Rae’s mythology

My mother had something in her nature that made her the way she was, but her less than ideal childhood must have fuelled whatever strangeness lurked there. I cannot be sure of the facts, as I have found that her memory can be inventive, however this is how I understand it. She has said many times that she was raped when she was five, by a family friend. It apparently happened while she sat on the man’s lap in the back seat of a car that her father was driving. He put a stop to it when became aware of what was happening. I feel guilty and disloyal to admit that over the years, aspects of this story have troubled me. The violation would have been difficult and excruciating for a small child, probably evoking screams of pain and terror. How did the man progress to actually rape her? My mother has a habit of depicting herself as The Victim, The Raped, The Violated, The Abused, and The Betrayed. I am sure this man did something to her, but whether it was rape is hard to know. The story, of course, may be devastatingly true. If so, considering the tragedy of the rape never being resolved, and to the best of my knowledge, no charges ever being laid, I would consider it a possible cause, rather than product, of her victim’s mentality. In any case, it has become a part of her mythology.

Her parents must have had a tough relationship. They lived in Whangarei, north of Auckland (my mother was born further south, in Waipawa). Her father, Les, was as an accountant. He was an unusual man. My father thought him quite mad, with somewhat of a mean streak. Grandma did not want a lot of children, but Les believed that contraception was a woman’s responsibility and refused to use a condom. These were the days before the contraceptive pill, so unsurprisingly; Grandma brought seven children into the world – one boy followed by six girls. My mother was the second girl out.

An Aunt recalls that my mother was a particularly difficult child, so much so that her grandparents refused to look after Rae when her parents went away. The only solution was for my mother to accompany her parents on holiday while the others were left behind with the grandparents. Apparently my mother read this special treatment as evidence of the special place she held in the hearts of her parents, above that of the other children. If it was a misunderstanding, at least it was a happy one. But I have a niggling feeling that it was an early foray into spin. Had she not spent the prime of her life on the Domestic Purposes Benefit, she could have cut it in PR.

The family was quite well to do by standards of the day. They were even the first family on the street with a refrigerator. But their relative affluence was short-lived. My mother relates the story of being handed the local paper by a classmate at school one day. In it she found out that her father had been sentenced to seven years’ prison for embezzlement. Sometime after, her mother, Helen, shacked up with another man (and had no more children so presumably he was of the opinion that contraception was his responsibility.) My mother alleges that this man then molested her and other girls in the family.

Sometime during her father’s incarceration, the youngest five children (including my mother) were sent to a brethren children’s home in Marton ‘for the weekend’. When their mother never returned for them, they realised that their stay was permanent. In the home, according to my mother, discipline was harsh, food was meagre, and bullying was rife. She told me that one day, fed up with being beaten so readily, she wrenched the leather strap from the hands of the home’s patriarch, and turned it on him.

My mother left the home at sixteen, and went to stay with her mother. This was a short-lived arrangement. According to Rae, she told her mother that she had been molested by her mother’s partner, and was promptly kicked out.

When she was 20 and living in Auckland, she became pregnant to a man about town called Peter. He didn’t stick around, but Rae kept her baby boy, Rhys. In 1966 it must have been tough being a single parent. There was no state assistance, so she had to find a way of supporting the two of them from moment he was a tiny baby. I know that she was a hairdresser, and provided domestic duties in return for board. There were also rumours of another form of income, but I will give her the benefit of the doubt. And if those rumours were true, well I can’t imagine she had many options.

My mother told me that at some point when Rhys was a baby, they spent a night sleeping in a digger on a building site. Like so many other stories, it is hard to know what is truth, and what is dramatic license. Perhaps there was an alternative on offer, but not packaged in a way she liked, so she decided to sleep rough in a martyr –like gesture. I know this is horrible to suppose – for all I know she was desperate and there was no alternative – but I also know her ways. She is cunning. Whatever the truth of the circumstances that led to that night, it pains me to think of my brother as a baby, sleeping out in that digger.

For the following five years my brother, a gorgeous wee boy, saw a lot that a young child should never see. My mother still liked to party, and men came and went. It must have been such a relief for him when my father introduced stability to his transient world.

My mother’s parents did not live long lives. Her father went on to marry a woman called Jill, who he treated poorly by accounts. She was young and a drug user. She died suddenly one day, of heart failure. The police questioned my grandfather following her death, but I do not know why. He died of a heart attack in his fifties, but I was only two so I have no recollection of him. My grandmother smoked heavily and died of lung cancer in her early sixties. I was seven when I was ushered in to her room to view her on her back in her deathbed the morning after she died. The sight of her face, contorted and coloured orange and purple, terrified and haunted me. For years I would never go to sleep on my back for fear that like her, I would never wake up.