The Opera Singers in the Basement: Growing up as a Secret Agent in Rerewhakaaitu

The day that I was destined to arrive in Rerewhakaaitu was a trying one for everybody involved. As if it weren't enough that I would have to spend hours being tossed around in the back of the old Austin as it perambulated the two hundred miles of winding central North Island roads between where we were and where we were going, my cruel mother got me out of the way of the moving men by making me sit in the car for half a lifetime before we even set off down the road. I was four years old at the time and not at all patient or tractable by nature, so it seemed entirely reasonable that, upon finding a pair of scissors in a basket with which I was obliged to share the back seat, should proceed to while away my term of imprisonment by cutting all the lace off my best dress.
    I remember that my mother, when she finally took notice of what I'd done chose to interpret this as yet another wilful act on my part to punish her for having brought me into the world, but I have a clear recollection of being motivated by a sense of neatness. The edges of the lace had, to be frank, become tatty, so I cut off the frayed bits. But then the rest of the edge looked tatty, so I cut that off as well. And after that the lace looked downright silly without its edge, so the only thing left to do was cut the lot off.
    I have sometimes wondered whether I was also motivated by some deeper sense of the rightness of setting out with no frills for a place in the sticks. But my mother never had my complex view of life, so the symbolic appropriateness of my act designed for the moment of embarkation on the journey to a new life in the isolation of the backblocks with a ring-fenced farm, no cowshed, no mall delivery, no phone, and only a part-house with a long-drop on the edge of somewhere no-one had ever heard of, was entirely lost on her. She simply declared that she would never, so help her God, buy me a dress with lace on it ever again. I looked forward to a life of unadorned misery in Rerewhakaaitu. But my mother later relented.
    I remember setting out for Rerewhakaaitu at the age of four far better than I remember setting off around the world twenty-five years later. Less clear in my mind is the actual journey, and the glimpse in the dusk of the first part-house in Rotomahana and the tantrum I am said to have had when I learned that our new fairytale palace in Yankee Road would be just like it. Having apparently protested vigorously that I was “not going to live in a squirty little house like that”, I gave my monstrous parents such a hard time that my father went out of his way to to pick me a “yellow birdie” from the broom bushes by our gate in an attempt to appease my sense of outrage at having been brought to such a terrible place.
    I am not aware of feeling, at any time in the next decade, a burning desire to escape from Rerewhakaaitu, but that was probably because of life. And I had enough space in Rerewhakaaitu to create such out-sized fantasies that no place I’ve ever been in since could possibly contain them. My mother always insisted that I'd been born in Otaki, but this was just an elaborate cover-up. In my real life I was no less than an American, and under our house in Yankee Road there was a huge secret cellar full of artifacts to prove it. There was also a brilliantly lit ballroom and merry-|o-rounds in an underground amusement park that went as far as the pumpshed and almost across to the pigsty. My mother used to always say how much she would like to have a real radiogram to play records on, but that was so that nobody would suspect that we had an orchestra and several opera singers in the huge bomb shelters under the extensions to our part-house.
    I once made the mistake of telling the Hooker girls about the merry-go-rounds, but after that my secret life as an American remained secret. I realised that it was absolutely imperative for my survival in Rerewhakaaitu (or anywhere for that matter) to keep the lid on one's real life. I became a realist without magic. If I wrote stories of underground caverns, the underground caverns contained only dead sheep. I took to studying nature in minute detail, and in Rerewhakaaitu there was plenty of it. I watched other people closely for signs of their real lives. I concealed mine with dastardly cleverness. I bet there wasn't a solitary Rereite who suspected that the pudgy asthmatic kid sniveling on the sidelines or coming last in the athletics was actually a secret agent sent to spy on them from the real world. No. And nobody ever suspected that my mother wasn't really my mother!
    I knew all along that my real life would turn out to have nothing to do with Rerewhakaaitu. No opera had ever been written for the place. No novel had ever been set there. It was never mentioned on the concert programme. It wasn't on the map. Its reality was subverted by the dual authority of the radio and the library. It didn't really exist - except in some raw, surface way which had no meaning to anyone outside the place. Even the corporeal Americans had deserted and left northing behind them but the stuff of our best mythologies - like the mortar bomb which my mother painted black and red and used in her floral art. We grew up with said mortar bomb in Yankee Road (never realising that there was anything live about it), and when I left home I took it with me as a relic of my nominal compatriots (me having been an American and all). Before I went off to the O1d World, I stashed all my artifacts away in the basement of my Wellington house, and the mortar bomb fell through a gap in the sarking and lodged itself in the dirt by one of the piles - where it stayed until several years later when the house was being repiled after we'd come back from America, where an act of fate had taken me (I'd long since stopped being an American). A workman was knocking out the old piles with a large pick when he struck something which turned out to be a bomb. He now has his own story to tell about the day he turned into a white Maori after hitting a live bomb which the police had to take away and explode. I wasn't at home at the time, so they didn't know they were destroying a piece of the evidence that Rerewhakaaitu was once almost part of the real world.
    It wasn't until after I'd gone to live in America, and my own children's lives seemed impossibly narrowed by the confines of the concrete jungle, that I looked back and saw what I'd always taken for granted: that Rerewhakaaitu was as real and as rich in nature as any place can be, and that my childhood as a secret agent there (watching for the cracks to appear) put me in ground a great deal more fertile than all the places and all the supposedly privileged and worldly positions my own children have been in. When she was ten, my daughter, bored to tears with travel, refused to come with her parents to Singapore and the Philippines, so we left her for a month on the farm in Rerewhakaaitu. Now that she's nearly twenty she still thinks of it as one of the best times in her life.
    Growing up in Rerewhakaaitu wasn't easy for an alien like me, but I live on a hill now, and the view is different - though my poor mother will never bring herself to see it. I've got an actual basement now - though it's never really been a bomb shelter. My son is an actual American as well as a real one. He loves the basement. It's full of junk, and I suspect the odd opera singer might still lurk there. Now that I don't have to keep the lid on it any more, I've begun to find it remarkably useful. And I've long been very grateful to Rerewhakaaitu for the fact that (even without the unnatural addition of all the superphosphate and trace elements) it was always big enough for me, and fertile, and abounding in natural wonders - so grateful in fact, that I felt compelled, some years ago, to get out the scissors and start cutting and pasting it into the real world.

Vivienne Jepsen

35 Garden Road,

Wellington 5.

August 1992.