Her loveliness from the walls looked down,
Over the towers of Troy town,
Hundreds of miles away.
But my mother was beginning to feel very far away, and wherever she was, had taken herself there without much reference to me. Why should I care? Jane and I were both going to St Margaret’s school now. We wore green uniforms and panama hats. I liked school, but could wish for more from home. It wasn’t the kind that other children had. Other children didn’t live in hotels and had a mother to collect them:
we had a different lady friend to do it practically every day. They all seemed to want us to like them, mind you, and were forever giving us things. At Easter I was given so much chocolate I was sick. I asked for a car for my birthday and was given a toy one, not a real one, and then they wondered why I was crying: if I’d had a proper mother she could have explained. Why on earth would I want a toy car? I was a girl. I was Fay. No one ever called me Franklin now.
Rita Angus, or Rita Cook, as we knew her, one of my father’s friends, took it into her head to paint a portrait of Jane and myself. Rita was to be reckoned as one of New Zealand’s finest painters, but at the time was seen as a rather eccentric dabbler in the arts. The portrait now hangs in New Zealand’s National Gallery. We were put in our matching check dresses and told to sit still. Jane managed this very well but I couldn’t. I kept running off to get a drink of water. I somehow lost the belt of my green cardigan and Rita had to paint it out. She sat our dolls in a row above us but dressed them up first in a rather formal way which in my opinion didn’t suit their personalities at all. She put in some of the hotel teacups, and painted them to give us a rest from sitting still. She was very nice, though we didn’t think we looked at all the way she had painted us. We were more real and lasting on the canvas than we were in real life. But we were very polite. We knew instinctively from an early age that the artist’s sensibilities are to be protected, lest they give up altogether and walk off into the night.
I got up one morning and my legs wouldn’t work. I had poliomyelitis, or infantile paralysis. It could kill you or lame you: I knew about that. Everyone was terrified of it all over the map, or up and down the orange. I was a map person, Jane was an orange person. I could see by now that she was right but I wasn’t going to admit it. I was given a bed in the conservatory and Jane wasn’t allowed to come near me. The waitress would put my food down and run away. My father cried, but I knew it was all right: he was the best doctor in the world and would see to it. And nothing bad could happen to me: fate was on my side. And so it was. Today, when I’m tired my right ankle tends to turn my foot in a little, but that’s all. There was some talk at the time about callipers, which happily soon went away.
By now Jane and I were so close I hardly noticed any difference between her and me. We seemed one body. Even our names were bracketed together. We were called Jane’nFay. My father was standing for parliament: I watched to see if he stood up more than usual but no, he sat down just as much as ever. What were they all talking about?
One day at school, as I lay sleepless on my mat on the floor, a woman I didn’t know bent over me. It was afternoon-nap time, a torment if ever there was one. You had to lie in rows on the floor for what seemed forever, when all you wanted to do was run about. This still quietness, this ‘rest’, seemed such a waste of life. The stranger wore a scarlet pillbox hat with a little black veil, so her face seemed covered with small black dots. She kissed me and said she was my mother and I was to get up now. That was a relief. Jane confirmed that she was who she said she was and she took us out of school for the day. I asked her what her name was and she said it was Margaret. I seemed to remember that.
We sat in Cranmer Square for a bit and I told her about the worms. She said that at home it had rained a lot. I asked her whether the ship had had to climb up the sea to get to the equator, and she said no, and dropped a stone and explained the theory of gravity. Jane said she knew that already. Then my mother took us back to the private hotel but did not stay. Nor did my father ask her to. It was amazing how the lady friends seemed to melt away, and how quiet everything suddenly was.
In his Memories Edgar remarks that my mother was a better writer than either he or Selwyn, and that her novel Via Panama was proof of it. He complained that it was gloomy, and it is perhaps not surprising if it was. It was written on her journey back to Christchurch, whence she had fled so impetuously from Frank’s infidelities and his embarrassing failure to keep out of debt. She had been trying to establish a life for herself in London, and had found a flat and, miraculously, a job on the News Chronicle as a journalist. This would pay just about enough to enable her to support herself and her two daughters. She would return to New Zealand to fetch us as soon as she had got the money together.
The first letter she received from Frank said that if she did not come back at once he would take Jane’nFay to South America and she would never see us again. Rightly, she did not believe him. She did not reply. But his second letter was brief and to the point. Fay had polio and Margaret must come home at once before it was ‘too late’. Overwhelmed by anxiety and guilt, she took the next boat home, giving up both the flat and her job. Trapped on shipboard for six weeks, without news of her younger daughter, not knowing what she would find when she disembarked, she spent the time writing a novel.
Via Panama was about the shipboard voyage out; and contained a thinly disguised portrait of my father, whom she clearly still loved, and of her fellow-passengers, mostly New Zealanders, whom she affected to despise for their drunken and provincial ways. The novel was published both in England and the US to critical acclaim – and for a thirty-year-old young woman it was a triumph – but when it reached New Zealand there was uproar. She had insulted her hosts: she was an ingrate, the worst kind of homie. She put on airs: she thought herself too good for New Zealand. She was not Public Enemy Number One – that role was preserved for my father, who was standing for election as a socialist candidate – but she was Public Enemy Number Two. Frank lost the election because of Via Panama – or so he believed – and my mother was so shaken and upset by its reception that she resolved – as her father had once done before her – never to write a ‘serious’ book again. From henceforth she would write only to entertain. (Edgar’s first novel, The Passion for Romance, written when he was at Oxford, had been ‘serious’, had taken him three years to write and earned him only £6.19s. It was on financial grounds that he came to the same decision. Or so he said. Forget art, forget literature, forget enlightening his readers as to the ways of the world, and the state of their souls, the rent must be paid.)
In my mother’s footsteps, some forty years later, I was to write a television play about an English husband going home with his new second wife to the New Zealand outback – affectionately known as the boondocks – to an uneasy welcome which included Pavlova cake and separate beds. That got me into trouble, too. I was accused of stereotyping New Zealand women, portraying them as backward in their attitudes, cake bakers all. Useless to say but I’m not writing documentary, I am under no obligation to produce a fair and balanced view, this is a particular story about particular people – such arguments never convince those predisposed to take offence. But I was older than my mother was when she wrote Via Panama, and tougher, I daresay, and others came to my defence and I was soon forgiven. But for my poor mother, alone and far from home, the uproar was definitive. Had she been
