IN MY MOTHER’S memory things just happened. Big life-shattering breaches went unexplained or were distilled down to a Punch and Judy line: Well, she had to choose between him and me, and in the end she chose him.

But things don’t ever just happen. Things occur in a particular way and for a reason.

Mum never did see inside the folder held in the vaults of the national archives. Here, the past was presented with disarming bureaucratic plainness—a brown folder bound with packaging string. In late 2011, it sat before me on a reader’s desk. For a few minutes I did little more than stare at it. Then, slowed down by a ceremonial sense of how to proceed, I pulled gently on the ends of the string, and the folder breathed out. And I smelt the old air of an unvisited room shut up for the better part of a century.

It was like the end of a long flight when you wake in time for the descent through the cloud and look out the window to the startling detail of a place you have only vaguely heard about. And because the detail has a fresh and unclaimed quality, the fevered eye seeks out everything all at once.

That is what happened with my first reading of the 125-page court transcript of Maud’s divorce from Harry Nash. I read quickly in order to reach the end, then I went back to the beginning and read everything more carefully. It was the third or fourth reading before various details found one another. Inevitably, a narrative began to take shape. I began to see Maud. And, rather wonderfully, a grandfather whom I never knew, emerged—my mother’s father, a farmer from North Canterbury. I read with a jurist’s attention. I read with glee, and I read with a next-of-kin’s cringing sense of embarrassment. Opinions formed and shifted. I read with an open mind, which led to a sympathy for someone for whom I’d only ever felt contempt. And then I read with imagination in order to bring to the surface the motivations that the jury apparently could not see for itself, and I read in such a way that I found myself reconsidering everything that I’d known about my grandmother, Maud.

The pity is my mother never got to hear Maud tell her own story, or to hear what her own mother had had to say about her.

Now there were dates, departures, places, occupations to consider. The positioning of a life in Somerset followed by upheaval. And, of course, the ‘facts’, such as they are.

Maud was an assistant mistress of a ‘high school’ in Wellington, Somerset, where she spent seven years looking after ‘the little ones’ (receiving ‘a certificate for efficiency’).

In 1912, aged twenty-eight, she worked her passage as the governess to the children of a headmaster and his wife and sailed out to New Zealand. As the court transcript doesn’t mention this fact, I have an idea Mavis told me. I have a faint recollection of her describing a general uprooting of the family around that time to various places across the globe. Canada was mentioned, and a number of American cities. Chicago, I seem to recall.

A brother, Bert, who surfaces during the divorce trial, said his sister came out to New Zealand in order to ‘better herself’. But look at what she left behind.

I type ‘Wellington Somerset 1912’ into my browser and discover a very pleasant English market town. Ivy, hedges, canvas awnings shading a line of shops. People on foot share a thinly populated road with a few figures on large bicycles and a horse and carriage. In their caps and heavy black footwear three boys in a market street look like miniature adults. There is a monument on a hill and a public garden, much like any to be found in Christchurch or Wellington at that time: flax, a cabbage tree, cypress trees, paths, a sweep of lawn. A steady sky, a wisp of cloud. There is a tranquillity not easily found in the landscape that Maud arrives to.

The slopes of the Rimutakas that rise like the gates to a forbidden kingdom at the head of the Hutt Valley have been relentlessly logged. In the city of Wellington a deforested Mt Victoria looms above dwellings of corrugated iron and unpainted timber like a giant mudslide waiting to happen. From the wharves the bare hills look hobbled and barnacled with small timber cottages. It is as though the original builders set off with a wheelbarrow and spade, and a tool to hack their way through the bush, with instructions to pitch their tent wherever they saw fit. If Maud’s eye for efficiency took in all of this, she will have noted that roads do not rule these hills. It is hill first, then outlook and aspect, then the house itself, and finally the road, which is a glorified term for a track pitching in and out of ferny shadow to sun-lit bends walloped by the wind. The same wind that threatened to lift me off the tops of Pencarrow as a small boy shakes the living daylights out of anything not pegged or anchored down. The bonnets in the market street of Wellington, Somerset, would not last a second.

Why did she settle here, in the wind-blasted Wellington down under? For my mother’s sake. I’ll come to that.

Maud leaves the headmaster and his wife in the capital and continues to Christchurch to stay ‘with friends’. Who are these friends? No names are given. They live on a farm ‘in the South Island’, which again is not very exact. Maud is there a year. Then, towards the end of 1913, she takes a position on a North Canterbury sheep farm, where for another year, she says, ‘I acted as a housekeeper’.

If she came up from Christchurch, she would have taken a train to the small North Canterbury township of Hawarden, and from there driven by horse and buggy to Taruna, the sheep farm of Owen Tibbott (O.T.) Evans.

I have always thought of Maud as old. Her name makes her old to start with. And being my mother’s mother makes her older still.

I have to remind myself that this traveller is a young woman. In Taruna, she is a young woman with barely a neighbour for miles around. There are the mountains at the back of the house. Sheep in the paddocks provide small shifts in the landscape. The wind from the nor-west is like some incessant curse whistling in the eaves when she is heating water, hissing in her ear when she is pegging up the washing. It is there in her face, in her hair, whenever she walks down the long drive to stand by the letterbox. But then, without warning, come moments of absolute stillness, and it is as if the world is telling her, ‘Look where you have arrived. You have fallen through a hole in the earth.’ Of course I am imposing my own thoughts on Maud. She may have felt differently. Taruna with its majestic setting may have seemed like the start of something new.

The court transcript has very little to say about Maud’s time at Taruna. But it is here that she became pregnant to O.T.

As far as the court record is concerned, Taruna is just a prelude. But it interests me. There is the figure of a grandfather to disinter. There is a romance to imagine. Leading up to and during the time my mother was conceived, O.T.’s wife, Maggie, was staying at their Christchurch residence, nursing their firstborn, Geoffrey. My mother was born in December 1914, but as late as May of that year Maud is still in the district. Her name appears in the Christchurch Press along with a number of other women who ran a clothing stall that month to raise funds for the tennis courts and bowling green in Waipara, the nearest town.

So, clearly, she is part of the community, pitching in. She is already two months pregnant when she helps out at the stall. People will know her—perhaps by name. At the very least they have seen her face around.

Perhaps she doesn’t yet know she is pregnant—but the moment of discovery cannot be far off.

If Maud’s world is about to gain another dimension, O.T. must have felt as though his was teetering. It is also clear that Maud’s family in England never knew about the pregnancy. The decision to keep it a secret was taken early. One imagines the conversations, difficult conversations long into the night, about what to do. In 1914, a child born out of wedlock was occasion for tremendous shame. The Salvation Army gathered at the bottom of the cliff with its various categories of ‘fall’ to consider—how long fallen, first fallen, twice fallen, and so on. The method of fall had its particulars—taken advantage of, alcohol, foolishly led astray, bad company, seduced, ruined under the promise of marriage. A high percentage of ‘fallen women’ in the care of the Salvation Army Home were domestic servants, often from humble origins.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story of a fallen woman in The Scarlet Letter brought him fame on both sides of the Atlantic. For a time the novelist was the American consul in Liverpool, a role that his wife excitedly wrote is second in importance only to the embassy in London. In Liverpool, Hawthorne liked to roam the docks. One day he stopped to observe a procession of girls and young women from the workhouse heading to the dock to board the ship that would take them out to the new world to work as domestic servants. He wrote in English Notebooks:

I should not have conceived it possible that so many children could have been collected together, without a single trace of beauty or scarcely of intelligence in so much as one individual…[their] coarse, vulgar features and figures betraying unmistakably low origin, and ignorant and brutal parents. They did not appear wicked, but only stupid, and animal and soulless.

The Asia, with the Bibbys on board, had stopped in Ireland to pick up a number of women from the workhouse to deliver to Port Chalmers in New Zealand, where most of them, according to a follow-up report, proved themselves to be entirely useless as domestic servants. A small number were held in barracks from where they were in the habit of escaping, getting drunk, and coming into quick money in ‘unexplained ways’.

If Hawthorne’s notebook entry speaks of type, in The Scarlet Letter we find a more sympathetic portrayal of the fallen woman in the form of Hester Prynne.

As in a Puritan village in Massachusetts, so in a colony emerging from the Victorian era at the bottom of the Pacific, a child born out of wedlock was a life-shattering event. The shame had to be absorbed until the fall became part of the life story, shaping all those touched by it.

The catastrophe for fallen women such as Maud and Hester is the length of the fall. Both women will go on breaking their fall with one hand while clinging onto their child with the other.

My mother’s story begins here—with her own mother in flight.

How fiercely present the world is.

How nice and orderly its arrangement.

Through the trees the glinting paddocks and their bright promise. The road that brought Maud here now leads her discreetly away.

This is the last time she will set eyes on Taruna. And then she is on a train, on her way out of the farmer’s world. An overnight ferry pushes by the mountainous Kaikoura coast and on to the windswept strait.

Until the baby arrives there is not much to do other than wait in Wellington, perhaps grow bored with the hospital window and its cloudless day. It is coming into summer.

Maud’s confinement is spent in a private hospital. Later she will tell the court that she paid for this herself—clearly a matter of personal satisfaction to her. But which hospital? I wonder if it was Calvary where I had my tonsils out when I was eleven. Nuns, the first I had ever seen, had glided along its corridors. Or St Helen’s, a specialist maternity hospital on Coromandel Street that climbs up from the Newtown shops on Adelaide Road. But that maternity hospital was for married women.

She may have snuck in there. Funny to think of Maud’s recourse to invention beginning with her admission to a maternity hospital.

There were options—abortion, adoption, infanticide. But Maud’s mind is made up, if indeed there was any doubt. The bathroom mirror holds her gaze and reports back the ordinary truth of someone looking for something that is not there. She is pregnant with a child. She hasn’t robbed a bank.

She will keep my mother. But to do so will require another sacrifice. She decides to drop out of sight, to self-erase.

She stops writing to friends and family in England. She will end all communication with the people who knew her before she entered hospital.

By the time she has given birth to my mother, Maud has accomplished something similar for herself—she has a new name, a whole new identity. She has created a widow’s story for herself.

She is now May Seaward. Maud has an aunt by that name from Portsmouth. She will say May is from Portsmouth as well, and since she must give an occupation to ‘the late Mr Seaward’, he can be an engineer, someone able and essential to the creation of new worlds.

A man named Harry Nash has advertised in the local newspaper for a live-in housekeeper. In her letter of application Maud says she is after such a position with a ‘refined family who would not object to her and her little girl’. When Nash replies that the position has been taken, Maud writes back, ‘I was sorry not to have got the position of housekeeper to you, but would be pleased if at a future time you are unsuited you would write to me.’

The letter is on file; her forwarding address is care of a Mrs Harrison, Rodrigo Road, Kilbirnie. Who is Mrs Harrison? We hear no more of her.

Maud finds another live-in position, this one on a farm in Gladstone in the Wairarapa, 130 kilometres from Wellington. The Tararuas, which divide the Wairarapa from the Manawatu in the west, are not nearly as imposing as the Southern Alps, but they offer the same feeling of wilderness at the end of the road. Maungahuia, which is the name of the farm, and locality, sits inside a bowl of cleared hills, where the grasslands are still coming into being. The summer air is filled with thick smoke. Ash drifts across the farm—it gathers along the windowsills, and marks the lines of washed sheets.

On summer nights, people drive to the edge of the burn off to take in the spectacle. Buggies and drays by the dozen, one or two cars, a truck, and in the dark the awe-struck crowd gazes up at a sky that burns like a fabulous city. Bright embers fill the night and as one dies another takes its place. High above the lit sky is another, larger chamber containing the galaxy that is permanent and glowing.

Weeks later, by which time the lit sky has drifted down to earth, the blackened stumps smoulder into the grey hour. Shouting men call their dogs back from the burning ash. Within a year or two no one will remember what was there. A cow will graze on grass where once stood a three-hundred-year-old tree. And a dreadful silence rolls out where once the distinctive call of the huia was heard through the forested slopes. Women liked to wear the huia beak as a brooch and its distinctive white-tipped tail feathers made an attractive adornment. Now, the only huia left are stuffed and mounted. When I was a child the bird still graced a sixpenny postage stamp. And I have heard it said that it derived its name from a distress call—uia, uia, uia, or (in Maori) Where are you?

Maungahuia, ‘the hill of the huia’, can be seen on a country road before Gladstone. The original farmstead where Maud and my mother stayed has gone, and the forest that covered the hill of the huia has disappeared. The farmer of a farmhouse I visited believes the last huia was found lying dead on a tennis court around the time of the First World War.

The spell in hospital must have made a favourable impression, possibly it was the nurses who moved swiftly and unseeing, because within a few months of moving to isolated Maungahuia, Maud has decided she would like to become a nurse. She writes to St Helen’s Hospital, the maternity hospital for married mothers, and receives notice that a new intake won’t be accepted until September 1915. Meanwhile, a letter from Harry Nash arrives to say that the position in his household has become free. Maud replies that she can offer him six months until the hospital intake later in the year. Nash writes back with his acceptance.

In late February 1915, armed with their invented histories, Maud and my mother enter the household of Harry Nash on Upland Road.

The widow and widower ought to have this much in common—the persistent shadow of the absent spouse, and the confusion thrown up by a suddenly lopsided life.

Everywhere inside the house are photographs of the late Mrs Nash. Maud, of course, has none to show of the late Mr Seaward. And Mr Nash has three children, two sons and a daughter, all of them at boarding school. Their faces are easily traced back to the photograph of the late Mrs Nash. But when Harry Nash studies my mother, her lineage is not so easily pinned down. Perhaps there is something of Maud’s long face, and her pale blue eyes, but then the terrain mysteriously changes into the features of the farmer who cannot be named.

Mr Seaward, on the other hand, can be anyone. For a number of months Maud keeps her widow’s story afloat. There is a lot at stake. She has landed on her feet—she has comfort and a degree of security in Nash’s house. Kelburn is an attractive neighbourhood on the fringe of the city. Upland Road winds through a muddle of small hills and valleys. There are plunging views over orange-tiled roofs. But it is difficult terrain for a pram. Maud has to push and shove uphill and then grip the pram going down to prevent my mother from rolling away.

Harry Nash has proposed, and after only three weeks of Maud and my mother moving in. Maud has asked for a day to think it over. Obviously she has slept with Nash. It is easy to work out since her first child to Nash, Eric, is born that year in December, barely nine months after she and my mother arrived from Gladstone.

Quite coincidentally, as Maud would have it, she bumps into O.T. Evans on Lambton Quay in the city. She told the court that the farmer was on his way to Porirua, then farmland, now covered in state housing. O.T. might have come up to Wellington on business. It is possible. But so might have been a planned visit to see Maud and my mother.

In Maud’s account she tells the farmer she is to marry. The farmer is pleased. She doesn’t mention ‘relieved’.

More significantly, Harry Nash has offered to adopt my mother, to bring her up as ‘one of his own’, and in the end that’s what persuades Maud to accept his marriage offer, in order, she told the court, to give ‘Betty a name’.

Betty. It is there in the transcript. After knowing her all my life as Joyce, it is weirdly dislocating—even euphonically jarring—to discover Mum is in fact Betty.

For the first years of her life she is Betty—Betty Seaward with a false past and a father who doesn’t exist.

Betty is a complete stranger to me. Betty suggests someone ready with a tray of cakes in the unexpected delight of visitors turning up to the door. Betty suggests an open smile. My mother’s smile was more guarded and, before the happy pills took effect, only ever parsimoniously wheeled out. Although on the odd occasion it could blossom with indecent delight, such as when she was reminded that her careless driving had knocked a boy off his bike and she replied, ‘Oh, you mean that fat boy!’

She was Betty until the age of four—long enough for the cast of personality to set around that name. And yet, try as I may, I can’t recall a time when that first name floated to the surface. Is it possible for a name to just fade away?

While that may be so, the larger world inhabited by Betty stayed with her, because Betty, it turns out, belongs to a household of verbal and physical abuse, humiliation, threats, and endless push-and-shove violence between Maud and Harry that, on occasion, rose to madness.

On 29 June 1915, Maud and Harry Nash marry in the Presbyterian manse in Ellice Street, Mt Victoria.

Before the wedding Maud makes a terrible mistake. She decides she will tell Harry the truth. There is no Mr Seaward. There was never any engineer. She is not a widow. She made it all up, but it was a necessary tale, because otherwise she would be a single woman with a child in tow, a social pariah, like Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne and her daughter Pearl, each a liability to the other.

A resentful Nash feels he has been doubly deceived—first, by Maud’s lies, and second, by the timing of her confession. The invitations have already gone out. It is too late to recant and cancel the wedding.

A different question now occurs to Nash. If there is no Mr Seaward, then who is the father of the child?

Maud will not say.

Nor would Hester Prynne as she stood on a scaffold with her child before a hostile crowd, facing down a clergyman’s insistence that she name ‘him who tempted you to this grievous fall’.

‘Speak and give your child a name,’ demands a voice in the crowd below the scaffold.

‘Never,’ she replies.

She is further condemned for her obstinacy and reminded of ‘the vileness and blackness’ of her sin.

The scene shifts to a courthouse where an old minister is instructed to examine Pearl for the Christian qualities as would befit a child of her age. Pearl escapes through an open window to stand on an outside step ‘looking like a wild tropical bird of rich plumage, ready to take flight into the upper air’. Peering out the window the old man asks, ‘Who made thee?’ Pearl sticks her finger in her mouth to consider the question. She announces she was not made at all, but (in a variation of my own cabbage-patch origins) was ‘plucked by her mother off the bush of wild roses that grew by the prison door’.

In frustration the magistrate turns to the physician who undertakes to analyse the child’s nature and ‘from its make and mould, to give a shrewd guess at the father’.

Maud’s refusal to name my mother’s father enrages Nash. Someone has got away with something for which he must pay. He stomps about with moral indignation. But, I wonder, is that what really galls him? Or is it Maud’s evasiveness on the subject of the father, the fact that she will not reveal the man’s name or say anything bad about him? If she won’t, then he will—and he ends up feeling foolish for slandering a ghost.

What does her silence mean? He turns his attention to Betty. She is someone else’s love child. He is the sop who picks up the bills. He lifts her up and tries to shake her father’s name out of her. She doesn’t understand, of course, that she is a meteorite that has crashed into Nash’s world or that what he holds in his hands is not just a child, but evidence of Maud’s alternative object of affection.

Over the coming months Nash comes up with a formula designed to satisfy him and make Maud miserable. She must be made to understand that the world will not bend to her will. She cannot have the child and also expect to have him, not after the exposure of Mr Seaward as a fabrication. If she won’t reveal the identity of the father, Maud must choose between Nash and her daughter.

It is easy to see where Eric and Ken have sprung from. Harry can find plenty in them that is reassuringly familiar. He is present, and so is Maud. But the man Maud won’t name is also present—in my mother’s face, inside Harry’s house, sitting up to the table, almost one of them.

Nash takes to bullying and humiliating mother and child in public.

By now, Mum and the Nashs are living in Manley Terrace, Newtown, and it is here that things spiral into violence.

One afternoon Maud comes home to find my mother bleeding from the face. Harry says the child cut her nose on the bars of the cot as he was lifting her out. Maud looks at the blood on the floor, and at my mother, and accuses Nash of striking her. Infuriated at having his word questioned, Nash raises his hand to hit her, whereupon Maud runs into the kitchen for the carving knife.

What the neighbours see is Harry Nash backing out of the house onto the street and Maud in the doorway holding the knife.

Some weeks later, the same neighbours witness Maud hanging out of an upstairs window. Two male hands grip her.

Whose hands are they? Harry Nash’s? Who else could they belong to? In which case, are those hands trying to save Maud? But from what—self-harm? Or are they threatening to drop her out the window?

The neighbours rush inside the house and pound up the stairs to find Maud on the bed, exhausted, with a black eye and red marks on her face.

The same neighbours report rows at night—Harry playing his piano ever louder, Maud retaliating on her violin, scratching her notes, sawing into Nash’s brain; Nash violently crashing his hands down on the piano keys. On it goes until the neighbours call the police. On their arrival, the transformation in Harry Nash is remarkable. He is suddenly calm, thoughtful, concerned.

By the time I enter the world the stain has spread. Maud is callous and dreadful and manipulative. But no one had bothered to wonder why.

In 1923 separation and divorce were the business of the court, and anyone willing to go through the ordeal had to face a jury, like a criminal, and the prospect of their dirty washing hung out for all to see.

For Maud, the courtroom has turned itself into a version of the scaffold on which Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne was made to stand with her daughter Pearl and atone for her sins.

Nash’s case is based on proving that Maud is guilty of mental cruelty towards him. Maud denies the charge, and for her own reasons is just as eager to prove that Nash is guilty of cruelty towards her with physical and verbal abuse of her and her child. And worse—blackmail, which is how the name of O.T. Evans surfaces, although his name never makes it into the newspaper coverage of the trial.

I read the letters between Maud and O.T., then returned to the court transcript. I picked up the letters. I read them more carefully a second and third and fourth time. I went back to the transcript. I didn’t know what to think or whose word to take. Maud is as mad as a snake. Nash is a violent man. The transcript is infuriatingly inconclusive. However, the tinder and flames that produced the long smouldering silence that hovered over my childhood are there.

My mother was present all those times Maud and Nash traded blows. She was there when Nash dragged her mother about the house and jumped on her stomach. She was upstairs in the house in Manley Terrace when Nash attempted to throw her mother out the top-floor window. She was definitely there when Nash followed mother and daughter through the streets of Newtown shouting indignantly—as if from some bizarre local remake of The Scarlet Letter—that the child there is a bastard child!

By today’s standards, such a charge is absurd. But the charge doesn’t matter as much as the shame of having it yelled in the street, and shame is toxic.

Perhaps after a while these humiliations turned into the distant rumble of passing thunder. I imagine Mum was too young to know that the argument in that marriage was all about her, and that the lies Maud told were to protect her and her father.

Seeing everything so plainly set out, the ‘facts’ or, I should say, the nakedness of the facts—I didn’t expect to feel the revulsion that came over me.

A woman who is my grandmother, a stranger up to this point, suddenly appears before me—on the page—waving a carving knife in her husband’s face. It was embarrassing to meet her first up like this. I even felt oddly implicated—she is my grandmother after all. We may not have set eyes on one another but she is partly responsible for the genes spilling around inside me, and so I found myself looking for and finding traces of self-recognition, not so much in the violence—apart from her attack on Nash’s piano with an axe (I once took an axe to a blow heater which had exacerbated my hayfever)—but in her persistence and the quiet indignation that sat behind it.

I read on. Maud throws filthy nappies in Nash’s face. She aims a heavy enamel billy at him but instead strikes new baby Eric on the head. Nash dashes from the house with the baby in his arms thinking it is dead. Maud attacks Nash with a carving knife as he sits down to breakfast. She threatens to kill Nash, and attacks him with a towel-rack. The following day she chases him from the house with a table knife. She repeatedly insults Nash in front of his customers and staff, calling him a liar and ‘the son of a convict’—the unfortunate Nash was born in Melbourne—possibly in retaliation for Nash calling her ‘the mother of all lies’. She hurls an electric iron at him; attacks him with scissors; smashes a window in a fit of ill-temper; scratches his face, disfiguring him; kicks him in the groin while he is cutting the hedge and forcing him to his bed for a week. Soon after that, she flies at Nash with a pair of scissors. She sets fire to Nash’s walking stick. ‘In a fit of rage’ she smashes a window with a clothes brush.

After a lifetime of hardly knowing a thing about Maud, suddenly there’s too much. She is not the person I took her to be. She is worse.

Once more I make myself reread everything in the court transcript, and this time I decide differently. She is a quiet woman who, nonetheless, happens to be armed with a carving knife. She is a schoolteacher, a woman with blue eyes and blonde hair seeking a ‘refined home for herself and her little girl’ who, nonetheless, happens to be armed with a carving knife.

Why?

Harry Nash has applied to the court for a Decree of Separation. He is the petitioner; Maud is the respondent. In the language of the law Maud is charged with having

pursued a course of conduct calculated to break down [Nash’s] spirit and to cause his health to break down, [Maud] having constantly heaped abuse upon [Nash], having frequently assaulted [Nash] and his children by a previous marriage, and having attempted to humiliate [Nash] before his employees and customers.

Nash’s evidence must fit the charge. As the petitioner he also has first say. Maud’s violence appears indefensible. But deeper into the transcript the picture changes. I found myself taking a more sympathetic view.

More so than the grub covering the trial as a newspaper artist for Truth. Under a headline ‘The Little Pugilist’ he has lengthened Maud’s profile in order to give her a hooked nose and joyfully made her unflattering hat even more outlandish to crown his obvious hope of conjuring up a witch. His treatment of Harry Nash is more respectful. Harry appears in a suit with collar and tie; he is business-like in bearing. He looks dependable rather than sharp. No part of him comes in for lampooning, although his moustache is possibly more glossy and luxuriant in illustration than in life. If Maud has been made to look villainous, then, by contrast, Nash’s agreeably open countenance is striking. He is described as softly spoken. He barely raises his voice, his delivery is even and a little weighed down by long suffering. For example:

In January [Maud] was learning the violin and in order to annoy me at night she would practise. On the night in question I hid the violin and told her to leave and I would give it to her in the morning. She went out and got the axe and proceeded to smash the piano. After this she refused to allow me to come inside the house. She used scissors to keep me out.

It is hard to believe that Maud could have intimidated Nash to this extent. Clearly her counsel thought so too.

‘Do you expect this court to believe that a big hefty man like you was knocked about by a little woman?’

‘There’s no one who can conceive what she’s like unless they’ve seen the woman. She’s a maniac.’

Asked what kind of man is the petitioner, Maud replies, ‘Most violent.’

‘And you have heard it said that you have a violent temper too?’

‘Yes, many times,’ [wearily].

‘And have you?’

‘One may be driven to extremes.’

One afternoon I left the shoe factory to walk up to Manley Terrace in Newtown, where Maud smashed the piano and chased Nash out to the street with an assortment of knives and scissors. It took about twenty-five minutes. I found the house, evenly covered in frost-white paint. Its front windows gazed darkly back at me. Manley Terrace turns out to be a cul de sac tucked away out of the path of the nor-wester and the colder southerly. The bay windows confront the street flush with domestic pride. The upstairs veranda has been closed off. In Maud’s day it must have offered a lofty stage for the lady of the house. Across the road, the brick stables have been renovated into a tasteful townhouse. Around the corner, in Colombo Street, the two-storey houses are from the same Victorian vintage, but a lesser breed. Terrace houses, cheek by jowl, each one with a stoop. At the bottom of the sloping street begin the worker cottages that stretch north and south.

Maud and Harry Nash’s house offers grandeur. But its aspect is limited. It wishes to face the street—and no more. There is the feeling of arriving in a bigger world as you turn into Colombo Street, and recoiling from the same as you enter Manley Terrace. The familiar geography of the city lies beyond Colombo, in the direction of the Newtown shops. And northwards, past the hospital, Mt Victoria rises in its hopeless and endless quest to touch the silver underbellies of the planes rising and descending from Wellington airport. In Maud’s day Mt Victoria had been scrubbed clear, and the streets sloping up the hill were lined with old wooden houses, some on a lean like a stack of wood waiting to be brought inside out of the weather.

In Manley Terrace I looked for the window Nash dangled Maud out of. I probably looked like a thief. In a way I was exactly that—I was looking for something to take. I had half a hope that old ghosts would suddenly appear on the doorstep. But the effect of the white paint is clear. The house does not wish to stand apart. It did not want to hang onto the history that had passed through its doors.

The police who showed up there regularly never suspected that the cause of the violence and commotion in the Nash household was a child and what she represented. The police never suspect because at such moments Nash is transformed into the respectable businessman. He is the reasonable one, anxious to placate the situation. Once the police depart, the madness resumes.

Very likely Maud is mad, but not without cause. There would be something wrong with her if she were not driven out of her mind by Nash’s determination to get rid of her child. By what hideous set of rules must her daughter be evicted as soon as Eric and Ken are born?

But as time goes on, the abuse shows no sign of ending. And I wonder if Maud’s resolve weakens. I wonder if her thoughts take her by surprise, thoughts that, at first, smell of betrayal, almost catch in the throat, but also serve the purpose of opening up a possibility. What would happen if she were to do what Nash is bullying her to do? What would that world look like without the presence of the child to provoke him?

Nash is more forthright, more out in the open with his thoughts. If Betty could just disappear the world will be a happier, saner place.

It is the dark side of the imagination taking over. For the moment, Maud’s resolve holds.

Nash destroys photographs of Maud’s friends and family in England. He forbids her to communicate with them. On one occasion he dresses her down for stopping in a city street to speak with a friend. The arguments continue. The name-calling returns, frequently erupting into violence. At her wits’ end, Maud capitulates. It seems that the only way to hold onto her daughter is to reveal the identity of the father.

The moment she names my mother’s father, a threshold is crossed. There is a wait to see how the cards have fallen—badly for Maud, as it turns out, because at Nash’s insistence she writes O.T. a letter, that is, she takes down what Nash dictates: a demand for money.

Maud told the court that Nash made her blackmail O.T. and his family:

One suggestion was to expose him to the neighbourhood where he lived, which, incidentally would have meant exposing her [Mrs Evans]. Eventually he came to the conclusion that the best revenge would be to extort money from the man and eventually at his dictation and under coercion I wrote for £70 to have the child adopted.

The letter Maud wrote to O.T. in August 1917 isn’t in the file. So there is no way of knowing how Nash made her frame the request, although Maud did call it ‘revengeful blackmail’. O.T. replies immediately, anxious to contain the situation.

Dear Maude [sic]
I just received your letter today as I have been away, and it knocked the life completely out of me. I am absolutely astonished by the tone in it. Whatever has gone wrong that you are so despondent. You told me you were getting married and your husband was adopting the child so I cannot understand what is the matter. If you write at once you can send it to me direct as I am at home alone. I am quite willing to do whatever I can for both you and the little one. Tell me what is wrong and what you want, and I will do it at once if I possibly can. But do please spare my poor old father and mother if you can. I don’t care what I suffer as I know I have sinned, but for God’s sake don’t do anything desperate. Send at once direct.

Maud replies:

Dear Mr Evans,
I can go no longer with Betty living in the same house, so that to get her adopted to someone who would love her and bring her up nicely as well as give her a name is the only way I can get happiness for her…

Nash later writes separately to O.T. enclosing a receipt for the money received. He writes with a pseudonym. He signs his letters H. Manley.

In the summer of 1917 the attacks on Harry Nash—which the court will hear about and the newspapers will leap on with glee—resume.

Nash is cutting the hedge. Maud is watching him from the porch. There is nothing wrong with the hedge, but Nash is cutting it all the same. He is imposing his will on the hedge. As usual he wants the world to conform to his desire, his needs. He does not care about anyone else. He makes the cutting of the hedge appear so reasonable. He would cut off the head of the little girl if he had his way; he would move methodically along the row and cut off her head without a second thought, mindful of process and appearance, mindful of himself and all that he might represent in the eyes of others.

There is something unacceptable about Nash, something so revoltingly present in the man that she cannot abide it any more. It is hard to say whether it is located in any one thing, although his breeches annoy, and the stuffy way he stands in his boots, and his sanctimonious air with the hedge-clippers. She gets up from the porch, almost without a thought other than her revulsion for all that Nash stands for, and it is suddenly necessary to do something to prevent him reaching that place along the hedge where he will harm her daughter with his thoughtless clipping. Something has to be done. And so Maud brings her foot back and kicks Nash in the crotch.

But did the incident actually occur? Nash says that injuries he sustained from Maud’s attack put him in bed for a week and that the doctor was called for. The doctor remembers attending Nash, but not at that time, and not for a kick to the crotch, but for a side strain.

If it did happen, then for a split-second Maud must have felt that some justice had been restored. It is hardly a legal argument. It is an emotional one, but this is the nature of her war with Nash.

Maud removes the photographs of Nash’s children and his late wife from their frames, presumably to make Nash understand what he is demanding of her, and to provoke him to imagine himself into that space. And to know that if he is abusive to her little girl she will be the same towards his children. And if he dares her into violence, as slight as she is, she won’t disappoint.

O.T. has sent more money, as per request, but only after a second terse note instructing him how much and what the money is for. Life has become intolerable and Betty cannot continue to live in Nash’s household. The money is to pay for Betty to be separated from her mother.

Maud writes, ‘Fifty or sixty pounds should do it.’ In 1917, fifty or sixty pounds was the average household’s rent and food for a year.

O.T.’s money duly arrives—much of it handed to a solicitor who makes the arrangements for my mother to pass out of Maud’s world. But in the course of managing the transaction the solicitor dies and, Maud told the court, rather than put herself through the ordeal with a new solicitor, she decided to adopt my mother ‘through friends’. She does say ‘through’ rather than ‘to’.

Dr Robertson who treated Maud around this time described her in a note tendered to the court as:

…a physical and mental wreck. She was very depressed. She gave the impression of something worrying her mind. She was not a strong woman. There was no evidence of insanity. She was in almost an hysterical condition. I attended her for an acute abscess under the chin, and had to give her a general anaesthetic because of her nervous condition. I considered her condition was due to some mental strain behind it all…I had a conversation with the nurse who merely indicated family trouble.

Another practitioner, Dr Couzens, recalled treating Maud for ‘nervous depression’.

One of my mother’s earliest memories, according to my sister Pat, is driving in Nash’s car. It would have been a treat, watching the spray fly off the rocks around the south coast, never guessing that the two people sitting in the front have already plotted another future for her.

The trips in the car turn out to coincide with a brief period when Maud and Nash separate. Maud is six months pregnant with Ken, Nash’s second child. But something is afoot. There is a change in Nash. He is accommodating and generous. He pays the rent on a cottage for Maud in Seatoun, a beachside suburb in the city’s east and provides her with a weekly income. During this sunny period he builds a house at Rona Bay, across the harbour in Eastbourne. At the weekend he turns up to Seatoun bearing gifts—flowers, chocolates. He has in mind a fresh start, one without Betty. Maud, too, has come round. She has already been through the mill as a fallen woman with an illegitimate child. She is no doubt reluctant to strike out on her own with two—and soon three—small children in tow. And since she is about to sacrifice my mother—and herself—to the greater good, she will stick it out. She will try again.

Several months of grace pass and she moves back in with Harry Nash, this time to the Rona Bay cottage to make a fresh start without the provocative presence of my mother, or the shadow of the child’s father that was such a torment to Nash.

Perhaps the damage was already done. In Rona Bay, Maud’s grief takes a new turn. She is erratic, irrational. Very likely she is suffering from depression. The old wound festers—there’s a return to the tit for tat of the bad old days in Newtown. Possibly it is as straightforward as this: if she cannot be a mother to Betty then she will not be a mother to Nash’s children.

She punches Nash’s twelve-year-old daughter Marjorie, blackening her eye. The child is forced to move in with friends until boarding school resumes. She throws Nash’s son William out of the house into a concrete wall. She smashes another window with a bowl of porridge after an announcement from Nash that he is taking Marjorie away to live elsewhere ‘in consequent of her violence’. She throws an iron at Nash who happens to be holding one of the babies; she hurls a music stand at him, she chases him out of the house with a poker, and so on. On the day of the baby’s christening she puts a hose down William’s back. On Christmas Day she throws a breadboard at Nash and it hits a glass door, smashing it. She then launches at him with a bread knife. The following Easter, on Good Friday 1919 (by which time my mother has been adopted) she attacks William with a lump of wood, driving the boy from the house. She rushes Nash with a carving knife. She chucks pots at him. She beats Marjorie with a copper stick. Marjorie tells of one occasion when Maud entered her room at 2 a.m. and demanded she come out of the house with her. There, after threatening to kill her, Nash, and the babies, Maud broke down and begged Marjorie to get the police. On it goes.

Maud denies most of these charges. Of the attack on the boy she tells the court, ‘he just fell over’. And of the broken window—it happened inadvertently while she was ‘trying to talk to Nash’ and somehow the clothes brush flew into the glass…

And yet, tellingly, in one incident after another—in Manley Terrace and in Rona Bay—when the neighbours intervene it is Maud they take in.

There is also plenty of evidence of violence that for some reason didn’t trouble the jury. Dr Couzens tells of finding

a mark on Maud’s forehead, marks of a kick to the left knee, and bruises on her arms, legs and body as though she had been hit and kicked by some person. She told me at the time that her husband had assaulted her and was responsible for her being in that condition.

Testimony from neighbours in Rona Bay recount Maud ‘crying and trembling and her blouse torn’, and seeing Mr Nash man-handling her and pushing her around.

Nash tries to have Maud committed, but after examining her, a doctor in Rona Bay declares there is nothing wrong with her sanity.

Undeterred, Nash urged a builder to come to the house to look at his wife. Sam Fisher thought she must be sick or had had an accident. He told the court Nash acted like a lunatic, rushing ahead of him and urging him on. After Nash disappeared inside, presumably to haul out the mad woman, Maud appeared at the door holding a carving knife. She said to the builder, ‘Look Mr Fisher, this is the one who threatened us with an axe and held it over us since five this morning.’ Nash, according to Mr Fisher, did not deny Maud’s statement but continued to argue the case of her sanity. ‘Look she is a lunatic,’ he said. ‘She is raving mad.’

‘I am just as sane as you, Mr Fisher,’ replied Maud, ‘aren’t I?’ I said, ‘Well, if you are, go and lay down that knife.’ She did so immediately. Then Mrs Nash turned to one of the boys and said, ‘He’s been thrashing and knocking us about all morning.’ The boy said, ‘Yes, he has.’ Nash made an effort to strike him, but the boy got away from him. Just then Mr Downs jumped the fence and Nash was saying all the time ‘how mad she was.’ I said, ‘Oh, I think it is you who is mad.’

What a relief to turn to the farmer’s letters, which are civil and generous.

Of course, they are written by a man standing before a window fully aware of the destructive power of the woman outside clutching a stone in her hand. If the letters are civil, they are even more careful not to cause offence. O.T. writes to Nash, aka Mr Manley:

…I must apologise to you for addressing your wife by her Christian name, but believe me it was the tone of her letter that made me think she was in dire trouble, and I did not want to shelve the money part, but only wanted to know what really was the matter. I only wish she had explained in her letter and I would have been spared the misfortune of hurting her feelings or yours. I honestly did not want to hurt in any way, and was very thankful to her writing in the way she did. I have worried a lot since I last saw her, but, out of respect for you as her husband and herself, I did not write to her to know if she had got the child adopted. Owing to my father having lost nearly all his money and having given him all spare cash, it is a bit difficult for me to get all I would like to send at the present moment, but if it will help your wife in a small degree I will send £50 next week and another £50 before the end of the year. I will not forget the child later on and will do something for her when she gets older if it is in my power. I would esteem it a favour if Mrs Nash would reply to this, or just put a few words in to show that you are in harmony in the matter. I still have a great deal of respect for Mrs Nash and will always do my best to help her if she should be at any future time without a breadwinner. Kindly let me know if this arrangement will suit you, and I will forward the money early next week, and the second lot as soon as possible, but not later than the end of the year. In reading Mrs Nash’s letter I really thought that she wanted to have the child adopted by strangers and will be thankful if it is the arrangement you are proceeding with. Please let me know what the child’s full name will be. I promise that I will not forget to help her if it is in my power in eight or ten years. If you can reply to this so that it will come by Thursday’s boat please reply direct to me. In concluding I must thank you both, especially Mrs Nash, for the kindness you have shown me. If there is anything in this letter that causes pain I assure you it is quite unintentional. Yours truly,
Owen T. Evans

PS. Please do not write if you cannot send it by Thursday night’s boat.
O.T.E.

In court, it has come down to Maud’s word against Harry Nash’s. On that score she doesn’t stand much of a chance. She is a fallen woman. She reeks of opportunism. She didn’t marry Nash because she loved him—a black mark—and sacrificing herself in order to give her daughter a name is not like rescuing a saint from the flames. The word of such a person cannot be held in the same esteem as that of a successful man, generous, perhaps overly generous. It would be hard to believe the jealousy that Maud claims has curdled inside him or her testimony that he is ‘a man of very violent temper which he could not control’. It is not easy to believe that he spat in Betty’s food and often hit her, or that he threatened to expose the father of the child, or that their frequent changes of address were due to Nash not wanting to remain in neighbourhoods where people knew of his treatment of her.

Ethel Hargrave, who was also paid to look after the children, told the court that ‘Mrs Nash was very kind and good to the children. We planned Marjorie’s clothes. I never saw her unkind. Marjorie was rather unmanageable and not too truthful.’

Even the assurances of another one-time housekeeper, Mrs Ashworth, apparently lacked sufficient persuasion:

I had the child, Betty, under my care all the time I was there and no one could have wished for a cleaner child. She gave no trouble. In fact, everyone loved her. She would not go near Nash. I often used to wonder if he had been cruel to her. She would make friends with everyone but Nash.

The court has a deaf ear by the time Maud is invited to explain herself:

About two years after marriage Nash was so cruel to the child, and made me so miserable about the matter, and so ill that under the coercion of Nash I wrote a letter to Mr Evans asking for money to have the child adopted…I kept Betty as long as I could but had to have her adopted as there was no hope…About a month after I came back from Seatoun I had taken Betty to friends to adopt her, and I did not want him to know where she was. He returned from Auckland (on business) and instigated Willie to kick me. I sent Marjorie for the constable. Marjorie’s statement is not true. He was so violent to me, and Marjorie willingly went, and as usual I was blamed. It was allusions to Betty’s father. Nash told people I was mad. Nash hated Betty and me. I have not seen her since the day of her adoption or heard from her adopting parents.

And here is the bit that I wished my mother could have read or heard for herself: ‘I only did this as last resort as I loved the child…and wanted to keep it and give it a name and bring it up as one of Nash’s family as he had promised before marriage.’

Betty nee Seaward turns into Joyce Lillian Fairley. She will live in Island Bay and, later, Petone, where James Fairley had his stationery- and bookshop. Mr Fairley, who my siblings grew up calling Grandad, was, I’m told, a kind and gentle man. The 1918 electoral roll describes him as a ‘torpedo man’, living at the Shelly Bay naval base with his wife Edith. My sister Pat said he took his own horse off to the Boer War and that on his return he ran a horse-and-cart milk delivery in Island Bay. She remembers his wife, Nana, had an enormous bust, and wore a dress that dropped off the edge of her like a curtain. She liked to play croquet. I imagine they led full lives, but these are the scraps that survive. All I ever knew of Mr Fairley was what was inside that mahogany box containing the past, which my mother had said was difficult to open. I understand he knew nothing of what happened at home when he was at the bookshop, when my mother was tied to a chair and thrashed for her failure to be what the bookseller’s wife wanted more than anything, a quick replacement for her own dead children.

In October 1917 the Fairleys lose their daughter, Isabella Margaret, and in April the following year seven-year-old John Fergus ‘Jackie’. Later that year, the Fairleys adopt Mum, and name her Joyce Lillian.

She never liked that middle name Lillian. She would smirk whenever asked to supply it on official forms. But Mum embodied the characteristics expected of someone called Joyce. Wore dresses that Joyce would—unflattering dresses—then, after her change of fortune, she dressed more stylishly, and Joyce the bag lady was superseded by Joyce the clothes horse.

The house Mum was sent to turns out to be an old rustic timber cottage. Eden Street lies one kilometre up from Island Bay on the edge of Cook Strait. I found the Fairleys’ house in a row of wooden houses below the crest of an east-facing hill one December afternoon when fog rolling off the strait had closed the airport and sat in drifts over the hills. A hammer banged away in the unseen distance. The odd car groaned up the steep part of Eden Street from the sea end.

Eight houses along from the Fairleys, the street disappears down a hill. Beyond the nearest neighbour in the other direction the road vanishes. It is an odd piece of landscape, a large sky-basking arena with bits and pieces of hilltop and hillside that sit as if suspended and apart from one another.

When my mother arrived there, Eden Street was the outer boundary of the suburbanisation that had crept up the hill from the Parade. Cattle grazed on the slopes above and on the naked hills across the valley.

I would have liked a tour of the house. I’m not shy about knocking on the door of strangers, so I mounted the steps. But through the front window I saw a woman on her bed reading a book, so I quietly retreated to the road.

The best I could do was to appreciate 88 Eden Street in relation to everything around it. I noticed those features that might have sprung memories were my mother to have stood where I did—the bullnose veranda on the villa across the road, a number of other rustic cottages of similar vintage, one lovely old place that sat on a knob of hill to the south, a very old and solid cabbage tree that shifted ever so slightly in a steady breeze that poured up the hill where the road dropped from view, and the pitch and roll of a landscape that never really settled into one thing or another.

I followed Eden Street down the steep incline, noting the number of ‘No Exit’ signs, and very quickly arrived at the Parade on the flat, to a number of two-storey timber shops. Across the Parade I noticed a pedestrian lane running through the back of the houses. The moment I started along it I realised I was following my mother’s route to Island Bay School. The lane came out beside a large timber house, possibly a boarding house in Mum’s day. On Clyde Street I looked across to the school, where a dad, dressed like an overgrown schoolboy, and his young son raced around the concrete play area on bikes. I crossed the road to read the school’s mission statement which was fixed to the fence:

We are a learning community growing children to be:

Skilled communicators

Deep thinkers

Superb managers of self

And confident about the future.

The word ‘confident’ was contained within a star. These are worthy values. But if I think of them as stars of alignment in my mother’s world of 1918 they begin to dim. Her launch pad into the world was altogether different.

The bastard is the godfather of the outsider. Filius nullius. A Nobody.

A bastard floats free of the normal constraints, but for that freedom a price is exacted—the bastard only ever occupies thresholds. In the Old Testament, the bastard is even more of an outcast: ‘He shall not enter the congregation of the Lord, and nor shall his offspring for ten generations.’ In the Old Testament the concern is less moral than an anxiety about the weakening of the tribal bond. A bastard in the context of the Old Testament was the offspring of a marriage between an Israelite and non-Israelite.

In King Lear, Edmund explains his aloofness from society on the grounds of an ‘irregular birth’:

Why bastard? Wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us
With base? With baseness? Bastardy? Base, base?

After I read Hawthorne’s account of Hester Prynne’s shame and the transcript of Maud’s divorce in the Supreme Court I felt the world begin to close around me. This is what a greater awareness of the past achieves. It finds a place for everything. Random occurrences—‘acts of God’—are exchanged for pattern and inevitability.

Of course the earthquake struck when and where it did, and to the naked eye of course the pattern of bad luck would seem random, unless of course you knew about the old city maps indicating ancient subterranean waterways, and of course I would find myself born into a world of silence because that is precisely what the shamed bestows upon the progeny—a wilful forgetting.

The bastard civilisation rises on its own conceit as ‘self-made’. It is as singular as a plant in the desert—luminously present and ducking all questions as to how it came to be there, apparently self-seeding and self-sustaining because there is no other clue to what sprouted it.

At 88 Eden Street, the bastard is delivered to a round of new people. There is a new Mum. There is a new Mr Nash. This one is called Mr Fairley. There is a new house, a new bedroom. The windows hold a different aspect.

She is into her fifth year and already there is a growing sense of a life lived and discarded.

The concrete has still to be laid, and when the nor-wester blows, dust rises off the streets. The world is delicate, light. Look how easily it shifts from place to place.

The streets off the Parade are named after rivers—the Derwent, Clyde, Thames, Liffey, Humber. Echoes of faraway places. Echoes of wishfulness.

Memory, in its unbidden way, will bring back the life she knew under Nash’s roof—of voices rising up the stairs at Manley Terrace, the sound of someone flung against the wall, Maud’s cries and protests. Perhaps a rogue thought—cabbage trees, a craving for something sweet, say ice cream—then the wind in the eaves scurrying the thought, and in the blank space she hears her own name hurled against the ceiling. And she wonders how it is that a name can sound so soiled and beaten about. The guarded inquiries of the neighbours down at the front door. The more forthright voice of the constable. There was that period at Maungahuia in the Wairarapa, where the wind whistled out of sinkholes in the hills and washing flew off the line, and there was the smell of freshly made earth. Perhaps she was just old enough to appreciate that her mother was not of that world.

Of course there are no documents that record the moment of the separation of the mother and her child.

But when the quake struck on 22 February 2011 the city’s inhabitants scrutinised themselves, directly, moment by moment. Time was stopped and put up on Facebook and YouTube. The ground shook, and it was recorded by closed circuit cameras, by mobiles switched to camera and whirled about in shaken hands, as well by cooler minds who calmly held up their phones to record the moment of destruction.

There is no footage of the events when my mother’s world dramatically changed, or a record of what Maud said to her that last morning. Perhaps it crossed Maud’s mind that this was the last time that she and her daughter would wake up under the same roof. This is the last time she will wash her child’s face and lace up her boots, or sit her up to the table with a spoon.

I remember taking the dog in its aged, blind state to the vet to be put down. It lay on the vet’s table, its tail flat and lifeless, one trusting eye cocked up at me, its muzzle on its paws. And there is another moment too—on the day my mother died. She is sitting in an armchair at home, frail, and every now and then doubling over with stomach pain, but rallying to smile politely up at the woman from the hospice. And just on the edge of my own hearing, so perhaps Mum didn’t hear, the woman from the hospice says, ‘I think we’ll give her another day.’ Mum looked interested, as ever wishing to be polite. As it happened she had another ‘event’ that afternoon. By evening she was hooked up to the morphine drip from which, I discovered, there is no return. Her child-like look of trust haunts me, as does the dog’s, and so, now, the terrible feeling of betrayal Maud must have felt as she put out her daughter’s breakfast, and later perhaps brushed her hair, and wet a fingertip to remove a crumb from her cheek is easily imagined.

People in Christchurch spoke of the plain everyday ordinariness that led up to the 22 February earthquake. Then, hours and days and months after the earth shook apart, the mind insisted on going back to when everything held together looking for a sign.

Perhaps a number of little warnings that passed my mother by at the time were later remembered.

Perhaps Maud packed a small suitcase with her things. So it is reasonable for my mother to think she is going somewhere. And then, in small bites, the new circumstances come clear. She is going somewhere. She is going to the Fairleys. And, there they are, standing at the door, smiling down from their adult heights. One tall, the other a pumpkin. The hall is strange too—a different grade of light and air from what she is used to. She follows Maud inside, perhaps to a room where she is invited to play. Time passes. She wonders where everyone is. She returns to the hall. Voices are coming from one of the rooms. She will go there. She pushes on the door, the Fairleys look up, and slowly smile. Her mother has gone.

At the zoo in Newtown she might notice those animals that appear to read our very thoughts and share our instincts. The white feathered cockatoo, for example, with its shifting pink eye. There are other animals that appear homesick or depressed. The baboon reaches up to an overhanging branch and with baffling grace moves off to a remembered corner of the forest. The lions are besieged with homesickness. They are a reminder of everything that is wrongly aligned or out of place.

From the front porch at 88 Eden Street the long view is broken up by stubbly hills and valleys. The fast-moving clouds suggest change afoot, perhaps some rearrangement of the dust at the door where her mother will show up.

She is somebody’s daughter. It is hard to say whose. She was Maud’s, but now there is another woman who acts like her mother: dresses her, feeds her, but then stares at her as if she ought to be someone else, and is disappointed to discover that she is not that person after all. So she must find a way of living with her failure to be what Mrs Fairley wishes her to be, as well as the failure of what she was in the Nash household.

Did Maud ever visit her daughter? Maud told the court she hadn’t set eyes on Betty since handing her on to the Fairleys, four years earlier.

In a letter to O.T. Maud mentions handling the adoption ‘through friends’. She doesn’t say the friends are adopting my mother. Her vagueness may be deliberate, to prevent Nash discovering Betty’s whereabouts. But then why would he care? Wouldn’t he be relieved to be rid of the child whom he regarded as a curse on his life, proof of Maud’s lying, and of a past of which he was never quite sure?

If the Fairleys were friends, did they cease to be the moment they adopted my mother? If such a friendship survived I imagine Mum would have remembered the bitter-sweet occasions of her mother visiting.

As long as there is memory a life is never fully discarded. It lingers on—a scratch on the ceiling, a corner of the wallpaper pulled away, a whisper, a laugh, a touch, the first lick of something delicious, a ride in a car. And other puzzling moments that make no sense on their own. Mr Nash, who used to cuddle her and at other times call her names, and spit in her food, and shout at her mother, shout at them both as they walked up the street, which made people stop and stare, while others walked on as if they had not heard a thing. And the silences that seem to mean something but she cannot say what it is. The silence building in the car, as they drove at the edge of the strait. Her mother, in the front. Mr Nash looking further up the road. They were on their way to somewhere, but that place has slipped her memory. Why does the mind produce such moments? Where is Mr Nash? Will he find her in his motor car? Perhaps she paints pictures—to reinstate the world she has lost. She puts in a boat, installs her mother as a pilot. The boat is at sea. She paints herself on the beach. Her mother cannot see her, and it seems impossible that the boat will ever turn to the shore where she stands waving. Has her mother lost her? Or is she busy, detained, preoccupied with the two boys. These are words she will learn to spell at Island Bay School. She is coming into the complexities of language that will help her establish the arrangement of the world and make sense of it. She is read to. She reads. She wonders where her mother is. What is taking her so long? She learns her mother is in England, which she discovers is on the other side of the world. She picks up a coin. On one side is the King of England. On the other, a tui. She clutches both in the palm of her hand. (As late as 1960, my mother referred to England, where she had never been, as ‘home’.)

She may find kinship in the emasculated hills—what once covered them has also gone. The old trees have been replaced. The wind rises to hysteria. People continue to smile. They are encouraged to.

She is awake. Daylight is breaking. It is time to get up, to wash, to eat breakfast, to brush her teeth, to go to school. There are things to attend to, teachers to listen to. Arcane bits of information to store away. Trees weep—a little-known fact. And farmers with an unsentimental eye slit the throats of fly-blown sheep. Beech, she will learn, are happiest in the company of other beech.

Solace.

Despondent over the departure of a good friend, Pliny the Younger writes to his correspondent who has offered sympathy, ‘Either say something that I have never read of before, or else hold thy peace.’

Cures for melancholia once included conserves of roses, violets, orange pills, condite. ‘Odoraments’ such as rose-water, balm, vinegar, ‘do much to recreate the brains and spirits.’

As an adult Mum swore by her daily tablespoon of cod-liver oil. She also loved to read about other lives, biographies.

Hawthorne introduced the W to his name to separate him from a Puritan forebear, Hathorne, who had been a judge at the Salem witch trials. A slight alteration of name might have succeeded in distancing him, but a writer’s works have a way of tracking back to his wellsprings.

Seneca spoke of Simon changing his name to Simonides and setting fire to the house of his birth so nobody should point to it.

In her reading Mum might have found solace in fables. Aesop, for example, telling off the fox and his companions who are complaining for want of tails—‘you complain for want of toys, but I am quite blind, be quiet; I say to thee, be thou satisfied.’

And, ‘It is recounted of the hares, that, with a general consent they were to drown themselves out of feelings of misery, but when they saw a company of frogs more fearful than they were, they began to take courage and comfort again.’

She loved the sea, found comfort in its moods and inconstancy, in its capacity to reflect and to absorb. As a young woman, she swam between the rafts moored out from Petone Beach. Her swimming course followed the Esplanade and a number of streets running up the valley, named after the ships—Aurora, Cuba, Tory, Oriental—that delivered the first white settlers to this same beach. She swam over ghosted moorings. Back and forth, said my father. He maintained she was a good swimmer. Years later, when I was a toddler, she would bring me to this same beach to splash in the shallows, even when the tide was red from the discharge at Ngauranga and the meatworks at the old p end of the beach. But I never saw her swim.

Krapp’s tragedy is that he is stuck with his life. Confined to his tapes, endless replays and outbursts of rage. Maud’s strategy was to forget, and to help the process she sought a physical solution. In 1919, some months after she gave up my mother, Maud approached a lawyer to begin separation proceedings. Nash talked her out of it, and persuaded her to spend some time ‘with her people’ back home.

Maud left in 1920 and returned to England. Two years later she sails back to New Zealand as if arriving for the first time. It is a retracing of an older journey, in the same way as my sister Lorraine would set out from the house after a fit of epilepsy, or, like the basilica on Barbadoes Street, a dismantling followed by a reassembling, so that with the crossing of oceans and the passing of time everything might be stitched back together as good as new. And on her return, Maud will learn to abide within herself.

But not quite yet. There is the tail-end of her marriage to Harry Nash to work through.

They had written to one another over the two years Maud was away. Harry Nash sent a letter off with each boat. Maud’s letters arrived regularly. ‘Some of Maud’s mail was nice enough,’ Harry Nash noted, but, ‘some of it could be nasty.’ In the one letter that survives, Maud calls Nash a liar and accuses him of backtracking on his promise to provide her and the children with a living income while in England. After Nash shows no willingness to pay for her return fare Maud marches off to the New Zealand High Commission in London to demand that the government take an interest in her domestic affairs. More unpleasantly, she threatens to tell Nash’s business colleagues in England of his ‘appalling treatment’ of her.

In England she lives in the house in Taunton where years later I would visit Mavis. Meat and fruit, she complains, are unaffordable, yet she takes herself off to the London theatre and treats herself to extravagant new clothes.

For her passage back to New Zealand she borrows from her brother, Bert. After their departure is delayed a fortnight following a collision in the Channel, Maud and the boys are handsomely compensated with an upgrade to a first-class passage. Six weeks later she passes through the familiar weather-beaten heads of Wellington Harbour.

Things don’t get off to the best of starts when Nash is late getting down to the wharf to meet Maud and the two boys off the SS Paparoa. Harry’s first conciliatory act was to take Maud and the boys to Kirkaldie & Stains department store for morning tea. In Nash’s account, within a short time Maud is nagging him.

The next day they make plans to go to the races. They squabble over some slight thing. Within three days of cohabitation Nash has moved out. There has been another incident.

In Maud’s absence Nash has employed a housekeeper, a Miss Andrews. I wonder if Maud sniffed the possibility of a dalliance between the housekeeper and Nash. If true, this has a certain poetic justice. If it isn’t true then there is no acceptable explanation for what follows.

Mr Nash: ‘Mrs Nash and myself had agreed to go to the races with a party. Miss Andrews came down to help and Mrs Nash chased her upstairs, and had Miss Andrews pinned on the bed…’

Miss Andrews: ‘Mrs Nash chased me up the stairs and into my bedroom and she tried to throttle me from behind and as I could not free myself I screamed for Mr Nash, and when he freed me I left the house without packing.’

And Nash files for a decree of separation.

The judge directs the all-male jury to find one party guilty of cruelty to the other. If it finds both Nash and Maud to be equally guilty of cruelty then he will not grant a decree of separation.

The jury returns in Nash’s favour.

Maud appeals on the grounds that the judge unfairly directed the jury, but also to clear her name of all the damaging things Nash said of her in court.

Nash mounts his own lawsuit against one of the Newtown neighbours, Harry Cobb, after he was seen acquainting himself with a number of jurors in a way that Nash felt was prejudicial to his case.

All six Supreme Court judges dismiss Maud’s appeal. Judge Stout is especially damning:

Is there evidence in which the jury could reasonably have come to the conclusion that she had been guilty of cruelty to her husband? In my opinion the evidence was ample. I go further and say that if the jury had found her not guilty of cruelty that verdict would have been against the weight of evidence and a perverse verdict.

Maud never did come to the front door or appear in the window of her house to wonder about the mysterious car parked along the street.

Maud will never again marry or, as far I know, enter into another relationship. She will raise the two boys on her own. She begins a women’s clothing business, which struggles.

Mysteriously, when Mum is around the age of twelve or thirteen, she is plucked from the Fairleys and returned to Maud to live in the building in High Street where, years later, we would buy my school uniforms.

Why? If she knew, Mum never explained. It remains a mystery. Just as puzzling is why the Fairleys would agree.

It’s possible that my mother was proving a handful. She told my sisters that after she moved with Maud, Eric and Ken to a house on The Terrace in the city she was forever climbing out of windows at night and getting into trouble. What kind of trouble? It was never spelt out. Mum told her children different things.

From Barbara I learnt that Maud disapproved of Mum’s table manners—said she ate ‘like an animal’. I wonder if Maud’s objection conceals a more painful truth. The little girl she had loved and given away in order to secure her a loving home has turned into someone less loveable than the child she remembered.

In an attempt to escape the past Hester undoes the clasp that fastens the scarlet letter A around her neck and throws it to the ground. The burden of shame and anguish passes out of her. Feeling herself liberated she lets down her hair, her mouth softens, and a radiance returns to her eyes. ‘Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her beauty came back from what men call the irrevocable past.’

Except, perversely and cruelly, in her newly liberated state she is no longer recognisable to her little girl. She has turned into someone else. For Pearl, the figure of motherly love is burdened and stigmatised, and so, aware of this sad fact, Hester has no choice but to reach down and reattach the scarlet letter.

Perhaps my mother and Maud had moved too far apart, and failed to recognise one another. Their reunion is unpicked and Mum is let go a second time and never again invited back into Maud’s life.

Both Maud’s sons go off to the Second World War. Ken is a naval officer. Eric returns from the disastrous Crete campaign with memories he will not speak of (and, on the few occasions we met late in his life, whenever I attempted to steer the conversation in that direction he would see it coming and with an evasive smile reach for his glass of gin). He farms land in the rugged central North Island King Country that has been broken in, cleared back to bare lumps of hillside dotted with sheep.

As Maud was a regular visitor, I wonder if the smells of one farm ever brought back memories of Taruna, and of Owen T. Evans, and of the child they had. Did she ever consider these gaps in her life—and reflect on what she had lost? Or had she absorbed the ability to forget?

To look ahead, one must forget. The rules of progress are written into the landscape.

In the 1960s, when she was still in her mid-twenties, my sister Pat knocked on Maud’s door. At the time Pat worked in the market-research department of the Wills tobacco factory in Petone. She was in charge of a team conducting a door-to-door survey, and when Maud’s name came up on the sheet of addresses my sister decided to take that one for herself.

She knocked on the door, and waited. She knocked again. She was about to give up when a woman in her seventies appeared from the side of the house. She had been gardening out the back. Finding the young researcher on her porch, Maud invited her inside. She made my sister a cup of tea and sat her down at the kitchen table.

Pat discovered Maud to be a polite and carefully spoken old English lady. Maud got out her photographs and proudly showed Pat her sons and grandchildren. Then she sat down and put on her glasses and answered the tobacco company’s questions without ever knowing that across the table from her sat her granddaughter.

The last Maud saw of my mother was when she told her never to show her face again. But Mum remained in Maud’s orbit right up to the end.

In 1977, Mum and my sister Barbara followed the cars leaving Maud’s funeral service to a house in the beach suburb of Waikanae on the Kapiti Coast. They parked out on the road, and sat there for a while. Mum, as usual, was riddled with self-doubt and old fears. At Barbara’s encouragement and insistence, eventually she made herself get out of the car, cross the road, and knock on the door.

Ken Nash recognised her immediately. Fifty years had passed since he had last seen her. He invited her in, but remained formal, distant. Fortunately, Eric was more welcoming. He seemed to know what Mum was after, and to his great credit he willing gave it. He invited her to stay with him and his wife, Barbara, in Warkworth, north of Auckland. After half a lifetime spent apart, sister and brother resumed their relationship. Mum would drive up to Warkworth or else Eric and Barbara would drive down the island to stay with Mum. I remember them sitting on the couch holding hands and, whenever Eric’s warm and lovely teetotal wife’s back was turned, they would top up each other’s gin glass.

Towards the end, when neither one could travel, communication was difficult. Eric suffered from emphysema and could not breathe without the help of an oxygen tank. A series of strokes had cleaned Mum out of language. On one occasion my sister Pat stood in the kitchen passing phone messages back and forth. She had to make most of it up. Eric died a few months after Mum.

I looked in the hairdresser’s window once and saw her, wide-eyed beneath a dryer, like someone receiving shock treatment. My father used to say I’d send my mother to the loony bin if I carried on the way I did. I can’t remember what I did to cause offence. This recollection has no real role to play. But, it continues to exist, like a card fallen out of a pack, representative of other such moments that fail to add up to anything more. In this way a life sheds itself. It leaves skin on furniture, hair on the pillow. A life reduces to a couple of walk-on parts in other people’s recollections. And while some faces may fade, others remain stuck forever like an overbearing portrait glowering down from the walls.

The other day I saw a woman in her fifties get up from a cafe table and embrace a younger woman who appeared to be her daughter. Maud never knew her place in Mum’s life.

She might have thought to break the ice, perhaps say something nice. Offered a cup of tea instead of turning the young mother away from the door.

I was thirteen years old when Apollo 8 delivered a wider view of where we lived. How humbling to behold our blueness as never before seen and the extreme vanity of our undertakings and devotions, as well as our fears, of death, and of shame.