Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
The table is honey coloured kauri, with turned wooden legs and tiny pinholes on its surface from when it was once used as an architect’s workbench. At one end there is a square bolt. A crank handle attaches onto it, and turns to lengthen or shorten the table, allowing panels to be inserted or removed. It has never been shortened. Even now, with just the two of them in the house, it stands, ready to seat ten people.
The table is at the centre of the house, literally and figuratively. It sits in the middle of the large kitchen, with The Crucifix, Mary, and the Saints on the Columban Calendar watching over it from the walls. It was present for the ordinary, the important, the mundane and the life changing. Secrets were kept or told at it, there were fights and reconciliations, truths and lies, tears, laughter, love and hate. Babies were bathed, changed, and fed on it: eight babies in all, in 1950s and 1960s Christchurch.
At dinnertime, Grace was said at ever increasing speeds by the father, Dan, until he finally swallowed the entire prayer in one mouthful that took him less than 3 seconds to say: “BlessusOhLordandthesethygiftswhichofthybountyweareabouttoreceivethroughchristourlordamen”. Grace was the calm before the storm and the signal for the feeding frenzy to begin. Food that was liked was inhaled and unwanted food was passed covertly between siblings: Brussels sprouts in exchange for carrots, peas for corn, corned beef for cabbage. They guarded their flanks – there was always a danger of some bugger stealing your last roast potato (and once, an oyster) off your plate. That particular incident achieved legendary status in family lore. Even those who had not been born or were not old enough to remember, know every detail; of the overwhelming temptation of that oyster (an unheard of luxury) and the uproar its theft unleashed. In the 1970s a dog circled the table at mealtimes. His paws clicked against the linoleum like a metronome, waiting for any morsel to accidentally, or purposefully, drop.
Mountains of food were prepared and served on the table. Baking was cooled on it, meat was minced or breadcrumbs made with the hand mincer, which would be screwed onto one end. Every summer there was a production line of food preservation. They came home from school to the smell of tomatoes being made into sauce or relish, raspberry jam simmering or peaches and apricots being bottled. They were well acquainted with the paraphernalia and process of the production line, and they knew not to touch the pristine bottling jars or the lid seals sterilised with boiling water. Filled jars of jams and preserves were lined up on the table like soldiers on parade. Food was bought, grown, sorted, prepared and made in bulk. Trays holding three dozen eggs each were stacked into towers. Twelve pints of milk were left each morning by the milkman, and a side of hogget was devoured each week. Bread for the morning school lunch preparation covered every flat surface in the kitchen. Endless pots of tea were made: oceans of tea.
Margaret was a dressmaker who made clothes for herself and the eight children. It was out of pure financial necessity in the early days. Having grown up during the depression and war, Margaret was a product of the school of hard work and no nonsense practicality, enforced by a particularly unpleasant step-mother. She felt the loss of her mother, who had died when Margaret was nine months old, profoundly her whole life. She was a devout Catholic and Dan had become a Catholic in order to marry her. Some in his dry, Methodist family were less than impressed when he married an Irish Catholic publican’s daughter in 1953.
The sewing machine would be set up at one end of the table and Margaret would sew late into the night. Mary couldn’t get to sleep without the familiar low hum of the sewing machine. Later on, when there was a little more money, Margaret still sewed but more out of being practical and even out of a little pride. Patterns were trimmed on the table then arranged on fabric to be cut out. They stood on the table while hems were pinned and trousers were taken up.
Never ending laundry was sorted on the table, into piles like a city skyline. The skyline would be dismantled and put away only to return the following day. It expanded over the years into an urban sprawl of singlets, socks, shirts and undies. Once a week nine pairs of sheets would billow on the washing lines like an armada of ships under full sail.
They grew up around the table, reading stories, drawing pictures, playing games and learning spelling and long division then graduating on to algebra, essays, and verb conjugations. Checkers and Monopoly became Chess and Five Hundred. Friends, boyfriends and girlfriends arrived on motorbikes and in cars with beer and cigarettes for parties, or more often, to take the teenagers out of the house away from the watchful eye of the parents –and of Mary and all the saints.
As the production line of food and laundry slowed down it gave way to more time for Margaret. She had time to sit at the table and actually read the newspaper and solve the crossword or read a book; luxuries she had given up for years in order to do everything else. Dan retired and found himself at the table too. It took a while for them to realise there was room enough for both of them.
Margaret sat down on Sunday nights to write letters, a boarding school habit, to her children as they left home and moved further away. Most of them didn’t have the letter-writing discipline she did and many of her letters started with “Dear Paul/Jane/Frances/Mary/Patrick/Neil/Gerard/Kathleen, “It’s been such a long time since we have heard from you….” Cue guilt. Her letters were full of details of the house, the baking, who was doing what, whether Daphne or Freesias from the garden were in the vase on the table, who she had seen at Mass. The recipients had mixed feelings on receiving these letters at different times in their lives: the angry 20 year old who couldn’t get far enough away, the homesick 30 year old half way across the world, the new parent desperately trying to remember “what did mum do?” for a baby with colic. As time went on the words, “Do you remember ‘such and such’? Well, they died last week”, became more common. News of weddings and baptisms were replaced with details of wakes and funerals.
The four of them sitting at the table that Tuesday lunchtime as the earthquake struck, thought they were going to die, as they clung on to it like a lifeboat and the earth heaved up and flung them around like rag dolls. But they, and it, survived. Family and friends, girlfriends and boyfriends, husbands and wives have come and gone. A young couple became an old couple and eight babies became eight adults. The table sits, constant in the kitchen.