An excerpt from Diana Wichtel’s tremendous new memoir, Unreel.
It was 1970. I was 19 and back in Auckland when Uncle Sy and Auntie Mollie, to whom I hadn’t spoken a word since I was nine, rang from New Jersey in the middle of the night. My sister and I stood shivering in the hallway as they told us that Dad was dead. It had happened a few months earlier. Of pneumonia. He left nothing, Uncle Sy said, but a box of papers. I was too shocked to get their number, to say please send it on. Years later I asked my cousins if they knew anything about the box. They didn’t. The last traces of him must have been thrown away. “Don’t forget you are a Wichtel,” Uncle Sy said. I couldn’t cry until the next night, when I couldn’t stop. There were no messages of condolence, no mention of our loss. I think Auntie Rosemary, who met Dad in Vancouver when she visited on her OE, sent a card.
As with so many of his erased family, there was no one but us to remember he ever existed, and remembering was to feel an accessory to some sort of crime. Not long afterwards, while Mum and Stew were still in Japan, Dr Greenberg, our Vancouver family physician, a friend of Dad’s, came through Auckland on a cruise with his wife. Ros and I went out to dinner with them. I can’t remember a thing about it except being in some sort of dissociative state brought on by the collision of old life and new. They were travelling on to Japan after Auckland, and had arranged to see Mum in Tokyo. “I’m a coward I suppose,” she wrote as the meeting loomed, “but I hate the thought of bringing up the past again.”
By 1972, Mum and Stew were back, living in an old villa in Devonport. I’d finished my degree and was saving money to go overseas by working shifts at the Auckland toll exchange. We sat in rows at switchboards connecting calls. It was well paid — double time on Sundays, triple on Christmas Day. For a few shifts after a doctor prescribed me some diet pills — amphetamines — I answered calls like a fiend. Otherwise, it was cataclysmically boring. We relieved the tedium by listening in on people arguing and — true story — trying to connect Mrs Hiscock to Mr Hercock.
By the time Mum and Stew got married, Philip and I were overseas for what proved to be a short OE. My mother-in-law Sarah was already in London on one of her trips home, living in a basement flat of a Georgian townhouse in the West End. We could look out and see well-heeled legs walking by. She was housekeeping for a family who were new money and brought out the upper-middle-class snob in her. “Provincial slut,” she would say of the demanding lady of the house. She used “slut” in its original Middle English sense, meaning slovenly, but it was still unnerving.
Our accommodation was house-sitting a flat in Highgate with no fridge and a bathtub in the kitchen. It came with the lovely 90-year-old lady who owned the house, on whom we checked up. I got a job as a temp telephonist at Westminster Social Services, plugging into clacking dolls’ eyes switchboards. It was an education in the British class system even Monty Python and socially radical BBC dramas had failed to put an end to. A man I put through to someone who clearly didn’t give him the help he needed shouted down the phone that he would get me. He knew where I worked. At home time, I would stick my head out the door, look left and right, and hoof it to the bus.
One morning a woman and two children came in. They had been sleeping rough in a park. New Zealand was never the egalitarian paradise of nostalgic memory, but this little London family was another level. Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home was unreeling before my eyes.
The next job was at the offices of some West End lawyers. No one introduced me to the partners, one of whom was furious when I didn’t know who he was. A delivery man came in as another of the partners strolled by. The phone rang from his office. “Are you all right?” he said. “Do you need any help?” he said. “No, thank you,” I said, bewildered. “With that chap,” said the partner. The delivery man was wearing a turban. “I’m fine,” I said. I wanted to say, “Mate, I’m from New Zealand.” I was instantly homesick for a home I didn’t have.
Philip’s father, Antony Alpers, was working on his second biography of Katherine Mansfield. We tagged along on a research road trip, driving to Higher Tregerthen, near Zennor in Cornwall. The cottages still stood where, in 1916, Mansfield and John Middleton Murry went to stay with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda. “You go by the edge of the fields to Katie Berryman’s for bread. You walk home along the rim of the Atlantic with the big fresh loaf — and when you arrive the house is like a ship. I mustn’t talk about it — it bewitched me,” Mansfield wrote in April 1916. It all went wrong. KM couldn’t take Lawrence’s rages and the couple’s crockery-hurling ways. She took against “that immense German Christmas pudding which is Frieda”. KM and Murry left.
That trip with Antony poured petrol on my already simmering Bloomsbury Group obsession. For a while Mansfield lived a short hop from St Ives where the Stephen family, including the small demon bowler at family cricket games who would become Virginia Woolf, spent their holidays. As writers Woolf and KM became friends of a spiky sort. One thing they must have recognised in each other was that they were both critics to their core. Virginia Woolf’s view of her task as an artist: “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.” She might have made a decent TV reviewer.
Woolf wrote, in her lyrical, ethereal novel, The Waves, the best description I have read about the business of creation and why people bother to do it. Her protagonist is talking about music, but it holds true for writing, painting or even being a critic: “There is a square; there is an oblong. The players take the square and place it upon the oblong. They place it very accurately; they make a perfect dwelling-place . . . we are not so various or so mean; we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares. This is our triumph; this is our consolation.”
Philip and I proceeded on the OE trail, buying our Kombi van outside the American Express in Amsterdam, as everyone did. Previous owners had painted a Canadian flag on it, causing some confusion on the road and to my psyche. That lost life. We took off on what I came to think of as a tour of the toilets of Europe — or lack thereof if you were female. Philip could join other relaxed gentlemen in an alley if nature called; for me it meant driving around looking for a rare public loo. In France a comfort stop at a café meant walking past a row of well-patronised urinals to find a stall with a “toilet” that was a square of vitreous china with a hole in the middle set into the floor. Place a foot either side, squat, aim. At one café, the toilet, in the centre of the dining room, was in a cupboard barely larger than the loo pan, so that the clientele idling over their Pernod or café au lait could watch as you backed in and shut the door. They would have heard a yelp of pain as I missed and peed on the mosquito bites, raw with scratching, on my feet.
We went to Germany, Switzerland, Italy . . . In Venice we made the mistake of ordering a hot chocolate in the Piazza San Marco and blew a hole in our Europe on $10 a Day budget. In Padua we saw Giotto’s frescoes. Works I had seen on slides in Art History class half a world away really existed. We met Philip’s mother in Paris and ate delicious couscous at hole-in-the-wall Algerian restaurants. Elsewhere, my Sixth Form French let me down and I was presented with a plateful of lamb kidneys in mustard sauce. I don’t know what I thought rognons d’agneau meant. We stayed in a romantic old walk-up hotel with a balcony over the street and a bidet in the middle of the room. We didn’t go to Auschwitz or Dachau. There were a couple of Polish guys on a train. I said my father was from Poland. They said, Oh it’s beautiful, you must go. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might. I just wanted to go back to New Zealand.
Unreel by Diana Wichtel (Penguin NZ, $40) is available from Unity Books. Diana Wichte’s My Life in TV is on The Spinoff here.