For better and for worse, till infidelity do us part - Part One

For years, and despite all the drama and calamities of his union with my mother, Rae, my father would not be drawn into the subject of their relationship, or her nature, in front of me. He was also not one to relive the past while those wounds were still raw. By contrast, my mother never spared us a nasty detail about our father, and if I were not so incredulous, I might to this day believe him to be a very wicked man.

In 1998, worn down by my dogged questioning, and licking his wounds after being left by his second wife, he illuminated the subject of the end of his first marriage. “I married her after knowing her for eight weeks,” he told me, “and it took me eight weeks to realise that I had made a terrible mistake. Unfortunately, it took me fourteen years to end it.”

My father was raised, the middle of three children, in a working class catholic family in Panmure, a post-war suburb nestled in between Auckland’s wealthy Eastern beach suburbs and the Tamaki Estuary. Following a shot-gun wedding, his parents lived for a time with my father’s maternal grandmother before they spent a year living in a cramped two room home in an army camp bordering Auckland Domain. Fortune smiled upon them when one of the new state houses in Panmure was finally offered to the growing family in the mid 1940s, a home shared by my grandmother and uncle to this day.

My grandparents were both factory workers, my grandmother never schooled beyond second form. She sewed their clothes, cleaned, and made the small amount they earned stretch to feed a five-person family. My father remembers his father as a stern man who once stubbed his cigarette out in his mashed potato, ordering him to eat it after the young boy had complained about the smoke blanketing the family dinner. Granddad could also be terrifying when he rolled home drunk from the pub in a mood for intimidation. But it could have been worse. My grandmother recalls a neighbour who was often brutalised by her husband, according to the screams she regularly heard coming from her house. When I asked if Granny ever called the police, she said that it broke her heart, but in those days people did not involve themselves in the marital problems of others. I don’t think that in practice there is absolute equality between the sexes today, but nonetheless, I am grateful that I was not born 50 years earlier.

My gentle and sensitive Grandmother, alive today, was a good catholic who must have found refuge from the drudgery and hardship of everyday life in the ritualistic rites of the church, and its seductive promise of eternal paradise in the next life. She held the church and its leaders in very high regard. It is no wonder then, when she asked Dad one day what he wanted to be, and he said “maybe a Priest”, that he found himself sitting across the kitchen table from the leader of their congregation the very next day. Not wanting to disappoint, my father entered a seminary in Christchurch at 17 years old, and spent the next five years trying to figure out whether the priesthood was his vocation. His quest ended during a weeklong catholic retreat, which Dad used for meditation on the conumdrum. With the end of the week approaching, and frustrated that he could not come to a conclusion using logic or philosophy, he sat in a field and made a plea to God. “Father”, he prayed, “if this is my true vocation, make this dandelion bend over”.

“But for a gust of wind,” he says today, “I would be a catholic priest.”

After leaving the seminary, he enrolled at the University of Auckland in a Bachelor of Commerce. Nearing the end of his study, he planned an OE with two friends, and was in the process of booking tickets for a six week boat trip to the United Kingdom when he locked eyes with heartache and trouble at the pub. My mother was pretty, petite, had curves in the right places, a short skirt and long red hair. With little experience of women, and some years to make up for, my father fell easily for this more experienced vixen, fully possessed of her sexual power. A friend of his once told me that his enduring memory of that night was of my parents spending much of the night getting hot and heavy in the stairwell.

A few weeks into their relationship, my brother, then five, asked Dad if he could call him “Daddy”. Enamoured of my mother, and feeling responsibility for my brother, he changed his travel plans for wedding plans, even as he wondered whether Rhys had been put up to the “Daddy” line. Recently, when Dad was questioning the hasty nature of their union, I asked, “Do you think, perhaps, you were…er…blinded by the sexual nature of your relationship?” He stole my true thoughts when he muttered “I think they call it cunt-struck. Yeah, probably.”

His parents were bitterly disappointed that he chose to marry a woman he barely knew who had a child in tow, but Dad was disinclined to heed the advice of his father. The marriage was a low-key affair, held at the home of my maternal grandmother. My mother wore a tight mini dress in black, lime green and orange. It laced up the front, ended just below her bottom and was paired with knee-high boots. We know this not from photos, the photographer was drunk and forgot to put film in the camera, but because the items of clothing remained in her closet years later. After the ceremony and a small bite to eat, my parents spent the ride home in the wedding car making the most of their updated marital status, to the amusement of the people riding up front.

Embarking upon the marriage was relatively easy compared to the decision to divorce. It must have been hard in those more religious and socially conservative times to face its stigma, even if by then my father was a lapsed catholic anyway. But there came a time when marriage dissolution went from tantalising possibility to unavoidable reality.