Book Review: The Plimmer Legacy, by Bee Dawson

Available in bookshops nationwide.

Most people who know Wellington will have come across the Plimmer name. It’s immortalised in locations such as Plimmer Steps, Plimmer House and the seaside village of Plimmerton, north of Wellington city. Many residents and visitors will have paused to look at the statue of the ‘energetic and entrepreneurial’ top-hatted John Plimmer and his ever-leaping little dog Fritz. The pair are found at the base of the steps between Boulcott St and Lambton Quay, a route that Plimmer often took. Bee Dawson’s book recounts the story of the Shropshire-born Plimmer and many of his descendants from the 1800s through to the present day.

Dawson is a social historian who has carried out extensive research not only on the Plimmer family but also on the growth of early Wellington. Her book also provides a comprehensive record of farming history in the Rangitikei area, where many of Plimmer’s descendants established farms.

The Plimmer family and other settlers faced many challenges. Earthquakes, infant deaths, rheumatic fever and other illnesses took their toll. Fires were common, sometimes destroying entire streets, and there were constant threats of work-related injuries and deaths. However, life was not all doom and gloom. The Plimmer family was fortunate to experience first-class trans-Tasman steamer trips, enjoying the plush couches, tempting menus, and solid marble baths on offer during the journey. Their social life included balls, fancy dinners and moonlight river excursions.

Dawson has drawn on accounts in newspapers, letters, journals and other records. Where there are gaps in these accounts, she suggests what was likely to have happened. Photos and maps supplement the text. There are plenty of diverse topics covered, some in more detail than others. They include Māori history and lore, transportation (with a hair-raising tale of brake failure), duck-shooting traditions, pest control, mourning rituals, and corporate ‘wheeling and dealing’. Dawson even offers a couple of the Plimmer family’s favourite recipes.

Dawson grew up on a Canterbury farm and her love of farming and knowledge of farming practices is evident throughout the book. As a townie I knew nothing about the complexity of land exchanges or the farm ballot systems that Dawson describes. I was intrigued to learn about the old Rabbit Board houses, and how farming families cope in remote areas during floods and electricity outages.

The tight-knit nature of rural communities is well-depicted, and Dawson also emphasises the strong family ties and business nous that have kept Plimmer’s legacy alive.
Succession planning has been critical to the Plimmer family’s ongoing success. Generations of Plimmer descendants have continued to work the farms, often during university holidays. This work often involved what they call the ‘d’ jobs: ‘drafting, dagging, docking, drenching and dipping’. Such hands-on jobs provided a solid introduction to farming life, although some descendants later pursued careers in the corporate world.

I suspect that this is the only book I’ll ever read where the appendix includes a list of paddock names. Some are named after family members, others after farm workers including shepherds, fencers and tractor drivers – there’s even one named after an accountant. Several names reflect the territory, purpose, or characteristics of the area, such as Flax Gully, Airstrip and Dam Flat. Dawson provides a thorough index and a short bibliography for readers keen to learn more, drawing primarily on New Zealand material. The family tree at the front of the book helped me to keep track of the main characters.

The closing notes include a descendant’s observation that the Plimmer family has now come full circle – from Wellington city to the Rangitikei district and back to the city again. The area where John Plimmer first established his business ventures is now ‘just a stone’s throw away’ from the family’s current office on Queen’s Wharf. That office is also not far from the statue of Plimmer and Fritz. If the statue could talk, Dawson’s book hints at the fascinating stories those two could tell.

Reviewed by Anne Kerslake Hendricks

The Plimmer Legacy
by Bee Dawson
Published by Penguin Random House
ISBN 9780143773559

Book Review: Driving to Treblinka: A long search for a lost father, by Diana Wichtel

Available now in bookshops nationwide.

Imagine saying goodbye to your father in Canada, expecting him to soon follow your family to New Zealand, and never seeing him again. That is what happened to Diana Wichtel and it’s something that had a profound effect on her life.

Wichtel grew up in Vancouver, Canada, with her brother and sister. Her mother was a Catholic New Zealander, her father a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust. When Wichtel is 13, her mother returns to New Zealand and she is told her father will follow them later.

Her father never arrives and the family eventually moves on without him, but Wichtel often thinks of him. The years pass and finally she decides she has to know what happened to him.

Driving to Treblinka is the story of her search for her father, but it is so much more than that. It is a story of courage, hope and survival in the face of cruelty and terror. It is the story of a family torn apart by war and the actions of the Nazis, and what survivors had to do to stay alive.

Part historical memoir, part search for anything that could shed light on her much-loved father, Driving to Treblinka is one of the most moving books I’ve ever read. Most of us take life for granted, but those who lived through the Holocaust had to fight for everything, expecting it to be snatched from them at any moment.

This book will make you smile as you read the stories about family life that are so familiar and heart-warming, but it will also make you cry – and possibly make you angry – reading about the millions who needlessly lost their lives during the Holocaust.

Wichtel’s father may have been seen as lucky because he survived, but often surviving is harder because it means living with the past every day of your life.

The search for her father is all consuming for Wichtel, but with the support of her extended family she learns more about his life and what happened to him after the family moved away from Canada.

I have always enjoyed Wichtel’s writing and this book is all the better for her sensitive handling of it. It is funny and sad, and it’s hard to accept what Benjamin Wichtel had to endure and what his daughter went through in order to find him and tell the story of his life.

Driving to Treblinka is an excellent book that deserves to be read and talked about.  In the weeks since I finished it, I have often found myself stopping and thinking about Benjamin and his family and the love that bound them all together.

Reviewed by Faye Lougher

Driving to Treblinka: A long search for a lost father
by Diana Wichtel
Published by Awa Press
ISBN 9781927249406

 

Book Review: Family History, by Johanna Emeney

Available in bookshops nationwide. 

Family History by Johanna Emeney begins with a secret: Emeney’s mother is an adoptee. When Emeney’s mother is diagnosed with breast cancer, and the lines of family history become something different, Emeney and her mother both have to navigate through a landscape of hospitals and grief.

Emeney begins with her mother’s old photo albums in her poem Captions. Her album is filled with written captions, from ‘MR AND MRS DUNNE AT OURS’ to simply ‘ME’. But some of these photos are just ‘bare grey squares’. Perhaps these photos were moved around, or maybe they were taken and never returned. As a result, these words have no photo to caption. Although the past and some of its photos have gone, the album still lives on, declaring a certain family history.

And then, with the diagnosis of breast cancer, Emeney’s family starts to unravel. How large was your heart is a poem where Emeney crosses over from the medical into the poetic, proving that the two do not need to be kept separate. Emeney portrays the rush of unfamiliarity that comes with medical terminology, describing how ‘The coroner reports a haematoma / over the anterior pericardium’. It is a flow of words that means nothing to a reader like me, who doesn’t have the medical knowledge. But then Emeney unpacks it in her own tender words. Emeney claims that she has already felt the size of her mother’s heart in her own way; ‘she has felt its beat in full swell / through warm, unbroken ribs’.

Further on, in Anonymous, Emeney’s mother is reduced to a sample of tissue that will be used for cancer research. A letter labels Emeney’s mother as simply ‘YOUR DECEASED RELATIVE’. The letter ends with a simple sentence: ‘You can be assured / no one will ever know / who the donor was’. Although these words are meant to be comforting, they also cause unease. Is it that easy for a person – brain, thoughts, and all – to be reduced to a piece of tissue when it was once so much more? This is why Emeney’s poetry is so rousing: it crosses between medical terminology – ‘Today I learned that heartstrings / are called chordae tendineae’ – to the complexity of human feelings – a ‘spectacle of attachment and loss’. Emeney tries to understand moments both poetically and scientifically.

And she does it beautifully. In Dandelion, Emeney reminisces on times from her childhood, fixating on the image of cicada shells stuck on her school jumper. In the final heart wrenching verse, present day Emeney finds traces of dandelions on her clothes, and she thinks of them as ‘three white parachutes’. She sweetly describes how these little parachutes remind her of her mother. To Emeney, those dandelion strands are ‘little angels of your (her mother’s) imprint, your leaving’.

The way that Emeney combines the medical with the poetic in Family History brings the true complexity of the medical world to light. Although medical science is based on concrete fact, the people in its system are still people, and they feel a variety of emotions. It is a world where words are charged with meaning, where diagnoses and procedures change the lives of patients and their loved ones. And Emeney is there, bringing the reader into that experience. It’s not just a medical history; it’s a family history.

Reviewed by Emma Shi

Family History
by Johanna Emeney
Published by Mākaro Press, part of the Hoopla series
ISBN 9780994137814

Book Review: My Father’s Ears, by Karen Goa

Available at selected bookshops nationwide.

Every family has a past, most of which is concealed in collective and individual whispers. The resulting silence creates wide gaps between parents and children, brothers and sisters. Yet the time eventually comes when some people, tired of distance, look for answers.

My Father’s Ears, the debut novel of New Zealand-based travel writer Karen Goa, tells the story of Sophia Sanzari, the daughter of an Italian-Canadian immigrant, Lou. Right at the beginning of the novel, Sophia finds out that she has a brother. His name is Alex and he comes all the way from New Zealand. The purpose of his visit in Canada is to get to know more about the history of the Sanzari family, now that he has a son.

At the arrival of Lou’s long-sought son, Sophia is initially sceptical. She gradually warms up to Alex and finds herself discovering new truths about her family, which has been pulled apart by their history of journeys and mysteries. She learns not only about Lou and Alex, but also her own mother, Rose. As he relates his childhood experiences, Lou (“Luigi” in Italian) reveals that he and his brother, Antonio, suffered at an internment camp during World War II. They faced abuse simply for belonging to the nation headed by the fascist dictator, Mussolini. What made matters worse for the boys was their separation from their mother and their sisters, Carmina and Margherita. Through her father Lou, Sophia learns about the bleak reality of war and loneliness, the eagerness to escape and the conflict between one’s needs and those of others.

This story of familial relationships is set against an emotional backdrop of war and immigration history. Through the character of Sophia, the story is painful, comical, dramatic, and sincere. And Goa’s skillful incorporation of Italian culture, language and gastronomy enlivens the narrative, inviting the reader to travel through time, from continent to continent, with the reassuring thought that anyone can open a door to the future despite a past of darkness.

Reviewed by Azariah Alfante

My Father’s Ears
By Karen Goa
Published by GoaNotesNZ
ISBN 9780473335878

Book Review: Black Rabbit Hall, by Eve Chase

Available in bookstores nationwide. 

This author’s debut novel is a delight to read. Crossing three decades, she reveals the families and stories behind a run-down Cornwall mansion.

Lorna, a modern woman seeking a wedding venue, visits Pencraw Hall at which she feels an increasing sense of the familiar.

When she visits again, the Cornwall weather cuts her off from London and home, and during her stay she learns more and more about the house and inevitably about herself.

Chase takes us back three decades, to the family to whom Pencraw Hall is known by the titular name – black silhouettes of rabbits at sun down. Already in a state of neglect, the family are none the less happy.

The happiness of their holiday home is felled by a disastrous death, an unwelcome second-place holder, and another tragedy. Events then and there lead to a direct connection to Lorna, of which she had no real knowledge.

One of the delights in this tale is the author’s exciting use of new phrases to describe faces, clothing, weather, emotions. Beautifully written, it held me in thrall for the day – a satisfying day with its satisfying conclusion. I hope to soon read more from Eve Chase.

Reviewed by Lynne McAnulty-Street

Black Rabbit Hall
by Eve Chase
Published by Michael Joseph Ltd.
ISBN: 9780718181642

Book Review: The Bletchley Girls, by Tessa Dunlop

Available in bookstores nationwide.

Bletchley Park – and the stories of the women who worked there during World War Two – is of keen personal interest to me. My Gran, Irene, was one of those women. She took the Official Secrets Act very seriously, and never told me much about it. So I jumped at the chance to read Tessa Dunlop’s book The Bletchley Girls and learn more.

Bletchley Park has undergone an extraordinary conversion over the past decades, from top-secret code-breaking factory to globally acknowledged key player in both the second world war and the development of the computer. Nowadays we all know about Enigma, the genius of Alan Turing, and how the German codes were broken and the war won: Bletchley Park has taken its rightful place in history.

What is still less well known is that a large proportion of those who worked at Bletchley were women. Dunlop sets out to explore this in her new book, The Bletchley Girls: War, Secrecy, Love and Loss: The Women of Bletchley Park Tell Their Story. In it, she interviews 13 women who worked at Bletchley during the war, and combines their stories together, working chronologically from the late thirties to the mid forties, and beyond.

My Gran – born Irene Rose Mary Roblou in London in 1920 – was a decoder at Bletchley Park from May 1942 to September 1943. When she joined, she was a young woman with an incomplete secondary school education, already a war widow, and away from home for the first time. Her name then was then Irene MacDonald. She had met Alec MacDonald (Mac) before the war at The Shipbuilding Conference (the professional association of shipbuilders), where they both worked. It was on Grosvenor Place, overlooking Buckingham Palace garden, and Gran claimed she occasionally saw Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret there.

Mac looking at a photo of Elizabeth’s gran, Irene.

Irene and Mac fell in love as teenagers, and were married on 17 January 1942. Ten days later, Mac was shipped out as part of the Fleet Air Arm. On 12 February, his ship was attacked by German aircraft in the Mediterranean and a piece of shrapnel went into his head. He was the only one on the ship to die. He was 21.

I only learned about Mac’s existence a few years ago, when my Gran was still alive, and I was living in England. If he hadn’t died, Gran wouldn’t have married my grandfather, Leslie Victor Heritage (Bill); she wouldn’t have given birth to my father, and I wouldn’t exist. It is a strange and uneasy debt. Seeking to better understand this, I made a special trip to Malta in 2007, to visit his gravestone. I found it in a tiny cemetery not far from Mdina, dusty white stone warmed by the sun. I sat there, sweating uncomfortably in the jaw-dropping Maltese heat, and tried to wrap my head around the fact that I lived in part because he was killed.

Most of what I know about Mac I have learned from a “A Wartime Love Story”, a brief memoir Gran typed out to accompany the deposit of her first wedding dress into the collections of the Imperial War Museum. He was born in Trinidad in 1920, elder of two sons of a Scottish father and Irish mother. He was sent to school in England when he was a boy, during which time his father died. He doesn’t seem to have seen his mother and brother again until, by chance, he was sent to Trinidad for flying training by the Fleet Air Arm in 1941. Mac’s relationship with his mother was very strained. He and my Gran became engaged when they were 19, but Gran writes: “Mac was a proud man and said he wasn’t going to ask his mother’s permission to get married, so we would have to wait until we were 21.” I can’t help but wonder why he felt that way – and think, if they had married earlier, would they have had children? How different our family would have been.

Mac was very much on my mind as I read The Bletchley Girls, as well as Gran. I like to think he would have been proud of her, doing important war work – except that he probably wouldn’t have known. One of the extraordinary legacies of Bletchley Park is how well the secrets were kept, and by just how many people, for decades. Don’t be misled by the recent film The Imitation Game: Bletchley was staffed by thousands (rather than an elite team of a few), and housed dozens or even hundreds of enormous, clunky decoding machines (not just one) – which, incidentally, were not built by Alan Turing, but were instead designed and engineered by another British genius, Tommy Flowers. (If you want to watch something about Bletchley, I recommend the British TV series The Bletchley Circle, about a group of ex-coders who get together after the war to solve crimes.)

Gran said there were all sorts at Bletchley, “from a gypsy to a duke’s daughter”. And nobody talked about what they did, they just got on with it. In an account of her life during the war, Gran wrote “We worked shifts [at Bletchley Park], 7 day weeks and then 1 day off, until Sat/Sun – a weekend off, and 1 week every 3 months. We were not involved with Enigma.” This terseness – perhaps a result of the secrecy combined with the stringent compartmentalisation of work – is shared by Dunlop’s interviewees. Although based on long, in-depth interviews, The Bletchley Girls is remarkably light on technical detail. Dunlop seems more interested in fashion than computing.

One of the strengths of Dunlop’s book is that you get a real sense of the drudgery, stress, privations and sheer boredom of working life at Bletchley Park. A lot of the work was mechanical data entry, or staying up all night with uncomfortable headphones on, twiddling a radio dial and hoping to pick up signals. As to the detail of her own work, all Gran ever said was (quoting again from writing she left behind): “I was taught to code and we dealt with the correspondence of agents and others.”

So I understand why, when given the chance, Gran wanted to leave her life as a decoder at Bletchley Park. She wrote: “In August 1943 I was approached to become PA to Sir Amos Ayre, who was … giving his services to the Admiralty during the war as Director of Shipbuilding. My boss [at Bletchley], who was a retired General, said he was reluctant to agree, but when I explained that the job would continue after the war and I would need a job, he consented. So once again I was back in London, and now involved in preparations for D-Day. The flying bombs started just after D-Day and later the V-2s – no warning because they flew faster than sound – beastly things.” A couple of years after the war ended, it was one of Gran’s Bletchley friends who introduced her to my grandfather.

I found The Bletchley Girls to be a useful resource in seeking to understand both my own personal history and the history of women in the second world war. I wish, though, that it had had a different author. I found Dunlop’s writing breathless and cliched (“Pat’s bright bird-like expression clouds briefly”) and her tone condescending. An academic herself, she throws up her hands at the revelation that hardly any of her interviewees had been to university (and yet they were so capable! and good at learning! without formal education? but how?!). I don’t think Gran would have approved.

Despite Dunlop, though, these women’s stories are a treasure, and the good news is that other people are writing them too. Don’t depend on Dunlop or The Imitation Game; use the opportunity to ask your family about their war experience. And then write it down.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Heritage

The Bletchley Girls
by Tessa Dunlop
Published by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
ISBN 9781444795721

Book Review: Horse with Hat, by Marty Smith. Collages by Brendan O’Brien

This is a simply beautiful book.

Marty Smith’s poems are by turns quirky, sad, punchy, amusing, thought-provoking, and above all they provide a sense of time and place and family in  a way that just makes you want to read all the way through.

Which I did.

And then of course I had to go back, because I went a bit fast and missed some things! I felt quite a connection to the people represented in the poems. A large and complex family, with huge horses, farming in tough country – nothing like my own background in the slightest; so I think Marty Smith has created magic in enabling the reader to make that connection to her family. I’d love to know what other people have found on reading this book.

I found the short untitled poems – often about the war – remarkably powerful. In fact the evocation of the after-effects of war on New Zealand families is a strong vein through the entire work.

Brendan O’Brien’s collages brilliantly support the poetry in the book – being poetic in their own right. They made me stop and think, trying to work out which parts of which poems are represented – but that’s a puzzle to which there may be no correct answer, and maybe it doesn’t matter, because they enhance the book in such a delightful way.

Since I am a  reader who does not usually rush to the latest poetry on offer, I find that this book has made me want to explore further – and in particular I look forward to finding what else Marty has written (though this is her first collection), and as well I am going to find everything illustrated by Brendan O’Brien.

Reviewed by Sue Esterman

Horse with Hat
by Marty Smith, Collages by Brendan O’Brien
Victoria University Press
ISBN 9780864739278