A History of Silence (25 page)

As in a Puritan village in Massachusetts, so in a colony emerging from the Victorian era at the bottom of the Pacific, a child born out of wedlock was a life-shattering event. The shame had to be absorbed until the fall became part of the life story, shaping all those touched by it.

The catastrophe for fallen women such as Maud and Hester is the length of the fall. Both women will go on breaking their fall with one hand while clinging onto their child with the other.

My mother's story begins here—with her own mother in flight.

How fiercely present the world is.

How nice and orderly its arrangement.

Through the trees the glinting paddocks and their bright promise. The road that brought Maud here now leads her discreetly away.

This is the last time she will set eyes on Taruna. And then she is on a train, on her way out of the farmer's world. An overnight ferry pushes by the mountainous Kaikoura coast and on to the windswept strait.

Until the baby arrives there is not much to do other than wait in Wellington, perhaps grow bored with the hospital window and its cloudless day. It is coming into summer.

Maud's confinement is spent in a private hospital. Later she will tell the court that she paid for this herself—clearly a matter of personal satisfaction to her. But which hospital? I wonder if it was Calvary where I had my tonsils out when I was eleven. Nuns, the first I had ever seen, had glided along its corridors. Or St Helen's, a specialist maternity hospital on Coromandel Street that climbs up from the Newtown shops on Adelaide Road. But that maternity hospital was for married women.

She may have snuck in there. Funny to think of Maud's recourse to invention beginning with her admission to a maternity hospital.

There were options—abortion, adoption, infanticide. But Maud's mind is made up, if indeed there was any doubt. The bathroom mirror holds her gaze and reports back the ordinary truth of someone looking for something that is not there. She is pregnant with a child. She hasn't robbed a bank.

She will keep my mother. But to do so will require another sacrifice. She decides to drop out of sight, to self-erase.

She stops writing to friends and family in England. She will end all communication with the people who knew her before she entered hospital.

By the time she has given birth to my mother, Maud has accomplished something similar for herself—she has a new name, a whole new identity. She has created a widow's story for herself.

She is now May Seaward. Maud has an aunt by that name from Portsmouth. She will say May is from Portsmouth as well, and since she must give an occupation to ‘the late Mr Seaward', he can be an engineer, someone able and essential to the creation of new worlds.

A man named Harry Nash has advertised in the local newspaper for a live-in housekeeper. In her letter of application Maud says she is after such a position with a ‘refined family who would not object to her and her little girl'. When Nash replies that the position has been taken, Maud writes back, ‘I was sorry not to have got the position of housekeeper to you, but would be pleased if at a future time you are unsuited you would write to me.'

The letter is on file; her forwarding address is care of a Mrs Harrison, Rodrigo Road, Kilbirnie. Who is Mrs Harrison? We hear no more of her.

Maud finds another live-in position, this one on a farm in Gladstone in the Wairarapa, 130 kilometres from Wellington. The Tararuas, which divide the Wairarapa from the Manawatu in the west, are not nearly as imposing as the Southern Alps, but they offer the same feeling of wilderness at the end of the road. Maungahuia, which is the name of the farm, and locality, sits inside a bowl of cleared hills, where the grasslands are still coming into being. The summer air is filled with thick smoke. Ash drifts across the farm—it gathers along the windowsills, and marks the lines of washed sheets.

On summer nights, people drive to the edge of the burn off to take in the spectacle. Buggies and drays by the dozen, one or two cars, a truck, and in the dark the awe-struck crowd gazes up at a sky that burns like a fabulous city. Bright embers fill the night and as one dies another takes its place. High above the lit sky is another, larger chamber containing the galaxy that is permanent and glowing.

Weeks later, by which time the lit sky has drifted down to earth, the blackened stumps smoulder into the grey hour. Shouting men call their dogs back from the burning ash. Within a year or two no one will remember what was there. A cow will graze on grass where once stood a three-hundred-year-old tree. And a dreadful silence rolls out where once the distinctive call of the huia was heard through the forested slopes. Women liked to wear the huia beak as a brooch and its distinctive white-tipped tail feathers made an attractive adornment. Now, the only huia left are stuffed and mounted. When I was a child the bird still graced a sixpenny postage stamp. And I have heard it said that it derived its name from a distress call—
uia
,
uia
,
uia
, or (in Maori) Where are you?

Maungahuia, ‘the hill of the huia', can be seen on a country road before Gladstone. The original farmstead where Maud and my mother stayed has gone, and the forest that covered the hill of the huia has disappeared. The farmer of a farmhouse I visited believes the last huia was found lying dead on a tennis court around the time of the First World War.

The spell in hospital must have made a favourable impression, possibly it was the nurses who moved swiftly and unseeing, because within a few months of moving to isolated Maungahuia, Maud has decided she would like to become a nurse. She writes to St Helen's Hospital, the maternity hospital for married mothers, and receives notice that a new intake won't be accepted until September 1915. Meanwhile, a letter from Harry Nash arrives to say that the position in his household has become free. Maud replies that she can offer him six months until the hospital intake later in the year. Nash writes back with his acceptance.

In late February 1915, armed with their invented histories, Maud and my mother enter the household of Harry Nash on Upland Road.

The widow and widower ought to have this much in common—the persistent shadow of the absent spouse, and the confusion thrown up by a suddenly lopsided life.

Everywhere inside the house are photographs of the late Mrs Nash. Maud, of course, has none to show of the late Mr Seaward. And Mr Nash has three children, two sons and a daughter, all of them at boarding school. Their faces are easily traced back to the photograph of the late Mrs Nash. But when Harry Nash studies my mother, her lineage is not so easily pinned down. Perhaps there is something of Maud's long face, and her pale blue eyes, but then the terrain mysteriously changes into the features of the farmer who cannot be named.

Mr Seaward, on the other hand, can be anyone. For a number of months Maud keeps her widow's story afloat. There is a lot at stake. She has landed on her feet—she has comfort and a degree of security in Nash's house. Kelburn is an attractive neighbourhood on the fringe of the city. Upland Road winds through a muddle of small hills and valleys. There are plunging views over orange-tiled roofs. But it is difficult terrain for a pram. Maud has to push and shove uphill and then grip the pram going down to prevent my mother from rolling away.

Harry Nash has proposed, and after only three weeks of Maud and my mother moving in. Maud has asked for a day to think it over. Obviously she has slept with Nash. It is easy to work out since her first child to Nash, Eric, is born that year in December, barely nine months after she and my mother arrived from Gladstone.

Quite coincidentally, as Maud would have it, she bumps into O.T. Evans on Lambton Quay in the city. She told the court that the farmer was on his way to Porirua, then farmland, now covered in state housing. O.T. might have come up to Wellington on business. It is possible. But so might have been a planned visit to see Maud and my mother.

In Maud's account she tells the farmer she is to marry. The farmer is pleased. She doesn't mention ‘relieved'.

More significantly, Harry Nash has offered to adopt my mother, to bring her up as ‘one of his own', and in the end that's what persuades Maud to accept his marriage offer, in order, she told the court, to give ‘Betty a name'.

Betty. It is there in the transcript. After knowing her all my life as Joyce, it is weirdly dislocating—even euphonically jarring—to discover Mum is in fact Betty.

For the first years of her life she is Betty—Betty Seaward with a false past and a father who doesn't exist.

Betty is a complete stranger to me. Betty suggests someone ready with a tray of cakes in the unexpected delight of visitors turning up to the door. Betty suggests an open smile. My mother's smile was more guarded and, before the happy pills took effect, only ever parsimoniously wheeled out. Although on the odd occasion it could blossom with indecent delight, such as when she was reminded that her careless driving had knocked a boy off his bike and she replied, ‘Oh, you mean that
fat
boy!'

She was Betty until the age of four—long enough for the cast of personality to set around that name. And yet, try as I may, I can't recall a time when that first name floated to the surface. Is it possible for a name to just fade away?

While that may be so, the larger world inhabited by Betty stayed with her, because Betty, it turns out, belongs to a household of verbal and physical abuse, humiliation, threats, and endless push-and-shove violence between Maud and Harry that, on occasion, rose to madness.