by Gee, Maurice
1961–63. She completes the part-time course at the library school. She has her first successful love affair and completes that too. The man – he’s not a boy – does not exactly want to marry her but does not want not to marry her. She knows what she thinks about it: won’t be tied down yet. No thank you. His name is Tom and he’s good-looking and good in bed – delicious love-making is a phrase Ellie uses – but he’s indecisive, the sort of man she will call a wimp later on. Part of the satisfaction in love is falling out of it, almost as good as falling in. She is free again and, not being hurt or disappointed, does not need to throw her diaphragm away. (Had found a broad-minded doctor to fit her with it, an Austrian.) She babysits for her mother now and then. She moves to another flat where the morals are not so loose although the noise is just as bad. One day she sees a newspaper photograph of Harold Prime’s yacht – bigger than Surprise – preparing for a Wellington–Auckland race. One of the crew members is Hollis Prime, but because the photo cuts him off at the waist Ellie cannot see his crippled leg. The young woman standing by his side doesn’t get a name. She’s very pretty. Ellie is reminded of Dolores. She writes a card, Hey, remember me?, and sends it – Please forward – to the Masterton address where Dolores’ parents live. There’s no reply. Ellie will never see Dolores again. She joins a tramping club: loves fording rivers and reaching mountain tops. Dark valleys and overhanging bush make her uneasy. She does not like the feeling of being locked in.
1964. Ellie takes a job in the Army Department library. She could easily fall for some of the officers who come in but they are married – there’s an ease she likes in married men but it has a wall you can’t climb at the back of it – so she goes out with a driver for a while but drops him because he’s limited, or thick in the head. She learns that good looks are not only not enough but can be used to hide deficiencies. She has not met a man yet who wants to talk to her. Some of them don’t even like it when she laughs.
1965. In her summer holidays Ellie and five others complete a tramp from the Lewis Pass to Lake Rotoiti. It’s country mapped only round the edges, with no tracks. She has never felt so happy or so free. Keep pointing north. Follow the ridges, trek down tussock hills, cross shingle slides opening into huge wide-open valleys, drink at creeks, climb again. She wants never to do anything else. After ten days they find the Sabine, and Ellie, who has not brought a sketch pad, draws the St Arnaud Range – its bare tops and midnight bush – in the leader’s trip book. She washes in the river, where the cold takes her breath away. She cannot understand why she lives in a city. As they walk on the track by the lake and find the lodge she feels something slipping away, some knowledge that was peace and excitement hand in hand. She feels a sob in her breast at the sudden emptiness and knows that she must leave Wellington. The resolution lasts although it puzzles her after a while. She quits the Army Department and takes a job as borough librarian in Taumarunui, where she makes friends. The peace and excitement of her ‘long march’ fail to return. She does not really expect them (although she does not forget) but believes she has read a signal that sets her in motion after standing still. That is the important thing about 1965. There’s a man friend too, whom she enjoys. He is not a nobody but does not need a name, although she remembers it in the list she amuses herself with later in her life. She sees no reason why a woman should not have as many lovers as a man and thinks it might be fun to aim for a hundred (she’s had six so far); but the extravagance of the number causes more distaste than amusement and she decides the right number is one, no matter where he comes in the list. She is not sure she will ever find ‘one’.
1966. She leaves her job and joins a small shearing gang as a fleeco. They work on Lands and Survey blocks along the Wanganui River and in Tongariro National Park. There’s a gun shearer and his wife (she’s cook and rousie), two youngsters aiming for their two hundred, two fleecos and a presser. It’s a happy gang. Ellie likes hard work, although she wakes on her first night, sits up in her bunk and throws a fleece, then falls back asleep, and can hardly drag herself to the shed at 5 a.m, she aches so much. She gets a quick crush on the second shearer, a Maori boy who is so handsome she can almost taste him. She would love to wrap him into herself. It’s the first time she has gone for someone younger – and he won’t look at her, has a girl back home. Soon they’re just friends – so Ellie says. She has a sad and happy four months. Draws him but makes him far too pretty. Ends by drawing hills and river instead, sheep and dogs, the men at work, but doesn’t much like anything she does. The lanolin in the wool has made her hands as soft as dough. You need hard hands for drawing, she believes. Soft in some way means insensitive.
1967–68. Ellie works at the Chateau in January. It makes her laugh – she’s a waitress at last. Then it’s back to the gang for second shear. She’s been saving hard for an overseas trip although she is not sure why she is going. Everyone does, and she’s getting old, twenty-four, and will have to think soon about what she’s going to do with her life. She doesn’t want to stay a librarian, it’s too much indoors. She doesn’t particularly want to be married and have children either, especially after helping with her half-siblings. Her mother is pregnant again, unexpectedly, and is frightened of having a baby at her age. Ellie feels bad about going away. All the same, she goes. It’s London, where everybody starts. A month is enough. She heads for the country, works in hotels in the Scottish Highlands and on Skye. Winter drives her back to town, and London is better now. She lives in a house in Fulham with seven others – New Zealanders, Australians, a South African – and takes part in demonstrations against the Vietnam war. She tries to get to know some English people. Class makes it easy with some and hard with others. She comes to see class as poisonous and doesn’t want to do the Kiwi thing of cutting through – just keep away from it. Ellie oversimplifies and does not get to know as many people as she should. In her second summer she goes north again but it doesn’t work this time. These are not her hills. She has a look, moving on, at France and Italy and Spain – hard work backpacking among the hordes of young. She loves what she is seeing but comes to hate the way it must be done. She hates the way money rules everything and how people are always trying to get it out of you. They’re lost behind their need and greed for money. It spoils Paris and Rome and Madrid, but cannot spoil everything. Goya, in the Prado, knocks her backwards several steps. She stands there stunned, with her skin stripped off. So that is what painting really is. It is knowledge for her to carry home. She is glad that she has found it at the end of her stay …
Good Life
‘You’ve got so thin,’ her mother said. ‘Ellie, you’re not in some sort of trouble?’
‘I’ve never been fitter,’ Ellie said.
She would have liked to say ‘freer’ as well, but landing in New Zealand had squeezed her between two hands – all the things she’d done, and what she might do next – and she couldn’t move. Yet she had to and didn’t know in which direction. It made her want to put things off, and put them off again, because she might choose a way she couldn’t get out of.
‘I didn’t like it when you got arrested,’ Mrs Brownlee said.
‘It was only a demonstration. We sat down and wouldn’t move, so they threw us in a van and carted us off. There were more than sixty of us in court, so don’t worry, Mum. I only got fined one pound.’
‘But they might have your name written down. They mightn’t ever let you go back in.’
‘I don’t want to. I’m a New Zealander from now on.’ The declaration failed to set her free; she still felt hands shoving and clutching – unbalancing her, constricting her.
‘Is there someone you’re fond of?’
‘A man, do you mean? No there’s not. Don’t try and make me get married, Mum. I’m not ready yet.’
Nearly twenty-six: she could see her mother about to say it, and did not want it said because it butted blindly, not with her lack of a man – there was no failure there – but with the need somehow to secure herself
, hold herself steady, then move on.
‘What happened to that one you went to Scotland with? The foreign one?’
‘He was a German. He had a girl back home.’ All the same, she’d added him to her list. ‘We climbed every mountain on Skye. Not that they’re real mountains; they’re only pimples.’ No, she told herself, don’t be cheap. They were great hills and good climbs and wonderful days, and dangerous too, with the sort of weather they have there. ‘I had a good time in Scotland. And Werner was nice.’ But what, she thought, do I do now?
She babysat. She took Andrew and Heather to the pictures and the zoo, went into town on weekdays pushing Derek in his pushchair to give her mother a rest. Sometimes on Lambton Quay she passed people she knew, and twice stopped to chat – a Willowbank girl, an ex-dental nurse. ‘No,’ she explained, ‘he’s not mine, he’s my brother.’ She did not want to have a child like Derek, who had a milk allergy and was raised on soy milk, and who was, putting it plainly, unattractive. He was watchful, slanted, pinched, always damp in his nappies, on his skin. She hated accumulating words like that, impressions like that, for a little boy who was not well, but could not find, when she picked him up and tried to make herself fond of him, any warmth to match the warmth she tried to show – so became attentive, fussy, verbal, diligent, and told herself, It’s not for long.
George was kind to her, but with a sadness caused, she supposed, by the things he suspected she’d been up to. He was a storeman not a taxi driver now. The better hours freed him more for his family. He was bone-tired, but also pleased, and would have said if anyone had asked him, ‘This is what I wanted. A wife and children.’ Ellie tried not to think about it – the price you paid, the things you got, the new lives, the open mouths, the noise and work and anger and the never-failing love. Her mother was almost as good at love as George. Ellie did not want to be locked up with them.
‘I think I’ll go tomorrow,’ she said.
‘Where?’
She had not thought about it, but the place had come to her in town when she saw new-season’s apples in a greengrocer’s shop.
‘Down to Nelson for the apple picking.’
‘Oh Ellie, that’s not a job.’
‘It’s hard work. I like hard work.’
‘But – your future?’
‘I don’t think in those terms, Mum. Things will look after themselves.’ She could not believe she’d said that easy thing, that stupid thing, and she blushed. She was sorry for her mother too – so worn with her own hard life, yet so concerned for her. ‘Hey Mum, don’t worry. I’ll probably get a library job soon. But I want a bit of sun. I’ve just come out of an English winter.’
‘I had you when I was nineteen,’ her mother said.
Ellie almost answered, ‘Times have changed’; wanted to say, ‘Women don’t have to have children any more’; yet was confused. She did not want a Derek but remembered the love she’d felt for Andrew ten years before. ‘Mmm,’ she’d said, nuzzling his downy head, ‘mmm, you’re mine.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘we’ll see.’
Her mother and George had shifted Derek’s cot into their bedroom. Ellie slept her last night in the room with the orange ceiling and the blue and green enclosing walls. Brooklyn thumped its gates and clanged its fences in the wind. She did not feel at home, and she wanted a home, where she would not be buffeted and nudged all the time and made to feel she’d missed a step she should have taken. She wanted to be easy and sure, and then she would find out what came next.
She took the morning ferry across the strait, caught a bus in Picton and slept the night in a youth hostel in Nelson. Backpacking again: in Europe it had seemed natural, but it made her feel out of step here, as though she should hide her nationality. There were Dutch and German travellers in the hostel. She found she did not want them, she wanted New Zealanders, and supposed the orchards would be thick with foreigners. She had chosen wrong and should be back in Wellington, going steady at twenty-five with some steady man – yet when she lay in her bunk in the dark and tried out that future, her mind slid through it and came out the other side. So stop all this head stuff, Ellie said, get out to Motueka and find a job.
She caught a bus in the morning and waited until it ran beside the sea before getting off. There was no hurry; the apples would not fall off the trees. She took off her sandals and walked on the sand and began to feel at home. Cold lapping sea, open water, baches made of corrugated iron and fibrolite, rolling hills, orchards, sheep, mountains in the distance on two sides: although she’d never been here she recognised the place and began to feel a humming in her chest as though a hive of bees was there wanting to get out. She walked into the water up to her thighs, then ploughed back, looked around for people, dropped her clothes beside her pack and ran into the sea. It was like getting baptised, full immersion. She dived and followed her hands down and swam along the sand, where shells slid under her like stars; came up and stripped her hair back behind her ears. Like being saved. She rolled and swam, with salt touching everywhere and changing her flesh – touching in her head with a stinging freshness, turning warm. Ellie floated. Cars went by on the road, too distant to see her pleasure or nakedness. She stayed until the skin on her hands began to wrinkle. It was like growing old in a place where you belonged.
At midday, dried and warm, she shouldered her pack and walked back to a store the bus had passed, and bought a pie.
‘Are there orchards round here where I can get a picking job?’
‘Are you one of those flower people?’ the shopwoman asked.
‘God, no. Do I look like one?’
‘You can go about a mile along the road. That’s where the big orchards start. You should have gone to the Labour Department, though. A bus load from there came out this morning.’
‘So I’m too late?’
‘There’s plenty of work if you’re any good. Try Jim Barchard.’
‘Where’s he?’
‘Go back and take the first on your right and keep on walking. He’s about two miles.’
She walked into low hills, eating her pie and drinking coke. The sea kept on getting lost and coming into sight, and she hoped she would be able to see it as she worked. The Abel Tasman coast and the Nelson coast made two arms in which she could see muscles work. Everything was warm and alive. The pine trees had a tangy medicinal smell and the blackberry and gorse flowers by the road were honey-sweet, astringent, contradictory in a way that made her feel rounded out.
She passed through farms and orchards, looking for ‘Barchard’ on a mailbox. Pickers stood on ladders in the trees. The winey smell of apples filled the air. Bins of Coxes Orange waited in crushed grass beside clay roads and open gates. Drunk wasps crawled and hovered. Ellie supposed that getting stung would be part of the job.
She found Jim Barchard’s box in a mis-matched pair at the top of a rise. A dirt road ran beside a row of pines to a villa above a paddock where half a dozen black and brown sheep grazed. That must be Anerdi and Webster, the owners of the mailbox with rainbows painted on it. Barchard’s was made of creosoted planks and was large enough for a watchdog or a goat. His drive ran down the hill to dark-green hedges encircling a red iron roof. Ellie heard a tractor coughing in the apple trees that dipped and flattened out beyond. She walked down the drive and found a packing shed behind the house. The tractor sped into the yard and speared an empty bin on its front end. The driver saw Ellie and throttled back. He grinned at her.
‘Looking for work?’
‘Yes. They sent me at the shop. Apple picking.’
‘You done it before?’
‘No. I’ve been a fleeco. I can work.’
‘A fleeco, eh?’ He eyed her. ‘I’ve got a full team. You’ll have to do some work in the shed.’
‘I don’t mind that.’
‘Dump your stuff in the hut then. You had your lunch?’
‘I had a pie.’
The man laughed. He looked in his sixties and was unshaven, grizzle-haired, with
a dirty woollen cap on the back of his head. He got down from the tractor and led her round the side of the shed to the pickers’ hut.
‘Girls here, blokes over there. I won’t have any dope-heads, OK?’
‘I don’t smoke dope. I don’t even smoke cigarettes.’
‘There’s a fridge in the kitchen. You can bring some beer in, it gets hot work. But no one gets boozed.’
‘That’s all right with me,’ Ellie said. She liked the man. He wasn’t being male or trying to make her feel like a girl. Maybe it was because she ate pies.
‘Sixty cents an hour. I’ll take you down to the gravvies first so you can get the hang. You got other shoes?’
‘I’ve got boots and sandshoes.’
‘Sandshoes. You get a wasp in sandals and you’ll jump. What’s your name?’
‘Ellie Crowther.’
‘I’m Jim Barchard.’ They shook hands. ‘No sloping off after a couple of days.’
‘I’ll stay as long as you like.’
‘No promises from my end. We’ll see how you go. Bathroom down there, dunny out the back. Grab a bag at the shed when you’ve unpacked and come on down.’
There were three beds in the room. Ellie put her pack on the one that seemed free. Pressure had glued her shirt to her back. Her feet were dirty and her hair sticky with salt but she felt clean inside from the sea, so she pulled on her sandshoes without socks, found her cloth hat in her pack and went outside.
There were two women grading and packing in the shed. One of them, Jim Barchard’s wife, gave her a canvas bag and showed her how to buckle it on. Ellie went into the Gravenstein trees and learned how to pick – palm underneath, lift and twist; how to work a ladder; how to empty her bag into the bin so the apples would not bruise. Branches kept knocking her hat over her eyes. Discovering not to wear it seemed a big step – trade secret perhaps, because the boy in the next tree gave a broken-toothed grin. ‘Hats are a pain in the arse. Watch out for wasps.’
