A History of Silence (19 page)

I could sniff rain on its way. It was the edge of a front that was forecast to batter the country over the coming days. I hurried back to the car and drove on until I found a path on the northern side of the hill more closely aligned with the map that the woman in the office had given me.

I quickly found the row beginning with Smith but, as before, could find neither Eliot or Wilton. I checked with the map and was certain I was on the right path. I found one unmarked grave but still no Eliot or Wilton. I walked up and down the rows of headstones. Many of the graves were overgrown, sprouting ngaio and other shrubs. I had to push away the branches and press my fingers into the letters on headstones grown over with lichen. By now it was spitting, so I started back up the hill.

Near the road two leis hung in the branches of a tree sheltering a headstone. A woman knelt on a grave with a bucket of water and a scrubbing brush. There were photographs on the headstone of a Samoan woman and a Scotsman. The kneeling woman was scrubbing their grave as though it were a doorstep. I stopped to show her my map to see if she could make sense of it. She said she had just come from visiting her husband's grave at Makara Cemetery, now it was the turn of her parents. A shorthaired dog lay on the next grave. She said she always brought her dog and made a point of introducing herself and the dog to the deceased.

As I drove away from the cemetery I found myself hatching plans for when I find, as surely I will, my grandmother's grave. I will have a headstone erected and inscribed. It won't make any difference to Eleanor Gwendoline Jones. But it will push back the edges of erasure to honour a history that has never been acknowledged.

It is a shock to realise how easily the past is disposed of. The man from Pembroke Dock rises from his hospital bed a different man, a single man without responsibilities. He leaves the hospital to find a new world with different possibilities. In a sense he has risen from the dead—a ‘drowned Welsh sea captain'—to stumble up the beach to a new and more interesting place where he can start over without the inconvenience of history. He can get on his way again. He can forget Eleanor and all those kids. How many of them. Six? The wind is getting up—look how it dislodges old paper stuck to the road, peeling it off, scattering it. Nothing sticks forever. Nothing—not love, or hygiene, or appetite, not day or night, or the tide. No, wherever he looks, he finds a provisional world.
I am a father
can turn into
I was a
father
. He can pretend that Eleanor and the children were a kind of misadventure. As he leaves the hospital gates to walk along Adelaide Road, how new and vital the world smells. Like everyone else in this city he knows how changeable the weather is. In minutes a fine still day in Wellington can turn into a tempest. If it comes to that he will burrow down into the wind, hold his hat low to his face and pick his way around the edge of the city. At the railway station he will buy a ticket to Auckland, and in the new city his resurrection will take full possession of itself.

On his way north, a moment arrives at Kaiwharawhara where the train enters the hillside and pitches into darkness. It is pleasant to be in the dark, even an attenuated dark. To be nowhere in particular loosens any lingering obligation to those irritating bits of responsibility. Then, as the train leaves the tunnel and an enormous light flashes in the window, he blinks, and when he looks again he finds the world changed. The harbour and its plug of sky have been left behind. There is greater latitude in the landscape. It doesn't know him, and he doesn't pretend to know it. And yet there is this other layer, an openness, a welcoming. He is on his way to somewhere—a place he is yet to visit but whose pull is nonetheless irresistible. His recent past can join the general debris of lived moments. There was Pembroke Dock and Swansea, places erased by the crossing of oceans, and Milton, Otago and Wellington, and marriage, and all those children, and those jobs that started and went nowhere. His own self has hardly assembled into a regular and concrete idea; he calls himself whatever the situation requires—labourer, master mariner, naval officer, clerk—and as he passes through each tunnel on his journey north he bursts from the darkness into a new landscape and future.

Sadness will inconveniently erupt now and then. On the back of a child's cry or a child's name shouted in a playground, the past will belch into the present. Perhaps a couple holding the hands of a child will bring competing thoughts of small faces, and of trust and treachery. Perhaps a waitress's smile will remind him of his daughter Laura, and perhaps in a moment's confusion he will call his new wife Eleanor.

Dad once told Pat that when he was a small boy he was visited by a man in a naval officer's uniform. He was living in one of many homes in the lower North Island. When the man was leaving, he pressed half a crown into Dad's hand. It was only later, much later, that Dad wondered whether the man in naval uniform was his father.

More likely that person was contracted by the Wellington Industrial School, which had taken over guardianship from the orphanage, to visit my father and report on his wellbeing. Somewhere in a departmental vault lie letters by the boxful detailing the living conditions of Dad and his siblings, charting their prospects and growth in a similar way to the pencil marks on the doorjamb at 20 Stellin Street. I suspect the man in uniform was such an employee. But in Dad's confusion, in the absence of a father, and finding in this adult a grain of kindness in the form of the half crown, perhaps he began to believe that this stranger was not a stranger after all, and conflated two ideals—a father figure and a naval officer capable of avoiding hidden reefs. The visit turned into further evidence of the tale told of the man drowned at sea.

The fate of the
Ionic
was published in the
New Zealand Herald
in July 1917. I suspect Arthur Leonard Jones read the article and added a few details of his own, exaggerating one thing in order to achieve the other, a sinking for a drowning, and then perhaps engaged someone to write to the one child unable to verify the record for herself, Laura, who is blind. She disseminates the tale of the naval officer drowned at sea. And so, in his own letter, Percy passes on the myth: ‘I found out that our father was a member of the crew of the
Ionic
which was sunk in American waters…all crew and soldiers she was carrying were lost.'

In fact the
Ionic
lived to a ripe old age, and in 1919 Arthur Leonard Jones rises from the depths of his deception to marry Ada Perrin in Auckland.

The ‘drowned at sea' line is an old ruse, an honourable despatch, a plausible explanation for unexplained absences. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel
The Scarlet Letter
, Hester Prynne is tempted into an affair only after her husband is presumed drowned at sea.

Drowning was a blameless misfortune. Ships thrown off course in violent storms off unfamiliar coasts. It even contained shades of heroism. Our hero, Arthur Leonard Jones, was on his way to the war, battling high seas. The great poet has left behind an uncompleted work. The city has been struck down by a freakish act of nature. Then, the ship's master is discovered to be a drunk. The poet's salted arteries were already closing down before his vision was transcribed. A city discovers its old seismic history and swampy foundations. And Arthur Leonard Jones turns out to be a liar.

Following a visit to the orphanage on 117 Tinakori Road, an
Evening Post
reporter wrote approvingly of the conditions he found. ‘The children are domiciled until they are fit for transplanting…' He goes on to say, correctly for some but surely not for Eleanor Gwendoline Jones's children, ‘The State is the only kind of parent within their memory.' And that the State, in the form of the Industrial School manager, will exercise control over the children until each one reaches the age of twenty-one.

The twins, Jack and Gladys, still babies, are placed with a woman in Todman Street, Brooklyn, in the hills above the city. Dad, Percy and Arthur are placed in the orphanage. Laura is sent to the Institute for the Blind in Parnell, Auckland.

The death of their mother must have been a terrible shock, their delivery into the hands of strangers and institutions another. A series of foster homes will gradually erode the bonds of family—although Jack and Gladys will live near one another in the Manawatu and enjoy a closer relationship than will their siblings. Arthur, the black sheep, is drafted into another life. There is that spell in prison. The blue book mentions a restraint notice from the police preventing him seeing Gladys. Why? No explanation is given.

As soon as they are ‘fit for transplanting', that is, to be boarded out for service, each child is issued with a wardrobe the cost of which will be reduced from future earnings.

A boy's outfit consists of:

2 pairs of boots (one best, one working)

2 caps or tweed hats

2 suits (one best, one working)

1 extra pair of saddle-tweed trousers

1 jersey

4 shirts (two best, two working)

3 under flannels

2 pairs of braces

3 pairs of socks

6 handkerchiefs (3 coloured, 3 white)