At the End of Darwin Road Read online

  My grandparents had left the district by then. They may not have subscribed to the actions of the Moawhango farmers in 1913, but the New Zealand Farmers Union had been formed at the end of the nineteenth century to exert pressure on the government for free trade, free access to Maori land and security from the threat of trade unionists and socialists. And, the distance between my mother’s family and my parents had something to do with the distance between town and country, farmers and ‘workers’, between Presbyterian and the Irish and Roman Catholics, or both, and between Maori and Pakeha. I look at the teapot some mornings when I am having breakfast and wonder about things I was not told.

  It was to Ruakaka Station that my father came courting Flora, around 1931. Hugh Eakin, an itinerant English farm worker, was a tall thin young man with chiselled features and an olive complexion. He was good-looking, or so I thought, except for his large beakish nose, which I inherited, and a snarled tangle of teeth. He was born in Middlesborough, into what he described as the lower middle class, although it was clear that he longed to advance up the social scale. There was something of the dandy about him. I have a pile of photographs of him, mostly taken before he met my mother. In one he is a child wearing a frilled shirt and a huge Breton hat; in another he is a grown man wearing a one-piece bathing suit with straps over the shoulders, on a beach in Hawaii; in the next, he is a sailor with a pipe in his mouth, on board a ship; he wears plus fours in yet another, a serious business suit next, and here he is again, wearing tennis whites with a group of stylish young people; in several he has one foot up on the running board of a Model T Ford, in the Australian outback. In all of the Australian pictures, he wears a hat like Humphrey Bogart’s tilted over one eye. He referred to his parents as the Mater and the Pater. His mother had died long before I was born. Her husband, my paternal grandfather, once a sergeant in the Royal Irish Constabulary, lived until not long before my birth on the other side of the world.

  Here is another photograph: the only one of the Mater, my grandmother Eakin, born Ann O’Hara at Bandon in County Cork, Ireland. In the photograph, she wears a dark high-crowned hat with a severely cut brim. Above her stern mouth, the large eyes looking levelly out of the photograph are my own. There was talk, when I was a child, of a lost castle, of an educated Irish family, a vanished gentility. Unlike my mother’s family, she already knew that the world was lost to her and her children. In letters to my father, which he kept, she tried to explain this to him, but he didn’t believe her.

  My father had emigrated to New Zealand in 1929 on a church-sponsored passage that required him to stay in New Zealand for five years. He was twenty-five and the Depression was biting hard. Despite several trips to sea, seven passages through the Panama Canal and living briefly in Vancouver, where he jumped ship and was rescued from imprisonment by his Irish uncles who were Mounties, he had already spent years out of work. He tried San Francisco for a while, where he sang in the chorus of light opera and became engaged to a girl called Sybella, but he left her and returned to England. Young people like him tried to hold onto their sanity through tennis parties and picnics. I don’t know how my father came to meet the people he did, but by the time he emigrated he had a vision of himself as more English than the English. He landed in New Zealand with some of the colonising dream that had inspired the Wakefield colonists: there would be cheap fertile land for farming, and local labour that was easy to come by. Soon he would be landed gentry. He had the accent for it. I doubt his family spoke as he did: this boy from Middlesbrough, with the Irish family background, spoke what we now call BBC Received English with an intermittent stammer. Something like Alistair Cooke, who had gorgeous British vowels despite his working-class origins in Blackpool.

  Of course, it was too late. My mother’s forebears, blunter, more pragmatic people, were the true inheritors of the Wakefield dream. My father was a johnny-come-lately, and by then New Zealand, too, was falling on hard times. I can see that if he had been born at some other time, he would have been an artist or a writer. He was to try his hand at both as he grew old. But he suffered disappointments that seemed to have little to do with my mother or me, although in time they would come to haunt us all.

  Perhaps an accumulation of these sorrows had begun to burden his heart when he turned up on my grandparents’ doorstep, and they detected them. Or perhaps they believed he was simply an adventurer, and an Anglo-Catholic one at that, not to mention the Irish influence. At any rate, while he captivated the heart of the youngest, seemingly most unlikely daughter to be attracted to this outsider, the Smalls were not impressed with his courtship. Just how they showed their displeasure was never spelt out, but he told me that he felt it. In later years I sensed an unease when he was present at family gatherings. At the time, matters were left to follow their own path. There were plenty of problems on the farm. My grandfather’s woolshed was bursting with unsold wool as the bitter economic truth of the Depression bit even deeper. The unthinkable happened and the family walked off the land. Although my parents were engaged to be married, their future looked hopeless. My father’s five years in New Zealand were up. He proposed to join Bill, his recently married brother, in Western Australia. He had a small inheritance from the Mater after her death in 1935. The letter the Pater wrote then breaks my heart. ‘Lofty’ is my father.

  You will have a recollection of how mother used to complain of her stomach from time to time, and get a bottle of stuff from Pedlow for it, ‘a tablespoonful 3 times a day’. During the autumn she got a few bottles from Dale the chemist, they seemed to suit her better, and that was all the difference that I ever noticed, a few days previous to Tuesday 15th January. She complained in the usual manner but nothing at all serious or to worry about. I had been for a walk after dinner as mother was keen that I should every day, and on my return just at dusk I noticed a light in the front bedroom. Mrs Fawcett was inside and informed me that ‘Mrs Eakin had got a bad pain in her stomach and I’ve put her to bed and been for the doctor.’ Well the doctor came and was on with the usual remedies which eased her a bit, but he began to fear obstruction of the bowel … Pedlow decided that mother should go to the hospital for an operation. We arranged accordingly for a private ward in North Ormesby Hospital, you may recollect mother’s horror of a public ward. Well the operation was on Saturday afternoon, at about 4.30 and at 11.30 p.m. on Sunday dear mother breathed her last, quietly and without pain with myself and Fanny Thomson by the bedside. Cause of death cancer … I have to send you some money, in accordance with the terms of your mother’s will. There will be about half the amount we had in the Yorkshire Penny Bank, the whole of some saving’s certificates (mother used always warn me that these were for Lofty, they are my own private savings she used to say, oh! All right I’d say, they are for Lofty) and the whole of the insurance amount, you remember the one-armed man — the agent — who used to come every other week for the money, mother used to call him ‘Trouble the House’. It won’t amount to a terrible lot but it will be a nice little start for Flora and yourself.

  Later, the Pater describes how his cousin Fanny Thomson had arranged for a Mrs Murphy, a widow with nine children, to come and take care of him.

  If my father seems to have been favoured by his mother’s will, this was not quite as it appeared. Bill, the brother he was about to meet up with, had had fragile health as a child and was raised in Bandon by my grandmother’s single sisters, Polly and Sarah (or Poll and Sal, as they were known). Most of the family wealth, and their house, had been set aside for Bill. Among my uncle’s health problems was a cleft palate, which appears to have recurred in members of my grandfather’s family. I am just one step removed from this condition. I have a distinctive voice that, in the years I worked as a producer in radio, prevented me from voicing programmes. There is a hollowness, an echo, I was told, because the very high roof of my mouth traps sound. I try not to think about this when I speak on radio now, and when I give talks. We would know that voice anywhere, people tell me. Yes, indeed. />
  My father felt that the money he had inherited might be put to better use in Western Australia and my mother agreed that she would shortly join him there. His newly acquired wealth lasted about three weeks in Australia. On the week-long railway trip across the Nullarbor Plain to Western Australia, he met a land agent who persuaded him to buy a worthless chicken farm, without first laying eyes on it. When he arrived all that remained were some broken-down cages on a piece of parched land, and not a chicken in sight.

  Meanwhile, in New Zealand, my mother’s family took up a piece of ragwort-infested land at Te Awamutu. My grandfather, the proud man used to riding though bush for days at a time, just for the pleasure of it, the strong and successful presence, grew out of touch with the world. My mother and her two brothers did most of the farm work. My mother also worked as a housemaid at various properties around the Waikato. Gradually she acquired a small nest egg.

  Four years had passed since my parents’ engagement. Possibly the Smalls thought my mother had forgotten about the itinerant Englishman, but she had not, although her heart had faltered more than once. She wrote to say that she would not go to Australia, then changed her mind again. One day she announced to the family that she had booked her passage to Sydney on the SS Wanganella. From there she too would take the train trip across the Nullarbor to Perth, where my father would meet her. By then he had a job as a herd tester, and he promised he could support her. Her journey became a family epic, part of the legend by which the three of us, my mother, my father and I, would live.

  Once, years after my father died, I followed that train journey across the huge limestone plateau that spans the width of the Great Australian Bight. Like many people, I thought Nullarbor was an Aboriginal word. I should have known better because I learned Latin for a time at school: it is simply Latin for no trees. But while it took my parents a week to cross the plain, my journey took only three days. I remember the way dingoes slid away from the stations, the scarlet stain of the sun erupting over the horizons at dawn, the little huddles of houses that people on the train called towns — Watson, Loonana, Rawlinna (a big ‘town’ with twenty buildings) — the absence of people out there among the ghostly blue-brush and the grey green salt-brush. As I climbed off the train beneath the great dome of Perth Railway Station, I tried to imagine my mother stepping down to meet my father, as he waited there, dressed in his best Donegal suit, sans fortune but still set on marrying her. He was such a funny man then, she would say; he used to make me laugh. Then.

  When I arrived, there was a cousin there, virtually all that remains of his family. She looked more like my father than I do, but she didn’t, as I do, have my grandmother’s eyes.

  A few weeks after my mother’s arrival in Perth, she sat down to breakfast in the boarding house where she was staying. It was the time of the wild flowers in Western Australia. Primrose orchids and mondurup bells scattered the plains and crowded the parks.

  ‘And what are you doing today?’ asked the woman sitting across the table from her.

  ‘Getting married,’ my mother said, to the surprise of her companion.

  Later that day, she and my father were married at St Andrew’s Church in front of two witnesses. My mother wore a spray containing kangaroo paw flowers on her pleated linen dress, and a big-brimmed hat.

  They might have stayed there in Australia. My father spent weeks travelling the countryside in his Model T Ford with his terrier Mac. My mother was happy in Donnybrook where they lived. She ran the local library, played tennis and owned a bad-tempered pink and grey galah called Cocky, which screamed with maniacal laughter at people it disliked. Her lifestyle was relaxed and, despite her married state, she was able to exert some independence during my father’s absences. With dismay, she learned that he was restless again.

  They might have gone to Tasmania. Instead, with the thought of starting a family on her mind, my mother said that, if they must shift, she preferred to return to New Zealand to be near her people. In the end there was a compromise. He would return to New Zealand, provided there was a distance between him and her relatives.

  I was born in Hawera on 26 March 1940, at a quarter to midnight in Mount View Private Hospital facing Mount Taranaki. I was delivered by Dr Andrew Young, standing in for my mother’s regular doctor, while he was on holiday. I was a seemingly healthy nine-and-a-half-pound baby, with strawberry-red birthmarks scattered across my nose and forehead.

  Two hours later, the Labour Prime Minister, Michael Joseph Savage, died. One great light replaces another, my family joked, but that’s all it was, irony, grim humour. They were not socialists. My mother knew nothing of these events. She was unconscious for two days. Out there, the crowds were gathering to weep as Savage was borne through the country by train to his funeral. When she woke up, it was over.

  Chapter 3

  Shortly after my mother left the hospital with me, I became ill. Jean had come to stay and help, and to fall helplessly in love with me. She had married a year or so earlier, and was hoping for a baby of her own. There never was one. The visit did not last long, owing to coolness between her and my father. I was to be christened in the Church of England, not Presbyterian, and Jean did not stay for the ceremony. But she would become, in her own mind at least, and perhaps in some respects in mine, another mother; I was the link that would hold the family together whatever fallout and quarrels might follow.

  My father was a door-to-door insurance salesman at that time. We lived at 49 Egmont Street and then at 10 Nelson Street. I have no idea what these houses looked like, yet sometimes I dream of a house I don’t recognise. My dreams are often about houses I have lived in. This one has a long rectangular lawn with a path leading through it in a straight line and there’s a single tree in front of the door. The house is narrow; inside the walls are painted light green, and it’s full of shadows. A woman with dark hair sits at a bare table with her head bent. It’s cold in this dream, cold and still outside. I don’t know whether it was one of these houses in Hawera or not, although my mother tried to describe one of them to me once, and I think this is where the dream comes from. I do know that my mother couldn’t feed me and I had an allergic reaction to milk. She paced the floor at nights while I screamed and projectile vomited.

  ‘You’ll never raise her,’ the landlord said.

  Her pacing increased. Someone, possibly my father, suggested that her nerves would be improved with cigarettes, so she took up smoking. Her regular GP, a Dr Cameron, had returned. Neither he nor the Plunket nurse could provide answers. I was dying. The medical director of Plunket, a specialist in child health called Dr Helen Deem, was due to visit Hawera and it was suggested I be taken to her. As my mother told it, she was kept waiting for several hours while I continued to wail. It was a bitter Taranaki afternoon, with snow licking around the mountain, and my mother’s appointment was the last of the day.

  When she finally saw Dr Deem, she was greeted with chastisement and criticism for failing to care for me properly. There was nothing wrong with my lungs and perhaps my crying had rattled the specialist while she looked at the other babies. The only answer was for me to be placed in the Karitane Hospital in Wanganui (which specialised in looking after sick children), on condition that my mother didn’t see me until contacted by the hospital authorities. It was clear, Dr Deem said, that she was unfit to raise me. Bewildered and distraught, my mother turned me over to the hospital. As she left me there, she had already said goodbye to me in her head.

  Months afterwards, the hospital got in touch to say I could go home. I was well and merry, and at first my parents didn’t recognise me. Whatever my temporary mothers in starch had done for me, I was healthy. Yet, well though I was, it is impossible now to imagine the thinking that led to a supposedly dying child being so arbitrarily disconnected from her mother. My mother and I might have withdrawn from each other, but the reverse happened. We became mutually protective in a way that is hard to explain, and that never stopped.

  There was anoth
er ordeal in store. Dr Cameron had been giving some thought to my birthmarks. They would make life harder for me when I was older, he told my parents, and offered to try a new technique to remove them. The earlier it was done the more likely it was to succeed. The process involved burning the birthmarks off with dry ice. I screamed thinly and desperately through each session.

  ‘I’d never let anyone experiment on my child,’ the landlord’s wife sniffed.