Somehow you learn at an early age that there are questions that you must not ask. Families have secrets. Even before starting school, I noticed that other children had people called grandparents whose sole purpose in life was to make a fuss of them. They had uncles and aunts and cousins. I had none of these apart from Aunty Thelma who was really just the lady who lived in the upstairs flat. Although she did make a fuss of me. We seemed to be an isolated unit with no history and to question how that could be was somehow to act badly.
Another thing that made me wonder, later, when I was allowed to stay with school friends, was why Mum and Dad didn’t sleep in the same bed. Other parents did. Mine didn’t even sleep in the same room. I asked Mum about it and her answer made sense. “He snores. And I can’t sleep when he snores.” That was true enough. He did snore.
Mum and Dad came over from Australia just after the war and only a few days before I was born. We lived in the bottom half of a house in Auckland until I was four. Then we moved to a farm in Mamaranui in the Kaihu Valley. I don’t know where the money came from but I think it certain that Dad had had prior farming experience.
It was in Mamaranui that I started school. I enjoyed the farm and the opportunities to help. At first it was just feeding the calves. Putting my fingers in their mouths and teaching them to drink skim milk from a bucket. They were stronger than I was and pushed me about a lot but I loved doing it and loved them. Those were the days of home separation and sending cream to the factory in cans. The rest of the skim milk was fed to the pigs. We had Large Whites. Milk-tanker collection didn’t start until my teens.
By my years at primary school, I was milking morning and evening, getting up in the dark, a quick cup of tea, and out to get the cows in. And several hours later, a gulped breakfast and a rush down to the road to catch the school bus. The longer bus ride and the homework during my high- school years changed the mid-week program but I was still fully involved on the weekends.
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I had always hoped for some brothers and sisters, preferably brothers, but it was not to be. When I came to be of an age where I had some understanding of the mechanics of making a baby, I couldn’t see it happening. Any spark between Mum and dad seemed to have been quenched or at least very much damped down. They treated each other with respect and obviously cared for each other but it was more like brother and sister. And Mum was getting older.
I was at High School the day that Mum died and Dad was down at the store. It was one of those stupid things. We had a Fergy tractor and she had a weak battery. We’d been starting her with the crank handle and, because she always started first pull, we just hadn’t got around to getting her a new one. Why Mum wanted to use the tractor that day, we’ll never know. Mum had left her in gear and, when she fired, she moved forward pinning Mum against a strainer post.
Dad took me out of school after that to help with the farm. It was almost the end of the year anyway and I was fifteen. That’s why I never got past the fourth form.
Now that there was just Dad and me, he had a local girl come in during the day as slavey. Actually her cooking was not much better than ours but the house was cleaner. We’d been living like that for about seven months when Carl Olsen, who farmed next door, dropped dead on the footy field. He had the ball and was going like stink for the line, fending off tackles and looking unstoppable—but his heart had other ideas.
Dad and I went over to help with the milking for the next few days after doing our own, Mrs Olsen could hardly be expected to do it under the circumstances, and after that he kept sending me over to help in other ways.
I had never spoken to her even though she lived on the next farm. Carl had never been happy to have anyone talking to his wife. Not just men, whom he assumed had designs on her, but anyone, even women. Carl was someone that you wouldn’t want to cross. He was an asset on the rugby field but otherwise best kept at a distance.
When I first spoke to Mrs Olsen it was, “Please call me Susan,” and Susan she became. She was
HE SNORES Page 3 more that twice my age but I found that she was someone that I could talk to without reserve. And the reverse seemed to be true. It was obvious that she needed someone who would listen. She was the exact opposite of Carl, artistic and sensitive. I came to feel that losing Carl was a release for her. Perhaps even a blessing.
But then she became my step-mother. Locals had been of the opinion that this was something that was bound to happen. They had taken notice of Dad’s helping her and had drawn their own conclusions. A widow and a widower on adjoining farms. That signalled a royal wedding to unite two kingdoms.
Actually, the wedding was a low-key civil ceremony. When some time later twin girls were born, I’ll guarantee that every local woman counted off the exact number of days on her calender.
Well before that event, I was down in Auckland working for the Parks Department and boarding with ‘Aunty’ Thelma. Dad had set it up for me. He knew someone. I was anything but happy with him marrying Susan. My initial opinion of her had changed drastically. The time away was supposed to be temporary but for the next six years I didn’t go home. Dad and I kept in touch by letter. I was always going to be a Mamaranui boy interested in everything that was happening there.
Then, after a letter drought, Susan wrote, ‘Could you please come home? I know it will be hard for you but your father is ill. His mind is going.’ I put through a toll call and days later I was home.
It was painful to see the wreck of the man that I loved. The now shambling gait, the mind fallen into confusion. And it was hard to call Susan ‘Mum’ although it was obviously politic to do so.
Another problem was the joint hostility of the brats, Annette and Linda, to this outsider. They were in school by then and doing well. They were bright—perhaps too bright—and thoroughly spoiled. Dad had been much too indulgent with them and, as his mind started to go, they had taken advantage of the fact. If their Mum said, “No! Definitely not!” they went to Dad who said, “Yes, of course sweethearts.” I convinced Susan that the time had come when Dad must be firmly overruled in his dealings with them. They didn’t like that at all. And they didin’t like me for pulling them up
HE SNORES Page 4 for some of the things they did. “You’re not our father. You can’t tell us what to do.” They’d have had a few good clips around the earhole if it had been left to me. And there was never going to be a reconciliation between us.
Eventually, we had to put Dad in a home. He needed watching every minute or he’d wander off. It was just so wearing. He no longer knew where he was anyway. And enough time had gone by for people to accept the idea of Susan and I being a regular stepmother and stepson and it was a situation that I had come to accept myself.
They’d put share-milkers on the Olsen farm during the time that I was away so we combined the two farms in the off-season when the contract ran out. We built a new herring-bone shed to milk the combined herd and hired a farm worker who lived—-still lives—with his family in the other house.
Annette and Linda cruised through school and high school and the money was there to put them through university so that they hardly had to ask. Even then they were determined not to like me. Yet I’m the one who helped put them where they are today. It was me that made that money. They started out debt free.
Back when pay-out was on butterfat, we ran Jerseys but, once it became based on milk solids, I moved us over to Friesians and began to build herd quality with top sires, careful record keeping, and some savage culling. Over the years, I’ve replaced every bit of our pasture with newer better strains, improved our pasture management, vastly improved the drainage on the flats. Peak growth used to come at the end of summer when it was least needed. Farming has become increasingly scientific. I have to keep running to keep up.
The girls have always looked down on me from their lofty education, Annette is a lawyer, Linda a psychologist, and all they can see is my two years at high school. Nothing of the country has rubbed off on them.
But things have changed in the last ten days. First, Susan has died. Her cancer couldn’t be stalled forever. Then Dad followed her only two days later. It couldn’t be a broken heart. He wouldn’t even
HE SNORES Page 5 have known that she was gone. And the deaths mean big changes. They have made no recent wills. There are only those that they made when they first married which leave the possessions of each to the other. Dad, by surviving for two days, became Susan’s legal heir.
Both girls put in an appearance for the combined funeral and left straight afterwards. Everyone remarked on the fact that neither of them spoke to me. But I received a letter from them today and it has brought something of a shock. It is written is Annette’s best legal prose and it positively gloats. Annette has been digging hard to exhume the family secret, which I suppose is what lawyers do. They had wondered about the lack of relatives on Dad’s side and have known the reason for some time and been sitting on it. Just waiting for this very moment, no doubt.
They are adament that there is not going to be a three-way split. It appears that Dad was not my father but, really, my uncle, Mum’s brother. Mum conceived me out of wedlock, a shameful thing back then. When she refused to consider putting her coming baby up for adoption, her parents disowned her. Dad, and I must still call him ‘Dad’, Brought her over here where they were not known so that she could have the respectability of being ‘Mrs’ Walton. He was that sort of man. So that was the end of his acceptability at home too.
The girls insist that I have no inherent right to any of Dad’s property since I am ’not of his issue’ and that any attempt on my part to make a claim against his estate will be fought vigorously. Natural justice obviously doesn’t come into it.
But most families have more than one secret and I’m sitting on one myself….AND…I’m waiting for the right moment too.
The biological father of that prize pair was barely sixteen at the time.