Towards Another Summer (21 page)

Number Fifty-six was unlike any other house we had ever lived in. It had a bathroom with a bath, a shower, a basin, taps for hot and cold water. It had a lavatory between the wash-house and the coal-shed - a little wooden house with spiders in the corners and a shelf spattered with candle-grease. The electricity which we had never known before provided my father with a new complaining exclamation,

—All the lights in the house blazing! You can see this place all the way down Thames Street; who do you think we are, all the lights in the house blazing?

Thames Street became my father’s landmark. If we shouted we could be heard ‘at the foot of Thames Street’; if anything seemingly impossible were demanded the reply came,

—You expect me to traipse down Thames Street!

My father pronounced Thames to rhyme with
lame
. I marvelled at the way he refused, against all opposition, to change it to rhyme with
hem
. . .

So. A house, a garden with a rose arch, a banksia rose summer house where we could act
Hugh Idle and Mr Toil
, two japonica bushes, one Japanese, one red; a plum tree with half the branches hanging over the neighbour’s fence; a pear tree with two kinds of pears, honey and winter; apple trees, cookers and Irish peaches; a peach tree which never bore fruit; a fowl-house; a cow-byre; at the back, beyond the garden, the bull paddock, the hill with its caves and fossils, the pine plantations extending for miles; and everywhere, to the left, to the right, across the street, along Glen Street to the gully, so many neighbours and their children . . . the rich people whose children were not allowed to play with any small child who rapped at the door, ‘Please c’n Mary come over to play at our place’, and the poorer parents who didn’t mind where anybody played and who, in the evenings when bedtime was near, stood at the open front doors up and down the street, calling in loud voices, Joh-nny, Joh-nny, the last syllable rising an octave, the word scouring every corner of the insistently sleepless twilight. Our mother, with five names to call, was one of the best callers in the street, with bush Coo-ees added to strengthen her commands which began with the eldest, descending in order of age to the youngest, Isy, Jimm-y, Gra-ace, Dott-ums, Chickabidee! With so many names called there was little likelihood that no one heard, although we tried to establish that only one name had been called,

—Isy, you’re wanted.

—Jimmy, you’re wanted.

Or, more threatening,

—Dad wants you!

In the end we gave in, wound up our game, said see-you-tomorrow, and trooped home to where our father, tucking into his dinner, would say, with more discrimination than my mother who did not mind (or said she did not mind) who were our playmates as all children of whatever wealth, race, creed should play together,

—I hope you haven’t been playing with the Petersen children . . . Don’t let me catch you with Billy Walker.

These admonitions thrilled us with pleasure, enabling us the next day to boast, as a condescending prelude to playing with the Petersens or Billy Walker,

—We’re not allowed to play with you.

Our piece said, we would enjoy our game, relishing the extra spice of danger provided by associating with forbidden friends.
Associating
. That was the grim word—Don’t you let me see you
associating
with Ted McLeod.
Associating
was a more grave crime than
playing with
.

 

That was Oamaru; everything and everybody swiftly made clear with names and nicknames, nicknames for the admired and friendly, nicknames for the mad, passing slipper-slopper at the end of the street, shaking fists and cursing. The new world was so full of fearful and pleasurable excitements that the movement of them overflowed in me. I blinked, made funny faces, and my mother and father, looking me up in the green-covered ‘Doctor’s Book’ said,

—St Vitus Dance.

—Stop making those faces, my father said.—You’ve got St Vitus Dance.

—St Vitus Dance, St Vitus Dance!

It was something to tease me with, and teasing-points were so powerful that we quickly seized them for use one against the other. My nose wobbled like a rabbit’s nose.

—I’ll put you out in a burrow with the rabbits if you don’t stop making those faces. Look at her, just look at her.

My shoulders and arms jerked up and down like pump-handles.

I was six years old, in Standard One at the North School, and it was such a long way to go to school, not a simple ‘down the road, across the railway line and around the corner’, but through and up and down many streets with choices of this or that street according to time, mood and company. To get home for dinner and back to school in time we had to run and run, jog-trotting with frequent glances at the always visible Town Clock; not to reach the Eden Street corner by a quarter to one
meant that all was in vain, we would be
late
. Most of the pupils living up Eden Street had to run at dinner-time and often as I was jog-trotting along, perhaps with the stitch (Oh, I’ve got the
stitch
), a big boy with bare knees and hairy legs would catch up with me and hiss in my ear as he passed me,

—I’m after you!

And when I sat down to my dinner of mince and potatoes I would say proudly,

—Willy Collins is after me!

Sometimes I put fear in my voice, if I felt the occasion demanded.

—Oh, I can’t go down to get the meat and the paper, Willy Collins is after me!

My mother would reply,

—Those big boys have no upbringing.

My mother often talked of ‘upbringing’. Whatever it was, we had it.

—I’ve got upbringing, I said to the girl at school sitting next to me in the single desk. All desks in Standard One were singles, an advance on the primers with their chairs and tables that made you feel you were being put in a doll’s house, but how my heart beat fast when I walked by Standard Two’s room and saw the double desks which the children talked of as ‘jewl’ desks. How I longed to sit in a ‘jewl’ desk! How I longed to be asked to fill the inkwells on Monday mornings! To put the flowers in water and be able to stand, dawdling, alone, out by the taps, listening to the mixed murmur of tables or the singing of
Come Oh Maidens

For the teacher to ask me to stay behind to help him after school! To give out the exercise books in the morning!

And how I longed to be able to skip ‘Double Dutch’ and French skipping alone instead of being ‘All in together this fine weather’ when the powerful and important children whose mothers gave them
whole clothes-lines
for skipping-ropes would invite the rabble (including me) to crowd into the skip ‘for good measure’! Oh the stifling feeling of wonder and admiration when I looked upon the one or two pupils who each season brought skipping ‘in’. One day there were no ropes in the playground, the next day a few spun by powerful pioneers; on the third day the excited shout, ‘Skipping’s in! Skipping’s in!’

The days were filled with longings, excitements, discoveries. I discovered geraniums. For days I lived in a dream of geraniums, their name, their colour, the way they spread wild on the banks by the houses in Glen Street. I picked them, touched the petals, crushed the stalks; the juice ran in the cracks of my fingers and hands where my life-line showed, and my heart-line, and my long line of deceit, and, crooked in my little finger, the seven lines which told me the number of children I would have - all my life and my heart and my deceit and my children were drenched with the smell and juice of geraniums!

 

I skipped to Standard Two, by the window, still not in a ‘jewl’ desk. The teacher was a young woman who said ‘Come out here’, and strapped hard, especially on Friday afternoons when we had Silent Reading. One day she looked out of the window and said,
and I sat so still, without making any faces or twitching my shoulders, while the deer were drinking; drink; the brink; link; that was water, lapping, and a quick escape into the forest; the ‘mellow’ stars; petals, butter.

—Pay attention!

Pay!

—Take out your
Dominion Song Books
!

Now
Come Oh Maidens
. Sing up, open your mouths! One, two. Now
Like to the Tide
.

Now sing it in Maori. Come on, open your mouths.

 

‘E pare ra . . .’

 

 

 

 

We were poor, there were wage-cuts, talk of the dole; the food bill went up and up, and my mother put on her best costume to go down to pacify the rent-man, and suddenly my clothes were too small and there was no more room for them to be let out and the Petone aunt sent a dark brown dress smelling of sweat, an old lady’s dress with gathered sleeves and the front rucked and tucked where old ladies put their titties. The geraniums were dead. And Fluffy the cat was sick. Jimmy was sick too, in the middle of the night, and my mother ran through the house in her nightie, crying,

—A convulsion, a convulsion! saying the middle syllable like a rush of warning, and we got out of bed, in the middle of the night, as if it were day-time; yawning, blinking, rubbing our eyes; huddled together with nowhere to go, no room was safe; the convulsion went rushing past our ears, like a wind; and no one knew why, no one could explain.

 

—Ready, one, two. Open your mouths, sing up!

The sun, shining so brightly in the classroom, was withdrawn. The brown desks and floors and walls with no light to mellow them, turned a dark dreary colour like furniture in passages where people walk in and out and along, but never stay. A wind coming from under the door clamped cold on my feet in their laceless gymshoes with the holey toes.

Is Grandad dead? Yes, Grandad is dead and he has left behind his spectacles in their velvet purple case, and his pipe, and his razor with the polished black handle.

Fluffy the cat died. I ran round the corner, I could not bear the terrible doom, the chill in the classroom, the song, the lonely beach with the sea sighing in every breath unable to stop or help; and no people, the warriors drowned or slain.

I ran home. Isy sprang out at me with a cry of triumph,

—Fluffy’s dead! Look, a Red Admirable Butterfly!

—Dead?

—Poisoned. A Red Admirable. Catch it!

—It’s
Admiral
.

—That’s the Navy, silly. She’s dead. We put her in a sugar-bag and buried her down the garden near the hedge.

 

But this is Winchley, this is not Oamaru. I am a migratory bird.

Grace went down to the kitchen for her coffee. Philip had returned from church and was leaning against the mantelpiece, smoking, drinking coffee, his light-hearted mood apparent in the occasional way he made a grab at Sarah or Noel, flung them on his shoulders or swung them from hand to hand like water-buckets aimed to extinguish the generally still-smouldering mood of Sunday. The kitchen had grown warmer with the meal now cooking, and Anne’s face was flushed and streaked with red. She sat down, sighing with weariness, at the end of the table to finish her coffee. Sarah, in a sudden rediscovery of the delights of looking from a window, and with the demand that the pleasure be hers alone, was pushing and pinching the tearfully persistent Noel who wanted to share the view although he was not high enough to see.

—Let me see, let me see! was the interpretation of his dribbly moans and wails.

—Sarah, now Sarah! Anne’s voice was calm, gentle.

—He wants to look out, Sarah said, with equal placidity, pushing deftly at Noel.

—Let me see, let me!

—Have you read your library book, Sarah?

—I can’t find the picnic in it.

—The picnic one’s back in the library. This is your new one. Have you read it?

—It’s gabbidy, gabbidy, gabbidy, Sarah said vehemently. —Very gabbidy.

She left the window and went to Philip who pulled her on his knee and sat on one chair with his feet on the other.

—I’ve been telling Grace about my friend who burps, Anne said.

—Fine. Did you tell her about Wallace?

—Yes, I told her about Wallace and her bedsitter and the cooking.

—Do you always call her by her surname? Grace asked.

—Yes. It’s a habit from college days. The roll-call.

Philip turned to Grace. His eyes were like stones with yellow and brown water flowing upon them and flecks of darkness within them.

—In May, he said,—we go to a croft in the far North-West of Scotland where they talk of the rebellion of the forty-five as if it were recent history - (Oh, not again Philip, Anne was murmuring, smiling.)

—There’s Old Dugald -

Philip lifted Sarah from his knee, put down his cup of coffee, stubbed his cigarette in a tray, and stood, facing his audience, to become Old Dugald.

—You should hear him, he said. Changing to a far North-West accent, wagging his arm up and down with his fingers extended, he quavered,