‘I’ve been watching you carefully, and it looks so easy and so interesting, and I should like to be able to tell my friends that once I had driven a motor-car!’
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
When Kate was seven she came home from school one afternoon to find Mrs Nelson seated at the dining table with their mother. Kate and Maura stood trailing their schoolbags uncertainly in the doorway. Mrs Nelson had never to their knowledge set foot in their house before. The closest they came to contact with the Nelsons was when their pigeons landed, nodding and dipping, among the peas and had to be dispatched with a lump of coal, a clod, whatever came to hand. Or when Kate or Maura had to retrieve a ball strayed over the fence. They entered the Nelsons’ garden with awe: standard roses lined up along the Nelsons’ drive, like dancers en pointe in a froth of gypsophila. The lawns were green rugs bordered with pansies, and around the back the Nelsons’ vegetables grew lush and orderly. And undisturbed. The Nelsons’ pigeons knew better than to fossick in perfection. Every morning Mrs Nelson stood on a special concrete step behind the washing line by the fence, cup of tea in hand, and called, ‘Ooo-hooo!’ to Mrs Evans, who was a widow and lived on the other side. Mrs Evans emerged from her kitchen with her cup of tea and stood on a step on her side of the fence and they chatted amicably for fifteen minutes while the sheets bellied white on the line behind them. Mrs Nelson never called ‘Ooo-hooo!’ to Kate’s mother, who couldn’t be bothered wasting time gossiping anyway: she had her cup of tea by the range, with her book.
Mrs Nelson turned and frowned at them.
‘Shh,’ she said, though they hadn’t made any noise. ‘Your grandmother’s dying and your mother’s upset.’ She had brought over a chocolate cake with coconut sprinkles to mark the seriousness of the occasion.
Their mother went down to Millerhill that night on the bus. A week later she returned. She had nursed Grandma and when she died she had laid her out. After all, she was a nurse and trained to do such things.
In death, Grandma had shed her years and become young once more. Her skin had become smooth and white and all her freckles had reappeared, a brown sugar sprinkling over the nose, just like Kate’s. And while Kate’s mother was laying her out, Grandma had said, ‘Don’t cry, Tollie,’ though she was already half an hour dead. She had sighed, her roses knocking at the window, and said, ‘Don’t cry, Tollie.’
Their mother inherited a share of the farm when Grandma died. She sold her share to her sisters and with the money, she bought a car.
Their father had already bought a car: an Austin Standard with blue tartan seat-covers and two little black indicators that popped from its sides at intersections like stunted fingers. It was painted red. Red was not a colour that could be lost in a crowd. The reason he had insisted upon a car of that colour was that he had gone to a test match in Dunedin with his mate Trethewey, who drove a grey Morris Minor. When they emerged from Carisbrook, the Springboks down 10-6, the crowd ecstatic, vengeance for 1949 in the air, it had taken them four hours to find Trethewey’s car in a sea of grey cars.
‘Red,’ he said. ‘That’s the only colour for a car, I reckon. You can’t lose a red car.’ The Standard was red as a cherry, red as a phone box. He drove them in it that first weekend to view the Parade of Homes. Their mother sat in the front and Kate and Maura sat in the back, careful not to knock the upholstery with their shoes. They joined the procession of cars slowly inching along a cul de sac that had only a year before been a rubbish dump. Where seagulls had previously squabbled among scraps and heaps of garden clippings, there now stood a double row of houses with picture windows and white sheers and front doors with deer etched on frosted glass. Kate’s family would never own such a house themselves. They would live all their lives with damp rot and a sunless kitchen and a row of buckets the length of the hall runner whenever the rain came from the south. They would never be able to move to tapestry brick and picture windows, but at the Parade of Homes they could dream. They could imagine life in a kitchenette with a breakfast bar and a roof tiled in permanent materials, impervious to storm and tempest.
Their father drove with a fine careless air, one arm crooked in the open window, the good hand turning the wheel this way and that as they drove the length of the street, then back to examine the houses on the other side, and their mother said, ‘Ooh, I like that one, don’t you, Pat? Look at that one with the boomerang design. Now, I’d say that one would get all the sun.’
Then they drove to a milk bar out on the Main North Road, a new milk bar called the Carolina, with a black silhouette of a lady in a crinoline on the front wall, and they got ice creams: double dips bigger by far than the ice creams from Mr Budd’s dairy. The Carolina added peanuts at no extra charge and a serviette around the cone to catch the drips.
They sat in the Standard eating their ice creams while their father drove them down the main street and around the corner to park overlooking Friendly Bay. And though it was cold they were warm inside the car, not huddled on the beach like the people who did not have cars. They ate their ice creams then drove home singing ‘I’ve Got Sixpence’ all the way through to the part where the soldier had spent everything he had and had Sweet Fanny Adams for his wife, poor wife.
In the Standard they could go on holiday. Their mother stayed up all night baking biscuits and fruit loaves and bacon-and-egg pies for the journey, then Kate and her sister sat wedged in the back, crammed among bedding and suitcases and cake tins and cartons as the Standard chugged up the Waitaki Valley to the Power Board’s crib at Hakataramea. The river churned somewhere off to their right behind bands of swaying willows dipping their long hair in the water. On their left stood limestone outcrops marked with strange creatures sketched by people who had walked this way hundreds of years before Kate’s father drove by in the little red Standard. The family peered through the wire that kept the dream figures on their curve of limestone.
‘Taniwha,’ said Kate’s father. ‘Or maybe a giant eagle.’
And somewhere above their heads there was the rush of great wings as the bird fell from the eye of the sun, and somewhere at their bare necks was the brush of talons big enough to grip moa or child, to carry them to a high bluff to be torn into morsels for the gaping beaks of its fluffy nestlings.
They ran back to the car and off went the Standard, bumping across the black bridge at Kurow and zigzagging through the gap into the valley where heat created mirages of water on the road ahead and the air smelled of sheep and dry grass and a million briar roses, pink as burnt skin, pink as summer.
The car Kate’s mother’s bought was a 1948 Morris. She arrived home with it one night without warning. She simply pulled in behind the Standard in a car as round and brown as the little red hen’s newly baked loaf. The car was registered and insured. She had taken lessons and had her licence.
‘It’s my money,’ she said.
The next afternoon, Kate and Maura came home from school to find a note on the dining-room table.
Gone to pick apricots, said the note in their mother’s quick, jagged hand. Back around 7. Tea in oven.
There was a mutton casserole and some potatoes all peeled and soaking in salt water on the hob. The table was spread beneath a filmy throw.
Their father was furious. ‘What does she mean, running off like this?’ he said, mashing potato as if it would bruise. ‘Leaving you children on your own?’ At seven she returned. They heard the quick tread of her footsteps in the hall. The door opened. In her arms she held a wooden fruit box.
‘There’s two more in the car,’ she said.
‘What the hell are you playing at?’ said their father, and he would have hit her but she was serene, untouchable, her arms carrying apricots.
‘They’re half the price of the fruit at the auction rooms,’ she said. ‘I’ve got enough for bottling and for jam.’
Next afternoon the kitchen was sweet with the scent of stewed fruit. Rows of jars filled with fruit arranged like petals in syrup stood cooling on the bench, and on one shelf stood twenty jars of apricot jam, their father’s favourite. He could hardly object. He had been outflanked by apricots.
The following week she ventured further afield, up Central for raspberries. And after that she picked strawberries at Geraldine, nectarines near Kurow. The cupboards were crammed with jams and pickles and chutneys and preserves. On her way to pick and gather, she took to dropping in on relatives she had not seen in years: elderly aunts and distant cousins. She began to collect dates: a wedding here, a birth date there, and note them down. She began to bring back family along with the fruit. Peaches in their velvet skins, the brown saucers of mushrooms plucked from some roadside paddock, blackberries oozing inky juice through the cardboard box she had used as an impromptu container. And dates and anecdotes: the great-great uncle, Drysdale Stuart, who lost all his money and went to Canada where he made a fortune in timber. The second cousin who had married a man who had another wife across the mountains in Westport.
‘He drove the coach,’ she said, ‘and she had no idea until the day of his funeral that there was this other woman and four kiddies over on the Coast.’
She cleared a space on the kitchen table among the jars for a Remington portable from Harris’s second-hand shop and a shoebox full of cards and photographs. She was going to write it all down (omitting, of course, Drysdale’s bankruptcy and the second cousin’s perfidious husband. Some things were best forgotten.). She was going to preserve her family.
In time she took to staying away longer. Sometimes she visited her sisters in Millerhill. Sometimes she needed to gather information from relatives in Gore or Wanaka. Sometimes she simply left, driving off along Highway One, unpicking the white line between herself and home like a row of stitches. She took a thermos and a sleeping bag so she could pull over wherever she pleased and sleep curled up on the back seat beside a river or among the tossing heads of tussock in the Danseys. She returned home, calm and happy.
‘Cope all right?’ she said to Kate as she lifted a tray of Black Doris plums from the back seat of the Morris.
‘Sort of,’ said Kate.
‘Of course you did,’ said her mother. She patted her hand. ‘Our family always cope.’
‘Those men last night did bring very bad news, and Father will be away for some time. I am very worried about it, and I want you all to help me, and not to make things harder for me.’
‘As if we would!’ said Roberta, holding Mother’s hand against her face.
The Railway Children by E. Nesbit
Kate’s mother and Izzie talked at the kitchen bench as they stood buttering bread and cutting cold mutton for the shearers’ lunches, and talked as they knelt in the garden dragging out armfuls of chickweed and couch. They spoke quietly, laughing in a secret giggly fashion that stopped the minute one of the children approached.
‘What do you want?’ she said as Kate stood on one leg, then the other, shy of this stranger who materialised in her mother’s place whenever they came here to Millerhill. Their mother seemed younger here, once more the youngest sister. She became Tollie, the one who left home to go nursing, the adventurous one who married out of the district, the bold one who told jokes and spoke her mind. There was a streak of earth over her forehead and her hair had come loose under an unfamiliar sunhat with daisies on the brim.
‘I can’t find the others,’ said Kate.
Auntie Izzie and her mother looked about absently, as if it did not matter at all where the other cousins might be.
‘We were playing sardines,’ said Kate, ‘but no one found me, and now they’ve all gone.’
She had been so clever finding the cupboard in the laundry, tucked in behind all the boots and outdoor coats. She had heard the footsteps on the lino from her safe nest behind a raincoat where a mason wasp was busy whipping up a tube in a long fold of japara. Its tiny drill squealed beside her head as it smoothed the clay ready for the store of preserved flies for its babies to eat when they hatched. It was warm in the cupboard. It smelt of all the people who had ever worn these clothes, a thick odour of belonging. She felt contained by it. Maybe she dozed a little. It’s hard to sleep four to a bed; there is always a stray foot nuzzling at your neck. When she woke in the cupboard nest, the house was silent. She climbed out on stiff legs to find only the house cat curled on rug by the range, and out in the garden, her mother and aunt in their sunhats, kneeling among the weeds.
Her mother tugged at a dandelion.
‘Have you tried the caravan?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Kate.
‘The barn?’ ventured Auntie Izzie.
‘I’ve looked there too,’ said Kate.
‘They’ll be around somewhere,’ said her mother. It was a dismissal. Kate turned to go and as she did she heard her mother say, ‘So what did Ted say when … you know …’ They were talking Grown-up, the code of glances and silences that was not to be understood by children. As Kate trailed off across the yard, her aunt’s soft conspiratorial giggle emerged like the scent of daphne or winter sweet from the overgrown flowerbed.
Posy was very noticeable with her red hair, and she already danced rather well for somebody of her age, and people stared.
‘You are a show-off, Posy,’ Pauline said.
‘It’s not showing off, it’s because I thought of something and wanted to see if my feet would do it,’ Posy explained.
Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield
Her mother was determined to go to the opening of the Millerhill Hall. All winter the farmers had been pouring concrete and hammering away on a patch of ground opposite the church and the school. Their wives brought them scones for smoko. They paused briefly to sit on saw benches and piles of timber, teasing one another the way men did, poised for the joke that would put them ahead, like puppies play-fighting for the grip on the neck. By spring, just before lambing, the hall was ready.
‘Are you coming down for the opening, Pat?’ Kate’s mother said. Pat shook his head.
‘Not likely,’ he said.
‘I want to go,’ she said.
‘Suit yourself,’ he said. He turned a page.
Auntie Annie was in charge of the catering. The phone rang incessantly, long short long. Pause. Long short long.
‘So can you manage some sausage rolls?’ said Auntie Annie, and it was not a real question despite the rising inflection. ‘Four dozen? … Grand … Toodle-oo.’ She ticked sausage rolls on the list pinned to the wall.
Kate and Maura sat with the other cousins on the morning of the opening, folding crêpe-paper streamers at the kitchen table: red over green, yellow over pink, until their fingers were brightly stained. They were dressed in their best clothes mid-afternoon and then hung about, rustling with sticking-out petticoats and white socks while the adults rushed about taking forever.
‘There,’ said Auntie Izzie at last, twisting in a pair of crystal earrings. ‘Let’s have a look at us all.’ She lined them up and surveyed them with satisfaction. ‘My,’ she said, ‘aren’t we flash?’ And they were. Uncle Ted had on his Sunday suit, and his hair — which was thinning on top — was smoothed in individual strands across his skull as if it had been neatly darned. There was a rustling in the doorway behind them.
‘Wheet-whewww!’ whistled Uncle Ted and they all turned to look. Kate’s mother stood there, wearing a dress Kate had never seen before. It was toffee brown, but when she moved it changed colour. It had rainbows concealed in it, like the rainbows on a road after rain. Her waist was tightly cinched and the skirt swirled out. There were amber crystals at her neck and matching earrings and her hands were concealed beneath long white gloves.
‘Oh, you beautiful doll!’ sang Uncle Ted and he tried to dance her off around the kitchen, though she resisted, said, ‘Don’t be daft, Ted!’ but not meaning it, for her eyes were shining and her red lips were smiling. Auntie Izzie gave her a hug. ‘You’re a cracker,’ she said. And then, if everyone was ready, ‘Into the car, kiddies!’
Crammed into the back of the Vauxhall, Kate’s mother gave Kate’s hand a squeeze.
‘All right?’ she said, and Kate could only nod. Her mouth was stuffed full of excitement and strangeness.
At the hall cars were drawn up in the dark but light poured forth from the new door and all along the walls were the streamers they had made that morning and bunches of balloons, like Christmas. The band — the Rhythm Boys from Palmerston, drums accordion and two guitars — were standing on the little stage in glittery jackets and someone was sprinkling powder on the floor and behind the kitchen slide were dozens of sausage rolls and devils on horseback and sandwiches, plain and club. There were no drinks except orange cordial but out the back in the carpark the car boots were up and men were standing about in the dark having a few beers. Uncle George made a speech, then the Rhythm Boys did a drum roll and Mr Brown the school teacher, who was MC for the evening in a proper black suit and bow tie, grabbed the microphone, which whistled and clicked, and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, take your partners, please!’
Kate had kept close to her mother during the speech and the jokes about Bert Crawford who had left a couple of bags of cement out in the rain and if anyone wanted weights for the tractor, well, he knew where to find some! Laughter had hung about like a bright cloud above the forest of white furry stoles and evening bags and pressed trousers, but suddenly her mother was moving away to join the ring of women forming in the middle of the slippery floor. A circle of men surrounded them and the Rhythm Boys were setting off, tee dum tee dum, and everyone was moving. The men took the women in their arms, two steps to the right, two to the left, then the women spun under the men’s arms and they all knew how to do it. Her mother knew how to do it. She was laughing up at a man as she passed from him to the next man. And when it was over she walked over to their side of the hall with a man who looked a bit like Mr McGregor but all polished and smiling and not like the dour man who kicked his dogs and swore at them, his anger bouncing from the hillsides and amplified the length of the valley. He was saying thank you to their mother and almost bowing and as soon as he had turned away the MC was announcing a Gypsy Tap and another man had come up.
‘Tollie Stuart, isn’t it?’ he said.
And Kate’s mother was smiling.
‘Alex! I didn’t expect to see you here!’ And off they went. Heel toe and step step step.
‘Come on!’ said Rosemary, grabbing both Kate’s hands. ‘Come and dance!’ She hopped and Kate had no option but to hop too, and Maura joined in, and before the Gypsy Tap was over all the children had joined hands and were hopping about and skidding over on the polished floor in their best clothes and no one was saying they shouldn’t.
The dancing in the middle became more crowded and as the men drifted in and out from the carpark, the laughter grew. Kate’s mother danced, light on her feet, her back straight, her arm at just the perfect angle, then Mr McGregor took her into a snappy foxtrot and everyone stood back and watched as they swooped into all the corners, and turned and executed deft little twinkling steps from one side of the hall to the other. The brown taffeta dress swirled about her slim legs and caught all the colours and they were the best dancers by far. When they’d finished everyone clapped. Then Graham got down some of the balloons and the children danced balloon dances, and when the balloons popped it didn’t matter because there were so many more, pink and yellow clusters of them, ripe for plucking.
Then Auntie Annie slammed up the kitchen slide and they ate sausage rolls and sponge cake and devils on horseback all on the same plate until they could eat no more and the dancing began again. Kate was sleepy now so she went into the cloakroom and slept on a pile of coats, and when she woke it was morning and she was back in bed at Auntie Izzie’s.
There was the sound of quiet talk in the kitchen next door, so she slid out without disturbing the others and found Izzie and her mother in their dressing gowns sitting either side of the fireplace having a cup of tea.
‘So how did you like your first dance, Kate?’ said Auntie Izzie.
‘’Sall right,’ said Kate, but she knew as she said it, snuggled against her mother’s warm side, that it was not enough. Her mother was herself again this morning, hair tangled, no make-up, but now Kate could see the dancer in her. She could hear the quick light step as she rushed back from the shop, late with the tea. She could see the straight back and the elegant lift of the head. She knew the dancer was there.