The Grass Catcher Read online

  I’ve been back a few times in the decade since that disenchanting return home in 2003, and something similar always happens. Most recently, in March 2013, I was in Blenheim with three other poets, Dinah Hawken, John Newton and Cliff Fell, to give readings in the same Millennium Gallery where Bill Culbert’s work had been exhibited. Our theme was, as it happens, home. We arranged to meet for lunch and plan our evening. Cliff Fell came over from Nelson with his partner Pammy; they were in time for a long, talkative, preparatory lunch among the grapevines out at Rockferry, in a landscape that looked nothing like the nibbled pasture of my childhood. Dinah Hawken and her husband Bill also made it to lunch; they came over the hill from Waikawa Bay around from Picton, where I spent much of my childhood in a backwater that, then, had almost no houses, no marina, and a gravel road that petered out just past the boatshed where my grandfather’s clinker dinghy waited to be pushed to the water along manuka rollers. Cressida Bishop, Director of the Millennium Gallery, also came to lunch; the gallery wasn’t there when I was a kid, but the Memorial Clock Tower was, just over the road, along with the Floral Clock, both of them structures of awe-inspiring grandeur to my eyes in 1953, when the Queen visited and laid a wreath (I couldn’t see her). John Newton couldn’t make it to lunch because he was moving house (home) on Waiheke Island, but he tore through the door of the gallery with minutes to spare before the evening reading, and would have been happy to see that copies of his new collection, Family Songbook (which is about home), were for sale.

  In John’s book, home territories radiate out from Robin Hood Bay at the entrance to Port Underwood: back inland to what used to be called Beavertown (or ‘more/ fancifully still’, Beaver Station) – now Blenheim; south from there to the Dashwood Pass and North Canterbury; or west through the Rai Valley to the Whangamoa Saddle, which my grandmother, Agnes Horne, was the first woman to drive a car over on the way to Nelson. We were all in our different ways trying to find that grid of locations, circumstances, memories and relationships that located us in some way somewhere.

  Cliff, for one, was able to point out, from a perspective that had more to do with historical amusement than whakapapa or with what John characterises as ‘homesickness’, that his great-great-grandfather Alfred Fell was responsible for surveying the town that would become Blenheim, and named a disproportionate number of its streets after his children. Cliff came to New Zealand in 1997, and on visiting Blenheim for the first time may have found himself going along Francis Street, which his ancestor had originally called ‘Frances’. Before coming to lunch, I’d gone on my usual pilgrimage to Francis Street. As usual, I tried but couldn’t find it. Then I adjusted my scale, stopped walking nostalgically towards the yellow Wither Hills, and there it was, much closer to the centre of town than it seemed to be when I was a kid; and there was number 32, the slightly-the-worse-for-wear California bungalow, my childhood home, again.

  Dinah Hawken said that, for her, being at home is both utterly tangible: ‘this room, this actual house – and garden, neighbourhood, coastline, town, country and world’; and intangible: ‘the state of being at home with myself and with others’. I know what she means: after the reading, a woman my age came up and asked if I remembered her. Glenys. We used to play together. My answer had to be evasive to be truthful: no, I didn’t remember her or the startling escapades she then reminded me of (we’d pinched someone’s engagement ring); but yes, I did remember, because her name and the place we were in again after sixty years were drawn towards each other without quite making meaningful contact: somehow tangible and intangible, incongruous and even comic, as in Cliff’s historical frame, and also melancholy, as in John’s sense of ‘homesickness’.

  On my journey to rediscover these home places I will need the grass catcher to guide me to them, and my ghost fragments to guide me to the self I was when I was there – a self that may often have been a version of the counterfeiter who used his twin brother’s pain to secure his own pleasure. Will I recognise these places called home and the dissembling play-actor who lived in them? Can my own experiences teach me anything about the experiences of others in the places I called home? How was it for them? This is what I need to find out.

  The ivory bracelet

  Under the paradoxical sign and faded colours of my dead father’s weathered grass catcher, I begin the record of my journeys home.

  I thought I’d begun this book long before I really started. In February 2004, I left the Museum of New Zealand after working there for ten years, and took out with me some incoherent questions about the country we live in, constructed as it is of almost indecipherable accumulations of memory, stories, objects, representations, and landscapes shaped by natural forces and human inhabitation. There were places I knew had been visited and represented obsessively by tourists, artists and writers: Mitre Peak, the Bay of Islands, the Otira Gorge, the Waipoua Forest. I wanted to go to these places and gawp; to drive in a dusty cavalcade of campervans towards Aoraki Mount Cook; to take a photograph of the railway station at Cass (through a viewfinder of the Rita Angus painting of it). I wanted to go to Ruapekapeka and see if I could imagine the British bombardment of Kawiti’s fortified pa – I knew the 1846 John Williams painting of that event. I wanted to go to Maunganui and look at the places where Horatio Gordon Robley had painted the limb-shattering trench warfare of Gate Pa in 1864. I wanted to go to the Mackenzie Country and think about sheep dogs and Jock McKenzie, to eat whitebait in Westport, to walk up into freezing wind above the beeches in Arthur’s Pass, to get to the top of the Panekiri Bluff on Lake Waikaremoana and imagine the lake before Tuhoe were cleared from its shores. I wanted to go to Ahipara on Ninety Mile Beach and look at the blunt hill through the eyes of McCahon’s many paintings of it, and to walk along the foam-line at Muriwai, thinking about his beach walks, ‘necessary protection’, and an offshore island shaped like Moby Dick.

  I wanted to stop and start among the unremarked or unremarkable places in the country whose stories I didn’t know, the ones nobody had been interested in recording, or in erecting ‘scenic’ or ‘historic site’ signage next to – the mangrove-clogged creek behind the off-season camping ground; the pub with its row of diligent pokie players; the gravel back road with its sagging, mossy fence posts, busted, derelict farm machinery and dead, sodden lambs. I longed to go to all these places and look at them – half expecting to see or hear some answers to the questions I was still trying to work out how to ask.

  I also just longed after ten years driving a desk nowhere to get out on the road and go around the country; to decide where to head for in the morning and change my mind before nightfall; to stop when I felt like it or when I was tired; to turn off the road on a whim or follow some vague memory spoor; to roll my sleeping bag out where I’d pulled the car over on a deserted coastline facing east into the sunrise I hoped to wake to; to rattle all the way down the gravel road to Tomarata just so I could hear the poet Ken Smithyman’s laconic ghost-voice talking to me from rustling toetoe by the lake.

  And so the following spring I threw a sleeping bag and some other gear in the car, and took off, all over the North Island, and subsequently on two separate occasions all over the South. Along the way, in a state between lonely, exhilarated and devastated, I babbled for hours into a tape recorder, took hundreds of photographs and wrote obsessively in notebooks. I talked to people in the dining rooms of backpackers and on mist-wreathed viewing platforms while waiting for their photo opportunity. I wrote a novel called The Viewing Platform and a long poem called Letter to Peter McLeavey based on these trips.

  The Viewing Platform was written in France during the six months when I had the Katherine Mansfield residency in Menton in 2005. I went there intending to write the book about home, and thought The Viewing Platform was going to be it. It wasn’t – or wasn’t quite. On the way to France, I spent an emotional month in Bangladesh, looking for and finding the place where our family had lived in the 1950s. I thought that pilgrimage would be part of the home book p
roject, and it was, but in the form of a Bangladeshi tourism operator I invented called Mohammed Baul Biswas, one of the six main characters in The Viewing Platform. Thus, the home book tore off on a tangent and became the one I wrote about leaving the Museum of New Zealand, not about leaving home.

  On the way back to New Zealand from France, I stopped off in New York and went on another pilgrimage, this time through the flag-bedecked patriotic heartland up the Hudson Valley and the Catskills, to look at the places and landscapes that had informed the work of the Hudson River school of painters. Then I stopped in LA and drove up to Santa Cruz, following the nation-building visions of the Hudson River artists transposed through the redwoods of California and along the Pacific coast. It was research – it was also a continuation of the road trips I’d begun in 2004 in New Zealand. It was a project that was getting me closer to the home book by first taking me further from it.

  In 2006 I went back to New York and attempted to recreate the experience I’d had of being there in September 2001 when the twin towers came down and the ash-clogged concept of homeland security rose up; I also went to look at dozens of the nineteenth-century Hudson, Pacific and Yellowstone paintings and photographs by nation-building artists in New York, Boston and San Francisco. This, too, was research, I told myself, and meant it, or meant it to be. I noticed then, and think about again now, the spatial performances of those artists, moving out to the wilderness to make pictures that would define home and nation for metropolitan sophisticates and captains of industry, and that would subsequently expand the popular imaginary of boundless frontiers, opportunities and entitlements – of a homeland that was always going to be greater than the sum of its parts: an imperium. All the time I was edging further away from writing about a home haunted by the mysterious double-life phantom of my father’s grass catcher in Blenheim, New Zealand; and yet all the time I was also closing in on that haunting.

  When I finally sat down to write this book, having summoned up the grass catcher to be my spirit-guide or lucky charm, two things happened. My youngest son Jack left home for the third or fourth time and got on a plane, intending to go first to Melbourne and then, a few months later, to his remotely ancestral home, Germany; and a second cousin, Paul Robinson, emailed me an item about a distant German ancestor:

  At the Alhambra Theatre, in Leicester Square, on July 8, 1882, appeared Marian the Giant Amazon Queen in an operetta called Babil and Bijou, billed as ‘a grand fairy spectacular opera, with music by G. Jacobi’. According to the billing at this time she stood eight feet two inches high and was still growing.

  The theatre critic of the Illustrated London News, the famous journalist George Augustus Sala, wrote of the giantess: ‘Notwithstanding her colossal height and build, she is very well proportioned, and she is decidedly handsome, possessing as she does the true pre-Raphaelite maxillary angle.’ The Daily News remarked: ‘She possesses a conspicuous advantage over most of her compeers, inasmuch as she has really considerable claims to good looks.’

  My good-looking son Jack is taller than me, though not as tall as his distant relative, the giant Marian Wedde, born in Benkendorf in the Thuringian area of central Germany on 31 January 1865. Great-grand-aunt Marie, or Marian, or Marianne, reached eight foot three inches before she died. At twenty-five Jack was older than the poor giant was able to be – she died shortly before her nineteenth birthday in 1884. Some say she died in Berlin, where Jack was headed. Others say Paris.

  Probably her wanderings were at the behest of theatre impresarios, but wandering also runs in the family. Wandering genes have flowed strongly into this home. Jack is a wanderer – no sooner back from a year in Japan than he was plotting this latest escape. His paternal great-great-grandfather, Heinrich August Wedde, became a sailor at a young age, apparently to the dismay of his family; he wandered as far as Wellington, New Zealand, where (in one version of the story) he jumped ship in pursuit of a woman from his home town of Kiel, Maria Reepen, with whom he raised a large family: Herman Conrad, Fritz (of whose wanderings more later), Herbert, Wilhelm Frederick, Bertha, Reinhold Heinrich, Freda, and my grandfather Albert Augustus. Jack’s paternal grandfather, my father Frederick Albert, was an inveterate wanderer around New Zealand in his youth and around the world after we left Blenheim in 1954. So was my mother Linda – more so, if anything.

  So was her paternal grandfather, Lewis Keele Horne, an English ship’s doctor – or doctor who did his time on ships – born in 1832 or 1833. He married Ellen Clifford of Quebec in 1854, and finally settled in New Zealand, first in Collingwood in 1857, and subsequently in Marlborough, where he and Ellen raised a large family of eight sons and eight daughters. Perhaps the family was too much for him – Dr Horne seems to have been staying apart from it in the Criterion Hotel in Blenheim, and was presumed to have died when the hotel burned down in 1887. One account has him running back in to rescue his twelve-year-old son Leonard, and perishing in the attempt (Leonard had already been taken care of); but a descendant, Alexander Monro, was told by his father Herbert Monro on his deathbed that his grandfather the doctor had in fact left the burning hotel by a back door, taking his mistress with him; the following day they caught a river vessel down the Opawa and disappeared to Christchurch. This rumour continues to surface from time to time as an aside to semi-official accounts which treat Dr Horne as an exemplary pioneering figure in the province – which he was, in the public record. Horne Place in Springlands, Blenheim, is named after him; its serene, sunny house-fronts may conceal other discreet scandals.

  The doctor’s many children are said to have run wild at Dillon’s Point and seldom went to school. The sons – George, Francis, Charles, Lewis, Ernest, Leonard, my grandfather Herbert, and Richard – were a wild bunch and ruined the family, my mother said. One contributed to the ruin by accepting a wager he could leap his new horse over the Blenheim town band – he killed the bass drummer in the process, or so we were told.

  Linda’s father Herbert’s share of the Horne family fortune was said to have been a cast-iron kettle. Lillian, his sister, seems to have had better luck – she inherited a painting by Landseer, a friend of the doctor’s, and left it to her son Gordon Gifford. Others of the ‘wild bunch’ became, variously, a gold miner at Kalgoorlie, a stewardess on the Opawa River ferry, a big-game hunter in South Africa and Rhodesia (‘Had offspring to black ladies’, according to my distantly removed cousin Pam Oliver’s account), ran a boarding house, had a cattle run in Queensland …

  The cast-iron kettle story is probably apocryphal; nonetheless, ‘the colonial doctor of Dillon’s Point’, as the historical record is fond of calling him, despite his having also been an entrepreneurial landowner, drainer and flood protector on the Wairau flood-plain, seems to have left little for the son who became my grandmother’s second husband. My brother tells me he once had, and may have stashed somewhere, receipts made out to Dr Horne from the New Zealand Government for payment of the salary he earned in his official position of ‘Vaccinator of the Natives of the Wairau’. Our mother told us that Dr Horne was mostly paid in kind – vegetables and fish. When we were kids, Maori from Wairau used to come round with kerosene tins of whitebait, and Nana Horne would dip mugs of it into a big bowl. The memory of Dr Horne seems to have reached across to Waikawa Bay as well, where Aggie Horne’s husband Bertie built a bach on ‘Maori land’ – though what that meant is unclear.

  Apparently there was a long-running challenge to Dr Horne’s will, of which his wife Ellen Horne was executrix. The dispute was referred to the Privy Council, but I don’t know what became of it. Nana Aggie’s and grandfather Bertie Horne’s family was hard-up during the Depression and the war; our childhood was secure but very frugal, and when we left Blenheim in 1954 my parents had never owned their own house.

  Also apocryphal may be the possibility that the Horne connection to Marlborough goes back further: the port of Picton is in Waitohi Bay, which Captain William Steine renamed Horne Bay in 1832 after the owner of his command, the King Wil
liam the Fourth. In 1844, the New Zealand Company’s Francis Dillon Bell (whence Dillon’s Point) and Governor Sir George Grey bought Waitohi Bay off the local iwi, who then moved to Waikawa Bay. It would have been their descendants who later sponsored Bertie Horne on to a bit of land in Waikawa, where he built his bach. The Horne association with Maori probably owes much to Bertie’s father and his work as Medical Officer of the district from 1870. If we have homes in history, mine seems at once irrelevant and inevitable.

  My mother’s Scots mother, Agnes Ogilvie Tait, was born in Dundee on the night of the great Tay Bridge disaster, 28 December 1879. In some illogical way, I associate the collapse of the bridge with the emigration of my Scottish ancestors – as if, at that moment, they said, ‘Enow! We’re oot o’ here!’

  They weren’t the only Taits to move out from Scotland across the expanding global field of opportunity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And they may have had other reasons for being restless, or just for leaving. Sometime after starting this quest for what might be called the family home – that circumstance rather than place where my ancestors converged – I discovered that Aggie’s grandparents can’t have been the James and Martha Mein Tait whose headstones I found in the old Omaka graveyard in Blenheim, who died in 1897 and 1902 aged seventy-nine and eighty-one respectively. Martha would have been sixty-eight when the bridge went down and Aggie was born, which seems too old to become a grandmother. It’s possible, though, that some members of Aggie’s Tait family had already made their way to New Zealand, including perhaps a great-aunt and -uncle called James and Martha, and that her own father and mother, William and Susan (née Ogilvie) Tait, came to Marlborough to join family living at Tua Marina. I need to know more about Aggie’s faither and her màthair, and why they chose to cross the world with a wee bairn, my grandmother.