False River, page 17
The farmhouse itself is white, irregular and individual. Even with the road nearby, its setting is serenely pastoral. A charmless museum built in the sixties abuts the house, breaking sight lines. Its insensitive proximity signals both the desire and the rush to commemorate, a lack of forethought that speaks of enthusiasm, amateurism and practicality. Like so many old houses and local museums in America, Rocky Ridge Farm’s preservation is due to the dedication of individuals rather than government initiative. Rose would have approved.
When we visited, the museum was staffed by a fierce array of middle-aged women. Our guide, Vi, ushered us to the compulsory first stop, the video room, and gave us lots of statistics: twelve tour guides; five bookstore workers; fifty thousand visitors; sixty million books sold. Julia and I were the first visitors that day. We sat on trestles watching the video collage of old photos and listening to the sound of ‘Pa’s fiddle’. By the time this finished, a group of elderly ladies in bright sweatshirts were waiting impatiently outside, and we asked permission to see the house before we looked through the museum — an outlandish request, judging from her shocked expression — in order to get a head start on the new visitors. Inside the house we were hurried from room to room at quite a pace, as though there were hundreds at our heels waiting to enter through the screened back porch.
Apparently everything sat just as it was when Laura died forty years ago. (The last record she played is still sitting on the turntable: ‘Annie Laurie’ by John McCormack.) The house was an appealing jumble of small rooms, reflecting a place built in stages as the Wilders could afford to expand. Almanzo had built a low chair for Laura — she was very, very short — and constructed kitchen counters to scale so she wouldn’t have to stoop, as well as window seats and boxes to store her things. With its bright yellow and green paint, the kitchen felt like something out of a dollhouse.
The living room featured a fireplace built with giant slabs of stone, something Laura personally demanded. The windows were large. Laura wrote about them in a Missouri Ruralist column in 1916. ‘Did you ever think that great painters have spent their lives trying to reproduce on canvas what we may see every day?’ she asked. ‘I have in my living room three large windows uncovered by curtains which I call my pictures … I have never seen a landscape painting to compare with them.’
After the house tour, we sat on a bench under an oak tree. The next set of visitors was a large group of Amish people. The elderly ladies made a brisk tour of the house and then climbed back into their snappy white minivan, pointing us out to each other.
We had to drive to the Rock House, because Vi told us it was no longer possible to walk there across the ridge as Rose did every day to drink tea and talk writing with her mother. The little house where Laura wrote her first four books looks exactly like the picture in the Sears catalogue: England meets California. It faces east, its back turned to the farmhouse on the other side of the hill. The view was a broad meadow and an almost unbroken vista of green.
Julia pointed out that the windows have small square panes, framed in green, breaking up the view into a grid. For someone like Laura who loved her big windows, this must have been a daily irritation.
Later that day we returned to the old house to linger outside in the last of the afternoon sun. The rock chimney stood tall and rugged, unlike the spindly Rock House chimney that needed to be rebuilt several times. The farmhouse was calm now, house and carpark emptied of visitors, the back and side doors hazy behind screened porches. Sun lit up the roof above Rose’s attic bedroom and the trees threw shadows on the lawn. On our house tour, the only room we were not permitted to see was Rose’s.
After Rose left Rocky Ridge for good in 1937, Laura and Almanzo moved back here. The Rock House was too small. Laura wrote the rest of the Little House books in the big house, with her big picture windows. She was world-famous before the series was finished, answering readers’ letters from her rocking chair in the dining room. Rose never lived in Mansfield again. She didn’t even return for a visit until her father’s funeral, late in 1949. The little house she built just before the Crash — when everything still seemed possible in her life, and the Little House books didn’t exist — sat empty, just as it does today.
Inheritance
In June 2016 I was back in Denmark, attending a witch-burning.
Two years earlier, I’d spent a month in Denmark. Tom and I were in Svendborg, on a writer’s residency at the Brecht House. Svendborg is a port town on Funen, the big island where Hans Christian Andersen was born. Copenhagen sits gazing towards Sweden on the island to the east, Zealand. To the west is a large peninsula called Jutland, stretching from the German border and pointing north to the rest of Scandinavia.
Much of Funen feels like a rural idyll. Farm stands sell local new potatoes and strawberries. People ride bikes. The main attraction in Odense, its biggest city, is the Hans Christian Andersen Museum. The harbour in Svendborg, on Funen’s south coast, is a stop for yachts from Germany and all over Scandinavia.
The Brecht House sits west from the town of Svendborg, in what used to be countryside and is now more of a suburb. It’s a whitewashed cottage with a thatched roof, and from the study there’s a view of the Svendborg Sound. Bertolt Brecht and his family moved there in 1933. They left Berlin the day after the burning of the Reichstag, no longer safe in their own country: Brecht was an active anti-fascist, and his wife, the actress Helene Weigel, was Jewish. They hurried to Prague, then Vienna; they considered a move to Switzerland. But the writer Karin Michaëlis invited them to Denmark, and this was their haven until 1939. By then Brecht’s German citizenship had been revoked; he’d been declared an enemy of his own country.
War meant the family had to flee again: to Sweden, then Finland, then via Vladivostok to the United States. Brecht’s creative collaborator (and lover) Margarete Steffin died en route, in Moscow. They couldn’t stay in Svendborg, because of that land border with Germany. When Denmark was invaded, it fell in six hours.
It’s impossible to sit working in Brecht’s study, looking out at sailboats on the blue water, Danish flags flapping on white poles, the wooded slopes of the island across the Sound, and think of it as purely a peaceful place. When Brecht lived here he was plagued by the booming guns of German warships on manoeuvre. He could never forget what was happening at home. In his poem ‘Concerning the Label Emigrant’, he wrote: ‘Oh, the stillness of the Sound doesn’t fool us! We hear the / Screams / From your camps over there.’
In 2016 Tom and I returned to the Brecht House for another month-long residency. I was working on a novel, the last chapters of which play out in Skagen (pronounced ‘Skane’) — a town at the northern tip of Jutland. I was happy to be back in the house, a seagull nesting in its chimney, the sea breeze rattling the windows. In Brecht’s study, the old computer had been removed and the desk was a clear space, pushed under the window for the best view. The bust of Brecht, smooth-headed and cross-eyed, still sat on the sill, looking vaguely disapproving. The weather was rainier this time; asparagus was still in season.
Though most things about the house were the same, one important thing was different. The last time we were there, in 2014, my mother was still alive. That July was the last full month of her life. In Svendborg I sent her a long email every day, writing something each evening after we finished dinner, and including pictures of the small pleasures of the place: boats passing by, fields of long grass, sunsets, the tall red hollyhocks outside the shed.
These emails were timed so they’d be there in the morning, when my mother awoke. My father printed them out and my brother, calling in on his way to work, read them aloud to her and her carers. He’d sit on the bed and read her my accounts of excursions into Svendborg or to the nearest farm stand, and my misadventures learning to ride a bike again. (I am a life-long incompetent.) Apparently the carers took a close interest in my activities, and made various asides about my numerous bruising falls. One day, according to my brother, a carer remarked: ‘I notice she hasn’t mentioned getting back on that bike.’
I got back on the bike.
Sometimes, my father told me, my mother would ask him to check the computer in the evening, to see if I’d sent another email. She couldn’t read books anymore and she couldn’t pay much attention to television, but she liked hearing the daily reports from Svendborg.
So this year I was in Denmark again, ready to report on our small activities, the day’s rise and fall, the view from the study window. But my mother’s not at home. The carers are gone, looking after other dying people, making their last days comfortable. Some of the carers came back to visit after my mother died; one of them sat on her bed and wept.
My mother’s not waiting for me to describe anything, or to tell her any more stories. But still, I gathered them for her, unwilling to break the habit.
The day before St John’s Eve, which falls on 23 June, we drove west to Jutland and then north as far as we could go, to Skagen. St John’s Eve is Denmark’s midsummer celebration. On this date every year, all over the country, people walk through the twilight to the community bonfire, sing Holger Drachmann’s ‘Midsommervise’, and watch the effigy of a witch disappear into the flames. In Skagen, where Drachmann is buried in the dunes, the bonfire is on the beach, and hundreds of people turn out.
There’s nothing ancient — or even medieval — about the witch-burning element. Most people think it’s a post-World War I development. The bonfires are alleged to dispatch the witches to their favoured meeting place, Blocksberg or the Brocken, the highest peak in northern Germany. ‘Now to the Brocken the witches ride’, Goethe wrote in Faust, though he was talking about Walpurgis Eve — or Hexennacht — in April. In Europe the pagan and the religious, as well as key dates and regional traditions, tend to bleed into one another.
On the beach in Skagen a large crowd gathered around 9 pm, though the night was cold and wet. There were speeches on a stage, the longest by someone who works promoting Denmark as a tourist destination to German tourists. We tried to sing along to ‘Midsommervise’, clutching a damp song sheet, but Danish is tricky.
Gusty wind meant the bonfire could only be lit from one side, and it instantly looked dangerous. Three nonchalant firemen stood by while graduating high-school students, wearing traditional white caps that made them look like sailors in a stage musical, tossed study notes into the flames. A few hardy teens stripped down to underwear and ran into the sea. The witch — more a gender-fluid scarecrow — flew off to Germany when I wasn’t looking. Darkness loomed, and the rain grew heavier, so we walked home around half-past ten, soaked to the skin.
My mother would have loved the witch-burning, I told Tom, and he agreed: he knows that both my parents were always fond of a bonfire. They dedicated many weekends of their lives to the battle against the bush on our section in West Auckland, and there was a permanent clearing for bonfires by the creek at the bottom of the garden. Sometimes these fires threatened to get out of control, like our garden, like our family.
The day after St John’s Eve the rain cleared. Once Skagen was an isolated fishing village; now it’s a picturesque tourist town in an affluent country, with lots of small clothing and jewellery shops. My mother would have loved the bonfire on the beach, but I know she would have loved the shops in Skagen most of all.
Not long before I travelled to Denmark I conducted a half-hearted tidy-up of my bag collection. I’ve given lots away over the years — to friends, relations, charity shops — but I still have many more than I need. A snakeskin bag of my mother’s, bought in Australia in the eighties. Beaded bags from the seventies. Threadbare evening bags from decades earlier. Two kete my grandmother made, too delicate now to use.
One bag of my mother’s I decided to toss rather than give away. Its black ‘leather’ was moulting, peeling like withered skin. The label read ‘Prada’, but nothing about it was real. I bought it for my mother in Shanghai in 2005, because she wanted a fake designer bag.
These days I’m more particular about intellectual property, but in 2005 I let a teenage girl lead me away from the sprawling market of knock-offs down various litter-strewn alleys. We entered a grey apartment building, walking through a primitive kitchen where an old woman was cooking, and into what was probably the flat’s living room and bedroom, transformed into an impromptu handbag showroom. It felt strange, dark and illegal, and I regretted going. But the young women running the place were not going to let me leave without buying something.
I spent about half an hour there, though it felt like much longer at the time. The knock-off Prada bag I spotted quickly, and knew my mother would like it. But nothing had a price; everything had to be negotiated. My starting price was US$10 and theirs was a hundred dollars. The calculator went back and forth; there was a lot of sighing and shaking of heads. At one point we all grew fatigued and stood around in silence, eating mandarin oranges. When the girls refused to go lower than $50, I decided it was time to escape into the street. I managed to find a way out, different from the kitchen route, though once in the alley I had no idea where I was.
One of the girls chased me into the street and shouted: ‘Let me have face!’ So back in I went, and agreed to a price that was just above my final offer, exhausted by the whole ordeal. The girls were smiling now and very complimentary. I was, they said, a very good negotiator.
My mother was delighted with the bag, and even used it occasionally. This was surprising, because many of her bags she didn’t use at all. One of the last things I ever bought her was a clutch bag in the Waipu museum shop that she desperately wanted, though I never saw her take it anywhere.
In the last two years of her life, my mother was too frail to walk around shops. My sister and I would borrow a wheelchair in the Westfield mall in Henderson, or in Smith & Caughey’s in the city, and push her about the place. My mother loved wheelchair shopping, because she could drag things off rails and shelves and pile them on her lap. Once, in Smith & Caughey’s, Tom was in charge of pushing the wheelchair. Before too long he realised that my mother had accrued various items of clothing and a handbag, and was riding around with a considerable stack on her knee. He had to stop his wheeling and return them all. She wasn’t intending to buy any of them, anyway. She just wanted to get her hands on them for a while.
The issue with my mother and things: it wasn’t that she needed them, or wanted to wear them somewhere in particular. The acquisition was the thrill. When she died, some of the clothes she’d asked me to buy for her over the years in England still hung in her wardrobe, dangling their original sales tags. She had boxes of expensive Italian shoes, unworn. Her feet were smaller than mine and larger than my sister’s, so we gave them all away. First choice was offered to her hairdresser, who came to the apartment to cut my mother’s hair when my mother could no longer venture outside.
In the last years of her life, my mother grew particularly obsessed with jewellery. She would save up her pension and then buy another expensive ring. She would tell my sister and I that they were really for us; we would tell her we didn’t want them. My father struggled to manage all the household expenses on his pension. He couldn’t afford to attend my nephew’s wedding overseas. We begged my mother to stop buying rings. We nagged my father and brother not to drive her to David Keefe’s shop in LynnMall.
The last ring she bought — diamonds and rubies — she never wore; she just slept with it under her pillow.
My mother had grown up poor in the north of England. Her mother’s side were coal miners, but her father’s family were shoemakers and had more money. Her father was gassed in World War I and didn’t work again, apart from occasional cash-in-hand cobbling gigs; he died when my mother was sixteen. Her mother, my stern English nana, decorated other people’s houses to earn money: she was expert at wallpapering, and expert at making a little money go a long way.
My mother was working in a shop by the time she was fourteen. My nana moved away and remarried. My mother lived with her older sister, until there were too many children and not enough room for her. She lived with relatives who didn’t want her, and after that she lodged with strangers. In her teens she learned how to type, moved to London, and got a job in the civil service. She always wanted more, much more, than seemed possible at home. She lived in Paris for a while, then Luxembourg, then London again. She tried living again in the northeast of England, but there was no going back. In 1964, with my father — a homesick New Zealander — and my sister, she moved to the other side of the world.
My mother’s Great-aunt Pauline was wealthy. She lived in a three-storey Victorian house high above the golden sands of the beach. We visited her in 1978, when she was a tiny old lady; everything about the house looked and felt Victorian. She was a Victorian herself. My mother spent a lot of time at that house during her childhood. She loved the grandfather clock and the piano and the family portraits. She loved the meals Aunt Pauline made her. She loved Aunt Pauline. Much of the affection and happiness she experienced as a child was associated with that house.
But when Aunt Pauline died in the early eighties, she left everything to my uncle. My mother had moved to New Zealand, an act of defection. He sold the house and everything in it, even the family portraits and a sampler embroidered by the girls of the family a century earlier. My mother got no memento, no item of sentimental value. My uncle used some of the money to visit us in New Zealand. He and his wife brought us clothes from Marks & Spencer.
My mother had no inheritance of any kind. No money, no house, no land, no things. Her parents left her nothing, not even a wedding ring. My nana, who I believe suffered from depression, burnt all the family photographs. I saw a picture of my mother as a child for the first time last year, when an old class photo surfaced on someone else’s Facebook feed. When she moved to New Zealand, she had nothing to bring from home but clothes.
