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

Singing & Drowning

By Janet Kenny

“The house I grew up in had the atmosphere of a dark bruised place. I do not know whether that was unusual in those times. My mother was quite pretty, and I think she longed for clothes and gaiety. My father too longed for laughter and crowds. In the small country town where everyone had their place, my rural parents, oppressed by respectability and poverty and the looming presence of my father’s good sister now a tyrant, failed to find a way of negotiating the social maze. They retreated into haughty exclusion. Blood is thicker than water my father told my mother. He meant Flora and his sister. My mother was the water.”—Janet Kenny

Editor’s Note: This installment from her memoir-in-progress comprises the second column by New Zealand-born poet and singer Janet Kenny. (Read the first installment here.) 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.”

Fifth Gasp—Grandfather

POINT VERNON Australia—(Hubris)—September/October 2025—When I read Elizabeth David’s description of French provincial life I recognized the New Zealand home of my maternal grandparents. The rich black soil brought forth prodigious vegetables, fruit, and flowers. My grandmother’s freesias surpassed any I have seen, as did the gooseberries, quinces, and vegetables. A tall hedge surrounded their property and the paths between the manicured lawns and flower beds were made of tiny white river pebbles. My grandfather allowed me to play with the pebbles as long as I didn’t spread them onto the lawn. At the bottom of the large garden a fowl run was well stocked with a variety of birds. Buff Orpington, Rhode Island Red, Leghorn and others I can’t remember. I doubt whether my grandparents had ever bought an egg or a vegetable from a shop. Every morning was announced by the tenor voice of a rooster. My grandfather, a retired farmer, and his delicate pretty wife were both capable of beheading a loved bird for the table. My mother too was raised to face reality in this fashion. Years later, my mother refused to eat battery chickens. 

The food at my grandparents’ was simple roasts and traditional boiled or baked vegetables. It was the quality of ingredients and the perfection of preparation which made it memorable. No vegetable was over-cooked. The table was always spread with starched white linen, the silver gleamed, and the thin engraved glasses sparkled. There was no alcohol. My grandparents were Presbyterians. There was a glass pitcher of water. The baking was traditional Scottish and that is one of the best baking traditions. The New Zealand national sponge-cake floated proudly above its plate with its filling of whipped cream and little cubes of jelly. Sometimes, meringues were the excuse for eating the superb local cream. New Zealand farm people were accustomed, like their French equivalents, to lavish quantities of delicate nutty cream. The common understanding of quality and freshness and the ceremonial aspect of the family table is a universal rural trait. My mother brought this tradition to her married home, only to have it treated as a sign of greed and indulgence by my father, raised at Flora’s stingy, unsensuous board, and later fed by landladies who rented rooms to bank clerks. My father used to eat slowly and disdainfully which made my mother comfort herself with two helpings. My father would silently raise his eyebrows.

I wondered as a child why my mother’s parents used funny grammar. They regularly used sentence structures which would have caused me to be corrected had I used them at home. Double negatives such as “I haven’t got nothing” instead of “anything.” “Haven’t got no” rather than “any.” Both my grandparents were very formal and well dressed. When I asked about their speech, I was told that people of their age spoke differently. My mother and her sister both spoke correct English, despite the sister having married into a German farming community. To the child I then was, my grandfather seemed a huge man. He had thick, white, curly hair and silver-framed glasses. He used to sit in his cut plush patterned chair with its turned mahogany wood and read the newspaper. The many polished pendulum clocks would tick loudly and chime when it pleased them. Some would recognize the quarter hour, others the half, and all, the hour. Almost at the same time. 

Above an outhouse door, my grandfather used to keep a switch with which to chastise his grandchildren. I didn’t love my grandfather. I almost loved my small pretty grandmother, but she was too busy for a child to love. She was an extension of her house and her husband. Her hands and chin shook with the first stages of the Parkinson’s Disease, which later killed her. My grandfather then took to drinking and to giving away all his money to strangers in the street. This caused his children to take him to live at my mother’s sister’s farm. They used to find half bottles of whisky in his wardrobe, under the bed and in the fireplace. He used to escape out his bedroom window and walk miles to the farm gate where he caught a bus to the nearest town. When my father’s sister summoned me, at my boarding school, to tell me of his death, I wanted to laugh at her conventional expectation that I should feel grief for the man who kept a switch to hit me. I remembered that he had made me a rag doll and then I did feel genuine regret. I also remembered how I used to help him to make the chooks’ pollard with hot water on winter mornings and how he had shown me his plants and walked with me to buy his newspaper. A Martian and a dolphin doing their best to communicate. My grandfather’s huge black boots, conforming fascinatingly to his bunions, heavily treading on the black volcanic soil which asserted itself through the fine gravel footpaths. People would greet him pleasantly as if glad to meet him and he would joke and chat with them in a way he seldom did at home.

My grandmother’s house was fragrant with lavender. The furniture was antique and polished till it shone, as was the dark wooden floor between the faded pink and gold rugs. Long, straight, dusky pink, silk curtains framed a view of the coastal North Island town’s volcanic hills and white water-tower. A Chelsea dog guarded either side of the fireplace with its brass coal scuttle and tongs. No individual object was particularly beautiful; it was in the harmony and maintenance that the beauty lay. Apart from the rarely used sitting room it was a place for people and never an object in itself. The sunny dining room always had a fire burning in the grate and was the true sitting room, a custom my mother continued in our own home. The kitchen had unvarnished wooden benches and a table which were scrubbed white and spotless. The back porch had tree ferns on either side of the entrance and led to the wash house. No laundry nonsense here. In the wash house, piled high on shelves attached to every wall, were copies of Punch extending back to the last century. Gerald Du Maurier’s aristocrats with their long necks and lorgnettes were part of my infant mythology. I poured over them for hours every time we visited my grandparents. Old calendars with wonderfully colored pictures of clothed chimpanzees fishing, hung on the walls of both the wash house and the lavatory which also opened off the back porch.

My grandfather drove a Dodge. A huge brown car with extra seats in the back that you could pull out, like a London taxi. Once he drove us to the beach. He wore his suit and waistcoat complete with watch chain and my grandmother and my mother wore hats. We had an uncomfortable picnic. 

Sixth Gasp—Liar Pinocchio

One day, my teacher read us Browning’s Pippa’s Song. He told us about the children who worked in dark satanic mills. He explained that Pippa had one half day’s holiday every year. He told us about the children and men and women pulling carts in the underground coal mines. He told us about slavery. Karl Marx never achieved so easy a convert.

Charles Kingsley finished the job. Little boys writhing in soot-choked chimneys. Tom and the Water Babies. Strange dull, unforgettable, book. Charles Dickens drove the lesson home. David Copperfield and Oliver Twist. The Water Babies and the little Jewish children in concentration camps. The Cockney refugees who never talked about The Blitz. The disappeared cities of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Coventry, and Dresden. How could we forget these lessons?

The man who told me about some of these things in such a way that I never forgot, was, himself, a brute. He used a hooked walking stick. He delighted in using the curved end round the neck of his chosen victims to drag them in like a fish on a hook. There was one particularly small boy who was always in trouble. Warren Piddington with his buck-toothed grin and wiry energy, was always in hot water. Once, when some smug classroom monitor had unjustly reported Warren Piddington, I stood up and said it wasn’t true.

The teacher turned the full blow-lamp of his sarcasm onto me. He drew a caricature of me on the black board. He drew me with a long nose, like Pinocchio, and said it was because I poked my nose into places where I wasn’t wanted. Then he caned Warren Piddington. Why didn’t I reject the teaching of this brute? I think some truths are self-evident. The message seems to matter more than the messenger. How else does faith survive organized religion? Party allegiance, parliamentary performance?

Once, when I was seven, a pound note went missing at school. The headmaster came into the classroom and said that any child who knew anything should stand up. I still can’t explain why I stood up and said that I had seen my brother picking up a piece of paper. I suspect I stood up in the first place because I had been trained to do what was requested. I had been raised by hand. My mother used to beat me with a frenzy that shocks me when I recall it. Then, I was sure that I deserved it. Finding myself standing up at the headmaster’s bidding, I had to say something. The story about my brother was the best I could do. My mother wouldn’t speak to me for two weeks. I was forbidden to speak, and all privileges were stopped. No radio or pudding, and I had to go to bed straight after tea. I knew I deserved it. I also knew that there must be an explanation that someone could give me. I needed to know why I had done this dreadful thing. 

There was an orphanage next door to the school. Not all of the orphans were orphans. Some of them said that they hated their parents. When pressed for an explanation, they closed their mouths grimly. There were several sets of brothers and sisters as well as lone orphans. They usually played together. They couldn’t come home to play after school. They couldn’t ask us to play at the orphanage. There was something pinched about their appearance. Their shoulders imprisoned their chests and their manner was defensive. They didn’t have bicycles, dancing, or piano lessons, or nice clothes. The boys rarely wore shoes. They all seemed older than the rest of us. I experienced a deep fear of what life could do when I looked at them, and in a strange way I felt inferior. There was an air about them of knowing something concealed from other children.

Then there were The Bowdens. Two sisters with the stamp of the outcast. Something about their features set them apart. They resembled pictures in our encyclopedias at home illustrating the skull development of stone-age man. They were thin and smelled of unwashed underclothes and deprivation. Pity was unable to overcome the horror of occasionally having to hold the hand of a Bowden during physical-education class. Physical education indeed. 

I also remember a large-boned, good natured girl called Lenny Bolshevik. It was the only name she had and that’s all I know about her. 

Seventh Gasp—Alone

I felt dreadful. My narrowing throat was on fire and my head thumped and spun.

There was a scarlet-fever epidemic, and I had joined the ever-increasing number of its victims.

I can vaguely remember being carried on a stretcher by ambulance-men and whisked around the corner in an ambulance to the nearby hospital. I also vaguely remember added terror as I dimly recognized the forbidden No Admittance doors through which I was carried. Then I was taken to a ward marked Isolation. Did people ever emerge from this ward? Who would know you were there?

I found myself with three other children in a large room with curtains around each bed. We had our temperatures taken and were given horrid medicines accompanied by a great deal of discipline from a tart-faced matron who took away any fruit parcels sent to us by our parents. She said we got it back with our meals, but younger rebellious nurses told us in secret that the matron kept the fruit, and certainly, the meager portions of over-cooked stewed fruit served with our rice pudding rarely corresponded to the commandeered fruit parcels. Our parents were not permitted to visit us. My mother and most other parents defied the law by talking to us through the window until the matron discovered the practice and put a stop to it.

The hospital bread was soggy and lumpy with sudden concentrations of salt. It was made in a factory owned by the father of one of my room-companions who boasted about this fact but then sobbed pathetically when her cruel roommates told her that her father’s bread was disgusting. Like all young animals, we missed our parents. In the evening, some generous and imaginative nurses would sing us songs accompanied by a guitar. I particularly remember a beautiful nurse whose angelic face was framed exotically by a coronet of braided hair. She sang us folk songs from her native Byelorussia. A Maori nurse with a soft contralto accompanied herself on the guitar as she sang us Maori songs and popular Hawaiian songs. These nurses tucked us up and kissed us good night, apparently unafraid of our terrible disease. We worshipped them.

My classmates and teacher all wrote me affectionate letters which I received in a large parcel. I was deeply touched but puzzled as to why some of them, who I knew disliked me, had written to me. Did this mean they knew I was going to die? A little boy in a private room next door to my room had died of diphtheria. They had bored a hole in his windpipe but he had died all the same. We knew it was possible. We scarlet-fever sufferers competed at producing the largest unbroken piece of peeling skin as our red little hides shed the dried-out outer layer. 

After a month, all the others went home and, to my horror, I was informed that I had to stay another month. An infant kidney complaint might produce complications. There were compensations. More comics than I had ever seen. Mickey Mouse, Pegleg Pete and the Dirigible. The Phantom. Superman, The Katzenjammer Kids, Little Orphan Annie, Felix, Mutt and Jeff. It was endless. My mother sent me The Mary Martin Cut-out Book. The Carmen Miranda Cut-out Book with brilliantly printed hats made of piles of fruit. A National Costumes From Around the World Cut-out Book. My father’s good sister sent me poetry anthologies in which I discovered the delights of Christina Rossetti and Scottish Border Ballads. Also, some dreary collections of soppy plays. I was already a critic.

When I was small, I had wanted a dolls’ house. Mainly because other children had them. I never did receive a dolls’ house, but my illness must have prompted my mother to express her affection, and possibly, guilt over this lapse. When I came home there was a dolls’ bed with a complete set of bedding and a new set of clothes for my doll. 

This was my first conscious use of tact and deception in my relationship with my mother. I feigned ecstatic delight, but, actually, I was already several years too old for such toys. I was looking forward to a set of oil paints and an easel. I was nine years old. Nine is an age when we move away from childish interests and start to explore the world about us. I understood why my mother had made the dolls’ clothes. I was ashamed of the loneliness that her generosity induced in me. I began to understand that we are all alone.

Eighth Gasp—Respectability

My father gave money to the lepers. He kept the newsletter with his cigarette papers and tobacco on the kitchen windowsill that looked across the town to the distant ranges of hills. He rose every morning at four a.m. and lived his real life in our vegetable garden where he fed the sparrows and thrushes and weeded and watered. He drank tea in the kitchen and made the family porridge. Then he put on his bicycle clips and went to the bank where I think he experienced humiliation.

Flora had four children. The handsome, boastful son who married Ruth and left the country. A good daughter who forsook her talents to become a teacher and bread winner. My father, a larrikin and not very clever. The youngest of all, a clever, “silly” girl who married better than many realized.

They put my father in a bank when he turned 16. He climbed mountains, tap-danced, played the mouth organ, wore a boater hat, rode motor bikes, and drank a lot until two bad road accidents and respectability killed his courage. He married my mother when he was past 30. 

I loved my father best when he would produce his harmonica from his jacket pocket and deftly perform lively dance tunes and tap dance like Fred Astaire. My mother pretended to disapprove. A glimpse of what might have been.

His courage would return to haunt him, those mornings in the vegetable garden and he would dream of leaving us. He dreamed of being a tramp. A hobo. Once when my mother was ill in hospital, he told me his dream. I could tell that he hoped my mother would die. She outlived him by many years. 

What was the source of my family’s great unhappiness? I was two years younger than my brother. We always distressed each other. Always competing. Never together. My mother dissatisfied. My father fastidiously suspicious of our germ laden presences. The two motorbike accidents that injured his head happened before I was born. I only know the larrikin through hearsay. I knew a worried, fearful man who loved trees, birds, and sunsets, who cut slugs in half with a pocketknife carried for that purpose. 

My mother read romantic historical books with social undertones. Once a bible-class teacher, she had lost faith and viewed the world with bitter disappointment. Her farmer-father kept his eldest daughter at home as an unpaid slave. Her younger sister escaped into marriage some years before my mother married my father. She married him in the nick of time before rural spinsterhood was established.

The house I grew up in had the atmosphere of a dark bruised place. I do not know whether that was unusual in those times. My mother was quite pretty, and I think she longed for clothes and gaiety. My father too longed for laughter and crowds. In the small country town where everyone had their place, my rural parents, oppressed by respectability and poverty and the looming presence of my father’s good sister now a tyrant, failed to find a way of negotiating the social maze. They retreated into haughty exclusion. Blood is thicker than water my father told my mother. He meant Flora and his sister. My mother was the water.

My father’s sister, once the family provider and now the maintainer of standards, resented my mother. She found my mother’s taste poor and her lack of education an embarrassment. My mother served to bear children for the family line but was distressingly unsuitable as a parent. My brother, the family name-bearer, resembled my mother’s family. I resembled my father’s family. That was official. The gospel according to my mother. My simple country mother clung to her first-born male child. My features reminded her of the disdainful rejection by Flora the duchess and her good daughter. Their cruelty was mine. I was born guilty. My aunt doted upon me. She was determined to save me from my mother. My mother added this to my burden of guilt. Boxes of gifts would arrive. My aunt had many old books and teaching aids. Historical legends and illustrations. Fortunately, all fascinating to me because already it was clearly established that feminine pursuits must follow a certain direction. My brother’s world was made of machine parts, the internal combustion engine, and the question “why?” but he was a child without a parcel. “Nothing for me,” he said. My mother looked at me.

From my aunt’s gifts I learnt English snobbery and history. I discovered Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Arthur Mee’s My Magazine with the Phat Pheet sandal advertisements and orange-tinted drawings. Viking invasions and the glory that was Rome. Anglo-Saxon rebellion and Mrs. Bruin. Westminster Abbey and Shrove Tuesday. Roundheads and cavaliers. Never, the Tolpuddle Martyrs nor the industrial revolution. And never, never a word of science or philosophy.

New Zealand houses were meeting places of the British colonial cultures. Popular Mechanics, Punch, Readers Digest, National Geographic, Saturday Evening Post, The Illustrated London News, and Lilliput with its wonderful cartoons and photographs, jostled each other on our bookshelves. Junior publications included the American Wee Wisdom with its talk of Girl Scouts and Halloween, Chicks Own and Rainbow with the Mustard Chums; Film Fun, Playbox and Buck Rogers which also contained Boots and Her Buddies and Freckles and His Friends. These last all wore ankle socks, loafers, and met in Drug Stores. 

In our bookshelves were The Boys Own Paper Annual, the Strand Magazine Annual and books by, among others, Ion L. Idriess, R. M. Ballantyne, Louisa M. Alcott, John Buchan, L. M. Montgomery, Sax Rohmer, Charles Dickens, Susan Coolidge, Jane Austen, H. G. Wells, A. A. Milne, Erich Maria Remarque, Anna Sewell. E. Nesbitt, Richmal Crompton, Rudyard Kipling, Lord Lytton, Mary Grant Bruce, George Eliot, Ethel Turner, Angela Brazil, E. S. Ellis, and Arthur Ransome.

There was also Sir William Orpen’s Outline of Art, a gift to me from my aunt. Little did she know that this innocent grey-colored, post-war history of European art was to radicalize me totally. Handing great art to an impressionable child is like handing a bomb to a terrorist. It’s no use saying, But I didn’t mean you to actually use it. Van Gogh’s prisoners exercising in the prison yard made me a socialist and civil-rights protester. Goya’s executions into a pacifist; Holbein’s young Danish woman who magnificently rejected Henry the Eighth, into a feminist, and Picasso and Boccioni into a Modernist. Shadowy revolutionary friends entered my life. They have remained with me and comforted me. I am not comforted by the image of the crucified Christ, but I am comforted by Leonardo, Goya, and van Gogh. The absence of female painters failed to disturb me then. The human spirit was one in the world of art whether the male artists knew it or not. My heart sang with theirs. Did it matter if they failed to hear?

Ninth Gasp—The Unknown

The public hospital was close to our house. The hospital was like a city of hideous brick buildings with an over-powering smell of disinfectant. Steam roared out of gratings and one of our major adventures was visiting the hospital furnace where half-naked men shoveled coal into red hot roaring open maws. Nearby was the animal section. Cages of rabbits and guinea pigs accepted grass through the mesh doors. Somehow it never occurred to me that they were used for experiments. I viewed them as pets.

At the other side of the hospital was a bus shelter. One day I was waiting at the bus shelter with my library books. A neatly dressed elderly Maori woman sat beside me.

Dignified and upright, she did not acknowledge my presence but stared straight ahead, lost in her thoughts. Another elderly Maori woman approached the bus shelter. When she saw the other woman, she stopped still. The woman in the shelter looked up and made a small choking sound. She got to her feet. Slowly they approached each other. They placed their noses together and closed their eyes. 

As they stood, they communicated without speech or gesture. At first, tears poured down their cheeks, then they both smiled with gentle sadness, then they frowned, then smiled again, then wept. 

Not a word was spoken. Then they sat down together and waited for the bus. The bus shelter became something like a church and something like a home. Ever since, I have envied Maori people this gift.

The town library was the focus of our house. All major experiences came from the library. The world opened up for me in that library. I feel sorry for children who live in the easy world of television. Those rebound, brown-covered books connected my time with my mother’s time and my great grandmother’s time. We had all read some of these books. The discovery of odd unfashionable things and the private refuge of an unshared story restored tranquility to a far from tranquil spirit. The adventure of looking for this week’s books was the most important experience in my life.

Our town was built around a square. A commercial center for a prosperous farming area, it had a disproportionate number of large department stores. These stores played the same part in town life that art galleries and museums play in the lives of city people. Changing colors and shapes all were revealed by the department stores. The smell of leather in the glove departments and the strange, sweet smell of new cotton in the fabric section. Irrational depression and fear experienced in the linoleum department and fear and embarrassment in the corset section. The surgical appearance of the corset section convinced me that life was not going to be easy.

I have returned to this town more recently. The charming sylvan square has been developed by civic vulgarians. Ugly monuments crowd the once elegant and simple garden. Progress has marched towards its hideous goal.

The Town Gardens were beautiful by any standards. A proper mixture of wilderness and botanical garden, they were situated on the edge of a majestic river.

This river was never less than impressive and when swollen by rain in the hills, became terrifying. The huge concrete bridge which spanned the river, regularly rocked and shuddered as the fierce yellow-brown waters hurled logs and dead cattle at its supports. It was a river that commanded respect.

Sometimes, I would venture on my bicycle across the bridge and climb the steep road into the hills beyond. Cattle dogs and fear of the unknown discouraged me. A huge area of virgin native bush tempted me to face my terror and repeat the adventure.

The dark entwined secrecy of the bush seemed to imply revelations and adventures.

Fear always prevented me from entering too deeply into the bush. A rustic path led over wooden bridges past waterfalls and deep brown ponds crowded by grass and dark trees. No sound apart from the clink of pebbles stirring in the water and the occasional bird note warning of my presence. Always I was forced out again by invisible hands. Always I experienced the sense of survival and escape when I emerged into the light. 

Tenth Gasp—The Bicycle

If anything dominated our family life, it was the bicycle. Not for my mother, although I can dimly remember that she once owned a very tall one with a skirt guard. She sat me in a special seat on the back. I think I can remember falling, with my mother. 

My brother got a bicycle before I did. He rapidly became a person with a private life. One day he went missing, returning after dark. He had watched planes at the aerodrome. My mother was crying hysterically. I only saw her cry one other time, and that was when her youngest brother was killed in the war. I didn’t understand at the time, but there was something proud about that grief. At last, she had something of her own.

My brother became part of a group of mud-and-oil-covered boys who played speedways in the back paddock. They made themselves an oval track, incorporating jumps and obstacles. Girls were excluded. I found them stupid and violent. There were no feminist phrases to protect little girls in those days.

My father dreamed of cycling 50 miles to the next town. He achieved his personal Everest when he was near retirement from the bank.

My own first bicycle was brought to our house by uniformed army-friends of my dead uncle. They had come to talk about him to my mother, and for some mysterious reason, one of them wheeled in a secondhand bicycle. My parents seemed to have bought it for me. I had dreams of a shiny black sports model like my brother’s. This one was three-quarter size and lumpy with silver bicycle paint. It had back brakes and pedals I couldn’t reach. They put wooden blocks on the pedals, and I fell off repeatedly until the magic moment of mastery crept upon me unawares. The chain used to come off. As it was the only means of braking, I narrowly missed death. I can recall hurtling to the jagged ground and sustaining bloody injuries. Legs without skin became part of daily life. 

It was worth it. I discovered the other side of town, and the open country.

Dogs with flaming eyes would rush at my skirt and tug it with their teeth. I put my feet up on the handlebars, ashamed that I was showing my bloomers. I made friends with girls in other parts of the town. My bicycle had freed me from the family. I returned for meals, and to sleep. I discovered other families with other problems. There was the rich family where the handsome father used to beat the mother, there was the academic family without a mother, and there was a family that was happy in a way that shocked me, because they were common; there was a family with a swimming pool and a garden with a stream in a valley of spring flowers. There were two adopted families, one happily so and the other traumatized by the recent discovery. There was the Russian refugee who lived with her mother in the house of a fat old blind woman. The house smelled of urine. The Russian girl made me a salad. “You will love it with oil and vinegar,” she said. All that I could taste was the penetrating urine.

One friend belonged to a glamorous family. Both parents came from the same district as my mother. Both parents had been my mother’s social inferiors, and now both were so far ahead, it puzzled my mother. My father’s fault.

My friend’s mother had the panache and style of Rosalind Russell and my friend’s father, an accountant, was like Ronald Reagan. He drove or walked to work. My father would cycle past him. Each raised his hat. My friend’s house had a tennis court and white carpets. My friend was beautiful and clever. They stopped our friendship. We were too close they said. It was unhealthy. Many years later, I met the stylish mother at an airport. She wanted to speak. I had been on the English stage. I could not forgive her and walked past. She died soon afterwards.

I used to lie awake at night listening to unearthly screams. I knew they came from the open country beyond our street. One day I got on my bicycle and headed in the direction of the screams. A small grey donkey trotted docilely to meet me at a paddock gate. It allowed me to scratch the wool between its large silky ears. I had laid a ghost and found a friend. 

I repressed my fear of farm dogs and cycled miles into the countryside.

Sometimes on summer mornings, I would complete 20 miles before breakfast. I used to stop my bicycle by some idyllic sylvan spot. My rapture always gave way to fear of the unknown, and I would return home as fast as I could pedal. I slept through school. Like my father, I lived in the early mornings.

Eleventh Gasp—The Dog

My mother trained us to say table napkin, never serviette. Drawing room or sitting room, never lounge. She considered the word laundry to be a pretentious vulgarity. Her indignities and miseries found their full expression in the washhouse. The other women in her circle owned washing machines and rotary clotheslines. My mother suffered a wood-burning copper, two wooden washtubs with a hand wringer and, in the back garden, a wire stretched between two posts and when in use supported by a wooden clothes prop.

Her years of slavery on her parents’ farm seemed to be perpetuated as she chopped kindling wood to burn under the copper in order to boil the washing. Washing was always boiled within an inch of its life in our home. Reckitts blue bags were used in the rinse which was performed by hand after using a wooden stick to haul the heavy burning sheets out of the adjacent copper into the wooden tubs. Starch was used in various dilutions according to the article undergoing treatment. Tablecloths and napkins were starched heavily. 

My mother’s sense of injustice was intensified by the fact that our back garden was overlooked by the two-story house next door. This house was occupied first by a party-giving piano teacher who drank cocktails at night and appeared, still in her housecoat, at mid-day. Later, the house was occupied by an upwardly-mobile estate agent. Both households were fully equipped with regulation American-Dream white-ware. An ex-Beauty Queen from a large city lived in the house on the other side. The Beauty Queen was invited to the piano teacher’s parties. My teetotaler parents were not. My mother felt like a member of some primitive tribe being studied by missionaries. “No other woman . . . .”

The washhouse opened off the high back porch from which concrete steps descended to the sloping lawn. My brother and I played cricket on the lawn and rode our bicycles in circles, ducking our heads under the clothesline as we revolved. The beautifully tended vegetable garden, which supplied most of our needs, lay beyond the lawn. The fowl-house was at the bottom of the garden abutting the back fence which divided us from the descending paddock beyond. My brother and I used to perch our bantam rooster on the clothesline. The poor little monarch rocked back and forth like a fretwork parrot. We didn’t understand that a bantam’s feet couldn’t grip the wire. We loved the rooster and meant no harm. Tiny bantam chickens slid down their mother’s back in infant games.

One day, I arrived home with a puppy. It was the last to leave its mother and had taken full advantage of the extra nourishment. It could hardly squeeze into my bicycle basket.

My parents hadn’t liked to refuse. In books about children and dogs, nice people always let pleading children keep puppies. My parents knew I had read such books. The trouble was that they only knew the cold impersonal relationship of the farmer and working dog. I had been trained to fear dogs. “You never know what they will do when they sneak up behind you,” said my mother. Dogs always chased me. This was my first chance to make friends with a dog. 

The dog took me for walks, belching and straining ahead of me on its leash. It became a cartoon dog sliding along the footpath as it crossed the road to avoid dangerous territories of larger dogs. It barked and howled. It urinated on my father’s vegetable garden. It tore my mother’s first pair of nylon stockings. It swung on her laboriously boiled and hung linen. It took to lying in wait to bark at passers-by at our front gate. Once, when a large dog attacked me, I called my dog’s name and it came with eyes like blow lamps to defend its own. It was a hunter and chaser, a mixture of sheep dog and spaniel. 

We took it with us when we stayed at the seaside for a holiday. It urinated in a nervous tracery of circles as it dragged me all over the station platform and its howls from the guard’s van could be heard for the entire hundred-mile train journey, particularly when we entered tunnels. It swam miles out to sea snapping at teasing seagulls. It was a happy beach-urchin. 

It was the dog that revealed to me the underlying uncertainty of life.

Our school textbooks burgeoned with reproductions of such moral paintings as The Boyhood of Raleigh and Faithful Unto Death, which depicted the Roman soldier standing motionlessly on guard in Pompeii as the embers fell around him. The Boyhood of Raleigh showed an enraptured child transfixed by a swarthy sea dog who gestured towards the horizon. We found our own living sea-dog storyteller in the person of Mr. Eathorne, a retired boat builder who earned small sums in the district by putting up shelves and making fire screens. Rather, he made fire screen frames for hideous wool-tapestries obsessively embroidered by our mothers. There were two predominant emblems. A vase of flowers, usually on a nauseous fawn background, or a sailing ship on stormy blue woolly seas.

Variants included Frans Hals’ Laughing Cavalier, famous for its eyes that followed you round the room, although when interpreted in wool this quality seemed somehow to vanish. There was also Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen.

My brother and I used to visit Mr. Eathorne in his garage where he did mysterious things with vices, saws, glue, and sandpaper and where half-finished objects seemed nascent masterpieces. Mrs. Eathorne was a large shapeless woman whose role was respectable maintenance of house and husband. I never heard her express an opinion or a preference. She was the traditional home body. 

Mr. Eathorne had lived and worked with his father and brothers in a fjord at the northern tip of New Zealand’s South Island. They had built boats for fishermen, whalers, and even for coastal traders. His tales were of seabirds, whales, terrible storms, and shipwrecks. He lamented the lost life and found solace in our eager attention. From him I developed an image of a life of great beauty and hardship. He told us how important it was to handle wood correctly and how lives of sailors could depend on the trusty craftsman’s hand. I worshipped Mr. Eathorne. 

One day, he came across the street to talk to my parents about some shelving. My dog rushed confidently up to him, wagging its tail and pawing his feet. 

Mr. Eathorne bent down and picked up my dog by its head and swung it round and around above his head. The dog screamed and I screamed. Then I kicked Mr. Eathorne hard on the shins and he dropped the whimpering dog. I never spoke to Mr. Eathorne again.

One day when we were motoring in the hills, near the agricultural college over the bridge on the opposite side of town, we saw our dog with a gang of dogs, chasing pedigree sheep in the college grounds. The dog was home before we were. It was a solid ball of mud, panting like a steam train and its face had a terrible innocence. 

My father built a wire pen in which our dog was enclosed. The dog became snappy. It paced all the grass into a muddy bog. It no longer reacted to us in a friendly way. I became scared of it and didn’t take it for walks. 

 One day the pen was empty. “It died of flu,” my parents said.

Twelfth Gasp—Conformity

“Is any girl ready to take her tenderfoot oath?” said the Captain.

“I am,” I said. 

I had, I considered, reached that stage of purity of motive and heroic intention which seemed to me to be the essential qualities needed for entering the mystical sisterhood of the Girl Guides. 

It was a summer evening, and I was one of a small band of newcomers who were not yet initiated into the inner circle. Initiation conferred the right to wear the leather belt with the silver clasp and the brass clover-leaf badge.

“Form into a semi-circle girls,” said the Captain and, Druid-like, the girls did as she had bidden. In the evening half-light, the school playground had a different character. Girl Guides from around the world seemed to be there in ghostly form, joining in the rites.

“Let the tenderfoot step forward,” said the Captain.

I was surprised but did as I was bidden.

“Recite the oath,” said the Captain.

I looked at her blankly.

“Recite the oath,” she said rather waspishly.

I shook my head.

Here was a terrible mess. The rites had commenced. There was no going back. Powerful magic was at work, and the spell would be totally shattered if we broke off at this point. “Don’t you know it?” hissed the Captain.

I’d never heard of it and certainly didn’t know it. I just wanted the belt and the badge like the older guides. Syllable by syllable, the Captain prompted me and, syllable by syllable, I limped along, sensing the contemptuous stares of the Druid semi-circle behind me.

The Captain gave me a wooden badge. She said they had run out of brass badges, but I didn’t believe her. 

I had studiously mastered the knots and the bandages. I had burnt my hand cooking sausages while attending a Guides’ picnic down by the river. I had bravely jumped up and down with the other Guides on the swollen sides of a beached drowned cow with its head still under water. Beasts that we were, we laughed at the bubbles that issued from its nose when we pumped the pathetic body with our green-hide-shod feet. I had endured the boring singsongs round the inadequately warm campfire. I felt ready to be accepted.

Recite the oath.

I’d never heard of the oath. 

Actually, the only thing I liked about Guides was the uniform. I liked the Reckitts-blue sweet-smelling cotton dress and the strong creaking leather belt and the amazingly constructed silver buckle. I liked the scarf and the toggle. I liked the normality of it all. In the Guide uniform, I felt at once dashing and anonymous. I suppose that’s how military men feel. I suppose that’s why I could jump up and down on a dead cow and why men can shoot one another.

“Repeat the oath.” 

We always repeat the oath. It’s the others watching that make us do it. 

 . . . .to be continued.