1
Every day the sea
grandmother
the last fringe of light lies
beneath a banner of storm
clouds the burden of hills
presses against air from out
of my window I touch the leaves of kowhai we planted
a whole quarter of a century
ago such an accumulation
of years how we guarded those saplings from hurricanes
nothing much changes
lights aeroplanes a tangle of cable wire
but the outlines of the place
we’ve both called home
are still here
I know you through
these hills, this horizon, tonight’s
wild dark, our summer
days
because you are my grandmother
Grandparents, they are the history that lies beneath our skins.
For much of my life I chose not to pursue my ancestry. And yet it was there, lying at my feet and all around me. All the time. I live on a hill that overlooks land occupied by my forebears two hundred years ago.
On 31 January each year, two distant cousins and I set off for the Seashore Cabaret on the foreshore of Petone, a satellite district of Wellington. The café, its dancing glory days now in the past, is up a steep flight of steps and crowded with what you might call a cross-section of people, some eating large meals: women in head scarves, Māori and Pacific Island families, young mothers with wriggling shouty children. The walls are crowded with retro posters and there is an advertisement for tarot readings on Sunday afternoons at five.
My cousins, the Sutherlands, and I are all of Celtic descent, but we are not here to look for mystical meanings, or the power of the Celtic Cross, although that’s not to say we’re uninterested in the past. We have a number of things in common. Melody and Bess are sisters; one was previously a trademark executive, one a librarian. When I was very young, I was a librarian too. I feel it’s a sign that we’re intrinsically connected by books and ideas. Every time we meet, I find myself searching their faces for clues to my own identity. Do I look like them? Melody has auburn hair, Bess has curls, mine was once heavy and dark. It’s the eyes, we say, it’s something about them that’s distinctive, that sets us apart, though in my heart of hearts I know that’s not exactly true. If I resemble any of the women who went before me, it is most likely my Irish grandmother, whom I never knew. Never mind, there is a sense of kinship. And, given how few close relatives I have, Melody and Bess have designated me their honorary second cousin and I like so much that they have. It’s more like fourth or fifth; it’s always hard to stitch up the generations. What we recognise is our forebears in common, Alexander and Elizabeth Sutherland, who arrived on the appointed date of our meetings, in 1840. We gather to spend time together and to remember, to look at the sea, at the heads that the Oriental sailed through before reaching safe harbour, to consider the beach below us where the emigrants landed; to marvel that our great-great-grandmother had given birth not long before – it is said while the ship was hove-to at the Wellington Heads, although the dates are a little cloudy. We laugh over the fact that if Elizabeth could have made it to land, the little girl, whose name was Kathrean, would have qualified for a bounty as the first European baby to be born in our town.
In the north, six days after the Oriental made landfall, the Treaty of Waitangi was signed.
On my mother’s side, this is my whakapapa. We remind each other, Melody, Bess and I, that our ancestors are not called pioneers today but settler colonists, the takers of the land; it seems to ill behove that we celebrate their heroism. Yet we can only salute the fortitude, the sheer will to live, that Elizabeth, our great-great-grandmother, exemplified on that journey. Without her, we would not be here.
Those forebears were settlers in the land-hungry migration organised by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, an Englishman with a shady past and a penchant for kidnapping young heiresses, who set up the New Zealand Company to buy land from Māori for much too little and sell it at a profit. My Sutherland great-great-grandparents came on one of his five ships. We may acknowledge this troubled past to each other, but we have become part of this land and there is no returning, any more than there was for that birthing woman on the Oriental. We have no other place to call home; we are prisoners to our history but also its celebrants.
I think of Elizabeth on the pitching sea, tended in childbirth by women who had come from the same village of Badbea (pronounced bad-bay), in the Highlands of Scotland, and how she somehow survived her ordeal.
We don’t know much about her at that stage of her life, although there is a legend with the power of myth that I come back to over and again, and if I have told it before, it is because it never leaves me. It is a metaphor for what mothers do when their children are at risk, or they are likely to be separated from them.
That village of Badbea was occupied by tenant farmers. Most of us who are descendants of this line know the story of the Clearances, the way the landed gentry turfed tenant farmers off the land, burning the roofs of their crofts so that they could not live in their houses, leaving families homeless and poverty stricken. They were sent to small farms on the coast where farming was unsustainable, expected to take up fishing or the collection of kelp from the seas. The weather in Badbea is said to be so harsh that, as the people worked, they had to tether their livestock and their children to rocks or posts to prevent them being blown over the cliffs. My great-great-grandfather, Alexander Sutherland, raised by the local preacher (so there is that in my line too), was an opponent of the Clearances and one of the first in the village to depart for New Zealand, joining the mass migrations to the ‘colonies’ that was taking place all over the Highlands.
Elizabeth’s family didn’t want them to leave, and she didn’t want to go either. She already had a little girl, Christy, and she was recently pregnant. With great reluctance, Elizabeth travelled to the eastern coastal village of Brora, where a ship was waiting to take the travellers to London to join the migration. They had with them an assortment of possessions that included a Bible, some willow pattern jugs and a mahogany table. But when it came time to board the ship, Elizabeth held back, holding Christy in her arms. I can hear the keening rising in the air, the laments and the farewells; I can see her refusal, see her mother’s anguish, yearning for her daughter and grandchild to stay.
At that moment, her husband came down the gangplank, snatched Christy from her mother’s arms and left Elizabeth standing there. So that was her choice, to follow her child, her first born, or give her up forever. She followed.
I would have done this too. I would follow my children to the ends of the earth. But it doesn’t always work like that, as it did not for the mother of Elizabeth, and that is the lesson you learn, I suppose, that there is only so far you can go with your children. And then, when there are grandchildren, they might be anywhere in the world, scattered in foreign countries. But they are always kin, they are part of who we are.
Later, after this migration, my great-grandmother, Margaret, was born, here in this town.
We point to the heads, Melody and Bess and I, and wonder aloud how Elizabeth did it. The sea is sometimes sunlit, but the last day we went it was sullen, clouds hovering overhead. The records do not say what the weather was like by the time the ship reached the shore in 1840, but we believe it rained for days afterwards. There is a touching story about a young wife who sat on an upturned boat, soon afterwards, and remarked quietly that it was ‘a long journey to make just to see some rain’. We don’t know the exact spot on the sandy beach beneath the Cabaret where the new settlers first set foot but we understand they made their way ashore along a rough, newly erected jetty. They would live in tents for some time to come. What we do know is that we are sitting here in the Cabaret, exploring the ties of blood, because our great-great-grandmother made it that day.
Survival. There are two sides to most stories. One displacement sets the scene for another. I know that my great-great-grandmother flourished in this country. A cow had been carried on the Oriental from London to Wellington, and Elizabeth was the only woman who knew how to milk it. She got more cows and made butter, which she sold for five shillings a pound. She and Alexander grew wealthy on a farm that spanned the bay below where I live now; they added sheep to their holdings and grazed them on land that, coincidentally, borders the house where I have lived for the past fifty years. When the great earthquake of 1855 occurred and the land was displaced, they picked up their sheep and carried them around the coastline to new pastures to the north.
I let none of this touch me for decades.
My grandparents, my mother’s parents, disapproved of her marriage to an Irishman who was not Presbyterian. We moved away from them when I was a child. I turned my back on my mother’s history. But there are certain things I know without being told, and I found myself increasingly unsure of where they came from. In 1986, I wrote a novel called The Book of Secrets. It was about a charismatic preacher called Norman McLeod who led a migration from the Highlands of Scotland to Nova Scotia, and from there to Waipū in the north of New Zealand, where my own parents owned a farm. I considered Waipū and its history the sole inspiration for that book, but I don’t know any more whether that’s true, especially as I sit with my kin remembering the Oriental’s landing. Who am I? One part of me is from the Irish grandparents I never knew, the other part from a Scotswoman. When I was nine years old, I knew, like her, how to milk a cow, I called a fictional character in The Book of Secrets Christy and I am, I have learned, the descendant of a preacher who drew hundreds to him. The same keening that farewelled McLeod and his followers followed mine. A part of me is undone by this knowledge.
In the passageway of my house, I have an old wood-framed photograph of my great-grandmother, and one of her husband, Neil Small. She stands in front of a velvet curtain looped back by braid, her fingers trailing over the back of a chair. Her eyes appear fierce and direct, although my informants tell me she had dementia by the time the picture was taken, so that stare is hard to interpret. She wears a hat like a guardsman’s helmet tilted over her brow, and there is a ruffle of lace at her wrists. This is Margaret, grown old and rich, bringing with her a variety of legacies. Above my bookshelves stand fluted silver vases, and on the middle finger of my left hand I wear a mother of pearl ring. The vases and the ring came from her.
Later, all that money would be gone. She lies in death in a country cemetery, surrounded by Neil and several of her descendants. Their son, another Alexander, married my grandmother, Elizabeth Stewart, from Dumfries. In a drawer, I have the paisley crinoline cover that Elizabeth’s mother wore on the ship out (it actually belongs to my daughter but I am caring for it at the moment), and in family lore there is a wealth of ‘good connections’. The Stewarts went all the way back to Robert the Bruce, fierce battles and murderous times, to the Sinclairs and the Kirkpatricks and the Mackays and the Camerons, names borne by my mother and her siblings. I am one of their two surviving remnants. The clans speak across centuries. My uncle Robert, my mother’s brother, bought a length of Royal Stewart tartan to be made into a skirt for me when I was a child. I failed to learn the Highland fling.
because you are my grandmother
I wear old fine gold and mother-of-pearl
because, because of this,
I wear this hair shirt of guilt
the settlers’ shame
There was that too. In the years that I spent on farms, there in the Waikato, and later in the Far North, it did not occur to me that I was occupying what has been termed ‘debatable land’, that in time to come the entire country would be contested. Now I understand the concept better with each passing day. Just recently, while talking to a woman I had newly met, I described my house on the hill as my tūrangawaewae.
‘Not in a Māori sense,’ she said, with some acidity. She was talking about spirituality and connection with the land.
It stung. Looking at my history, my whakapapa as we say now in Aotearoa New Zealand, and where it stretches to that Petone beach, I know that in a sense what she said was true.
‘It’s my place to stand,’ I answered, uneasily. ‘It’s the place where I know who I am.’
And that is true too. I have no other.
‘The Emigrants’ by Gerald Laing, situated at Helmsdale near Badbea, in Sutherlandshire, depicting a crofting family looking back to the home they have been forced to leave.
HEATHER HOURIGAN
2
If my maternal grandparents left a trail of belongings that revealed their journey from the poverty of the Highlands to the rich, hilly expanses of New Zealand, there is little of my Irish grandmother to be found, except a handful of letters and the photograph my father kept, the one in which he likened my eyes to hers. I’m sure there is some truth in that. Hers are large and direct beneath the straight dark brim of her hat, and my optician has remarked more than once on the expanse of my eyes, a problem for those who suffer, as I do, from dry eyes. So much more blinking to be done. These are my grandmother’s eyes, the imprint she has left on me and, as I have got older, I feel the Irish in me in an astonishing way. It seems that what Ann O’Hara of Bandon, County Cork, bequeathed me was her gene pool. Her husband, Henry Eakin, was born in County Leitrim, but I know even less of him.
Ann died years before I was born. She is buried in a cemetery off Tees Road in Middlesbrough, the Yorkshire town where my father was born. In her death notice, the text read: ‘And they shall be mine saith the Lord of Hostes, in that day when I make up my Jewels.’ Writing to my father, her sister described her as ‘that most unselfish of women’. Probably true. She had given her childless sisters her eldest boy, my father’s brother, to raise in Ireland.
I have nothing of hers but there is a letter that she wrote to my father in 1934, from Granville Road in Middlesbrough where she and my grandfather were then living. Calling my father Lofty, and further on Nip, she asks whether he received the suit and a cash draft she had sent. In a sense he was her only child. His sister had died shortly after birth. His brother had been frail when he was relinquished to his aunts. There is longing in her tone: ‘This has to be a short letter till I know what or where you are likely to be, you see at present I do not know.’
A month or two later my grandmother died of bowel cancer. My grandfather had gone for a walk in the afternoon. While he was away she was overtaken with dreadful pain and knocked on the wall of her terraced house to alert her neighbour, but by the time she reached hospital, it was too late. She had had some discomfort, my grandfather wrote in another letter, but she had been treating it with a bottle of stuff from Pedlow, the doctor – a tablespoonful three times a day. During the autumn she had got two or three bottles of something else from the chemist and thought that suited her better. Just before Christmas she complained of indigestion and decided not to have a roast fowl, but managed some lamb and plum pudding instead.
After she died, my grandfather took up with a widow called Mrs Murphy, who had nine children. She was supposed to be taking care of him but there are a number of photos of the pair of them at Redcar, where they had gone to live. I suppose that my grandfather must have had a late, last love. He left her what money he had.
My knowledge of his early life is scanty, except that he was born in County Leitrim, near the ruins of fifteenth-century Fenagh Abbey, once a place of worship for the Church of Ireland, and a place my father would recall from time to time. My grandfather was Protestant; his family was connected with the Royal Irish Constabulary and, for someone seeking their Irish roots, that’s not a good look. But if I don’t tell that truth, sooner or later, somebody may well do it for me. Our history is never as shiny as we would want, our folklore often clouded.
Despite that deep conservatism in my father’s background, my Scots grandparents disapproved of my mother’s marriage simply because he was Irish.
3
During the Second World War, my mother and I lived with her parents, my maternal grandparents, the Smalls, on a Waikato farm, and several of her siblings, my aunts and an uncle. At night, my mother and I slept in a tiny cottage at the bottom of the garden, heated by a wood stove as the winter fogs swirled outside. In season, calves bleated against the walls. Alongside my uncle, my mother milked cows when they ‘came in’ after their calving; my father came and went on his leaves, wearing his air force uniform. My uncle played his bagpipes on the hills at night when milking was over. One of my aunts was a pale beautiful invalid and had breakfast taken into her on a tray, complete with her daily senna pod juice to help with her constipation. Another aunt was brisk and accepted no nonsense. Yet another visited and flashed an engagement ring, long after the time for marriage seemed over. I was the tearful flower girl at her wedding when she became the third wife of a man who would adore her always. I was supremely happy there on the farm, ensconced in this broad nest of family. At its heart were Sandy and Lizzie: Alexander, descended from the Sutherlands, and Elizabeth from the Stewart line.
My grandmother was already old and floury faced. By the time I was born she was almost past hoping her barren children would provide her with grandchildren. I threw a stone at her one day when she grew irritable and, in the fuss that ensued, I ran for my life, straight between the legs of a horse that stood still and allowed me to pass. In the terror of what might have been the consequences, the way I could have been killed, how fortunate they all were that I had been spared, I was forgiven. Of course I was.
As for the story of my grandfather, that is a familiar one too. My parting from him was the central drama of my childhood, the trauma that I would endure for years to come, the one that makes me fear separations and partings. I will hold on like someone clinging to the edge of the precipice with their fingernails rather than let anyone leave my life. I’ve fallen off a few times; there are slippages and surrenders and goodbyes and the moment when it is impossible to remember the phone number of a beloved person. The wounds aren’t fatal but that one, that wrenching and tearing apart, felt close to it. We would sit, my grandfather and I, in long slanting sunlight at the breakfast table and his stories would begin, always the stories. He had a trim moustache and a shining bald head. He would spread his porridge with honey and butter while he talked, his attention always fixed on me. But naturally, for I was the only child, the whole of the next generation, as near perfect as it was possible for a round girl with a pudding basin haircut to be. Our conversation would go on, long after everyone else had left the table and gone their way for the day’s work.
Alongside of us, filling the length of a wall, stood a tall dresser, ceiling high and ornately carved. I would know it anywhere. It was a family heirloom, and I understood it came on a ship, although which one is a mystery. It wasn’t on the Oriental, so possibly it was on a later sailing, the Stewart migration perhaps. Sometimes when I climbed down from my chair I would trace the whorls in the wood, the intricacies of each groove, as high as I could reach, the dark stain polished to a satin finish by my grandmother and the aunts.
My grandfather and I would set off to the hills then and he would go on talking and I would ask for more and more about the old days, the horses, journeys around a long-gone sheep station that took days, about how he cut out his rotten tooth with his pen knife once when he couldn’t wait to get attention for it, about how to slit the throat of a sick sheep, about the word of God when it came to him, about where the hens might have laid their eggs today. I was like a bell hung round his neck, the voice that told the watchers and minders where we were. My grandfather had dementia, as his mother had, but I didn’t know this. I know only that when my father came back from his wartime service, my parents and I packed up and left. The last time I saw my grandfather was on the railway station at Frankton Junction, his old, old face leaking with tears. That’s the opening scene of my second novel, Mandarin Summer; a child leaving behind those she loved, the bitter aftermath of that farewell, that sense of loss, for me, and for him. Whenever I think of him, I recall the family story that, after I was gone, he would scour the hills looking and calling for me.
And far away in the north I would be asking myself why I was there and how I could get back to him. So here I go, weeping about it all over again. He died soon after and that was that, but that never really is. It’s a word which means nothing and covers pretty well everything, if you let it.
The dresser slipped from the family’s grasp, and I realised after a time that though it represented those years, it was an object, not the person I loved. By the time I found it again, it had assumed a different place in my history.
Besides, I have many things. As well as Margaret Sutherland’s mother of pearl ring, which I wear most days, I have Lizzie Stewart’s wedding ring and my mother’s, and sometimes I wear all of them, though I’m not given to rings in a general sense. I have in my possession the black lace collar that was worn on a mourning dress of another great-grandmother. I have family china, which is unfashionable now, and my grandmother’s clock. And so on. That accumulation of the past. You could create a museum if you allowed yourself, and that is not something I want to do.
Yet there are nights when I say to my grandmothers, as I look towards the same sea they sailed across, do not abandon me.
4
I was forty-three when my first grandchild came along, and another five would follow. Each child seemed like a miracle. I would hold these new-born babies, sometimes within minutes of their arrival, with such a profound sense of wonder, as if they were an extension of myself. Which, in a manner of speaking, they are. They stopped coming a long time ago, but now they are reproducing themselves. I have five great-grandchildren already. I have to remind myself that they already have grandparents – my children. I have learned to cede some rights. But they are still part of that great life cycle to which we all belong.
I have a saying that I pass on to friends who are becoming grandparents for the first time. I tell them: ‘Becoming a grandparent is nature’s way of reminding us when we are old what it is like to fall in love again.’ And they agree.
Grandparents, it has to be said, can be crashing bores, thrusting photographs in front of their friends, or even people they meet on buses and trains, demanding that these children be admired. They are the smartest kids, they will tell you, cute and funny and endearing, and given the slightest chance they will launch into a story that demonstrates the truth of their assertion. I have done it myself, waited for the murmur of approval, the polite nod of the head, the obligatory smile. But it’s true, there is some deep level of response, almost hormonal, primeval, a triumphant inner shout that says I endure, I am now, and I am the future. We see it in these children.
My own parents were fine grandparents, their home the perfect holiday destination for our children until they moved close to us. My father and I had had an uneasy relationship, as he did with most people, and remembering that makes me sad for all sorts of reasons. He had an inner loneliness but, in his grandchildren, he discovered a love that tumbled out unrehearsed. There were times when I envied the closeness between him and my daughter. He blew blue smoke rings around his grandchildren until the last painful week of his life, when he left behind an unexpected legacy. As he lay in hospital, he repeatedly asked my son, then eighteen, for a cigarette, which he refused, as he was bound to. Afterwards, my son told me that he had made a resolution, stubbed out his last cigarette because he couldn’t bear to be in that dreadful position himself. He never smoked another. A day or so later, my father died in an infectious-chest ward, while down the corridor lay his newly born first great-grandchild, unmet though he had longed to survive long enough to see her.
What sort of a grandparent have I been? Or, were Ian and I, because it was a joint endeavour from the beginning.
In my view, Ian was a model grandfather. When he set eyes on his first grandchild, a girl, a fierce protective bond was forged between them that lasted until the day he died; he never stopped loving her, he never failed her. And when he was old and growing frail, she looked after him. Neither, so far as I could see, did he fail the boys who followed. In their memory, he is the person who made them laugh, who performed tricks, who made sure they got home safely, who put his hand in his pocket if they needed things, who stood and cheered Saturday after cold Saturday at sports grounds, who muttered curses to himself if the referee called against them. When the chips were really down, he’d speak his mind to his grandsons and they would listen. He was Grandpa; his was the word.
For my part, I cooked often for my grandchildren, and food is as good a persuasion, a honey pot, if you will, as any. They swarmed all over many meals. But I was also the Grannie who was hopeless at board games, timid at cards, couldn’t kick a ball, but decided they should have experiences, like going to the theatre. The girl and I did a lot together, the experiments with the boys were more spasmodic, but instilled in all of them is an acknowledgement of the arts and a real love of music and drama and painting. I’m proud of that.
In return they would bring small treasures and finds, and these are scattered around my house still. I used to think I should explain the odd assortment of mementoes: they’re not connected, they don’t have a theme and most of them have little value, except to me. A visitor once remarked that our house was ‘comfortably cluttered’. Well. So? There are shells collected at beaches, toby jugs from second-hand shops, pen knives, a chipped vase, stones painted in rainbow colours, a model fishing boat built to scale. I know where each item came from. There is, as well, a beautiful art installation painted by the grandchild who is now an artist in London. And, tucked alongside my grandmother’s silver teapot, there is a souvenir Arc de Triomphe, about the width of my closed fingers, coated with a dull bronze-coloured patina that is soft and silky to the touch. When I look at it, I see a fifteen-year-old boy with a dagwood haircut, wearing the baggy trousers that were fashionable twenty years ago, boarding a plane.
At school this boy had a best friend whose English parents decided to relocate to their hometown, taking their son with them. As they left, they said blithely to my grandson, Come and see us in England. He took it seriously; he was that kind of person, still is. He scrimped and saved by stacking shelves at the supermarket after school and family threw in money as Christmas presents. When he had the fare together, he bought his ticket and off he went, all by himself, an unaccompanied minor.
‘Darling,’ I said, at the airport, ‘you can’t go all the way to London without going to Paris.’
What on earth was I thinking? This boy, my son’s child, looked at me with the typical quizzical gaze that he has carried from childhood, through medical school and into marriage and parenthood. I could see what he was thinking: How do I afford that? And, it occurred to me afterwards, What a mad grandmother I have. I popped a roll of notes into his hand.
‘For Paris,’ I said. ‘You get on the Eurostar.’
He went, and to Amsterdam too. On the way there and back he was searched for drugs, this blond, clean as a whistle child. Well, of course he was. What was I thinking, really? When he arrived back in New Zealand, his parents had to sign to get their child back off the plane.
The Arc de Triomphe is what he brought me back, his trophy and mine.
I have been that sort of grandmother.
My children didn’t know their paternal grandmother until they were at school. I had been married to Ian for ten years. There had been an estrangement within the family. I loved Ruby, real name Amelia, when I met her, and it was mutual. She knitted for the children and crocheted a bed jacket for me and gave me treasured items of jewellery that she wanted me to pass on. Her story, a hard life, is reflected in my short fiction, ‘A Needle in the Heart’. Her lineage, Ngāti Maniapoto and Ngāti Raukawa, runs through some but not all of my descendants. My son, who came to me as an infant, is of Greek origin: he is Papou rather than Grandpa to his grandchildren and they call their grandmother Yiayia. So I have grandchildren and great-grandchildren who are Greek. And Ngāi Tahu. And Spanish and French, and Chinese and Dalmatian, not to mention that blend of Irish and Scottish that runs through my veins and our story and song lines.
Although it is true that I come from settler stock, what I see in my descendants are people far removed from that constraint, that perception of themselves. They are both of and at one with the land and, at the same time, bring new dimensions to what it is to be a citizen of Aotearoa New Zealand. They have set me free from the uneasy past.
Everyone has grandparents. Not everyone has grandchildren. I have been fortunate.
There are things I could go on and on saying. Like the names. We hand them down too, treasures to keep memory alive. My granddaughter shares the names of two great-grandmothers, and also of my mother, Flora. My son bears the name of his adopted great-grandfather, stretching back generations and carried forward to his children and his grandchildren.
I can tell you about the olive trees that grow outside my kitchen window. Each one was planted by a grandson, each one sturdy and brave against the winds that blow here on this hill where I live.
I can tell you that, at Ian’s funeral, he was carried from the church by his six grandchildren, who had hurried from here and there, around the world.
I can tell you that the one who came from London slept beside his grandfather’s coffin for five nights, here in this room where I am writing now.
I can tell you that my granddaughter slept beside me on some of those nights.
And that is enough.