Something for the Birds

Jacqueline Fahey

• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781775581567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito artistico

Fizzing with wit and style and featuring original illustrations by the author, this lively, humorous, and tragic memoir traces the roots of a distinguished painter and her crucial role in New Zealand's feminist movement. Exploring the author's Irish ancestors; childhood in provincial Timaru, New Zealand; bohemian life as a student; and marriage to celebrated psychiatrist Fraser Macdonald, these stories highlight the evolution of culture and visual arts in New Zealand while they brilliantly depict her courageous and flamboyant trek through life.

CHAPTER ONE

He Rode Like a Cossack

‘He rode like a Cossack,’ my mother would announce randomly and quite often. Then she would add, ‘Oh! His beautiful red hair, like an Irish water dog.’ All declared as if she were quoting Shakespeare.

My mother certainly was quoting, because she never knew my great-grandfather and nor for that matter did her mother, who would have been little more than a baby when he died. It would seem then that these stories about Michael Gerity must have evolved through constant repeating from my great-grandmother to my grandmother and then to my mother, so that I am the last to repeat and remember. The basic plot went something like this. Michael had a fine horse called Nottingley. He was either all black or all white – sadly I can’t remember which – but whether black or white Michael loved him. His last ride was out past the Washdyke Bridge on the grand occasion of the Point to Point. There was good prize money, and of course Michael won, and also of course there were drinks all round afterwards at the Washdyke Pub. With the return of the watchers back to Timaru, word spread of Michael’s triumph, and my great-grandmother set herself up to wait for him and Nottingley to come home.

The Geritys built the first two-storeyed house in Timaru, and it included a large turret on top of which was their bedroom. This turret overlooked the circular drive, and the circular drive was fringed by cabbage trees. All this is important as it sets the scene for my great-grandmother’s heartbreak. As the first light allowed some view of the drive she heard Nottingley galloping, approaching. With joy and relief she flung up the window – and saw that Nottingley was riderless. ‘He is dead,’ she said in the most factual way, and closed the window.

Michael Gerity’s body was found in the river that day, and in due course the verdict was death by misadventure. I don’t think my mother ever believed it – that Nottingley slipped on the bridge or threw Michael into the river, or that he must have been drunk. Great-grandmother said she had never seen him lose control when he had been drinking. It seems Mum secretly believed the gentlemen riders killed him. ‘He was handsome and charming. Why wouldn’t they be jealous of him?’ she would say. ‘And showing them how to ride a horse. Do you think they would like that?’

This sort of storytelling always makes connections, leads us on, or takes us sideways or even backwards. It follows the creative directions that are produced by the first story. So now the house that the young Gerity couple built takes over. Well, they didn’t actually build it. Duval – full name Mauris de H. Duval – designed and supervised its building. He also designed the convent and the Grange in Timaru. The convent has now been demolished, I think well over ten years ago, but the Grange and my great-grandmother’s house and my grandmother’s house are still there. Duval built to last, in stone – a very classic French style. He was also my great-grandmother’s and grandmother’s constant companion. Not surprising, given that they lived in his houses, read French literature and knew about music. With his assistance, they also learnt French cooking. I do wish my mother was still alive: I would like to ask her, Was he homosexual? When did he come to Timaru? What happened to him? They knew he was hiding out, and where better than the ends of the earth? They suspected a sexual scandal, but one that involved women, so perhaps he can’t have been gay. Later the mystery was partially solved. Apparently he was a famous counterfeiter from Paris.

For a time I began to doubt Duval’s very existence. There was no mention of him in any books on architecture. Among those whom I might have expected to know about him there was no information whatsoever. He had seemingly disappeared from the history of New Zealand – if he had happened at all. However, I persisted, and I found him where I should have looked in the first place. I rang the Catholic Archives in Dunedin, and a Mrs Lee gave me my best lead so far. She sent me two copies of the New Zealand Tablet, one dated 13 February 1880 and the other 8 October 1880.

The first describes the laying of the foundation stone of the Convent of the Sacred Heart. There is a great deal about bishops and priests, but not until the last sentence a mention of Duval: ‘Mr M. de H. Duval is the architect.’ In the second article he appears as part of the procession that was formed immediately after the Mass to celebrate the completion of the convent. The procession was marshalled by a Mr J. J. Crofts, assisted by Mr O’Driscoll, three other men and Duval. (Another surprise: my great-grand-stepfather O’Driscoll and Duval are there together in the same sentence.) I remember those processions much later on in time. We children walked on an elaborate carpet of fragrant flowers shaped into wonderful abstract patterns. I imagine that was the sort of carpet that welcomed home the heroes after the fall of Troy. How did that tradition get to Timaru? From Spain? France? Italy? Who knows, I never asked.

Being so distracted by my own memories of the Timaru convent, I nearly missed it. Here it is: ‘Winter Mass was very well rendered by the Choir under the direction of Mr Duval.’ So Duval is also the conductor? But there is more. ‘Miss Gerity presided at the harmonium.’ Here she is: my grandmother in an intimate musical alliance with Duval. And I note she is called Miss Gerity, not Miss O’Driscoll. She has the name of the dead horseman who rode like a Cossack and had hair like an Irish water dog.

When I returned to Timaru in 1990 for the Centennial I visited Great-grandma’s Duval-designed house. It stood in a small section in what had become a shabby part of town round the corner from the Basilica on Craigie Avenue. Great-grandma’s property once encompassed the whole large block, but now her house was awkwardly crammed into a small section littered with parts of old cars. The front door, however, was lovely – more Roman, I would have thought, than French, and inscribed above the lintel in Latin: Veritas. There too was the turret with the bedroom window where Great-grandma, in the early morning light, had seen Nottingley galloping riderless up the drive.

When Great-grandma married again it was to an O’Driscoll. He was a shepherd on an estate. The master of the place wished to propose to Great-grandma but recognised he was not very good with words. He sent O’Driscoll in his place, hoping that he would persuade her of the good sense of the match. O’Driscoll did his duty, and put his master’s case (I bet with his own implied agenda), and then she said, ‘And now speak for yourself, John.’ ‘Speak For Yourself John’ was a popular song of the day and its meaning was clear.

Was their marriage a success? Obviously she was besotted to begin with. She built, down from her house, dotted through her huge garden, little Irish cabins in which she housed her husband’s relations, desperate relations. These were people who had survived the first onslaughts of the famine in Galway and Cork. My mother said nothing that implied O’Driscoll was difficult, and perhaps he had nothing to do with Great-grandma’s children being sent away to boarding school. The two boys went to the new Jesuit college in Melbourne and my grandmother to the convent in Dunedin. The youngest child went to a convent in Sydney where she died. So why does he make me so uneasy? Perhaps I have been seeing too many of those television programmes – you know, the ones where the new top lion who has killed her husband feels a crazy urge, while he’s at it, to do away with the first husband’s offspring. However, if you were Catholic there was no way to get a secondary school education in Timaru. Well, there was the local convent for girls, but what they learnt was limited. For Catholic boys there was nothing at all. That is, after all, a good enough explanation for sending the children away.

My grandmother, Maggie Gerity, went by boat to Dunedin, as indeed the boys did to Melbourne. They would have been lucky if they got back once a year at Christmas – but who knows how lucky or unlucky that would be, for Christmases can be very fraught. One son was disowned, disappeared, married out of the Catholic Church. He was an ambitious guy and started a non-denominational private school for boys in Melbourne. It was a great success. He had done an excellent degree and was a committed scholar. But most important of all he was a man of the world, charming and entertaining.

In the meantime, my grandmother, Maggie, stayed on at the Dominican convent until she was twenty-four. I must say this does seem a little excessive. She played the organ at the convent, and read French novels in French and a great deal of French history. She also developed a passion for Napoleon, for the lives of his mistresses and every move on the fields of his many battles. She did, of course, teach at the convent too, but in all that time obviously never heard God calling. Why didn’t her mother want her to come home at some point? Was there a general expectation that young women teachers like her would eventually hear the call? Maybe their parents were keeping their daughters under wraps? Or simply didn’t want them around? At this time Great-grandma was involved with hotels. She started out with high-style tearooms, but in due course saw a real business opportunity and built a hotel opposite the Law Courts, intending to water and feed visiting judges and lawyers. We have seen this scenario in Wild West films: the strong handsome woman dispensing hospitality with wit and style, ruling her little empire with an iron hand, more interested in her relationship with her husband than her connection with her children.

There are only a couple of stories I remember about O’Driscoll. Like him declaring to their guests in the hotel – members of the court, that is: ‘Come now, Tommy could never do anything like that!’ Tommy was Tommy Hall, the notorious murderer, poisoner. And Great-grandma, his wife, says, ‘He’s as guilty as hell!’ It was Great-grandma who brought Tommy Hall’s wife tempting dishes as she lay dying, slowly poisoned by her husband.

Other things said, remembered, passed on down, remembered again, just fragments now. At this time in Timaru the Orangemen marched every year through the town’s main drag. Imagine how this must have made O’Driscoll’s relations feel. O’Driscoll, in his hotel bar, most publicly offered a large lump of cash for the first man who would march against the Orangemen. He was well aware that informers lurked and that the police, who at that time were largely made up of Orangemen, would immediately be told. They were, and they panicked. They sent for back-up to Christchurch. The police from Christchurch arrived on the train first thing in the morning, all raring to go. But then no march happened, and the police were convinced the Irish Catholics in town had been intimidated by their presence. When the news came through that the counter-march against the Orangemen was taking place in Christchurch, the train back to Christchurch had already left. In Christchurch, with no police escort to speak of, the march went off comparatively peacefully. The plot had been worked out between O’Driscoll and the Barretts of Barrett’s Hotel in Christchurch.

So it follows that my grandfather, Michael Edmund Dennehy, must originally have been welcomed into the O’Driscoll family, for he was a devoted Parnell man. He was also a wit and a drinker. When I saw the film Ryan’s Daughter, it had to be based on my grandfather Michael Dennehy’s family in Ireland. The story was brought forward to the First World War, but it more rightly belonged to the 1850s. My great-grandfather Michael, Dennehy’s father, as a young husband bought the hotel-cum-boarding house-cum-store in Dingle Bay where the film was set. He had three children, a boy and two girls. He became obsessed with the education of his children, and offered the young English schoolteacher at the Protestant school in Galway City free board in return for educating his children – and he meant to university entrance standard. This was against the law, so as each child graduated he sent them off to New Zealand.

He himself left Ireland with his youngest daughter, and he never went back. He lived with his son Michael in Timaru, which was enough to have driven poor Michael to drink. Michael and Great-aunt Mary-Ellen were devoted revolutionaries but their father was, to put it plainly, a religious bigot. When Parnell was exposed as the lover of Kitty O’Shea, he lost all reason. His blazing rows with his son and his daughter at dinnertime became the local theatre.

Great-aunt Mary-Ellen, like Rosie in Ryan’s Daughter, was a beauty. I still have a faded cameo of her. Her mother was supposedly the child of Daniel O’Connell’s sister, so her involvement in politics should have been no surprise to her father. (Strangely, Fraser, my husband, was also a direct descendant of Daniel O’Connell. We were both very proud of that.) When she was sixty, Great-aunt Mary-Ellen returned to see Galway and Dingle Bay, and as she and her niece walked up the bay they encountered an old revolutionary. He recognised her after all those years, and he bowed to her and said, ‘Oh Mary-Ellen, you were the most beautiful woman in the whole of Ireland.’ Apparently Mary-Ellen accepted this compliment graciously, but only as if it was her due.

The niece also reported that when Mary-Ellen was asked her age when she was entering Ireland she replied, ‘Thirty’, which seems to contradict her favourite statement: ‘Pretend nothing.’ She also had a great deal to say about posture and about men. To kiss a man without a moustache was like eating an egg without salt. She should certainly have known about this, as she was engaged three times. Her bigot of a father ruined her last and best love, an Australian painter who was in the country to paint the Bishop of New Zealand. One night Mary-Ellen and the artist were going out for dinner and Mary-Ellen complained that she was hungry and would he please hurry. He said, ‘All I have to do is finish the bishop’s fucking leg and we will eat.’ Somehow this got back to her father. Was it Michael telling a funny story and too late having to understand what harm he had done? Anyway, that put an end to her romance. But why did she obey her father? I don’t understand. He burnt the paintings her love had given her and said he would disown her if she married him. So she wasn’t such a feisty revolutionary after all. She obeyed him.

But there is a footnote to this story. After Mary-Ellen died, her Australian painter’s daughter came to Timaru to find her father’s lost love. Melbourne was holding a retrospective of his life’s work, and the paintings he had left with Mary-Ellen were important. Mum had to tell this excellent person the whole sad story, including the fact that the paintings had gone up in flames.

Michael, my grandfather, was already showing signs of fecklessness. He had before his marriage done accountancy papers and worked as the town clerk. I think the problem was that he couldn’t take Timaru seriously. However, there were those in Timaru who thought he took things far too seriously. He was given to writing letters to the local paper about the land grabs in Hakataramea, for instance. Comparing the predicament of the Maori in New Zealand to the situation of his own people in Ireland. As his mother-in-law, Mrs O’Driscoll, was one of the beneficiaries of those land grabs, what he was doing was very desperate. Great-grandma cut him out of her will. Perhaps with things so fraught Mary-Ellen couldn’t, in the end, leave her father. Perhaps she felt she owed him for giving her the education that had allowed her to survive and given her some freedom.

I was told that my grandmother kept some order on what was in fact an extended family. In addition to her own nine children there was also Michael’s father, Grandpa Dennehy, Mary-Ellen and two great-uncles. The two dead-loss uncles took up a room each; Grandpa had his room; Mary-Ellen her room; Michael and Maggie as Mummy and Daddy had the large front bedroom; and then there were the nine children. The twins died as toddlers – overfed by Great-grandma, according to Grandma. That left seven children. It was fortunate that Duval had designed a very large house, though it was just one storey, in fact a half a house – the other half was to be added on as the family grew (though that addition never happened).

As Michael became more irresponsible, money was a problem, although he did keep on earning even after he was sacked from the Town Hall. Like his son Tom, he was blessed with an amazing recall for facts and numbers. Because he was mates with the president of a big company in Timaru, Michael would do their accounts. At the yearly board meetings he would spend twenty minutes reading aloud his quite brilliant financial assessment for the year. Then, to a round of applause, he’d pass the sheets of paper he had been reading from to the president. They were entirely blank. This sort of thing unnerved people. Was he having them on? Showing off? When in old age he worked on the railways – his job was to note down the numbers on the wagons and then enter them into the log book – he would watch the trains coming in while telling funny stories and entertaining the locals. A fellow worker was disgusted. Clearly Michael was not doing his job properly. He dobbed him in, only to find out that Michael’s reports of wagon numbers could not be faulted.

Another way Michael made some money was by writing obituaries for the Herald. That attitude, that ‘Look Mum no hands’ approach to life, undermined him here also. One of his obituaries I remember went something like this: ‘Poor little Linda, she flew through God’s winda.’ In fact Timaru liked his style but quite rightly suspected his intentions.

Then how did Mary-Ellen contribute to the household? Well, she did various jobs but ended up running the women’s prison in South Canterbury. Mum, on holidays from the Dominican convent, loved going there for lunch. Mary-Ellen would produce a well-known prisoner to wait at table so Mum could satisfy her curiosity about crime and criminals.

And what about the two dead-loss great-uncles? Michael called them the remittance men. Once a year a lump sum arrived for them. Why and from where I have no idea. Their smart on-the-town clothes from last year were brought out, cleaned and pressed, and the uncles took off for Christchurch. Two months and they would be back. It would take them another year to recover. Mum said they went to the gallops, drank champagne and stayed at the best hotels until the money ran out, then it was a twilight existence until the following year.

Grandma must have received some money from her mother, but it was the older girls who kept things ticking over. My grandmother herself played the organ at the Catholic Basilica, and Eileah, the eldest girl, as soon as she turned sixteen took on any number of music students. She was also expected to babysit my mother at the same time.

As soon as my mother Maggie (Margaret only for official and formal occasions) could speak, it became clear she had been learning music since birth, possibly in the womb. One day Eileah was trying to teach a not very bright student to recognise different notes. She kept pressing down on one piano key, calling out ‘And that is?’, and getting no response. This went on for some time and then Maggie, under the piano, pulled her thumb out of her mouth and lisped, ‘Octave above middle C.’ For a household that, as time went on, more or less relied on its musical skills to survive, this was great news. Maggie had perfect pitch. Obviously she also had the brain to go with it. By six years old she had appeared in the London Gazette as a child prodigy. Where the photograph is now I don’t know, but she stands clutching some certificate in one hand, and there is a look of complete concentration on her face. There is a slightly alien effect caused by her out-of-proportion forehead – the forehead my mother had inherited from ancient times. This head was supposedly superior to the head most humans possessed. The gene was passed down from a people who had inhabited Normandy, the west of Ireland, and the Hebrides and Wales. Their culture was destroyed by a new warlike people and they virtually disappeared. Certainly, it was true that learning anything was, for Mum, simply a matter of knowing about it. However, just doing something competently bored her. She often talked about the divine fire. She believed that without that illuminating energy, all the competence in the world was a complete waste of time.

Some talent scouts from Italy heard of Mum and tried to convince my grandmother to let them develop her potential in Italy. This was through perfectly legitimate channels, but Grandma could not bear to give up her little girl. Great-grandma decided Maggie must go to the Dominican convent in Dunedin, so that at least she could come home once a year. At twelve she was doing her final music exams and then it was discovered that she needed first to have her Matric. In six ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Epigraph
• CHAPTER ONE : He Rode Like a Cossack
• CHAPTER TWO : When They Stopped Singing
• CHAPTER THREE : Imagining the Faheys
• CHAPTER FOUR : Marchwiel
• CHAPTER FIVE : My Father’s Teeth
• CHAPTER SIX : Are These My Memories?
• CHAPTER SEVEN : The Index and Teschemakers
• CHAPTER EIGHT : The Dove, the Hawk and Mother Francis
• CHAPTER NINE : Finding Out About Myself
• CHAPTER TEN : Timaru in the Forties
• CHAPTER ELEVEN : Exit from Christchurch
• CHAPTER TWELVE : Looking for Colin McCahon
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN : Messing Up in Timaru
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN : Falling in Love
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN : Party in a Submarine
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN : Commitment to Madness and Painting
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN : Harry’s
• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN : Looking Back and Being Here
• Plates
• Copyright