Sister

Oct 12, 2022 | Blog

I think of the morning we came home from school
You did not understand, school lasted till three.
I was more scared of Mum than the teacher but I came home with you.
You were only five, I thought, forgetting I had been five two years ago and had stayed when I wanted to go because I would get the strap.
My heart was beating like that tap dance I made you do
at the concerts I organised at the river when you giggled
and couldn’t stop and wet your pants in front of everyone
seven kids and a dog.
I did not feel very loving then.
And then and then － you are dead, my sister, my sister is dead －
I want to run through the streets crying.
Last week your daughter and I remembered, ‘Thirty years,’
she said, ‘I can’t believe it. Thirty years.’
‘Yesterday,’ I said, ‘yesterday. We can run through the streets together －
‘although,’ I added, ‘I’ll have to take my stick…’
I think of all those words, the tellings, the books, the dancing, the day I threw your teddy bear, Edward B Jones, up on the roof…
How could I have done that?
The slow awakenings － the realisation － this is forever
these ongoing lessons －
how hard it is to love, how vulnerable we make ourselves.
Easy targets － we run and sing and dance towards these lessons
and as we stumble, recover, keep walking, one foot in front of the other,
falling, smiling, failing, crying, laughing, hugging, falling again
that forever mixed-up lesson － how easy, how hard, oh how bloody hard
it is to love.

Renée

The Arrangement of Words

Jun 8, 2022 | Blog

Kia ora Koutou,

I was involved with the online launch of I Will Not Cede, a collection of poems by the late Heather McPherson (pub Spiral) last Sunday. It made me reflect how often, through the centuries, we have gathered to hear poets speak their words, writers read their stories, groups act out their experiences or to listen to someone tell us about a poet and her work. We have sat around campfires, by the lights of candles, under the latest modern lighting systems, and in the darkened auditorium.

It seems something deep inside us likes the feeling of gathering together to show our love and respect for those whose placement and arrangement of words has touched something deep inside us. As humans we respond to these skills. The success of weekend gatherings like next weekend’s Featherston Booktown, which presents writers in conversation and as presenters, is another example of this.

Think of people in the time of Charles Dickens, gathering in groups outside the newspaper office on the day his latest weekly chapter was published, someone grabbing the still warm paper, giving it quickly to the one who could read, who then read out loud the latest chapter of say, Great Expectations or Nicholas Nickleby, to the eager group of listeners. The listeners would gasp, laugh, look horrified when the villain was creeping around doing his evil deeds, or clap their hands and cheer when the ending was happy. They walked away afterwards shaking their head or smiling or looking anxious. Dickens was a master of the old maxim — Make ‘em wait, Make ‘em wait, Make ‘em wait ’ — and his chapters often end at a point where that group of listeners could speculate about what might happen next. The characters, Bill Sikes (or Sykes), Mr Squeers (so scary I have never been able to read Nicholas Nickleby since), Miss Haversham, Joe Gargery, and all the others became real people – what would happen to them? What would they do next? Would Good triumph over Evil? Would the innocent young (and sometimes rather dull) young maiden, be swept up into the villains’s clutches, or would she end happily in the (heroic but sometimes deadly dull) hero’s arms, looking forward to a deadly dull but somehow blissful future…?

We forget that only people who could read would buy or borrow Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte) or Middlemarch (George Eliot). This left the rest of us reliant on the kindness or goodwill of others. When I was a kid and up until I was around twenty I often came across people who could not read. The man who had to get his daughter (still at school) to read him the latest Best Bets so he would know which number to say to the bookie. And the woman whose eyesight had been damaged from hours of sewing and knitting by candlelight whose two daughters took it in turns to read her the romance novels she loved.

It was not until reading was taught to everyone that novels, newspapers, nonfiction became truly available. And then along came Films and TV so if you wanted to, you could cut out reading altogether. Even now there are those among us who cannot read as the people who go into prisons and teach reading will testify. If you can’t read, you can’t get a driver’s licence. Think about that. What it does to the person who has probably already got strikes against them in terms of a warm home and a decent income.

From way back, poets, lyricists, writers of fact and fiction, have made us sing and lightened our mood because although they show us inequities and painful circumstances, they also make us smile — sometimes they bring tears to our eyes and other times they make us dance — but possibly the best times are those when a crowd of us gather together to pay homage to a writer who arranged words in a way that made and makes us think, laugh, act — smile and remember. Thank you Heather for being one of those.

Renée

Pansy plants and other delights

Jun 1, 2022 | Blog

Kia ora Koutou, thanks to the angel who keeps my garden weed free I have some pansy plants and other delights which will bloom in spring…I tried staked tomatoes last year (having always planted the ground hugging ones before) and they were great and fruitful so I might put some more in this season. I remember that In 1924 Ursula Bethell, with her partner Effie Pollen, started their garden at Rise Cottage, Christchurch. Ursula began writing poems when she was fifty and her first collection was published the year I was born, 1929, but I didn’t read it till many years later. I didn’t read any poems written by women and especially not by women who lived in this country.

When I went to school we were taught The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes and we had to learn all 17 (or was it 19?) verses which we chanted in a singsong kind of way, terrified that if we forgot a line or a word the whole class would have to go back to the beginning and start again. I had a good memory and a sense of rhythm and The Highway man is a dramatic story so it was easy — there were these characters — the Highwayman, the Landlord’s daughter Bess, the soldiers who tied a rifle to her breast so that if she called out a warning the gun would go off…and of course, of course, Bess, with her long dark hair, called out a warning, the gun went off, the highwayman was warned and galloped away safe…and then…and then …he discovers that the beautiful Bess has died to warn him and he goes back in an agony of pain and disbelief shouting a curse to the sky and gets shot down like a dog on the highway…a bunch of lace at his throat…

And still on a winter’s night they say
When the wind is in the trees
And the moon is a ghostly galleon
Tossed upon cloudy seas

along comes the ghost of the highwayman…riding, riding, riding…

I loved every melodramatic line of it. No wonder I had a Mills & Boon phase when I was 12. I used to read them so fast, finish, start the next, read that, finish, on to the next… and then one day that phase stopped. Like when you eat great wedges of Coconut Ice, one after the other, there came a moment when I knew that if I ate/read one more M&B I would be sick, so I stopped.

Many years later when I began reading poems written by poets who lived in this country they were mainly by men. I didn’t find Ursula’s until the 1970s, forty or so years after that first collection was published.

‘Established’ is a good word, much used in garden books.
‘The plant, when established’
Oh, become established quickly quickly, garden
for I am fugitive, I am very fugitive….

I think of these lines every time I plant something, and then there’s the huge excitement when a seed I’ve planted shows its green tip, or the plant that someone else has planted stretches out another leaf or bud.
Oh become established quickly… quickly

Renée

Labour Day

Oct 27, 2021 | Blog

Kia ora koutou,

So, Comrades, Labour Weekend has come and gone and I spent it doing very little. I thought of the value I place on still being able to work, to play around with words but also the freedom to bake a Sultana cake, lie back and read (‘I don’t want to be hard on your mother, Phoebe dear, but I have to say she is the most grasping, selfish and mercenary creature I have ever met.’  Faro’s Daughter by Georgette Heyer) and in between times I changed the sheets, did the washing, hung it out, looked in my diary to see what I was doing this week, fiddled around on the new computer which I love, deleted three pages, wrote another and much better two pages, picked silver beet to steam, checked my tomato plant called Barry, and all is well. He’s doing fine.

I thought of Sam Parnell, carpenter, who, along with other unionists, led the struggle for the eight hour day, which was achieved in 1840 but Labour Day, the annual day off to celebrate that victory only began in 1890. I wondered, as I do every Labour Day, why it never entered Sam’s head (or anyone else’s it seems) to include women working at home as workers? He, and his comrades, gave no thought whatsoever to the hours women worked at home. Unpaid. Who could not afford help either with their kids or in the house. Women got the vote in 1893 but hours of work didn’t seem to be high on their agenda. True, they were mainly middle class women – working class women were too busy working.. they simply did not have time to go on marches or attend meetings. We can be pretty sure though, that without a cook/housekeeper and someone to wash and iron her clothes, someone who thought she was lucky to get half a day off a week and be paid a pittance, neither Kate Sheppard nor her companions would have been able to lead marches and go to meetings. We can be thankful however, that instead of attending tea parties and chatting about fashion and the dear Queen, they chose to use their free time to march and make a noise about the rights of women to vote. They did not however, raise the subject of the eight hour working day for women who worked as washerwomen, cooks or did housework.

So there are mixed messages about Labour Day. There are still divides. There are still people who work long hours for pitiful wages, others who have Labour Day off and go shopping (and good on them because they guarantee the ones behind the counters keep their jobs), but we can be sure that there are still women working long hours, caring for children or needy others, who do not get a cent for the work they do nor are their hours kept to eight. Yes, I know there is a wage for Carers (and very few of them would do only eight hours) but I also know that there are so many hoops to jump through that a large number of carers just get sick of it and give up.

So the Busk raises its hat to those women and men who work long hours because they have to, or for love, or who work because they get a government subsidy to care for a whanau member, or those who do it because there’s no–one else to do it, all those whose hours of work stretch far past eight hours per day (or night). Without you, some people’s lives would be wretched indeed.

Homai te pakipaki…

Renée