IN THE MONTHS AFTER EILEEN’S FUNERAL, I BEGAN TO wonder why I didn’t know anything about my grandparents as a couple, so I started to try to draw the unspoken stories of Frank and Eileen out of my family. That was also when I began to wonder about what actually happened to Poppa. Not how he died—that part was obvious. What I really wanted to know was who recovered his body from the mountain, how he was identified, and how he made it home. When I began asking, I was astounded to learn that no one seemed to know.
So I did what any good researcher would do: I googled my grandfather’s name.
I immediately discovered a coroner’s file at Archives New Zealand, and I put in a request to access it. But that soon hit a roadblock. They couldn’t release Frank’s records ‘just like that’, I was told. I’d need permission from an immediate family member, someone like his wife or his children.
I would have to ask my mum or her siblings … but I didn’t want them to know what I was up to. Mentioning Erebus in our family is like unleashing a tightly wound coil. My stomach churns at the thought.
It takes me a month to find the right time to ask. I am sitting outside having a cuppa with my mother. We sip our tea and I pick at the crumbs in the biscuit tin, stalling, testing the waters, feeling her out before I ask a favour. My fingers toy with my mug. I have no idea what reception I will get.
‘Mum, I need your help.’ I coax my courage out from its hiding place. ‘I’m trying to find out more about what happened to Poppa, and there’s a file on him at Archives New Zealand, but I need permission from an immediate family member to access it—someone like you. Can I put you down as my contact person?’
I can see Mum rifling through her mental index, referencing and rearranging which parts she will need, cataloguing her thoughts to access the right story before she starts talking. She doesn’t answer my question. Instead, she tells me that there was no news, and almost a whole month went by before they heard that Frank would be coming home. He was one of the last to be identified, she says, and he had been badly burned. She talks about the visits from the police and the JP, and about her anger at the funeral director, who stopped them from viewing Frank’s body. She spits her disgust at Air New Zealand, at Morrie Davis and Ron Chippindale and Rob Muldoon.
She gains momentum and disappears inside her story. She’s oblivious to my muscles tensing in response, to me gingerly sliding backwards in order to distance myself from the waterfall of pain that spills from her mouth, a dark torrent of syllables. It’s too much to take in. I start to feel sick. Mum’s words spark my own anger at the whole bloody saga, and those painful childhood memories return. This is the story that never goes away. A blanket of grime that sits on my skin and gunks up my ears and my brain and my heart.
I shut out the words so I won’t feel her pain.
Once the deluge eases, I repeat my question for I know how this dance will go—she has to voice these stories inside her before we can talk about anything else.
‘So, Mum,’ I say. ‘Is it okay if I put you down as my contact person?’
‘Sure,’ she says. ‘No problem.’
Huh. Easy as that.
Many years after Erebus, one of Mum’s sisters requested a copy of the coroner’s file on Frank. Like me, my aunt had questions about her father’s death, preferring the truth to her long-held imaginings, no matter how painful it might be. Mum tells me that she had the same questions, and wondered whether she should request the coroner’s file too—in our family, a certain discomfort accompanies the knowledge that someone else might know more than you. If my aunt had requested the report, surely Mum could do the same. But should she?
‘I was working at Wellington Hospital and must have been thinking about what I was going to do about Dad,’ Mum remembers. ‘This was quite a long time after Erebus, now that I think about it. I was in a little side room, putting things away, and the woman in charge of the blood bank was talking with someone and she said, “Stop taking my things, or I’m going to put tickle locks on the door!”’
The woman’s comment took Mum right back to her childhood, to the game she had played with her father when she was a little girl. Frank would chase her through the house, then pin her down and tickle her until she almost couldn’t breathe. Right at the brink, when she couldn’t take one moment more, she would muster just enough breath to yell, ‘Tickle locks!’ and he’d stop.
Tickle locks: you’d had enough and you couldn’t be touched.
‘When I heard her say, “I’ll put tickle locks on the door”, I just about dropped to the floor,’ Mum says to me. ‘In my mind, Dad was telling me, “I don’t want to be touched.” And I thought, That’s that. Let it go. Later on, I did glance at the report briefly. He was burnt badly. I wanted to see it, but I realised it was for my head and not for my heart. No wonder he said tickle locks. Why would he want to put us through that?’
Tickle locks. Show me mercy.
One time, I got locked out of my work computer after three failed attempts. I sheepishly called the IT department, who told me it was a ‘tickle lock’ before they reset my password. That day I’d learned that, in IT speak, a tickle lock is something that allows a lock to be released to another requester after an idle period. I had forgotten all about it until Mum told me this story.
What could I do but take this as a sign from Poppa?
Go for it, girl. Ask away.
Enough time has passed. The gateway is open. The lock has been released.
A few weeks later, I receive an email from the Ministry of Justice with Frank’s file attached. The email informs me that the documents contain distressing material, and recommends that I ‘open the file in the presence of, and with the support of, a family member or friend’.
I take my time. I digest the reports from the dental surgeon, a chemist from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) and the chief inspector of police, each confirming the identity of Hugh Francis (Frank) Christmas. I read a deposition from the Air New Zealand employee who collected Frank’s ticket and confirms he boarded the flight. I realise this woman must have collected 236 other tickets that morning, meaning she must have signed 236 other depositions for the 236 other passengers on that plane.
I see numbers and abbreviations and legal terms I don’t understand.
Then the coroner’s post-mortem report catches me by surprise. I learn that Frank was identified with the aid of clothing samples provided by my grandmother, a hair sample, dental records and jewellery. I had always been told that he was identified forensically, but that wasn’t true. He was identified thanks to my grandmother’s keen eye and willingness to help. And he wasn’t burnt. Frank was, in fact, one of the first bodies to be identified—not one of the last. I skim-read the rest of the report, trying to shield my heart from the power of its words. I learn that my grandfather’s body, minus his right foot, was essentially all there, that he was easily identifiable, and thanks to the ice he was perfectly preserved.
The familial black box had it wrong. Things were not as my mother had believed for all those years. The report did not match the stories that had been told around our dining table.
As I reread the coroner’s file, a lump forms in my throat. I think about the travel agent who sold Frank his ticket, and the woman who collected it at the gate. I think about the men who went to the ice, who worked for days in abhorrent conditions, who never slept. I think about the loaders and pilots and drivers, the mortuary staff who walked kilometres each day between the chillers and the embalming tables and their desks. The men and women who took fingerprints and samples, who photographed scars and tattoos and jewellery and clothing, who measured heights and weights. The desk clerks and chemists and coroners who typed and signed report after report, word after bloody word. The stonemason who carved and chiselled Frank’s name on to his headstone by hand.
All of these people who worked as one orchestrated body towards a common goal—and all in such a short period of time. They did all of this for Frank. For us. How can I express how grateful I am?
And what other myths has my family created in the absence of information? What else don’t we know? What would I uncover in my quest to understand Frank’s story?
Enough time has passed. The information’s yours. Do with it what you will. I’ll release the lock.