Dear Oliver by Peter Wells

Author:Peter Wells [Peter Wells]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780994147370
Publisher: Massey University Press
Published: 2018-06-23T04:00:00+00:00

Polly

Who was Polly Northe? Her 1942 obituary in Napier’s Daily Telegraph struggled with the dilemma. While she was ‘one of the most highly respected residents of Napier’, she appeared to have done nothing more than be born, marry, have children and die.

‘THE LATE MRS NORTHE DID not take any active part in public life but was well known and esteemed for her kindness and generosity to all deserving cases.’ The obituary went on, as if struggling to find some further redeeming quality or achievement: ‘Her many friends and relatives were always certain of a hearty welcome at her home.’

So she was kind, a ‘hearty’ hostess and helped people in need — so long as they were deserving. This hardly amounted to much, considering her lifespan of eighty-two years. What had she seen, felt, understood — misunderstood?

Like so many colonial women, her life was subsumed in her husband’s biography. Even in her obituary he takes up more elbowroom. She was the ‘widow of the late Mr Robert Northe, founder of the well-known firm of R. Northe and Sons, merchants’. She had accompanied him to Clive ‘when her husband took up farming’. She had had eight sons, and a daughter who predeceased her. She had twenty-one grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. In its own way, it was some sort of accomplishment. As a heterosexual woman she had fulfilled her function. But was that all?

I ask this question because her apparent lack of accomplishment — she took no ‘active part in public life’ — meant her life, like those of so many colonial women, was routinely underestimated. Even in the graveyard, the most these women got was a single line, in second place, below their husband who in death, in granite or marble, still got further space, a bigger headline.

In the absence of any other information, I wondered how I could evoke this woman who featured in Bess’s conversations as if she were still very much alive. Polly, or Grandma Northe, as Bessie called her, was a kind of emotional touchstone. She lived just around the corner, and Bessie went with her parents and sisters to visit her on a Sunday. (All Polly’s sons lived ‘around the corner’, like planets orbiting round their sun.) Ern ‘was always very good to his mother’, Bessie told me. ‘He loved his mother.’ In one way his relationship with his mother stood as a model for mine. But when I asked Mum about Polly, hoping to find some historical romance, all I ever got was: ‘She was very kind’ — which was pleasing news but it hardly qualified or quantified her.

No letters of hers survive — well, she lived ‘around the corner’, so letters were unlikely. And there were no objects that expressed Polly’s personality: no jewellery, gloves, even any stories. There was nothing, apart from the rather stilted photographs of her as a matriarch surrounded by her family, much as a convict might be surrounded by arresting officers. It took me a long time to realise there was not a single photograph of her as a young woman or a bride.

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