Before I Forget Read online

  Mum was appalled at the pit of corruption that she had chanced upon. She cried out that it was unbelievable and in a hospital of all places. It was of course unbelievable, and I for one did not believe it.

  The winter of Mum’s despair did pass and there were no more distressing episodes. But if we look into our hearts we all know grief is not easily eradicated. Trying to talk about moving on was gross thinking to my mother. From her family, from her immersion in classical music, she had a reverence for death. She understood this happening deserved her full attention. That this catastrophic event should be dismissed after what society decided was a reasonable lapse of time never came into my mother’s head. Her grief was profound.

  She had such a rage to explore where her grief came from and what its true source was. Forget Livingstone tracking down the source of the Nile in that unknown country – Mum’s explorations would be a lot more extensive.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Time of Day

  Spring came into our garden at Kingseat and the hydrangeas were no longer a bundle of old twigs. Vibrant small green shoots appeared. The plum and apple trees were an ecstatic pink. The birds got up earlier and earlier, and each one was propelled by a consuming urge to sing louder and with more meaning than any other bird in the garden. The garden itself was in a celebratory mood, all flickering lights and shadows, and my mood lifted. In response, the children ran wild in the garden all day and Mr Quickly the gardener, who had come with us to Kingseat, bossed two helpers about. These helpers were what the not-so-delicately minded psychiatrists in Australia called burnt-out schizos. They haunted the garden like bewitched zombies.

  While Fraser was in hospital when we were first married, I read him the Russian novelists. Our favourites were predictable: Turgenev, Pushkin, Chekhov, and of course Tolstoy. War and Peace took some time. However, that spring I started to reread Chekhov. Somehow he seemed fitting. After all, Chekhov also had tuberculosis. He was also a doctor. And he had lived for quite a long time in a small village. Quickly’s helpers began to seem to me to resemble Russian serfs on a country estate. Our estate in the country at Kingseat, forty-five kilometres south of Auckland, rolled down to the estuary and into the mangrove swamps.

  Chekhov managed to avoid the Russian Revolution by dying, but Fraser was not so lucky at Kingseat, where a revolution was soon under way. At Porirua, Fraser had encouraged members of Alcoholics Anonymous to visit the hospital and to get involved in the treatment of their fellow sufferers. Other doctors on the staff resented what they saw as interference. Fraser pointed out to them that because they were very cynical about the rehabilitation of alcoholics in the hospital, it would be only fair to let someone else have a go. They had conceded more from indifference than from any change of heart. This experience convinced Fraser that community psychiatry was a solution, that if it worked with alcoholics in Porirua, it could work throughout the whole hospital. Opening up a large mental hospital to interaction with the so-called normal world would, however, eventually lead to its demise, but then small community centres could be established around Auckland.

  This big change was Fraser’s ambition on his arrival at Kingseat. The doctors on the staff were decent enough in their own way but they didn’t want to be disturbed. There was a great deal of pressure on doctors at that time to excel. Getting into medical school in itself was a huge achievement. Great things were expected of them and I fear they felt Fraser was trying to show them up. However, he was a charming and persuasive guy. During their periodic transitions into full-scale prima donnas he was able to deflect their resentment, soothe their hurt pride with praise and offer them some task he knew that they might excel at. These were only holding tactics, for the doctors liked things the way they were.

  Fraser had more success with the paramedicals and the public. As superintendent, Fraser broke the rule of silence. Rather than retreating into defensive denial mode, he would agree with the scandal-mongering reporter about the latest disaster involving the hospital. He would ask the reporter, who seemed to care about the plight of our mental hospitals, just how he could help Fraser effect change. Fraser would make the reporter feel that he was part of Fraser’s mentality, that he could indeed help Fraser to effect change, that Fraser was confiding in him as a very special person. On Fraser’s part, this was not a conscious performance but a genuine wish to communicate and to change things.

  Meanwhile, the revolution had begun. The matron told Fraser it would be a happy lovely hospital if only it weren’t for the patients. Fraser felt that the patients were the very least of his problems: his medical staff in turn thought that paramedicals were challenging their authority, pushing them aside. Nurses felt challenged by patients who, they said, no longer showed respect.

  The hierarchy was crumbling. All Fraser had done was shift a few blocks at the bottom of the edifice and the whole construction was threatening collapse. I got some insight into this when a doctor’s wife complained to me that nowadays it was very hard to tell the difference between the staff and the patients. Her complaint was not meant to be amusing – it reflected the changes going on in the hospital. Fraser had asked the doctors not to wear their white coats any more or their stethoscopes, which they hung around their necks like a badge of office. And the demeanour of the patients themselves was changing. Through the support of the paramedicals and the social workers, they were now better dressed. Fraser had also integrated the wards, which made the patients more aware of their appearance as they tried to impress the opposite sex.

  It is necessary to say at this juncture that our lifestyle was becoming more hazardous. With Fraser’s ambition to invent a new kind of hospital, and with our family of three young children, there was no time for us to party, to socialise. Whenever did recognising an unhealthy situation do anything much to change it? But come, we obviously enjoyed a good dinner party and our friends in the medical world were highly pleasant and entertaining people: the Chuns and Gresions and Montgomerys at the university, and our old good friends the Bidwills from Wellington. As things turned out, none of these people really did share our politics but they were well read, up with the current news, and charming. They also enjoyed drinking, but not as much as Fraser and I did. This contributed to Fraser’s stress, which I reacted to with criticism of his drinking. Easy for me to pick his problem. As is the way with folie à deux I did not have the same insight into my own problems. Fraser endured one or two unpleasant episodes and then decided bravely that drinking wasn’t fun any more. That was the end of parties for him.

  I was fortunate that over this period at Kingseat my devotion to my children remanded intact, despite all this pressure. I already understood how things going wrong forced me out of my mode of dependency and that desperation triggered my creativity. When I say my mode of dependency, I mean a tendency, like most other wives of the time, to leave important decisions to my husband. How money was spent, buying a car, where we lived. When I think about it that didn’t change much. Partly because, in my case, I wasn’t all that interested in who spent the money. What I mean is that when it came to my painting and my writing I knew I had to make my own decisions. Up to that time I had considered the opinions of other painters, those that I held in esteem. I still held them in high esteem but no longer considered their opinions when it came to my own work. I knew where I was going. I knew I had to make my own decisions.

  Some of the painting I did at that time stays in my mind as an example of a truly sincere effort, on my part, to see for myself. To see what I saw, not what I had been taught to see: In Memoriam, Mum and me at the time of my father’s death; Augusta’s Bedroom, telling it like her bedroom really was but somehow still very lovely; and Christmas Day, a large portrait of my mother as a woman of power, surrounded by her Christmas presents.

  As the superintendent’s wife, I had a strictly defined role. My job was to hand out medals once a year to the nurses who had completed their course, appear at various functions and organise a party for the hospital ba
ll. But I became interested in the fate of a group of young Maori girls, aged around eleven to sixteen.

  I recall that they were labelled ‘behaviour problems’. Their state of mind was the result of oppression and poverty. From oppression and poverty comes abuse, and abuse of young girls was very common in New Zealand then, and still is. While on leave in London during the First World War, my father was told: do not go into those areas where incest is more common than a square meal. Those areas were the poor parts of London and when those guys were on leave they inevitably drifted there. This was because prostitution flourished in those places, places where everything was for sale. The same could easily be applied to parts of New Zealand.

  It was explained to me that it was no good teaching those kids anything because they had an attention span of five minutes. I persisted, nevertheless, and came up with the idea of holding painting classes. The reason given for turning down my offer was of course money. So I bypassed that problem. I conned a factory into donating poster paint, got some rolls of paper and offered my skills for free.

  The hospital grounds were very lovely. Kingseat was the only mental hospital that was actually built to be a mental hospital and had been well designed. Rather like some eighteenth-century estate in, say, Georgia, in the southern United States, the buildings were large and the different wards in distinct buildings separate from each other. The windows of these elegant buildings looked out on a spacious and well-kept area that I suppose was the village green. There were pleasant seating areas and a large aviary.

  This was a view my new students looked out upon every day. I decided that they would do a large continuous painting of that view, a big landscape of something they could easily refer to and already understood emotionally and visually. When the painting was finished we hung it on a large screen that ran around the room. We celebrated with an afternoon tea party and even the nurses were impressed. They recognised that this artwork was superior to anything they themselves could do or understood as art. There was no more talk about five-minute attention spans and after that I was able to take the girls out of the wards for their classes. They set up working spots round our garden and I suggested they paint the events that had brought them to Kingseat.

  A painting by one of those young women, Rachel, has stayed in my mind ever since. It must have been 1967, while I was pregnant with Emily. In the painting, Rachel’s father is standing, gun in hand, outside a large raupo hut. It is built into a hill. It is a Colin McCahon hill. Or, as Rachel would never have seen a Colin McCahon hill, it is a Rachel hill. There is a strong blue sky and a high wind. I know that there is a high wind because the white clouds, the grass and the odd tree are bending before it. In front of the hut, a sobbing child is bent over clutching her stomach and, further up the hill, a dead woman is covered in blood. In fact, they are all covered in blood.

  And that was what had happened. Her father had gone stark staring mad, brutally murdered his wife and then raped his two little girls. Another painting explains how a brother enters the stage, is shot, and then the father proceeds to shoot himself. Rachel’s younger sister painted a more abstract, Maori version of this horrific event.

  I had one other serious entanglement in the hospital before I understood that I was not appropriate there. At the suggestion of Helen O’Connor, the top social worker at Kingseat, I got involved with the children’s ward. I liked Helen a lot, not least because she was so supportive of Fraser, shared his attitudes towards the patients and shared his values. Fraser left Helen and I to get on with it.

  These babies in the children’s ward often came into the hospital at birth, usually with some kind of defect. I have never visited a Romanian orphanage of today but I think I can confidently state that this children’s ward would have been as awful. As I walked in, I was overcome by at least eight four- and five-year-olds. There was a desperate hope still flickering in their eyes, a frantic begging in their clutching little fingers. I was their mother come to save them. If they wore one garment on top, there was no bottom; if there was a bottom, there was no top. It wasn’t long before I slipped in a pool of vomit. Outside, in the rain, I vomited into a hydrangea bush, those bushes that are so emblematic of mental hospitals. This tragic shit was happening right here in New Zealand.

  It seems as if the further away it is, the easier it is to see. It’s easy for us to see the Nazi death camps way back when or the Romanian orphanages now. It’s easier to get the whole picture. Romanians brainwashed by communists. Yes, they did it. Nazis stressed out by a treaty after the First World War. Oh yes, they did it. So what’s our excuse? Why did we ignore kids rotting in mental hospital wards forever? Like the Germans, we can say we didn’t know. Is evil just not knowing?

  I could now see because I was directed to see by an angel of mercy. Helen O’Connor, social worker and good practising Catholic. Personally, I don’t think her being a good Catholic had anything to do with it: it just so happened she was a very decent intelligent person. There were plenty of those around, I mean good Catholics, and they were as blind as any German farmer ploughing his field next to a Nazi death camp. The Catholic priest appointed to Kingseat had seen nothing.

  But Helen’s time of divine intervention had arrived. I was but her instrument. She used my fresh new disgust and horror to motivate the Bishop of Auckland. Helen said sympathetically, ‘Well, we could call on Bishop Delargy.’ She got us an appointment with him while the horror was still burning bright inside me and awful enough to move me to eloquence.

  Bishop Delargy reminded me of those noble Franciscan priests from Spain who took the side of the Indians persecuted by the conquistadors. Rome displayed great wisdom by appointing him New Zealand’s first and only cardinal. The one and only Cardinal Delargy, what a guy. At the time he was the head of the Auckland interchurch charities.

  So on the appointed day Fraser gave an inspiring address in the cathedral. Delargy had me give the congregation the distressing picture, which, remarkably, he did something about. Delargy didn’t blame anyone; he simply made it better. All those upstanding congregations went out to the wards in shifts. Far from getting in the way, as the staff feared, they helped the nurses. They bought suitable clothes for the children to wear. They bought good washing machines and driers to keep the clothes wearable. They took children home for weekends.

  Delargy, however, could see into the future. So he started planning for a whole different structure, when this rush of compassion would abate. I remember his indignation when he was told that, of course, this completely new complex would take at least seven years to build. ‘So,’ he replied, ‘a three-year-old will be by that time a ten-year-old. Is that right?’

  Delargy had a great deal of influence and with Fraser’s wholehearted support I am glad to say that it didn’t take seven years to build new accommodation for the children.

  Outside of the art lessons and the work with children, I had a growing awareness of my role as the superintendent’s wife at Kingseat. Whereas the doctor, and especially the superintendent, would be given some leeway in terms of difference or eccentricity, his wife would not. Wives were expected to represent respectability, compassion, and to have a pleasant demeanour. Around this time, I was warned by other doctors’ wives, local women and some nurses that I should stay away from the children’s ward. I was told that my baby might contract some sort of mental retardation that could be lurking there. I took this as a way of giving me the evil eye. I realised that I had achieved as much as I was ever going to achieve in the hospital, that others could do this much better than I could.

  A few years ago I was asked to talk at a seminar on child abuse. Looking back at what I had witnessed at Kingseat, I was surprised to find – no, I was seriously indignant to find – at the conference that I was viewed as a child abuser. This was to do with my High Chair paintings from 1961–62.

  I must have fallen out of the loop somewhere along the way. I am not aware that sitting crawlers and toddlers in high chairs is a bad thing. I
think of them as an aid to help them learn to eat solids, to take the transition in comfort, so to speak. That it is a cruel and unnatural restraint has never crossed my mind. Should they eat on the crawl, smearing bits of food randomly as they stagger about?

  Anyway, my children loved their high chairs and begged to get in and when I tried to take them out protested wildly. But getting back to child abuse. The abuse of children, the hitting of children seems to me the worst barbarity. I never hit my daughters when they were young. (I will qualify that soon with a recent story.) I wasn’t controlling myself in not hitting my children, I simply didn’t want to hit them. We practised, Fraser and I, time-outs and long chats about being decent to each other. We had a rule that went, ‘If you are really nice to my friend I’ll be really nice to yours.’ This worked. However, there is one thing you can be certain about in life and that is it’s going to change. Nothing is forever.

  About four years ago I punched one of my daughters very hard on the arm. It came as a stunning surprise to both of us. She cried out, ‘You hit me! You hit me! You hit me!’ And I shrieked back, ‘High time! High time!’ So I must accept that in me violence lurks. I must also accept that I am not particularly observant. Until I had my own children I never noticed women hitting children in the street. Yanking them about, yelling at them. But then why would I? I didn’t notice pregnant women until I was a pregnant woman, then I saw pregnant women everywhere. On the street, in trams, on trains and in eating places, they suddenly made themselves apparent. Everybody seemed to be having a baby. Was this a pregnancy epidemic? Anyway, one evening a friend and I were sipping a glass of wine in the garden and listening to the birds. Small children gambolled at our feet. Quite suddenly my friend shrieked, and began to belabour her child with a wooden spoon that she had secreted about her person. ‘Do not do that!’ she yelled. ‘I have told you before, do not do that!’ she chanted in rhythm to her blows. Then ignoring her child’s sobs she sat back and continued our conversation. I myself was convinced she was mad.