Auto Da Fay. Fay Weldon

       Cranmer Square

      Cranmer Square was not actually a square but an oblong, its grass intersected by paths in the pattern of the Union Jack. In this city of boxy bungalows set in neat gardens it seemed to me a significant place, if sloppily named. Nearly all the buildings which lined it had stairs: that is to say they were more than one storey high. There was the Girls’ High School at the north end, and St Margaret’s to the west and the Normal School to the south. In between were boarding-houses and hotels. On wet days, when heavy rain drummed on the ground and made the corrugated-iron roofs rattle, slugs and snails would come out in enormous number to cover the stripes of the Union Jack, making walking hazardous. The crack of a snail beneath the shoe or the sight of a squashed worm strikes horror into the little-girl heart. There were few wet days, of course: winter in Christchurch was an eight-week affair and then it was over. The nor’wester was a worse affliction; wake up to see the arch of cloud in a heavy sky, and know that within hours the hard, hot, strong wind would get up and blow for days, making everyone cross and tired.

      Our winter was England’s summer: that was strange. In the conservatory of the private hotel which was now our home the apples and the oranges would come out as my father and his friends tried to prove to me that the earth was round, not flat, and circled the sun, like this, and the moon went round the earth, like that, and why night happened and so on. It still did not seem convincing. As well claim we were all living in the fruit bowl.

      Jane and I shared a high damp steamy bed in the front ground-floor room. The bedspread was made of bright green artificial silk which was chilly and slippery to the touch. I cried a little on the first night we slept in it, and was proud of Jane, who didn’t cry at all. There wasn’t a pot under the bed and we didn’t know where the lavatory was, so that night Jane wee-ed on the round Chinese carpet. She said it was their fault, not hers, and I wondered as I have often wondered all my life, who ‘they’ were. I didn’t like to witness her desperation, but marvelled at her pride and determination.

      We ate our meals in the dining room with the other guests. I could see there were advantages to this situation. There was no one to fuss about washing your hands or combing your hair or worrying what you were doing. If there was anything you didn’t know Jane probably would, and at least in an emergency she could be relied upon to tell you. My father took much more notice of us now my mother was out of the way, and I resolved to look after him properly, and make him happier than she had. I would never go off and leave him the way she did: I could see I was too small to take her place but I would do my best.

      But my father had other ideas. I was not allowed into his bed, for one thing. Ina came in and out, wearing her absurd silk turbans and heavy strings of wooden beads, hooting and chirping away. Rita Angus the painter would drift palely in, look sad and drift out again. Then there was Jean Stephenson and Helen Shaw. Jean was thin and clever and edited the New Zealand Listener. How on earth did you edit a person and what was he listening for, I wondered. It sounded very important, like being Prime Minister. Helen was rounded and creamy skinned: I thought she was like Helen of Troy, in the Walter de la Mare poem my mother used to murmur.

      Helen of Troy was beautiful,

      As all the flowers of May:

      Her loveliness from the walls looked down,

      Over the towers of Troy town,

      Hundreds of miles away.

      But my mother was beginning to feel very far away, and wherever she was, had taken herself there without much reference to me. Why should I care? Jane and I were both going to St Margaret’s school now. We wore green uniforms and panama hats. I liked school, but could wish for more from home. It wasn’t the kind that other children had. Other children didn’t live in hotels and had a mother to collect them:

      we had a different lady friend to do it practically every day. They all seemed to want us to like them, mind you, and were forever giving us things. At Easter I was given so much chocolate I was sick. I asked for a car for my birthday and was given a toy one, not a real one, and then they wondered why I was crying: if I’d had a proper mother she could have explained. Why on earth would I want a toy car? I was a girl. I was Fay. No one ever called me Franklin now.

      Rita Angus, or Rita Cook, as we knew her, one of my father’s friends, took it into her head to paint a portrait of Jane and myself. Rita was to be reckoned as one of New Zealand’s finest painters, but at the time was seen as a rather eccentric dabbler in the arts. The portrait now hangs in New Zealand’s National Gallery. We were put in our matching check dresses and told to sit still. Jane managed this very well but I couldn’t. I kept running off to get a drink of water. I somehow lost the belt of my green cardigan and Rita had to paint it out. She sat our dolls in a row above us but dressed them up first in a rather formal way which in my opinion didn’t suit their personalities at all. She put in some of the hotel teacups, and painted them to give us a rest from sitting still. She was very nice, though we didn’t think we looked at all the way she had painted us. We were more real and lasting on the canvas than we were in real life. But we were very polite. We knew instinctively from an early age that the artist’s sensibilities are to be protected, lest they give up altogether and walk off into the night.

      I got up one morning and my legs wouldn’t work. I had poliomyelitis, or infantile paralysis. It could kill you or lame you: I knew about that. Everyone was terrified of it all over the map, or up and down the orange. I was a map person, Jane was an orange person. I could see by now that she was right but I wasn’t going to admit it. I was given a bed in the conservatory and Jane wasn’t allowed to come near me. The waitress would put my food down and run away. My father cried, but I knew it was all right: he was the best doctor in the world and would see to it. And nothing bad could happen to me: fate was on my side. And so it was. Today, when I’m tired my right ankle tends to turn my foot in a little, but that’s all. There was some talk at the time about callipers, which happily soon went away.

      By now Jane and I were so close I hardly noticed any difference between her and me. We seemed one body. Even our names were bracketed together. We were called Jane’nFay. My father was standing for parliament: I watched to see if he stood up more than usual but no, he sat down just as much as ever. What were they all talking about?

      One day at school, as I lay sleepless on my mat on the floor, a woman I didn’t know bent over me. It was afternoon-nap time, a torment if ever there was one. You had to lie in rows on the floor for what seemed forever, when all you wanted to do was run about. This still quietness, this ‘rest’, seemed such a waste of life. The stranger wore a scarlet pillbox hat with a little black veil, so her face seemed covered with small black dots. She kissed me and said she was my mother and I was to get up now. That was a relief. Jane confirmed that she was who she said she was and she took us out of school for the day. I asked her what her name was and she said it was Margaret. I seemed to remember that.

      We sat in Cranmer Square for a bit and I told her about the worms. She said that at home it had rained a lot. I asked her whether the ship had had to climb up the sea to get to the equator, and she said no, and dropped a stone and explained the theory of gravity. Jane said she knew that already. Then my mother took us back to the private hotel but did not stay. Nor did my father ask her to. It was amazing how the lady friends seemed to melt away, and how quiet everything suddenly was.