A History of Silence (27 page)

More so than the grub covering the trial as a newspaper artist for
Truth
. Under a headline ‘The Little Pugilist' he has lengthened Maud's profile in order to give her a hooked nose and joyfully made her unflattering hat even more outlandish to crown his obvious hope of conjuring up a witch. His treatment of Harry Nash is more respectful. Harry appears in a suit with collar and tie; he is business-like in bearing. He looks dependable rather than sharp. No part of him comes in for lampooning, although his moustache is possibly more glossy and luxuriant in illustration than in life. If Maud has been made to look villainous, then, by contrast, Nash's agreeably open countenance is striking. He is described as softly spoken. He barely raises his voice, his delivery is even and a little weighed down by long suffering. For example:

In January [Maud] was learning the violin and in order to annoy me at night she would practise. On the night in question I hid the violin and told her to leave and I would give it to her in the morning. She went out and got the axe and proceeded to smash the piano. After this she refused to allow me to come inside the house. She used scissors to keep me out.

It is hard to believe that Maud could have intimidated Nash to this extent. Clearly her counsel thought so too.

‘Do you expect this court to believe that a big hefty man like you was knocked about by a little woman?'

‘There's no one who can conceive what she's like unless they've seen the woman. She's a maniac.'

Asked what kind of man is the petitioner, Maud replies, ‘Most violent.'

‘And you have heard it said that you have a violent temper too?'

‘Yes, many times,' [wearily].

‘And have you?'

‘One may be driven to extremes.'

One afternoon I left the shoe factory to walk up to Manley Terrace in Newtown, where Maud smashed the piano and chased Nash out to the street with an assortment of knives and scissors. It took about twenty-five minutes. I found the house, evenly covered in frost-white paint. Its front windows gazed darkly back at me. Manley Terrace turns out to be a cul de sac tucked away out of the path of the nor-wester and the colder southerly. The bay windows confront the street flush with domestic pride. The upstairs veranda has been closed off. In Maud's day it must have offered a lofty stage for the lady of the house. Across the road, the brick stables have been renovated into a tasteful townhouse. Around the corner, in Colombo Street, the two-storey houses are from the same Victorian vintage, but a lesser breed. Terrace houses, cheek by jowl, each one with a stoop. At the bottom of the sloping street begin the worker cottages that stretch north and south.

Maud and Harry Nash's house offers grandeur. But its aspect is limited. It wishes to face the street—and no more. There is the feeling of arriving in a bigger world as you turn into Colombo Street, and recoiling from the same as you enter Manley Terrace. The familiar geography of the city lies beyond Colombo, in the direction of the Newtown shops. And northwards, past the hospital, Mt Victoria rises in its hopeless and endless quest to touch the silver underbellies of the planes rising and descending from Wellington airport. In Maud's day Mt Victoria had been scrubbed clear, and the streets sloping up the hill were lined with old wooden houses, some on a lean like a stack of wood waiting to be brought inside out of the weather.

In Manley Terrace I looked for the window Nash dangled Maud out of. I probably looked like a thief. In a way I was exactly that—I was looking for something to take. I had half a hope that old ghosts would suddenly appear on the doorstep. But the effect of the white paint is clear. The house does not wish to stand apart. It did not want to hang onto the history that had passed through its doors.

The police who showed up there regularly never suspected that the cause of the violence and commotion in the Nash household was a child and what she represented. The police never suspect because at such moments Nash is transformed into the respectable businessman. He is the reasonable one, anxious to placate the situation. Once the police depart, the madness resumes.

Very likely Maud is mad, but not without cause. There would be something wrong with her if she were not driven out of her mind by Nash's determination to get rid of her child. By what hideous set of rules must her daughter be evicted as soon as Eric and Ken are born?

But as time goes on, the abuse shows no sign of ending. And I wonder if Maud's resolve weakens. I wonder if her thoughts take her by surprise, thoughts that, at first, smell of betrayal, almost catch in the throat, but also serve the purpose of opening up a possibility. What would happen if she were to do what Nash is bullying her to do? What would that world look like without the presence of the child to provoke him?

Nash is more forthright, more out in the open with his thoughts. If Betty could just disappear the world will be a happier, saner place.

It is the dark side of the imagination taking over. For the moment, Maud's resolve holds.

Nash destroys photographs of Maud's friends and family in England. He forbids her to communicate with them. On one occasion he dresses her down for stopping in a city street to speak with a friend. The arguments continue. The name-calling returns, frequently erupting into violence. At her wits' end, Maud capitulates. It seems that the only way to hold onto her daughter is to reveal the identity of the father.

The moment she names my mother's father, a threshold is crossed. There is a wait to see how the cards have fallen—badly for Maud, as it turns out, because at Nash's insistence she writes O.T. a letter, that is, she takes down what Nash dictates: a demand for money.

Maud told the court that Nash made her blackmail O.T. and his family:

One suggestion was to expose him to the neighbourhood where he lived, which, incidentally would have meant exposing her [Mrs Evans]. Eventually he came to the conclusion that the best revenge would be to extort money from the man and eventually at his dictation and under coercion I wrote for £70 to have the child adopted.

The letter Maud wrote to O.T. in August 1917 isn't in the file. So there is no way of knowing how Nash made her frame the request, although Maud did call it ‘revengeful blackmail'. O.T. replies immediately, anxious to contain the situation.

Dear Maude [
sic
]
I just received your letter today as I have been away, and it knocked the life completely out of me. I am absolutely astonished by the tone in it. Whatever has gone wrong that you are so despondent. You told me you were getting married and your husband was adopting the child so I cannot understand what is the matter. If you write at once you can send it to me direct as I am at home alone. I am quite willing to do whatever I can for both you and the little one. Tell me what is wrong and what you want, and I will do it at once if I possibly can. But do please spare my poor old father and mother if you can. I don't care what I suffer as I know I have sinned, but for God's sake don't do anything desperate. Send at once direct.

Maud replies:

Dear Mr Evans,
I can go no longer with Betty living in the same house, so that to get her adopted to someone who would love her and bring her up nicely as well as give her a name is the only way I can get happiness for her…

Nash later writes separately to O.T. enclosing a receipt for the money received. He writes with a pseudonym. He signs his letters H. Manley.

In the summer of 1917 the attacks on Harry Nash—which the court will hear about and the newspapers will leap on with glee—resume.

Nash is cutting the hedge. Maud is watching him from the porch. There is nothing wrong with the hedge, but Nash is cutting it all the same. He is imposing his will on the hedge. As usual he wants the world to conform to his desire, his needs. He does not care about anyone else. He makes the cutting of the hedge appear so reasonable. He would cut off the head of the little girl if he had his way; he would move methodically along the row and cut off her head without a second thought, mindful of process and appearance, mindful of himself and all that he might represent in the eyes of others.

There is something unacceptable about Nash, something so revoltingly present in the man that she cannot abide it any more. It is hard to say whether it is located in any one thing, although his breeches annoy, and the stuffy way he stands in his boots, and his sanctimonious air with the hedge-clippers. She gets up from the porch, almost without a thought other than her revulsion for all that Nash stands for, and it is suddenly necessary to do something to prevent him reaching that place along the hedge where he will harm her daughter with his thoughtless clipping. Something has to be done. And so Maud brings her foot back and kicks Nash in the crotch.

But did the incident actually occur? Nash says that injuries he sustained from Maud's attack put him in bed for a week and that the doctor was called for. The doctor remembers attending Nash, but not at that time, and not for a kick to the crotch, but for a side strain.

If it did happen, then for a split-second Maud must have felt that some justice had been restored. It is hardly a legal argument. It is an emotional one, but this is the nature of her war with Nash.

Maud removes the photographs of Nash's children and his late wife from their frames, presumably to make Nash understand what he is demanding of her, and to provoke him to imagine himself into that space. And to know that if he is abusive to her little girl she will be the same towards his children. And if he dares her into violence, as slight as she is, she won't disappoint.

O.T. has sent more money, as per request, but only after a second terse note instructing him how much and what the money is for. Life has become intolerable and Betty cannot continue to live in Nash's household. The money is to pay for Betty to be separated from her mother.

Maud writes, ‘Fifty or sixty pounds should do it.' In 1917, fifty or sixty pounds was the average household's rent and food for a year.

O.T.'s money duly arrives—much of it handed to a solicitor who makes the arrangements for my mother to pass out of Maud's world. But in the course of managing the transaction the solicitor dies and, Maud told the court, rather than put herself through the ordeal with a new solicitor, she decided to adopt my mother ‘through friends'. She does say ‘through' rather than ‘to'.