Before I Forget Page 2

  After the war the mental hospital network in New Zealand had been renamed the mental hygiene division – an unfortunate choice with its suggestion of a regiment of trained exterminators of brain infection who could provide deep cleaning of that organ. To go with the name change was a reorganisation of status. One wit at Porirua Hospital complained that the system had become like a South American army: lots of generals and no troops.

  When it came to the hierachy of wives, it was all a rather uncertain business. If your husband was a general you might only aspire to be a colonel. If a wife was unsuitable or invisible, she might only just make an officer. If Fraser was an officer, then that made me a sergeant. As a result, when we wives sat together drinking coffee we assessed one another and our uncertain statuses. We were indeed a reflection of the lives lived by our husbands – where things of importance took place.

  I realised I had to get back into the art world where I could be something like myself. Homesickness, alienation or depression always roused in me an urge to paint, to get things out there so I could take a look at what was bothering me. As luck would have it, I met a glamorous couple, living in a big old farmstead not far from Mont Park, who provided some let up from the world of the hospital.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Revelations and Lost Bits

  The glamorous couple, Gretchen and her officer, had got together as Berlin fell. He was a member of the British army and she was a German civilian. Gretchen looked and dressed like the lovely goose girl in the fairytale. In a pond in front of their house, fat geese sported. At parties they followed Gretchen about as if in an operetta. For dinner, one would be chosen as a sacrifice and was eaten with much red Rhine Valley wine and creamed potatoes.

  At one of their parties, I met a German-Jewish painter who had recently been involved in a scandal in Melbourne, running away with the Danish ambassador’s wife. He obviously had not run very far.

  The Danish ambassador’s wife had decided that having found true love she might now be her true self. She was growing out her gleaming golden tresses and two inches of grey was now very visible at the roots. She was quite lovely, a Garboesque beauty. However, I could not but think of Yeats’s lines:

  That only God, my dear,

  Could love you for yourself alone

  And not your yellow hair.

  What a satisfying mix that party was; fifteen years after the war and there was an English solider, a Bavarian Hitler Youth woman, a German Jew and a Nordic beauty all in the same room.

  The painter and the ambassador’s wife literally saved my life. He employed a model in his studio once a week for painting sessions. If my drawings rated, he told me I could be included in his group. I was rated. Much to Fraser’s and the doctors’ relief, I began happily harmonising with painters.

  I have been rummaging around in the boxcar of my memory, sorting and discarding, but I cannot not find what I am looking for: the name of the German-Jewish painter. It has simply evaporated, disappearing into some soggy non-functioning part of my brain. I feel a state of anxiety, a loss of certainty in my recall. I tell myself this is not necessarily evidence of ageing – I have never been good at remembering names. But then I remember one thing: the book the painter gave me.

  The book was the Last of the Just and he had given it to me when we left Melbourne in 1961. I can even remember who wrote it, André Schwarz-Bart. So I have all that, but the painter’s name is lost to me, forever abandoned in that dying bit of brain. By giving me that book he was a sharing his past, revealing what he had himself so narrowly escaped. The book describes the exit of Jewish children from Paris, separated from their parents, herded into cattle trucks and deported. Imprisoned in their compartments of doom, they enter that last circle of hell. The hero of the book, and he was some hero, makes the decision to join the children and to give them as much comfort as he can on their journey. This was a demented world he chose to enter, stalked by devils, inhabited by terrified victims.

  My painter friend made it from Germany to Paris, and from Paris to London, and was then sent off to Australia’s interior. He was a lone survivor. Speaking very little English at fifteen, he worked on the farm of a redneck Australian, as racist towards Aborigines as any Nazi ever was about Jews. The farmer treated the boy as slave labour. At seventeen, he managed to escape to Melbourne, where he struggled towards his dream of becoming a painter. The painter imparted his story to me without any suggestion that he was sorry for himself. He accepted the truth of what had happened: that he was hunted down as a child, that people were capable of the most appalling acts of evil, that the world we lived in was a brutal place. The thing he found the hardest to bear was the exploitive backblocks Aussie bastard. Where he had every right to expect sanctuary, he found even more persecution.

  The night I met the German painter, his new partner was making jokes with Gretchen, our hostess, about the Soviet soldiers in Berlin at the end of the war. Apparently the soldiers had orders to rape all the women, young or old, that they could lay their hands on. I didn’t quite get their joke but it was something to do with red weals marking the women’s waists. It seems the Soviets didn’t take their leather belts off while they were performing this patriotic duty. But it also seemed as if only people who had been there could laugh at a joke like that, so I did not attempt to join in.

  This was not the first time I had been privilege to intimate conversations with survivors from the war. There were the Polish girls, survivors of the march from Krakow through Russia to Siberia, who ended up at my boarding school. And then there was Harry Seresin, whose coffee bar I had worked in back in Wellington, and where I had been subject to Harry’s black humour. Harry told tales about his relations, some who had and some who had not made it out of Germany when Hitler closed the borders. They were walking, talking survivors of the evil that humans are subject to.

  But what of the guards at Buchenwald who made lampshades out of human skin in their spare time? What of those who laughed dementedly as they propelled cringing naked women into the gas chambers? What of them? Misguided thinking? Just easily influenced country folk? There is nothing to explain such a macabre occupation or sadistic enjoyments. In the years after the Second World War, we carried an acute awareness of the brutalities these people had perpetrated, while also having to sustain, somehow, a belief in a sane, compassionate future.

  But I must get back to Melbourne, to the time after we had met our new friends at Gretchen’s party. Through their machinations, I think, we were invited to a dinner party at the home of the sculptor Gus McLaren and his wife, Betty. Or perhaps I had met the McLarens at a life class I went to. The truth is I have no idea how I met them; a lot of our social life in Australia is a bit of a blur. We were submerged most of the time in compulsive working routines, and the two babies were a compulsive working routine in themselves. When Fraser and I got our heads out of the water, we had an urge to frolic. When we were partying, someone once compared Fraser and I to two performing seals.

  I am trying to write this in the way I thought at that time. I don’t think I cultivated friendships because the person was famous or might be famous, or might be of use to me in my future career. We hooked up briefly with Betty and Gus simply because we liked them. We liked their work, their politics, their creative idea of a good time. That’s what attracted us to them and what attracted us, after all, to anyone we met.

  The big mode of the day was Japanese and that night the McLarens had really gone overboard. The drink, the food, the utensils and all the seating arrangements were Japanese. Our host had been drinking a lot of sake. He insisted that you could not get drunk on sake and that it was quite safe for him to drink it all day. Nevertheless, he was drunk.

  Here were soulmates who talked the same language as we did and enjoyed the same way of life. There was a lot of conflict about the Labour Party – an argument flared up every now and then. The Labour Party had been divided by the Catholic Church, so they believed. Most Catholics in Australia voted La
bour, and were largely from Irish backgrounds. They were union supporters and often quite radical in their politics. The Italians only came in any numbers after the Second World War and, though Catholic themselves, their politics were often much more conservative than those of the Irish-Australians. Our new friends in the Melbourne art scene viewed the newcomers as spoilers and dubbed them the Italian Mafia.

  Then there were very competitive clashes about getting work exhibited in London. That was another obsessive topic. Those who proclaimed lofty indifference to fame were raucously shouted down as fucking no-talent pretenders. But like a lot of potential artists in the 1960s, I had an ardent desire to keep the wellsprings of my creativity pure. Or that is how I explained it to myself – not to allow crass motives to sully my vision or murk my intent. Of course there were destructive elements in this attitude. And it could also result in imagining that success implied a sell-out, part of a very puritan Kiwi urge to denigrate oneself.

  With our host, we would argue about art and politics and other subjects until, somehow inevitably, we got back to the subject of divorce, settlement and property. Somebody’s wife had just left him. Was that Arthur Boyd? I can’t remember. Possibly it was another guy. Apparently split-ups were fraught with many problems, the major one being money. This couple, who were splitting up, had been gifted their land and houses by a millionaire. The gift was strictly to the artist. In those early, halcyon days no couple believed they would ever split up; they were in love and had no wish to break the spell that their love had woven around them. To contemplate a future without each other seemed like bad luck.

  I make it sound as if we were partying all the time in Melbourne but this wasn’t so. Most of the time I was feeding and washing my two babies, cooking dinner and cleaning up the house, while Fraser was swotting and doing lots of night duty. In Melbourne I was in charge of Augusta and Alex in a way I had never been at Porirua Hospital. In Porirua, Fraser and Mrs Meacham, my home help, wielded the control in the house. But in Melbourne, as both Fraser and Mrs Meacham had given up being in charge of me, I could take charge of my own life.

  I set up a structure to my day so I could paint. I tried to set up a system that made Fraser and the babies secure and happy, but would also satisfy me. After all, an unsatisfied mother is not a good mother. That meant getting up at 5.30, which was going to happen anyway; next was feeding time for the kids and Fraser’s breakfast. Fraser would then be off to the hospital to do some swot before his ward rounds started. The next task was closing up the house, drawing the blinds and curtains. An immense and throbbing heat had enfolded the land and the only defence was the same one my grandparents had used in hot weather in New Zealand. When the sun went down, all doors and windows were opened and left open for as long as possible. In the morning, around eleven o’clock, I turned on the cold shower and placed the two little girls with their toys underneath the water. They loved it and the cold water cooled them down before lunch at twelve. They had their nap at one o’clock, usually sleeping through until three.

  It was then I would go into the garage and examine the drawings I had done around Melbourne. I had one day off a week and I spent it looking for suggestive buildings in the city. Those that spoke of power and money, that conjured up images of good times and romance. Obviously I had not yet accepted my immediate surroundings as sufficiently inspiring. That was to come later.

  What Melbourne did was take me on a virtual tour, further back into European history. Because Australia was settled much earlier than New Zealand, its buildings were consequently designed in earlier architectural styles. I saw more Regency there and, in the outer suburbs, buildings influenced by colonial architecture in India. For me, having never been out of New Zealand, they were a visual luxury. Living in a modern, poor person’s house, I found painting those buildings an escape into more elegant quarters. The paintings that resulted were glamorous but also ramshackle and inhabited by rather spooky wraiths of unresolved longings.

  Nothing would have come of my friendship with Fraser’s colleague Diamond if I had not started painting again. Diamond liked my paintings and though not yet a painter himself, he got involved in the production side.

  He was a lucky guy, born happy. He loved Australia and had projected all his boundless energy into offering his new country a transcendent persona. He would overlook the desolate miles of suburbia, stretching from Mont Park to the central city, all the gruesome lookalike brick bungalows with coarse iron fretwork and fruit-salad gardens. He simply didn’t see them. He was a futurist.

  As a futurist, Diamond felt I should be taking advantage of the new paints that were apparently being developed for jet planes and space travel. That sounded interesting so off we went to find the forward-looking factory developing these paints. The assistant was most helpful and popped off the lids of two tins, praising the paint’s magic qualities. Something else, however, was going on here, as if we had indulged in smoking dope and were now feeling a small hit. Next came the smell, it was low-key but pervasive. Not of this earth.

  I said, ‘A peculiar smell.’

  Diamond said, ‘Unreal.’

  The assistant said, ‘I can’t smell anything. When I come to think of it, not since I came to work here.’

  Diamond was uneasy and, saying something about how we would be back, he hustled me out. When we got in the car, he said of course the assistant couldn’t smell anything. That stuff has destroyed his smell buds. What the fuck is it? He was indignant. ‘What about industrial medicine? They’re meant to be policing stuff like that.’

  Then he went back to being a positive and amusing Diamond: ‘Hilarious, the tripping painters of the future, but not for you, lady, this is not for you.’

  And that was the end of his research into contemporary paint experiments.

  Remembering all this, I got something seriously wrong about John Diamond, some flawed chunk of recall about his supposed history. I had it in my head that his exotic family made it out of revolutionary Russia, through Mongolia and into China, then in due course to Melbourne, Australia. I really fancied Diamond starring in this story. I imagined his father, possibly a cavalry officer, mounting forays on advancing German troops and, sensing the coming revolution, reading the writing on the wall and deciding to plan his family’s escape. As I was writing all this, John Diamond rang me. Rang me after fifty years. It was as if by thinking about him, imagining him, he had materialised to my will.

  He turned up a few days later on his way to Canberra, where he was showing his latest paintings to much acclaim. I must admit that in the interim, after the phone call, I had sneakily looked up John Diamond on the internet. Diamond, it turned out, was now a New York guru, an analyst with magic powers. He also believed that painting with deep spiritual intensity could bare your soul, even reveal your past to yourself and possibly predict your future. He had become a very successful person, which did not surprise me at all, but he was not who I thought he was.

  What I had done was stolen the story of his then wife, Susan, and given it to Diamond. (Curiously, the name of his second wife was also Susan. Both his wives were predictably attractive, lively and intelligent.) I had given him a romantic history: clever aunts, lecturing at Monash, distinguished uncles. John was no fool. His own story obviously did not enthral him as his first wife’s story had. The real Diamond had come to Australia by boat from Scotland at the age of, I think, ten years old, accompanied by his father. That was all he had to say about the matter. It was while we were talking on my deck as they prepared to leave that the rather embarrassing truth about my ideas of his past emerged. Susan, however – that is, the here and now Susan – smoothed the situation over.

  If I try to concentrate a little more than I obviously had been doing, the image of Diamond takes on a different aspect. More Diamond the boy genius. Diamond was five years younger than me, ten years younger than Fraser. He was sitting his first exams in psychiatry. There certainly was something of the boy wonder about him, as if he envisione
d endless possibilities in learning, dazzling discoveries to be made. Diamond was no practising artist in those days, more of a devotee of the arts, and also a devotee of literature and of music. Everything seemed to contain unlimited fodder for his own intellectual consumption.

  Diamond was to tell me fifty years later that I was viewed by the other wives as unpredictable, dangerously sexual. Flattered as I was by this image of myself, I also believe that the other Mont Park wives’ experience of ‘dangerously sexual’ was seriously limited. If I had made the wives of Mont Park uneasy, I assured him, then so had he.

  Meanwhile, back in Melbourne, the fires had started. One morning, peering out the bathroom window, I was astonished at what I saw. In the distance, in Mont Park, a long thin man made of fire stood up from the ground. He ran very fast across the paddock and in his path the fire ignited. I was so totally fascinated by this spontaneous eruption, I forgot it was my duty to ring the fire brigade. While I watched this phenomenon, just glimpsed through the smoggy heat, the fire brigade came, desperately chasing the man of fire around the park.

  The fires became more and more frequent, and then we got a telephone call. The McLarens, of the lovely Japanese dinner party, had to leave their house because the fires were getting too close. Could we help them get their stuff out? I remember little about this rescue mission, except the last part. I was in their car holding the older child, while Fraser drove our car full of the McLarens’ necessities. Suddenly Betty screamed, ‘Turn back, turn back!’ She had forgotten her contraceptive pills and no way was she leaving without them. We must have been a bit high to go rushing back into that danger zone again, especially with two young children. But she was adamant; no way was she getting pregnant again and I could understand her attitude.