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href="#ulink_eb43e870-0a67-5076-90cc-bd1b6f01b0bc">Via Panama
In his Memories Edgar remarks that my mother was a better writer than either he or Selwyn, and that her novel Via Panama was proof of it. He complained that it was gloomy, and it is perhaps not surprising if it was. It was written on her journey back to Christchurch, whence she had fled so impetuously from Frank’s infidelities and his embarrassing failure to keep out of debt. She had been trying to establish a life for herself in London, and had found a flat and, miraculously, a job on the News Chronicle as a journalist. This would pay just about enough to enable her to support herself and her two daughters. She would return to New Zealand to fetch us as soon as she had got the money together.
The first letter she received from Frank said that if she did not come back at once he would take Jane’nFay to South America and she would never see us again. Rightly, she did not believe him. She did not reply. But his second letter was brief and to the point. Fay had polio and Margaret must come home at once before it was ‘too late’. Overwhelmed by anxiety and guilt, she took the next boat home, giving up both the flat and her job. Trapped on shipboard for six weeks, without news of her younger daughter, not knowing what she would find when she disembarked, she spent the time writing a novel.
Via Panama was about the shipboard voyage out; and contained a thinly disguised portrait of my father, whom she clearly still loved, and of her fellow-passengers, mostly New Zealanders, whom she affected to despise for their drunken and provincial ways. The novel was published both in England and the US to critical acclaim – and for a thirty-year-old young woman it was a triumph – but when it reached New Zealand there was uproar. She had insulted her hosts: she was an ingrate, the worst kind of homie. She put on airs: she thought herself too good for New Zealand. She was not Public Enemy Number One – that role was preserved for my father, who was standing for election as a socialist candidate – but she was Public Enemy Number Two. Frank lost the election because of Via Panama – or so he believed – and my mother was so shaken and upset by its reception that she resolved – as her father had once done before her – never to write a ‘serious’ book again. From henceforth she would write only to entertain. (Edgar’s first novel, The Passion for Romance, written when he was at Oxford, had been ‘serious’, had taken him three years to write and earned him only £6.19s. It was on financial grounds that he came to the same decision. Or so he said. Forget art, forget literature, forget enlightening his readers as to the ways of the world, and the state of their souls, the rent must be paid.)
In my mother’s footsteps, some forty years later, I was to write a television play about an English husband going home with his new second wife to the New Zealand outback – affectionately known as the boondocks – to an uneasy welcome which included Pavlova cake and separate beds. That got me into trouble, too. I was accused of stereotyping New Zealand women, portraying them as backward in their attitudes, cake bakers all. Useless to say but I’m not writing documentary, I am under no obligation to produce a fair and balanced view, this is a particular story about particular people – such arguments never convince those predisposed to take offence. But I was older than my mother was when she wrote Via Panama, and tougher, I daresay, and others came to my defence and I was soon forgiven. But for my poor mother, alone and far from home, the uproar was definitive. Had she been to school, I daresay, she would have been better able to cope.
For a time my mother was able to support us, just about, by her pen. Over the next few years, under the name Pearl Bellairs or Bentley Ridge, she was to write a run of romantic serials – Velvet and Steel, The Cups of Alexander – which were published in London by Herbert Jenkins, then Edgar’s publisher. Her editor wrote in enthusiasm to say she had readers queuing up for them in the bookstores as they came out. She’d write by hand in bed, in tiny script, with a fountain pen; and then get up and type it all out on a clattery typewriter. My contribution was to pick out the ink which clogged up the keys. I used a pin. The o’s and the e’s, the most frequent of the letters in the alphabet closely followed by the t’s, were always most in need of cleaning. I loved doing it. Typescripts, in the days of the typewriter, always had an individuality of their own. Microsoft produces a clean, uniform print, for which we should be grateful, but something’s lost as something’s gained.
My mother borrowed the name Pearl Bellairs from the vapid romantic novelist in Aldous Huxley’s novel Crome Yellow – she was saying, I suppose, to anyone who might happen to make the connection: ‘I can do better than this, I am worth more than this, it’s just I have to make a living.’
She worried greatly about the morality of writing romance: she thought it was wrong to put false ideas into the heads of young women: better that they understood that marriage was not necessarily a happy end, and that poor helpless girl catches strong handsome rich man was simply not the way the world went. And she had a point: Velvet and Steel – with its overtones of Pride and Prejudice – the helpless shop girl wooed by her wealthy employer, bringing him to heel by virtue of charm, wit and personality, would today, alas, read as a sorry case of sexual harassment.
Then the war came, and forget principle, the sea-lanes became impassable. Ships were torpedoed, manuscripts went down with everything else: there was a shortage of paper, and none to be spared for frivolities like fiction: that was the end of that, for four or five years.
My mother took advantage of the impossibility of earning a living from these problematic works, and started what she called her magnum opus: a book of philosophy, which dealt with the relationship between morality and aesthetics. She did not type this out: it remained in handwriting: thousands of overwritten pages, which would get in a hopeless muddle on the kitchen table. I wished she would not; I knew even when small how important it was to keep papers collated and in moderate order. The eighty per cent behind you had to be more or less finished and complete, if it was not to distract you and make you restless as you moved ahead into the unknown. What you were working on currently required chaos, what was behind must be orderly, or you would be overwhelmed by confusion.
After the war, my mother said to me, when she thought once again of aspiring to be a ‘proper’ writer, styles of writing had changed. Novels ceased to be discursive, writers could not hide behind their anonymity; politics and social comment began to enter in. The novel was becoming a confessional, and readers demanded that the writer speak the truth as he or she knew it, and my mother’s truths were difficult enough to live through, she said, let alone writing about them as well.
There were various to-ings and fro-ings between my parents and then it was Frank’s turn to walk off into the mist. This was a literal mist, more than just the usual cloud of childhood unknowing. I was growing up. I was six. We stood upon a beach on a rainy day, my father, my mother, Jane and I, and my father walked off along the shore without us, saying, ‘Don’t ever leave the children with friends. Have them properly adopted.’ And then the mist swallowed him up; the tall, dark, consoling figure faded away, without so much as a glance behind. My mother was crying, which is not surprising. He was divorcing her for infidelity. She had only thirty pounds in the world, we had nowhere to live, and my father had gone to catch a ship to England, ‘home’, which was due to leave within the hour. Once the gangplank was up he changed his mind but it was too late then.
Matters had come to a head between them. To demonstrate to him just how upsetting she found his persistent adultery she had spent a night with a passing stranger, and told him that she had. But instead of showing remorse for his own behaviour he had been outraged by hers, and had started divorce proceedings within the hour. It was different for a man than a woman, as common wisdom had it then. Even now women will do this kind of thing, believing tit for tat will somehow cure matters but of course it never does. I have never known a confession of infidelity work anything but harm. The couple who ‘tell the truth to each other’ after their first visit to the marriage-guidance counsellor seldom enjoy many more nights together.