The Pink Bangle – Joan Benjamin

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER

The first time I saw my Amah, no, I’m not sure it was the first time I saw her, rather it was my earliest memory of her. She was playing with the beautiful pink bangle on her arm. I can still see her sitting on the verandah. My memories before then would have been of her holding me and so I wouldn’t have seen her as a whole person. She was twisting the bangle and she had a dreamy, happy, smile on her face and she wasn’t focussed on me. I later recalled the image of her and asked her about the bangle.

She smiled, it was a gentle smile, not a big smile and she said it was a very expensive bangle, I wonder now if she didn’t mean very valuable. She told me her mother gave it to her just as her grandmother had given it to her mother. It was part of the family’s treasure that they had brought with them from a land far away. “How is it expensive” I asked? “What is it made of?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but it is very precious, because it has been in my family for a very long time”.

Just then we were interrupted by a commotion out in the street and we were running, running, running and my father swept me up and dragging my mother we ran down to the docks. I didn’t see my amah again. I never got the chance to ask her more about the bangle. I didn’t get to see her for many years.

I now know that a revolution was happening in that country and we had to get out fast. My father had been preparing for this because he had a tramp steamer fuelled and waiting at the docks for us. It had been seemingly making repairs, no one suspected that it was waiting for anyone in particular. But it was ready, fuelled and ready to get us away.

Many years later I was able to return to the country and although much had changed I was able to make inquiries about the family of my amah and was able to trace them back to their original village. I was able to drive the twenty miles or so and I found the family of my amah and my amah herself. We recognised each other and she proudly held up her daughter for me to see. Her daughter was wearing the beautiful pink bangle.

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If I was to have a second story to share and this was the first one in the workshop where we had to write for 5 minutes without stopping it was this.

I think that the book ‘Spinster’ by Sylvia Ashton Warner is a perfect example of how fiction can convey a really important message. (We talked about this earlier in the workshop) Sylvia, the author, turned her experience into a novel where she described her experience of arriving in an isolated Maori village (in the 40s I think) as a young teacher. It was a one teacher school. She struggled to teach the children using the standard New Zealand readers which featured Jane and Dick and their Pets Spot and Fluffy. They all lived with their middle class mum and dad and dad would do dad things like wash the car on the weekend and mum was always pictured wearing a frilly apron.

Sylvia invented new reading materials based on the events her children described to her every day. Stories about fights and killing and blood and hate and love and kissing. The point of all this is that Sylvia went to on to become quite famous in New Zealand and the US as an educator responsible for developing the Key Word Reading Scheme. The novel set the scene, provided the context (and made a bloody good novel) that led to significant changes in the way reading was taught in New Zealand and some progressive schools in the US. The novel was written and published before her book ‘Teacher’ and the acceptance of her innovative reading scheme.

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