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

Singing & Drowning

By Janet Kenny

“All my conscious life there was talk of war. Later, it was The War Effort. My mother went once a week to help out at the Patriotic Shop. I was too young to understand the underlying tensions of that place. I knew some women were more powerful than others. I did not know that struggle is a natural part of existence, even in Patriotic Shops. They used to raffle things. A kewpie doll in a crinoline to sit over the telephone. I remember large vulgar dolls in boxes. I was told that some lucky little girl would win one. I never did. I was not a lucky little girl.”—Janet Kenny

Editor’s Note: This excerpt from her memoir-in-progress comprises the third 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 have discovered, emitted while “singing and drowning.” (For the first two installments of Kenny’s memoir, click on these links: A Provincial New Zealand Childhood (or, What I Did in the War) and A Provincial New Zealand Childhood (or, What I Did in the War): Part II.)

Thirteenth Gasp—The Curse

POINT VERNON Australia—(Hubris)—November 2025—My mother used to purchase mysterious parcels in the corset department of one of the larger department stores. She never divulged their contents and for some reason I never asked.

I can’t remember when I first heard about menstruation. My first information about sex was told to me, along with lurid anecdotes, by a clever pretty girl who was two years my junior. Although I had already read delicately pornographic historical novels for some years and had been enrolled in the adult library since I was nine years old, I had somehow read the purple passages without understanding them. 

I can remember regaling my father’s good sister and her teacher-friend with a tale about Lady Emma Hamilton who insisted on placing a bolster down the middle of the bed when she allowed a soldier to spend the night with her. I also remember showing them a reproduction of Goya’s portrait of a clothed duchess and telling them that he painted it for her husband and another unclothed one for himself. Afternoon tea was being served in the sitting room at the time. I was making small talk as I handed around the cake rack.

My mother must have been unable to find the words to explain things to me. There was a terrible fear of physicality in our house. Kissing was extremely rare and hugging unknown. 

For some time, I had thought that I was failing in basic hygiene as telltale signs of the approaching menarche appeared embarrassingly on my underwear. My mother, who washed my clothes, failed to explain anything to me and I was too mortally ashamed to ask.

Then, on my thirteenth birthday, when we were visiting my mother’s parents, my first period arrived. By then I knew about periods. At least I knew they existed and that if they stopped happening it meant you were going to have a baby which meant a terrible casting forth from society and being locked up in an institution run by nuns.

I told my mother what had happened. She had to tell her mother as we were in my grandparents’ house, and needed what I viewed as surgical equipment to staunch the flow. Some snowy-white but slightly-worn towels were produced and my mother and grandmother, both with ancient sibyl-like expressions, demonstrated how to cut and fold the towels and gave me some huge safety pins. There was an almost ritualistic air in the house. I was put to bed although I felt quite well. It seemed that in some way I had both failed and passed a stiff test. The Virgin Mary’s mother’s face must have betrayed the same mixture of pride and disappointment when she first heard the good news.

Although I knew how to soak and wash the rags (I never had shop parcels), I found that I needed more than I could keep up with and I lacked privacy and space to wash and dry them. My brother was always around. I took to wrapping them in newspaper and shoving them under the twin bed until I could furtively cope with their tyrannical demands.

One day, my father was searching for something and looked under the bed with a torch.

He demanded to know what they were. I told him.

“You filthy slut!” he said, “and your mother’s a filthy slut, too!”

He had never used expressions like that before.

I remember once I was reading a book about war-time Poland and I came upon the term prostitute. 

“Dad”, I called out. “What does prostitute mean?” There was a pause. Then the answer came from a distant room. “In a reclining posture”, said my father.

I also remember the hideous discomfort of cycling miles to school with the added fear of coming through. 

Once I was on holiday at a seaside town which was famous for its Mardi Gras. Half child still, I rode a flying horse, a passion for some years, and not only did I come through, but my skirt blew up over my head, revealing the safety pins to all and sundry. Round and round I circled, clinging to the neck of the plaster horse for dear life, yet praying for death.

Fourteenth Gasp—The Valley

The high point of our family’s life was picnics in the high river valley. Sandwiches, bacon-and-egg-pie, salad, and the Thermette, or Kelly Kettle, a patented device with compartments for kindling-wood and water which was part of the indispensable tea-making equipment. The day before the 30-mile trip, my father would check the wheels, tires, oil and water in our two-door family sedan. He did it again, in case, on the day of the trip. We made sure our togs were rolled up in towels. We listened to the asthmatic and pessimistic radio weather forecast which seemed to dwell on the inclemency of Stewart Island and Invercargill before arriving reluctantly at our more favored zone.

My father made us wait till he had backed the car out of our driveway before allowing us to get in. My brother and I sat in the back and my mother sat in the passenger seat in front. My father had bought a two-door car with rear windows that opened a mere four inches, so that the children should not fall out. I suffered from agonies of claustrophobia as I contemplated my fiery death, trapped as the car collided with an express train, not so unlikely in our town where the railway-line intersected the main shopping area. Or plunging over a precipice, equally possible as my father was terrified of bees and steered away from them even when, by chance, they entered the car as we threaded the gravelly mountain passes towards our picnic place. 

Out of town, past the gasworks, through mellow poplar-lined valleys towards the foothills which nestled at the feet of a mighty spine of ranges. Through these ranges ran tributaries of the larger river which dominated our town. Pockets of native forest and stark cliffs surrounded the river valley which was our accustomed destination.

Just above the large pool where we swam, shallow rapids rushed across sun-baked rocks. We swam with the eels in a thermal pool. Birdsong and the fragrant bush framed our pure pleasure. I would lie on my back and see the sun spread its blaze across the light stretch of sky inside the perpendicular white cliff. 

Some experiences are fundamental. Our family was not a success, but we found beauty together at this place.

Sunburnt and hungry, we would join my mother who read as she sat on our picnic rug. My mother claimed to dislike swimming, but I knew she felt self-conscious in a bathing suit. We gathered wood from the forest floor and lit the Thermette so that we could make tea. The cicadas and bees hummed and the pebbles clinked. The food tasted like a banquet and my brother and I sometimes stopped quarrelling.

Once, when my brother and I were older, a Russian school-friend of mine accompanied us on one of these picnics. She was clever and old beyond her years. She had endured unmentionable horrors in the war. She and my brother disappeared for two hours. My parents and I ate our lunch in silence. My mother’s face was terrible and my father was white and silent. When my brother and my friend returned it was almost dark and their story about being trapped in a slippery ravine lacked credibility. My parents didn’t speak on the way home. I can’t remember many picnics after that one.

Fifteenth Gasp—War

I was three and sitting on the Axminster carpet examining motes of dust which floated in a broad ray of morning sunlight. My mother was talking about Spain. “Poor Spain.” “Why?” “They’re having a dreadful time.” “Why?” “Poor, poor Spain.” I turned my attention to constructing a card house which always collapsed.

All my conscious life there was talk of war. Later, it was The War Effort. My mother went once a week to help out at the Patriotic Shop. I was too young to understand the underlying tensions of that shop. I knew some women were more powerful than others. I did not know that struggle is a natural part of existence, even in Patriotic Shops. They used to raffle things. A kewpie doll in a crinoline to sit over the telephone. I remember large vulgar dolls in boxes. I was told that some lucky little girl would win one. I never did. I was not a lucky little girl.

I tried to like dolls, but the only ones I really liked were the paper cut-out dolls that you could dress up and act plays with. I wanted a dolls’ house, but I never got one. You could have acted out tremendous dramas with a dolls’ house. All those private sanctums revealed when the walls were opened up. I made a dolls’ house theatre out of my kidney dressing table with hail-stone muslin frills. My mother had supplied me with a bedroom suite of suffocating prettiness. I used to get mud from my shoes on the hail-stone twin bedspreads. They were removed and replaced with cottage weave. 

The war meant funny ice cream made with malt instead of sugar, the disappearance of aniseed balls and chocolate, and exercise books with squashed insects and lumps of wood in the off-white cardboardy paper.

War meant a double-spread of spottily printed portraits of young men “Killed or Missing in Action” in the Auckland Weekly. My brother and I used to argue over which was the best or the most peculiar looking. Their ears usually stuck out. My mother’s brother appeared among the others. I boasted at school. Sometimes, when I was alone with their pictures, I would be overwhelmed by the mystery and terror of it all. We laughed at their ears and wondered in our hearts at a world where boys with funny ears were sent to die after leaving school. I also wondered at nice people who could kill other people. Other people with mothers and homes. I didn’t like the patriotic shop. I felt its phoniness even then. 

We laughed at Hitler who was easy to draw as an egg with a lock of hair and a moustache. He was easy to dress up as too. “Run Adolf, run Adolf, run, run, run.” Comedians Flanagan & Allen and George Formby were the war, too. 

There was a radio serial called Talking Drums. It was about African witch doctors. My parents decided that it was unsuitable for me but listened to it with my brother, while banishing me to my room. Too scared alone in my bedroom, I stood in the dark hall outside the dining room where the radio was kept. The pounding drums and blood-curdling screams peopled the dark hall with witch doctors. I experienced real terror.

One night, as I approached my brother’s room, I saw a dreadful cruel face peering through the window. My screams caused the family to come running to my assistance. The cruel face turned out to be a reflection of the poster of Winston Churchill which my brother had fastened on his wall.

The school committee dug trenches in the clay soil of the school play-ground. Then there was air raid practice. Each child had a name tag made of some brick-colored synthetic substance, a cork to place between the teeth, and cotton wool for the ears. They didn’t usually order us into the trenches as most of the time these were filled with rainwater.

Sometimes, my family would dress up in order to go to the town center when there was a military parade. We often stood upstairs and looked out the window of some obliging bank client whose business overlooked the parade route. Bren-gun carriers terrified me. The marching troops aroused my intense derision. Hardly any of them could march in time and nearly all of them had comic walks. Some, self-important with their chests out. Others with stomachs and bottoms out, their feet splayed like ducks. The music was exciting. What I loved most was the highland pipe bands. The combination of barbaric harmony and heroic costume would move me to tears. I used to run after them, fearful of missing a moment. 

The war meant crackly news broadcasts in which British voices spoke of horrors and massacres in fabulous places. My mother’s brother sent me a silver filigree link bracelet with the letters JERUSALEM, a glossy book of photographs of Palestine, and pressed flowers from the Holy Land. “Here some smiling young Palestinians welcome the Allied troops.” When I held those flowers, I experienced something of the awe felt by Mediterranean Christians before their broken pieces of saints in glass containers. 

News reels at the pictures began with strange Australian birds or animals and continued to show aeroplanes raining death on everything that moved or lay below, or aeroplanes crashing in flames to the ground. The black smoke rising from the crashed plane, a requiem for the men inside it. Tanks rolled through blizzards of bullets, and there were sinking ships which spewed forth blackened figures to struggle in oily seas. After one such prelude, my mother marched me out of Tom Sawyer because I was crying with terror when Indian Joe had the hero trapped in an underground cave. My mother did not realize that I was crying with rapture the way southern American Blacks say Amen during church services. I was left with the image of Indian Joe forever approaching with a knife, without the relief of plot resolution. Plottus interruptus. 

My brother drew planes engaged in dogfights, or tanks with guns belching smoke. I hated these things but admired the precision of his drawing.

I drew portraits of people and, I admit with shame, ballet dancers and horses. It was the heads of ballerinas which most fascinated me. The hair scraped back from thin wild-eyed faces with protruding cheek bones. I longed to look like them. Many years later, at an arts festival, I lived alongside the Netherlands Dance Company. I could not take my eyes from their savagely elegant faces and mantis-like limbs.

Sixteenth Gasp—The Barrier

My mother often parked our small car in the main street of our town. After we had changed our library books and made the necessary purchases, we would sit in the car and watch the pedestrians go past. This was my time of friendship with my mother. We both delighted in every detail of people’s appearances and manners. We would eat chocolate rough and point out various aspects of the cabaret. Jai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage.

My mother would say that there was something about a person that she did not like. She could not quite put her finger on what it was, but there was something. She would point out suspicious suede shoes or a tarty walk. We knew the background of many of our victims. She’s one of the Macphersons. The Macphersons were all extravagant and elegant. They lived in hotels but never paid their bills and moved on at regular intervals. The young women had long hair and elegant clothes. The mother wore film- star black with pearls. They were so far in debt that it gave them an aura of wealth. Sometimes, the father went to jail.

I developed a theory that people with heavy lines from nostril to mouth were common. Well, I was close. They certainly had qualities which would have shocked my father’s good sister. I noticed that uneducated people had less control of their facial muscles. Their faces were slack. When they spoke, their lips were slack which affected their vowels. People who might have been handsome with a little middle-class deportment were, instead, lacking in definition. What a shame that I learned to despise the poor. Perhaps they were too close for comfort. Every effort was made to confirm the essential gulf.

There was a beautiful part-Maori girl in my class. Her exercise books were almost unnaturally neat. She excelled at games, and her manner was gravely charming. There was no doubt that she was the leader of our class. One day, she condescended to come to my house after school. My mother told her that her mother must be worried about her and sent her home. I lost a lot that afternoon. I think that my mother was as concerned by the fact that my friend’s mother worked in a cut-price store, and her father dug ditches, as she was by the Maori connection. Working was something women in our town were ashamed of. My mother sat on a couch, curled up like a cat, reading, always reading, and smoking. Waiting for something. My mother lived in a waiting room.

None of my friends’ mothers worked. Many years later, my Maori friend married a doctor and confounded the small-town critics. To marry a doctor was the highest possible feminine achievement. 

The Auckland Weekly was suddenly filled with horror. The war was over and the photographs increased in hellishness a hundredfold. Flattened cities. The opening of the concentration camps. My generation is permanently marked by this. How can we cope with what we saw? What we read? What we were told? The Nuremberg trials. The Simon-pure judging proven sinners. The ANZAC prisoners of war, resembling the concentration camp victims. Later, I learned that Japanese soldiers in the Pacific had starved to death, too. My own response has been a complete rejection of war. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Our school cheered at the head teacher’s bidding. For whom did the bell toll? It tolled away centuries of hope. 

Through all this ran the images of hard American blondes with meaningless faces, whose legs, we were told, placed them in the halls of fame. I was dimly aware of Beethoven and Brahms, Einstein and Da Vinci. I was being taught that men used their heads and women had legs. Nobody in my town had heard of Wanda Landowska. Eileen Joyce was acceptable because of her dresses. My brother was encouraged to develop his mathematics, and I was expected to become a primary school teacher like my father’s sister. A polite interest in the arts would be a social and professional advantage. Our family did not consider university. It was not in their spectrum. When I asked why I could not go to university my question was greeted with incredulity and “Who do you think I am, John D. Rockefeller?” My mother used to warn me against becoming like Katherine Mansfield. “She left her family. She wrote about people.”

Seventeenth Gasp—Music

Music began for me with my shabby wooden xylophone. It confirmed its place in my life when I got my first mouth organ. The xylophone had restricted me to the dark discomfort of cold garage floors. The mouth organ went with me, into trees, on top of fence posts, into my mud pit. I can’t remember any sand. 

The Art Deco valve radio was our magic door to another world. Our small town had one commercial radio station. My first musical memories are mostly dross, but there was gold. The Don Cossacks singing “Monotonously Rings the Little Bell.” The solo voice rose ecstatically ever upwards like a skylark, or soared like a bird of prey through the bitter black harmonies of the basses in the choir.  Then there were the Comedian Harmonists. They could imitate musical instruments and were so dapper and neat. Trained cage birds to a man. Paul Robeson singing “Ol Man River” wonderfully.

Then war songs came along. Little New Zealanders were taught, “There’ll Always Be An England” convincingly sung by the Australian, Peter Dawson. Vera Lynne with her sentimental yodel and the “Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover.” The rousing “Maori Battalion March to Victory” reminded us of where we were. Gracie Fields and George Formby proved that only English accents were funny.  “Hanging out the Washing on the Siegfried Line” and “Tipperary.” 

I don’t remember any songs about the Pacific war. American Hawaiian music conveyed nothing of the chlorophyll lunar land encountered by New Zealand boys sweating in impenetrable jungle, feeling the focus of the invisible Samurai marksmen. Bram Stoker or Edgar Allen Poe perhaps. Starvation and stark terror is not the stuff of songs. There was no mythology for New Zealand soldiers. Rupert Brooke had not prepared them for this anonymous annihilation. It is strangely terrible to fear death among unfamiliar birds and trees.

Perhaps the most potent music of all was when the harbingers of Christmas, the Salvation Army, loaded their brass band onto the back of a truck and drove it around the suburban streets. They would stop the truck every few hundred yards and play a Christmas carol. The distant sound of their sweet, stern harmonies, so different from the familiar military bands, was the first sign of Christmas. Through the crisp sunny morning air, the incongruous “Silent Night” would lift the hearts of children and adults. “Oh, Come All Ye Faithful” brought us running down the street. The poke bonnets and the red and gold insignia were a hint of other times and places.

One day, I heard some music that changed my life. Rossini’s William Tell overture linked episodes of the radio serial “The Lone Ranger.” I had no concept of an orchestra. I was unprepared for such an experience. 

I used to say to my parents, “Don’t you just want to play in an orchestra? Just in the middle? One of the violins?”  

“No”, they said.

Over the back fence of our first home was a huge wooden colonial house with peeling paint and a neglected garden. We called it the violin house because a violin could be heard there playing for hours at a time. It was the home of a child prodigy who later became famous. I used to climb the fence and listen from the shelter of a macrocarpa hedge. For some reason, I was always afraid. I begged to be allowed to study the violin. I don’t know why this wish was never granted. My mother used to remark occasionally that there was nothing worse than being in the same house as a child who was learning the violin.

My father’s good sister owned a dulcitone. This frustrating instrument made the enchanting sound of a glockenspiel. I loved to play it, but longed for something more tractable, such as a piano. After my father’s sister moved to another town, I only had access to a keyboard instrument when we visited her during school holidays. I occasionally had a few stolen moments at piano keyboards in other houses and already knew the responsive and submissive nature of the piano. I had discovered that a piano can say whatever we choose to make it say.

My father’s younger sister was a good pianist. She had snaffled her husband (girls always snaffled husbands in our small town) with her wily, seductive accompaniments of his tenor art-songs. He became a successful politician, and she became the successful politician’s wife. She could play Chopin but pretended to despise her performances. When I persuaded her to play, her whole manner changed, and she played with immense seriousness and dedication. She cultivated the light manner. The next generation would call it cool. 

Then we too got a piano. It had belonged to my maternal grandparents. My mother had submitted to the usual piano lessons on that same instrument when she was a child, and some evenings we would gather around the piano and sing “Ta Ra Ra Boom De Ay” from the Grandfather’s Song Book. My mother was out of practice and played rather badly but her audience was appreciative. We didn’t mind the wrong notes. It was the event that mattered. I don’t know why she stopped.

The musical focus in our town was the annual Competitions. Forty trained typists beating out the same tune to a panel of judges. Eventually, I won prizes and confidence in that annual marathon. Marks were given for expression and execution. Our town possessed an opera house which was oddly large for so small a community. We firmly believed that it possessed the largest stage in the southern hemisphere.

Sitting in the dark recesses of the opera house watching the ballet section of the competition, I discovered the deeper mystery of theater. Often, I would be the only person in the auditorium, apart from the judges. A thread of tragic melancholy would be spun from the invisible piano and to a wisp of Chopin some transformed creature in a splash of light would emerge eerily onto the empty stage. At school, the ethereal being might be overweight, stupid, or malicious, but here, something external translated a colonial school girl into a poetic wraith.

My mother’s youngest brother was a handsome school teacher and footballer. He represented his province and was widely favored as a future All Black. He was everything that a New Zealand boy should be. I liked him. He had a snappy little dog called Pete. When he called to see my mother, she became happier than I can otherwise remember her. As the oldest daughter of a large farming family, my mother’s relationship with this brother was more that of a parent than a sibling. One day, a tall blonde with bright red lipstick was introduced as his fiancée. She looked just like an American film star. I could sense my mother’s enmity. The blonde told us that she had seen a photograph of my mother’s brother and had deliberately organized a meeting. This further shocked my mother. She considered such behavior to be utterly bold and calculating. 

I was trained to call this alien creature Aunty Claire. Aunty Claire played a new sort of song on the piano. She played “Bless’em All,” which she managed to make oddly suggestive. She showed me envelopes containing letters from my mother’s brother. The envelopes had big red mouths on them where she had kissed them. 

We went to visit Aunty Claire’s family. They lived in a large old house which was elegantly and comfortably furnished. The garden was like a park. The afternoon was a musical one. Strange, fat men sang Irish ballads and another man played the violin. I was confused. These people who were manifestly wealthier and more accomplished than my parents, were, I could tell by my mother’s manner, in some way unacceptable. A whiff of trade and the Levant perhaps. They seemed to have more fun than we did.

Later, after my mother’s brother died, shot by a sniper in Florence the very day the war ended, my mother and her mother and sister turned against Aunty Claire. Aunty Claire married someone else too soon afterwards and wore a necklace that my mother’s brother gave her. Her wedding photograph was in all the newspapers. She wore white satin and a long train. She sent my mother’s parents a large bouquet of yellow flowers on their golden wedding day. My mother’s mother cried, and my mother and her sister wore disapproving expressions. I never met her again. Wicked Aunty Claire.