will know, last weekend the results of the New Zealand Heritage writing competition, run by the Canterbury Society of Authors and Christchurch City Council, were announced. The theme for the Short Prose section was "hidden histories", and the piece I wrote, "Finders, Keepers", was the winning entry.
I've had a lot of queries about where to find it. The organisers have told me that they hope to get the winning entries up on the
soon, but in the meantime I can go ahead and post mine on my blog. So here you are.
Finders, Keepers
My
mother tells me what she knows
Each time my mother tells me what she knows about the
family I came from, she speaks in her story-telling voice. I learn these fragments by heart, word for
word.
The
lady who had you was so plump that at first no one noticed she was pregnant. When
her mother found out, she took her to the home in Auckland run by Doctor Smale. He was the
doctor seeing me because I couldn’t have children.
Some
of this sounds wrong for telling a child. Perhaps she adds details as I get
older.
He’d
promised he would find me a lovely little girl. That’s how we got you. We
brought you home when you were only two weeks old.
This isn’t quite the same as the story I used to ask
for so often at bedtime, about Mum and Dad going to the hospital to look at all
the babies and choosing me. I knew it was true because when I was five, they went back
to the hospital and came home with my baby sister. But
I don’t want to say anything to stop Mum talking.
The
doctor’s nurse saw the name on the card. It was a family she had known in Christchurch.
Your
grandmother was a very clever woman who wrote books.
Names
I
was named Frances
after my mother and her grandmother. Mum is always called by her second name,
Ryda, and I’m always called by mine, Anne. She calls me Frances only
when she’s cross because I’m reading and don’t hear her.
_________________________________________________
My
sister is having problems with her first pregnancy. Mum and Dad hand over her adoption
papers, in case knowing her original surname can help. Because they always
treat us exactly the same, I get mine too.
I
have a surname, but no first name: I am ‘unnamed female H.’
When
I phone Social Welfare I have my story ready.
I have two boys, but my
sister’s just had a baby girl. She’s promised that if you can tell me my birth
mother’s first name, she’ll give it to her daughter as her second name.
The
helpful woman I speak to probably doesn’t believe a word of this. But we both
know she’s allowed to pass on any non-identifying information. A week later she
phones me back.
There’s almost nothing
on your file, but your mother’s name was Mary, and her middle initial was R.
___________________________________________________
Marie
Rose H. of Christchurch
turns out not to be my mother, though when she writes back she says she wishes
she was. So I take a new tack, and hunt for the clever grandmother who wrote
books.
A
friend finds her in the Alexander Turnbull Library. In 1939 and 1943, the Bay of Plenty Times published
collections of poems to raise money for soldiers’ parcels. The author was
Kathleen H.
In
the 1943 electoral roll, a new entry appears at the same address as Kathleen: Mary
Rylana. Her foreign-sounding middle name echoes my mother’s: Frances Ryda.
By
1954 she’s gone, but I find a marriage certificate. She has married a man with
an unusual surname, and her new address is in the same electorate. At Christmas
I send a letter and a photo, and she replies.
Seven
years after my birth, Mary had a daughter (another daughter) and named her Ann.
Ann named her own daughter Ana, and she named her son Patrick.
Now
Ann’s Patrick is at school and my Patrick has moved to Sydney. The next year he turns eighteen, and
in October he dies there. My mother isn’t able to come down for the funeral. Mary
asks me if I would like her to come and I say yes, so she does.
What
Kathleen knew
Kathleen is the only child of a prosperous Tewkesbury brewer and his wife Jane. She’s thirty when the first world war begins.
It’s still going when George H., a tea plantation manager in Ceylon who’s close
to forty, reads one of her poems and begins writing to her.
After the war he comes to England
to meet her, then she sails to Colombo
and marries him on the dock. A photo shows her sitting up on a dais with him, wearing
a wreath of marigolds and a confident memsahib’s half-smile.. She looks
intelligent and strong-minded, used to running things the right way.
________________________________________________
Although the man’s social credentials are impeccable,
it’s much too late for a hasty marriage.
And of course it’s completely out of the question for Mary to keep me.
The rule is that she must never know my new name – it
has to be a complete break. Kathleen has other ideas.
Somehow she persuades the doctor, or maybe the lawyer,
to tell her who is adopting me. Perhaps she feels she must know, in order to be
sure she has made the right decision. However she manages it, she finds out my
new name.
For seventeen years she never once speaks of me to her
daughter, but she reads the Herald.
In December 1962 she comes to Mary with the paper.
You’d
better see this. The girl’s come dux.
Maker
unknown
I’m staying in Mary’s spare room. She opens the
wardrobe and shows me two carefully shrouded Victorian cotton dresses. They come
from Kathleen’s mother Jane’s family in Tewkesbury.
Kathleen carried them with her on the ship to Ceylon and then on to Tauranga. Now
Mary doesn’t know what to do with them. They’re rare survivals, I say. Would
she like to give them to Te Papa?
The curator lays them out and explains how she can
date them back to the early 1800s. The checked one has an unusual waist: you
can let it out to allow discreetly for a pregnant stomach. She thinks they would
almost certainly have been made by a local dressmaker.
They go off to join the crowded racks of dresses, running
up to the 1960s, listed in the catalogue as Maker: Unknown.
___________________________________________________
My mother sews all her own clothes, as well as mine
and my sister’s, on the ornate Singer treadle machine my grandmother gave her
when she got married. Though she never
uses dressmakers, I know about them because down the road in the Mount Eden
shops, not far from our flat above the grocer’s shop on the corner of Valley Road, two
large and imposing women run a drapery and dressmaking business. Mum sends me
there to buy Sylko thread and what I hear as Cruel needles. Every few weeks, if
I pick a time when the dressmakers aren’t too busy and ask nicely, they give me
leftover scraps of cotton, wool and satin to make dolls’ clothes.
I don’t make my first proper dress until I’m fifteen,
struggling stubbornly with a striped cotton shirtwaister. Two years later, with
the school ball looming up, I fearlessly tackle the mandatory bell-skirted
brocade dress. Sandra Coney and I stand out for choosing the same deep crimson,
instead of the usual wishy-washy pastels.
After I turn eighteen and get engaged, my mother comes
tentatively into my room with the Woman’s
Weekly. She’s used to me turning up my teenage nose at her ideas, but she wants to show me a photo of a simply
cut wedding dress with a draped obi sash at the back, made from a Vogue pattern.
She’s so happy when I say I love it, then buy yards of white linen and spend
weeks making it.
A year after the wedding, I cut it up to make a shirt,
but I keep the short lace mantilla I made to go with it.
___________________________________________________
Between us my mother and I sewed hundreds of clothes.
All of them have disappeared.
I wear the bedjacket and shawl she knitted for me; the
ecru lace cloth she crocheted to go in my villa lives in a box, along with the
lace edging she tatted for her mother’s nightdress when she was seven, and my mantilla,
decayed into holes. On top are the loose delicate folds of Kathleen’s blue
dress.
"Tomorrow I am receiving advance copies of my new poetry
anthology... it will be
launched next Sunday by Fiona Kidman here in 
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