Open Writing

There were rows, and more rows. I tried to hide whenever I could, so I didn't have to listen. My grandmother was involved in these arguments. I can't remember my grandfather saying much, but I suppose he thought there was enough going on without his input.

The day my father left, he walked up the street, carrying a suitcase, towards the tram stop. I remember calling out, but he didn't turn around.

Our life went on, much as usual. He wrote letters. Sometimes I got a letter addressed to me. I was made to reply to these letters, but I have no recollection of what I found to write to him about. I believe he sent money; he would have done the right thing, as doing the right thing was his policy. Perhaps it wasn't enough to keep us, because my mother started working for Mr Dunne, who lived, with his wife and two sons, in a brick house across the street from us. He had his own business, and some of the parts were made in a large shed in his backyard. My mother's contribution was putting together electrical fuses. They came in pieces, and she put a piece of paper into a tiny glass tube, and glued the top on. This is all I remember, although I think the ends had a welded piece on the tips. I wasn't very interested, and not curious enough to wonder why it was necessary for my mother to do this.

I was always embarrassed about my father being in New Zealand, and thought everybody must know about the rows, and the way we lived with our grandparents because we were poor. I would just say, if anybody asked, that he'd been sent to New Zealand to do a special job. Any remarks about volcanoes, or Maori people in grass skirts, I'd just say, 'He's not near anything like that, he's in a town called Auckland.'

Not that my father ever mentioned anything in his letters to me about earthquakes, or Maori people, so I had no idea what it was like for him to be living in New Zealand. Nor did I really care. It was more peaceful without him. He hadn't been a prominent part of our lives for as long as I could remember. My grandmother didn't like him. She made no pretence, either. She would run him down. 'You've made your bed, now you must lie in it,' she was fond of quoting to my mother.

She often came into my sister and me when we were in bed, and started criticizing him to us. She would say he was a terrible father, and a terrible husband. She would go on in this vein until I stopped listening, as we heard the same thing all the time. I'm not sure my mother knew about this, as she was profoundly deaf, and wouldn't have known my grandmother was speaking unless she happened to be in the room as well.

Slowly, after my father had been gone almost two years, I became aware of discussions between my mother and her mother. These escalated into acrimonious rows and tears. I was afraid, and kept out of the way. One day my mother took me aside, and told me that we had to go to New Zealand, as my father had stopped sending money, and if we didn't go, he was going to divorce her.

'Well, I'm not going,' I said. 'I'll stay here with Granma and Granpa.'

'There's no question of that,' she said. 'The three of us have to go. Look at this!' She showed me a photo of a brick house. 'This is the house where we are going to live. It's just along the road from where he works.'

I found this hard to take into my mind. It felt like somebody had taken the top of my head off, and left me living in a vacuum, where all I could think was, 'We're going to New Zealand'. This could have been, 'We're going to the moon,' for all the reality that it held for me.

© Shirley Henwood

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Shirley writes for Bonzer! magazine. Please visit www.bonzer.org.au