Between My Father and the King (6 page)

I knew that Grandma's other daughters and sons had married and bred enthusiastically and we'd heard many tales of our gentle religious cousins — ‘quiet', ‘a help around the house'; of the girls ‘little mothers'; of the boys ‘gentlemanly'. I felt neither gentle nor motherly. I felt prickly and irritable and I didn't like my tartan skirt with the bodice having to be hitched and hitched and not being able to get inside it to scratch, either ordinary scratchings or the fleas that Grandma, if she stayed long enough, would soon find out about. Oh, it was the ‘latent' period all right but whatever was going on you could see it, just as they said you could tell someone was submerged and drowning by the bubbles that kept rising to the surface.

I do not think it was a case of our building up hopes and having them shattered. I do not think it was a ‘case' of any kind. We decided that we felt neutral towards our grandma. The walk along the gully was not really a failure, as Grandma had no opportunity to charm the birds out of the sky and there were no reeds to make pipes from and no poisonous berries. She walked well but we were shy and had nothing to say and perhaps our shyness affected her because there were none of the wonderful stories my mother remembered, and though we did not expect our grandma to speak as they did on the films, saying, ‘I love you', we thought she might show it somehow; but she kept judging and wanting to change
us, making us better or neater or quieter; in our imaginings, when she came, we had stayed as we were; but then she had been as our mother, the liar, painted her. I had a feeling which developed into jealousy and resentment that Grandma cared more for our mother than she did for us: she looked on us as our mother's enemies.

The gully walk ended; we met our mother's questions with answers disappointing to her. I thought she was going to cry. No, the fantails had not perched on Grandma's shoulder; there had been no fantails. As for whistles and pipes and divined underground springs . . .

Our father was home from his Saturday shift. It was teatime. Tempers flared.

‘I'd expect the girls to set the table at least. If you ask me they haven't even made their beds and tidied their room.'

My mother was in the scullery. There was a loud, clear, ‘Shut up, Mum,' from my eldest sister.

Grandma's dark eyes grew darker and bigger.

‘No grandchild is going to tell one of my daughters to shut up. I've never ever heard that expression in my household. What little monsters has your mother raised that they should use that expression! God forbid that a child should speak to her mother in that way. Her mother!'

My grandma's face was flushed, her chin was held high, and we sitting in a row on the old kauri form that my father had sat on when he was a child and had turned upside down to make a canoe; we were now silent and afraid and sad and guilty because we knew that we did not love or even like our new grandma, especially not after her suddenly expressed threat:

‘If you were my children I'd take the belt off the sewing machine and whip you!'

She meant it. Had she whipped her own children, I wondered; and had my mother forgotten? Surely the birds of the air would never fly down to perch on the shoulder of someone so cruel? And
the music would refuse to come readily through the tiny holes of the reed or bamboo pipe? And the secret water not announce its presence to the hazel twig?

Grandma's threat was real. The belt around the wheel of the sewing machine was thin, with wire inside, and would sting and cut. Surely Grandma had never whipped her own children in this way? Grandma, who stood equal and sometimes above, in praise, the Pioneers, President Garfield, Lord Shaftesbury, Katherine Mansfield, Mr Stocker the dentist: between these and God, I reasoned that if Grandma did not deserve the praise, perhaps the others, including God, were equally undeserving. It was all inexplicable and strange. I did not like my grandmother; obviously, my mother loved her. I had thought my mother belonged to me, but how could she, looking through such different eyes at the world and the people. Even her daylight, her daylight and night did not seem to be mine anymore, and I thought they had been. Everything she said about Grandma must have been true but it was her truth and Grandma's and it didn't belong to any of us.

The clock ticked. It had a long face with dragons painted at the edges. The fire roared because the damper was pulled out. I felt very lonely, as if I lived under a separate sky.

We panicked. We showed our fear and hate. We used several words that could be described as ‘that expression'.

‘Don't let me hear you use that expression again. None of my other grandchildren have ever used that expression in front of me.'

Our mother's grief made our behaviour worse; we were helpless.

‘Get the forks from the kitchen drawer.'

‘Get them yourself.'

‘Put on a shovel of coal, there's a good girl.'

‘I won't.'

‘I won't!'

This was called ‘outright' or ‘downright refusal' — a serious crime. Yes, I remember this as a bitter episode in the so-called ‘latent' period of my life. It was a time of being judged and condemned. It was dramatically expressed by every grown-up who knew us that we had ‘broken our grandmother's heart and our mother's heart and brought disgrace on our father and the home'.

There were no photos taken in the Town Gardens, though we wore our dresses and Mother wore hers and my brother wore his new serge pants; but my father did not blow his nose on his birthday handkerchief, and we did not feel at home in our new clothes.

Grandma went home after two days and vowed never to return. My mother cried. My father talked of sending us to the Industrial School at Caversham.

Shut up, I won't, bum, fart, fuck — we had said them all, happily and unhappily rejoicing in their power. Shut your gob. Gob!

Grandma kept her word: she never returned either in real life or in our mother's spoken memory of her. Though we missed the stories we had loved and we wished it were as it used to be when we'd never met Grandma but had dreamed of her, we thought, in our turmoil, Good riddance, and buried our disgrace down a handy pocket in the ‘latent period', and that was that.

A few years later Grandma died, and when her home was sold my mother received fifty pounds and a ‘keepsake', a grey and white oil painting of a lighthouse and a storm at sea which she hung in the passage by the bathroom door. With the fifty pounds she paid the grocer's bill and bought my father a new fishing bag
and herself a set of bottom false teeth which she could not wear because the gooseberry seeds hurt; and we had new bright blue bathing togs.

We lay on the beach in the sun, half-closed our eyes, and looked up lazily at the remote birds of the air wild and free in the spinning blue sky.

One of the few people who gave comfort and advice to my eldest sister Joan was a middle-aged widow with a name like that of a bird — Gull or Sparrow or Robin. I think it was Gull, Mrs Emily Gull who lived alone in a corner house in front of a clay bank that, unlike other clay banks in the neighbourhood, had no pink-flowering iceplant growing on it. It was typical of Mrs Gull, people said, to leave her clay bank naked to the world! Mrs Gull smoked, too, in the days before smoking was accepted in a woman. She swore. She put on make-up. She committed the crime of speaking to my thirteen-year-old sister as to an equal, and insisting that Joan call her by her Christian name (her
Christian
name!), Emily. Emily Gull, living alone in a corner house in front of a naked clay bank on an unkempt section where tinker-tailor grass grew waist-high along the wire-netting fence and old cabbages of years ago rotted yellow in their unmade garden beds and a forest of hemlock surrounded the weathered grey boards of a long-untenanted fowl house.

Mrs Emily Gull. That Mrs Gull. Everyone knew what Emily Gull had been, and how she'd led young girls astray.

When I listened to the grown-ups talking about her I could not understand for I did not fathom where young girls could be led astray to, and I did not know, though I was curious about it, what Mrs Gull had been. My knowledge of her was so different from that of the grown-ups who talked about her that sometimes I believed they were speaking of another person, a wicked Emily Gull whom I had never met or known. The woman I knew, when Joan came crying to her place, taking me with her clinging to her hand, would invite us into the kitchen while she cooked a meal or baked cakes; and she would never speak an angry word to us.

‘Take a pew.'

When we had taken our pew and Joan had stopped sniffling, Emily Gull (peeling the potatoes or dropping the ‘dry' ingredients into the bowl and mixing) would say,

‘Trouble at home?'

Joan would begin sniffling again.

‘It's Dad. He won't see reason.'

Emily Gull would smile and grunt, ‘My father never saw reason either.'

Seeing reason was a most admired gift which everyone claimed for himself and denied to others. Perhaps it was not so important to be able to see it, for when you'd seen it no one believed you and you had to keep telling people you'd seen it, and if there were no witnesses how could you prove it?

‘He said I'm too young to go to the dance, that he'll lock me in the bedroom on the night so's I can't go.'

Now Joan had been given a long purple lacy dress by someone whose name was — strangely — Violet. It was a dress for dancing in. I was four years younger than Joan and had no thought of dancing, but I assumed that if you had a dress for dancing you must surely use it. If you had feet you walked, didn't you? Or
danced? If you had hands you waved and hit and clapped? If you had a dance dress you danced. And if our father hadn't wanted Joan to go to a dance he should not have let Violet Jackson give her the dress. Violet Jackson had gone dancing in it. What did age matter? Joan was as grown-up as anyone could be and with a touch of powder and paint and mascara she could make herself look even more grown-up, so why the fuss?

‘My own father was a hard man,' Emily Gull said.

We stared at Emily, thinking how strange it was that she'd ever had a father — or a mother. She must have got rid of them early, we thought. Perhaps killed them.

‘Dad's awful. He's the worst father anyone had. And Mum's too soft. If you ask her something she says, Ask Dad, because she's scared to say. And when Dad says Yes she says Yes and when Dad says No she says No, so what's the use of having a mother at all?'

I did not quite agree with Joan that our mother was no use. It might have been so with Joan, for it seemed that as soon as Joan became grown-up (and no one but her and me admitted she was grown-up) Dad took charge of her, to ‘train her', as he said.

‘The girl must have training, discipline. She's running wild.'

I wished sometimes that I could get on the other side of things to see the view other people had, especially of Joan, ‘running wild'. She bit and pinched, of course, as one sister to another, and she got excited and enjoyed herself. How, I wondered, was that ‘wild'? I myself found our mother useful chiefly because she was
there
. If she wasn't in the dining room she was in the kitchen. If she wasn't in the kitchen she was in the wash-house. She was always somewhere. She was also useful because if I asked persistently enough for the best biscuits she almost threw them at me,

‘There's your whack! Now are you satisfied?'

Sitting in Emily Gull's kitchen, talking about the dance dress, Joan forgot her sniffling. This day Emily Gull was baking a cake, and ash from her cigarette kept dropping into the bowl.

She screwed up her face.

‘Why worry?'

Her face was brown and wrinkled. Her hair, dyed blue-black, was really grey, and to me it seemed as if she camped rather than lived in her house, and this was proof that she was a gypsy and, when she chose, could take her place on the heath with Petulengro and Jasper and others whose story had been in our School Journal and who had impressed me with their earnest conversation and the way they kept saying, ‘Life is sweet, brother.' I hadn't thought about whether life was sweet: I merely tasted and swallowed it; but I knew that for some reason Joan wasn't finding much sweetness in it; indeed, I could have said that for Joan at thirteen, life was sour.