A History of Silence (17 page)

Some years ago my sister Pat began to delve into our family history. It was a time when documents held by government ministries were accessed only with great difficulty and perseverance. One Christmas she produced for Mum and the rest of us a blue cloth book containing birth and death certificates, some letters, a few newspaper articles. For the first time we knew the name of Mum's father. Pat's efforts also flushed out the Bibbys, the parents of Eleanor Gwendoline Jones, Dad's grandparents and my own great grandparents, as they are but as I never knew them to be.

At the time the blue book came into existence my notion of family was confined to my immediate one. The Bibbys sat too far back in the story and lacked the mythic charge that might have made me sit up and take notice.

I was more impressed by my wife's family history. Its evidence was everywhere—in photographs, on home movies, in story—some of it worked up to myth. Such as Max, jailed for revolutionary activity in Russia in the 1880s, his escape made possible by his mother singing instructions up to his cell window in Yiddish. Max's brother Joe had a scar on his face made by a cutlass. On account of the scar, my wife's father, Jerry, always thought Joe was the hero. In fact, Scarface had dobbed in his brother. I was also impressed by the fact that my wife's grandmother had been one of the first female pharmacists in Brooklyn, New York, and that she used to sell heroin to the Mob over the counter and was licensed to carry a firearm, which she did, as shown in the photographs, holstered to the outside of her dress.

Our family story comprised little more than a list of names, and none with a flair for anything.

But, on my second time through Swansea, I suddenly remembered the Bibbys.

John Bibby, ‘mariner', and his sixteen-year-old wife, Mary, both illiterate, appear on the register of assisted immigrants aboard the
Asia
. They sailed from Tilbury Dock in 1874 to try their luck in the raw Otago settlement of Kaitangata.

In a newspaper report of an assault case against Great-Grandfather Bibby, he is referred to as a ‘farmer', a generous description for the owner of a ‘modest section' bought as part of the Cemetery Reserve block sale. In another report he appears as ‘a settler'. And, a ‘flax-cutter' in a longer report of a case where his name appears as a suspect in an arson attack on a neighbour's stack of ‘oaten shaves' valued at £100.

Bibby had taken exception to a suggestion by an inspector from the Rabbit Control Board that he wasn't doing his bit to keep the local rabbit population down, and, consequently, felt a strong urge to punch the man. In the arson hearing, a rabbiter working in the area where the fire occurred said Bibby was a regular sight on the hill and, ten days before the fire, had told him that his neighbour, a man named Smith, ‘could cut his throat if he got the chance, but he [Bibby] would do some harm to him some day'. Bibby denied the claim that he and Smith were on bad terms. He said he'd never made threats to his neighbour or any other person. He then said he did not remember saying to the rabbiter that Smith could cut his throat and that he would injure him. But he ‘would not sware [
sic
] that he had not said so'.

‘The defendant made a long rambling statement,' the article continues, ‘endeavouring to prove provocation.'

The
Clutha Leader
concludes with the jury's decision: ‘The stacks (with a value of one hundred pounds) had been wilfully set on fire by some person to them unknown.'

Bibby may well have had a motive. In another article he is the victim of arson. In the night he is woken by dogs barking and discovers his stack containing eighteen to twenty bushels of oats on fire. While attempting to put out the fire he hears the movement of a man in nearby scrub. The man runs off; Bibby gives chase but loses him. The article also provides some detail about the marriage. The Bibbys sleep in different bedrooms. Mary Bibby had moved out once before ‘in consequence of some words with him', but also after their pigs were poisoned and some property was stolen. Several times Bibby had asked her to return; finally he prevailed, only for this arson to rekindle her distress. The newspaper article also mentions that before their move to their current address the Bibbys had lived briefly in Milton, where their house, insured, had burnt down.

Why should I care if he was guilty or innocent? Curiously, I did care. A niggling doubt about Bibby's role—his evasiveness and rambling statement—perhaps has something to do with my own trickle-up or trickle-down misdemeanours, such as setting fire to the rubbish dump at the back of the house at 20 Stellin Street. I wonder if waywardness can be inherited. I wonder if Bibby was a bit of a hot head. I feel it might be true.

It had been thrilling to see the rubbish dump go up in flames. Just as it had been thrilling when I threw all the firewood patiently collected and stacked by a man and his grown-up son into the Hutt River. I'd hidden in the bushes so I could watch their reaction. That was really the point of the exercise, but it became less exciting when father and son looked around and quickly split to circle behind my position and flush out ‘the little prick'. The prick was marched to the riverbank. Father and son debated what to do next. The son wanted to throw ‘the prick' into the river. The father spoke of driving ‘the little prick' to the police station. In the end, after soliciting my telephone number so they could ring the prick's parents (naturally I gave them a wrong number) they let the prick go.

The newspaper articles and a coroner's report also provide detail of Bibby's mixed fortunes. From milling timber and building props for the nearby Castle Hill coalmine he has saved enough to begin building ‘a good-sized cottage' when he is struck down.

In no particular order he cuts his finger on a chafing knife, is knocked off his horse by an over-hanging branch, is thrown from his horse and lands on a tree stump and then, with his foot caught in the stirrup, is dragged along the ground. The incidents read like a series of indignities. One of his injuries, however, will lead to an excruciating death in 1894 by tetanus.

The coroner was unsure, at first. Bibby's symptoms suggested either strychnine poisoning or tetanus. To add to the confusion, the correspondent for the
Clutha Leader
reports ‘an epileptic fit' as the cause of death. If correct, here is the source of Lorraine's epilepsy, as it is carried through the male line.

Mother and daughter describe a strange mood overtaking Bibby. He seems abstracted, unreachable. His wife recalls him often depressed and prone to sitting around the house lamenting the decision to buy in Kaitangata instead of staying in Milton. He complains of rheumatism, until it reaches the stage where he can barely move his arms and legs. His nine-year-old son describes him on a milling expedition lying down in the bush unable to move. At night he wakes screaming, his body in convulsion. The fits increase until at last he agrees to see a doctor.

Dr Fitzgerald found him calling out in pain and grasping a rope with his right hand. Bibby wouldn't let the doctor touch him:

He said each touch brought on one of those turns he had had. I found him bathed in perspiration, his shirt being simply soaked. His pulse was rather rapid, pulsations being about 108 per minute. He complained greatly of thirst. His wife gave two sips of water. While still on his bed he took a fit of vomiting and vomited about two or three ounces of clear fluid. Almost directly after one of the vomits he took a fit, and while the fit was on his face was livid. He did not froth at the mouth nor bite his tongue and seemed conscious all through it. He took a second fit much more severe from which he did not rally.

Dad's mother, Eleanor, is sent to the local hotel to identify her father's body—presumably there was no hospital—and there, in the hotel, two doctors saw through Bibby's skull and cut out the brain to search for clues to his death.

Dr Fitzgerald continues, ‘Apart from a slight adhesion to the membrane everything was normal. The upper part of the spinal cord all healthy. The lungs and heart healthy. The stomach was found empty, no trace of poison could be detected.'

The hotel where Bibby's brain was cut out can be found in a watercolour by Christopher Aubrey, painted in 1878, a few years after the Bibby's arrival in Kaitangata. The hotel and church huddle by the confluence of the Clutha and Kaitangata Rivers. To the rear the hills, which presumably Bibby had a hand in clearing, look stiff and paralysed.

From Tilbury Dock to Port Chalmers the Bibbys were seventy-eight days at sea. Their immediate world is dense, stifling. A child's cough or runny nose is a worrisome thing. Fear of sickness and especially fever accompanies the endlessness of the journey. After a few weeks of being washed in sea water, clothes have a stiff salted feel, and the flesh crawls with imaginary lice. Sleeping conditions are appalling. People are stacked into impossibly small places, which they enter feet first. These long voyages were perhaps the first step in losing contact with old ways. A child might be sewn into a linen bag and dropped overboard less than two hours after its death, and despatched with the body is that lingering sentimentality more common on land.

I wonder about the tremendous distances that existed in those days and the erasing nature of the ocean—that vast and bland divide between past and future—and the effect on the Bibbys of a journey where the land went missing for weeks on end, before, suddenly, there it is, like a monstrous surprise, and where so much is seen for the first time, so much that is unfamiliar, perhaps spectacular. But how much of it is retained in the minds of the illiterate? How might meaning be attributed or memory preserved in the absence of diaries, journals, cameras, canvases, sketchpads? Things don't get written down. Observation and eloquence come from official sources—the captain, the surgeon, the church minister.

I wonder if the assault on the Rabbit Board inspector resulted from bluster on Bibby's part. The inspector has reached into his pocket for a document, and to cover up the fact that he cannot read Bibby finds a way to shift things into an area where he knows how to conduct himself.

Another generation on and that scoundrel Arthur Leonard Jones will make the same ocean journey. He will meet and marry John Bibby's daughter, my grandmother.

If I'd paid closer attention when the blue book first came into my hands I might have discovered Arthur Leonard Jones's reason for leaving Wales. On his marriage certificate (to Eleanor Gwendoline Bibby) he is described as a ‘widower'. He may have wished to put as great a distance as possible between himself and the place of grief. What better place to choose than faraway New Zealand? His wife died in 1897. He married Eleanor in 1903.

A birth certificate, a marriage certificate, a death certificate and an outstanding bill to cover the expenses of the orphanage his kids end up in appear to be the only times he came to official notice. Both he and his parents-in-law, the Bibbys, although for different reasons, are a part of the legacy of silence dumped at the door of 20 Stellin Street, together with an enormous capacity to forget.