As the Little House settled down on her new foundations, she smiled happily. Once again she could watch the sun and moon and stars. Once again she could watch Spring and Summer and Fall and Winter come and go.
The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton
Dad’s book was propped against the teapot. Maura sat on his right with her book open against the sugar basin and Kate, crammed on his left between the sideboard and the dining table, had her book balanced against the cruet set. Her mother sat out in the kitchen with her books and pamphlets spread among the pots on the Formica table. From time to time she called, ‘Want any more?’ and if they answered yes, preoccupied, turning a page, there would be a rustling of paper before she appeared bearing a saucepan and the big spoon. The fire burned in the grate; the radio played ‘Popular Parade’: ‘How Much is that Doggie in the Window?’ (wuff wuff)
They sat peaceably reading beneath the King’s letter.
‘Five pound,’ their father had told them. ‘That’s what came with that letter. Five pound for a widow with six children.’ And the canary chirrup of emphysema already in her lungs.
That was typical, their father said. The King was British and upper class: how could he possibly know what was decent under the circumstances? Grandma Kennedy had put the five pound toward a passage to New Zealand, where her children would have a better chance. Spent the remainder of her short life scrubbing the patterns off Protestant lino until her children were old enough to cope on their own. By then her lungs were awash. She had died when Kate’s dad was fourteen, and once a month they went to put flowers in the jam jar on her grave: daffodils, marguerites, chrysanthemums, according to the season. Kate’s father tidied the grave as if he were picking lint from a woollen skirt. Then he stood for a moment and his hand flickered across his shirt in the sign of the cross.
‘So if the King was so stupid, why do we have his letter on the wall?’ said Kate.
Her father turned a page. He looked up briefly.
‘So we remember,’ he said. He meant that they should remember their grandfather, whose picture lay in the applebox in the spare room. He was a stubby man in the uniform of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. He rested one hand on the shoulder of their grandmother, who was delicate and had cheeks of a hectic rose-pink. She sat on a velvet throne in a hothouse dripping with ferns. That was Kate’s sole image of Dundee, Scotland, where her father and his brothers and sisters had been born. When he was eight they had sailed away down the Irish Sea. His mother had taken them all to the railing to show them the coast of Ireland.
‘What was Ireland like?’ Kate asked.
Her father licked a cigarette paper.
‘Green,’ he said.
Naturally. He spat a few shreds of tobacco and felt in his shirt pocket for his matches.
He had seen the shining line of the horizon where Kelly had marched with his long curling hair, and people thought it was sweet to die for the faith of their fathers — they didn’t mind a bit — and a pale moon rose above an endless succession of crystal fountains in vale after green vale.
They were to remember Ireland and their grandfather as they sat to eat their saveloys and upside-down pineapple puddings; they were to remember the five pound posted to a poor grieving widow by a regent too rich, too upper class, too British to care.
Their grandparents’ picture could with due justice and elegance have replaced the King’s letter, but their mother did not like to have dead relatives hanging about the walls. Her own were lined up where they belonged, in black and white on the walls of the Pioneer Gallery in Dunedin: men and women who had sailed from Scotland and then, hands clenched in crocheted mittens, lips pursed over dubious teeth, appeared to be regretting the decision. Or they lived in the applebox too, with their boater hats or Oxford bags or bonneted babies. All properly labelled with names that became familiar with repetition. When Kate and Maura were sick or when it was too wet to play outside, they would get out the applebox and tip its contents onto the floor.
‘Who’s that?’ they would ask, and their mother would lean down, take the photo in her hand and hold it to the light at the window.
‘Ah,’ she would say. ‘That’s my cousin, Gwen Scott, at Halfway Bush. All the Scotts were tall, well over six feet. She was a beautiful dancer but she found it hard to get partners on account of her height. Then she met Maurice and he was six foot six. He had to stoop to get through doors. He couldn’t dance, but it was a perfect match …’
‘And this?’ they’d say, though they knew already.
‘That’s my Great Uncle William,’ she said. He had been a gentleman. He had been possessed of such perfect manners that he had got on the boat to go to Sydney and been too refined to go to the toilet. ‘They had to … you know …’ Her voice lowered with the indelicacy of it all … ‘Go … over the side of the boat.’ But not Great Uncle William. He had held on all the way to Australia and expired on the quayside on arrival. Kate and her sister put Great Uncle William reverently back in the box — a high-browed man with full beard and crinkly hair like Kate’s own: Falconer hair, red and crimped into lambswool — imagining his sad demise. The crowd standing by the boat, the man lying on the wharf, the pop as he exploded from all that pent-up pee.
They left the sad photo to last: the one of their mother’s younger brother seated astride an Indian motorbike with the little dog on his lap. Their mother held this photo to the light and stroked the surface free of dust.
‘That’s Tom,’ she said. ‘That’s Tom and …’ She would stop there always and peer more closely. ‘… Tug … or maybe it’s Skipper …’ Her voice trailed away. ‘Such a waste,’ she said. Kate and Maura would wait for the story that always followed, about the boy who was so clever, who knew more than the teacher at school, who had pointed out mistakes in the sums on the blackboard, who could play the violin not as others played — with music to read on a spindly stand — but ‘by ear’, which was much better. He could go to the pictures and come home and play all the tunes ‘by ear’. He had a beautiful German violin that had cost a fortune. Their grandmother had bought it for him with all her teaching money, all the shillings amassed on countless afternoons spent listening to the children of the district stumble up and down C major at the piano in the front room. Tom had taken it out of the wrapping — ‘green felt wrapping’ their mother always said, for she liked to get the details accurate — and he had played it for Grandma right there in the kitchen: difficult things: Handel and whatdoyoucallhim? Bach. Yes. Bach. With lots of double-stopping. He had played ‘The Londonderry Air’.
Kate’s mother always stops there. She is hearing the music in her head. She is seeing the young man playing difficult things under a drying rack hoisted up to the ceiling with its load of work shirts and socks. ‘The Londonderry Air’ still makes her cry when she hears it on the radio.
‘Then what happened?’ says Kate, for the story did not stop with the German violin.
Her mother sighs. Tom got Matric and went off to Dunedin to study to be a lawyer. He shared a room in Cumberland Street with another young law student, Henry Parata, from down Wyndham way.
‘He was such a nice chap,’ says Kate’s mother.
There is a photo of Henry in the box too, standing beside Tom, one arm draped companionably across his shoulders in front of the clocktower on the banks of the Leith.
‘Tom and he were such great chums.’
They played music together — Tom on violin, Henry on piano — four evenings a week and Sunday afternoons at the Savoy.
Their mother stops again. She turns the photo over to read the names written on the back. Tom and Henry P. Dunedin 1928. She is hearing Czardas, Raff’s ‘Cavatine’, airs and tangos played from the carved Tudor corner of a carved Tudor room to tiered cakestands of butterfly cakes, to diners chatting over silver and starched linen.
‘Parata and Stuart!’ Henry had yelled in Tom’s ear as they roared home late one night along Cumberland Street on the Indian. ‘Barristers and Solicitors!’
‘And then?’ says Maura. Because now the sad part is coming.
Then Henry got ill. They thought it was just a chill. The room was cheap and damp. Henry began to cough. Tom, too, caught a fever.
‘They’d overdone it, you see,’ says their mother. ‘They’d got run down with all the swotting and every night out working. They’d let their resistance get low and there was a lot of TB around in those days.’
Henry died within the year. Tom went to the sanatorium up at Waipiata and survived. Then one afternoon out at Millerhill when he was chopping kindling, his father had said something to him.
‘What did he say?’ Kate asks. But their mother will not tell them. Something about Henry, something that made Tom pick up the hatchet and threaten his father.
‘He wasn’t right, you see,’ says their mother. ‘He wasn’t right in the head.’
The TB germs had swum up into his brain and destroyed that part that makes people love their fathers no matter what they do or say, and he was taken away to Cherry Farm, where the doctors took away that part of the brain that makes people take up the kindling hatchet and hate their fathers.
And now, ‘What a waste,’ their mother says, holding her brother between her hands so that the light will fall full upon him. ‘What a terrible waste.’
She means the saggy brown cardigan. She means the woollen slippers. She means the shining dayroom, the white villa. She means Cherry Farm.
It is a name like a place in a book.
Cherry Farm.
It should have thatched cottages, trees in white blossom, a barnyard of fluffy chicks. It is instead a treeless settlement of white boxes that grew on the banks of the Waikouaiti River between one summer holiday and the next, as if overnight, the way white things seemed to, with their white frills and white poisonous gills. They passed Cherry Farm on their way to their grandma’s house at Millerhill. They looked down as they crossed the bridge to see how the water beneath had turned rusty red.
‘To think we used to swim here!’ their mother always said. The mud stank. They held their noses until they had driven safely past. Sometimes, though, they could not pass because their uncle lived there and must be taken for a drive.
‘Hello, Tollie,’ he would say, shuffling across the lino in the shiny room where men rocked to and fro in vinyl chairs or made sudden loud cries and the room smelled of damp and cabbage and dreadful waste.
‘Hello, Tom,’ said their mother, and she put her arms around him. The man who rode the Indian bike at breakneck speed navigating all the twists and turns of the Kilmog, until the TB ambushed him and wriggled into his brain so that it rotted like a bruised apple. It went brown and soft, and he became mad.
Photos and their stories belonged in boxes hidden away in the spare room. There was too much story for each photo to bear everyday contemplation. When Kate and her sister and father sat at their tea beneath the King’s letter and the Columban calendar, they remembered, but not too much. Not a single saint among the many listed on the calendar was related to them.
They read their books instead, piling meat and potato and peas onto their forks with absent-minded dexterity. ‘Pass the butter,’ was all the conversation required. Chewing steadily, they read their way through the books they brought home each week from the Library.
Once upon a time there was a little girl.
She had a Father, and a Mother, and a Grandpa, and a Grandma, and an Uncle, and an Aunty; and they all lived together in a nice white cottage with a thatched roof.
Milly-Molly-Mandy Stories by Joyce Lankester Brisley
On Friday nights — good Friday nights when their father was safely himself — they walked into town. Their mother took the pushchair for the return trip up the hill. It was steep and Maura’s legs got tired. Kate, too, sometimes hitched a ride, sitting with her feet dangling over the front, with Maura’s knees pressed against her spine and bags of shopping wedged about them both — shoes in awkward shoeboxes, plants in punnets for the garden, groceries from the big shop that proved week after week that Mr Budd at their dairy charged more than he should for the convenience, not to mention being prone to slip mouldy fruit in with the good oranges and keeping a blunt thumb on the scales when he was weighing out the mild or tasty.
Even when they were too old to ride in the pushchair their mother took it for the shopping while Kate and Maura walked hand in hand with their father, taking exact turns corner to corner with the Bad Hand and the Good Hand. The Good Hand had all its fingers. The Bad Hand was twisted and lacked fingers because of The War, and neither of them liked the feel of it, the thumb and pointer finger like a hen’s claw. All the way to town and all the way back, dawdling up the hill in the dark, they maintained a strict rotation, running behind their father’s back to swap. Their shadows broke from pools of light beneath each street-lamp, stretching and mingling and washing back like sand caught on a receding wave.
The week after Kate recognised the doughnuts, her father had taken her to the Library. The Library was a massive edifice, an athenaeum, a temple, one of several on the main street with columns at the front carved with leaves, as if the stone went up and up until it could bear to be simple stone no longer and must sprout. Around the back, where a few cars parked among puddles in a rough and ready fashion, the carving stopped and the temples dwindled to unadorned blocks and corrugated iron, just as houses had brass doorknobs and verandah lace pinned on their fronts, but were wash-houses and coal sheds behind. The doors to the Library were of glass and heavy polished timber and when they swung to it was with a flump flump, a sound like velvet. Inside, people spoke in hushed voices as if they were in church, and women stood at a high counter, doing something serious. There was the smell of paper and the rustle of pages turning over on a long table where people were reading newspapers. Kate kept tight hold of the Good Hand.
‘Now,’ said her father, ‘you must always take two books from here …’ and he showed her some shelves where all the books had white numbers on their spines and were real, ‘… and two from here.’ Those books had no numbers and were not real. They were just stories.
Kate dutifully picked two books from each section and carried them home, holding them close to her chest the whole way. She read The Little House before bed. It was about a house that might not have been real, but that looked like her own home, with windows either side of a front door. It stood happily among the blossoming apple trees until the city marched over the hill and surrounded it with traffic and high buildings. The little house became sad and neglected until one day a truck came and it was carried once more to the country to stand on a hill among apple blossom.
The little house was an image of perfection: a place lived in over many years, a house with a story. And its trees with their pink and white blossom against the green of fresh leaf, the crimson fruit, the golden fall, the frosted branches of winter, were an ideal of beauty.
The second book was about a little girl who lived in a nice white cottage with a thatched roof. The little girl ran errands and picked blackberries. Her life was simple and orderly. There was a map at the front of the book. You could walk your fingers down the road to the school or the village shop. It showed where everything belonged.
The third book had no story but lots of pictures. There were children playing dozens of different games, a woman walking on flowery grass among dancers whose dresses were so thin you could see their bottoms through the material, a room with blue walls and yellow chairs … Kate examined each picture minutely, touching the children, the flowers, the yellow chair so that years later, when she came upon them unexpectedly in some museum or gallery, grown huge perhaps, occupying metres of red velvet wall-space or framed in gilt, she felt the same pleasure at finding them there among anonymous hordes of goddesses and courtesans and kings as she felt meeting a friend from Dunedin, by accident, in the middle of Piccadilly.
The fourth book was about animals. There was a sloth hanging upside down in a jungle tree. It moved so slowly that plants took root in its fur. There was a frog that carried its babies in its mouth and a giant anteater with a slender snout and a snake that could swallow whole cows; there was a photograph where you could see the shape of the cow in the distended tube of the snake’s body, like a toy crammed into a a Christmas stocking. The sloth, the frog, the snake were real, but every bit as mysterious as a bear that turned into a prince.
Each Friday night now she went to the Library for two of what was real and two of what was not. Down Wharf Street, past the fire station, crunching across the white gravel of the Garden of Remembrance, over the railway line where sometimes they had to wait while the bells rang for the people who sailed above them in their lighted carriages through the early evening, going somewhere. Past the white bank temples and the Post Office with its frilly tower and machines that spat stamps — pttt — when you put in a penny. Past the war memorial where the soldiers stood before ranks of elm trees drawn up two by two, all the way along the main street to the second war memorial, where a big black lion kept order at his end. Past the auction rooms where the shutters were down but around the louvres seeped the damp scent of King Edwards, leeks and cabbages. Past the Power Board where their father worked, its windows glittery with new heaters and a skinny tasselled bevy of standard lamps. Across the road to the Library.
The flump flump of the double doors, the muffled voices.
Outside, the Friday-night cars cruise the length of the main street where young men try a thoughtful swish swish at the drum kits in Beggs Music Store and the man at the bookshop who has half an arm furls a Weekly News, a Woman’s Weekly and a Chatterbox expertly into a tube, then holds it steady with the stump while whipping a rubberband around the lot with his other, whole hand. It is one of the physical wonders, like the woman at the bakery who has a lump in her neck that looks like something swallowed incompletely — a whole Sally Lunn perhaps, or an entire sponge roll, like the cow in the snake — but is actually there because she didn’t eat her nice fish in white sauce when she was a little girl. In the shoe shop, people walk about, seeing if their toes reach the end. They peer through the machine at their bones wriggling in the dark like flatfish spotted on a shallow night-time estuary. Outside Woolworths the pipe band is drawn up in a circle, white duck feet flapping, cheeks puffed with the glorious caterwaul of ‘Scotland the Brave’ and ‘Road to the Isles’ and a block south outside McKenzie’s the Salvation Army is drawn up in competition, having marched down from the citadel playing hymns no longer slow and Sunday serious but recast with a cocky military swagger into brassy 4/4 formation. The bodgies, leather-clad, straddle their motorbikes outside the Excella or gather with girls backcombed and beehived, around the jukebox. Starlings chatter at roost in the darkening trees and the people stroll up and down from the banks in the south to the northernmost point where the shops dwindle to bike repairs and a petrol station. G’day, George. How’s it going, Gwen? Hear you’ve been crook. Izzat right? Well, hooray, then. Tataa. Or they retire to the front seats of grey Morris Oxfords and beige Vauxhalls and Ford trucks powdered with the white limestone dust of country roads to sit side by side, sucking peppermints as if they occupy the front row of the balcony and it is Saturday night and they are here to watch the show.
There is the rustling of pages from the newspaper table. The rubber stamp leaves blurred blue numbers on the endpaper. The people choose what is real and what is just a story. Then they carry these things home, free as mushrooms from an autumn hillside, free as blackberries among the broom and wild roses on the banks of a swirling milky river, free as Christmas plums on a wild tree.