Who do you think you are?
Who do you think you are?What sort of question is that? (Gruff.) “Who do you think you are?” It’s usually asked like that when people want to indicate you’re getting above yourself. But in the UK and in America and Australia – and hopefully some time soon in New Zealand – it’s also the name of a TV programme where celebrities get to find out their heritage – their family’s history that made them who they are.
You don’t have to be famous to do this, of course, and once you start to dig deep into anyone’s life there are always surprises. That’s what makes family history so totally fascinating. When I was a child my Dad used to look at me and say, in his deep rich voice, “Girl, you’re a real blight.” I was hurt. I didn’t think I was that bad …
Then when I was about eleven we went down to Cornwall and I found out that his mother’s maiden name was Blight, and she came from a shipbuilding family in Cornwall. I also found out that the reason his Cornish family lived in Devon was that she had eloped with one of her father’s carpenters, and had been cast off without a shilling ... Or so the story went.
My dear Dad had such a big nose that his nickname in the Army was Birdie Brice. My sister and I were relieved that our noses were relatively normal, and when my first grandchild was born, I couldn’t help remarking to HIS father, “Oh, what a sweet little nose.” “Yes, it is a Sweet nose”, he replied, “He takes after my mother’s family, the Sweets.”
We inherit so much from our ancestors, and not only the size of our noses. An d for many of us, at some time or another, the desire to answer that question, “Who do I think I am?” leads us to writing a memoir, a biography or a full-blown family history with an extended genealogy.
When I came to New Zealand, I found that there was here a great tradition of researching and writing the story of who you are, and it has been my pleasure over the last few years not only to read many of those histories, but to teach people how to write them.
As for reading them, well, one of the things I soon discovered in Tauranga was the treasure trove that calls itself the New Zealand Room. I was a teacher-librarian all my life and I know what I’m talking about when I tell you Tauranga City has a great library service. In the New Zealand Room you can find family histories, local histories and the many, many stories of our city, our country and our culture. Only recently, Jenny Jenkins, a local history teacher, published Battle at the Gate: the Story of the Battle of Gate Pa. In this beautifully illustrated children’s book she tells the true story of Heni, the young Ngaiterangi woman who, along with the rest of her iwi, showed mercy to the wounded and dying British soldiers.
Some of those soldiers are buried in the Elms cemetery, and you can see Heni depicted in a stained glass window at the old church in the Historic Village at 17th Avenue. Jenny’s father is a member of Tauranga Writers, to which I belong, and he wrote the poem that first inspired his daughter to research this old narrative.
Tauranga Writers itself clocked up 40 years of history last year that made it the longest-running self help group for writers in New Zealand, and yes, we too produced a book. This Side of the World is a celebration of story, memoir, history, poetry and prose as presented over those years by local writers, some of whom have gone on to become well-known locally and nationally, like playwright Bronwyn Elsmore, farmer and conservationist Field Candy, children’s writers Phyllis Johnson, Jean Bennett and Lynley Dodd, and novelist Sue Emms, who was my writing mentor when I came to Tauranga, and is now a close friend and partner in many writing projects we have undertaken together. Then, of course, there is me – now world famous in New Zealand!
Sue and I shared the work not only This Side of the World, but of two other exciting initiatives of which I am extremely proud. I used to edit a community magazine in Tauranga called The Little Red Hen. I took it over from its founder Rose Webber and for a year or so we sailed merrily along taking the environmental message out into the Bay.. Unfortunately, local and national organizations like DoC and EBOP began to get in on the act, and, with all the government funding they get, their newsletters were free. Well, you can compete with cheap - but not with free; and so The Little Red Hen quietly folded.
It was then that I recalled how when I asked Sue if she’d like co-edit the Hen, she replied, “No, thanks, but if you ever start a literary journal, let me know.” I had already discovered that the Bay of Plenty was the only region in New Zealand that did not have its own magazine of the literary arts, and so lo! In November 2003 Bravado was born, and has been going strong ever since. We have always produced a good mix of established and emerging writers, and I make sure, as prose editor, that there’s always some memoir or local history included in the pages. Such writing is, after all, a particularly Kiwi tradition. Bravado also became known for the excellence of its poetry, and for the last five years has run an International Poetry Competition that attracts over five hundred entries, on average. Compare an early Bravado with the last (you can do this on www.bravado.co.nz.) We’ve come a long way, baby, and we know who we are!
Partly because of Bravado, and partly because of my own activities as a writer, including a weekly column in the Bay of Plenty Times, and partly because of writing workshops I did for the University of Waikato, I was head-hunted by the Waiariki Institute of Technology to create and develop an online course for writers. Naturally, I invited Sue to join me in that task. Today the Diploma in Creative Writing has been running for five years with over fifteen modules on offer that cover all kinds of writing from Technical Texts to Poetry and Scripts, as well as Contemporary Maori Writers and Indian Writers in English.
Sue and I have written most of the modules between us – some 40-50,000 words for each. This proves that a ‘writer’ is not only someone whose books you can borrow from the Library. In fact, to be a writer all you have to do is sit down and write – and you would be surprised how many people are doing just that, scribbling poetry in secret, keeping a journal not to be opened until after they die, or sending off stories to competitions and telling no one until the glorious day they come 3rd or 2nd or – Hallelujah! – they win!
One of the first modules I created was what was then called Writing Based on Family & Personal History, and which now has the much more interesting title of Penning the Past. This remains a universally popular choice for students, and one result of its fame for me was that I got into the business of helping people to write their own story, either as editor or ghostwriter. Often this was as a legacy for their descendants, or to make sense of a troubled or traumatic past.
This is not as easy as you might think. Yes, you are now answering the question, “Who do I think I am?” – but how honest can you be? Memory is a faulty and unreliable thing. And how honest will others let you be? In 2007 I was commissioned by his son to write the story of George Claridge, who was then fast approaching his 100th birthday. George has had a fascinating life. He was the leading man in New Zealand’s very first talking film, Down on the Farm. He is the brains behind our national Bowls Association for whom he wrote the rules and a best-selling guide to coaching. He designed the first Dunedin University buildings and laid out that city’s inner roading system. When he moved to Tauranga, he developed the Bayfair residential estate, and is now, at 102, still on the city’s roading committee trying to get them to see sense and put new roads where they are most needed, with what he calls ‘maximum efficiency and minimum fuss’.
George has also been an inventor all his life, and only three years ago came up with what he calls ‘the whispering toilet’, whose trade name is SilentNite. He got the idea for this when staying at a hotel with his wife Billie, Neither of them could sleep for the flushing of loos up and down the corridor . His toilet is not only quiet, it is also ergonomic and environmentally-friendly, and is selling in the hundreds to hotels around the world.
Billie has been a wonderful helpmeet to George throughout his life; but on that question of ‘telling it as it is’, she was definitely not helpful to George and I as we worked our way through the long story of his life. He would say something like, “So then I told him, If you don’t do as I say, I’ll stuff your teeth past your tonsils.” Billie would read it, and go, “Oh, George, that’s not very nice”. And we’d have to rewrite it as, “So then I told him, I am getting angry with you.” Not quite the same impact, eh?
Billie was worrying about upsetting the people who featured in George’s life story. I wanted to say to her, “What people, for God’s sake? Most of them are dead!” In the end the published version, Tried and Tested, is the story of George according to Billie. The uncensored manuscript is now a family archive.
I’m often asked, “Where do you begin to write a life story?” The answer to that is simple. You begin at the beginning with a chronology, year by year; and that’s what I did with George. This is a man, after all, who was born in 1906. It seems strange that you would have to research your own life, but you do. We’re not writing as we were then, we’re writing as we are now. Memory is unreliable, as I said, and when things happen to you, that is the perspective you remember them from. When rewriting as story, you will often find yourself pondering more deeply on the reactions and responses of other people who were involved along in that story along with you, some of them before you were born.
If you’d like to know the basic guidelines are for telling your story with integrity and meaning, it is to write out the episode or incident as a factual account, and then:
· Check your chronology.
· Check the location.
· Check what others were present or involved.
· Check what happened before .
· Check what happened after .
Whether you’re recording a story that is told to you by someone else, or working from archives, letters, diaries, and other old records, concentrate on what the facts are and how they fit together. See what questions you’ll have to ask of yourself and of others to fill in the missing gaps.
When you do this, you often make fascinating discoveries, and this, too, happened with George. All her life his mother had thought she was illegitimate, a matter of much shame to her. When I did the basic genealogical research, I found out that this was not so. Her parents were married a year and a half before she was born. But yes, there had been a shameful secret in the family that lay behind the reason why her husband and child emigrated to New Zealand. When her only child was born, she suffered a series of epileptic fits, triggered by the pregnancy and worsened by the birth. In Victorian times, little was known about this disorder, and, for the lower middle classes, contraception was abstention. She was treated as mentally ill, and a danger to herself and her child. George’s grandfather was warned against resuming marital relations, and the marriage effectively ended. His wife was institutionalized and died in a Liverpool infirmary when she was only 31.
Her husband was already a steward working the boats from Liverpool to New Zealand. He simply reversed the order of his sailings and took his three year old daughter with him to Wellington. He regularly visited his wife until her death; but isn’t it sad that he never, apparently, told the little girl the true story. She thought that she was a bastard; and it’s obvious her father thought she was better tainted by that stigma than by the stigma of a ‘mad mother’.
Paul Bennett was a man with a troubled past, too. An outstanding athlete, like most of his family, he was when young well on his way to becoming New Zealand’s first Maori world surfing champion. But Paul threw fame away, he almost threw his life away, on drugs – starting with pot and ending up with P. He destroyed his ambitions, his marriage, and his health. At 36, suffering nightly visions of Satan and his demons of Hell, and with his lungs shot to pieces, Paul was given six months to live. Only a lung transplant could save him, and he had just been diagnosed with hepatitis, which excluded him from surgery.
Paul came home to die – his parents had already lost another son to drugs. He visited his whanau and the urupa where his brother and ancestors were buried. He called on them to help him. He says that they did, and that they continued to sustain him during the long years since that it has taken him to turn his life around. This is the journey he recounts in Walking with the Taniwha, which I was pleased to edit for him. Paul will never recover that splendid good health he took for granted when he was a young boy, but he is alive, and doing great work in the world as a drug counsellor. Now when he is asked, “Who do you think you are?” it is a question he can answer with pride.
Some people can’t make sense of a troubled past. I personally believe that what you suppress, repress and cannot express is what ultimately destroys you. I have had two failures. I was ghostwritng the story of a woman who was New Zealand’s first woman prison guard to work in a man’s prison – and who alternated her life as a prison warder with prostitution. She was a girl who had been repeatedly sexually abused as a child, and she never got over it. She wanted to tell her story: get rid of it, get past it. She never could. Whenever we got close to dealing with the real and ongoing trauma that had damaged her life, she would back away – fail to turn up for appointments, or turn up drunk. In the end I had to tell her, “Skye, you’re not ready to tell your story yet. Come back when you are.” I learned recently that she has died, her story still untold.
Finding out who the hell you are is the most important part of a human being’s emotional and intellectual growth and development. You need to know who you are because your only job on earth is to be the person you were meant to be; to be yourself and no other. We come into the world so perfect, and we are so easily damaged. Putting it down on the page in private, or in print for sharing with others is a great means of addressing the harm that life does to us, if we let it. Get it down, get it out, get rid of it. That is why I have become very interested this last year in ‘write to heal’ courses, or writing as therapy; and why perhaps the next work I will be doing is to develop a course in creative writing for prisoners. Until we can find the words to express our hurt, it will poison and fester inside. Some of us are lucky enough to be able to speak of past wrongs and injuries. Others never found the trust in others that is needed to share your own story.
Sometimes the world just doesn’t want to know. One of the first people I met at Tauranga Writers when I came here in 2000 was Robin Lee-Robinson, who married Barry Crump when she was a sweet young thing of 22 and he was 43, and who stayed married to him for twelve years, against all odd. Barry was by then a famous man of great charisma, one of the earliest progenitors of what I call ‘the Kiwi bloke genre’. I have read A Good Keen Man and Wild Pork and Watercress, shortly to be made into a film. I have also read his brother’s account, In Endless Fear, of life with their fiercely abusive father, Wally Crump.
Sadly, the children of abusive parents often become abusers themselves, and that was the case with Barry and Robin – and his other wives too, if truth be told. Far from the popular myth that it was Barry who ‘shot through’ his marriages, it was usually the wives who threw him out or left him. That was the case with Robin, but when she tried to tell her story of this, the longest marriage of Barry Crump, she came up against a wall of silence. Nobody wanted to bring down a national icon who epitomized all that was staunch and finely upstanding in Kiwi manhood.
Eventually Robin self-published her story, In Salting the Gravy, and it has been a runaway success in spite of the fact that she didn’t know me then, and so it was badly put together. (LOL) She has found both peace and profit from telling her story, and in making sense of who she really is. Certainly not the woman who lived in Barry Crump’s shadow for so many years. One excellent result was that it demonstrated to her that she could come up with a writing project and carry it through. Another was that, with the bad times before her and set down in black and white, she was able to remember all that she had learned from Barry as “the bushman’s apprentice”. She rediscovered the fact that, although their marriage was troubled and eventually no longer sustainable, there had been as well much love and laughter.
Robin has written another book, Talkback Toast: a Reminiscence of Radio Pacific, and this time she found an excellent editor– me! If I ever thought editing was a cushy job, I found out differently working with Robin. She has so many good stories to tell, but she is not computer-literate and she doesn’t understand, as I do, the concept of order – that chronology of which I spoke – and the processes by which you discover the natural flow and clarity of your written work. If I ever set up a literary agency in Tauranga - which I am often asked to do – I will call it Rumpelstiltskin after the dwarf who saved a queen from her royal husband’s ire by turning straw into gold.
Robin and I are immensely proud of the final product, and I am pleased to report it is selling well, with a second print-run coming soon. Talkback Toast is the story of the now defunct Radio Pacific and of regular callers to the radio station, among them Trevor Watson, a grand old man of 94, who has shared his life, his wisdom and his love of Auckland on air for many, many years. Robin also talks about the Bush Telegraph, Barry’s extremely popular radio show for which she was the producer, and shares with us other, more kindly stories of her life with the last bushman. She came to Tauranga when she left Barry because he said he hated the town and would never live here. Ironically, when he remarried for the fifth and last time, he and his wife Maggie came to Tauranga, and here he died and is buried in the Pyes Pa cemetery. Robin tells me she took a copy of In Salting the Gravy and laid it on his grave.
Writing is very good means of finding out who you think you are, and it also reveals, almost without us knowing it, many thing about ourselves that are deeply-hidden. I have a joke, “How do I know what I think until I see what I wrote?” I could as easily say, “How do I know who I am until I spread out my memories and make of them stories and poems?” In Greerton is a lady who calls her business Living Legacy, and who will help you to put photographs and anecdotes together to create a memoir of your life. I have started doing this at home, picking a photo out at random and attaching to it a story or a poem. A pattern is emerging that shows the influences that have made me who I am and taught me things to do – a good mother, a bad manager of money, a woman of active mind and lazy body, a teacher, dreamer and thinker, and, above all, a woman with a talent not only for writing her own stories, but for helping others to write theirs.
posted by Jenny Argante @ 10:17 PM
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