There was no big OE for this Otahuhu girl. While my friends went off one by one to London and other more exotic locations, I finished my degree, got married, and bought a house. Not exactly in that order, completely the reverse actually. I also got a job, not in law, but in local government. Turns out that knowing nothing and no one in the legal game, not to mention being a woman, meant it was not that easy to get into a law firm. It might not be that much different now, except that being a woman is no longer a disqualifier because there are not enough blokes coming through law school.
Anyway, I was happy enough not to have to live with a crowd in a scrappy London flat, and I assumed one day I would be able to afford to travel in a little more style. Of course I expected to do so with my husband, and we did indeed travel. But sadly he died before we ever got to Europe, one of the few things he had not done that he had said he would do.
This is my fourth trip to Europe, and indeed each time I have travelled in a style that while not lavish, is a vast improvement on what I would have managed in my twenties. Somehow I do not mind having missed that formative experience. I was doing other things, laying other foundations, and it is not necessarily a bad thing that I am less impressionable now than I was then. In any case I am far too much the introvert to ever have coped with the communal and social ambiance of my friends’ experiences. I would always have been the one sitting in the corner pretending to have a good time, and wishing I was somewhere else. Now days I cope better, can shuck off the constraints of shyness when I need to, and enjoy company more.
Where is all this heading? Oh, yes. The Channel Islands. So I first went to Europe to visit my daughter, Laura, who at the tender age of 17 spent her final year of high school on an exchange programme in Agen. With her younger sister, Amy, we flew directly into Paris, made our way to Bordeaux where I collected a car, then to Agen to stay with Laura’s lovely host family, and on to Barcelona, Florence and Rome. Not bad for a first attempt.
The next time it was with my half Spanish friend Jacqui. That time we flew into Milan, hopped a plane to Barcelona, trained south to do Andulucia by car, and departed by way of a few days in Florence. Again not bad. Even though Jacqui’s Spanish was not quite what I expected, she refused to eat red meat or olives (in Spain!), and decided excessive drinking was uncharacteristically out of the question for the duration.
The third time is when I decided to take my mother to see where her mother had come from. That was a different kind of trip. To begin with I was in company with Amy, then 22, and my mother, about to turn 80 on the weekend we were due to return to NZ. And the trip itself was ambitious, and filled with numerous train journeys. Auckland, Dubai, Vienna (Amy wanted roast goose and a white Christmas – we had neither), Venice, Marseille, Lyon, Paris, Rennes, St Malo, Jersey, Guernsey, London, Dubai again (stopping over this time) and home for Mum’s 80th birthday bash two days later.
Guess who was camp mother, slept on the roll out bed in hotel rooms, directed traffic, kept the crew entertained, and mostly paid for everything? Anyway, here’s a bit more of the Grandma story.
Three succeeding generations went to visit my grandmother’s homeland, the first and last of her many descendants ever to do so. Eighty-eight years is a big gap. But my mother, the youngest of her six children and the only one surviving; me, the favourite grandchild; and Amy, my brave and fierce daughter – all set off to see what we could see. And what we saw gave us a glimpse, the merest glimpse, of that long ago life.
By the time we got to Jersey my mother had disabused herself of the long held and oft proclaimed notion that she had the soul of a European. Notwithstanding that she has the slightly hooded eyes of her French ancestors, it was immediately evident that she was not enlivened by the history, culture and traditions of western Europe. She was certainly interested in the food and the shopping, but when being urged to consider a 600 year old building she had a distressing tendency to be distracted by a handbag shop. By the time we got home she was more than happy to declare herself an antipodean through and through, and has expressed not the least interest in ever leaving NZ again.
But she did come alive on Jersey and Guernsey.
We took the ferry from St Malo to St Heliers, just as generations of her family must have done many times. The extent of French versus English ancestry is unclear, but it seems the family was more French than English from the records and the family names. At St Heliers the debarkation was slightly chaotic, and we had to head up a single narrow set of stairs. We were already sensing a certain familiarity with the generic looks of the islanders on the boat, but we both gasped in recognition of the woman of about 70 who glanced casually back towards us as she climbed the stairs. She could so easily have been my grandmother as I remember her, with her greying hair up in a bun and a streak of darker colour through the centre.
I had established contact with an older first cousin of Mum’s before we left, and we were hopeful there would be other descendants of my grandmother’s family of eight siblings. So for all we knew the woman ahead of us could have been family, but as it turns out that is unlikely.
Jersey is beautiful, as indeed is Guernsey and the other Channel Islands.
It has a ragged and rocky coastline, views for ever, red gravel roads and beaches, flowering hedges, fortifications, and cute cottages galore. Not to mention historic castles and sites too many to mention. But it is tiny. We drove around this tiny island that seemed like a series of miniature English villages, each separated by narrow lanes, that were in fact the main roads of the island. In the tiny commercial centre we ate surrounded by solicitors entertaining clients, who were no doubt taking advantage of the unique tax regime.
We went to look where Grandma had lived. The original family home on the waterfront had long been demolished and the site re-developed. But we did find, down a lane and above a shop, the much more modest accommodation her mother took for the family after she was widowed.
We also found and visited other places familiar to my mother. The picture below is of La Corbiere lighthouse. A photo like this, which was torn from a calendar, was nailed to the inside of the door of the outside lavatory of my mother’s house in Onehunga throughout her childhood. The causeway is often under water, but we made it across and back just ahead of the incoming tide.
But there were no long lost cousins or other relatives to meet and greet. Only Gerard, a very dapper and sprightly 92 year old was there to greet us. A first cousin of Mum by one of her mother’s sisters, and the brother of another cousin, Joan, who I met as a child. Like the rest of the family, as it turns out, Joan had left Jersey and settled in NZ for good, although not before coming and going a few times. So many comings and goings that in fact we had lost track of her till we saw an obituary for her from Paeroa, of all the unlikely places for a Jersey girl to end up.
Gerard was a delight, and although he had not known of my mothers existence, he certainly know about his two aunts who lived in NZ. In fact he spilled the beans about my grandmothers older sister, who had been dispatched, pregnant, to NZ for what sounded suspiciously like an arranged marriage to an older man. I strongly suspect my grandmother was sent off to visit her to avoid the same fate. However, in the event, she surpassed all expectations in that direction.
Whatever the intention in sending her to visit NZ, it was never going to turn out the way her mother hoped. She was not a women designed to live in such a small, tight society. The sense of confinement, and the vaguely incestuous and judgemental community, would be a living hell for a free spirit. And rightly or wrongly, my grandmother was a free spirit. NZ may not be big, but it must have seemed, to a young girl from Jersey, like a different world. Like freedom. Whether it was a man who turned her head, or NZ itself, she was not in a hurry to go back.