A Provincial New Zealand Childhood (or, What I Did in the War)

Singing & Drowning

By Janet Kenny

“When I was young, I believed that nothing ever happened to people in small towns. Only growth and pain. Life and death. I traveled around the world to discover that nothing ever happens anywhere. Here is a tale of a carefully lost life painfully rediscovered through hyperventilation. Holding one’s breath and plunging into the forgotten sometimes caused cramps and dizziness.”—Janet Kenny

Editor’s Note: This installment from her memoir-in-progress comprises the first column by New Zealand-born poet and singer Janet Kenny. In the June 2025 issue of Hubris, I introduced readers to Kenny’s poetry, subsequently inviting her to contribute to the magazine in the first person. Kenny’s is a “memoir of gasps,” as readers will discover, emitted while “singing and drowning.”

First Gasp—The Beginning

POINT VERNON Australia—(Hubris)—August 2025—When I was young, I believed that nothing ever happened to people in small towns. Only growth and pain. Life and death. I traveled around the world to discover that nothing ever happens anywhere. Here is a tale of a carefully lost life painfully rediscovered through hyperventilation. Holding one’s breath and plunging into the forgotten sometimes caused cramps and dizziness. 

Early one morning, when I was very young, I ran away from home and discovered a paddock with long sweet-smelling grass. In this paddock was a stand of native bush with a clearing in the middle. Sun streamed down through the branches. A flock of tiny red and yellow birds flew through the brilliant light. Nobody had told me there were colored birds. A movement on the ground caught my attention. On the ground lay a bearded man in an old cloth coat, his head on a roll of blankets. We said hullo. I ran away. My heart thumped all the way home. Next day when I was with my mother we passed the man in the street. We said hullo again. My mother told me not to speak to strangers. “But I know that man,” I said. For years, my mother told people how I had lied about the tramp. But I did know that man. We had shared something. We were friends.

On my first day at school, I hit the only girl who was nice to me. Groucho Marx said he wouldn’t want to join any club that would have him as a member. Groucho would have understood. I didn’t understand, though. I was ashamed. An adenoidal child called Oliver Milton told me that I had bad breath. I thought this a very sophisticated insult. It smacked of American advertisements in Colliers and Saturday Evening Post. (Our family’s teeth were cleaned with salt; my parents took theirs out to clean them while my brother and I struggled with less convenient equipment inside our mouths.) Oliver Milton let me help him with his blackboard drawing. I could make the chimney stand up instead of sticking sideways.

I hated school very much. When they asked me to beat time on a metal triangle to “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” I struck it between the beats. I couldn’t believe they wanted something as simple minded as one beat to the bar. I was up to “Turkey in the Straw” on my wooden xylophone at home. The teacher thought I had no sense of rhythm. My father’s teacher-sister was against kindergarten. All the other children had attended kindergarten. They laughed and whispered together. 

My father’s sister was a famous educationalist. The teachers made a fuss of me. I was always top of the class. Top in everything. Until I was nine, when I stopped trying and my aunt went out of fashion. At this time, my mother also stopped trying. I had started school with a new frock for every day of the month. When I was nine, my clothes were often neglected. I think I was depressed. A depressed child. A clown with a broken heart. My farmer-uncle called me Smiler.

My mother was always cross in the mornings. Every task was a martyrdom. She sawed through bread with resentful impatience. “Hurry up, you children!” Scrubbed the iron parts of the gas stove. “No other woman has to put up with . . .”

Scrubbed the kitchen linoleum. I knew it was my father’s fault. And my fault. 

My brother was sensitive and I was not. This was my mother’s declared view. I was born to be hanged. And I was just like my grandmother. The arrogant Scottish Flora. Duchess in her own eyes. Her husband quarreled with his land-owner father and took his ambitious older wife away from the big house. She made do with less while he sold insurance to farmers. He traveled on a motor bike and died of pneumonia. Flora taught piano and French and trained her children to know the right people. My mother was not one of them. 

We lived in Flora’s house for a year. It was pale green and made of wood.

Flora was mysteriously ill. She ruled her subjects from a dark musty bedroom. She sat me at a table and made me play scales on its surface.

She timed me with her watch. There was a silver framed photograph of a lady with ostrich plumes in her hair. That’s your Aunty Ruth. She presented New Zealand visitors at Buckingham palace to the king and queen. I was impressed. Aunty Ruth was no blood relative. She had married Flora’s oldest son. Her widowed father was New Zealand High Commissioner. He was a Sir. Flora referred to Ruth frequently. Ruth and her husband lived in Australia. She sent me Australian books and, once, a beautiful spotted blue cotton scarf of the kind then worn by art students and Parisian bohemians. She died of cancer. Flora was vague about what Ruth’s husband, her oldest son, did in the AMP. 

Flora had a framed reproduction of the well-known painting of the boy in the dock. He was sent to prison for stealing a loaf of bread. Snobbish old Flora was capable of this much social conscience. She gave me ancient moldy toffees from her top drawer. She told me how she and her husband had planted the garden together. It was a wonderful garden. Many of the plants were Australian. There was a smoke tree. The poetry of this idea made me shiver. The fumes of cotton thread blossoms fulfilled the promise. There was a huge crimson poppy with a jet-black spider center and swollen tight calyx. My mother told me that it was a forbidden plant. Flora had deliberately planted a forbidden plant. There was a pepper tree, crawling with stick insects. Horror when a stick insect crawled inside one’s collar.

There was a spoiled little girl staying for an extended visit over the road. She had ringlets and always got her own way. One day she fell ill. She died the next day. Nobody had told me that small people could die.

My mother refused to stay in the same house as Flora any longer and we moved out. The good teacher-daughter moved in. She owned an old cream-colored, porous edition of Through the Looking Glass with a brown holland cover. I read it with terror whenever we visited. I still read it with terror. 

Flora became strange. One day she wandered down to the Boys High School and climbed through the wire fence of the sports field to save a boy from drowning. In the end, the good daughter put her in a home. The home sent her back. They couldn’t cope.

Several other homes did the same. I think she finished in a mental hospital.

Poor Flora.

Hatred of Flora gave my mother’s life meaning. My mother came from a line of North of Ireland Scots. They are famous for their long memory.

Second Gasp—The Tree

When I was seven, my parents moved to a house on a low hill. It was the only hill to break the plain of the town until the extensive ranges across the river led to brooding mountain ranges beyond. The kitchen window looked across a large paddock which sloped downwards towards the town and its frame of mountains.

Our family refreshed itself daily with the changing light and cloud patterns.

Visits by the landlord, an important client at the bank where my father earned our living . . .  My mother at once sycophantic and defiant. I was mortified. We did not own our house. We were not free. I hated the landlord. Highland Scottish pride ran through my life like a purple ribbon.

I knew my father’s family had once been important. The decline was shrugged away. The importance was perpetual. None could diminish it. “Och! People!” my mother used to say bitterly. Her family had been merely respectable. 

My mother complained about the wind, which she said came right in the back door.

Wind was an important part of life in that town. The houses were mostly made of wood, and the inside walls were scrim with wallpaper pasted over it. When the gales roared and whistled, the whole house shook and the inside walls bulged like tents. The light was bright and harsh during the day, and the stars were brilliant by night. My skin was burned by sun and wind. Bicycling to school often became a heroic act. Standing on the pedals but not moving at all. Then there were the earthquakes. Often on still days, which acquired an eerie significance because of their rarity, people would shake their heads and say, “It’s earthquake weather.”

Oddly enough, my memory convinces me that earthquakes indeed occurred on still days. You would first hear or rather feel that you heard a distant rumbling. Then a jolting would begin, and the sounds of breaking plates and cracking timbers still accompanied by rumbling. Then stillness. A terrible stillness. I often thought that the stillness after a battle must be like this.

Playing my mouth organ to my mother’s chooks and feeling like The Great God Pan or St. Francis of Assisi. Eye contact with a glass bird eye and meeting a soul. Dimly aware that Mrs. Green, the estate agent’s wife and her brat Frank, were staring vacuously from their upstairs window next door.

Picking raspberries and examining the hollow fearfully for white grubs. Hanging fiercely to the fragrant macrocarpa branch in the paddock, soaring up and down, arm sockets in agony, fearing the approach of the gypsy Lovejoy’s half-broken horses with yellow teeth. These same teeth stole my father’s tomatoes over the fence. 

Sometimes, one of the horses would bolt towards me across the paddock. A true nightmare. The supporting posts were on the other side of the fence and the fence-top was higher than I could reach. Only by repeated jumping to catch the top of the fence with desperate fingers and scrambling up the slippery seasoned wooden surface like a human fly, was I able to escape those thrashing hooves and rolling eyes. When I fell bleeding and panting on the other side of the fence, the horse would pace back and forth whinnying and snorting near the place where I lay. 

Sometimes it would kick the fence or look over the top with bloodshot eyes. Despite this terror, the heady pleasure of leaping up and down on the end of the fragrant macrocarpa branch was stronger than my dread. One day, my father and a neighbor cut down the mighty macrocarpa. Its ghost never left us. Without its massive shape, our homes were exposed and puny. The apple tree in the valley seemed to mourn its distant companion.

We smoked dock leaves rolled in newspaper. It was horrible. We ate the nut inside the purple scotch thistle flowers. Years later, I recognized the scotch thistle’s handsome big brother, the artichoke. The pain experienced by childish fingers dissecting the thistle was echoed in the anatomy of the purple spiked artichokes. The Lovejoy gang used to shoot BB guns at us. They shot birds in the paddock for no reason other than the desire to stop a living target. Sometimes in the morning, a lark would rise and rise and rise, its throbbing song intensifying with the increasing altitude.

There was an empty house with an overgrown garden across the paddock. It was separated from reality by a deep valley with cow pats and a bog. A mad man lived in the house. My friend Sydney the pansy, my senior by six years, crept with me through the cow pats to peer into the dark windows by the flowering apple tree. I lost a sandal in a cowpat. Something moved in a dark room. We ran.

Third Gasp—Danger

We were going to the sea. For a holiday. My English story books had lots of pictures of children wearing layers of clothing but with bared feet and buckets and spades. The same books spoke of Punch and Judy shows and shrimp nets. I was looking forward to the sea. We drove for what seemed a lifetime. Then suddenly a blue vastness. A line where the sky and water vied for supremacy. So much space. So much light. So much. And as we got closer, a roar. All unpredictable and impersonal creation was in that deep powerful voice. The voice of the sea. It seemed to say, “I’ll stay here for just now, but if my mood changes, I’ll bury you.”

Nature revealed as force. Scale without meaning. Fear, the source of religious experience. Nice people add love, fellowship, and redemption. The motor of religion is fear.

My father’s good sister was teaching in a seaside town. She had bought a quaint brown wooden house which clung, on top of its garage, to a cliff overlooking the wild west coast of the North Island. The Tasman Sea flung precipitous breakers onto the black iron sand. The sand hills with blowing grasses and wild asparagus led to huge open beaches.

This beach had a shipwreck. The ship lay there near the shore and the fierce water gouged deep hollows in the surrounding seabed. I was petrified with fear. My parents tried to lead me to the water’s edge. I screamed and refused to approach this living water that breathed menace and sent poisonous messengers rushing up the sand towards us. They boiled and seethed as they rushed back. The wrecked ship lay there, desolate. 

As if this were not enough. New Zealand was in daily expectation of a Japanese invasion. And how would the Japanese arrive? Why, by sea of course. Rolls of barbed wire were all along the beach and concrete pill boxes at intervals throughout the sand dunes. 

I remember dancing to Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Reeds,” which I heard for the first time on my aunt’s radio during that holiday. My brother was rocking in the wooden rocking chair, one of the reasons we liked to visit my aunt’s house, and suddenly through the enchantment of the twining flutes, I realized that we were in immense danger. My parents hadn’t told us about it, but we heard things on the radio and glimpsed things in newspapers. Those flutes became poisonous and hypnotic. Outside, the sea loomed enigmatically.

On calm sunny mornings the sea was beautiful. Luminous water received the sun’s warmth and kingfishers sat patiently on the cliff top. Waiting. When they flashed downwards, a new color of blue was revealed to us. A blue echoed in butterflies and oil floating in puddles. 

An eccentric politician had the wrecked ship dismantled and carted away to be converted into a tank which was too heavy for bridges and roads.

My brother and I took a great interest in the proceedings. We were taken over the gangplanks to look inside the ship. I was losing my fear of the sea. I even began to love paddling in it and, sometimes, pretend-swimming. But when a wave hurled me over and over, rubbing my face in the sand and wouldn’t let me breathe, I remembered what the sea really was. 

One day, our family was strolling along the sand when the sea did it. A gigantic wave, which seemed to shut out the sun, approached us slowly and relentlessly. Up, up the sand it came. We tried to run away but the rolls of barbed wire were between us and escape. The wave caught us, and we were trapped and torn by the wire. It seemed forever. The wave must have flattened out by the time it reached us because I can remember a seething mass of icy water around my neck. We were all soaked and miserable. 

In the garage under the house, another horror lurked. Hairy black spiders of a size and solidity beyond belief. “They always go in twos,” my father told us, and I believed him. They were awful. Too big for insects. 

Next door was a broken wilderness which had once been a formal garden. There was a cracked, weedy tennis court with a torn net. Mossy statues and silent fountains peered out of rambling plants which crept like a jungle all over them. An eccentric woman painter lived alone there.

She lent me a very old translation of the original German fairytales collected by the Brothers Grimm. No nonsense about happy endings or pretty stories. The grim reaper was the main character. “Death and the maiden.” I loved them. 

One day, I was swinging from a rope when it snapped and I died. Well, I thought I was dead, because when they said Are you all right? and I tried to answer them, I couldn’t speak. Then I found that I couldn’t breathe. In or out. I was stuck. Death was the only rational explanation. I tried to scream, and I couldn’t do that either. Someone said, “I think she’s winded.” I thought that meant dead. I still couldn’t scream. Finally, I found some slight muscle power and tiny trickles of air started to enter my body.

Everyone was cross. I felt guilty because I had been lying to my brother at the moment of my fall. I was telling him that I was really an Indian princess and that I was adopted. I had renounced my family, and I had been punished.

Fourth Gasp

Death lived at the top of our street. The hospital morgue with its dark green Gothic tower and weathervane behind a tall hedge of macrocarpa, was immediately visible from our front gate. The Chief Pathologist, doctor of death and his grave wife lived next door to his place of worship in a charming house. Like a vicarage, it was slightly superior to the houses nearby. Dr. Murdoch and his wife walked daily past our house with their black Labrador dog. Our family greeted them with the respect and awe due to both of his roles; august medical official and the intermediary between us and the unspeakable mystery. He had not only seen dead people but, and one tried not to dwell on this, he cut them up. It was important not to offend such a powerful person. 

Two Cockney refugees came to live with the Murdochs. One boy of 15 and a younger boy the same age as my brother. The older boy had hairy legs which looked strange in the colonial school uniform of short serge trousers and three-quarter knee socks. 

One day, the older boy asked me to come and play with him in the orchard and patch of rainforest which divided the morgue from the doctor’s residence. An invitation to the edges of beyond from someone who was almost a member of the presiding family. I did not wonder why a 15-year-old boy would want to play with an eight-year-old girl. My mother had told me that the Cockney boys had experienced terrible things in The Blitz and that they had risked a perilous ocean voyage in enemy-submarine-infested seas in order to reach the tranquility of our town and the house by the morgue. I was deeply honored to be the chosen companion of one who already had met all the mysteries. 

He took me by the hand and led me deeper and deeper into the wood. The black dog accompanied us. The boy told me that the next part of the journey was secret and that he wanted to do something which I should not see. He explained that this was the reason he was now obliged to blindfold me with his not too clean handkerchief. 

At this point, I became cunning. I knew nothing of life, nothing of sex. We are ancient animals and at this moment I discovered the wisdom which has also given us a fear of spiders, heights, and all the menaces, obstacles, and ambushes first encountered by our antecedents in our primeval climb. I became full of guile. I pretended we were still playing. I humored him by saying all the things which would prevent him from suspecting that I was afraid. He picked me up and carried me. He said it was so that I shouldn’t dirty my white sandals and so that I wouldn’t know the way to a secret place. He put me down and said that he had to do something. I heard the splash of water on the ground and recognized the smell of warm urine. Then he put something in my hand. What is it? he said. If you can tell me what it is I’ll let you go. I was as alert as a Red Indian war party. My ancestors cried, “Be careful.” “Be careful.” 

“I’m not sure,” I said. 

“Try and guess,” he said.

Then I became as old as I will ever be. “It’s the dog’s nose,” I said.

There was a silence. “Are you sure?” he said. 

“Yes,” I said.

There was a long pause. Then he said. “Well, we’ll go back now.”

I could tell the danger was not over. He carried me still blindfolded part of the way, then untied the filthy handkerchief from my eyes. We were near the morgue and the street. His face was red and his manner abrupt. “I’ve got to go now. Goodbye,” and he walked quickly away towards the doctor’s house.

The strangest part of the story is that I have no recollection of having ever told my mother about any of this. I must have thought it was my fault. 

Seven years later, when a respectable middle-aged neighbor grabbed me in an unambiguous way, I told my parents. They were strangely unreceptive and made no effort to complain on my behalf. They had greater fears.

To be continued . . .