During the Second World War, my mother and I lived with her parents, my maternal grandparents, the Smalls, on a Waikato farm, and several of her siblings, my aunts and an uncle. At night, my mother and I slept in a tiny cottage at the bottom of the garden, heated by a wood stove as the winter fogs swirled outside. In season, calves bleated against the walls. Alongside my uncle, my mother milked cows when they ‘came in’ after their calving; my father came and went on his leaves, wearing his air force uniform. My uncle played his bagpipes on the hills at night when milking was over. One of my aunts was a pale beautiful invalid and had breakfast taken into her on a tray, complete with her daily senna pod juice to help with her constipation. Another aunt was brisk and accepted no nonsense. Yet another visited and flashed an engagement ring, long after the time for marriage seemed over. I was the tearful flower girl at her wedding when she became the third wife of a man who would adore her always. I was supremely happy there on the farm, ensconced in this broad nest of family. At its heart were Sandy and Lizzie: Alexander, descended from the Sutherlands, and Elizabeth from the Stewart line.
My grandmother was already old and floury faced. By the time I was born she was almost past hoping her barren children would provide her with grandchildren. I threw a stone at her one day when she grew irritable and, in the fuss that ensued, I ran for my life, straight between the legs of a horse that stood still and allowed me to pass. In the terror of what might have been the consequences, the way I could have been killed, how fortunate they all were that I had been spared, I was forgiven. Of course I was.
As for the story of my grandfather, that is a familiar one too. My parting from him was the central drama of my childhood, the trauma that I would endure for years to come, the one that makes me fear separations and partings. I will hold on like someone clinging to the edge of the precipice with their fingernails rather than let anyone leave my life. I’ve fallen off a few times; there are slippages and surrenders and goodbyes and the moment when it is impossible to remember the phone number of a beloved person. The wounds aren’t fatal but that one, that wrenching and tearing apart, felt close to it. We would sit, my grandfather and I, in long slanting sunlight at the breakfast table and his stories would begin, always the stories. He had a trim moustache and a shining bald head. He would spread his porridge with honey and butter while he talked, his attention always fixed on me. But naturally, for I was the only child, the whole of the next generation, as near perfect as it was possible for a round girl with a pudding basin haircut to be. Our conversation would go on, long after everyone else had left the table and gone their way for the day’s work.
Alongside of us, filling the length of a wall, stood a tall dresser, ceiling high and ornately carved. I would know it anywhere. It was a family heirloom, and I understood it came on a ship, although which one is a mystery. It wasn’t on the Oriental, so possibly it was on a later sailing, the Stewart migration perhaps. Sometimes when I climbed down from my chair I would trace the whorls in the wood, the intricacies of each groove, as high as I could reach, the dark stain polished to a satin finish by my grandmother and the aunts.
My grandfather and I would set off to the hills then and he would go on talking and I would ask for more and more about the old days, the horses, journeys around a long-gone sheep station that took days, about how he cut out his rotten tooth with his pen knife once when he couldn’t wait to get attention for it, about how to slit the throat of a sick sheep, about the word of God when it came to him, about where the hens might have laid their eggs today. I was like a bell hung round his neck, the voice that told the watchers and minders where we were. My grandfather had dementia, as his mother had, but I didn’t know this. I know only that when my father came back from his wartime service, my parents and I packed up and left. The last time I saw my grandfather was on the railway station at Frankton Junction, his old, old face leaking with tears. That’s the opening scene of my second novel, Mandarin Summer; a child leaving behind those she loved, the bitter aftermath of that farewell, that sense of loss, for me, and for him. Whenever I think of him, I recall the family story that, after I was gone, he would scour the hills looking and calling for me.
And far away in the north I would be asking myself why I was there and how I could get back to him. So here I go, weeping about it all over again. He died soon after and that was that, but that never really is. It’s a word which means nothing and covers pretty well everything, if you let it.
The dresser slipped from the family’s grasp, and I realised after a time that though it represented those years, it was an object, not the person I loved. By the time I found it again, it had assumed a different place in my history.
Besides, I have many things. As well as Margaret Sutherland’s mother of pearl ring, which I wear most days, I have Lizzie Stewart’s wedding ring and my mother’s, and sometimes I wear all of them, though I’m not given to rings in a general sense. I have in my possession the black lace collar that was worn on a mourning dress of another great-grandmother. I have family china, which is unfashionable now, and my grandmother’s clock. And so on. That accumulation of the past. You could create a museum if you allowed yourself, and that is not something I want to do.
Yet there are nights when I say to my grandmothers, as I look towards the same sea they sailed across, do not abandon me.