Spoiler alert – I don’t have the answer.
Three and a half weeks home and life is settling into a familiar rhythm. I get up, go to work, construct the meals provided in my Whoop Box, do yoga, enjoy or curse the weather, and have found new and old favourites to watch on Netflix and Lightbox. Then there is Johan, and family and friends, and all the events and occasions they bring. Not too bad actually, but I am no longer prepared to drift. France may not have taught me how to live the rest of my life, but it did confirm that I need a sense of direction to live it.
And as I remarked to someone last night, once I get an idea into my head I tend to want to get on with it toute suite. So watch out for changes on the horizon. No big revelations just yet. Not even any final decisions. But something has to give soon.
I am not sure how my grandmother dealt with the grind of day to day life. By the time I knew her she seemed pretty resigned to it. But the pattern of her behaviour over the earlier part of her life suggests she did not easily succumb.
There could have been worse places to be than Auckland in the 1930’s. The Great Depression might have been biting, but no one was starving in the temperate north. George V was still on the throne, cars were only for the very wealthy, the trams ran down Manukau and Dominion Roads into the city, and the mantra of “rugby, racing and beer” was the cultural norm. People went to church on Sundays, knew their neighbours, and each others business. They went to see movies in black and white (talkies!), and stood up for God Save the King beforehand. Wireless was a novelty and the latest luxury household item. Auckland was growing and pushing out in all directions, so that Onehunga became a suburb instead of a disconnected town.
The merged family could have been happy, and sometimes they were. Certainly there can be no doubting the strong bonds my grandmother’s children felt to her, although she may often have been careless about nurturing them.
When my mother was born into her two-part family, Bill was already 18 – essentially a man and no longer living at home. James was 15 and Maisie 14. They were both well on their way towards moving on. Children grew up fast in those days, and even faster in this family. Bob was five and Jack nine. In families of six the youngest is seldom spoilt. Certainly my mother was not. Benign neglect was the norm. However, she adored her brothers, notwithstanding that the younger two treated her more like a play thing than a play mate.
In those days children, when not in school or church, ran free and unhindered. No one much knew or cared where they went when out of sight. As long as no one complained about their activities, they could go where they liked and do what they wanted. Adventurous in mind and body, Jack and Bob did just that. My mother tagged along. In response they did what boys do. They tossed her into the sea to practise their rescue skills. They sent her climbing trees to see how high up she would go before she got stuck. They tied her up, chased her, got her lost, used her to beg favours, and generally treated her like a vaguely annoying wind-up toy. She may not have loved every minute of it, but her brothers became her ideal of what boys and men should be.
Just a pity about the bad habits they acquired as they got older – women, booze, just the usual. Boys will be boys.
So there was Mum, just a scrap of a thing, hanging out with her brothers and their friends, and as she got older with her own little gangs as well. She was not well-dressed. Going to the local convent school, her school uniform was the default all occasions dress-code. New clothes and shoes were unknown, and new 2nd-hand a rarity. She was not particularly clean. No one cared enough to ensure that she was, although a kindly neighbour with a child the same age took her in for a good scrub occasionally. But she was pretty. Very pretty, and that was an asset. Neighbours and shop keepers took a shine to her. That was handy when my grandmother needed credit or to borrow something. Send May to ask. When she was old enough to understand, this became a source of burning shame to her, but she never refused an errand. One did not refuse to obey in those days.
Spare the rod and spoil the child. There was nothing actually biblical about my grandparents’ approach to child control, but they certainly neither spared the rod nor spoiled the child. In that household, and probably in many others, corporal punishment was instant and brutal. Worse, the severity of the punishment did not necessarily equate to the offence. A learnt response of course, and to me as a child who inherited this pattern, the greatest source of injustice and grief.
My uncles got the worst of it. Being boys they probably did not succumb easily enough to avoid the spiralling intensity of their parents’ tempers. And of course it was my grandfather who dealt out the worst beatings, occasionally well beyond the bounds of what was considered acceptable even then. No one intervened. No one called the Police or child welfare. It was not that bad. It was, just barely, normal.
Let me be clear. These children were loved. They were clothed (after a fashion), sent to school, even feted on occasion. But they were mistreated. By parents whose own problems and dramas left them vulnerable and only intermittently inclined to bother.
Children grow up and they move on. All had their demons. They all loved their parents unreservedly, but not uncritically. They became parents themselves, and I will get to that somewhere in this story.
While not unscathed by violence and neglect, that is not what forged my mother’s values.
While children see only what is closest to them, those around them see and infer much more. What the neighbours saw was a European woman married to a Maori husband, whose children very clearly did not have the same father. Two strikes. While he was upright and proud, she was slovenly around the house, careless of the children, and a regular at the trots and gallops. Her store accounts paid late, and a little too friendly with men in general, particularly those who could do her a favour. Three strikes, maybe more.
And the older siblings. Dark skinned, nattily dressed, and stunningly good looking. But, oh my, they were free and loose with the opposite sex.
Onehunga was a working class area, but people still had their standards. They might have been shitty, unthinking, unforgiving standards, but they were used to judge. It is always nice to have someone to look down on. So while the neighbours were being nice to my mother, they were also pitying and patronising. Not just the adults. The children pick these things up as well. As a child my mother was only obliquely aware of this, but as she got older it sunk in all too well. Her reaction – an overwhelming desire for respectability above all else. It is a habit and a mindset that has taken her a lifetime to overcome, and it has shaped every facet of her life and that of her family. The question is never, who am I, but rather, what do other people think of me?
Ok, it is not getting any easier. Enough for now. The long weekend beckons.