At the End of Darwin Road

by Fiona Kidman

  It was the beginning of March 1970. In a few weeks I would turn thirty.

  Chapter 13

  Transition.

  Moving from one place to another.

  I hadn’t known how difficult it would prove. I had never lived more than ten kilometres away from either my parents or the Morrinsville relatives. I had always known the people around me. I wasn’t prepared for being cast adrift. Or that’s how it felt.

  Even coming here to Menton was hard at first, which sounds absurd, given the luxury of living on the Riviera. I’ve grown used to continuity. I stand on the balcony here in the evenings and everything is alien. All those old romantic lines from the Golden Treasury come back. Wine-dark nights and blood moons. A couple of nights ago there actually was a blood moon. It’s hard to compare it with anything, although I thought of a lunar eclipse or the sunrises in the Australian outback, but really that doesn’t describe it. What I can say is that, very late, after night finally set in (because in these summer months the light lingers on until well after ten), the colour of the moon intensified minute by minute until it was a darker, deeper, more disturbing red than anything I’ve ever seen. I found this phenomenon unsettling, frightening even.

  Madeleine and Brian have been and gone and their visit settled me down. There were no startling new discoveries. We laughed a lot and drank rosé and ate fresh cherries bought from the daily market that opens beneath the apartment in the early morning. The men watched the World Cup football games on the little television on which we can otherwise get only Italian game shows. I saw some of the games too. I like soccer a lot and at home I often watch my grandsons play at the weekends. Madeleine read a book when I was looking at TV; she’s never liked sport much, although after I left Northland College, and she went there, she was the school swimming champion. Her eyes are still navy blue. (I go on about eyes a lot, and I must admit different shades of blue fascinate me. My own eyes are a sort of muddy hazel.) She had an accident some years ago, and walks more slowly than me. I have impatient brisk footsteps, a lot like my mother’s. I had to remember to slow down, and to arrange to catch buses back from town. The bus station is at the foot of the street where we live.

  We went up into the mountains, and spent a day in Gorbio, which is one of Ian’s and my favourite villages, reached by a bus that races around hairpin bends while the driver sings. There is a 300-year-old oak tree in the square, and a café by the bus stop where you can get a great lunch of fish, salad and bread, and a huge carafe of cold wine, for a few euros. The air is cooler up there, filled with the sharp scent of geraniums, their colours splashed in every window box. Menton looks like a toy town far below. Our friends Luc and Michel, and Michel’s mother Madame Imbert, have a summer house there, which we reach by way of a cobbled path; theirs is one of the oldest of these ancient stone residences. Some nights we have dinner with them here, dark mountain faces on two sides, beneath us the lights of Monaco in one direction, and of Italy, in the other.

  I had imagined that the four of us, Madeleine and Brian and Ian and I, would take the train to Nice — it’s a journey of less than half an hour — and see Matisse’s house, and the Chagall musée, perhaps travel on further to Cagnes-sur-Mer to visit Renoir’s house. But nobody wanted to do that. I’ll go there on my own, later on. I have to remember not to organise people’s time so much. At home, in New Zealand, I make lists and stick to schedules. People think I’m efficient, but really I just need some kind of a blueprint to get me through things.

  Being here, it’s different. The sun beats down, the moon glows with the eerie light I’ve described, tides of people with oiled leathery bodies roll into town for the summer months, and lie packed hip to thigh on the hard white pebbled beaches for hours on end. (The population has risen by 50,000 for ‘the season’.) I can’t see the pleasure of lying on those beaches — the swimmers have to wear odd little plastic slippers to protect their feet — but the crowds are interesting to watch from beneath the vast straw-fringed parasols that line the sand. And the thing is, I don’t have to hurry anywhere. I need to keep reminding myself of that.

  The week after our arrival here the Deputy Mayor Luc Lanlo presented me with the key to the Katherine Mansfield Room at Villa Isola Bella. The ceremony took place in La Salle des Mariages (literally, the Marriage Room), a room at the town hall designed and decorated by Jean Cocteau in the 1950s. It is the only place in Menton where marriages can be legalised. Throughout the 1950s Cocteau was absorbed in the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, writing books and making a film based on the story. He chose to carry the theme over to this commission. I think he must have had his tongue firmly in his cheek, for it’s a fairly brutal story to link with marriage: Orpheus, according to Greek myth, is the only person to descend into Hell and return. A player of the lyre and composer of charming odes, he falls in love with the nymph Eurydice and marries her, only to have her die suddenly from a snake bite. He follows her into Hades and, through his music and lyrics, persuades the gods to bring her back to life. The story goes on, none of it ends well, they all die. The legend is illustrated in murals that decorate the entire walls and ceiling of the Marriage Room. At the front of the room, like twin thrones, stand two chairs. These chairs and an altar-like construction are covered with red velvet. A carpet with a leopard skin pattern runs the entire length of the room to where it opens into a second portico stage that, with a final theatrical flourish, Cocteau lined with floor to ceiling mirrors. There, heavy doors open onto the street. When people are married bells ring, summoning the citizens of Menton to gather and hail the newly-wed couple.

  As Luc is also the person who conducts marriages, Ian said, as an aside, ‘You’d better marry us again.’

  Sometimes Ian’s jokes are taken seriously when he least expects it. By this time, I was armed with a large bouquet, and clutching the keys to the Katherine Mansfield Room, streaming with long blue and white ribbons, the colours of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the city of Menton.

  Luc disappeared for a few moments. When he reappeared he was wearing the ceremonial blue and white sash he dons for weddings, and before we knew it, Ian and I had been sat down on the red ‘thrones’. I sat in a daze through what was apparently my second marriage. When it was over we were turned around, marched down the aisle to the ringing bells and found ourselves blinking in the Menton sunshine while the assembled bystanders clapped and cheered.

  If Cocteau’s design seems a mildly cynical reflection on married life, perhaps he had a point. In the 1970s, Ian and I went to hell and back: it was a trip that a lot of people would take at that time. Death, divorce, drink, despair — there was plenty of them all to go around. Some would survive, but a lot didn’t.

  Naenae sits close to the wide Hutt River, some twenty kilometres north of Wellington. The streets run over a flat plain beneath a line of hills. It is a landscape that could be pretty, but is somehow depleted by the factories and row upon row of state houses that cover it. I would visit Naenae often in the years ahead, but I never found it easy to find my way around. There is a sameness that baffles me.

  Naenae College, where Ian now began to work, had been built in the 1950s, as one of several responses to the 1954 Mazengarb Report. In the wake of two incidents, a wave of moral panic about the activities of adolescents had swept New Zealand. One was the Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme murder case, in which two Christchurch girls had murdered Parker’s mother; the other was what was described as ‘the Petone incident’, relating to the activities of ‘milkbar cowboys’ and reports of underage sex in the Lower Hutt area. The hastily prepared report on the moral decline of the young attributed these alarming developments partly to the proliferation of state housing.

  If the town structure of Naenae was unprepossessing, the school was a place of hope, run on visionary lines by Derek Wood. Some see him, in hindsight, as an overly righteous principal, but if they had seen what Ian and I had in schools, they might have better understood his liberal and compassionate view of education. Although
Wood set high academic goals, he believed, too, that if a community was struggling with its problems, the school couldn’t operate in isolation from it. This would be one of the tasks he set Ian, to go out into the Naenae community and seek its co-operation with the school.

  We set out with the intention of settling in the area and it was something of an accident that we ended up living in Wellington. I think Ian sensed dismay on my part when I looked at my surroundings. That, I suppose, does me little credit, although my willingness to move south had been driven by the opportunity to follow a life in the city. This was suburbia all over again, and a bit more down market to boot. As it turned out, Ian often said later that he couldn’t have worked so effectively in Naenae if he had had to worry about my reaction to living there. We rented for a few weeks in the Hutt, while we looked for a house to buy. The city was half an hour away by train; many of the students Ian taught at Naenae had never been to Wellington.

  Besides, there was still, for Ian, the lure of Evans Bay, where he had lived with Tom and Doll. They had gone to live in Levin some years earlier, after the death of Doll’s mother. The house where they all lived held no charm for Ian, but the front yard had been the playground of his youth. Evans Bay is at the end of an inlet running in from Wellington Harbour, the line of the Orongorongo hills in the background, the airport and Cook Strait beyond. Ian, who had been an air force pilot in his compulsory military training days, had always loved watching the planes coming and going. Until quite recently, flying boats had landed outside the front door of the old house.

  Many friends he had sailed with on the bay were still around, including Clyde, who lived with his mother in the house where he had grown up in Hataitai, the hill suburb above the bay. One evening we drove into town to see them, climbing the long zigzag path from Rakau Road up to their house. The trees and houses were colourful and pretty, the air clear and Hataitai looked a much better proposition than the place I had remembered.

  About ten doors along there was a house for sale. ‘You could buy that,’ Clyde joked, never thinking we would take him seriously. ‘It’s going for a song,’ he added.

  Ian decided we should look at it, and the next thing we were back down the path and climbing an even steeper flight of steps. The empty house, which clung precariously to the hillside dropping sharply beneath us, was a state rental, although it had been built in earlier times, with a gabled roof and leadlight windows. The last tenant had died after living there for thirty or so years at the equivalent of three dollars a week. The outside looked solid and well maintained, although we got the impression that the interior would take a lot of work to make it livable. Still, the outlook was glorious, and people we knew lived in the neighbourhood. Carole, the new friend who had visited us in Rotorua, was down at the bay. Ian said, ‘Let’s buy it.’

  Before I knew it, we had agreed. It was the craziest thing. The inside of the house proved a disgusting tip, full of dried rat shit and rubbish, the carpet rotten and the wallpaper curling down between stretches of brittle match lining. The bareness reminded me of Kitty Slick’s house, although at least that had been clean. But we were young and ‘doing up’ a house seemed exciting. What we hadn’t considered, that pleasant summer evening, was how close we were to the hill behind us and how little sunlight there would be, nor that there was no space for the children to play outside.

  I spent my thirtieth birthday moving into this house. Although we did a major clean-up the day before, we made only minor inroads into the filth. A lot of our furniture and possessions were still packed in boxes that had come from Rotorua. Now the movers began unpacking them. I had thought the packers up north a bit cavalier when they boxed up our stuff, one older man cackling over my ‘pretties’, meaning my underwear. Now I found that bottles of Worcestershire sauce and other kitchen condiments had been packed unsealed among the ‘pretties’. Many of my clothes were ruined and much of our furniture was chipped. Our belongings looked like the debris from a war zone piled in the rooms of our ‘new’ house.

  I sat on the steps and cried. ‘I’m thirty today,’ I said out loud; ‘I’m thirty and look at me.’ The children put their arms around me. We sat in a huddle until I pulled myself together. It was up to me to make the best of it. I think Ian and I were both in a state of shock, wondering what we had done. Even though the house was cheap we were still heavily mortgaged and we could see that the costs of fixing things was much greater than we had anticipated. We bought fish and chips and a birthday cake from the grocer’s, because of course it had been Joanna’s birthday the day before. She had turned seven, and it was time to sing happy birthday to both of us.

  The next day Ian became a serious commuter between Wellington and the Hutt Valley, something he would continue for more than thirty-five years. We didn’t stay in that house for long but we didn’t move far away either, and we have looked out on the bay and the strait and the hills ever since. But the early years in that house were indescribable. Until we got the place properly clean, we were often sick with stomach bugs and the wind whistled through cracks round the windows, making winter desolate.

  I enrolled Joanna at the local primary school along the street. The headmaster, Mr Gladwell, had been there for a very long time. He and I didn’t get along from the start. Our family name was the same as that of a former student who had been involved in an unsavoury ‘incident’ and nothing would shake his belief that we were connected to this person. I found Gladwell authoritarian. He let it be known that he expected women to keep their place. Hoping to placate him, and wanting to ensure that things went smoothly for the children, I said I would be happy to make myself useful at the school. Perhaps I could make myself available for the school committee (what we now call the board of trustees). Gladwell looked at me coolly and said, ‘We don’t have ladies on the committee but you’d be welcome to join the ladies’ auxiliary.’

  For some, he was the ideal headmaster. Hataitai, for all its charm, has remained relatively conservative over the years. To me, his methods seemed like turning the clock back to older, more unkind methods of keeping children and their parents in their place. But one of the things I did like about the school was the large number of Greek children who attended, bringing energy and vitality to the playground. Although most of the families have moved on, back then our ‘village’ bristled with the heavy moustaches of Greek men, and women dressed in black, from headscarf to toe, threading their way from shop to shop. The Greek widows reminded me of the black swans that used to glide over Lake Rotorua, steady, calm, dark.

  When Giles started school a few months later, several Greek children began on the same day.

  To Ian’s and my astonishment, within a short time he became a fluent Greek speaker, the only one among the ‘non-Greek’ new entrants. As with Maori children in the old education system, their language was frowned upon in the playground, and before long English prevailed, but this early linguistic connection with his heritage has never really left Giles. At that time, I began to understand how important it would become for him to acknowledge his Greek identity.

  That day, when I arrived back at the house from enrolling Joanna, the postman had been. A letter in a long envelope awaited me, my first mail in my ‘new’ house. It was a commission from Bill Austin to write another radio drama, only the commissioned rate was nearly five times what he had been paying me before. I stood staring at the letter, scarcely believing what I saw. I looked up at the house and thought, ‘Right, we’ll fix you.’

  This was the beginning of a family life lived in two halves, Ian’s in the Hutt Valley during the week, from six thirty in the morning until he arrived home towards six, and mine in Wellington. The weekends were filled with carpentry and decoration, and clearing landfill to make way for a bigger kitchen at the back. Ian never seemed to rest. During the school holidays, the children and I would frequently return to Rotorua to stay with my parents while Ian knocked down walls and tore out windows. The Desert Road became increasingly familiar territory.
I came to know every bend and twist in it, learned the names of the staff in the truckie’s roadside cafs, picked rosehips in the autumn from beside the road, occasionally glimpsed the wild horses that roam the territory. It is a wild area of open space, full of the unexpected, which I love to this day.

  I wrote the play Bill had commissioned in a short, month-long dash. Tell About Man was a story about an intellectually disabled girl who is befriended by a man suspected of ill intentions towards her. In fact, he does her no harm and illuminates her life with a brief glimpse of happiness until it is undone when the pair are separated by well-meaning authorities. Bill and Arthur loved it. Although they had paid for two of my plays, so far nothing had been produced. (It had been decided that Martha was too controversial to air, and it never saw the light of day.) Now they decided that Tell About Man would be my debut. They assigned one of their top producers, Antony (Tony) Taylor, to produce it. Ginette McDonald, who was only sixteen at the time, played the lead role, and George Henare, who would appear in many of my later dramas, had a role. Tony invited me into the studio for the week of production so I could learn more about the nuts and bolts. I loved what the actors brought to my script. The Listener took my photograph and there was a brief write-up in the magazine the week before the play went to air.

  I wasn’t prepared for how I would feel when I listened to the play on air. Radio drama is composed purely of words, sound effects, music and silence. As Arthur pointed out to me, a brief well-placed pause in dialogue can have all the significance in the world. It is up to the listener to decide what is in the silence. These pauses, and the music, were vital to Tell About Man. The production was so good, so subtle, that it made me forget for a time that I had written the play.