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| ISBN-13: | 9781775581857 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 260 |
| File size: | 476 KB |
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The Godwits Fly
By Robin Hyde, Patrick Sandbrook
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2012 Patrick SandbrookAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-185-7
CHAPTER 1
Glory Hole
Until the year after the war, life for the Hannays always meant other people's houses, and they wore out a long line of cats, invariably and irrespective of sex named Tam. Perhaps there had been some Tam the First to whom they were genuinely attached, and the rag, tag and bobtail merely stepped into his name, as into the place left vacant by his little white boots. The cat-stream, at all events, was ceaseless. The dog is a gentleman's animal, demanding licence fee and collar, but the tribe of Tam came from nowhere, and mostly shifted for themselves. Whenever one of them died (which they generally did in the cellars, requiring to be excavated by John, with great pains and blasphemy, when they had begun to smell), Augusta, his wife, skewering her auburn hair with a grim vigour intended to show that this time she had made up her mind once and for all, declared, 'Well, that's that, and good riddance to bad rubbish. The last time one of those strays shows his ugly face round my kitchen door! You children eat up your porridge, and don't let me catch you encouraging kittens to follow you home. Filthy things, with their vermin and their diseases.'
In a week's time there was always another stray showing his ugly face wherever he liked, except on the dining-room cushions, which were sacred. At night Augusta would put down a saucer of milk for him beside the stove. When the Hannays moved, part of the ritual was clasping a struggling tom against somebody's bosom, while Augusta buttered his paws. Complaining bitterly of his uselessness and the nuisance he would be in their new house, she creamed his pads until wherever he stepped he made messy little footprints on the floors she had scrubbed stark for the incoming tenants. Then he was immured in the dress-basket, which had been Eliza's cradle on the voyage from Cape Town; and Carly, the sentimentalist, stood by mourning over him. 'Tam, Tam dear, don't miaow so. It's only so that we can take you on the tram. Oh, Mummy, are you sure he can breathe in there? He won't suffocate?'
For the Hannay children (Carly and Eliza, joined by Sandra about the time they moved from old Captain Puckle's to the house in Oriri Street) their migrations were no trouble, but adventure. Carly, who was three when they came to Wellington, could go back in memory to the Sampson house, where Mrs Sampson used to stand on the stairs, talking too much and too loud, her hair all down in rats' tails over a red kimono which wasn't even properly done up in front; and she didn't wear a camisole underneath. That was the real reason they moved. Augusta didn't think it decent, with a strange man (John) liable at any moment to come out of the bathroom and feast his eyes on Mrs Sampson. In their first New Zealand years, many things shocked Augusta, especially the way people, instead of bleaching their linen snow-white in properly secluded drying-grounds, pegged out meaty-coloured combinations and underpants to flap balloon legs and arms right under anybody's nose. But she hid her feelings, except from the family, and when they left the Sampson house, Mrs Sampson thought it was on account of having to carry the children's bath-water up all those stairs.
Carly could tell most of this wisely and graphically, as if scoring a point against Eliza — and so she was, for remembering things after dark in their bedroom was much their most popular game. But if Carly's memory stretched back into dimmer recesses, it was Eliza who could tell things better, and she knew it. Of Cape Town she remembered nothing, neither the mealies nor the old Kaffir women who used to follow Augusta about because Carly had such beautiful long hair. But she hung about, gathering crumbs of information from her parents' table, and at the critical moment she could nearly always squash Carly. 'Anyhow, it was me who went to sleep in the big bulldog's kennel. You were afraid — so there.'
Eliza's first real recollection was of the Puckle house. If she shut her eyes in the dark, and waited until the twirly pictures beneath the lids had faded away, she could see ferns growing under a doorstep, fine as green lace, and above them a little window of sad blue glass. She knew she was sitting at Captain Puckle's back door, and that in front of the big house, if she ran round, wind would be stooping shiny yellow grasses and veronica bushes all one way, in a garden so steep that it had to be climbed by many flights of wooden steps, called 'The Zigzag'. The Zigzag was a public right-of-way, and people in black clothes climbed up it, bending nearly double. Sometimes their umbrellas blew inside out, and they stood and swore. If she waited long enough in the memory-dream, she could see the furniture-van drawn by two old horses, straining slowly uphill. Suddenly one of the horses slipped and fell. It lay plunging about, and two men in blue overalls leapt down and ran to the back of the van, while a woman in a near-by garden shrieked: 'Mind that pianner! — you dratted, lazy stots, mind that pianner!' Then Eliza was standing in the little crowd who had thickened around the accident, and the furniture man said hoarsely, 'You'll 'ave to sit on 'is 'ead, Bill.' Obeying this strange command, Bill sat his short thick body — like a broken-off clay pipe — on the horse's head, and its legs stopped plunging. The crowd shouted encouragement, and Bill's mate sang out, 'Yo, heave away!' and presently the old horse was on its feet again, trembling all over, but ready to be yoked and pull the van. Its brown eyes behind the blinkers had long powdery lashes, and looked so very sad.
And she had diabolos, but she threw them too high and they got stuck in the telegraph wires. And John bought her miniature bagpipes, the squeak part of which looked like a black sausage when blown up; but Mrs Puckle said she couldn't have those things about the place; her poor head, her poor head. So much was perfectly clear. The shapes of Captain and Mrs Puckle took on identity much later, though to Carly Eliza pretended she could remember everything straight through. But in her heart she knew that the old people were only real because often, after leaving them, Augusta took the children back from Oriri Street to visit them. She liked old Mrs Puckle, and said of the Captain, 'At least he's a gentleman.' Eliza thought they were like the toy couple who pop in and out of cardboard weather-houses, the little man holding out an umbrella for the wet, the little lady with a parasol if today will be fine. Captain Puckle had a very long white beard, and his wife was dumpy and tiny as an outsize fairy. She made lace on bobbins, great yellowish cobwebs of lace, to be sewn into shawls, coats, babies' christening-robes and quilts for the best bed. While she was talking, she never took her eyes off your face, and it was uncanny to watch her yellow fingers making minute loops, swiftly and stealthily, as if they worked without her connivance. On the walls of her sitting-room, whose great bay windows looked down on Wellington Harbour, photographs framed in red plush were arranged in fans. Young men, top-hatted and with greyhound waists, stuck out horizontal legs, the spokes of the fan. There was a cabinet filled with seashells and dusty mushrooms of coral, rose and white. Sometimes Captain Puckle, who was very deaf and said, 'Speak up, speak up,' took out a shell and thrust its polished lip against Eliza's ear, saying, 'Hark to the sea a-murmuring, a-murmuring.'
The greatest curiosity in the cabinet was a dried Maori head. Eliza always hoped he wouldn't show it, for its lips were drawn back in such a queer, implacable grin from its long yellow teeth, and its eyes had dried up, but you could see them between the lashless eyelids. On a satin cushion in the room sat a small liver-coloured pug, who cried perpetually, both from his eyes and from his negroid black nose. He made Carly and Eliza uncomfortable; Augusta said that children with runny noses were dirty, and not to be played with, and when they sat near him they were seized with a desire to sniff. But Mrs Puckle was most attached to her pug. The steadiness of the thread worming its way over the bobbins, the horizontal legs, the tears of the pug, all made the big room rather frightening, even on the days when old Mrs Puckle didn't produce her legend.
This was about the time when she was bitten by a katipo spider. The katipo, a tiny black spider with a red spot on his back, is almost the only poisonous thing in the country, though the boys called the rose and indigo blobs of jelly washed in with the tides at Lyall Bay 'stingarees', and said that once a little girl was stung to death by them. But Mrs Puckle had really met her spider, and been bitten. She didn't die, though she might have; but her arm swelled up the size of a bolster and turned purple as a damson plum, and for three days and nights she cried with the pain of it, without so much as a wink of sleep.
If she told the story with sunset pouring in through the faded slats of Venetian blind, light livid and dust-moted in her yellow room, Eliza could see her sitting there with a huge purple arm, and had to draw her breath down very deep and hold it tight inside her chest, to keep from running and running when she got outside into the tessellated hall. She knew she was a coward, though John still joked her about going to sleep with the fierce bulldog. But she had already thought that out; she was only one when it happened, and probably she didn't know then how much bulldogs bite.
The Puckles' house, enormous if very old-fashioned and decrepit, was the most pretentious of their stopping-places. At Oriri Street they had a dingy little bungalow, and almost no garden. Tomatoes grew over the wall from the house next door, and Augusta said it was theft to pick them; but John said, 'Rubbish, finds were keeps,' and little enough he ever found, worse luck, so he had the tomatoes with bread and butter for his supper. The children very seldom had bread and butter. Augusta wouldn't buy margarine, which she considered Cockney and horrible, but they spread slices of bread with dripping, and when they came to the brown-gravy parts, it was really nicer than butter.
At Oriri Street the Glory Hole was Eliza's adventure, and Sandra's was the earthquake. It seemed a shame to waste the earthquake, for Sandra was only a baby, too little to understand or remember. The walls growled, and the lights in the house started swinging violently from side to side. Sandra's cradle, which stood outside on the portico, was upset, and she rolled all the way down the steps to the asphalt path.
Augusta, with a face like death, tore out to retrieve her, while Eliza whimpered, 'Oh, look, Mummy — Daddy's moustache cup is broken.' There was nothing much wrong with Sandra but an indomitable, ferocious yell, which she could supply without any earthquake when the mood was upon her. But Augusta sat with the baby on her lap, fingering the skin beneath the ringlets of pale Scandinavian gold, and repeating, 'It's a great bump the size of an egg ... the size of an egg.' John, who was working night-shift at the office, came home excited about the stone ball that had rolled off the top of the Post Office and crushed a man standing underneath. But Augusta didn't care about the crushed man. She would only cry fiercely, 'Stop talking, can't you, and think about your own. She might have been killed.'
John rubbed Sandra's bump with his brown, clumsy fingers, and smiled sheepishly.
'Nothing to worry about, old girl. Stick a lump of butter on it and she'll be right as ninepence in the morning.'
Augusta, shivering from head to foot, tossed off his hand.
'Much you care. If it had been Eliza, you'd have wanted the doctor in.' She rocked Sandra fiercely in her arms. At moments of family crisis, Eliza knew, either John or Augusta was likely to accuse her of being the Pet. And Carly always said it....
But John was right, John with his queer, brown, hurt face. Of course it was far more interesting about the man who got crushed by the big stone ball than about Sandra's little bump, which hadn't hurt her much, anyway. The earthquake was like the old nursery tale. ('Oh, Goosey-Loosey,' said Henny-Penny, the sky has fallen on my poor bald head, and were all going to tell the King.')
It was Bob Malley who owned the Glory Hole. For one brief day, that made him more important and beautiful to Eliza than any King. He lived next door, not on the tomato-growing side, but in a low, ramshackle bungalow whose cream paint, like that of most Wellington houses, was thick-pelted with dust. He was nearly fifteen, a tall boy, long-legged as a giraffe, and with a forelock falling over his freckly forehead.
Eliza sat on their garden wall, swinging her legs and watching him smooth a plane over crisp white pieces of wood. He threw one piece aside, and started making thin puddles of sawdust under his father's sawhorse. She stared at him, feeling defiant and lonely. She was glad when he looked up and spoke to her.
'Hullo, little girl next door. Come along over; hurry up, and I'll show you the Glory Hole.'
'What's the Glory Hole?'
'Where the fairies live. Hurry, this is just the time to catch them at afternoon tea.'
Bob's hands, firm under her armpits, swung her from the wall. They went into Mrs Malley's wash-house, Eliza holding tightly to Bob's hand. It was a very tidy wash-house, and Mrs Malley had a new rubber wringer. Augusta was always asking Providence for one, and saying it broke her back to wring the clothes out by hand. Bob pulled aside the matting on the floor, and there lay a great hole, a square filled with black velvet darkness.
'Down there is where the fairies live.'
She stared at him. Suddenly she knew that all her life she had never really believed in fairies, and always she had wanted to. Little sheeny iridescent wings, bodies like floating bluebells....
'Truly?'
'Want to come down and see?'
She nodded, unable to speak. 'Then come on,' said Bob; and at that very moment they heard Mrs Malley's voice outside.
'Is that you, Bob? Where are you?'
'Bother women!' muttered Bob.
Mrs Malley came into the wash-house. She was a dark woman, her navy blue print frock very clean and well-pressed over her firm bosom, and her hair drawn straitly back. She said at once, 'You're not taking Mrs Hannay's little girl down your nasty, dirty hole, Bob Malley, I'll tell you that. I'd like to know what her mother would have to say — her pinny all dust and webs when she goes home. The very idea!'
Eliza, shivering as her mother had shivered when the earthquake tipped Sandra out of her cradle, wanted to explain that she would risk all the clean pinnies in the world, all the scoldings, or even the hairbrush, for one moment to watch the fairies, one glimpse of their blue wings through the spy-hole Bob Malley had dug down under the earth. But words wouldn't come; she was tongue-tied, a silly baby in the clutches of a grown-up.
'A dear little soul,' said Mrs Malley, firm-bosomed and speckless.
Bob said, 'Never mind, Liza. I'll bring you back a present from the Fairy Queen.' He swung himself over the edge of the Glory Hole. At one moment his freckly hand gripped the floor-boards, then they had vanished, and Eliza was left behind. Mrs Malley took her on her knee.
'Bob's a big rough boy,' she said, stroking Eliza's hair. 'You mustn't mind him, he doesn't mean to tease. Your mother keeps you neat as a little picture, that I'll say. My, what pretty curls. I'll bet those get combed out morning and night. I could do with a little girl of my own. Would you like to live here and be Mrs Malley's pet girl?'
Live with the Glory Hole. ... And yet Mrs Malley didn't care, she wasn't wondering where Bob was now, downstairs in the dark earth. Perhaps the big spiders had got him. Perhaps there was a stair that twisted up and up.
'I want to go down the Glory Hole.'
Mrs Malley laughed.
'You'd get cobwebs on your pinny that your mother's ironed all nice and fresh for you. You're lucky little girls to have such a good mother.'
Presently Bob's freckled hands swung into sight again, and a moment later the rest of him doubled over the edge of the Glory Hole. A strand of web lay dusty on his cheek, and he looked tired, but to Eliza his eyes seemed full of mysterious light.
'There you are, Liza.'
He put into her hands a lavender china shoe, filled with wet new violets. Their scent made a pale streak in the wash-house.
'The Fairy Queen sent you some violets in one of her shoes, and she hopes you'll come yourself next time.'
Mrs Malley's face brimmed with half-laughing, half-compassionate mischief, the face of a grown-up fixed in the attitude of being grown-up.
'There now, do look at your trousers, all dust and webs. You'll wait a long time before you get another pair, my lad, I can tell you that. How you can be bothered with your nonsense, and putting ideas into her head. Run along and brush yourself, do. Eliza, dearie, wouldn't you like a piece before you go?'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Godwits Fly by Robin Hyde, Patrick Sandbrook. Copyright © 2012 Patrick Sandbrook. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Acknowledgements,
Introduction by Patrick Sandbrook,
Author's foreword,
1 Glory Hole,
2 Little Houses,
3 Bird of My Native Land,
4 O Rome, My Country,
5 Follow the Boomerang,
6 Toy Town,
7 Laloma,
8 Little Ease,
9 Reflections in the Water,
10 Timothy,
11 Broken Trees,
12 Business Girls,
13 Road Roundabout,
14 In Your Stupidity,
15 The Sparrows When They Fall,
16 Barbarian for Caesar,
17 The Kind Green Arm,
18 Farewell and Adieu,
19 Alien Corn,
20 Thorny Mauds,
21 No More of Me You Knew,
22 Carly,
23 Absalom, My Son,
24 Various Goods,
A Note on the text,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Copyright,