by Fiona Kidman
Over school holidays, Ian and I worked at extra jobs to raise money for a car and a deposit on a house. Each day, I walked down Fenton Street’s burgeoning boulevard of motels and neon strip lighting to my job as a waitress-cum-sandwich hand at the tearooms outside Whakarewarewa’s tourist thermal area. I crushed bowls of boiled eggs that smelled like the sulphur pools for sandwich fillings, bore the brunt of tour bus drivers’ shouted insults if I didn’t move my backside fast enough, and ‘picked up the spits’ for local penny divers. Maori kids diving into the river for tourists’ coins pocketed the money in bulging cheeks to exchange for a single coin of a larger denomination. My job was to offer a bowl of clean water for the divers to spit out the pennies, and count the money.
‘Watch out for the rough tough Duffs,’ I was told. Probably just popular alliteration — the bunch of freckle-faced brothers, Stephen and Alan Duff among them, didn’t cause me trouble, although they liked to get to the head of the queue. Their father, a quietly spoken scientist, was a friend of my father’s at the nearby Forest Research Institute.
The world was changing. Kennedy was shot. Camelot turned to crap.
My friends were becoming anxious that ‘I might not be able to have a baby’, and I wanted one anyway. It seemed like time to be ‘real people’, with our own Fiat 600 and a suburban bungalow. My career at Rotorua Boys’ High School ended when, as one boy put it to Ian, ‘You’ve knocked her up, sir.’
Knocked up I was. With a baby on the way, we opted for a shift to the polite new suburb of Lynmore, renting a house vacated by Tom and Barbara Tague, which we would eventually buy. Nev Thornton was a likeable easy-going man in many ways, but I was nonplussed by his view that it was time for me to put my feet up and knit some booties. The evidence of pregnancy did not sit well in a boys’ school in the 1960s.
Finding myself at home and alone, I was not at all pleased. I didn’t have the slightest idea how to knit a bootie, although I did try a moss-stitch matinée jacket, made from peppermint green wool. That was it. In the afternoons the old lure of radio serials called again. I immersed myself daily in adaptations of the New Zealand writer Nelle Scanlan’s Pencarrow novels. Some of the stories reminded me of those I had heard about my mother’s family; the women in them sounded like my aunts.
As it happened, a group in Rotorua, connected with the Shambles Theatre, was running a playwriting competition so I decided to try my hand at writing a play, drawing on familiar themes. My play, about a young woman who gets caught up in the intrigues of a small town football club, bore the dubious title ‘The Orange-Scented Tide’. All the old hunger to express myself on the page had returned.
I wrote in a state of elation and excitement, the pages mounting day by day. I looked forward to every morning so that I could begin again. It was as if the new creation within me had been transformed into another creation beyond. Motherhood, now it was almost upon me, was scary, but writing was not. I was certain that, whatever the outcome of the competition, I would continue to write, if possible, every day of my life. I didn’t have a typewriter, so I paid a public typist to type up the play. I should have been warned by her response. She was shocked and told me so, but she typed it anyway.
I have often told people about the outcome of the competition, and they are astonished, as I was then. The judge, an older man, was not at all impressed with my work, and wrote a disapproving letter. Further, on being told by the organisers of my age and sex, he told them I must be one of the dirtiest minded young women in New Zealand.
When I think back now, I wonder why I was so surprised. Few New Zealand women had found a voice in 1963. I was a young mother and I had told men’s secrets. I had told on men. I had broken the code. Of course it wouldn’t do. The problem was, nobody had told me the code. Except for the library, I had mixed with men in a number of jobs, and they had been very free with their conversation; they had told me many things about themselves and their lives, and I hadn’t found what they told me strange so much as interesting. Perhaps, even worse, I had adopted men’s voices. Over the years, debate has raged about whether I write men who are ‘weak’ or whether I can’t write men at all. It took me years, and a lot of heartache, to work out that the men I write about are not so different from women when it comes to experiencing pain or love or joy. But, for the most part, they have simply been conditioned not to show it, particularly New Zealand men. My men got hurt, as all people do.
Despite the outcome of the play, my determination to write did not falter. I might be young, but I clearly knew things about the world that made people sit up and take notice. I wasn’t about to be silenced. At intervals over the years, I reworked the themes I had used in this play. Eventually a version of the early part of it emerged in the context of my first published novel, A Breed of Women.
Meanwhile, the birth of our baby had not gone smoothly. I had become ill towards the end of my pregnancy. Late in March, I was going to bed one evening when my waters broke, and a torrent of blood cascaded to the floor. Ian rang the hospital, but they said not to worry, it would only be a show. I was certainly not to come in until the pains were regular. Throughout the night he filled the bath with blood-soaked towels and sheets and continued to ring the hospital, meeting the same response.
By five in the morning, Ian could bear it no longer. He bundled me into the car and drove to the hospital. A long avenue of oak trees led up to Rotorua Hospital. As we walked beneath them in the breaking light, I said to Ian that I wanted to go home. I would have given anything for some way to get through what I had to do, without it actually happening.
I was bleeding so heavily that a ward cleaner followed me along the corridor with a pail and mop to clean up the trail of blood. But the same night staff who had treated Ian so casually on the phone remained unconcerned. A nurse told Ian they would let him know when it was all over and he could pop back to see me then. Dismissed.
In the ward where I was put, I tried hard to keep what my father would have described as a ‘stiff British upper lip’. At nine, a woman in the next bed called for a nurse, alarmed by my paleness and noting that I was drifting in and out of consciousness.
Mercifully, there was a changeover of staff. Within minutes, my doctor and grave-faced specialists were hurrying to my bedside. My doctor was a short, genial man with a huge bristling moustache, who wore peaked tweed hats when he careered around in his little red sports car. He was furious when he discovered my condition. I had had a placenta previa the night before. Now it was too late to perform a Caesarean. During the afternoon it seemed certain that my baby, at least, would not survive, and I might not either.
My daughter decided otherwise. Galvanised into action, she made a sudden appearance later that evening. I could hardly believe she looked so well.
‘She’s a little beauty,’ said my doctor, seeing Ian still outside, as he left the theatre.
The theatre staff left us to look at our baby in her bassinet, while they hurried away to another crisis. In the next theatre a young woman was having her baby under anaesthetic. Her doctors were not so kindly. As I discovered later, Barbara was an unmarried mother. The conversation carried clearly through the walls.
‘Look out, Doctor,’ said one of the nurses, ‘there’s some blood coming away there.’
‘Black blood, I’ll be bound. Who knows where this one came from,’ was the reply.
In fact, Barbara’s daughter was blonde. Over the next two weeks I often came across Barbara weeping. All our babies were kept in a dormitory ward down a long corridor. I asked her why she didn’t go down to see her baby who, I learned, was to be adopted out.
‘I’m not allowed,’ she said, turning her face away from me. ‘They won’t let me.’
‘There’s nothing to stop you,’ I said hotly. I suggested that she simply accompany me down the corridor and walk into the nursery.
‘They’d stop me,’ she repeated, over and again, and nothing would convince her otherwise. Her baby lay like a creamy star, alone in her
bassinet. One morning I placed my hand on hers and her fingers curled around mine. I have often wondered if her mother ever learned what a beautiful little girl she had. Still, it didn’t really occur to me then that there might be other options. When girls ‘got in trouble’, as we said, they either got married or gave their babies away to others.
Hers was not the only study in separation and grief. In a bed near mine was a Maori woman called Martha, whom welfare authorities were trying to persuade to give up her newborn child, because she already had three children, an absent husband, and a house with an earth floor and no running water. I understood their concerns, but not the need to remove her child. Another woman who looked more like a grandmother was off to the races the day after she got out of hospital. I asked her who would look after her baby. She looked at me as if I was touched in the head. She had nine children already and she certainly wasn’t keeping this one. She would be giving the boy to her sister.
But on the evening of the twenty-fifth of March, Ian and I could only marvel that, after all the fuss, our daughter Joanna was so smooth, olive-skinned and lovely. She lay chortling in her bassinet, seeming to laugh at us.
The following morning I woke in the hospital ward. I had been placed alongside the bedpan sluice room and it was noisy, hot and steaming where I lay, hurting from many stitches. But there I was, a mother and a writer. It was my twenty-third birthday.
A few days later, the babies were wheeled out from the nursery on a long trolley, a dozen or so at a time, to be distributed to their mothers for feeding. When all the babies except one had been given out, a nurse wandered over with a puzzled look on her face. ‘I’ve got one Maori baby left over,’ she said.
The baby was mine. I couldn’t have been more proud of her.
Chapter 11
We would take our daughter and our Siamese cat called Oscar riding through the countryside in the Fiat 600 we had bought not long before Joanna was born. As my parents had never owned a car, or not during my lifetime, it is hard to describe how complete I felt when we went Sunday driving, as if my truly grown-up married life had begun, filled with the freedom that roads and distance offer. There were routes leading out of Rotorua in several directions. The Fiat’s tiny engine was at the rear of the car, purring along behind us. In the back seat, the cat purred too, and our daughter hummed. On sunny days we rolled the windows down, so that the warm air could trickle across our faces.
Once, we came to a place in the Bay of Plenty, where the sky was immense and blue, and a railway line ran through the golden-brown summer grass. It was like a Grahame Sydney painting. There was not another human being or house or car in sight, but in the distance we heard a train whistling. We stopped the car and stood on the side of the road as it came into view, surely the longest train in the world. Joanna clapped her hands. She had a dark sealskin cap of hair, and that day she wore a pink and blue cotton dress that belled around her as she stood on tiptoes, and we counted the wheels. Ian lifted her on his shoulders. We stood and counted the wagons, all one hundred and nine, rolling over the parched landscape beside an electric-blue sea. We weren’t sure exactly where we were, though we thought it near Opotiki. Blue-eyed Oscar never stopped licking his fur while the train disappeared over the horizon.
Days like that have a dream-like quality. For a time I was very happy although often exhausted: our daughter was a restless sleeper. Sometimes at four in the morning, Ian would pour her and me into the car and we would drive around the deserted streets for half an hour or so until peace reigned. When she was christened at St Faith’s, the ceremony was disrupted by television cameras being set up for the wedding of Maureen Kingi, Miss New Zealand, scheduled for later in the day. With Joanna’s godfather, Quintin Burslem, a young Englishman we had met in the Lake Road days, we dodged the cameraman while Manu Bennett dashed distractedly backwards and forwards to check that sound systems were working. Jennifer was her godmother, but couldn’t come to Rotorua as she and Peter were about to get married. I was going up to be her matron-of-honour in Waipu the following week. I leaked breast milk through my satin dress while I handed out the cake.
Ian was working hard at Rotorua Boys’ High, endeavouring to carve out a niche for himself in secondary education. He was teaching boys with learning difficulties and troubled lives. His own life gave him a natural empathy for kids like this, and he was popular with most of them. In the weekends he put in long hours in extra-curricular programmes, so we didn’t see as much of each other as I would have liked. He took over running the night school and this burgeoned into such a big enterprise that he was out most evenings. Before Joanna’s arrival I had taken some courses myself in floral art, still practising to be the perfect wife.
That was turning out to be more difficult than I expected. Although neither Ian nor I knew much about conventional family lives, Lynmore seemed full of people who did. The wives took days to prepare for dinner parties; there were coffee mornings at least once a week when the hostess prepared elaborate food and the invited guests dressed up in twinsets and pearls. These descriptions sound like battered clichés of the times, but that is what it was like. And if you wanted to be anyone, you belonged to Plunket, the society spawned by Sir Frederic Truby King to protect mothers and babies. A group was to be found in almost every suburb the length of the country, run mainly by young mothers.
I desperately wanted to be someone. I wanted to be a proper mother, a good wife, a respectable person. I was accommodating to every request. Yes, I would wear my bridal dress again in a parade of former brides to raise funds for Plunket; yes, I would mind this or that person’s children — nothing was too much trouble. I made jam and preserved fruit and made my own clothes, not that I was very good at any of these skills. Preserving fruit was a mark of how successful you were as a housewife. Anything less than 100 bottles was considered a failure. Although I make a wonderful tomato soup nearly every year, from a recipe given to me by Barbara O’Connell, it was years before I began to bottle fruit just for the pleasure of it.
The house at Lynmore was on a flat quarter-acre section, facing the road and a long dense row of macrocarpa trees. New Zealand Gothic. In winter it got bitterly cold in the shade of the trees, with hard black frosts that often didn’t lift until three in the afternoon. Just behind us, houses lay in lovely sunlight almost all day. On the other side of the trees there was a poultry farm; Iles Road was a kind of demarcation line between Lynmore’s more upmarket profile and the next suburb.
Anyone passing by could see me sitting at the kitchen table. A moment or two later, there would be a knock on the door, someone on the doorstep looking for a cup of coffee. If I had a book in front of me, I would guiltily put it away. If I was writing in my notebook, I immediately declared that I was writing out a recipe, or a letter to my aunts. It seemed easier than the truth. I was scribbling again but now I was getting to know my neighbours, I wasn’t sure it was something I should be doing. We would chat for an hour or two, about the children and their health, or our finances. A frequent topic of conversation was whether we should wear our most glamorous outfits and short skirts when we called on the bank manager to discuss our overdrafts, or whether to go looking miserable, with the children in tow. We usually opted for the first. We gossiped about our husbands, and, more significantly, about other people’s husbands. The grapevine worked like magic. People told long intimate stories about their lives. I listened, and told less about my own.
I made some good friends in Lynmore. A few of those friendships have survived all the years that have passed since I left, and the not always flattering accounts of life in the suburb that have turned up in my fiction. But it was becoming clear to me that I didn’t really conform.
And some clouds were gathering over my life. When we first married, Ian and I had planned to have several children. As an only child, I had hoped for at least three, perhaps more, but I began to miscarry frequently. We were never sure of the cause of this problem, although later we had a theory. One summer,
Ian’s long holiday job was working on Lake Rotorua spraying lake weed. At the end of each day of spreading chemical poison, he would load the drums on the back of a Marine Department truck and bring them home to wash out on our back lawn. It was about then that the miscarriages began and I can’t help but think that the poison affected one or both of us. At the time, it was just grief and more grief, without any explanation.
There was nobody much I could talk to about it; it didn’t seem to be one of the things people discussed over coffee, although my mother did sympathise. My doctor, the one who had delivered Joanna, had driven his red sports car into the side of a bridge and died instantly. My new doctor wasn’t sympathetic when I went to him about the miscarriages. ‘I don’t suppose you kept the pieces,’ he said. When I admitted that that was the last thing I had thought of doing, he snapped that women never did.
Nev Thornton was due to move on from Rotorua Boys’ High, but before he left, he had a surprising guest to speak to the boys and their parents, and invited guests such as myself, at the school prize-giving. I was in the audience when Phoebe Meikle first delivered a speech that became famous and was published afterwards in various places. When she appeared on stage she was mild-mannered in her appearance (although, as I later learned, she could be very firm), with grey hair, large glasses and an understated elegance. She spoke directly to the assembled boys without patronising them. She said, among other things, that it was possible to be happy when you were alone, and she expressed her abhorrence of violence, her opposition to war. Then she said:
