Saturday at the market

Saturday is one of the big market days in Aix, as I suppose it is in many other French towns and villages.  The Textile market runs the length of Cours Mirabeau, and the Food market spreads itself around La Rotonde at the head of the street.  In another month or so the Christmas market will be there too I understand.  So this morning I skipped my yoga session (which I caught up in the afternoon) to rummage and take some photos.  Check out some of the food treats on sale below.

The sun was out, the sky was blue, the crowd was out to enjoy itself.  People were eating, drinking and soaking up the unseasonable warmth.  Even the soldiers patrolling with machine guns in hand looked relaxed.  Yes, armed military, not police, patrol the streets of this little provincial town, as they do everywhere in France now days.  Interesting times.

I love the markets here, but I keep getting drawn into discussion with stall holders and buying things.  Yes, they are usually men, and some of my readers will know I have the same problem with the wine sellers in Farro’s at home.  Well I am in a different place, but I am still me.  Its amazing how easily a friendly conversation in Franglais can lead to the purchase of a scarf, or a bag, or even tea towels with Cézanne prints on them.  Do you think they see me coming?

Some of my FaceBook friends expressed an interest in the story I started last time based loosely on my grandmother.  So here is a bit more …

What I do know is that she arrived in Auckland in 1910, before the Great War.  Somehow she met and married one William Pera Aperahama, native of a NZ as foreign and distant from her home as it was possible to get.  Later he fought in that war back in and for her old world, and would eventually succumb to the lung disease that resulted from mustard gas poisoning.  But not until quite a lot of water had flowed under the bridge, as they say.

Him I never knew at all, except as a dark and exotic face in a sepia photograph of a very young man in military uniform.  I have had the original of that photo restored, and it hangs on my wall alongside another predecessor from my father’s side of the family.  People amuse me by assuming the two men are related, which is about as far from reality as it is possible to get.  But for many years the young man in that photograph represented my much treasured claim to be truly of this place – actual tangata when, although I never heard that term until well into my adulthood.

By the time I knew what tangata whenua meant I knew I was not it, because Grandma’s husband was not my mother’s father.  Not her natural father anyway, although he was her legal father and the man whose household she and her two full brothers grew up in.  I should have figured it out long before my mother spilled it out.  I knew all of my uncles and aunts, the older three dark skinned, brown-eyed and glossy haired.  The younger two and the youngest, my mother, all fair, blue-eyed and curly haired.  So how did that happen?  And having happened why did my grandfather, by all accounts a proud and truculent man, continue to maintain the household and bring up three children not his own?

All I know for sure is the bitter legacy it left for my mother.  As a child she had no more idea than I that her father was not her natural father, but she felt the sting of contempt the respectable of the time reserved for those who did not measure up without knowing what she did to deserve it.  Bad enough her Pakeha mother was married to a Maori without so obviously straying from her marriage vows as well.  For what was hidden from a child was as plain as the nose on your face to the rest of the world.

I was there the night one of her older brothers flung the truth of her parentage in her face during the course of a drunken rant.  She was already the mother of two small children, and while not understanding what was said, I can still recall the impact.  And the provocation was that most emotional of all issues – land.

 No wonder the bitterness seemed to well in my mother from that day forward until it seeped through her skin and began to rub off on those around her.  As a small child I had learnt from her lessons of tolerance and racial equality.  Not as broad and liberal an approach as we aim for today, but well-intentioned and imbibed with the ideal of fairness.  As a teenager she taught me hatred and intolerance and blame.  But too late.  Do not the Jesuits say give us a child until he is seven and he is ours for life?  In my case at least it was true, and the earlier lessons took better than the later ones.  But quoting my mother’s own earlier lessons back at her led to a turbulent ride for a teenager.

Of course time has completed the circle.  My mother no longer hates, has adopted grief for the past in place of bitterness.  Such is age, which does not usually encompass wisdom, just painful acceptance.  I cannot find it in me to blame my mother for what she became in those years.  I only blame her for trying to spread the poison.

As a young woman my mother was a beauty.  At my age she was still an attractive woman, although lacking that well-cared for and dressed look that preserves the luminescence of wealthier women at that age.  As an older woman now you can still see that she was once striking, although she is shrinking and fading before my eyes.  But as a young woman she was embarrassed by her family while hardly aware of the reason why.  True, as young adults during the war her siblings had been involved in the odd scandal of the sex out of wedlock sort.  But it was war time.  And the Yanks were garrisoned in Waikaraka Park at the foot of her street in Onehunga.  Plenty of other families had similar tales to hide.

What my mother craved was not sex or glamour, and certainly not rock and roll.  What she craved was respectability.  A steady income and a rock solid family to rely upon – that was what she wanted.  So when a shy and unprepossessing but persistent young man began courting her, she let him.  She took a look at his family.  Fourth generation kiwis of Protestant Irish extraction.  None of the slight hysteria of her own Roman Catholic upbringing.  Father in paid employment, mother at home with the kids – no illegitimates.  Sisters plain, but apparently respectable.  A modest house, which they owned, and a car.  Well-off aunts and uncles who looked down on her a little.  She approved of what she saw.

And my father was kind and steady and not a drinker.  At least not a real drinker like her brothers and most of the men she knew.  Nor did he bet on horses, which was the hole her mother kept chucking money down.  He even had his own car, and gave up smoking so he could afford to take her out.

So she said, “yes”, and lo and behold within a couple of years she had a house of her own looking down on the WOOD IS GOOD sign at Penrose from the slopes of One Tree Hill.  She also had a live-in mother who could not afford her own lodging, so in time honoured manner stuck with her youngest daughter.  And I had a live-in grandmother who loved and indulged me because by then all the men had left her life except sons and son-in-laws.

Oh Lordy Lordy – may God have mercy on my soul.  REMEMBER – this is a story.