A History of Silence (24 page)

I had taken to travel at quite a young age, thinking that if I moved through the world with my mouth, ears and eyes open, something would catch. And it did, fleetingly. The world flooded in through the windows of buses and trains across America and Europe. And at odd times a picture of Dad would slide into view—of him at the kitchen sink, gazing out through the window to the street with his ship-rail stare. And always it was a disappointing place to arrive back to, one that I had fled from because it seemed to locate me, as well as define me. And I didn't wish for either.

But that winter, as I wandered through zones of dereliction in Christchurch, I was being nudged quietly homewards on currents I was hardly aware of.

The air in the city was thin, it almost hurt to breathe, and a week-old snow stuck around. I found myself outside the basilica staring through the barrier at the autumnal bronze leaves of a hornbeam tree. I was told the leaves would hold on until the spring growth began to come through. The tenacity of the hornbeam stood in stark contrast to everything crumbling around it. It would hang on until it didn't need to. Things, it seems, had first to set, then unravel, for the new growth to begin. In this way old information had a way of becoming new information.

FIVE

IN MY MOTHER'S memory things just happened. Big life-shattering breaches went unexplained or were distilled down to a Punch and Judy line:
Well, she had to choose between him and
me, and in the end she chose him.

But things don't ever just happen. Things occur in a particular way and for a reason.

Mum never did see inside the folder held in the vaults of the national archives. Here, the past was presented with disarming bureaucratic plainness—a brown folder bound with packaging string. In late 2011, it sat before me on a reader's desk. For a few minutes I did little more than stare at it. Then, slowed down by a ceremonial sense of how to proceed, I pulled gently on the ends of the string, and the folder breathed out. And I smelt the old air of an unvisited room shut up for the better part of a century.

It was like the end of a long flight when you wake in time for the descent through the cloud and look out the window to the startling detail of a place you have only vaguely heard about. And because the detail has a fresh and unclaimed quality, the fevered eye seeks out everything all at once.

That is what happened with my first reading of the 125-page court transcript of Maud's divorce from Harry Nash. I read quickly in order to reach the end, then I went back to the beginning and read everything more carefully. It was the third or fourth reading before various details found one another. Inevitably, a narrative began to take shape. I began to see Maud. And, rather wonderfully, a grandfather whom I never knew, emerged—my mother's father, a farmer from North Canterbury. I read with a jurist's attention. I read with glee, and I read with a next-of-kin's cringing sense of embarrassment. Opinions formed and shifted. I read with an open mind, which led to a sympathy for someone for whom I'd only ever felt contempt. And then I read with imagination in order to bring to the surface the motivations that the jury apparently could not see for itself, and I read in such a way that I found myself reconsidering everything that I'd known about my grandmother, Maud.

The pity is my mother never got to hear Maud tell her own story, or to hear what her own mother had had to say about her.

Now there were dates, departures, places, occupations to consider. The positioning of a life in Somerset followed by upheaval. And, of course, the ‘facts', such as they are.

Maud was an assistant mistress of a ‘high school' in Wellington, Somerset, where she spent seven years looking after ‘the little ones' (receiving ‘a certificate for efficiency').

In 1912, aged twenty-eight, she worked her passage as the governess to the children of a headmaster and his wife and sailed out to New Zealand. As the court transcript doesn't mention this fact, I have an idea Mavis told me. I have a faint recollection of her describing a general uprooting of the family around that time to various places across the globe. Canada was mentioned, and a number of American cities. Chicago, I seem to recall.

A brother, Bert, who surfaces during the divorce trial, said his sister came out to New Zealand in order to ‘better herself'. But look at what she left behind.

I type ‘Wellington Somerset 1912' into my browser and discover a very pleasant English market town. Ivy, hedges, canvas awnings shading a line of shops. People on foot share a thinly populated road with a few figures on large bicycles and a horse and carriage. In their caps and heavy black footwear three boys in a market street look like miniature adults. There is a monument on a hill and a public garden, much like any to be found in Christchurch or Wellington at that time: flax, a cabbage tree, cypress trees, paths, a sweep of lawn. A steady sky, a wisp of cloud. There is a tranquillity not easily found in the landscape that Maud arrives to.

The slopes of the Rimutakas that rise like the gates to a forbidden kingdom at the head of the Hutt Valley have been relentlessly logged. In the city of Wellington a deforested Mt Victoria looms above dwellings of corrugated iron and unpainted timber like a giant mudslide waiting to happen. From the wharves the bare hills look hobbled and barnacled with small timber cottages. It is as though the original builders set off with a wheelbarrow and spade, and a tool to hack their way through the bush, with instructions to pitch their tent wherever they saw fit. If Maud's eye for efficiency took in all of this, she will have noted that roads do not rule these hills. It is hill first, then outlook and aspect, then the house itself, and finally the road, which is a glorified term for a track pitching in and out of ferny shadow to sun-lit bends walloped by the wind. The same wind that threatened to lift me off the tops of Pencarrow as a small boy shakes the living daylights out of anything not pegged or anchored down. The bonnets in the market street of Wellington, Somerset, would not last a second.

Why did she settle here, in the wind-blasted Wellington down under? For my mother's sake. I'll come to that.

Maud leaves the headmaster and his wife in the capital and continues to Christchurch to stay ‘with friends'. Who are these friends? No names are given. They live on a farm ‘in the South Island', which again is not very exact. Maud is there a year. Then, towards the end of 1913, she takes a position on a North Canterbury sheep farm, where for another year, she says, ‘I acted as a housekeeper'.

If she came up from Christchurch, she would have taken a train to the small North Canterbury township of Hawarden, and from there driven by horse and buggy to Taruna, the sheep farm of Owen Tibbott (O.T.) Evans.

I have always thought of Maud as old. Her name makes her old to start with. And being my mother's mother makes her older still.

I have to remind myself that this traveller is a young woman. In Taruna, she is a young woman with barely a neighbour for miles around. There are the mountains at the back of the house. Sheep in the paddocks provide small shifts in the landscape. The wind from the nor-west is like some incessant curse whistling in the eaves when she is heating water, hissing in her ear when she is pegging up the washing. It is there in her face, in her hair, whenever she walks down the long drive to stand by the letterbox. But then, without warning, come moments of absolute stillness, and it is as if the world is telling her, ‘Look where you have arrived. You have fallen through a hole in the earth.' Of course I am imposing my own thoughts on Maud. She may have felt differently. Taruna with its majestic setting may have seemed like the start of something new.

The court transcript has very little to say about Maud's time at Taruna. But it is here that she became pregnant to O.T.

As far as the court record is concerned, Taruna is just a prelude. But it interests me. There is the figure of a grandfather to disinter. There is a romance to imagine. Leading up to and during the time my mother was conceived, O.T.'s wife, Maggie, was staying at their Christchurch residence, nursing their firstborn, Geoffrey. My mother was born in December 1914, but as late as May of that year Maud is still in the district. Her name appears in the Christchurch
Press
along with a number of other women who ran a clothing stall that month to raise funds for the tennis courts and bowling green in Waipara, the nearest town.

So, clearly, she is part of the community, pitching in. She is already two months pregnant when she helps out at the stall. People will know her—perhaps by name. At the very least they have seen her face around.

Perhaps she doesn't yet know she is pregnant—but the moment of discovery cannot be far off.

If Maud's world is about to gain another dimension, O.T. must have felt as though his was teetering. It is also clear that Maud's family in England never knew about the pregnancy. The decision to keep it a secret was taken early. One imagines the conversations, difficult conversations long into the night, about what to do. In 1914, a child born out of wedlock was occasion for tremendous shame. The Salvation Army gathered at the bottom of the cliff with its various categories of ‘fall' to consider—
how long fallen
,
first fallen
,
twice fallen
, and so on. The method of fall had its particulars—
taken advantage of
,
alcohol
,
foolishly led astray
,
bad company
,
seduced
,
ruined under the promise
of marriage
. A high percentage of ‘fallen women' in the care of the Salvation Army Home were domestic servants, often from humble origins.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's story of a fallen woman in
The Scarlet
Letter
brought him fame on both sides of the Atlantic. For a time the novelist was the American consul in Liverpool, a role that his wife excitedly wrote is second in importance only to the embassy in London. In Liverpool, Hawthorne liked to roam the docks. One day he stopped to observe a procession of girls and young women from the workhouse heading to the dock to board the ship that would take them out to the new world to work as domestic servants. He wrote in
English Notebooks
:

I should not have conceived it possible that so many children could have been collected together, without a single trace of beauty or scarcely of intelligence in so much as one individual…[their] coarse, vulgar features and figures betraying unmistakably low origin, and ignorant and brutal parents. They did not appear wicked, but only stupid, and animal and soulless.

The
Asia
, with the Bibbys on board, had stopped in Ireland to pick up a number of women from the workhouse to deliver to Port Chalmers in New Zealand, where most of them, according to a follow-up report, proved themselves to be entirely useless as domestic servants. A small number were held in barracks from where they were in the habit of escaping, getting drunk, and coming into quick money in ‘unexplained ways'.

If Hawthorne's notebook entry speaks of type, in
The Scarlet
Letter
we find a more sympathetic portrayal of the fallen woman in the form of Hester Prynne.