Blog 5 - Thursday 4th of January - In the Footsteps of Fine Men.

I wake poised to sneeze, which is terrifying. I don’t have any stitches but seem to have been glued together, so I have a fear of bursting forth like an intestinal geyser. Fortunately, the sneezeis muffled, not hearty, but leaves a vague sense of disappointment. My scar winds above and below my belly button, which once could have fitted an emerald the size of a large pitted or not pitted olive, but now has been glued shut. I need never worry about developing omphalophobia.

There is a text from Michael, my ex-husband, who I fondly call Moo Hefner, as he entertains women at his holiday house in the Marlborough Sounds, where they pout and strut about in bikinis between the pongas and kowhai bushes. I know this because, try as I might to resist, I cannot help myself staring in amazement at the photos these nymphettes post of themselves.

I am supposed to be doing up the old cottage in the Sounds for myself, but Moo Hefner, as always, controls the project .His text says, Where are the tiles? Get your people to call my people. I feel anxious, as I know Moo Hefner sees me as a financial burden, even though we worked together to build our nest egg, which seems continually to be battered by an increasingly unreliable world.

Moo Hefner’s permanent residence is aboard a big old boat, which, like all expensive toys, costs a fortune to sit idly growing moss on its bottom in the Picton marina. Guests are confined to two-minute showers and freeze to death in the winter, as the generator cannot be turned on at night, for its archaic efforts keep all the residents around the marina awake.

Mum comes into my room in a creepy but delicate way, as if she is playing soft piano notes with her feet. All her actions are designed to soothe my wounds because she loves me. Mum is not a person compromised by a surfeit of empathy, but she is always fair and consistent in fluffing the feathers of her three daughters, who are always screeching for her attention.

She is wearing a bright housecoat with big blue flowers and light puffy sleeves.

“You look cherry,” I say.

“But it is not a cherry day,” she replies. “It is a dreary, grim day which dims one’s sparkle.”

While we have our porridge and tea, we talk about star signs, with Mum a shining example of a perfectly balanced Libran, carefully weighing her words and thoughts — which is all very well until a Taurean charges through her delightful china shop. Mum, who is much too pragmatic to believe in star signs but does believe the exception proves the rule, tells me about Boydie, her Libran son-in-law, throwing his scales to the wind when watching sport.

She says, “Ash, it is astonishing. He leaps from couch to couch while pumping his fist up and down during All Black games,” while Jo (his Libran son) copies these antics like an interpreter to the deaf.

“You see, Ash,” Mum explains, “I am a Libran, but it is not like me to prostrate myself in ecstasy; these are extreme states of being that I don’t think I’m capable of.”

I think of when Moo Hefner left me, and I would bang my head against the floor or the wall so my tears could soothe my aching soul. My emotions completely govern my intellect, and this trait, I am learning, is unsettling to the Libran.

Mum tells me about a friend of hers who goes to every single game the All Blacks play, at home and right around the world. To Mum, to fly around the world to watch sport would be as unlikely as her wolf-whistling at a workman with his shirt off on a particularly hot day in Remuera.

When I eventually go into the kitchen, I notice it is yesterday’s paper on the bench, and I ask Mum why she hasn’t made her usual short walk to the mailbox, as this — plus taking every single piece of recycling on an individual trip to the bin — gives her at least 2000 steps a day.

Mum sighs, “Ash, I’ve been caught short and I haven’t made it to the letterbox.”

I feel the pang of guilt of one who intrudes into the life of another, and I decide to make amends by tidying up the kitchen. There is a knob of butter on the butter knife, and I go to wash it away, but Mum grabs my wrist to save the hapless knob of butter.

I know this frugality is the result of the Great Depression and the war. I ask her to tell me again what it was like to live at that time.

“Oh darling, the Depression was terrible. The men would knock on the door looking for work so they could feed their families, as there was no social security; and then the war followed. There were coupons for sugar and butter, and we would save them to give to Aunty Ellie so she could feed the farm workers. There was a black market for coupons — just imagine, darling, even in

wartime people were profiteering while others were dying; their names posted on a board outside

the post office.”

I remember as if it were yesterday — June 22nd, 1940. I was 7. My grandparents had left Paris during the Depression to look after me. They had been in NZ for 5 years, and they were sitting hunched around the radio. Lucy was weeping as she heard that the British had sunk the French fleet so that the Germans wouldn’t seize the ships.

Unbelievably, my mother’s father, Hubert, fought for the British, and her grandfather for the French, at the same battlefield — Passchendaele — in World War I. The name Passchendaele now synonymous with mud, blood, and futility.

I think of Churchill’s description of the French: Many are apt to regard the French as a vain, volatile, fanciful, hysterical nation. As a matter of fact, they are one of the most grim, sober, unsentimental, calculating and tenacious races in the world.

I read this description to Mum, and in her literal interpretation of everything, she says, “Well, Churchill is right. The French have been fought over since the beginning of time, and the Germans are always invading France.”

Gigi, Matt and Hector are coming for lunch today, as it is Gigi’s birthday, and Mum is making egg and salmon sandwiches. She says she must go and buy fresh Molenberg, and I say if she lived in China she could get her bread delivered.

“No darling, that’s just a lot of work for a lot of people.”

As is the way with Mum and me, the mere mention of China transports us to China and Chinese foot binding, and the unlikelihood that a woman with a foot the size of a thumb could buy her bread herself. Mum quotes her mother, Louise, telling her that foot binding was done as men — Japanese men in particular — find hobbling women sexually seductive.

Mum quotes Louise a lot, just as we quote Mum a lot. Louise’s husband — Mum’s dad — died when Louise was 60, and adamant that there was no place in society for a woman alone, she married a Dane called George, who she renamed Thomas. She met him on a ship coming from Greenland to New Zealand. He had been an electrician on ships but had fallen down the hold and had one massive crease across his huge forehead, which sat atop a huge head on a

stooped body with giant hands.

Anyway, I was a favourite of Thomas, whom my grandmother would call Tom-aaa, and he gave me a book on New Zealand native birds, an Arabian knife, and made me an origami bird whose wings moved when you pulled the tail. I thought it was magical. When my grandmother was getting quite old, he took her to live in a caravan in the Far North, which didn’t have a step, so she couldn’t get out of the caravan by herself — and Thomas only fed her on raw vegetables.

Out of this austerity, and what seemed at times unrequited love, she created some of her most beautiful paintings, as she was an artist.

I ring the boys to tell them my condition has a 40% mortality rate, and Charlie says, “Shit, I’d better not give you more bad news then. But there was a big boom in the kitchen yesterday, and your bedroom window is now on the kitchen roof.”

I ask them if they are watering my indoor hydrangea, which sits on the kitchen table, and know they aren’t when Gus says he doesn’t need to, as it’s raining.

I tell them I am writing, and they want to know if I am writing about them.

“You’ll never know, as you don’t read,” I reply. They say, “That’s ok. If it’s any good, it’ll be made into a movie, and we’ll go to that.”

I ask Gus if he can fix the window, as there is a sub-tropical storm coming.

He says, “So you want me to feed the cat and fix the window?”

I feel an overwhelming tiredness of disappointment, but I know that my boys have an enormous capacity for love — but they never had a father who taught them what it is to be a fine man. I worry, like all people alone, that they will come and visit me when I am old. They always joke that they will make sure I have a room in the old people’s home with a view over the car park, and I

imagine sitting there, looking at the cars coming in, and hoping they are in one of them.

I tell Mum that I am disappointed in my children sometimes.

She says, without looking up from buttering her sandwiches,

“That’s not the point. Ring the insurance company.”

Matt, Gigi and Hector come for lunch, as it is Gigi’s birthday. Hector sizes up which items in the house are the most precious, and it certainly is not the toys Mum has put out for him. He plays with the curtain chains that hit the window, runs up and down the hall for a kilometre, and puts on

my grandfather’s steel hat from the war.

I think, I hope you never have to wear that. Mum says, “War was long periods of boredom mixed with brief periods of terror.”

The little family leave, and Mum and I sit down to a dinner of sausages and cabbage and sautéed potatoes. Mum tells me to read The Remains of the Day by Zazou Ishiguro, whose name she rattles off like a smooth rattlesnake.

I pass Charley in the bathroom and say I think I’ll call this blog In the footsteps of fine men and he replies “Do you think Great Grandpa would be proud of me straightening my hair? “