Fragments in time
David Hill reflects on the nine family members who helped shape and support him through his rural 1950s childhood.
David Hill reflects on the nine family members who helped shape and support him through his rural 1950s childhood.
‘ May, 1930”, it says on the back. It’s the only photo of my mother’s family together, lined up in front of someone’s box Brownie camera.
My father’s family didn’t matter when I was growing up. I won’t go into that. But all my mum’s siblings, except one, lived within a nine-mile radius of Napier, so they filled my childhood.
The exception was Aunt Nettie, eldest of the eight kids. She stayed in Scotland when the family emigrated in the 1920s. (Family lore says my grandfather had been a gillie on a Scottish estate, and after World War I, he swore he’d never call anyone “sir” again.) In the photo, he still looks displaced. God knows why he’s holding a fishing rod; the nearby Tutaekuri River held only eels and whitebait.
Newly married Nettie never saw or spoke to her family again. We’re not just talking pre-Skype days, remember; we’re talking pre-international phone calls, almost pre-airmail.
Howard and Lance were born here, in rural Puketapu. Howard was just 12 years older than I was, glowing with health and New Zealand ultraviolet. He liked to set me up in conversation; puncture my pompous teenage pronouncements. He didn’t mean to hurt; it was just that shoulder-punching Kiwi male dialogue that sometimes edges into intimidation.
I look at the photo now, and the figures are like tesserae in a historical mosaic. Their stories hold a fragment of the 20th century.
Let’s take them left to right, front row first.
Grannie Marshall sits goitrous and permed. She moved between her kitchen, its wood stove fed with macrocarpa, and a sitting room where bookshelves held titles along the lines of Smith Saves the Side, Play Up, School! and other public-school yarns so remote from 1950s Hawke’s Bay that I read them over and over. Her lavatory was a long drop; she handmilked the house cow till her last year. She was floury, chuckly, bigoted.
Ena fell pregnant to a Catholic boy; “had to get married”. (Anyone remember that phrase?) I gather Papism rather than pregnancy was the unforgiveable aspect, and I’m not sure that Ena and Jack were ever fully forgiven. The fact that their marriage was gloriously successful only aggravated things.
Next, Howard, all fair hair and mischief. Then the back row.
Pretty Effie, my mother’s confidante and rival, became a farmer’s wife. It’s how she wished to be known. In every big earlyish-20th-century family, one daughter had to look after the widowed parent, and Mum and Effie jostled for that role.
Adam was the eldest son, already a man in the photo. He fought in World War II, came home with shrapnel in his back and ghosts in his mind, wouldn’t talk about either; was shy with me because I was clever at school.
John served in the same war. Look at him here; he’s a kid. Afterwards, he made a confident living as a labourer – wharf, farm, harbour board. Could anyone do that now? He killed anything furred or feathered, left carcasses on our back doorstep for dinner.
Then Lance, bat under arm. The family felt sorry for him. He married elegant, intelligent Shirley, soared high in his job, had a flash house. But he lived in the city, and my mother made it clear that could only be pitied.
There’s a half-hidden face behind Lance. It’s my mother, Molly. She was 19. The year before, she’d had all her terrible teeth taken out, and she hated being photographed after that. She was already a smoker, like the rest of the family: 15 or 20 a day when I was a kid. Emphysema killed her when she was 52. Most of the others died in their sixties; it’s still a jolt to realise that.
Grouped together like that, they make me think of Philip Larkin’s MCMXIV: “Never such innocence,/Before or since.”
They weren’t innocent, of course. They were complex, conniving. They often didn’t know what to make of me, just as I didn’t know how to relate to them. They were always on my side, though it took me decades to understand.
I’ve never been much interested in genealogy. It reminds me of crosswords – that triumph at filling in gaps. But these nine shaped and supported me. A Happy May to them all – just 87 years late.