A visit from my grandmothers and their sisters
It was January 2009: I had just attended my Ph D graduation. It was the first graduation I had ever attended. I was 59 years old and had been working on my Ph D for seven years, looking at Playback Theatre as professional development in three primary healthcare centres. I called my Ph D Tracing out Patterns in a world in Slippage – the more I looked at memory, storytelling, performance, the more I was in contact with the reality that human interpretations are like flute music floating out across a lake at night time – fragile and fleeting in an infinite world.
I would probably not have attended the graduation but my mother had raised it with me, indirectly, as she so often communicated (as do I). She had asked me about going to graduation and I had said no, our generation, the 60s mob, never did, we were always capped in absentia. A week or so later she said to my older son, as we visited her in the room in the old people’s home she had inhabited since my father died, surrounded by paintings of the four of us, her children: “And she says she’s not going to go to graduation, how ridiculous, I never heard anything so ridiculous!” I protested, “Mum, I didn’t know you thought that, we never have gone to graduation, that’s not what our lot ever did!” and she responded scornfully, “It’s not about you, it’s about your institution, they supported you all these years, you owe it to them!” She died less than two weeks later, at the age of 91, two days before what would have been the 60th anniversary of her wedding to my Dad who had died three months before.
So, anyway, I went to graduation! I wasn’t about to go against her advice, given so powerfully at such a point in our life together... and I was glad I did too, with an ex-bishop from the Anglican church capping me (something she would have loved I knew); the small taaniko kete from Grandma Maria from Waikaremoana tucked under my arm; colleagues on the stage standing to honour me; and Aunty Wai’s karanga to me (to the kete I thought) ringing out across the Aotea Centre. Afterwards, we had dinner in the pub in Aotea Square and I got home to an empty house quite early, maybe 9.30pm. It was a beautiful balmy Auckland night and I wanted to sit outside on the verandah, in the dark, with streetlights making shadows of the queen of the night, bamboo and lasiandra bushes growing up through the balustrade.
I sat there, so full, so complete somehow. And then amazingly, my grandmothers and their sisters, the first people to whom I had dedicated my thesis, came up the steps to where I was sitting, very simply and naturally, they came one by one into my mind and heart.
First, Ethel, know by me as Bimmy, my caregiver when I was a baby... she who had gone to Munich at the age of 21, with her sister Margaret, so that Margaret could study painting there. Magic little woman who lived by stories and songs and who told me when I was a child, “if anyone says you should not believe in fairies, just tell them, William Shakespeare did!” Half Irish, full of second sight, healer, dancer, brave heart who came to New Zealand at 72 saying to my aunt Sylvia, “Well, my grandchildren are in New Zealand, so you’d better take me there.” She lived until I was 21, and I now know that she saved me from the squashed place 13 months behind my beautiful older sister by taking care of me, telling me stories, communicating with me that imagination can be something to live by.
Then came her sister Margaret, who had initiated that magical journey to Munich which has led to our whole family of cousins in Germany, who live in ways we all recognise, precious kin over all these miles and years: Thomas, Veronika, Martin, Nikki and the wonderful young ones too, Til, Nele Sampo and Neomi all of whom I have met and recognized. Margaret whose life was so full of art, suffering, gardens – whose sweetness and kindness was remembered with such clarity by my mother – who was a founding member of the Munich Women Artists’ Association, with whom Bimmy started the “Misses Rice Dancing Academy” because they didn’t like teaching English and “the German girls were great lumps who needed exercise” that is how Bimmy used to say it to us. What training had they ever had in dancing? How astonishing it was, that they should go from being daughters of the Rectory in Cheam Village to living in Munich, starting their own business, then Margaret having two babies before being married, to her ‘little philosopher, Dely” Rudolf von Delius. She did in the end marry Dely, and had the third child Erika, whom I met in the mid 1990s and who said to me “This is not like strangers meeting, this is like finding one another again!”
Others of my grandmother’s sisters came up the steps too – first Aunty Polly whose furniture we grew up with: the oldest daughter, she had kept house for her father because her mother ended up an invalid, living upstairs with a nurse, having had puerperal insanity (post-natal psychosis which I had mildly after my second child when I was convinced that the doctors in National Women’s kept bringing medical students to see me because I was dying and that they hadn’t wanted to tell me because it might depress me! I would think, this is depression, but then would say to myself, well of course, I am depressed because I am dying!). So that Great Grandmother came too, up those night time steps, Eleanor Macan of Meryon Square Dublin, whose father had started off a pupil teacher in Sligo and ended up as a Judge in Dublin. Eleanor who played the piano so brilliantly, and whose small lapis lazuli box for calling cards has been with me for many many years, I can’t remember when I was given it. Aunty Polly did not have children; she did not marry Uncle Reg till she was older, in her 50s. She lived in a women’s club sometimes in London and mum and her sister Sylvia sometimes stayed with her: Aunty Polly said, “I like to be alone in a crowd.” What did she do for a living? I wish I knew. I know she was in Canada at some point – did she do things like be housekeeper in schools or institutions?
Another of Bimmy’s sisters, came up the steps, such a beautiful girl, Nellie who had had a baby, Bernard and then died so young –Bernard had then been brought up in the household at Cheam, like a younger brother. The last time I saw Bimmy she said (92 by then, in a home in Remuera) “Isn’t that Bernard, playing outside on the lawn?” And finally, Aunty Alice, who Mum always used to say must have been perhaps schizophrenic, who lived down by the Thames estuary, and sent us copies of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass, when we were little kids. Aunty Alice, who looked after people’s children and always sent a handkerchief to each niece or nephew for their birthday each year, who was so kind and so unfitted for the world as it turned out to be...
None of these women went to university – none of them had any hope of that. Nor did my mother who should have gone to the Royal Schools of Music - or my aunt Sylvia, who had wanted to study geography and chemistry. Their father died when my mother was 13 and Sylvia was about to leave school. Sylvia was called to the headmistress’s office and taken to my grandfather’s office in the London County Council where she had to identify him. He was just lying on the floor, dead, with not even a blanket over him. It turned out that there was no money, so Syl had to get jobs straight away and so did Mum when she left school. Bimmy got a house in Oxford, against her brothers’ wishes, (“You can’t possibly get a mortgage!” She was in her mid fifties and she DID get a mortgage!) and had paying guests, graduate students and summer school students in the long vacation.
I was aware of Joan too, the middle one of three, as I am. She is the baby in the photograph to the right here. She was funny and brilliant, a cellist, who died in late teenage, after whose death Bimmy went into severe depression. She has travelled with us all through our lives, like beautiful Nellie.
It was as if they acknowledged what I had done, all the women on that side – and then the New Zealand side came too – my grandmother Olive, known to us as Mop, and her sisters Teddy, Rosie, Maunie, Ella, Eva... none of them had gone to university though several of them had been teachers, one down the East Coast in Omarumutu, and Mop in Waitotara, where she had ridden a horse every day over the hill to school. Even my aunts on my father’s side had not gone to university – one nurse, one phys ed teacher – until Bunty went and did a BA in her forties.
I sat on, in the warm January night, and it was as if each woman came in turn – all dead now – even my darling aunts Bunty and Mary who were so much younger than Dad but died before him. Each one came singly up the steps and I registered the flavour of each – Mop so pleased, Teddy somehow brisk, Mauny dreamy and poetic, Ella so beautiful and absent minded, Rosie cryptic and mysterious, Eva so small and round and kind, whose cottage on the beach at Ohope we have all inherited jointly and try to share intelligently...Bunty so clumsy and loving, Mary so snobby but so practical, so breezy, so full of care...
Finally it was as if they had all come and greeted me and I was free to go inside and take off my gown and shower and sleep. What did they come to say? I found it impossible to summarise – but through this visitation I realised in my skin and bones how new it is that a woman alone, like me, would have the chance to study deeply and do the kind of brooding enquiry I had been able to do. I know not to take this for granted – and I know that however privileged I might have appeared – daughter and sister of professors, that long drought that banishment of women from the academy had only broken in my generation. I thought of my sisters and female cousins who have gone to university in NZ, Britain, Canada, Australia and Germany - and my nieces, one already with a Ph D before she’s 40, one with a science degree now studying medicine in Australia, one just starting on an art and design degree. I sent my love and thanks back through the years to those women who had visited me – for their creativity, their determination, their wildness, their courage, their perseverance, their love. As I said in the dedication in my thesis – “because you were, we are.”
Fe Day, Auckland, 2010 Fe.Day@aut.ac.nz
