Ngawhatu

Ngawhatu. I tried the on-line Maori-English dictionary but I can’t find a definite meaning. So, I broke the word into two. Nga and whatu. Nga is A suffix used to make verbs into nouns sometimes called derived nouns and whatu delivered this… eye, pupil of the eye, stone, hailstone, anchor, kernel (of fruit).

Recently we were in Stoke, staying with friends who have moved from Auckland to retire. They didn’t grow up in the area, like we did. We went for a walk and ended up in a new sub-division, with nicely built, new homes. You know the sort. Large windows, stylish grey cladding and matching roofs, everything tone on tone. We commented how damp the valley was, how little sun the homes would catch, and speculated who had owned the land before.

There was an old sealed road behind a closed fence going up the hill, proof we knew, that the land had been farmed for years, possibly still is. But it wasn’t that road that we followed. I knew exactly which road I wanted to go up. There was another padlocked gate and a sign advising that trespassers would be prosecuted. I’m the obedient sort, who believes signs have a purpose. There were four of us, and two who could see that there was a gap between the padlocked fence we could slip through. We dithered, argued a little, me on the side of caution. And yet, it was me who had led us to this gate. I imagined men with guns (the writer in me) and one of us shot as we trespassed. Or perhaps a controlled explosion and the four of us collateral damage. And then a utility came down the closed road and we asked the driver of the ute, what was going on ‘up there’. He said it was a now a sub division development site, but we were welcome to walk up the road. He cautioned us to stay clear of the old buildings. He had keys to the locked gate, and we slipped through with his blessing.

I knew this road from my childhood. It’s the road up to the loony bin. In my memory it is tranquil, tree-lined, peaceful, and today is no different, except the few buildings left, are empty derelict and eloquent in their disrepair. I remember Kinross, the villa where my Dad would stay when he volunteered to come up for a while and have shock treatment. Kinross was benign, it was where the old soldiers with ‘nerve problems’ went for a while. Nothing serious, just a lapse. Three of my family have been here – my Dad, my brother and an Uncle. Two of them volunteered for ECT, believing it helped their depression. Further up the hill, sinister scarier, were Lanark and Stirling. Stirling the worst. It was the ‘lock-up’, where the mentally disturbed, the dangerous, the weirdo’s were housed. Stories abounded of patients on tables threatening staff. We were grateful they were further up the hill. The patients at Kinross were like your next-door-neighbours, or in my case, your family.

I can’t find Kinross. Maybe it’s been demolished. There are flattened areas with cracked overgrown paths, but tellingly, lamp posts still that must have once lit the way. We speculate. I try to recall exactly. I know Kinross went off to the left. We marvel at the range of ornamental trees grown way beyond their ornamental purpose. How beautifully planted this whole area has been, still is, but not entirely any more… more rambling and where buildings have been torn down, there’s stumpy grass and neglect. In two of the still standing two-storey buildings, the windows are cracked or boarded up and we peer inside but there’s nothing to see. All the names of the villas are gone, so I lose my bearings.

And then I found a map on the internet, with all the names of all the villas, to the left were the male villas and to the right the women’s villas. I’ve written a sestina and shared it with a fellow poet who suggested I try a freer form. I’ll keep you posted. The names themselves are quite poetic. Lanark, Stirling, Clovelly and Kinross. All of them Scottish. And then oddly, the women’s villas to the right had Maori names, Totara, Manuka, Hinau, Kowhai and Rata.

When I was a kid, you only said Ngawhatu as an insult. It meant the ‘loony bin and we all knew it. Now I’m older, and I hear what a beautiful word it actually is, the sound of it, whether it be, stone, anchor or kernel… of the stone the dictionary says a stone invested by the tohunga with powers for rendering a rāhui effective. Naturally, I then had to go further and find the meaning for rāhui – the dictionary tells me flock, herd, mob, swarm, cluster.

I can still feel the Sunday sunshine as my Aunt’s Morris Minor drove us up the hill, higher, above the damp valley where the new houses are being built, up, up, to the houses where the mob, swarm, cluster, flock or herd of old soldiers, the mentally deficient, the angry, the misunderstood, the deviants the sectioned, the alcoholics, post natal depressed, all lived for a time, back when ECT and basket-making were de rigueur therapy. And oddly, I found that Lithium (once used to medicate bi-polar and depression), has its origin in the Greek word λίθος lithos, “stone”.

Tooth and Nail

I’ve been working on a local anthology and part of the pleasure has been the reading that has to be done to source our material. It was my good fortune to be directed by the Eastbourne Historical Society to a New Zealand novel ‘Tooth and Nail’ first published by A.H. and A. W. Reed, in 1974. At first I simply began skimming the book to find the piece I’d been alerted to, which is a very small piece about the author working as a cook-general in Lowry Bay. It was brief and not that eventful, but while skimming to find this extract, I became absorbed in Mary Findlay’s story.

Yes, it is an autobiography ‘except for some small changes made to disguise identities or to connect incidents speedily, I have invented nothing. M.F.’

I had never heard of her book or of Mary Findlay but now I want to shout to every young woman in New Zealand – read this! It is an extraordinary tale of a daughter of the depression. Her mother has died, and her father is an abusive alcoholic. The period the story covers is really quite a small part of her life, but one of the most formative times in a young girl’s life, her early and ongoing teenage years. Her courage, tenacity and lack of self-pity are quite remarkable. The challenges she overcomes, the deprivation, the knock-backs (there are so many) and the opportunities that she seizes by the throat (indeed, tooth and nail), are riveting to read about and also a fascinating insight to New Zealand social history.

Mary Findlay is blessed with real intelligence and the ability to see through the rigid conservatism of the times, allowing her to challenge it constantly albeit to her own detriment. The escapades, the adventure, the sheer grind of her life are both astonishing and uplifting. She manages to have enormous insight into her own character and doesn’t paint herself as other than how it really is, with all her flaws given equal space alongside her extraordinary courage.

Unpopular at school because she is grubby and wears patched bloomers, Mary Findlay gets her revenge on her fellow students in a school assignment that requires the class to write portraits of other students. No-one, (especially the teacher who asks Mary to read hers aloud), expected such devastating accuracy and honesty in these portraits. Even knowing that she shouldn’t write them, Mary is compelled to do so, and it is this particular aspect of her character that carries the story forward, her determination and often bloody-mindedness, which I admired and envied.

The writing is sometimes uneven but the subject matter is so compelling that it hardly matters and too, at times, there are hints of Robin Hyde and moments of extraordinary lucidity and powerful observations of both her own and the nature of other people.

I’ve decided that this should be a Kiwi Classic (revival) like ‘Sydney Upside Down Bridge’ by David Ballantyne (although I’ve not yet read this novel) – but I am sure that every high school in New Zealand ought to have this story as part of their curriculum. It bears witness to a time in history when jobs were scarce, times were tough and there were no safety nets, and social conventions were very much stacked against a girl from the wrong side of the tracks.

Mary Findlay did not live to see her book published but in the epilogue she says this:
“As the world measures achievement my children are ordinary, but I, viewing them with a certain detachment, can say they are unusual. One son is a radical, the other a wanderer; one daughter a women’s-libber, the other an opter-out.” You have to remember, this is the early 1970s. I was absolutely gripped by the autobiography and deeply touched by the epilogue which also says this:
“I cannot say that after marriage I lived “happily ever after”. Both of us bore the scars of our deprivations. How well can the unloved love? Suffice it that we stayed together, bound more and more closely by emotional need and economic necessity. Gradually there came to us a sense of belonging which grew into a deep and lasting love.”

I was so happy for the author when I read this – glad to know that she found lasting love, because after all she had been through, her courage and tenacity, she sure deserved that.

Perhaps many of you have already read this autobiography and if so, do drop by to tell me – but if you haven’t, I highly recommend that you do. It’s one of those books, I couldn’t put down and to be honest, lately, that doesn’t happen so very often. I worked in the public service in the late sixties and early seventies, and Mary Findlay’s experiences in the public service a couple of decades earlier, reminded me of the hierarchy, the sometimes futility of the work undertaken and the part that as girls, we had to ‘play’ within the conventions.

There is an acknowledgement to, of one of our important pioneering publishers… “The Publishers are indebted to Christine Cole Catley who, after the death of Mary Findlay, prepared the manuscript for publication.”

It set me thinking about how fortunate we have been to have courageous small publishing houses such as Cape Catley to ensure that ‘our’ stories are told. And makes me proud to be working on an anthology of Eastbourne writing to be published by Makaro Press a new publishing venture by Mary McCallum.

FLASHMOB 2013

I worry we’ll be lost in the forest of crying pines.  I want to find the sea, to reach the beach. You say trust me, but I don’t, we argue, sand in my throat. I want to claim the dunes, the bathing shed, the outside shower.  I know exactly where Aunty parked her car under this tree, over here where uncle swam nude at night alone, where the men from Taiwan caught the crabs, where we built a fire with your father, cooked snarlers ,drank wine, where my Dad knelt in trousers to drink tea…how he hated sand and how silly I looked in my cut away togs with my waxed bruised thighs.

      We’re going forward. I can no longer claim to have lain on that bank in my bikini and they’ve moved the herons too so we can cycle through to Richmond close to the road where we waited by the mouth to the sea on school mornings with our net and a milk bottle for the whitebait.  Where’s the scout hall, the footbridge, the rubbish dump, the catch in the back of my throat freshly killed meat smell?

   All my secret roads are gone and our river’s changed course.