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Don palmer had never properly settled since his return from the war. Before he had volunteered for the army, life had taken a constant and self-evident direction. He had grown up in Central Otago, never far from the silent treacherous force of the Molyneux, playing among arid rocks, working in the summer holidays picking apricots and peaches at local farms. After school he would watch the gold dredge, where his father was winchman, sitting like a strange water animal in its pond, constantly foraging and devouring orange clay, constantly evacuating in neat barren rows its piles of gravel. He would stand on the bank and wave to his father who looked from the window of the winch-room. Sometimes his father would lower the gangway to the bank and he would run aboard, grinning at the men who were perhaps working on cables because there had been a breakdown, or with great guns, like cake-icers, were greasing the ladder which held the buckets. If the dredge was working he would run up the iron stairs, thrilling to see the men moving silently and expertly among the chattering machinery, the valves near the jigs quickly opening and closing, the water and sand flowing in channels beneath them; full of fear he would pass the rotating perforated barrel which separated the boulders from the fine soil, screaming so loudly that one could not speak above the noise. Once the men were on the barrel when the dredge was stopped, tightening its rivets, when without warning, it began to turn. They all jumped off except one, who was killed. Don’s father had been off sick that day, and another man had been winchman; they said it would never have happened if his father had been on the winch, he was so careful. Don could not pass this without imagining himself caught on the barrel, thrown to the edge and—he would never follow the thought, whether he would be crushed, or pulled out just in time. Up more stairs he would see his father, who would continue to work without more welcome than a grin. page 84 He would not leave the winch or turn his eyes from the window, but he would open his crib-tin and give Don one of the chocolate biscuits he always saved from his lunch. And Don would watch in wonder and fascination, these miraculous operations that depended on his father’s hand and brain, the orange cliffs around the pond, the deep clayey water on which the dredge floated, the two desolate miles of tailings behind it: like a huge wood-borer it carved its way ahead repudiating behind it its dunes of waste. Sometimes his father would tell him to go on home ahead of him, Mum would be getting worried, but sometimes he would let him wait and Don would watch him turn off the switches—or if the dredge was working a night-shift, hand over to another winchman—and walk off the dredge ahead of him carrying his crib-tin, proud to walk listening and unnoticed with the workmen, fascinated by this strange world of men who swore and called one another by their first names. Sometimes he and other boys would play at dredgemen, talking in stern mature tones, swearing if there was no one to hear them, making emergency decisions with curt commands.

They were a close happy family. It was seldom that he and Doris and Flora fought, and if they did they always made it up in genuine repentance. At the centre of their world was Mum, with her husky voice, her deep knowing face, her inexhaustible energy. There were few times Don could remember her punishing him—Dad left that to her—because somehow the occasion never arose when any of them deliberately defied her.

They were never conscious of a great gap of years between themselves and their parents. Mum and Dad at home seemed to have little interest outside it. They never read anything except the local paper and a couple of weeklies, Truth and the Auckland Weekly. Dad didn’t bother with a vegetable garden, though Mum had a few lettuces in the summer—they preferred to buy their vegetables. They occasionally listened to the new wireless set they had bought —one of the latest: it had a separate loudspeaker like an old-fashioned gramophone. But for the main part their life was concerned with themselves. After his dinner Dad used to romp on the floor with them; when they were smaller Mum used to give them aeroplane-rides, spinning them round like a merry-go-round till she was dizzy. Dad had funny names for them—Flora was ‘Dopy’, Doris was ‘Drip’, and Don was ‘Muttonhead’. They had their playmates, of course, but Mrs Palmer preferred them to bring the other children round to their place—she said it would train her children to be hospitable, and seeing that this was at the beginning of the slump, and wages were getting lower and there was page 85 some talk of the dredge closing down, the parents of their playmates did not object to their arrangement. Their home was the only kind of life the Palmer children knew: for them in those days their home in Dougalburn, near Cromwell, on a sidestream of the Clutha, was self-evidently good, sufficient, and eternally secure.

The dredge did not close down, though the only other one in Central did. It was a bit too early doing that. When Britain went off the gold standard the price of gold rose and goldmining was the only industry that thrived. Unemployed from the cities began to appear living in tents, prospecting along the rivers. The local people began to be suspicious of strangers on the roads. People sold any old watches and jewellery that contained gold. The men on the dredge kept their noses to the job because the management could easily replace them with men from the dredge that had closed down. Assured market or not, the men’s wages, in line with those of workers in other industries, were cut, and Dad’s along with them. He said at the time the country was going through hard times and he didn’t mind going without a little if it’d help the country through, so long as everyone else did his bit too. The Palmers now kept more closely to themselves, though Mrs Palmer let the children have other children home for an occasional meal. They dared not entertain neighbours who were out of a job because inevitably there would be jealousy that Dad still worked on a good wage, and she wanted to protect her children from malice.

It was at this time that Don was first made conscious of why his mother’s face was darker and deeper than those of other mothers. Once he was running cheerfully into the crisp clear sunlight of an early summer morning when he passed the wife of an unemployed lorry driver who had sometimes used to give him rides. This man was working for the month at a local orchard; after that he would trap rabbits but they fetched so small a price it wasn’t worth sending them to Dunedin, and his family had to cat them themselves. Don was full of expectant energy and called cheerfully to this woman, but she sneered over her gate: ‘Don’t you start cutting airs round here, you Maori beggar. Just ‘cause your old man’s a winchman.’ The bottom fell out of the morning and Don climbed slowly to the top of a hill of bare rock, and pondered all morning, so that he forgot about the sun and came home so burnt that Mum growled at him with unusual severity.

Dad tried to ease the situation.

‘You’ll be as black as a nigger, if you don’t watch out,’ he said.

‘We aren’t Maoris, are we Mum?’ Don said,

‘Who’s been telling you that, son?’

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‘Mrs Thomson. She said I was a little Maori beggar.’

‘That puts Jack Thomson last on the list for when the dredge takes new men on,’ Dad said, ‘if I have any influence with the foreman.’

‘Just don’t pay any attention to her, son,’ Mum said. ‘I’m the one who has Maori in me. And I’m proud of it. We owned this country before all the Thomsons and pakehas.’

‘Here, go easy. You’ll be saying I’ve got no right to be here, soon,’ Dad said.

‘Well, we believe in live and let live. We held out an open hand of friendship, son; we said, we’ll share this land. It’s just some of them go back on their word. Don’t you speak to Mrs Thomson again, son. There are some people who just aren’t worth bothering about.’

‘Can’t I play with Jackie Thomson?’

‘Not now, son. Mum knows best, I was of royal blood. My grandmother’s father was a chief. I can be as superior as Mrs Thomson if I want to.’

Don grew up a youth of outstanding good looks, with leisurely waving jet-black hair, big dark easy eyes, and soft masculine features set in clear light-brown skin. The slump was over in his adolescence, and their differences with the other workmen were buried. There was plenty of work now, and there were six dredges in Otago. Don joined a local pipe-band and Mum spent fifteen pounds on his pipes and his costume. The family went to Dunedin to see him march at the pipers’ contest at the Caledonian grounds. Their band only got highly commended, but as Mum would say, ‘It’s not the prize that matters, son. It’s the spirit of the thing.’

He began to go to local Saturday night dances. He learnt to dance readily by watching the steps from among the crowd of young men who couldn’t dance or were too shy, who always stood occupying a third of the floor space near the door. His first love was Jennie Thomson. Mum, strangely enough, encouraged it, went out of her way to invite Jennie to meals, and by this strategy they tired of each other. It was the fullest and noblest experience Don had known. The home lost its attraction. He was a greaser on the dredge now; and at work his mind was with Jennie, with her auburn hair and shy ways. Of evenings they walked together, or went to the local pictures; on Saturdays they danced, leaving early so that they could stand for half an hour in tremulous rapture at her gate, because she had to be in by quarter past eleven, standing close, talking in murmurs, kissing with faint excitement and a wondering joy because neither of them could think of the other page 87 without surprise. Home won in the end. Jennie’s mother, worried that they might marry and produce a brood of throwbacks, sent her to Dunedin to work and though they wrote for a while, Jennie met other men and Don had already grown doubtful before she went because at home she showed up as wanting, clumsy in her little violations of the Palmer code. It was Don’s only virgin love.

After Jennie he felt he was a man of the world. He began to flirt with girls, taking a different one to her gate every Saturday night; at the gate he had none of the shyness he had known with Jennie. He looked back in an assumed blase manner at that affair and thought he had been wet and green. He kissed and embraced passionately no matter whom. ‘They’re all the same in the dark,’ he once found himself saying, though he didn’t altogether believe it. He found himself sought after at dances: once one girl ran to beat another to him in the ladies’ choice. And that night was to be a landmark in his memory: the first time he had known a girl. Behind the hawthorn hedge round the cemetery on the edge of the town. He faced his mother with slight guilt in the morning, and he looked at Flora in her virgin freshness and he thought, ‘By Jesus, if anyone ever did that to her, I’d kill him.’ But his face alternated between a shallow uneasiness and a deeper sensual complacency, a sense of having done everything a man can do, of being initiated; and it was not lost on his mother. As if about nothing or everything in general, she said, with her back to him, washing the breakfast dishes: ‘Just take it easy, son. Don’t let it go to your head. Now for God’s sake be careful.’

He grunted, pretending not to understand.

‘There’s plenty more fish in the sea, son,’ she said, trusting herself now to turn and face him. ‘Jennie’s not the only one.’

‘I’m not worrying about her, Mum.’

‘You’ve got sheilahs on your mind, son. Mum knows. It’s only natural. But just go easy. I don’t mind you having a good time. Only be careful.’

‘Me. I’m always careful.’

‘I’m serious, Don. We don’t want any forced marriages. And for God’s sake don’t let on to Dad what you did last night.’

‘You know everything,’ he said resentfully.

‘That’s right, son. Mum knows.’ She took it as flattery.

Don went outside and for the first time since he was a boy he turned over the back garden with the spade that hadn’t been used since Mum dug a patch for lettuces the summer before.

Mum saw to it that Dad got more beer in the house. She encouraged Don to drink at home. Flora wouldn’t touch it, and Doris page 88 only drank shandies. ‘What I always say is,’ Mum would say, ‘if you make it shameful they’ll only go away and do it behind your backs.’ It was a strange sensation for Don to be unashamedly tipsy in his own home, because already he had been away in a friend’s car on Saturday nights, the two of them with two girls, to an isolated pub ten miles away where they served you after hours. And already his features had lost the expectant nobility of a year ago, a promise of ripening manhood, the looks that made him so fresh, with alert virgin eyes, when he had been in love with Jennie. His lips twisted, prehensile to cigarettes and women’s lips; his eyes began to burrow for the response to their invitation; his checks formerly expectant and alive, became complacent and dead. In spite of Mum and the beer on the kitchen table he began to range farther afield. There was hardly an attractive girl in any town within fifty miles that he didn’t know by name or repute. He and two mates began to take a rental car to Dunedin for a week-end every month. He lost interest in the pipe-band: his pipes he sold, keeping the money himself; and his costume, which was getting too small, Mum put away under mothballs.

Dad put his foot down once when Don was fined on a charge of drunken driving. He wouldn’t allow Don to drive to Dunedin any more; he said he would have to use the bus. Only Mum said that would make Don look small before his mates and Dad agreed that he could ride in the back seat of the car. ‘If there’s any more trouble, I’ll put a stop to you going to Dunedin altogether,’ Dad said. He would have done then, only he knew it would have meant convincing Mum it was necessary. He regretted later that he hadn’t because Mum said one Monday night, after Don had been away that week-end:

‘Dad, Don wants a word with you.’

‘What about?’

‘He wants to get married.’

‘Married? Gawd, what’s wrong with him—are you serious, Lil? Jesus Christ, he’s only a kid.’

‘He wouldn’t say it if he didn’t mean it.’

‘Who’s the girl?’

‘Some Dunedin girl.’

‘Why didn’t he tell me?’

‘That’s what he wants to see you about now.’

‘Can’t he ask me without doing it through you? I haven’t grown away from him that much, have I?’

‘Well, at that age, Dad, a boy always turns to his mother for advice.’

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‘Well, he’s going to have this thing out with me, Lil.’

Mrs Palmer went out of the room when Don came in.

‘What’s all this your mother tells me, Don?’

‘I want to get married Dad.’ He swallowed a little uncomfortably.

‘What do you want to get married at your age for?’

Don was uneasy, ‘I think she’s the right girl for me, Dad.’

Dad blew. ‘You don’t get married just like that, son. What are you going to live on? What sort of a family does she come from? What do her parents think about it? That’s just some of the things I want to know.’

Nor did Don reassure his father. She was a girl from St Kilda, from a small wooden house on the flat, on a tram route. Her father was a tramway motorman; they didn’t have a lot of money because he had only been working three years since the slump, when he had spent most of his life’s savings. She was just twenty-one.

‘There you are,’ Mr Palmer said. ‘She’s older than you.’

‘Only a year.’

‘Well, it’s the principle. A man should marry a woman younger than himself.’

She worked in the Golden Grill as a waitress, and Don had met her there one night as they went in to have a feed of oysters and chips after the Town Hall dance. Cheeky with beer he had asked could he meet her on her day off. Surprisingly she seemed to jump at the chance, and since then he had met her every time he came to Dunedin; and, as she had managed to change her night off with another waitress, they went to the Town Hall dance together, and later to other dance halls which were not so staid. She was dark and plump with a pampered and rather pasty face. Don’s mates wouldn’t have looked twice at her, but she had a baby-like manner which appealed strongly to him. He had no doubt that she had known other men, but that didn’t seem important to him. Wages were better now in 1938, and he had more money to spend, and most of it he saved for his week-ends with her. Mum often helped him out with a loan, though he seldom paid her back. He had met her parents only once. They didn’t take much notice of him, he was just another of her boy friends. It surprised him that a family could be like hers; she was never at home but she was itching to be out of it. She boasted of deceiving her parents; most of her remarks about her kid sister were catty. He pitied her, and thought she needed rescuing from such a home. Now when he went to Dunedin his mates didn’t see him after they let him out of the car at the Oval where he took a taxi to her place. They were resentful that their good-time comradeship was breaking up. They wondered when he page 90 would get tired of her, but he didn’t. She was obviously proud to have him at her arm. Myra was her name, and she dressed fussily and in poor taste got from women’s fashion weeklies. She had a new hair style almost every time he saw her. She used make-up generously, and she smoked from a holder. ‘She’s got a classy style,’ Don would say; but his mates didn’t comment after a few routine taunts like, ‘You’ve got it bad this time, Don’.

‘How do you know you can afford to get married?’ Dad said.

‘Well, there’s my post office savings.’

‘We paid that, son. You’re not to touch that till you’re twenty-one.’

‘Well, I suppose we can live on my wage.’

‘You don’t realize, son, what a responsibility you’re taking on. You’ve got to buy a hose and a section. You’ve got to be able to provide for her and for your children. You can’t do that on love.’

He went to the door and called, ‘Lil!’

Mrs Palmer came in. ‘I’m against it,’ Dad said. ‘You haven’t even convinced me you really want to marry the girl,’ he said. ‘You’ve hardly mentioned her.’

‘Here, son, tell Mum,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘Do you want to leave us for her? That’s what you’ve got to face up to, whether she’s worth leaving home for. Do you love her?’

Dad made an embarrassed noise and went out into the clear night air under the stars.

Don squirmed. ‘I like her, Mum. She attracts me. I want to be with her. I’m always thinking of what we’ll do next time. I’d like her to be my wife.’

‘Is it like when you were with Jennie?’

Don sneered. ‘That was calf-love.’

‘Well, I don’t reckon you really like this girl, whoever she is. I reckon it’s just her body you want. There’s plenty more fish in the sea, son. Can’t you wait a while? From what you say I don’t reckon she’s good enough for you. There’s a dozen girls in this town would be glad to have you. You’ll soon get sick of her body, son. You can’t spend all your time in bed.’

Don could not face such talk from his mother. He went to the door and found Dad. The air was sharp, and the stars were crisp and frail like frost patterns. The silence in the valley was active, almost audible. A faraway car murmured in a desert gully, and its lights occasionally searched the darkness over hills a long way off.

‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you, Dad,’ he said. The darkness gave him quiet courage. ‘I’ve got to marry her. She’s in the family way.’

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He felt a blow and staggered on to the leafless rosebush by the gate.

‘You deserve a bloody hiding,’ his father said quietly. ‘At your age. I never thought a son of mine…. This generation…. Get up, or I’ll give you another. Come inside.’

Inside Dad told Mum to leave them alone and he started again to punish Don. He punched him in the chest several times and thumped his shoulder. Don made no attempt to oppose him. It was the first time in ten years his father had struck him.

‘It doesn’t do any good, Dad,’ he said. ‘You know I won’t hit you back…. It doesn’t get rid of the baby.’

Dad sat down by the kitchen range and said: ‘How far gone is she?’

‘Two months.’

‘That’s not so bad then.’

He looked up at Don with a cheated look, bare of all sentiment, and Don returned the look, equally stripped: two naked selves opposed. ‘It ’s a pity I didn’t put a stop to your Dunedin excursions altogether. It was only that your mother wouldn’t have it.’

‘It’s my fault. Don’t blame Mum.’

‘I was ready to let you go drinking and dancing. I thought you were a decent clean-living lad.’

‘Don’t rub it in, Dad.’

‘Christ Almighty, it needs rubbing in. It’s a pity we didn’t rub it in earlier. You might have been a decent boy still.’

They sat in silence for a few minutes.

‘Well, your mother’ll have to know.’

‘Oh, son,’ Mrs Palmer said when she knew. ‘Oh, Don. As if I didn’t warn you.’

‘Is she the first girl you’ve done it to?’ Dad asked.

‘No.’

‘How long has this been going on?’

‘About a year.’

‘Did your mother know?’

Mrs Palmer looked tense with her big powerful eyes. Don did not look at her.

‘Yes. She knew.’

‘Well, you get to bed. We’ll talk of this in the morning. Go in and tell the girls to go to bed.’

When Don had gone, he gave his wife the only thumping she was ever to have from him. She took it submissively and making no noise except gasps because she didn’t want the girls to know. She collapsed and cried, not out of subterfuge but out of exhaustion; page 92 and she preceded him to bed. She felt cheated. It wasn’t the beating she objected to, but that Don should have given away their secret. Dad didn’t come to bed till one in the morning.

At first Dad wanted to turn Don out of home. ‘It’d be a lesson to him. He’s always had everything he wanted. We’ve spoilt him. The girls have never abused us like this. It’d be a lesson for him to make him stand on his own feet.’ But Mum dissuaded him on the grounds that it would mean telling the girls, and that the neighbours would get to know of it. ‘Mrs Thomson’d scent it a mile away…. Wouldn’t she be laughing at us?’

‘Bugger Mrs Thomson. It’s the girls I’m worrying about. But I’m warning you. No encouraging them to kick over the traces, now.’

The girls were never told that the marriage was forced. Their eager excitement helped to offset for the Palmer parents the grimness of pushing through with the plans. Mrs Palmer wasn’t impressed with Myra. ‘Jennie was worth two of her,’ she thought. There was little mutual attraction between Myra’s parents and Don’s. Myra only had her glory-box and thirty pounds in the post office; her parents said it was all they could do to pay for the wedding-breakfast, but they were pleased to have Myra off their hands with a man whose parents had a bit more than thirty pounds in the bank. The Palmer girls welcomed Myra eagerly, and she was rather flattered; she tended to exploit their goodwill and boss them about, but Mrs Palmer put a stop to that with one or two of her well-placed words. On the whole Myra did well out of the arrangement, and at the back of her mind she congratulated herself on having done what Mrs Palmer had suspected from the moment she met her, on having manipulated Don into fatherhood, to make sure of him. It was a humiliating blow to Mrs Palmer that after all her warnings, it had been Don himself who had been seduced.

The wedding was in the Anglican Cathedral. Myra’s people were Methodist and would have been happy to have the wedding in their local church, though they never worshipped at it. But Mum insisted that she take Don’s denomination, and that they marry in the biggest Anglican church in town. She would have insisted too on a reception at the most expensive hotel, offering to pay half if Myra’s people couldn’t afford it, but the management of the Grill offered to have the reception there, at a reduction, seeing Myra had worked there five years; they were just entering the wedding reception business and it would be a good advertisement; and the idea appealed to Mrs Palmer. Myra’s people and the Palmer girls got the most enjoyment out of it. Myra’s father and page 93 brother got coarsely drunk, her mother cackled rustily on three port wine and brandies; and Mrs Palmer felt strengthened in her majestic respectability by these waves of vulgar hilarity. Her husband relaxed for the first time since Don broke the news on them; he grew mellow as she encouraged him to drink because she knew he could take his drink and not forget to be a gentleman. Don looked well too, and for all that his mother said of his not being in love with Myra, he was obviously proud of her. He beamed at them all, in this moment of his pride, and in that beam the worst of his parents’ resentments dissolved. Irritated by the glint of triumph in Myra’s eyes, Mrs Palmer consoled herself that Don would soon learn to subdue her.

They had hired a taxi from Dougalburn at quite an expense. After they had seen the last of Don, frustatingly [sic: frustratingly] incommunicado under confetti in his happiness and everyone’s attention, they drove, sherry-sentimental and wet-eyed, through the workaday streets out through Caversham and back to Central Otago. Dad called at Henley for a round of drinks and they sat in the hotel lounge, Mum tired over a sherry, the girls excited over raspberry drinks, Dad easier and reconciled.

‘Well, it hasn’t worked out so bad,’ he said.

‘Dad! What’s wrong with you?’ Doris said. ‘Flor, listen to him! “It hasn’t worked out so bad!” Don got married. You should be happy.’

‘Yes!’ Flora said.

Mum said, ‘Let’s get back to the car,’ and rose quickly, her glass half full. In the car she gave in to a quiet fit of tears. ‘Twenty years we’ve seen that boy every day of his life. Now we won’t see him except on odd visits. I’m dreading going in to find his bed empty in the morning.’

Dad applied for a foreman’s job on one of the new dredges starting on the West Coast, and within three months they had moved to Coal Flat.