Towards Another Summer (7 page)

But
Ulysses
. Oh. Grace remembered
Ulysses
, but again it was not the book which claimed her memory. It was the realisation that the strangeness and insecurity of the late war years, spent at school and college, were epitomised most vividly and terribly, for Grace, in the paper on which books of those years were printed: pale yellow speckled paper where the printed word seemed just another blemish that could be attributed, in the preface, to War-Time Economy. Grace remembered that opening such books filled her with terror and foreboding; it seemed as if an end had come to everything, that nothing mattered any more; books had seemed, in some way, the last hope, and now that language had become as an excusable stain upon a piece of coarse kitchen towelling, there was no hope left.

At that moment Grace thought, What if Philip’s eyes with their dark flecks are reminding me of the print upon yellow sheets of war-time economy paper?

—Oh, she said suddenly and foolishly,—Oh it’s quiet here, there’s no traffic!

Philip and Anne stopped their reading to look tolerantly at her.

—Yes, you’ll find it a change, Anne said, returning to
Ulysses
.

—Winchley’s quiet, Philip agreed, opening
The Spectator
.

—I notice, he said, that the critics are ceasing to be indulgent towards every Russian writer who is published here. Some are
even turning against
Doctor Zhivago
. I didn’t care terribly for it myself.

—Oh I liked it, Anne said.—It made me weep. Of course, I was pregnant at the time.

—If you read it when you were pregnant and wept over it then perhaps the critics- Grace began.

Philip finished her sentence, laughing.

—Perhaps the critics were pregnant?

—Did you read it, Grace?

—Yes, no, I mean yes. I don’t read many novels.

—Professional jealousy?

—Perhaps; yes.

—I hope your coming for the weekend is not interrupting anything you’re working on.

—Oh no, Oh no.

Grace continued her study of the books near her, choosing one from time to time, reading a little, then replacing it. She felt tired. She wanted to go home to London, to the flat, to sit at her typewriter; she wanted to sleep; to turn her face away from the street-lights and close her eyes.

—Philip has plenty of New Zealand books.

—Yes.

She opened the
Book of New Zealand Verse
which in New Zealand she had always kept by her bed but which she had been unable to read during her stay in Great Britain. She touched the familiar red cover, noting with pleasure the clear bold printing, the beautiful m’s and n’s like archways, the lintel t’s, the delicately-throated r’s . . . She glanced through the long introductory essay, a self-conscious loving dedication to ‘these islands’, and then began to read some of the poems.

So I, a migratory bird, am suffering from the need to return to the place I have come from before the season and sun are right for my return. Do I meet spring summer or winter? Here I live in a perpetual other season unable to read in the sky, the sun, the temperature, the signs for returning. Is it homesickness - ‘I know a place whereon . . .’ the matagouri, the manuka, the cabbage tree grow . . .

I know a place.

Grace said to herself, I found my first place when I was three. It is a memory that is so deep in my mind that it is always and never changing. I went by myself into the dusty road. It was late summer, the gorse flowers in the hedge were turning brown at the tips of their petals, crumpling and dropping. The sky was grey with a few white clouds hurried along by the wind. There were no people anywhere, not up or down the dusty road. I looked up and down and along and over and there was no one. This is
my
place, I thought, standing still, listening. The wind moaned in the telegraph wires and the white dust whirled along the road and I stood in
my
place feeling more and more lonely because the gorse hedge and its flowers were mine, the dusty road was mine, and the wind and the moaning it made through the telegraph wires. I cannot describe the sense of loneliness I felt when I knew that I was in my place; it was early to learn the burden of possession, to own something that couldn’t be given away or disowned, that had to be kept for ever. I remember that I didn’t stay long in
my
place: I cried and I ran home, but my place followed me like a shadow and it is always near me, even here in Winchley, and I do not even need to close my eyes or call for silence before I am there, and once there wanting to escape from the message of the wind for there is no one up or down along and over and it is dust, not people, that whirls its busy life along the road.

I remember that a year later I found another place which was mine. I found it, that is, I set out to look for it; it was given to
me; I took possession of it. We had moved to a new district in the south (as ever) - a wilderness of sheep, cattle, the dark damp growth and precipitating water of gullies; swamps, tussock; few people. The railway house was there on the hill waiting for us to move in. We children had stomped about in every room making the wooden floors echo with our heavy rhythm of occupation. Men were carrying the furniture up the hill; my mother was ‘seeing to’ cups of tea for everybody; there were bursts of excitement, temper, tears, as we planned the first night when we always slept, in a new house, in a mattress bed on the floor with the blackpainted and scraped iron bedends with their screw-on brass knobs (in which we placed our communications in code) and the rusty wire mattress leaning against the wall, ready to be hammered together the next day.—Mum, have you got the bed-key? Where’s the bed-key? Why can’t we always sleep on the floor?

I’ll tan your bottoms the lot of you . . .

Suddenly finding myself alone and dissatisfied with the possession of a new house, I went down the front steps through the grass-overgrown garden into a paddock (sheep looked at me, their heads on one side, their long noble faces thoughtful, their eyes narrow, slit with bits of licorice; their bodies were bunched and overclothed like Mrs Daniel, one of our neighbours in the last town we’d lived in). I walked a short way into another paddock, along a gully until I came to a clump of silver-birch trees, some dead, or dying, with new leaves sprouting from their sprawled trunks. I walked into the green and silver darkness their leaves made. I scuffed the deep pile of old leaves, my shoes sinking through the fresh layer of whole leaves, through last year’s, through those of the year before and the year before until I uncovered the decayed leaves of any year or no year; they were no longer leaves; they were earth. I sat on one of the tree-trunks. I smelled the leaves and the silver and green enclosed air, and I knew, with a surge of pleasure inside me, that I had set out to look for
my
place, and that I had found it, that I had chosen it. There was no need for me to put up a sign that it was my place. My place. I had chosen it.

I returned happily to the new house (what did it matter who slept next to the wall, for safety, and who slept next to the door, to be grabbed in the night by bogies?). I told no one of my new possession. I did not visit the place ever again, for the new chosen possession brought its own burden - had I chosen something which would stay, or would it disappear; could I take it with me and shed it when I wished; what was it that I had chosen? I still remember the pleasure of finding it and owning it; it seemed then like a little birch-tree house; it seems now like layers of years that sink deep, like leaves, into rich fertile decay.

And now what confusion I feel when I sit here and read these poems. All the poets are writing about
my
place. Even if they were not writing of New Zealand they would be writing of my place. How can I ever contain within me so much of one land? Was it given to me or have I looked for it, found it, and have I been afraid to return to it?

 

—Reading New Zealand poetry?

—Yes.

—I suppose you’ve met some of the poets?

—Yes, I’ve met some.

Silence.

—I think, Grace said,—I’ll retire now - go to bed.

—Will you have coffee first?

They drank coffee, made and brought in by Anne. Grace returned to the shelves the books which she had accumulated around her, choosing, opening, shutting. She glanced again at the
Book of New Zealand Verse
.

‘
A View of Rangitoto

Grace made a wild movement with her hand as if she were trying to lift the volcano from between the pages, to carry it upstairs to her room. I know Rangitoto, she said to herself. I know Rangitoto.

But of course she did not know it. People in Auckland turned to gaze at it, to point and say, The shape is peculiar; from whichever angle it is viewed it appears the same; it is Auckland’s landmark, her phenomenon.

They gazed and gazed at it, but they did not know it, and Grace did not know it, yet she had learned to set poetic bearings by it; its outer sameness concealed its inner surprise.

Ah, she thought, I knew someone, once, a great favourite with all. I asked Why. I was told, He’s always the same, isn’t he, always the same!

No it wasn’t God.

 

 

 

 

—Goodnight.

—See you in the morning, Philip said, almost as if he did not expect to see her.

—Yes, Grace said.

When she had reached the top of the stairs, and had opened the door to her room and walked in, she could no longer pretend; she shrugged away the commonplace Yes No I see I understand, she cried No, No, No, I’m a migratory bird.

I remember, she said to herself, lying in the cold dark room at Winchley.

—Before I was born the Leith river flooded and the house in Leith Street where my mother and father, his parents, my sister and brother lived, was flooded too, and although the house was not abandoned the flood was serious enough to become one of the vivid memories of our lives - even of
my
life; it was talked of, dreamed of, it had been captured in photographs that were studied long after we had moved from Dunedin to Outram; when I was small I shared it with the family as our most recent disastrous memory.

—There’s Grandad standing at the door of the house in Leith Street. That was taken just after the flood.

—There’s Leith Street. During the flood. People sailed up and down the street in tables.

—There’s Dad and Isy and Jim. Before the flood.

—There’s Grandma. See, in her wheelchair she’s safe from the flood.

Grandma had diabetes, and one of her legs had been cut off. Sometimes she wore a wooden leg but she could move faster in her wheelchair.

I had learned so much about the flood, it had become so much a part of my memory that I was dismayed to learn that I hadn’t experienced it, and my dismay increased when I realised that Isy and Jim, my big sister and brother, could use the flood as a weapon against me. Ya, Ya, you weren’t in the flood!

—But I remember it, I said.

—You weren’t born. We’ve got photos of
us
in the flood, but you weren’t born.

I knew that not being born at the right time I had missed
something important, especially as I confused the Leith flood with the other flood so often talked of by my mother, where it rained forty days and nights, an ark was built, and the animals were rescued two by two. How I envied Isy and Jim their meeting with all the animals in the world, for I knew only the cattle and sheep in the paddocks, and in the cowbyre where I sat in my gocart I knew Betty the bigboned red and white cow with the long horns. I watched while my mother milked her. When I was old enough and had graduated from the gocart, had served my term in the petrol-box under the walnut tree (each new baby had a petrol-box to crawl, play, and learn to walk in), I used to stand in front of the bail throwing potatoes to Betty, and I used to gather the apples from under the trees in the orchard to feed to her. My grandma sang, and I wished that she would not sing it, for I hadn’t been there, and I couldn’t remember the animals, and the idea of going to Jordan frightened me, and my mother talked of the
Red Sea
and the
Dead Sea
, and the only river I knew was the
Taieri
. Why hadn’t I been born earlier, so that I
knew
?

 

I grew up. I passed into the grownup territory of playing, which Isy and Jim had already made their own - the engine sheds, the goods sheds by the ‘railway’, and farther along the road the drill-hall at the back of which was stored a ‘magazine’, always spoken of with dread. We were forbidden to go near the magazine. We did not know the nature of it but the word filled us with terror. Magazine. Whenever we went out to play my mother warned us, ‘Remember there’s a
magazine
at the back of the drill-hall!’