The Varnished Untruth (5 page)

Next to the vacant lot was a sweet shop. That sweet shop was the sugary yin to the salty yang of the fish shop. I still love liquorice – there they had thin, coiled ropes of the stuff, and sherbet we ate from paper bags, white chocolate frogs and the squishy, white ‘milk bottles’ which I still think are heavenly. Even the school tuck shop had donuts. Yes, that’s where my sweet tooth came from. And, partly as a result, I’ve battled with my weight my whole life.

Help me to understand exactly what you mean by that . . .

Well, I really like the kind of food that’s not very good for you . . . Once I start eating, well, chocolate, marshmallows, jelly babies or ice cream, for example, it’s very hard to stop. Food definitely equals comfort for me, especially anything sweet with a soft, squishy texture—

As if you’re cushioning yourself inside?

Yes! Oh, I’m aware I use food for the wrong reasons. I’ve gone up and down in weight quite drastically ever since I was in my twenties . . .

What kinds of treatment have you tried for that?

Everything. Diets, gym, personal trainers, pills, nutritionists, quacks. Now I understand the psychology of eating disorders, and successfully treat them in others, but for me personally it’s just so well entrenched. In those days we drank oodles of sugary soft drinks that seemed to help cool us down – and never considered the sugar content. Hardly anyone had air conditioning in those days and in summer it was difficult for my sisters and me to fall asleep. To try to cool my legs, I would slide them up against the plaster wall beside my top bunk. I envied my school friends who lived near the beach; kids in our neighbourhood simply played with the garden hose whenever they lifted the water restrictions. Most people had sprinklers, which were fun to jump through, but they were considered a particularly wicked waste of water. Occasionally we’d go on a Sunday school picnic to Balmoral Beach where they had a decent shark net (in those days many beaches had those), or attended a barbecue birthday party at Manly, but my parents were terribly busy, even when they were at home.

You felt they were . . . unavailable . . .?

Yes, pretty much. Aside from the Sunday afternoon drives, my sisters and I stayed around the house reading, practising on the piano, or studying. There was no movie theatre, shopping mall, bowling alley, or anything like that nearby. Actually, I think there may have been a cinema not too far away because kids at school used to laugh about dropping Jaffas – round orange sweeties with a chocolate centre – on people’s heads from the top balcony, but I don’t remember seeing a movie until I was around eleven. I think Hitchock’s
Psycho
was the first film I saw – at a church fellowship, of all things. What were they thinking? It was traumatic – not so much due to the suspense, but because the boy I was sitting with screamed like a trapped hyena during the shower scene. Back then I would never have imagined that one day I would live in the Hollywood Hills with a hazy view of the Norman Bates Motel set at Universal Studios in the valley below.

But I don’t think our family had the funds for things like cinema outings; money was to be used for education, not entertainment or luxury items. Our mother made our clothes on her Singer sewing machine. We listened to children’s radio programmes, but there was no TV then. Oh, and there were a couple of dirt tennis courts in the area. We did play with the neighbourhood children – I was given a red tricycle for my sixth birthday and a small gang of us used to take it in turns to free-wheel it, helter-skelter, down the hill. I suppose that was the beginning of my addiction to adrenaline . . .

You discovered that it felt good to move fast, be scared, perhaps a little out of control?

I suppose I did. It excited me more than anything else in my life at that time. Yes, definitely it elevated my mood from everyday boredom. But apart from that, I don’t really remember having very much fun. Oh, I do remember that I tried to organize the neighbourhood children into a drama club to perform plays but, very wisely, they’d have none of it. But my parents were not particularly happy people so I suppose it never occurred to them to have fun with us. I’m not exactly sure why they weren’t happy. My father Neville came from a lively, down-to-earth family from the North Island of New Zealand. His father, Octavius, was the postmaster of Opotiki, a town in the eastern Bay of Plenty. Dad was the youngest of nine. Of the four boys in the family, two brothers – Ted and Norman – were killed in World War II (they were in the Allied Air Force), so I imagine there was considerable pressure on my father to make his mark in the world. I recently learned that Dad really wanted to go to war but Ted wrote him a letter from the South Pacific (where he was eventually killed) telling him in no uncertain terms to stay at home and hold the fort there.

Most of the New Zealand Stephensons I’ve met are pretty laid-back and good-humoured. We are descendants of Samuel Stephenson, the son of an English sea captain – also called Samuel – who was murdered by pirates in Indonesia in 1820 when his ship
The Rosalie
ran aground. After hearing of his father’s death, Samuel junior sailed from England to try to recover his father’s assets in Indonesia, but when he failed to secure his inheritance, he moved on to New Zealand and established a trading post in Russell in the Bay of Islands. He married Hira Moewaka, a Maori woman from the Kapotai tribe whose father was probably Scottish (she also had a European name – Charlotte MacCauliffe), and the pair tried to settle down amid the volatile climate of fighting and land-grabbing that occurred between white colonists and Maori people in those days. Well, that’s the Cliff Notes – I’m romping through this bit of family history because I already wrote a whole book about what happened to my great, great grandfather called
Murder or Mutiny?
.

My father, who told me he used to go to school bare-footed, eventually became a scientist and teamed up with my mother to form a cancer research duo. As an adult he was shy and a little insecure in social situations; however, as a parent he was a tough disciplinarian. But he had an earthy sense of humour and a rather irreverent view of the world that I regard as his greatest gift to me. I think he may have been a bit of a prankster in his youth, but I imagine my mother would have reacted pretty sourly to that kind of ‘silliness’. Early pictures of him reveal his wiry, film-star looks, although his bemused expression while holding his first child – me – suggests that he may not have been quite ready for prime-time parenthood. But then, who is?

My mother Elsie spent her early childhood in Fiji. Her father was a businessman in Suva and her mother was a Methodist missionary. I was told my grandmother used to go door to door to try to persuade the Indian merchant families who had settled there to allow their girls to be educated. I’ve visited the property in Suva where my grandparents lived, a colonial-style house with a white, wooden gate and lush tropical garden. Early photos of my mother suggest she was a true child of the colonial empire – dressed to the nines in frilly, long-sleeved dresses and woollen socks in the tropical heat, posing coyly with her parasol. Like the children of wealthy white families in India at the time, my mother had an ayah or local woman who looked after her as a nanny, and there were probably other servants, too. But her father died suddenly when she was twelve and, immediately, her life changed. She was sent away to New Zealand alone, to board with family friends and be schooled. I imagine she was well looked after, but the sudden losses must have been traumatic, and I doubt she was happy from then on.

As an adult, my mother always seemed miserable. Now I realize she must have suffered from depression, and she was also highly anxious. She knew she had poor mothering skills (she apologized to me about that a couple of years before she died). To be honest, I always felt she didn’t really like me. And the pervasive envy, bitterness and dismissiveness I felt from her – especially during my teenage years – constituted a deeply painful trauma I have only recently come to understand. It spurred a deep sense of unworthiness, guilt and fury that continues to plague me from time to time . . .

Tell me more about that . . .

My parents told me once that I was ‘an experiment’. Bastards. I was always afraid to ask just how far that went. Did they deliberately deprive me of love and comfort to see how I’d turn out? Sometimes it felt that way. They had huge expectations of me, partly because some clipboard-wielding IQ tester had turned up at my kindergarten and pronounced that I was way too smart for Plasticine, paper chains and Snap (I could read when I was three). I was whisked off to a more advanced classroom where all the kids were sprouting pubic hair and talking about dating and periods, which meant that, at seven, I was a social outcast. And even though I was still near the top of my class, my father made it clear that second place was unacceptable. Yeah, I was an experiment, all right; a miserable baby-monster whose classmates didn’t understand that my savage competitive streak was solely in the interests of receiving what every child deserves no matter what their exam results might be – appreciation. How I wish I’d felt loved for who I truly was, not just for what I might achieve.

I know, I know – complaining about being bright seems like I’m perversely blowing my own trumpet but, as I learned when I was studying psychology, there are many different types of cleverness, and very few of them are teased out in standard IQ tests. I think it’s terrible that we expect everyone to perform the same way in school. Many absolutely brilliant people learn differently from the ‘norm’, but even though we now know more about learning differences than we did in the fifties, we still tend to value people who are, say, good at maths over those who are visually creative. And when it comes to dealing with life, I don’t even think IQ tests relate to success. I, for one, can be remarkably stupid—OMG, there I go again, apologizing for being smart. This has bugged me my whole life. It’s got more than a little to do with being female, but why exactly do I feel the need to beg your forgiveness when a) I’m sure you’re just as smart as me and b) you don’t catch Stephen Hawking saying, ‘OK, I can explain everything about the universe, but please don’t hate me cos in many ways I’m really an idiot’, do you?

I had kind and helpful teachers at the Boronia Park Primary School but, because I was perceived as ‘brainy’, I was thoroughly disliked by my classmates. I remember burying my head in my lap to try to block out the entire class chanting ‘Teacher’s pet. Teacher’s pet! Teacher’s Pet! TEACHER’S PET!’ But, by then, my tears of humiliation and frustration were tempered with some kind of inner knowledge that, one day, there would be transcendent rewards. I still marvel at that – as a young kid I really did understand envy; after all, it was perpetrated on me by family members, friends and even my own mother. But I learned to tolerate it, and that strength has set me in good stead. Thank God that resilience never left me, despite the punishment I took – and not just for my braininess. I was just never . . . liked . . .

. . . Well, of course you would have been unpopular. When parents fail to allow a child to be herself, she will assume a false self, more invested in pleasing adults than getting on with peers, and other children will recognize that lack of authenticity.

Hmmm. Looking back, I feel so sorry for my little child self, who felt she had to try so hard to be loved. She was terribly lost. At least I had my ballet lessons, which I absolutely adored – although, like everything else, I took them way too seriously. And there were a few disasters; some have said I peed in my bear suit during a performance of ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ but, erm, I think that might have been my sister. In fact, my performing career properly began at the age of five when I danced a solo as a butterfly. I had net wings and feelers on my head made out of pipe cleaners and, naturally, I was extremely anxious about being perfectly butterflyish. (See, the fact that it was my mother who made that outfit contradicts the part of me that believes she didn’t care about me, doesn’t it?)

But was that what you truly needed, or was it . . . something else . . .?

You’re right. I would gladly have swapped the butterfly outfit for one gentle caress. Anyway, the following year, when I was the ‘Spirit of Winter’ in a furry-edged tutu with sparkly snowflakes on my headdress, you could just tell I was a
Strictly
contestant in the making. Dancing was my escape. It offered me a way to slide outside my head and enjoy all the good feelings my body could provide. It was also beyond my parents’ area of expertise and, therefore, not under their control. It was mine. I could not have articulated it at the time, but now I understand how important that was. I felt transported by the beauty, the passion, the music, and the exactitude of ballet, and dreamed of being Margot Fonteyn, Alicia Markova, or New Zealand prima ballerina Rowena Jackson. How I wish I’d kept it up.

But dancing also provided me with a lesson that would haunt me forever and instil in me a lifelong fear. My ballet teacher Edna Mann was a beautiful, poised woman who had a little TV show in the very early days of black-and-white Australian TV. She gave lessons to viewers, using her pupils to demonstrate barre techniques, and once or twice she chose me. The last time I appeared, she asked me to perform a short Irish dance, a gaillard, which was part of the syllabus. In my green tutu and apron, I started off confidently, but halfway through I lost my way and forgot the steps. Terrified, I glanced at Miss Mann, who got me through by smiling encouragingly, but I felt totally humiliated. I remember how embarrassed I was when I got home and heard my mother laughing about it with a neighbour outside in the street. I had learned the price of being in the spotlight.