So Far, For Now, page 21
Anyway, I’d also met the writer Emer Lyons, who works in the department, and our first encounter had its own surprises. She is quintessential Irish, wide green eyes, red-blonde hair, a manner as lively as a dancer. Where is your home town? I asked her, to which she replied Bandon, County Cork.
And when I said, well, that is where my granny came from too, she asked the next question of me. Where in Bandon?
St Patrick’s Quay.
That is where I grew up, she told me then.
So, there was already a feeling of homecoming when I arrived at Room 103, some innate sense of belonging. In association with the Embassy of Ireland, Sonja had conducted a survey the year before, mapping the Irish community and people of Irish heritage in Aotearoa New Zealand. There is an estimate, based on this research, that suggests some six-hundred-thousand people fit this description. I had never been alone, I just hadn’t seen it. Nor, I guess, had my dad, but then this Irishness was not borne with distinction when he came here. Neither had it been a badge of honour when Albert Black arrived. There has been a steady influx of skilled Irish workers arriving in the country since 2000. The face of the diaspora has changed.
The Embassy of Ireland was established in Wellington in 2017 by Ambassador Peter Ryan. One of the things that I have noticed at gatherings he and his wife Theresa host is the diverse range of people they ask along: people from every walk of life, there is little sense of a formal diplomatic function. And the ambassador associates closely with Māori culture. In his company, New Zealanders are acknowledged as a mixture of people, and the embassy provides a natural meeting ground.
I thought about this a great deal during my time in Dunedin. It was never my project, but what I spent a fair bit of time doing in Room 103 was re-reading a play by the Irish playwright Brian Friel, called Translations. Peter Ryan had given me a copy of it. I wondered at first why he had given it to me, but as soon as I began to read I was struck by parallels between the colonisation of Ireland by the British and of Aotearoa, the way language had robbed the land, in each case, of its true meaning and identity. At almost exactly the same time as the sealers and whalers were arriving on the Ōtākou peninsula, in Ireland, the British were replacing Irish law and language.
I knew my Synge and Behan and Beckett and some other of the twentieth century Irish playwrights. But, somehow, I was not aware of Friel, who has been described — I’ve heard since — as the ‘Irish Chekhov’. Translations is simply one of the best plays I’ve come across in a long time. I need to explain here why that is: the play is set in 1833 in County Donegal in a hedge school, one of the small illegal schools set up to teach children from faiths that didn’t conform with the governing Anglicans (in other words, Catholics or Presbyterians). A young teacher is coaxing a girl with speech difficulties to speak; straight away we recognise the constraints of language, the necessity to have a voice if we are to survive in the world. Manus, the teacher, is the son of Hugh, the master (Hugh, by the way, was my father’s name). The audience is given to understand that the language spoken is Irish Gaelic, though the play is primarily written in English. Few of those assembled speak English, although Greek and Latin are taught and some of the cast are fluent speakers of these languages, too.
Manus is poor, like everyone there, but he dreams of marrying Máire. Close by, a detachment of the Royal Engineers has camped. Their job in Ireland is to make an Ordnance Survey, in other words to map the country for the benefit of the English government. In order to do this, they need the Gaelic place names to be recorded in an English version. Their surprise translator is Hugh’s older son and Manus’s brother, Owen, who has been absent a fair while and is now fluent in both languages. He comes upon the gathering of students and masters.
Manus asks his brother if he has enlisted, to which Owen replies: ‘Me a soldier? I’m employed as a part time, underpaid, civilian interpreter. My job is to translate the quaint archaic tongue you people persist in speaking into the King’s good English.’
And you can see how things will go downhill from there. The man in charge of the military detachment is starchy and self-opinionated Captain Lancey. He arrives accompanied by a lieutenant called Yolland. Yolland’s job will be to enter the new names of every hill, stream, rock, every piece of ground in a Name Book. Owen’s function is to pronounce each name in Irish and then provide the English translation. Lancey sets out to explain what is going to happen – a ‘general triangulation which will embrace detailed hydrographic and topographic information which will be executed on a scale of six inches to the English mile’. He looks to Owen to interpret.
Owen says easily, ‘A new map is being made of the whole country.’
Later, Manus will say to his brother, but you didn’t translate everything.
So the days roll on, and Croc Ban, which means Fair Hill, becomes Knockban, and Bun na hAbhann, which literally means the mouth of the river, somehow becomes Burnfoot, and a ridge called Druim Dubh becomes mixed up with the name of the place they named the day before.
But even as the landscape takes on new meanings, Yolland is being drawn in and tempted by an Ireland that appears more appealing than his life in England. His eyes have turned with yearning towards Máire, and he wants to learn Irish. He says longingly, ‘Even if I did speak Irish I’d always be an outsider here, wouldn’t I. I may learn the password but the language of the tribe will always elude me, won’t it? The private core will always be … hermetic, won’t it?’
It’s Hugh, the father, who tells the lieutenant that Irish is a rich language, full of mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception — a syntax opulent with tomorrows.
But the warning is not enough. Yolland will pay for his fantasies with his life, and in return Lancey will see that the village pays with their homes and their livelihoods.
And so, I see that some histories are universal. Wars happen, people are pulled apart from one another, land is lost because of words and the way they can be misinterpreted. I see how a people can be colonised by language. Inevitably, I look to the way that Aotearoa New Zealand’s history was rewritten from the time that settlers renamed it. I may be from settler stock on one frontier, but I see what language does to strip people of their identity; it’s similar to the way people of different cultures change their names in order to blend with what they perceive as the common voice, usually through anglicisation. I live in a village suburb known as Hataitai in the city of Wellington. But once I might have said that I lived in Whātaitai, named after one of the taniwha that is said to have created the harbour of Te Whanganui-a-Tara, otherwise The Great Harbour of Tara, and all of these old words are beautiful to say. The W has been dropped from Hataitai, and even if it were still spelled in its original version, the area referred to then is situated some kilometres away from here. As for Wellington, named by the New Zealand Company, it reflects the Duke of Wellington, the victor at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. This seems utterly irrelevant in terms of our harbour.
As for the stretch of water that I overlook, it’s called Cook Strait, after the English explorer Captain Cook, but Māori know it as Te Moana-o-Raukawa. Many places were named by Captain Cook; perhaps you can’t blame him for this, he didn’t know what to call places he saw for the first time and, like the Royal Engineers who couldn’t get their tongues around the Gaelic words, te reo Māori might have been just too difficult. Some of Cook’s names have a sting — he called Te Kauwae-a-Māui Cape Kidnappers, following an altercation with a local tribe member. Who knows what part language may have had to play?
For that matter, my father hero-worshipped Cook and, stripped away of its romanticism, his own cloudy past reveals some uncomfortable truths, including his family’s association with the Royal Irish Constabulary, set up to police hedge schools. His accent and insistence on the King’s English mark him out as descending from a position of authority, although that was not apparent in the life that he led in this country. It was not until I read Friel’s play that I made this connection between the RIC and hedge schools. But perhaps I should acknowledge that in the English that I speak, I may have inadvertently inherited some of that long-ago privilege.
What we need when we learn a language are also the words that heal. We cannot undo the past, but in confronting it we have the opportunity to do better; in particular, to listen with respect to the languages that others speak. If learning correct English was painful for me as a child, I better understand how difficult it must be for those new to Aotearoa, speaking a different language, who must start from the beginning.
I do not speak te reo, although its vocabulary cross-references into my everyday conversations. But I have listened to the language for almost as long as I can remember, its rhythms and cadences familiar. Ian, my husband, spoke it as a young child when he lived with his grandparents in the King Country, but then lost it when he started school, where Māori was not allowed to be spoken. He felt this loss, and yet it was never really gone, lying dormant in hidden parts of his memory, suddenly appearing when neither he nor his listeners expected it. I remember his shy startled look when it crept up on him like that. While I lay no claim to the language, I believe that restoring it to its rightful place is essential to our collective understanding of who we are. In Translations, Hugh the father says, towards the end of the play, that ‘it is not the literal past, the “facts” of history that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language … We must never cease renewing those images, because once we do, we fossilise.’
Which brings me back with sorrow and some regret to Hugh, my own father. I wish we had understood each other better. I wanted his physical presence and his affection in a way that was hard for him to show, and I think now I may have hardened towards him. He had lost the power of speech on his deathbed. It was a late move, but I told him I loved him and gave him the little notebook and pencil he was using to communicate. He wrote in shadowy lettering ‘Nothing to say’. Perhaps he could have added the word ‘more’— nothing more to say. If I thought at the time that language had failed us both, I think now that I was wrong. In some ways, my father had little, but what he had, he wanted to give me, his gift the power to speak with eloquence when it was demanded of me. To understand and articulate the language I was given. It has taken me further than either of us imagined. This was the best he could do and, in turning to look back over my shoulder, I see that he gave me a richness in my being.
But sometimes when I listen to Gaelic-speaking friends, I will hear a sudden familiar note, a timbre, and find myself wondering what else my father knew.
These are some of the things I thought about in Room 103. I didn’t do much else.
The door to Room 103 at 99 Albany Street, Dunedin, 2021.
This new condition
Truffles
This is not really about truffles, although they come into it. It’s about a man called Luc Lanlo. Ian and I met him in Menton in 2006, that magical year when we lived in the south of France, purring away our days in a Provençal apartment overlooking the Mediterranean. The dream time. The place I wake up some mornings and still see: the blond sand on the seashore; the wild dahlia-red skies of evening; the town pink and gold in the afternoon light.
I was in Menton because New Zealand still honours Katherine Mansfield and sends a writer there every year to live in the south of France, as she did. We had been there just a few days when the deputy mayor held a reception for us. This was Luc, a vivid dark man, born in Madagascar. A man who loved this town and loved literature, and somehow, astonishingly, seemed to love us. The love affair between all of us began the moment we set eyes on one other. When I say all of us, there were Luc and his husband, art historian Michel Imbert, and Michel’s mother Berthe, and Ian and me. Neither Luc nor Berthe spoke English, and Ian spoke no French. My French is halting; Michel and I bridged as many gaps as possible. I think back to the ‘conversations’ we had with Luc when Michel was absent with a kind of wonder. All I can say is that they worked.
That first meeting took place beneath a canopy of Jean Cocteau artwork, the ceiling of La Salle des Mariages, city hall’s official wedding room. There was a small function held to hand over the keys to the Katherine Mansfield room in Villa Isola Bella, near the edge of the Italian border. Then Luc, in a sudden gleeful moment, decided that Ian and I needed a second marriage ceremony and so we were united again, before I could say a word. What followed, during that sojourn on the Côte d’Azur, were concerts with our new friends, beachside dinners, trips to the mountains, conversations in the town square, and surprises sprung upon us in a spirit of merriment.
Luc and Michel and Berthe owned a winter house on the edge of the sea in Menton and a summer house in the medieval village of Gorbio, which nestles among hills, bougainvillea lacing its walls. The people who live there are called Gorbarins. Beneath Gorbio lies Monaco, in one direction, and Italy in the other. Some days we would go to Gorbio on the bus and sit under the shade of a three-hundred-year-old elm tree that spread across the square, or some nights by car with Gordon, a friend from New Zealand.
On the last night ever that the two of us were in Menton, Berthe walked into Italy and gathered truffles. From a market, I supposed. I couldn’t see her digging round the roots of oak trees, surely someone must have done that for her, but the truffles were fresh. I have always been fascinated by truffles, their mysterious underground existence, a fungus latched onto its host. I first saw them at a research station near Invercargill, where a scientist was experimenting to see whether they could be successfully grown in New Zealand. They were nuggety little things in a basin, emitting an odd cloying scent. I couldn’t match them in my mind’s eye with Colette’s famous remark that if she couldn’t ‘have too many truffles’ she would ‘do without truffles’. But they fired something in my imagination. Years later, I wrote a whole novel dedicated to the search for truffles closer to home. Songs from the Violet Café is set in a nameless town, although it’s so clearly Rotorua that I’ve never tried to deny it. There is a lake, an island, purple evenings. The imaginary café stands at the same address where Ian and I lived in the first years of our marriage, a place now occupied by a high-rise motel.
In Gorbio, we feasted on Berthe’s ravioli flecked with white truffe, and it was different from any truffle I have eaten before or since. We ate saffron prawns too, and blancmange, and drank a dark chardonnay. The table was laid with heavy silver cutlery on a crimson cloth; the walls of the dining room were bone-white stone, decorated with dark red paintings by an Indian artist called Raza. And all the while the lights of two countries glimmered beneath us.
When we came to leave, the family showered us with gifts: a small mirror etched with a Cocteau sketch tucked into a red velvet pouch for me; for Ian, whose birthday it was the next day, a white bone-china plate decorated with a Cocteau drawing. It shows a young man with a flaring nose, a curled lip and a fish for an eye. It hangs in my house still. We all wept then, promising that some day we would meet again. We would come back. Or Luc would come to New Zealand. Somehow the magic would go on.
Luc was at the railway station the next morning to say goodbye again. He helped us load our cases aboard the bullet-nosed TVG bound for Paris. He stood on the platform, his arm raised as the train drew away, gathered speed, took us beyond Menton.
I would see him three more times. Ian never did.
A few months later, I returned to France for a writers’ tour. There was a reception at the New Zealand embassy in Paris, hosted by the ambassador, Sarah Dennis. She told me she had a surprise for me – Luc and Michel and Berthe, who had made a special trip to see me. There they were, all lined up, shouting ‘Voilà’, laughing boisterously at my delight.
Years passed. Luc had relinquished his mayoral duties in the year following our departure. At New Year, he and Michel would phone up at midnight, shouting unintelligible greetings down the line. Then, in 2016, I made a trip south while on a visit to Paris, to see a friend in Marseilles. She and her husband were going to a conference close to Menton and volunteered to drop me off for the day. The town was crammed with people. The family were at their winter place and I had trouble finding my way back there, along the seafront.
It was almost like the old days, only Ian was back home in New Zealand, and the household in Menton had expanded to include Majod, whom Luc and Michel had adopted. I can’t remember what we ate that day, but I remember the excitement, the exchange of gifts. One of Majod’s roles in the house was to give massages. When I said lightly that was just what I felt like, I was ushered into their specially set-up massage room, facing the sea. I lay down on the table and was ministered to by Majod. It felt as if I had been re-admitted to the family. The new expanded family. We rang Ian and had a conversation that was sleepy at his end. It hit me then, just how much he had been part of the whole Menton venture.
Now Luc said we must walk through the town together. As we made our way through the crowded streets, I remembered other walks. The daily stroll to get an English-language newspaper at the news stand; the way we would often time this for lunchtime, to eat under a tree in the square. Things were the same but not the same. I bought a tablecloth at my favourite linen shop. Luc bought me a huge bottle of limoncello. Just along the street we came to the flight of stone steps that leads up to the local cemetery, where Ian had spent days admiring the ornate designs of the headstones and mausoleums. Our son-in-law had visited us in 2006 and taken a picture of Ian ascending those steps, wearing his little pack, a slight stoop in his back, heading away from us.
