About grandparents
1
Every day the sea
grandmother
the last fringe of light lies
beneath a banner of storm
clouds the burden of hills
presses against air from out
of my window I touch the leaves of kowhai we planted
a whole quarter of a century
ago such an accumulation
of years how we guarded those saplings from hurricanes
nothing much changes
lights aeroplanes a tangle of cable wire
but the outlines of the place
we’ve both called home
are still here
I know you through
these hills, this horizon, tonight’s
wild dark, our summer
days
because you are my grandmother
Grandparents, they are the history that lies beneath our skins.
For much of my life I chose not to pursue my ancestry. And yet it was there, lying at my feet and all around me. All the time. I live on a hill that overlooks land occupied by my forebears two hundred years ago.
On 31 January each year, two distant cousins and I set off for the Seashore Cabaret on the foreshore of Petone, a satellite district of Wellington. The café, its dancing glory days now in the past, is up a steep flight of steps and crowded with what you might call a cross-section of people, some eating large meals: women in head scarves, Māori and Pacific Island families, young mothers with wriggling shouty children. The walls are crowded with retro posters and there is an advertisement for tarot readings on Sunday afternoons at five.
My cousins, the Sutherlands, and I are all of Celtic descent, but we are not here to look for mystical meanings, or the power of the Celtic Cross, although that’s not to say we’re uninterested in the past. We have a number of things in common. Melody and Bess are sisters; one was previously a trademark executive, one a librarian. When I was very young, I was a librarian too. I feel it’s a sign that we’re intrinsically connected by books and ideas. Every time we meet, I find myself searching their faces for clues to my own identity. Do I look like them? Melody has auburn hair, Bess has curls, mine was once heavy and dark. It’s the eyes, we say, it’s something about them that’s distinctive, that sets us apart, though in my heart of hearts I know that’s not exactly true. If I resemble any of the women who went before me, it is most likely my Irish grandmother, whom I never knew. Never mind, there is a sense of kinship. And, given how few close relatives I have, Melody and Bess have designated me their honorary second cousin and I like so much that they have. It’s more like fourth or fifth; it’s always hard to stitch up the generations. What we recognise is our forebears in common, Alexander and Elizabeth Sutherland, who arrived on the appointed date of our meetings, in 1840. We gather to spend time together and to remember, to look at the sea, at the heads that the Oriental sailed through before reaching safe harbour, to consider the beach below us where the emigrants landed; to marvel that our great-great-grandmother had given birth not long before – it is said while the ship was hove-to at the Wellington Heads, although the dates are a little cloudy. We laugh over the fact that if Elizabeth could have made it to land, the little girl, whose name was Kathrean, would have qualified for a bounty as the first European baby to be born in our town.
In the north, six days after the Oriental made landfall, the Treaty of Waitangi was signed.
On my mother’s side, this is my whakapapa. We remind each other, Melody, Bess and I, that our ancestors are not called pioneers today but settler colonists, the takers of the land; it seems to ill behove that we celebrate their heroism. Yet we can only salute the fortitude, the sheer will to live, that Elizabeth, our great-great-grandmother, exemplified on that journey. Without her, we would not be here.
Those forebears were settlers in the land-hungry migration organised by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, an Englishman with a shady past and a penchant for kidnapping young heiresses, who set up the New Zealand Company to buy land from Māori for much too little and sell it at a profit. My Sutherland great-great-grandparents came on one of his five ships. We may acknowledge this troubled past to each other, but we have become part of this land and there is no returning, any more than there was for that birthing woman on the Oriental. We have no other place to call home; we are prisoners to our history but also its celebrants.
I think of Elizabeth on the pitching sea, tended in childbirth by women who had come from the same village of Badbea (pronounced bad-bay), in the Highlands of Scotland, and how she somehow survived her ordeal.
We don’t know much about her at that stage of her life, although there is a legend with the power of myth that I come back to over and again, and if I have told it before, it is because it never leaves me. It is a metaphor for what mothers do when their children are at risk, or they are likely to be separated from them.
That village of Badbea was occupied by tenant farmers. Most of us who are descendants of this line know the story of the Clearances, the way the landed gentry turfed tenant farmers off the land, burning the roofs of their crofts so that they could not live in their houses, leaving families homeless and poverty stricken. They were sent to small farms on the coast where farming was unsustainable, expected to take up fishing or the collection of kelp from the seas. The weather in Badbea is said to be so harsh that, as the people worked, they had to tether their livestock and their children to rocks or posts to prevent them being blown over the cliffs. My great-great-grandfather, Alexander Sutherland, raised by the local preacher (so there is that in my line too), was an opponent of the Clearances and one of the first in the village to depart for New Zealand, joining the mass migrations to the ‘colonies’ that was taking place all over the Highlands.
Elizabeth’s family didn’t want them to leave, and she didn’t want to go either. She already had a little girl, Christy, and she was recently pregnant. With great reluctance, Elizabeth travelled to the eastern coastal village of Brora, where a ship was waiting to take the travellers to London to join the migration. They had with them an assortment of possessions that included a Bible, some willow pattern jugs and a mahogany table. But when it came time to board the ship, Elizabeth held back, holding Christy in her arms. I can hear the keening rising in the air, the laments and the farewells; I can see her refusal, see her mother’s anguish, yearning for her daughter and grandchild to stay.
At that moment, her husband came down the gangplank, snatched Christy from her mother’s arms and left Elizabeth standing there. So that was her choice, to follow her child, her first born, or give her up forever. She followed.
I would have done this too. I would follow my children to the ends of the earth. But it doesn’t always work like that, as it did not for the mother of Elizabeth, and that is the lesson you learn, I suppose, that there is only so far you can go with your children. And then, when there are grandchildren, they might be anywhere in the world, scattered in foreign countries. But they are always kin, they are part of who we are.
Later, after this migration, my great-grandmother, Margaret, was born, here in this town.
We point to the heads, Melody and Bess and I, and wonder aloud how Elizabeth did it. The sea is sometimes sunlit, but the last day we went it was sullen, clouds hovering overhead. The records do not say what the weather was like by the time the ship reached the shore in 1840, but we believe it rained for days afterwards. There is a touching story about a young wife who sat on an upturned boat, soon afterwards, and remarked quietly that it was ‘a long journey to make just to see some rain’. We don’t know the exact spot on the sandy beach beneath the Cabaret where the new settlers first set foot but we understand they made their way ashore along a rough, newly erected jetty. They would live in tents for some time to come. What we do know is that we are sitting here in the Cabaret, exploring the ties of blood, because our great-great-grandmother made it that day.
Survival. There are two sides to most stories. One displacement sets the scene for another. I know that my great-great-grandmother flourished in this country. A cow had been carried on the Oriental from London to Wellington, and Elizabeth was the only woman who knew how to milk it. She got more cows and made butter, which she sold for five shillings a pound. She and Alexander grew wealthy on a farm that spanned the bay below where I live now; they added sheep to their holdings and grazed them on land that, coincidentally, borders the house where I have lived for the past fifty years. When the great earthquake of 1855 occurred and the land was displaced, they picked up their sheep and carried them around the coastline to new pastures to the north.
I let none of this touch me for decades.
My grandparents, my mother’s parents, disapproved of her marriage to an Irishman who was not Presbyterian. We moved away from them when I was a child. I turned my back on my mother’s history. But there are certain things I know without being told, and I found myself increasingly unsure of where they came from. In 1986, I wrote a novel called The Book of Secrets. It was about a charismatic preacher called Norman McLeod who led a migration from the Highlands of Scotland to Nova Scotia, and from there to Waipū in the north of New Zealand, where my own parents owned a farm. I considered Waipū and its history the sole inspiration for that book, but I don’t know any more whether that’s true, especially as I sit with my kin remembering the Oriental’s landing. Who am I? One part of me is from the Irish grandparents I never knew, the other part from a Scotswoman. When I was nine years old, I knew, like her, how to milk a cow, I called a fictional character in The Book of Secrets Christy and I am, I have learned, the descendant of a preacher who drew hundreds to him. The same keening that farewelled McLeod and his followers followed mine. A part of me is undone by this knowledge.
In the passageway of my house, I have an old wood-framed photograph of my great-grandmother, and one of her husband, Neil Small. She stands in front of a velvet curtain looped back by braid, her fingers trailing over the back of a chair. Her eyes appear fierce and direct, although my informants tell me she had dementia by the time the picture was taken, so that stare is hard to interpret. She wears a hat like a guardsman’s helmet tilted over her brow, and there is a ruffle of lace at her wrists. This is Margaret, grown old and rich, bringing with her a variety of legacies. Above my bookshelves stand fluted silver vases, and on the middle finger of my left hand I wear a mother of pearl ring. The vases and the ring came from her.
Later, all that money would be gone. She lies in death in a country cemetery, surrounded by Neil and several of her descendants. Their son, another Alexander, married my grandmother, Elizabeth Stewart, from Dumfries. In a drawer, I have the paisley crinoline cover that Elizabeth’s mother wore on the ship out (it actually belongs to my daughter but I am caring for it at the moment), and in family lore there is a wealth of ‘good connections’. The Stewarts went all the way back to Robert the Bruce, fierce battles and murderous times, to the Sinclairs and the Kirkpatricks and the Mackays and the Camerons, names borne by my mother and her siblings. I am one of their two surviving remnants. The clans speak across centuries. My uncle Robert, my mother’s brother, bought a length of Royal Stewart tartan to be made into a skirt for me when I was a child. I failed to learn the Highland fling.
because you are my grandmother
I wear old fine gold and mother-of-pearl
because, because of this,
I wear this hair shirt of guilt
the settlers’ shame
There was that too. In the years that I spent on farms, there in the Waikato, and later in the Far North, it did not occur to me that I was occupying what has been termed ‘debatable land’, that in time to come the entire country would be contested. Now I understand the concept better with each passing day. Just recently, while talking to a woman I had newly met, I described my house on the hill as my tūrangawaewae.
‘Not in a Māori sense,’ she said, with some acidity. She was talking about spirituality and connection with the land.
It stung. Looking at my history, my whakapapa as we say now in Aotearoa New Zealand, and where it stretches to that Petone beach, I know that in a sense what she said was true.
‘It’s my place to stand,’ I answered, uneasily. ‘It’s the place where I know who I am.’
And that is true too. I have no other.
‘The Emigrants’ by Gerald Laing, situated at Helmsdale near Badbea, in Sutherlandshire, depicting a crofting family looking back to the home they have been forced to leave.
HEATHER HOURIGAN