Choices

Often difficult.  I feel like I should be making choices at the moment, but so far I have failed to identify the options.

Some say there are no right or wrong choices, only better or worse outcomes.  I have some sympathy with this moral relativism, although like most people I still strive to make choices based on core values.  But for me, when choices come up that affect my future, logic comes a distant second to instinct and intuition.  I suspect my grandmother was the same.

What happened next is unknown to anyone now alive, and therefore unknowable.  My mother could have asked any number of people.  She could have asked her own mother who lived with her.  She did not.  Some things are apparently too dangerous to delve into.

To me this is simply incomprehensible.  Despite hints, and insults, and parsimonious snippets of information from her older sibblings, my mother simply never inquired.  Not me.  I would have delved where angels fear to tread, but my approach carries its own risks.  

My mother claims now to remember certain things.  A possible surname.  Visits to the house by a good looking, curly-haired man.  The gift of a bicycle, subsequently sold off when my grandmother had a debt to pay.  A visit charged with suppressed violence, where she was directed to go to her father and forcibly rejected when she went to the only man she knew as her father.  

I am not sure.  Memory is a strange thing, and for a not entirely happy woman reviewing her life through sleepless nights, it is not necessarily accurate.  At best, these are recovered memories, always suspect.

In the years after the war the family remained in Poverty Bay, and as he recovered my grandfather returned to work.  Apart from his years in the Army, he was a labourer of various kinds throughout his working life.  There was no shame in this.  Most NZ men of that era did similar work, turning their hands to whatever was available at the time.  During the Depression in the 1930’s he had government relief work, as did many others.  At other times he worked in the meat works at Otahuhu, which was a huge employer at the time.  Labourers were what NZ needed in those days.  The family may have been poor.  But so were most others, and they always had good food on the table.

At some point in time my grandmother got restless.  Or maybe just the relentless tedium of poverty, small children and provincial NZ wore her down.  Perhaps she  was just not having enough fun.  My grandfather after the war was no doubt a different man than the one she fell in love with.  Maybe she could not love the new man he had become.  Or else the clash of two strong personalities just got too difficult to handle.  In any event, another man came along.  Perhaps for my grandfather there were also other women.

There was a separation.  I doubt that it was amicable.  In my imagination I hear shouting and accusations, clothing and personal items tossed out the front door, and three little children resigning themselves to yet more upset and turmoil.  But perhaps it was not like that, and they were kinder to each other.  I was not there, so I do not know.

But my grandmother’s sister Mary was there.  She was a port in a storm. And my grandmother had a new lover.  Not just a passing interest either, but a serious, long-term relationship.  Their first child, John, was born in 1922, the second, Robert, in 1926, and finally my mother in 1932.  Ten years of domesticity and family, including the older siblings.  Six living children of mixed race and parentage, all bound together by my grandmother’s whim and will.

The household dynamics and inter-relationships mess with my mind.  By the late 1920’s, and perhaps even earlier, all the parties were living in Gisborne.  According to the 1928 census, my grandmother was living with her sister and brother in law at 6 Lytton Road.  We do not know if the other man, my biological grandfather, was also living there or elsewhere, or whether this arrangement was temporary.  It appears from those records that my grandfather, William, was living next door at number 4.  Certainly the two men would have been acquainted.  By the time my mother was born in 1932, the marriage had been resurrected and my grand-parents had moved to Onehunga in Auckland.

How or why my grandparents reunited is another mystery.  However, they had never been that far apart.  Perhaps the other man tired of her and left.  Perhaps the dramatic tension was simply too much for him.  Or she may have proved capricious and eventually found her former husband the more attractive of the two.  He may have petitioned her to return.  Who knows.  Whether she asked to come back, or he begged her to return, it must have taken a huge amount of swallowed pride on both parts for them to decide to live together again.  No wonder they departed to Auckland.

So choices were made, and then re-visited in a manner few people ever have the opportunity to experience.  The blended family were together in a workman’s cottage in Church Street, Onehunga, and my mother never knew it had ever been any different.  She grew up in and around the area occupied by DressMart today, with the Catholic Church where I was christened just along the road.  Her aunt Mary and uncle Denny also moved to Onehunga, and her cousins were only a few minutes away in Spring Street.  The house, which I passed many times as a child, was tiny.  She slept in a big bed with her mother until she was eight, which may be a clue to the state of my grandparents marriage.  Of course she was ejected for my grandfather’s visits, but I understand this was infrequent.

It would be nice to report that this unconventional family unit fared well, but that was not the case.  Survived would be a better description.

Yes, there is more to come.  Quite a lot I suspect, since I am nowhere near figuring out how we all got to be as we are.