‘The defendant made a long rambling statement,’ the article continues, ‘endeavouring to prove provocation.’
The Clutha Leader concludes with the jury’s decision: ‘The stacks (with a value of one hundred pounds) had been wilfully set on fire by some person to them unknown.’
Bibby may well have had a motive. In another article he is the victim of arson. In the night he is woken by dogs barking and discovers his stack containing eighteen to twenty bushels of oats on fire. While attempting to put out the fire he hears the movement of a man in nearby scrub. The man runs off; Bibby gives chase but loses him. The article also provides some detail about the marriage. The Bibbys sleep in different bedrooms. Mary Bibby had moved out once before ‘in consequence of some words with him’, but also after their pigs were poisoned and some property was stolen. Several times Bibby had asked her to return; finally he prevailed, only for this arson to rekindle her distress. The newspaper article also mentions that before their move to their current address the Bibbys had lived briefly in Milton, where their house, insured, had burnt down.
Why should I care if he was guilty or innocent? Curiously, I did care. A niggling doubt about Bibby’s role—his evasiveness and rambling statement—perhaps has something to do with my own trickle-up or trickle-down misdemeanours, such as setting fire to the rubbish dump at the back of the house at 20 Stellin Street. I wonder if waywardness can be inherited. I wonder if Bibby was a bit of a hot head. I feel it might be true.
It had been thrilling to see the rubbish dump go up in flames. Just as it had been thrilling when I threw all the firewood patiently collected and stacked by a man and his grown-up son into the Hutt River. I’d hidden in the bushes so I could watch their reaction. That was really the point of the exercise, but it became less exciting when father and son looked around and quickly split to circle behind my position and flush out ‘the little prick’. The prick was marched to the riverbank. Father and son debated what to do next. The son wanted to throw ‘the prick’ into the river. The father spoke of driving ‘the little prick’ to the police station. In the end, after soliciting my telephone number so they could ring the prick’s parents (naturally I gave them a wrong number) they let the prick go.
The newspaper articles and a coroner’s report also provide detail of Bibby’s mixed fortunes. From milling timber and building props for the nearby Castle Hill coalmine he has saved enough to begin building ‘a good-sized cottage’ when he is struck down.
In no particular order he cuts his finger on a chafing knife, is knocked off his horse by an over-hanging branch, is thrown from his horse and lands on a tree stump and then, with his foot caught in the stirrup, is dragged along the ground. The incidents read like a series of indignities. One of his injuries, however, will lead to an excruciating death in 1894 by tetanus.
The coroner was unsure, at first. Bibby’s symptoms suggested either strychnine poisoning or tetanus. To add to the confusion, the correspondent for the Clutha Leader reports ‘an epileptic fit’ as the cause of death. If correct, here is the source of Lorraine’s epilepsy, as it is carried through the male line.
Mother and daughter describe a strange mood overtaking Bibby. He seems abstracted, unreachable. His wife recalls him often depressed and prone to sitting around the house lamenting the decision to buy in Kaitangata instead of staying in Milton. He complains of rheumatism, until it reaches the stage where he can barely move his arms and legs. His nine-year-old son describes him on a milling expedition lying down in the bush unable to move. At night he wakes screaming, his body in convulsion. The fits increase until at last he agrees to see a doctor.
Dr Fitzgerald found him calling out in pain and grasping a rope with his right hand. Bibby wouldn’t let the doctor touch him:
He said each touch brought on one of those turns he had had. I found him bathed in perspiration, his shirt being simply soaked. His pulse was rather rapid, pulsations being about 108 per minute. He complained greatly of thirst. His wife gave two sips of water. While still on his bed he took a fit of vomiting and vomited about two or three ounces of clear fluid. Almost directly after one of the vomits he took a fit, and while the fit was on his face was livid. He did not froth at the mouth nor bite his tongue and seemed conscious all through it. He took a second fit much more severe from which he did not rally.
Dad’s mother, Eleanor, is sent to the local hotel to identify her father’s body—presumably there was no hospital—and there, in the hotel, two doctors saw through Bibby’s skull and cut out the brain to search for clues to his death.
Dr Fitzgerald continues, ‘Apart from a slight adhesion to the membrane everything was normal. The upper part of the spinal cord all healthy. The lungs and heart healthy. The stomach was found empty, no trace of poison could be detected.’
The hotel where Bibby’s brain was cut out can be found in a watercolour by Christopher Aubrey, painted in 1878, a few years after the Bibby’s arrival in Kaitangata. The hotel and church huddle by the confluence of the Clutha and Kaitangata Rivers. To the rear the hills, which presumably Bibby had a hand in clearing, look stiff and paralysed.
From Tilbury Dock to Port Chalmers the Bibbys were seventy-eight days at sea. Their immediate world is dense, stifling. A child’s cough or runny nose is a worrisome thing. Fear of sickness and especially fever accompanies the endlessness of the journey. After a few weeks of being washed in sea water, clothes have a stiff salted feel, and the flesh crawls with imaginary lice. Sleeping conditions are appalling. People are stacked into impossibly small places, which they enter feet first. These long voyages were perhaps the first step in losing contact with old ways. A child might be sewn into a linen bag and dropped overboard less than two hours after its death, and despatched with the body is that lingering sentimentality more common on land.
I wonder about the tremendous distances that existed in those days and the erasing nature of the ocean—that vast and bland divide between past and future—and the effect on the Bibbys of a journey where the land went missing for weeks on end, before, suddenly, there it is, like a monstrous surprise, and where so much is seen for the first time, so much that is unfamiliar, perhaps spectacular. But how much of it is retained in the minds of the illiterate? How might meaning be attributed or memory preserved in the absence of diaries, journals, cameras, canvases, sketchpads? Things don’t get written down. Observation and eloquence come from official sources—the captain, the surgeon, the church minister.
I wonder if the assault on the Rabbit Board inspector resulted from bluster on Bibby’s part. The inspector has reached into his pocket for a document, and to cover up the fact that he cannot read Bibby finds a way to shift things into an area where he knows how to conduct himself.
Another generation on and that scoundrel Arthur Leonard Jones will make the same ocean journey. He will meet and marry John Bibby’s daughter, my grandmother.
If I’d paid closer attention when the blue book first came into my hands I might have discovered Arthur Leonard Jones’s reason for leaving Wales. On his marriage certificate (to Eleanor Gwendoline Bibby) he is described as a ‘widower’. He may have wished to put as great a distance as possible between himself and the place of grief. What better place to choose than faraway New Zealand? His wife died in 1897. He married Eleanor in 1903.
A birth certificate, a marriage certificate, a death certificate and an outstanding bill to cover the expenses of the orphanage his kids end up in appear to be the only times he came to official notice. Both he and his parents-in-law, the Bibbys, although for different reasons, are a part of the legacy of silence dumped at the door of 20 Stellin Street, together with an enormous capacity to forget.
In Kaitangata the Bibbys hold two lives within themselves. A third, if childhood is included as country already passed through. On the far side of the world there are new transactions. Layers of observation and memory shift back and forth, between the old and the new, between the place left and the place arrived at, until a sharper impressio
n rises from the broth—this hill is a bit like that one, this bit of Kaitangata is a bit like that bit of Swansea, and if not, then reshaping things until the ingredients of memory disappear into the place of settlement.
But I also wonder if ancestral silence is a form of stage fright.
At primary school, some poor tremulous kid was always being hauled off the mat and stood in front of the rest of us to present a news item. I remember one boy pissing himself. On another occasion, a girl burst into tears. Pissing yourself or bursting into tears didn’t seem at all unreasonable. I lived in fear of the teacher’s eye beckoning me up into that exposed place in front of the class.
I was in a similar situation to my forebears arriving at a small unknowable place on the other side of the world. What could those faces peering back see in me that I couldn’t see for myself? For one thing I didn’t trust the sound of my voice. I was unsure where it came from, even less certain that it was truly representative of me.
Then arrived the moment of crisis. My mind turned blank. What did I have to say? I didn’t have anything to say. I’d lost the will to speak. Shame rose, like sap, inside me. In the eyes of my classmates I sensed a cruel excitement.
To make things worse I was trying to rid myself of a speech defect. I struggled with my th’s. I suspect it had come about after trying to sound like someone else, possibly one of the voices on television I heard through my bedroom door. I used to blame the Irish comedian Dave Allen. But I realise now that he spoke of ‘tings’ rather than ‘fings’. The point remains, however; at 20 Stellin Street the groove of speech was very lightly indented. The dominant voices were the ones on the television ringing through the house. I imagine that is how I came temporarily to lose the th sound. Someone like Steptoe bellowing through my bedroom door with his rag-and-bone voice. It seemed to happen without my being aware of it. I found myself talking about fings and foughts. And even when I realised what had happened I couldn’t shake the habit. I’d mislaid the th and now I had to make a conscious effort to join up this crucial frontispiece with my things and thoughts. In amazingly quick time I had shed something and the absence of it now revealed me differently to the world, in a way that I didn’t especially care for.
I don’t want to say fing or fought so I have to pause and dig around for the th sound and attach it to the word before the sentence can safely leave my mouth. A hesitancy creeps into my speech and with it a kind of delayed cognitive response. Instead of leaping fearlessly from subject to subject I have become timid, afraid I will say fing. I have turned into a stammerer, without the actual stammer, and in place of speech there arrives instead a sort of closed breath.
In London, I saw a man turn himself inside out as he hunted for words to deliver to an audience that had turned up to hear a free ‘talk’. It began promisingly: a young woman representing the gallery welcomed the artist Martin Creed, and a man with no arse at all, in a fire engine top framed by a dark vest, leapt on stage, and the audience—twenty-nine of us, as I recall—clapped politely. I had never seen a man who wasn’t already dead with so little colour in his face. His head seemed to be abnormally large. It wasn’t helped by that hair of his—more like foam—which, of its own initiative, as it seemed, had acquired dramatic personality of its own. So that both the hair and Martin Creed approached the microphone. Then arrived a moment of crisis that was very familiar. Whatever he had intended to say had gone clean out of his head. His mouth closed, and he walked quickly away from the microphone. The eyes of the audience stalked him to the corner of the stage where he stood with his back to us, presumably to collect himself and make a fresh start. After a few minutes of exhilarating silence, he returned to the microphone to make a fresh start. When eventually he spoke it was slow, agonising, but beautiful too, the way the words seemed to catch—some Scots can do that, sound like their words are drawing through a pit of gravel. He said, ‘Someone once told me, that if you don’t know what to do, it’s best not to do anything.’ We laughed—some of us uproariously, as though a horse had just burst out from a barn door and run through a line of washing. We wanted to encourage him, and for the first time Creed smiled. He began to nod, and his attention settled more broadly.
‘Did you pay to come today?’
We shook our heads.
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘That’s good.’
Another silence rolled out, and I detected a shift in the mood of the audience, a hardening of consumer entitlement. A man down the front sitting in a row by himself crossed his arms in an aggressive manner. This was answered by Creed dropping a hand onto his hip and raising his eyes to the ceiling and slowly shaking his head. Then, the change that came over him made the audience sit up. He strode across the stage and bent to pick up a guitar which I had not known was there until, worryingly, it was in his hands. He set the capo on a high fret and strumming away he sang, ‘I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to do it.’ Until Creed’s ‘talk’, it had never occurred to me that the presentation of self was a performance and, therefore, every bit as unreliable as the surfaces of a city or a painting, or, for that matter, family history. One observation of Creed’s has stayed with me. It came after he explained how the talk had come about; he said he had quite liked being asked, and then there was the newly published book that had catalogued all his work to date that needed to be publicised. ‘Aye, the book.’ Its mention seemed to depress Creed because he paused. Then he said, ‘It’s a bit like looking at your shit in a toilet bowl. It’s not very nice but sometimes you just have to do it.’
FOUR
WHO, I WONDER, knocked down the door of the Kilbirnie flat to find six children crawling around the corpse of their mother?
Eleanor Gwendoline Jones suffered, as her father John Bibby had, a toxic death, in her case, by hydatids, a disease picked up from contact with dogs. An affectionate lick from a dog is enough to transfer the tapeworm that more commonly infects sheep. Inside the host’s stomach the tapeworm grows cysts, some the size of tennis balls, and bigger. For a time the carrier goes about her business, without suspecting anything is seriously amiss. When the cyst bursts, as can happen in a fall, the victim—in this case, my grandmother Eleanor—dies from toxic shock.
Where is her husband, the father to all these kids? A year earlier, Arthur Leonard Jones and Eleanor had separated. Since then, Arthur, described in the blue book as a wharf labourer, appears to have led an itinerant life, leaving a trail of addresses across the city. He is already well on his way to turning into the phantom who will go down in history as a ‘naval captain drowned at sea’.
Laura, Dad’s eldest sister, is partly responsible for this account. There is a scrap of a letter written by her brother Percy passing on what Laura allegedly told him: ‘Our father drowned at sea aboard the SS Ionic, a troop-carrying ship, after it was hit by a torpedo off the coast of California.’
Except, everything about that story is wrong. The Ionic was fired on, but escaped unharmed and kept sailing. The incident did not occur off the American coast but in the Mediterranean in 1915 with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force on its way to Gallipoli.
I don’t doubt that Percy accurately recorded what Laura told him. But where did she hear this story?
On the strength of that ‘history’, I will develop a strong bond with the sea. I even convince myself that I have innate navigational abilities, which are repeatedly and more successfully put to the test on land than at sea, finding headlands and coastlines among spires and hilltops.
A different line of inquiry finds Arthur in a hospital bed suffering from sciatica the day his wife is lowered into an unmarked grave in Karori Cemetery, and, later, he turns up in Auckland where he remarries and otherwise leads an obscure life.
The woman in the office at the Karori Cemetery keyed in the name Eleanor Gwendoline Jones and with a minimum of fuss printed out her whereabouts, plot 107. She showed me on a map where to find her—‘at the row beginning Smith, the unmarked grave between Eliot and Wilton??
?.
I must have always known that my grandmother was buried in Karori Cemetery, but I never went there or paid it any attention because, as far as I can remember, Dad never did. Perhaps the idea of a mother—that particular mother, at least—was as alien to him as a grandmother is to me. I never once heard her name spoken.
Then, in the office, I had another thought. What had happened to Dad’s ashes? I remember, after his funeral, stopping on the way to the car park to gaze back in the direction of the crematorium and finding a thin trail of smoke. Edward Llewellyn Jones. The woman keyed in his name. Her eyes trawled down the screen. She looked up, and said, ‘His ashes are in the rose garden.’ ‘On whose authority?’ I asked. She put her glasses back on and looked at the screen. ‘Mr Robert Jones,’ she said. My brother.
The rose garden is below the road opposite the cemetery’s admin office. Down there a young runner was going through her warm-down routine. I stared at the roses.
It had never occurred to me to ask about Dad’s ashes. Apparently they had been spread without ceremony, or family in attendance.
That wasn’t the case with Mum. The last third of her life was spent at two addresses—a handsome house with a full view of the harbour and a townhouse just before the bend on the road leading out of the bay. In both bedrooms she liked to lie in bed and gaze across the bay and, at night, listen to the police on shortwave radio. I wouldn’t have thought she knew much about shortwave radio. But I like the idea of her and the other old ladies along Marine Parade at a sleepless hour tuning their transistors to the static and police-speak, finding comfort in those voices, in their proximity, in the same way that a yawn from the dog in its kennel at night used to banish thoughts of ghosts hanging about in our backyard looking for a way inside the house.