Well here is some more of the tale ….
Sex. Making love. Fucking. Someone I know used to insist on referring to it as ‘being intimate’. Quite a lot of it went on in my grandmothers immediate family.
When I was a teenager in the early seventies, the contraceptive pill had only recently become widely available. As a consequence we liked to think our generation invented sex. Not me personally of course. I was too much my mother’s daughter to take those sort of risks. But I, like my peers, certainly assumed that sex before marriage was virtually unknown in the generations that preceded us, and that they considered sex after marriage was more of a duty than an indulgence. Our mothers did not tend to encourage us girls to think of sex as pleasurable, at least not from a female perspective. But we were the new generation. We had read “The Joy of Sex”. We knew better and we were definitely going to have orgasms.
In reality, of course, we knew nothing. Our predecessors were a feisty lot. At least mine were. They had to overcome the odds to enjoy their sexual freedom – the church, the neighbours, the risk of unwanted pregnancy, the sheer exhaustion of grindingly hard labour – but overcome they did.
Not without consequences though. There were children born out of wedlock, forced marriages, tears, blows and heartbreak, but no one died. No one ever regretted the birth of a child. The family simply adjusted and carried on – just as it has always been and ever will be. Life has a way of begetting life, and sex is what makes that happen. Whether sanctioned by church, state and society or not.
So the ambiguous Onehunga family got some mixed messages about sex. The official message was, “don’t do it outside of marriage”. The example was different, and right in their faces. The results were mixed. Five of the siblings married, one of them more than once. Three marriages lasted a life-time, with more or less success depending on what stage you view as success. One never quite made it to the alter. None of them were childless. Some children were born inside of marriage, others outside. The latter are known, talked of in distant memory, and have largely disappeared from view. Others came into the family by adoption, and are as bound by the family by nuture as the rest of us are by blood.
It is not for me to recite the love lives of my uncles and aunt. But nothing should be taken at face value in the family. There are secrets that are not secret galore. Nor should it be assumed that my grandmother, having returned to the marital home, felt herself to be confined to the marital bed. She may have been frustrated by the wildness of her offspring, but she must have recognised that she could not expect from them a discipline she did not impose on herself. My mother was the exception.
The older daughter, Maisie, had gotten away from my grandmother at a time when she herself was easily distracted. By the time my mother was growing into adolescence she was aging, more settled and her adventurous past somewhat behind her. Her husband was weakening, and becoming ill again from the lung disease that eventually killed him. She became a widow when my mother was eighteen. The rest of the family had long gone. My mother was not going to get away from her. Partly I think because she had regrets, but not least because my mother was useful. She provided an income into the household, company, support, housework. And she drew admiration and praise. All parents live through their children a little, don’t they?
In any case, from having been left to her brother’s devices as a child, my grandmother took care to see that her youngest daughter did not run loose as she grew into womanhood. The reins were tight and closely held. Netball, movies and dances with girlfriends were ok. Any interest in young men was discouraged. No scandal would surround this daughter, who in any event was neither made for nor inclined to scandal.
Even so, my mother did meet my father.