A History of Silence (9 page)

The front door of a house opens. The quick shadow of someone dropping down a short flight of steps causes Mum's head to snap to. The person comes into view, but it is the wrong person, the wrong gate, wrong house.

Released from that tension we sit back, Mum's limp hands go back to the steering wheel, and we wait.

So, for what feels like hours, and perhaps is, we sit in the car and we wait for my mother to catch a glimpse of her mother, Maud, the woman who gave her away.

Out of the vanished or vanishing world of my childhood, figures come and go.

A girl, aged twelve, pregnant, her jersey pulled tightly over the hump in her stomach, is the most astonishing sight I have ever seen on the playing fields of Hutt Intermediate. At the sound of the school bell she remains there looking down at herself. The shadows of the other kids flee across the green fields. In her solitary world the girl continues to look at herself. She pats the ends of her jersey. She runs her hand down over her belly and when she looks up her face is filled with wonder.

Then one day she is gone. The grass where she stood is green and bristling. No one asks after her. No one says where she has gone. Instead, to the teacher's furious strumming on the ukulele, we bellow out a calypso song.

But how did that happen? A girl of twelve? No one asks, no one knows, no one thinks to ask. I wouldn't say that no one cares, but, like all the dogs that have been run over in the street outside our house and then forgotten, the pregnant girl has gone, and that is all there is to it.

Then, one night, on the other side of my bedroom door, the terrifying music of a television drama has waned, and in its place I hear tears and shouting, followed by the stampede of feet down the hall. The front door slams, and the house shakes. Car doors, one after the other, crack open and shut. A moment later, the car bursts off into the night.

I won't see my sister again for a while. Lorraine has gone to live with her boyfriend in a caravan. She has just turned seventeen and is pregnant.

Her bedroom used to be the one opposite the bathroom. When I poke my nose in there it still smells of her hairbrush.

On Sunday, we return to the beach to pick through the kelp thrown up by the storm that blew over during the week. The sun is out. It is a glorious day. My father's hair is whiter than ever. My mother hugs herself. Nothing was said in the car on the way here. Nothing is said about the pregnancy. The silence of course is occupied with nothing else.

I find a blowfish, perfectly whole in a way that other dead fish are not, as light as paper to hold, but when I look into its mouth and gullet I can find nothing there. It is completely hollow.

One day, the concrete layer is broken into and a huge tree trunk is unearthed at the end of the street by drainage workers. A crane and an earthmover have to combine forces and loop a chain around the log to lift it out of an ancient-smelling ditch. A crowd gathers and, to judge by the silence, it is in awe of this remnant from the erased world.

On another occasion an enormous slab of timber with the bulk of a Roman column is paraded through the streets on the back of a truck. We stop and stare as it travels by—massive, captured, like some barbarian of old paraded through Rome in chains.

No one knows its variety. The massive slab has been stripped of identity. It has moved beyond botanical association—beyond sympathy too for that matter, or a capacity to shock—to become building material.

After the ancient log was lowered onto the truck and taken away, the drainage workers leapt into the gaping hole and, stumbling over old roots, successfully joined the concrete pipes, and the sewerage line kicked into life again to pump its discharge out to the headlands where we like to walk at the weekend.

Thank God the ancient log has been disposed of. There is general agreement on this matter. Roots are hell to deal with.

Dad won't even have certain trees on the section. The ‘show lawn' is covered with little notches, rips and tears where it has come under attack. In the afternoon heat, on all fours, hatchet in hand, Mum hovers and tracks the rooting system of a rogue plant that she never chose to have on the property and so it will have to be chased out. She slashes with the hatchet and Dad looks on approvingly. He is ready to crack open a beer, but won't until Mum is finished. He has been waging his own war out the back of the section. Rarely are they so close in agreement about anything. It has been drummed into me—there is no point in pulling out a weed unless you rip out all its roots as well.

The incinerator will smoke away into evening.

I have been born into a world of amnesia. And in the world of amnesia, language is first to go—talk of fairies and nymphs disappears the moment the shade they shelter in is destroyed forever by the rush of daylight across a forest floor as the giant trees crash to earth.

We tell ourselves that ‘fairy' and ‘nymph' are English words. We have no use for them out here in the new world, and so amnesia finds justification in false pride.

Before the MOW is able to coat the world in silence a forest must be cleared. The largest trees are scarfed to encourage them to fall in the desired direction. Starting with the largest trees of those highest on a hillside, a ‘drive' is set up so that each one will crash and topple onto the next giant, which in turn cracks and drunkenly weaves before it too smashes down on the tree below. In this way an entire hillside falls like a stack of dominoes.

Then the fire lighters move through the fallen logs. The mayhem of men running like hoodlums with torches is captured in an 1857 sketch made by William Strutt. The fallen logs lie in a great tangle, like a battle scene described through the ages. It is chaotic, and pitiless.

The fires burn for days, and when the smoke clears the hills are covered in black stumps. The ground is black with soot.

For days the valley at the end of the harbour is lost in smoke. The sun disappears and, around sunset, turns into a fireball, which for the first settlers must have felt like a portent of the end of the world. The story of the hillside has been terminated. Gorse and grass take over, and a whole new story begins.

Smoke is the colour and texture of amnesia. Amnesia, like smoke, can only point to the condition. We are aware of a loss, not what it is that we have lost.

It is easier to dwell on the glories of what we have achieved. And, to show improvement, as in Charles Heaphy's 1841 watercolour of a land clearance. In the foreground, six tree stumps look like amputees but without engendering compassion. They don't shock in the way a log pulled out of the boggy depths by drainage workers does, because look at what has been won: a lovely croquet-smooth green field. In their supine and semi-stripped state the trees even manage to look elegant, almost improved upon. It would be easy to believe that they had signed their own death warrant for the sake of the greater good.

It is the end of a process that began with a makeshift plank bridging the gap between the decks of the
Resolution
and the primeval forest that William Hodges painted. Others follow, leaping off that plank with axes and fire.

Were it not for the likes of the naturalist William Swainson and the surveyors William Mein Smith and Samuel Brees, who compiled a painterly record of what they saw in our neighbourhood before it actually became one, there would be no lost landscape for us to imagine, let alone lament.

In one old painting is the riverbank where I played, but it is not as I found it. The still surface of the river holds the reflections of overhanging trees and bushes. A raupo hut occupies the near bank where, more than one hundred years later, the kid from across the street and I will sneak up on a car parked on the shingle, its windows steamed up. All we will see is a bare arse and a girl's startled face, before the car door is kicked open and a guy stumbles out pulling at his belt and swearing his head off. We tear into the scrub, most of it crappy undergrowth, bracken and gorse and broom, growing like weeds in place of the magnificent trees of the paintings.

Along with the original forest, the old Englishy names of the first homesteads—Algiony, Hawkshead and Herongate—thatched cottages that sat in a Garden of Eden, will disappear from collective memory. And the broad, many-fingered estuary of the river, which encouraged the first settlers to think of it as another Thames, will change its course.

In a sketch of his own place in the Hutt Valley, which he called Hawkshead, William Swainson delights in foregrounding introduced elements. Five bunches of English flowers shiver in the newly cleared space, forget-me-nots. The massive trunks of the forest push up through the top of the canvas in the background. Down by the river, a toetoe and a cabbage tree frame two cows drinking at the water's edge.

Soon enough Swainson is sketching men with long axes wading into the bush. Then the fires begin, the thick, sun-obliterating effect of the smoke follows, and amnesia sets in.

So it was easy to forget or, at least, accept grandparents and heritage as something that other people had, something that wasn't that interesting, or enviable, like owning a particular old artefact, a Victorian brooch or fob watch, for which there is no obvious contemporary use.

Years, decades, pass before I set eyes on Maud, my mother's mother, in Villa Rosa, a house on Bathpool Road in Taunton, Somerset. There she is in the album laid out on a table, photographed in the very same house that I happen to be visiting.

Mavis, a first cousin of my mother's (unearthed just a few years before my visit) will say of Maud only that she could be ‘a hard woman'. Which isn't quite the condemnation I had hoped to hear. I wonder if Mavis picks up on this because she repeats, in minor key, ‘She could be
very
tough.'

Well, yes, I should say so, in order to make the trade that she did, a trade my mother had no say in, and one that haunted her for the rest of her life.

As a matter of principle I grow up loathing Maud—at least the idea of her. Whenever asked about my ancestry, specifically my grandparents, I say with some relish, ‘I don't have any.'

I never did see Maud in all of those times we parked in her street so Mum could catch a glimpse of her. This occasion in Mavis's house is the first time that I have locked eyes on my grandmother.

She is not what I hoped for. But what did I hope for? I don't feel as though I have found another layer of me. She could be anyone. She has made no effort to smile for the camera. The eyes are flat, unyielding.

But then, in another photograph, her face has opened up to a generous smile and the transformation is staggering. She looks almost likeable. She has blonde hair. How strange. I wasn't expecting a grandmother with blonde hair. I check with Mavis. The photograph was taken on a visit to Taunton in 1922, eight years after my mother was born.