Chapter Eleven: English Flesh Saltier Than Māori Flesh
The New Zealand banquet continues
Now, believe it or not, Dee joined right in the festivities and talked and laughed all evening. Besides the Kiwi-ese and the broad Far North accent of Maddy Jane and several of her rellies*, and besides the fact that Dee’s hearing aid was probably still rolling around the floor of an Air New Zealand 747 somewhere, she pretended to follow everything that was said to her, smiling and nodding and telling stories about the Gabor Sisters and various other old celebrities whose hair she had cut and curled and colored during her years at the Beauty Shop in Palm Springs.
Nothing she said made any sense in relation to what was said to her but all the Reverend’s tribe just ate it up.
“So one of the Blonde Sisters, you know who I mean, comes into the shop and she’s got this flunky darting around behind her, you know this little flunky, her own personal little schmuck is darting back and forth and the Sister is putting on a show, never mind she hasn’t been on the TV or in any movie for I don’t know how many years, you know what I mean?
“But here she is larger than life and putting on a Big Show for her flunky and I guess for me and the ladies under the hair driers, so she’s pointing to her big head of hair which has been so over-bleached and over-stressed for a hundred years if not more, she’s pointing to her head of hair, if you want to call it that, and saying loud, ‘Can you match this?! I need a wig to match this! Exactly like my hair! Can you match my hair exactly!’
“The Empress, you know what I mean? So I put a hand on one hip, look her squarely in the eye and I says, I says, ‘Now why would you want me to do that when you got such shitty hair!”
“Ma! You said that to a customer? How’d you stay in business all those years!”
“What are you talking about, Beau. I sold her two wigs!”
Dee was on stage as much as the Gabor Sisters ever were, really entertaining the troops. The whole family is laughing their heads off by now and I’m wondering what they have understood because Dee has this kind of mixed up accent of her own, a combo of French Canadian that she was raised with, New Bedford Mass-Little Rock Arkansas-Palm Springs English that she’s been mixing up for the last how-many years, with just enough Yiddish for seasoning.
Maybe it’s the wine and beer and spirits that make them laugh, I am thinking, for if the truth be known, Maddy Jane’s daughters drink like grog’s going out of style. The Reverend Matthews should be here now, preaching about the Wonders of the Sabbath and the Evils of Alcohol.
As I am thinking this over, I can feel my mouth stretching into an Olympic-sized grin, having had more than its share of a drop or two pass its lips during this beach bach party. All troubles and sad thoughts of death are by now forgotten.
“I’m so knackered*,” said Maddy Jane. My Alsatian started barking at 3 a.m. this morning, well of course a.m. is morning. There was a possum outside howling and screaming to raise the devil, you see, my dog caught it and fought it, just out in the yard in front of the house, it went on forever, so I get up and find my leg in the dark and strap it on, in the dark, and off I go in my nightie to put an end to the whole thing.
“I guess Graham and Pippa and their girls’re just sleeping through the whole commotion across the way, so it’s up to me as usual. But can I find the gun?
No, so I go outside and the dogs have a hold of this possum and they’re all going in circles and before I know it I’m on the ground, right in the middle of the all the dog and possum fur, crikey!* I’m arse over tit*, no gun, no stick, my nightie twisted around over my head so I can’t see, but it kept my face from getting scratched up, you should see the rest of me!
“Well, no, you shouldn’t! So it’s dark as a dunny hole* anyway, black as a long drop hole! But somehow I manage to unstrap my wooden leg and I crack that possum right across the skull. That was the end of that fight and I won!
“But I had a terrible time getting to sleep after that so finally I just got up, made some coffee and I just went on the computer and surfed the web ’til daylight. Dee, do you use the computer?
“Did you see what they’re saying about Prince William and Prince Harry and that Camilla Parker-Bowles?
“You know, the Queen herself came up here to visit the North. That would ’ve been 1953. Course she only made it to the Bay of Islands, couldn’t get up to us here in the Far Far North in those days because we only had a little footbridge across the Taipa River then so we all had to go over to Kaitaia and then down the west side of the country, through the Mangamuka Gorge and back on over to the Treaty Grounds at Waitangi in the Bay of Islands to pay respect to the Queen and Prince Philip.
“Metal road all the way, rough as guts, and were we covered in dust and sweat by the time the Queen got to see us!”
Maddy Jane was giving Dee and us a little history lesson here.
I should remind you that the Waitangi Treaty is considered to be the Founding Document of the Nation of New Zealand, the bedrock on which the country has been teetering for its short 160-some years.
The New Zealand Company was established in the early 1830s, mostly under the impetus of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the thinker behind the scheme for settling the country with Brits — though he had to play out his role behind the scenes because he was more infamous than somewhat for abducting a schoolgirl heiress back in England in 1826. For which he served a prison sentence.
Fresh out of prison, he then got the idea of creating a “Better Britain” or a “Britain of the South” (maybe where it was not illegal to abduct schoolgirls?) and in many ways, New Zealand became more British than Britain itself.
Very British. Especially in expressing loyalty to the Crown and in its willingness to take part in Britain’s Imperial Wars. In WWI, New Zealand suffered the highest rate of military deaths of any nation in the Empire, including England itself. Every little town here, no matter how remote, has a memorial to the war dead and you will usually find that the dead came from a handful of families in the area because there were only a handful of families in each area. All for a war on the opposite side of the world, 12,000 miles away, for politics that had absolutely nothing to do with New Zealand, and for a Mother Country most of the Kiwi soldiers had never even visited and would never see.
But back at the beginning, back in 1840, when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed and the Nation of New Zealand was formed, there were only a little over 2000 British settlers in the North and South Islands combined and for the most part they were welcomed by the local populations, the tribes who today call themselves Māori.
The original people always referred to themselves by their separate tribal names — there were over 1500 tribes and sub-tribes, almost a separate tribe for every single Britisher in the land!
The locals did not consider themselves as a Māori people with a single identity. Tangata Māori simply means “ordinary people.” Māori means ordinary or normal.
Well anyway, various Tribes and Sub-Tribes welcomed the English in the beginning, mostly as a way to get an advantage over their traditional enemy tribes, an advantage called guns. Of course, like the natives in America who welcomed the Pilgrims to Massachusetts, they had no idea how numerous the British were and how many of them would be happy to escape England to settle in the New World. Or in the case of New Zealand, the New New World.
Within eighteen short years, the Pakeha settlers were thicker than fleas on a limey sailor and certainly thicker than the indigenous folk. By 1858, Pakeha New Zealanders already outnumbered Māori New Zealanders.
By the 1890s, just 50 years into the new country, the Māori Tribes had lost over 95% of their land to the newcomers. This should sound familiar to Americans.
The Māori began to use a proverb about the power of saltwater to contaminate freshwater. This was a nice culinary and gustatory metaphor because Pakeha flesh was reputed to taste much saltier than Māori flesh.
And so we are back to kai, to food.
Let me tell you about the food that night at the beach bach bash.
Our hosts had prepared all the local specialties, lamb on the spit with mint jelly, fresh snapper and crayfish (lobster we call it in America) and mussels from Doubtless Bay, and the Kiwi national dessert — Pavlova. Pavlova is a meringue cake with a crisp crust and soft marshmallow center, topped with whipped triple cream and fruit. It was named for the Russian ballerina when she toured Australia and New Zealand in 1925. The perfecting and the naming of the cake is a matter of rivalry between the Aussies — pronounced Ozzies — and the Kiwis. Most everything is a matter of rivalry between these two groups.
In fact, Kiwis don’t like to talk about it, but the Waitangi Treaty House itself, where the New Zealand Nation began, was designed by Australian architects, prefabricated in Sydney, and then shipped to the Bay of Islands for reassembly.
Big brother-little brother rivalry often makes for a swaggering, beer-drinking inferiority-complex-hiding little New Zealand brother, and a swaggering, beer-drinking inferiority-complex-hiding big Aussie brother).
Anyway, there was so much food to eat that night that we could have invited the entire Far North to have “Tea” with us. And everything was as fresh as food can possibly be. If you want to eat good, natural food, come to New Zealand. And you can get a lifetime supply of sugar from just one helping of Pavlova.
And no salty British flesh to mar the festivities.
The seafood is plentiful and the seas are as unpolluted as any seas can be in the 21st century. Scallops wash up on the shores of the beaches at Karikari Peninsula regularly, as do live snapper and John Dory, often enough to be a somewhat regular occurrence. Sometimes you can just stroll along and pick them up as they wash in.
The mussels we ate that night at the bach were pulled from the rocks on our own beach that very afternoon by some of the grandkids present, the fish and the crayfish were pulled from Doubtless Bay that morning by McMac and Graham and were being cooked up by the sisters, Stormy and Bluebird, who were drinking more during that one night than Julia Childs ever did in her entire career.
In fact, they were putting away more grog than the rough sailors and grizzled whalers of New Zealand’s early days. But still managed somehow to create a delicious feast.
During the evening, Maddy Jane decided to help us out when we got ready to build our house.
Beau and I looked at each other — of course, we hadn’t decided to go ahead with our project. Doc Stearns and his news had left us with everything up in the air. Everything. But we still had not breathed a word to anyone. Not during Dee’s big visit. So we just listened quietly to Maddy Jane.
“When your Boys decided to put a road in to their farm, Dee, I sent them the best road-builder in the Far North, that’s me brother, Gaddy. And when you are ready for an electrician, Boys, I’ll send you Marcy the Sparky*, he’s my cousin. Well, second cousin or something. My cousin.
“You’ll need a plumber and you’d be plumb crazy not to hire the best! Plumb crazy, get it? Now, that would be Grant what’s-his-name over the way here. He’s my brother-in-law’s brother. Or cousin. Anyway, known as the best in the Far North but he’s slow as a slug. Never mind, he is the best. When you’re ready for a chippie* and a brickie* I know who to send you.”
Before the night was over, McMac and Maddy Jane’s two daughters allowed as how they were going to start protesting the Yankees’ “take-over” of the most beautiful section on Doubtless Bay, where McMac and Bluebird had hoped someday to retire themselves. Said they were going to protest with signs and sit-ins just like the Māori sometimes do when they feel land has been taken unfairly by the Pakeha, mostly the Pakeha missionaries.
If they can protest against us and our ancestors from England, we can protest the Yanks!
It started off as a joke, I think, but soon a certain bitterness crept in. And the more the wine and beer disappeared, the more evident this bitterness became. There was some deep bitterness, jealously, anger on the parts of the daughters and their partners that Graham and his mother had sold off the most beautiful part of the farm they shared since the death of Maddy Jane’s husband and had divided the profit just between the two of them.
G.Reed was the youngest child but the only male child. And so he got everything and the girls were left with just their second “partners.”
It is the English practice of the right of primogeniture: the eldest male gets everything so as not to divide up the Family land as the generations go by. In this case, the youngest child was the only male. And so the youngest child got all.
“Pay them no mind,” said Maddy Jane finally. “They’re just pissed* or drunk I think you say in America.”
McMac spoke up. “Boys! What’s that statue you boys put up in the paddock? Deaf, dumb, and blind? What’s that all about anyways?”
As the silver moon looked on beautifully and impassively, the night air grew cool. It was time for us to head back to Whatuwhiwhi. Laughter and hugs and kisses all around when Dee said she had lost her Louis Vuitton handbag in the dunny, the long drop. Seems she had gotten her St. John’s Knits in a twist as she tried to maneuver inside the small enclosure and had accidentally knocked it into the hole, down it went.
“She’ll be right*,” said Maddy Jane.
We were to learn that this is a very common Kiwi expression meaning everything will be all right, all will be O.K., not a problem.
It seems most often used when everything is hopeless, when there is no use trying because a problem has no solution. Let’s just give up.
She’ll be right, mate.
I thought of Doc Stearns. “Aaron, do you know—?”
She’ll be right, mate.
On the way home, very full and very tired, we were quiet. Only once did one of us speak. It was Dee.
“Maddy Jane is very friendly. She will do anything for another person. As long as it’s in her own interest. Ruthless.
“Ruthless Matthews.
“And that McMac. Forget about hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil statues. He’s more like deaf, dumb, and blind.”
END OF CHAPTER ELEVEN
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Aaron Allbright’s novel in five parts will be published on Substack.
Before too long!
IN A DESERT OR A CITY
BOOK I
‘PRINCE CARTIER’ or HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE BEING GAY WITH MY SAUDI PRINCE AND TO START WORRYING
BOOK II
MONSIEUR LE PRINCE, PARIS
BOOK III
THE MYSTERIES OF PARIS
BOOK IV
TYROMANCY AND LUCIFER
BOOK V
WHY WAIT FOR THE LIGHT?