Towards Another Summer (16 page)

 

 

 

 

Philip’s eyes were closed. He was recovering from the day; languishing, convalescent.

—Change chairs, so that you can study the books on
this
side of the room. And tomorrow night you can sit in that corner, studying the books there.

He laughed. They exchanged their seats just as Anne entered with a housewifely glance that yet contained the sinister northern exultation of the Macbeth family ‘I’ve done the deed!’

—I’ve put the children to bed.

—Good.

(‘A sorry sight. A foolish thought to say a sorry sight . . .’)

—Grace and I have changed places so that she can see the books on this side of the room; tomorrow night she’s going to sit in that corner.

Philip seemed amused by his plan. Anne, sitting facing the fire, found her place in
Ulysses
and began to read. Philip opened his book on
New Zealand External Affairs
. Grace, unable to select one item from the sudden luxury of reading, studied the titles on the shelves: Architecture; Church Architecture. New Zealand Novels.

—The more I read about him, the more I believe that Peter Fraser was New Zealand’s outstanding Prime Minister.

Both Grace and Anne looked up swiftly, defensively. Grace saw in her mind the pathetic cross-eyed bespectacled Prime Minister of whom she knew little and had not cared to know or if she knew she had forgotten. She remembered the attitude towards him which she had absorbed unthinking, sponge-like, from the free-floating stain of public opinion. For the first time she tried to understand her dislike of him; she was appalled to realise that in a ‘young’ country of ‘young’ people, sun, beaches, sport, physical health as the ideal perfection, the fact that their Prime Minister had been cross-eyed, had worn spectacles, had seemed unforgivable! He had been regarded as a ‘bad’ Prime Minister because he wore spectacles.

Grace could have wept with shame. As the poet had commanded, she laid ‘a more faithful memory’ upon the scene of her country, omitting for once the spellbinding outward landscape, the tourist glaciers, mountains, rivers, plains, bush, so often referred to as if they had been planned glories of a human workshop; concentrating on the personal scenery, the truly human constructions of habit, opinion, prejudice. She watched the smooth golden people with their clear sight, perfect limbs, brains bouncing with sanity and conformity; it seemed they were Life-Guard angels marching from tiny Waipapa beach in the south (‘Like to the tide moaning in grief by the shore . . .’) to the Northland coast burning with pohutukawas; while the massed bands played - the brass band with the
Invercargill
March
,
Colonel Bogey
; the pipe band with the
Cock o’ the North
,
Speed Bonny Boat
; and the sun shone, the day surged with light, while offshore the tidal wave, restrained for the moment or day or year, bided its drowning time, played its blue patience of wave overlapping numbered wave. Grace observed, with terror, the fanatical innocence of the march, the acceptance of it, the reverence towards it - why, there was her mother, ordinarily a gentle peaceful woman, proclaiming in her confusion of Civil War, God, Country,

Vintage?

The Life-Guards were trampling sand. Why their sudden movements of irritation, the spasmodic threshing of their arms in the air? The sandflies. Of course, they were killing the sandflies, those tiny black insects which pursued biting, stinging, raising red lumps on the skin; unsightly lumps on the bronzed beautiful skin.

Grace was so surely on the beach at that moment that when a drowsy, lazily-observing sunbathing couple turned to her and said,

—Isn’t it wonderful, a great little country, sun, beach, everyone so healthy?

Grace agreed,

—It’s wonderful, the best place in the world to bring up children; sun, opportunity, health, happiness.

—And soon they’ll be getting that stuff to kill off all the sandflies. Then, it will be even better. It stands to reason that the sandflies are a nuisance.

—Yes, it stands to reason.

What do you expect, then, when the mad, the crippled, the unconforming, try to get a place on the beach?

And when a Prime Minister appears, with cross-eyes, spectacles, can’t you be expected to dislike him, as you dislike
a sandfly which spoils the parade by making an unsightly red lump on your perfect skin?

 

 

 

 

—I didn’t know much about Peter Fraser, Anne said to Philip.

—I didn’t either, Grace said.—I always think of Mickey Savage as the great New Zealand Prime Minister.

She remembered the huge photograph of Mickey Savage which had covered one wall of their kitchen at home; his gentle face smiling, unscribbled upon, because even as children they had revered him - they could never forget the moments of pure happiness when the notice came from the Health Department that medical and hospital attention were to be free,
free
, and their father had collected all the unpaid hospital and doctors’ bills, brushed the dust from their windows, opened them, smoothed them, read them aloud, shuffled them into a pile, and with a shout of joy, pokered the ring from the stove and thrust them into the fire. Grace remembered that their mother’s excitement had been tempered with a slight fear that the chimney might be set alight while the hospital bills burned.

—They charge five shillings for a chimney fire!

 

—Yes, Grace said, unconsciously quoting from her parents,

—Mickey Savage was the one!

(He’s the one, her mother would say.—After old Forbes-and-Coates and the Coalition, he’s the one! Grace never had a clear understanding of whether Forbes-and-Coates were one or two people or if they were people at all; her image of them was a childish one of coats, black, going green with age, tattered with moth-holes, hanging in a wardrobe; while the word ‘Coalition’ which she had seen printed made a sound like the shovelling of ‘slack’, and like slack it seemed something undesirable - the woman next door used to stand in her backyard and call to her son,—Bill, get on more coal, give me no slack!)

—He was the one, Grace murmured.

—Oh yes, Anne agreed.

Grace and Anne exchanged smiles, aware of their sudden bond of sympathy, their New Zealand background and experience overwhelming them with traditional attitudes and statements, their lips set firmly - they would show any Pommie who tried to tell them what they didn’t know about their own country!

The moment was gone in a flash but both Grace and Anne had realised it, their bristling in defence against ‘foreigners’ (especially ‘Pommies’). Grace quoted to herself,

Foreigners were dangerous, especially in a ‘young’ country. Queers too, outsiders, intellectuals, any doubtful group who might spoil the pleasure of the golden Life-Guards parading the golden beach.

—Certainly, Philip admitted.—Savage introduced Social Security. But it was Peter Fraser who moulded the San Francisco Conference. Almost in opposition to his country it was he who gave New Zealand a voice in World Affairs, who made her look beyond herself for a change; he helped New Zealand in a stage of growing-up.

Oh it’s so hard, Grace thought, to care for what one man contributes, invisibly, to the peace of the world, when there’s a vivid memory of another who brought peace, for a time at least, into our home set, strangely, in the street of innocence and experience - Fifty-six Eden Street Oamaru South Island New Zealand Southern Hemisphere the World. The world comes so far at the end of the statement; it is so easy to forget it. If I put my list of places to the test by holding them (as they say of the guinea pig) ‘upside down by the tail’ - Fifty-six Eden Street, Oamaru, South Island, New Zealand, Southern Hemisphere, the
World, - it is the world, like the guinea pig’s eyes, that would drop out; only places, like guinea pigs, have no tail; they are one; and nothing drops out, ever.

It is so hard to judge. Peter Fraser, Mickey Savage. South, north, the world.

Grace felt suddenly depressed, annoyed by her muddled insular thinking, tired of the ‘World’ and its problems, lacking the energy to spread her emotional net so wide and the power to pull it home unaided to her heart. She felt lonely; she would sit on a tiny island beach in the sun, or perhaps, after all, she would join the Life-Guards in their march; the massed bands would cheer her, yes, yes, it would be fun to march to the band, and not nearly so uncomfortable now that they had arranged to kill all the sandflies. Sandflies were a nuisance. It stood to reason.

—It stands to reason, her father shouted. What a wonderful phrase that was, what quelling power was contained in it!

 

—Excuse me . . . I . . . I’ll go upstairs for a time - to switch the fire on . . .

—Of course, of course.

Grace escaped upstairs. For a while she huddled over the gas fire, then drawn to the bookshelf and the few books which Anne’s father had chosen to bring from New Zealand, she found the
History of the Rifle Brigade
, sat down by the fire and began to read the chapter headed
War in the Trenches
, and while she read she could hear her father singing defiantly, trembling with fear, with disbelief that what was so, was so.

In the clear white-painted cold room which the gas fire could not even begin to warm, Grace read and thought about the First World War, reliving the squalor and terror of it, for though she had not been born until six or seven years after the end of the War, by the convenience of Hollywood, and by the quiet more obscure imaginings gained from her father’s talk of war, and the songs he sang about it, she had believed, as a child, that she lived during it, that she had, in fact, ‘been to the War’, fought in the trenches, suffered wounds by gas and shrapnel.

Nearly every Saturday afternoon at the Majestic Theatre, with her acid drops and aniseed balls in the crisp rustling bag, mixed fairly by the obliging Mrs Widdall so that neither acid drops nor aniseed balls would be left in a monotonous clump at the end of the bag, Grace went to the War, sometimes on the German ‘side’, sometimes on the side of the ‘Allies’. She could not think, without a stifling experience of horror, of the afternoon when she had been trapped under the sea in a submarine shelled by a torpedo. She and her sisters and brother had watched the serial,
The Ghost City
, and although they realised that cowboys and rustlers were ‘pretend’, they had been given their following week’s quota of nightmare by the ending of the day’s episode where the ‘goodie’ entered the shed of a deserted quarry while unknown to him the ‘baddie’ set in operation the huge stone-crusher; slowly, slowly it began to descend on him; he could not escape; the episode ended in a crash of music and hooves and it was time for ice-creams.

Then the lights were put out and Grace and her sisters and brother found themselves under the sea in a submarine, in danger of being suffocated or drowned. Every time they tried to forget their danger the picture reminded them by showing the water
gradually rising and the other members of the crew gasping for breath, collapsing, going mad with panic. Suffocation. It was a terrifying word. Grace could never forget the yellow gleam of the underwater light, not the colour of sunlight, for it lay so far from the sun that light had never touched it; a yellow sulphurous glow which reminded her of the last day of Pompeii - another catastrophe experienced and real in the confusion of remembering, knowing, dreaming, which seem to funnel all events read, heard or known, drop by drop into the containing pool of a child’s memory.

When the picture finished, and Grace and her sisters and brother trooped out, blinking, into the harsh sandpaper daylight so different from the soft secret gleam beneath the sea, they knew, or rather Grace knew, and she took it for granted that the others knew also, that the world had changed; it would never ever be the same. Grace looked at the people spilling out of the
Exits
; she almost felt that she could not breathe for thinking about their doom of suffocation and death. Although she had never noticed it before, she knew as she watched them that they were finding difficulty in breathing on and on and on, yet they were not under the sea, they were up here in the world, on the earth, with the sun shining, the daylight twinkling and birds singing and the leaves on the trees turning yellow and brown and gold and in the garden of the big two-storeyed red brick house where Miss Peters lived, the three sycamore trees leaning into the street were also turning gold.

—The sycamores are ripe, Grace thought, springing and skipping suddenly.—The sycamores are ripe.

That meant they were ready for windmills. On the way home from the pictures they made windmills from the sycamores, running along the street with them, but every third or fourth skip they remembered and knew that making windmills and running along in the wind couldn’t change the fact that people, even those walking about with plenty of air in the sky and all the world, were growing more and more frightened of not being able to breathe, of suffocating in a secret place withdrawn from the sun where the light, though softened by water, gleamed yellow as the volcanic
fire on that last day of Pompeii . . . Pompeii . . . Grace remembered that her mother had been there too, how she had called their attention to the rumbling of the volcano, and then stood quite still, holding aside the curtain of the kitchen window and saying in a voice shrill with disaster,—Pompeii. Pompeii.