Between My Father and the King (5 page)

‘I'm so glad,' she wrote, ‘that at last the children are going to meet their grandmother.'

In almost no time our dresses were made. My mother's was a shiny navy stuff that gave off sparks. My brother had a new pair of grey serge pants. My father had no new clothes but he unwrapped his present of two birthdays past — a white handkerchief with his initial in one corner.

‘I'd like her to see us neatly clad,' my mother said. I think it
was the first time I heard her use ‘neatly' instead of ‘warmly' as the essential only qualification of being clad. Neither she nor my father thought of clothes as serving any purpose except to keep out the weather, rain or sun, and we had been trained to think the same way. And if we erred and pined for a party dress my mother would release one more verse from her biblical armoury — ‘Consider the lilies of the field' — and when we knowingly returned her fire by questioning, therefore, the need to ‘toil and spin' where ‘toil' meant the morning making of beds and ‘spin' meant going to the store for the groceries, she became distressed and could not answer, and then our clever victory made us unhappy because part of the function of parents was their unvarying power to answer with conviction. My mother was almost always equal to argument, but when she was not quite equal she would raise her chin as if she were trying to keep her head above water and a blush would appear on each cheek and a moistness that was not tears but a kind of helplessness came into her eyes and mixed and spread their original blue diluting it like watercolour on the white drawing paper, her eyes becoming absorbed in the helplessness that would change in a flash to defiance.

Our tongues were sharp. We won the arguments by abuse or cleverness; yet our mother's power in simply being there forced us to live happily like lilies of the field and yet to engage in our fair share of toiling and spinning, which became more demanding as Grandma's visit drew nearer.

We found ourselves searching for ‘real' images of Grandma — her clothes, her voice, her face, her smile. She would be living in our house. She would walk in and out of the rooms, she would use the lavatory and have to take a candle out there at night and be chased by the big moths; she would eat the ripe pears off the pear tree and inspect the garden, the dahlias and chrysanthemums, and our southern morning, filled with spiderwebs. Yes, it was autumn and the bumble bees had thicker fur coats with yellow stripes like
old-fashioned bathing costumes. And the little dogs in the streets had colder noses and turned corners in a hurry with their noses in the air. And the grey flocks of homing pigeons released each morning from the house on the opposite hill flapped their wings heavily as they whirled sinking into the hill-mist; twice, three times circling above the houses in the valley, their wings rushing as they lowered over our place, and then returning home crooning and cooing with a soft bath-plug sound,
lu-lu-gurgle
,
lu-lu-gurgle
, that was sucked down into the gully and drained away. Or an autumn wind came and, making a spray of all sound — pigeons, greyhounds barking, trains shunting — rushed it towards the pine trees sprinkling their tossing heads in autumnal baptism until the wind died and the trees stood still, darkened by scarves of grey cloud, their needles occasionally dropping — like real needles, big darners scaled with rust or dried blood.

Our new grandmother would share all these sights and sounds: we wanted her to share them. In return she would bring her magical gifts of making pipes for music, divining water, and calling the birds of the air to perch on her shoulder.

As the day of her visit drew nearer, an excitement like Christmas enhanced our lives. When Grandma came there was to be a picnic in the Town Gardens to have our photographs taken, and a walk along the gully: it was all planned. We did not care for the Gardens; they were associated with relatives and photos and best clothes and behaviour. The only fun was in feeding the ducks and being rude about the naked statues and their squirts of water. Here there would be little hope of our getting to know our grandmother but there would be secret summings-up and glances and ears pricked to catch the grown-up conversation which never ceased to provoke a sense of wonder, a marvelling at time up there where the mouths of grown-ups opened to talk and laugh, so different from time down below where we lived; time up there seeming to have been extended and slackened like pants elastic
washed too often, so that instead of stretch and snap stretch and snap it was stretch only, for ever, with broken cords that no longer connected the beginning to the end but hung exposed and loose . . . What a strange world it was with people and their lives so far roofward and skyward!

It was a school day, which meant that when we came home from school Grandma would already be settled in. She would have a towel of her own hanging on the rail in the bathroom and a special chair to sit in, both in the kitchen and the dining room. We did not quite know what she would
do
apart from making pipes for us and divining water and calling down the birds of the air, but we supposed she would have to get rid of all her news of up north. There were many relatives with children and children's children, none of whom my mother had seen since her marriage though she heard from them regularly in long letters, chronicles of birth, death, marriage, diseases, cures, recipes, and the inevitable photos called ‘snaps'. Visitors to our house spent much time talking, giving and receiving news, the talk developing a recognisable pattern according to the length of stay and the closeness of the visitor. There was the usual first day of discerning likenesses, delegating origins of noses and chins and eyes and arms and legs and hair; the more personal characteristics were discovered later, repeatedly, with alarm or delight or pride in their detection. After likenesses, there was the concern with what each member of the family was going to ‘be', and then the debate on the wisdom of the choice and how the rest of the trade or profession fared; also how much work it would be, how much work!

‘You can never live your own life,' they said to my sister the aspiring ballet dancer. ‘Practice, practice, practice.'

‘That's a strange choice for a little chap like you,' they told my brother, the future sea captain.

We found visitors tiresome when they spoke to us. Happily, they seemed satisfied once they found out whom we ‘took after' and what we were going to ‘be'. Then they would pay less attention to us and talk of grown-up affairs, though sometimes they descended to us in an effort to reveal whom
they
took after and what
they
had become: they wanted us to
know
; and forever the first thing they wanted us to know was that they ‘got on well with', ‘had a way with' children.

‘Grandma will beat them all,' my mother said. ‘She is such
fun
. She has never grown old. She has kept a bit of childhood in her heart.'

I hated school; it was so hard not to wriggle for so long and when the playtime bell rang everyone would spring up, and once outside, arms and legs would wave and wriggle and we became more like cast sheep and dropped centipedes or caterpillars than children; waving and wriggling and whirling. It was the time of life described mysteriously by the psychology books as ‘the latent period' when things were happening but nobody was supposed to know they were happening and if you knew they happened you immediately forgot. It was a time of storing, of programming — so the psychology books told me, years later, when I studied ‘the child'.

And it may have been so: there were long spells of nothingness and then time would be measured by knees or a wart or a new way of doing sums or a National Day when fiercely, loyally, we saluted the flag and listened to speeches and sang
o valiant hearts who to your glory came
, ending with
your memory hallowed in the land you loved
.

That was New Zealand, Land of the Fern.

It was a clouded and a clear time, seen from here, in and then out of focus — my stern father with his passion for accuracy in
everything from tying knots and bows to sweeping the dust; from skirting boards to handling cutlery and pronouncing words. His command was military; he was impatient yet painstaking. And, in Scottish fashion, he ordered my mother to clean his boots, scratch his back and (with our unwillingly given help) fetch the coal which was always in plentiful supply — ‘eggs', lignite, Westport, Kaitangata, dull Ngapara — plenty of coal because my father was ‘on the railway', as we described it when asked what our father ‘did'.

That was my father. And worried. Always worried over money. My passionately accurate father, my praising mother and in the wings God and the Pioneers and the Poets, President Garfield, Lord Shaftesbury, Katherine Mansfield, Mr Stocker the dentist, and, heroes of my father who was Union Sec., the Workers locked in battle with the Government.

And the huge shadow of my northern grandmother.

Oh but she's small, how small she is, I thought as I pulled my face into a shy smile (‘She's shy') and said Hello for the first time to my northern grandmother. We had long exhausted our imaginings of her, ranging from witch to angel; for, we told ourselves, we had known both, and the populous parade in between. Yet my images had not included this small woman dressed in black warming her hands in front of the open grate of the kitchen range. Her face had a yellowish tint which may have been the reflection of the fire. Her eyes were big and dark and — I saw at once — disapproving. Adept as any visiting aunt or uncle at discerning family relationships, I could see that her chin was square like my mother's with the same look of defiance, like the photograph I'd seen of an opera singer surrounded by
enemies and singing at the top of her voice for help.

So this was my famous grandmother. I was still young enough to expect magic, and to be patient if it did not happen at once.

I waited.

‘She's shy,' my mother said again.

I frowned. Grandma had black lace-up old-woman shoes, like my own. I had never become used to not realising my dream of having button-up shoes; it stayed as an ache inside me. Oh, the passion that would overtake me in the middle of the night, just to have button-up shoes!

‘Say hello to your grandmother.'

It had started. It was strange and I did not like it.

‘Four girls ought to be a help with the housework, Lottie.

‘I suppose you make your bed in the morning and help with the dishes and are kind to your mother. Always be kind to your mother. You may not have her for long.'

I could never understand or appreciate this reasoning. I'd heard it before from other relatives and from my mother about her mother. It was, as my mother would say, like water off a duck's back, with the difference that the duck does not resent the water as I resented this blackmailing homily.

‘Do they make their beds and tidy the bedroom, Lottie?'

‘Oh yes,' my mother said loyally, while I saw in my mind our bedroom with its unmade bed and the mile-high dust and fluff and the full chamberpot like a punchbowl mixed with varying shades of amber, standing in the middle of the room, just waiting for someone to trip over it or trail an end of blanket or a dress in it.

I hated my mother for being a coward.

‘Of course they're at school all day,' my mother said, as if reading my thoughts.

‘That's no excuse,' Grandma said. ‘When you were young and when I was young and walking all the way down by the Maori pa to school, we had to do our hand's turn at home.'

She turned impressively to me. ‘Thirteen in your mother's family!'

‘Grandma's going to take you for a walk along the gully tomorrow,' Mother said.

I interpreted this as Don't judge your grandmother until you've been out walking with her. She'll call down the birds of the air, she'll show you tricks with trees and grass, she'll tell you stories, you'll love her.

Implied in this was the certainty that our grandmother would love us, too.