I also introduced some lines for young people. Miss McKay allowed me to order in some Whirl bras, which were constructed of spiralling wires that created a cone-shaped effect. I hadn’t got over my confirmation bra. They sold as fast as we ordered them in.
I was asked to stay on as permanent staff. As in most of Northland’s rural areas, where choices were limited, I would have been thought lucky to get a job. But I did go, fleeing, finally, in a kind of terror that I might stay forever in Lotus Land, without having sampled the world beyond. A message arrived from H, saying that he was sick and would be coming home soon. I knew then, as he had, that I wanted adventure beyond Waipu. I understood that if I stayed, I would almost certainly never leave.
As it happened, H was more ill than he knew and lived only a few years after his return, but long enough to marry. One day, I was sitting at my desk in a Wellington office, when the phone rang. When I picked it up, a woman introduced herself as H’s daughter. She believed I had known him? And when I said yes, she asked me what I could tell her about him. As he had died when she was so young, she found it hard to get a clear picture of him.
Later, when I wrote ‘Circling to Your Left’, based on some of these events, the narrator recounts that when she is phoned, and the caller identifies herself, ‘a shiver like violets shaken before a spring wind had passed through her. She thinks of Kathryn’s father as tenderly as she thinks of any man.’ I have since given this story to the daughter.
I didn’t go very far when I left Waipu, just to Jean’s place in Morrinsville, to work in an office. It was my first step into the world beyond. Fred and Jean came north to collect me. I have a photograph
of my last morning. My mother, unusually, is wearing a dress, even though we must have just finished milking. Her face is strained and sad. More than that. There is something broken in her appearance.
I can see now that, when I left, all the struggling up north, the hardship and the breaking in of land, must have seemed for nothing. I was what they had, and I was going away and leaving them to it. Soon after I went, things fell apart on the farm. My father’s health and new-found zest for life evaporated; he would sit for days at a time with his head in a book, just dreaming or staring into space. He wrote me loving and funny letters, my tangible evidence of the person he might have been.
Before long the farm was on the market. My mother hid in the hills when people came to look at the property, but the barking of the dogs gave her away, and it sold almost straight away. I could not bear to think of my parents leaving the farm I had so quickly and deeply learned to love, without my ever seeing it again. I asked for a week off work, and caught the bus home, appearing unexpectedly on the doorstep one afternoon in spring.
I walked all that haunted week. The hawthorn was already coming out around the riverbank and the wild briar roses and willow trees were in bud. I said goodbye to the animals: Toby, the dog who had worked the cows so well for me; the cows themselves, all of which I knew by name, including some that had come with us from Kerikeri; Deidre, the pig whose litters I had helped to raise.
When I return, I always go to the cemetery by the sea just before you reach the Cove. That is where McLeod lies. The place is full of old voices, which haunted me through the years, to the point where I was driven around the world in pursuit of the migration.
But the voices that follow me still are those of the first three names on the left-hand side going into the cemetery: the two brothers and their father from the farm next door, all the McAulay men. They remind me, all three of them, that despite a troubled early life, it was possible to have a perfectly ordinary rural childhood, in a quite exceptional and life-changing little town.
