The Grass Catcher Read online

  On Linda’s death certificate Bertie is described as a ‘shopkeeper’; and in a family tree, ‘Descendants of Randolph Horne’, assembled by Pam Oliver, it’s recorded that he ‘owned a Hairdressing Saloon in Blenheim’ – the one remembered by Barbara Matthews, where Linda worked. Though he may have been the legal owner of the business, the reality, according to Linda, was different – it was his wife Agnes Horne who established the business and saw the family through the Depression and the war with it. Another male Horne, Lewis Clifford or Lew (1913–1974), is described in Pam’s yellowed family tree as having ‘worked in Bert Horne’s saloon in Blenheim’ – so perhaps Bertie also cut hair there before losing his arm.

  Linda had to leave school young and work in the ‘saloon’, which was also a tea shop, to help support the family. This caused her great sadness and some bitterness, and by her own admission was one reason she wanted to get out of Blenheim when the time came. While she and Agnes (and perhaps Lew) worked the salon and tea shop, Bertie did nothing much – or couldn’t do anything much – except go fishing from Waikawa Bay. I suspect he also did so to put some distance between himself and his formidable wife.

  The impression I have of Agnes is a composite of childhood memories – brisk, no-nonsense, a piercing gaze, a judiciously eked-out bag of hard blackball lollies in the bloomers drawer of her Scotch chest; of my mother’s chagrin at the control Agnes had over her; and of anecdotes like the one about her being the first woman to drive a car over the Whangamoa Pass.

  Uncle Arthur remembered that one-armed Bertie sculled the dinghy expertly with a single oar over the stern once it was in the water. My father taught us how to do that, using kid-sized oars. I remember how the seawater ran along the oars and on to my hands when I rowed – me on one side, Dave on the other, an oar each, and also with two oars, ‘putting our backs into it’. Chick knew a few stirring poems by heart, one of which he adapted as a rowing-chant – John Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’.

  Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack

  Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,

  With a cargo of Tyne coal,

  Road-rail, pig-lead,

  Fire-wood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

  He’d haul back on the stress syllables and reach forward in between: ‘Dir-ty British coas-ter with a salt-caked smoke-stack …’ He didn’t so much love poetry as respond fervently to hearts-of-oak jingoism amplified by meter. But I’ve remembered the Masefield poem; and I remember how to row.

  Chick also showed us how to line up a marker astern and keep it in place as we rowed so as not to have to look over our shoulders at where we were going. Looking into those astern viewfinders, still sharp in my memory, it’s the scrubby bush of the Snout that I can still see, a fold where the creek ran down, the yellow stain of clay in the sea by the creek mouth, a little pebbly beach. When I go back to Waikawa now I can still spot the place as if I’m rowing across the bay with my back to the little store by the road, the old boatsheds, the big Arthur house on the hill with the Royal palm in front. These days there’s a marina, the town of Picton has extended its suburb all the way out past Waikawa, and there are expensive holiday homes overlooking the Sound. But from the foreshore on the mainland side, standing on familiar pebbles, sticky yellow clay and wave-smoothed broken glass, I can return without effort to the place across the murky bay from which we’d have set off early in the morning to Dieffenbach Point.

  I don’t know where my mother’s heavy ivory bracelet came from – not from my father, though it appears on her wrist in a photograph of her as a young woman at the tiller of a boat in the Sounds. I think this image may predate their marriage, but I don’t know for sure; it may have been taken on their honeymoon. They certainly honeymooned on a yacht in the Sounds, and the bracelet seems to belong there – I can hear it clacking against the hard kauri of the tiller. It may have come from her grandfather Horne, the former ship’s doctor, who was said to have brought exotic objects back from his voyages in the China trade.

  It also appears in photographs of a theatre production in which my mother took part. Both she and Chick were founding members of the Marlborough Repertory Society in 1948; Chick was a president from 1952 to 1953, and a vice-president in 1951–52. According to the theatre’s records, the Society’s farewell to them in 1953 included a production of Tony Draws a Horse. Until 1975, the Society staged productions in the classic Her Majesty’s Theatre, which was a cinema most of the time – Dave and I saw our first movie there: almost certainly Against All Flags, with Errol Flynn as the pirate Brian Hawke; we both remember Flynn swinging from ropes. There was a props- and set-building space somewhere away from the theatre, where Chick used to take us while he painted flats; the water-based paint he sloshed on with big brushes had an unforgettable, chalky smell. I don’t remember shows in which Linda took part, though Dave says one of them was The Arcadians – ‘I remember the title, and the hero arriving by parachute, possibly into Arcadia where who knows what awaited?’ Our cousin Norma, who went to drama school and was a regular and glamorous lead in the company’s productions, says that Linda was mostly involved with costumes and make-up. The record shows that she did have a part in a 1951 production of Fresh Fields by Ivor Novello – but the commemorative theatre prints I have of her can’t be tracked back to Repertory productions.

  When we were clearing out their house in Auckland after Chick’s death, I found a set of photographs from Gordon McCusker Studios, Blenheim, in which Linda appears to be barely out of her teens. When I asked her about the photographs, she said only that she’d enjoyed the performances and endured her stage-fright because she also loved the whole fantasy world of costumes, make-up and accessories.

  The McCusker photographs document her romantic lead as Lady Mary Lasenby in a production of The Admirable Crichton, J.M. Barrie’s gently comic 1902 satire of the English class system. According to my cousin Norma, this was a Blenheim Operatic Society production and took place before Linda and Chick were married. The ivory bracelet is conspicuous in all these photographs. In one, of a scene from Act Two in which the characters are marooned on a tropical island, Linda aka Lady Mary appears with the company, all of them clad in fanciful homemade deerskin costumes. Hers is the most elegant, as are the stylish sandals she’s wearing, and she alone wears a neat chaplet of leaves. She’s crouched on one knee next to a rugged-looking Crichton, with other castaways standing behind them. They look variously alarmed or expectant (one through a monocle) but my mother’s expression is calm and focused – with a slight smile, she’s bending a bow and aiming an arrow at some off-stage prey, presumably the dinner that only Crichton knows how to prepare and cook. The ivory bracelet has slid halfway up her slender left forearm, the one with which, as I now think, she was aiming at a future beyond the life she led in Blenheim – a life in which the fantasies of play-acting would become real, in the equivalents of tropical islands.

  I see the same smile in a photograph taken when Linda would have been in her late fifties, in the Casino du Liban, north-west of Beirut, overlooking the Bay of Jounieh. This time, it’s a cigarette she’s pointing in her right hand. Her left, bracelet-bearing arm is concealed, but I know the ivory bracelet’s no longer there, because by then she’d given it to me.

  My father died of a heart attack on 6 September 1981 when Dave and I were thirty-four. He was only seventy-four years old. He was cremated at Purewa Cemetery in Auckland and his ashes were scattered there. Dave, who looked after the arrangements for him, as he did also for our mother, said that Linda refused to have a memorial marker for her Chick. When we visited the place a couple of years ago, he told me that, typically, she didn’t want to be ‘a bother’. More importantly, she couldn’t bear the thought of a marker for Chick falling into disrepair, and couldn’t imagine anyone sticking around long enough to look after it. Most importantly, she saw no reason to remember him in that place. It had nothing to do with him – it wasn’t his home – and she wanted to remember h
im in all the different places where they’d lived together: in East Pakistan, England, Geneva, Korea, Cairo, Amman, Zambia, and in the many other places they’d passed through in their restless lives. As Dave told me this, I wanted to add ‘and the Sounds’ – but he would already have known where I was heading. So we talked a bit about how our mother and father came and went in our lives, and how their unmarked passing was somehow appropriate.

  Linda died on 7 November 1986 when Dave and I had just turned forty. That means she was thirty-six when she had her twins. Her death certificate says she was twenty-eight when she married; Chick was thirty-three. They were married for eight years before they had children. I know there were miscarriages, and Chick was away at the war. She was seventy-six when she died, having been ill with emphysema and associated conditions for many years. That didn’t stop her getting on a plane and going all over the world to see her old friends once affairs had been sorted out and their house in St Heliers, Auckland, sold after Chick’s death.

  She knew the trip away would kill her and said as much when we went out for lunch before she left. I asked her if she’d rather be making up drapes for her new flat. She laughed at the joke – she knew exactly what it meant. Some months later, she came back off the plane in a wheelchair, and died soon after. She, too, was cremated at Purewa. On the day we visited, Dave wasn’t sure if there was a memorial anywhere. He confessed to feeling guilty about such apparent neglect. But really, what did it matter? That neither of us could feel any kind of connection between those two wanderers and the lawns and memorials of Purewa Cemetery seems natural enough.

  That day, Dave lent me a hat to keep the sun off, and made his customary joke about me needing a bigger one because of the size of my brain. In fact, his head is bigger than mine, his mind is capacious and agile; he has an exceptional memory, and his ability at word-games and puzzles is phenomenal, like our mother’s for cryptic crosswords. My thinking constantly veers off into digressions. It gets distracted and sidetracked – for example, by the Qing Dynasty jade bull I went to find in Auckland Museum after we’d visited the crematorium’s memorial garden. I was still wearing the hat borrowed from my brother. The bull is called Yu-shek, and dates from some time before 1860. It’s in the Sir George Grey Collection, and I used to visit it regularly when I was a student at Auckland University and living in a flat in Parnell. Back then, it seemed to have a zone of calmness around it. When I found it again, I remembered the uncertainty and unhappiness of that time, how I couldn’t work out how to be peaceful. I also remembered my mother’s ivory bracelet. Later, on the way down Parnell Rise, I passed a shop called Home. Nothing in its window fitted the disordered cryptic crossword in my brain – but the ivory bracelet did. It made sense; it completed something.

  I felt miserable about my mother and father for years after their deaths. Something remained unresolved. I kept a number of talismanic objects with me, vaguely intending to do something with them one day. They included our mother’s ivory bracelet. In 2004, the year I left the museum, I was asked to write the concluding chapter in a book, Figuring the Pacific. I finished the chapter with an account of what I did with the bracelet.

  As a kid, I’d once told my mother that I was scared of her dying, and that her heavy ivory bracelet frightened me, because I thought of it going into the grave with her. In my memory, she took it off and gave it to me. As a kid, I was prone to histrionics – I may still be; my twin brother is sceptical this gifting happened (he may have his own reasons for this). After her death, though, I did have the bracelet, and it wasn’t on her body when she died. I also had one of my father’s old Omega Seamaster watches, and a scarf of my mother’s with a pohutukawa motif on it. I kept these objects together in a box in my office, with a couple of photographs: they comforted and disturbed me. They haunted me.

  In the summer, I often used to sail with one of my cousins in his ferro-cement yacht across Cook Strait from Wellington, through Tory Channel past the flank of Arapawa, and past Dieffenbach Point with its light. Sometimes when it was rough I’d do the strait sailing while he wrapped up, morose and miserable. That was the part I liked; he didn’t. Inside Tory Channel he’d brighten up, open a beer, and sail the rest of the way. One year not long ago, I took the ivory bracelet and my father’s Omega Seamaster watch, and wrapped them in the scarf with the pohutukawa motif. I weighted them down with a piece of obsidian I’d found years ago by a spilling midden in Otanerau Bay on the southern side of Arapawa Island across from Ship Cove. As my cousin took the boat around the light on Dieffenbach Point, I dropped the wrapped-up objects over the stern. They sank quickly. Though the tides are ferocious there, I know pretty much where they ended up.

  I don’t really understand how I came to this decision – I think it came to me. It felt right then, and it still does, especially when I think of my parents. I have a sense of well-being whenever I go past the Point. My cousin teased me all the way to Picton. Drolly, affectionately, he raised his beer-can in a salute as we passed the entrance to Waikawa Bay. I felt tremendously happy.

  Is there any point trying to explain this happiness? It’s possible that I succeeded in appeasing some guilt at leaving my brother to deal with the miserable bureaucratic mopping-up after our parents’ funerals. The happiness may be entirely selfish, more sign than substance. Perhaps the bundle with the ivory bracelet and the watch was what the English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called a ‘transitional object’. I was certainly no longer a child when I dropped the bundle over the side of John’s yacht, and had long ago ceased to expect my mother to ‘bring the world to me’; yet I needed an object, an ‘act’ that would bridge the abyss between me and a world without my mother and father.

  But I think the best answer is simpler. There’s a black-and-white snapshot of my mother and Nana Horne on the mainland beach at Waikawa. My guess is that it was taken while Chick was away during the war. Nana’s wearing a warm, sensible coat and the thin-framed glasses that gave her a piercing expression. She has one hand on the familiar clinker dinghy. My mother has her thick, dark, wavy hair pinned back above her ears – the cloudy background and ruffled bay behind them suggest it’s one of those cold, windy Sounds days when gusts rip down between the steep hills and drive whitecaps up against the tide that pours strongly through Tory Channel and past Dieffenbach Point. She’s wearing a stylish wind-cheater and trousers. Nana, bending to steady the prow of Bertie’s dinghy, is looking at her daughter sideways, with a conspiratorial grin. Linda’s looking at the camera: her rather aquiline nose directs her characteristic chevron-shaped smile straight at me.

  They look at home together, mother and daughter, probably making fun of the photographer. Though Linda was frankly resentful of her mother’s restriction of her schooling, and made no secret of the fact that Nana Aggie had been one reason she’d wanted to get out of Blenheim, still, they’d lived in the same house in Francis Street until my mother was forty-three, had got the family through the Depression together, run a business, got through the war, managed alcoholic and then one-armed Bertie, and raised twin boys to the age of seven. In the photograph on the beach, they seem to fit in to the place – Linda especially, with her wind-cheater; and Bertie seems almost present too, because his dinghy’s there. The one thing I want to see, but can’t, is the ivory bracelet, because my mother has her hands behind her back. But of course I imagine it’s there.

  At the simplest level, I think my Dieffenbach Point happiness came from the sense, present in the snapshot, that my mother too was happy there – away from the domestic, which she didn’t like much (‘Would you rather be making up drapes?’), and blowing away her irritation at the narrow circumstances of her life in Blenheim in the breezy, unpredictable environment of the Sounds, with its boat trips, fishing expeditions, beach picnics, make-do bach life and fun in general.

  There’s also an incongruous snapshot of a smiling Linda with her lanky, scowling, one-armed father, both of them standing in a neatly excavated trench with steps at what I
think is the bach section at Waikawa, though it could have been the air-raid shelter trench they were required to dig back at Blenheim. Bertie is leaning back, holding his pipe; he’s covered in mud. My mother, dressed in a chic costume with smart shoes, is striking a modelling kind of pose, with her hands on her hips and one knee forward. The caption on the back of the snapshot, in Linda’s neat handwriting, concludes, ‘N.B. House coat cut down & navy & white wedgie shoes of which I’ve told you. Do you like them dear?’

  Her wicked smile on the windy beach or in ‘the trench’ is one I see over and over in the hundreds of photographs my father took of her during their wandering years; and so I resist the impulse to suggest that my mother’s happiness at Waikawa Bay is a sign that she was ‘at home’ there. But, as a final resting place, a last home, haunted by the clatter of the ivory bracelet on a boat’s tiller, and raked by tides that resist any attempt to stay in one place, Dieffenbach Point still feels right.