Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

FROM THE RIDICULOUS TO THE SUBLIME

Within the last month, my wife and I drove down to Wellington from Auckland, and back again a few days later. We were sitting in a Wellington picture theatre when there was the big shake (6.5 on the Richter scale) on Sunday 21 July. Our seats juddered and rocked for about 15 seconds as if they were on springs. Little niggling aftershocks recurred throughout the rest of our viewing of an indifferent film.

This fearsome force of nature is not the focus of my tale, however, but rather something that we saw en route between the Largest City and the Capital City.

Driving south down the Desert Road, which we have both crossed many times in our lives, we for the first time saw snow not only on the three mountains Tongariro, Ngaruahoe and Ruapehu, but extending all the way across the Rangipo Desert. A sheer blanket of white reached from Ruapehu down to the road we were driving on, and across to the east as far as the hills. I am sorry if the words are hackneyed, but it was beautiful, awesome, breath-taking.

We could not stop, because frequent signs told us we were not allowed to. The road was clear and ice-free. But the practical people who keep the road open in bad weather do not like vehicles to halt and linger when there is snow around. Presumably they have images of cars and trucks trapped in snowdrifts, unable to start again and having to be hauled out by tow-trucks based in Turangi or Waiouru. The best we could do was to point a phone-camera through the car window as we passed and take as many snaps as possible.

Three days later, when we drove back north across the same road, the snow had already melted and retreated back to the mountains, where it shone from the lower slopes to the peaks. The Rangipo Desert was back to its usual scrubby, muddy, dirty, sandy, brown and black. Normality was restored.

Now where is this anecdote going?

I have recently read for review a rather indifferent book. It purports to survey all the formative “myths” of New Zealand, which still influence the way people see the country. Among other things, the author (who in this particular is not being very original) solemnly lectures us on the concept of the Sublime. We are told that the very idea of the Sublime was essentially a European idea, and an attempt to read European concepts of beauty and divinity into landscape. Indeed the notion of “landscape” itself was and is an artificial construct. On this basis the (derivative) author then proceeds to de-construct the work of 19^th century landscape painters of New Zealand. The underlying message is one belittling their works as somehow not being “true” to nature, or at least not “true” to what we, in our more advanced early-21^st century state of civilization, can perceive.

I repeat, I have heard these and similar ideas frequently from other sources. Indeed they are now almost the standard approach when historians and art historians discuss landscape. [Look up Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory on the index to this blog, for related ideas.]

Now I hope I am sophisticated enough to agree that all works of art are somehow the products of a specific culture, with norms that are conditioned by that culture. I am aware that aestheticians once talked about “the Sublime” in ways that they no longer do. I recognize that there are conventions in 19^th century landscape painting that are no longer our conventions. But even admitting all this, I find the attempt to banish Sublimity from human experience, and claim that it was merely a past phase of one human civilization, to be reductionist and trite.

I am not a nineteenth century landscape painter. But when looking at the sheer white sheet that covered the Rangipo, what else could I call it but Sublime?

A related idea occurs to me. Some years ago there was held in Auckland an art exhibition of European paintings illustrating “Orientalism” – that is, the tendency of European and Western artists and writers to fantasise about countries south-east of Europe, and to see them in terms of picturesque and unrepresentative exoticism. So the exhibition was filled with European images of glamourised harems and slave markets, and desert-roving Arabs posed dramatically on the horizon, and so forth.

I accepted the exhibition’s organizing principle that these represented European preconceptions as much as they represented any objective reality.

And yet I paused long before one canvas – a painting of Arabs on horseback crossing a stream – and asked whether this could really be dismissed as patronising European romanticism. My problem was that the painted image looked to me very like what a camera would have caught in recording the same scene.

I am not contradicting myself here. I fully understand that the camera can lie. Only last week (in the “Something Thoughtful” posting “Some Corner of a Foreign Field”) I commented on somebody who took unrepresentative photographs for reality.

But I do assert that we can be too precious in the way we interpret images from the past, or rule out the possibility of a common human experience. Yes, art is expressed in culturally specific ways. But that does not mean that somehow feeling the awe of a natural scene can be shuffled aside as a culturally specific phenomenon. A Zulu, Inuit, ancient Greek or Korean looking at the snow-clad Rangipo might have found a different word for it. But their vocalisation – whatever it was – would still have said that this was Sublime.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

“WE NEED NEW NAMES” by NoViolet Bulawayo (Chatto and Windus; Random House, $NZ36:99)

Allow me in deadpan fashion to outline the early sections of Zimbabwe-born American-resident NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel We Need New Names.

10-year-old Darling and her brother Bastard live in a miserable slum in Zimbabwe, perversely called the Paradise. They run with a gang, which includes Chipo, Godknows, Sbho and Stina. They spend much of their day stealing guavas and getting into trouble. Darling’s father is absent working in South Africa. The kids’ lives are at the starvation level. It seems clear that Darling’s mother gains some income as a prostitute.

The kids see terrible things.

They see a woman hanging dead from a tree – apparently a suicide, who preferred a quick death to a long one from a debilitating disease. When father eventually returns home he is wasting away with AIDS. There is the possibility that one member of the kids’ gang has been raped. A girl plays at performing an abortion on herself with an unbent coat-hanger, as seen on American TV shows. Exorcism rituals in the local African Pentecostal church come close to being a form of abuse in themselves. Then the kids witness the spectacle of government goons beating up a white couple and expropriating their house. (They are obviously Robert Mugabe’s goons, but the dictator’s name is given only as “our president” in the text.) Later the grown-ups, part of the democratic opposition to Mugabe, go to the polls in the hope of changing things for the better. They are stomped on. The kids are at the funeral of the ironically-named Bornfree, who has been murdered by the Mugabe crowd.

            By now, you are convinced that this is a depressing novel of unrelieved sordor, aren’t you?

But here is the paradox. In spite of all these terrible things that are depicted, the first-person, present-tense narration of Darling is vibrant, almost buoyant. Among much else, We Need New Names is about the resilience of children. We feel with Darling. We do not pity her. She is growing up with an observant eye and we are aware that there is a certain pitilessness in the gaze of children who have to observe the worst of life at close quarters. It is their defence mechanism and shield.

With unblinking gaze, Darling watches the Chinese contractors bulldozing slum homes so that the government can “relocate” people. Her attitude to visiting foreign reporters, who come to photograph the slums, is strictly ironical. So is her depiction of the Pentecostal church, which announces itself in capitals on a billboard thus: “HOLY CHARIOT CHURCH OF CHRIST – IT DOESN’T GO BACKWARDS, IT DOESN’T GO SIDEWAYS, IT DOESN’T GO FORWARDS. IT GOES UPWARDS TO HEAVEN. AMEN!” (Chapter 2 Pg.30)

In the worst possible circumstances there is laughter and there is possibility and there is life, even if it takes the grotesque form of the kids acting out Freeborn’s murder at his funeral. There is also the no-nonsense kids’ game that is part of the reason for the novel’s title, and that shows an unsentimental appreciation of the realities of power. The kids gather to play the game:

 “But first we have to fight over the names because everybody wants to be certain countries, like everybody wants to be the U.S.A and Britain and Canada and Australia and Switzerland and France and Italy and Sweden and Germany and Russia and Greece and them. These are the country-countries. If you lose the fight, then you just have to settle for countries like Dubai and South Africa and Botswana and Tanzania and them. They are not country-countries but at least life is better than here. Nobody wants to be rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan, like Haiti, like Sri Lanka, and not even this one we live in – who wants to be a terrible place of hunger and things falling apart? If I’m lucky like today, I get to be the U.S.A., which is a country-country; who doesn’t know that the U.S.A. is the big baboon of the world?” (Chapter Three, Pg.49)

Darling’s desire to go to America (as the author did) is signalled early in a passage of free-flowing conversation that is a good example of NoViolet Bulawayo’s ability to link ideas and tensions with a child’s physical experience:

“I’m going to America to live with my aunt Fostalina, it won’t be long, you’ll see, I say, raising my voice so that they all can hear. I start on a brand-new guava; it’s so sweet I finish it in just three bites. I don’t even bother chewing the seeds.

            America is too far, you midget, Bastard says. I don’t want to go anywhere where I have to go by air. What if you get there and find it’s a kaka place, and get stuck and can’t come back? Me, I’m going to Jo’burg, that way when things get bad, I can just get on the road and roll without talking to anybody; you have to be able to return from wherever you go.

            I look at Bastard and think what to say to him. A guava seed is stuck between my gum and my last side tooth and I try to reach for it wit my tongue. I finally use my finger: it tastes like earwax.” (Chapter 1, p.14)

            Among the skilful things in this early passage is the way possible disillusion is raised (“What if you get there and find it’s a kaka place?”). This will loom larger in the second half of the novel.

            Ms. Bulawayo is generally careful in sustaining a child’s-eye perspective and keeping Darling’s observations ones that a young girl could plausibly make. There are times, however, when she comes close to spelling out the oppressive political situation, and the disappointment of the hopes that black independence had encouraged, in more adult terms.

Here is Darling watching the grown-ups going off to vote, with little hope that the ballot will remove Mugabe:

“ The day that the adults go to vote, we stand at the edge of the Paradise, near the graveyard, and watch them leave. They are silent when they go, none of that talk-talk of the days before. We are quiet because we’ve never seen them silent, not like this. We want them to open their mouths and speak. To talk about elections and democracy and new country like they have been doing all along. We want them to look over their shoulders and tell us they will know what we are doing while they’re gone. We want them to say something but they are just silent like they are suddenly unsure, like something crept upon them while they slept and cut out their tongues.” (Chapter Four, Pg.68)

            And here is a four-way conversation among the adults that spells out the disappointment of hopes and loss of pride:

“Wasn’t it like this before independence? Do you remember how the whites drove us from our land and put us in those wretched reserves? I was there. You were there. Wasn’t it just like this?

No, those were evil white people who came to steal our land and make us paupers in our own country.

What, aren’t you a pauper now? Aren’t these black people evil for bulldozing your home and leaving you with nothing now?

You are all wrong. Better a white thief do that to you than your own black brother. Better a wretched white thief.” (Chapter Five, Pg.75)

At almost exactly midway through the novel, Darling’s dream comes true and she goes to live in Detroit, Michigan, with her Aunt Fostalina. But the real U.S.A. is not necessarily the U.S.A. of her dreams, and Darling’s maladjustment to the new environment is overlaid with the persistence of her formative myths. As she remarks early in the novel’s “American” half:

“With all this snow, with the sun not there, with the cold and dreariness, this place doesn’t look like my America, doesn’t even look real. It’s like we are in a terrible story, like we’re in the crazy parts of the Bible, there where God is busy punishing people for their sins and making them miserable with all the weather. The sky, for example, has stayed white all this time I have been here, which tells you that something is not right. Even the stones know that a sky is supposed to be blue, like our sky back home, which is blue, so blue you can spray Clorox on it and wipe it with a paper towel and it wouldn’t even come off. And other thing: you won’t see them from where I am standing but there are tokoloshes too in that snow. At night I dream they come out of it and they say, Hey, do you want to make a snowman? How are you doing? Where are you from? Then they say, Do you like High School Musical or That’s So Raven? They say, do you want McDonald’s or Burger King? They say, Do you like Justin Bieber? I shout at the tokoloshes to go away.” (Chapter Eleven pp.150-151)

It’s not my intention to spike all the novel’s surprises by summarising the whole plot, but I can say that the second half of We Need New Names circles around the whole issue of cultural identity. In America, Darling discovers that not all Africans have the same culture or see things the same way. Her Uncle Kojo is Ghanaian. A Zulu, with rather stereotypical conceptions of his African homeland, figures prominently in the story. More distressingly, American-born blacks – “Afro-Americans” – are often completely ignorant of the real condition of Africa. Some of them even praise the “anti-white-colonial” posturing and rhetoric of “our president” Mugabe. Darling also has to take on, and reacts against, the funny way some of them speak English and their demotic notion of “Ebonics”.

Then there is the pressure of American consumerism and waste. An opulent American wedding is described in anthropological terms. People over-eat and get fat. Kids gorge themselves silly from the icebox and the microwave, and they cuss their parents with four-lettered words. And there is the pull of the American media. There is not only mainstream programming, which Darling’s friends ape. There is also readily available pornography. A long and detailed chapter gives graphic descriptions of the porn Darling’s friends watch while their parents are out.

America is not Paradise; but the Paradise in Zimbabwe was not Paradise either. This is the unresolved situation young Darling is in by novel’s end: still uncomfortable with America despite all its material attractions, still homesick and nostalgic for Zimbabwe despite everything she knows about it. The between-two-worlds condition of all immigrants and refugees.

We Need New Names is a vivid and urgent novel, despite some moments of awkwardness. There is a disconcerting change of narrative voice in a short chapter linking the novel’s two “halves”. Later Bulawayo abandons Darling’s first-person voice for a couple of chapters so that she can give the collective voice of the African immigrants’ experience in America. The polemical bits are sometimes a little contrived.

For all that, this is forceful writing, which has a sense of authentic experience. Even if it is not always for the faint-hearted.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

“THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP’ by Charles Dickens (first published as a serial 1840-41; in book form 1841)

            By now you know my dismal track record with these “Something Olds”, don’t you? If it is some venerable classic, I proceed to give you a long plot summary, which, if you are a literate person who actually reads the classics, you find very irritating. After all, you don’t need to be told what you already know.

            Then I append some general comments and reactions of my own, at which you grit your teeth. How dare I intrude upon things that are better commented on by academic critics, who are more astute than I am at relating the works in question to current academic fashions? I seem to have the subversive idea that people who actually read and understand things, even outside an academic context, are entitled to their informed opinions. What’s the world coming to? Soon you will be calling me a “bookman”.

            Worst of all though, there is my habit of quoting choice bits, which I have copied into my notebooks, from the books under discussion. This really annoys you, as it is proof that I really have read what I am discussing. It should be much easier to slap me down as somebody who doesn’t know what he is talking about. Red with apoplectic rage, you quit the blog at this point and console yourself with your favourite volume of postmodernist literary theory.

            Yes, I myself get tired of the way I sometimes handle these “Something Olds”. So this week, instead of giving you my synopsis-plus-judgment, I will do something else. I offer you no synopsis. I assume you know the novel. I instead attempt to convey to you the actual experience of reading a book that is sort-of part of the canon.

            I first read The Old Curiosity Shop when I was a teenager.

            I read it again, out loud, to some of my older children over twenty years ago.

            Five years ago, taking just over four weeks to do so, I read it yet again, out loud, to my two youngest daughters who were then ten and twelve years old. I made a point of reading the novel to them complete and unabridged, though occasionally dropping in a word of explanation if something really obscure came up, just as I had when I read Oliver Twist to them earlier that same year. They could follow the story quite easily – it is, after all, a picaresque melodrama with clear villains and heroes and comedy. The only points at which they became confused were when the 28-year-old Dickens was laying on the heavy irony or over-indulging in those long, descriptive sentences with multiple subordinate or (more often) conditional clauses. Only one chapter in the book completely stumped them and made them look blankly at me when I had read it, because they obviously had not taken in a word. That was the one where Dick Swiveller goes to the party with Sophie Wackles, who is now being courted by his rival Cheggs. This is a chapter mocking gallant small talk etc., which went quite over their heads because the gallant small talk was of a type that is now quite dead.

            Apart from this, though, the story and characters gave them no trouble at all.

            When you read aloud, you become an actor, and you can’t read Dickens aloud without distinctive and exaggerated voices. That’s the way the characters are written. I found myself reading the oily and dishonest lawyer Samson Brass with a whining nasal voice modelled on a priest I used to know; Sally Brass as a booming-voiced dike (she is clearly a “man-woman”, tougher than her sneaking brother, and in the denouement, when she is escaping justice, one rumour is that she has got away by disguising herself as a man). Dick Swiveller I read as a likeable silly ass – almost Bertie Wooster; the Marchioness as a clever, but very young, Cockney kid; Kit Nubbles as a pocket edition of Sam Weller.

            But I really went to town on the villainous dwarf Daniel Quilp. You have to. I had Mr.Quilp shouting and growling with a slightly East End Jewish twang to his voice. I’m afraid, in short, that I did a variation on my successful reading impersonation of Fagin earlier that year. (I know Mr.Quilp is not meant to be Jewish.) As I was doing all this, I couldn’t help thinking that it’s a fallacy to think that there was no worthwhile British drama for most of the nineteenth century. Dickens was writing excellent scripts for the printed page. That’s why they read so dramatically. That’s why the dialogue adapts so well to films and TV versions of Dickens.

            My (then) 12- and 10-year-old responded in ways not always expected. They seemed to like best the travels of Nelly Trent and her grandfather; the fairground Codlin and Short (puppeteers) and Mrs. Jarley (waxwork show) episodes; and the Marchioness’ and Dick Swiveller’s exposure of the schemes of the Brasses. Given that they were still at the stage when girls like cuddly animals, I was surprised that they didn’t respond to the repeated comic scenes of the Garlands’ recalcitrant pony Whisker, which refuses to obey anyone but Kit Nubbles. Maybe it was because Dickens’ wordplay about the beast didn’t translate in their minds into the slapstick images intended. When I read them Oliver Twist they were underwhelmed by Nancy’s being bludgeoned to death, but my youngest daughter gasped with horror when Bill Sikes’ dog fell to its death and had its brains smashed out. With Oliver Twist, they also loved the Rose Maylie bits (where Oliver finds safe haven in the countryside), which get cut out of all the film and TV versions because they hold up the plot. With The Old Curiosity Shop, they were most horrified by the bizarre scene where Quilp pretends a figurehead he has bought is Kit Nubbles, whom he is plotting to destroy, and he does a kind of wild voodoo act with it, driving brass nails and spikes into it and cursing it. The girls got the savagery and intended homicidal violence of it. Thus they greatly relished Quilp’s death, by drowning, in the fog. Little girls who are sentimental about animals also love to see a villain plunging to his doom. Another great scene was the wonderful comedy of Dick Swiveller and the Brasses trying to wake up the “single gentleman” when he has slept in his lodgings for over 24 hours. That would make a good film sequence with the right comic director.

            Apart from the girls’ enjoyment of The Old Curiosity Shop, how did I respond to the novel myself?

            Yes, it is very, very sentimental, though it is not the fact of Little Nell’s death that troubles me so much as the overblown rhetorical way it is presented – all the talk of angels and the ennoblement of the spirit etc. My youngest daughters listened solemnly, but it did not move them to tears or anything of the sort.

            I was surprised at how strong and convincing were the three mainly descriptive chapters where Nell and her grandfather journey through the industrialised Midlands. There is a chapter where bargemen give them a lift, and their “roughness” is explicit enough to suggest (at least to alert adult readers) a sexual threat to the 14-year-old girl. There is another scene where a slightly demented factory worker worships a factory furnace fire like a god. This put me in mind of Conrad’s paragraph in Heart of Darkness about the African worshipping the riverboat’s engine. In fact, taken out of the narrative context, this part of the couple’s journey is almost like a nineteenth century The Waste Land (or it would be if Browning’s Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came hadn’t got there first). Early industrialised England as very hell.

            I was surprised that the Marchioness is not given that name until about three-quarters of the way through the novel (until then she is just “the small servant”). The most delicious scenes in the novel (and the girls loved them too) are the ones between her and Dick.

 

            But I found Quilp brilliant, and the real genius of the book.

            This is where there is really something demonic in Dickens’ imagination. Quilp is the novelist’s equivalent of Shakespeare’s Richard III or Marlowe’s Jew of Malta – a picture of evil so grotesque and lively and anarchic that you actually like him and you can see the author relishes the over-the-top effects he is producing. Quilp eating boiled eggs, shells and all; Quilp torturing his wife by getting her to sit up all night while he smokes cigars; Quilp forcing Samson Brass to drink scalding hot liquor and to smoke until he’s sick, and cackling all the while. (“Is it good, Brass? Is it wholesome, Brass?”) The best is Quilp bursting in on the tea-party after his mother-in-law thinks he’s dead. This is better than Huck and Tom attending their own funeral. You laugh with him. It is just right that Dickens makes Quilp’s mischievous hired boy (“Tom Scott”) – the boy who stands on his head and walks on his hands - actually like him and weep at his death. The cheeky boy and the novel’s villain are indeed kindred spirits in anarchy.

            Yes, there is much evidence of that tiresome Dickens serial improvisation – characters tried and dumped, and bits of the narrative left hanging; the narrator (Master Humphrey) who disappears after three chapters; the fact that in the opening chapters Nell’s brother Fred was obviously going to play a major role, but he just disappears from the action; the hasty thread-tying explanations of the “single gentleman” at the end; and of course the death of Little Nell. After a moment’s pause, my 12-year-old’s reaction to the death was “Well now there can be a happy ending with Kit Nubbles and Barbara”.

            You can’t fool kids for long about literary contrivances.

            I have to admit to something else that influenced the way I read the novel. Back in the very early 1960s, when I was about ten, I saw on our single-channel, black-and-white television a BBC serial adaptation of The Old Curiosity Shop, starring Michele Doctrice as Nell. I remember vividly her performance, and the weary shabby-genteel performance of an excellent actor called Anton Rodgers in the role of Dick Swiveller. But the outstanding performance was – as it should have been - Patrick Troughton as Mr.Quilp, relishing his villainy in ways that had us laughing uproariously. It added to my childish fun that Troughton’s face, with its bushy eyebrows, reminded me of my father. Troughton went on to be the second Dr.Who, and I have always regarded him as one of the best. (For the record, in my years as a film-reviewer, I saw an appalling musical adaptation of the novel called Mister Quilp, which is best forgotten; and more recently an okay TV adaptation made in 2007, which squeezed the whole plot into under two hours and hence managed to miss most of the really comic bits.)

            Back to the novel. I grant there is something weightless about the whole thing. It’s a fable often without a social context – despite those haunting “industrial wasteland” episodes. The comic characters are delightful. The evil ones are vigorous and grotesque. But it all seems to inhabit an alternative universe. I guess I missed the clearer understanding of class and its effects that is found in Dickens’ later novels, and think that by reading it out loud I really handled it as it should be handled – as a wonderful and inspired children’s bedtime book.

            Parting shots. After reading The Old Curiosity Shop for the third time in my life, I checked out a couple of the older Dickens enthusiasts. To my surprise, I discovered that the genial G.K.Chesterton disliked Little Nell almost as much as the sardonic Oscar Wilde did. (Wilde’s dead-obvious sneer – “It would take a hard-hearted man to read the death of Little Nell without… laughing” – was once quoted to me as if it were the height of wit.) But Chesterton generally liked the novel and chose Dick Swiveller as its best point, relishing particularly the fellow’s barmy poetry-quoting rhetoric. I’d go along with that. Like Micawber in David Copperfield, Dick Swiveller is a self-dramatizing ne’er-do-well who turns out to have a strong streak of decency. I think such people exist. At least I hope they do.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

SOME CORNER OF A FOREIGN FIELD

            Three weeks ago an old friend of mine died and I attended her memorial service. I hope surviving members of her extended family don’t mind my referring to her as a friend, as she was quite a few decades older than me, many people knew her much better than I did, and I was only an infrequent visitor to her in her last years. Indeed I had not seen her for nearly a year before she died.

            She was 95.

            Her married name was Anne Bradfield, but I will always think of her as Anne Holloway. Anne was the younger sister of the craft printer Ronald Holloway, who was well known to an earlier generation of Auckland literati. Ron died in 2003 at the age of 94. Ron and his family were my next-door neighbours for the first 22 years of my life. After many years as a spinster – now a passé word, but one which she herself would have used – Anne did not marry until she was in early middle age, so she was well established as a Holloway in the minds of my family. Anne never had any biological children. When she did marry (to a nice man who later died of cancer) she acquired an adoptive son, James, from her husband’s first marriage. James and I were about the same age, so when we were younger teenagers we knocked about a bit together. This brought me into Anne’s home more than might otherwise have been the case.

As well as thinking of Anne Bradfield as Anne Holloway, I was aware that she was a quietly imaginative woman who had altered her identity a bit, even before her name was changed by marriage. She was christened Jean, but as a girl she had decided to call herself “Anne” as she so liked the Canadian Anne of Green Gables books. Her choice was never questioned, and Anne she became for the rest of her life.

Anne was imaginative in other ways, too, which is really my reason for writing this memoir.

Ron and Anne were both born in England of English parents and were brought to New Zealand when they were young children. Anne was the most passionate Anglophile I have ever met, even outdoing her royalist and Tory older brother, who at least had a no-nonsense and somewhat left-wing wife to temper his views. There was a story, which Anne herself had told me a number of times before it was repeated at her memorial service, that when Anne was a child newly arrived in New Zealand, she was once found digging an impressively deep hole in the garden. She explained that she knew England was on the other side of the world, and she was trying to dig her way back there. Later, she tried to plant flowers upside-down, in the hope that when they bloomed they would be blooming in England. This remained her mindset for life. The most exciting times of her life, which she could not afford until she was middle-aged, were her return trips to England. New Zealand was for her a poor substitute, essentially the uncouth offspring of true culture.

Anne was not academically clever and had had little formal education. But in her adolescence she was told that every cultured person should know both the Bible and the works of Shakespeare. So she set about reading them both – the Bible, naturally, in the old Anglican Authorised version, the one which Americans first took to calling the “King James Version”. She re-read these tomes, in their entirety, many times in her life. Among other things, it meant that she could always drop an apt Shakespearean quotation into conversation, and that she thought of the Bible as an adjunct to Shakespeare – in other words, as a work of English Literature, a delusion which she shared with a great many Anglophone Protestants.

Anne’s older brother Ronald converted to Catholicism. His medievalism, love of heraldry and fondness for Latin drew him to the Catholic Church when he was a young man. There he remained, even if he did in older age frequently grumble about the modified liturgy and the loss of Latin after the Second Vatican Council. Anne, however, stayed staunchly Anglican and was a dedicated member of that church, serving on her local parish vestry committee and acting as a guide to Auckland’s Anglican cathedral. At her memorial service, one of her church-going friends recalled that during church services Anne would refuse to join in modern forms of prayer (“Why couldn’t they have kept The Book of Common Prayer?” she would mutter under her breath) and she would stare straight in front of her, refusing to sing a word during hymns, as she objected to the introduction of an overhead projector and thought that people should still have hymnbooks. But she attended church regardless.

When I was in her home, however, it was not the religion but the self-conscious and preserved Englishness that was most apparent. There were those framed photos and calendar pictures of English cathedrals and stately homes and thatched cottages. There was the framed embroidery that Anne had done at the time of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation – headed up “Vivat Regina Elizabetha”, and showing the crests and heraldic shields of various branches of the royal family. And there was the talk of royalty.

I hope I do not have to stress that these things not my own fetishes. The English royal family is a matter of indifference to me and is not held by me in any particular esteem. If pressed, I would call myself a republican, though I am no zealot and the matter does not keep me awake at night. I am reasonably well acquainted with English literature, I think, and on the whole have enjoyed my own visits to England. But I do not hold the view that English “culture” (however that may be defined) is the criterion against which the rest of the world has to be judged. I am very wary of people who start using the word “heritage” in relation to England. I know that this term tends to point to a narrow sort of English nationalism, in which a superiority to foreigners is linked with an idyllic, sylvan and somewhat unrealistic view of the English past, and a cherry-picked version of English literature, which stops somewhere in the Victorian age.

While emphasising that I enjoyed Anne’s company and enjoyed chatting with her whenever I visited, I would probably use such terms as retrograde, quaint, eccentric, perhaps even dotty to describe Anne Holloway’s rampant Anglophilia. Remember, I am speaking of a woman who had lived almost all of her long life in New Zealand. I believe she shared that fantasy to which I have found that many elderly New Zealand Anglicans are prone – the idea that the English are somehow the rightful settlers of New Zealand, all others being interlopers, and that the Anglican church (despite now including only a small minority of all New Zealanders, and a minority of practising New Zealand Christians) is somehow the rightful church of New Zealand. This may be a carry-over from the “Established” position of Anglicanism in England and is part of the mentality which confuses the status of English royalty with Christian religion itself.

In the end I ask myself, what was the England to which Anne Holloway was dedicated? Partly it was the product of happy and very early childhood memories of England – and we would have to be very dishonest if we did not admit how formative early childhood memories are for us all. But it was essentially the England of This England magazine, the fantasy England of castles, small towns nestled around cathedrals, hedgerows, stately homes, thatched cottages and cricket on the village green, meadows and leas and woods. The England which both the BBC and ITV often cunningly sell to a mass audience (especially an America one) in the form of nostalgic “heritage” series and period soap-operas like Downton Abbey. The tourists’ England. Given that meadows, hedgerows, stately homes and so forth do actually exist, readers of This England magazine might ask how I dare to call it a fantasy. After all, don’t they regularly look at real and un-retouched glossy magazine photographs of all these real things? Don’t hundreds of thousands of tourists every year go and take snaps of these real things? And the camera doesn’t lie, does it?

In answer I would refer to the selectivity of such images and their totally unrepresentative nature when it comes to depicting an England which is now overwhelmingly industrialised and urban and very multi-cultural. (Item – in England now, more Muslims regularly attend religious worship than Anglicans; and English Anglicans are a minority of regular Christian worshippers). The This England England is the England that has been preserved specifically for the tourists’ cameras. It is a maintained theme park.

I am not writing this with any special animus towards unrealistic Anglophilia. It has often been noted that the first-generation children of immigrants tend to freeze the nation from which their parents came into an antiquated image. In New Zealand there are doubtless people who harbour frozen and unrealistic images of their parents’ Ireland or Scotland or Croatia or Greece or the Netherlands or Italy or Samoa or Tonga. We all have formative myths of some sort, and most of us have unexamined or idealised conceptions of places where we do not actually live. Anne Holloway was simply an anachronistic, late-flowering example of those earlier New Zealanders who still referred to their parents’ Britain as “Home”, even if they had never been there.

Yet Anne Holloway had been to England a number of times, and more than once regaled me with stories of the quaint village customs she had seen and the delightful old inns where she had refreshed herself and so forth. Truly mythology is a powerful thing, and so are the images produced by the tourism industry. Anne had been to the real, modern, urbanised, multi-cultural England; but she had seen what she wanted to see, had accepted the tourists’ England as the “real” England and stored her memories to reinforce the idealization she already had.

So some corner of her Auckland suburban home would be forever England. Even if it was an England that very few residents of England would recognise as part of their daily lives.