Chapter Three: Old Mrs Van had a Secret

In a curious slip through time Mrs Van’s life hit pause at some point. I thought it may have been something to do with the war years. She and her life were stalled.

Old Mrs Van lived alone in a big wooden house along the beachfront down from our house. Just along the Shore. West Shore in Napier, New Zealand. There were probably six or seven houses and one quiet road to cross between us. . 

This was the late 1960’s but Mrs Van had no phone, no washing machine, no fridge, no car, cooked on a coal range, made her own soap and had a wild sandy backyard with a portion fenced off for a vegetable garden. She may have had electric lights but I only visited during the day so I don’t know for sure. She made all her clothes herself, on her treadle sewing machine. Even her iron was heated on the coal range.

She made her own handkerchiefs, dishcloths, mats for the floor and hemmed her own linen. 

She rose with the dawn and went to bed at night. She had no need for other lights, she said. 

In a curious slip through time Mrs Van’s life hit pause at some point. I thought it may have been something to do with the war years. She and her life were stalled - not in a morbid kind of way - she was a gentle, cheerful, strong woman. Maybe she just saw no need to change. Visiting Mrs Van was like stepping back in time. Her gate was my portal. There was a curious magic in her lifestyle.

As long as I knew her she was alone and quite comfortable with that. 

She must have been in her late 60’s at the time I write. An age that seemed terribly old to me at the time. 

I just loved her and our quiet times. I can’t remember her voice because she did not need a lot of words, but she smiled often, and I chattered on like children and birds do. We drank tea or worked in the garden. 

She always wore a sturdy homemade apron with big pockets over a home made cotton dress hemmed to below her knees with thick stockings and slippers indoors. No nonsense lace up brown shoes for the outdoors. Gumboots for the garden. A big cardy in the cold. Her long thick white hair was pinned into an untidy bun at the nape of her neck. She was not sad. She had a stillness about her. Her large dark eyes were watchful but confident. Confident is the best word I can think of but it was more than that. She had a kind of watchful power. 

Mrs Van was my Godmother.

From the time I could walk up the road unattended (probably 5 years old) I would visit her two or three times a week. She did not have a phone so she could not have known I was coming but she was always there - coming to the door when she heard the sound on her tall gate chime. Her garden gate had a big heavy spring on it and when I was little I found it hard to push open and walk through, so I would give it a hard shove then I would jump through with a great leap as it whipped shut behind me.

She always laughed when she saw me do that.

I will describe her house for you because her house is in my dreams lately. I know you think dreams mean embellishments but her house is always the same. Just no Mrs Van there anymore.

Come with me on a visit.  I always arrive at her house through the back door, which is actually on the front of the house at the end but down the path.The back door opens straight into a kind of lean-to which houses the washhouse and a little lavatory with an old flush toilet, the type with a handle on a chain to pull when you are done.  Turn right, go up a step and you are in Mrs Van’s small dark kitchen. If you were to continue through the kitchen, going straight, you would enter a butlers pantry with wood paneling and cupboards and a little counter for flowers, turn right again into the dining room with its big dark shiny table and chairs. Go past the table and through slightly open pocket doors to the parlour with its small sofa and uncomfortable chairs around an unlit fireplace. 

The blinds in the dining room and parlour are always pulled down so there are only thin beams of dusty light sliding through the yellowish lace curtains that hang before the blinds. Mrs Van called these rooms the big rooms and were the only glimpses I saw of her life outside the kitchen or maybe her life before the kitchen. I don’t know.

Our days revolved around the kitchen and the wash-house and the garden. So let’s go back there.

Oh, wait before we go back to the kitchen, open the parlor door and take a peek out - into the wide dark passageway - look left and to the end of the hall; you will see the big glass front door to the sunroom that runs the width of the house in the front. That is where the front door is. Do you see it - at the end of the long corridor. This is where the sun is.  The corridor is polished dark native timbers glints of sunlight making it glow in patches.  

All the doors on the other side of this corridor are closed. Three doors. All closed.

Now come back with me to the cozy half light of the kitchen where Mrs Van has her back to us. She is a tall slender woman with a straight back. She is taking the whistling kettle off the range and pouring boiling water into the tea pot then covering it in a knitted tea cozy like a perfectly round wooly hat, pom-pom and all. She places the teapot on the iron trivet already set on the table.  We are going to sit together and eat a sandwich and have a cup of tea before starting work. Mrs Van makes much better bread than my Mum. 

Come on, sit with us at the kitchen table.  Mrs Van has set a table cloth on one end of the table and there are cups and saucers and little plates. The posy of flowers I brought are in a perfect glass jar in the middle.

From the table we can see the big black coal range. It has five hobs and two ovens and runs 24 hours a day. Above it is a rack with plates and cloths. The coal range heats the water for the taps and also heats the water that runs through the radiators to warm the house.  Though I think most of the radiators are turned off. Behind the range, level with the hobs and next to the chimney is a little piece of glass. A tiny window but not one you would open. Like a glass block it looks directly out to the garden. I have never seen this in any other range and it fascinates me. To the left of the range is a counter with cupboards underneath in dark tongue and groove, the varnish is old and bubbly almost black in places.  There is a big old sash window and hanging pots.  To the left of that is the pantry.

On this wall there is also a tiny door to the meat safe: This is a little box that is set out into the cold side of the house and is covered on the outside in very fine strong netting.  Here Mrs Van stores her milk and butter and presumably meat because it is called a meat safe after all. She opens it like a cupboard from inside the kitchen and pops the jug of milk back in there.

Can you see it in your mind's eye now? Mrs Van's house?

My jobs changed depending on the day or the season but I was always to fill her coal bin with coal from the big sack in the little shed outside. Then feed her chickens. 

The coal was set into a little outside cupboard that was also opened from inside the kitchen so the dirty coal was never carried through the house.

To get to the backyard I had to go out the back door of the wash house. The wash house that we saw when we entered through the back door. The wash house was as big as the kitchen and set up as a work room and store room, with bare wooden floors and a long smooth bench down one side for baskets of onions and potatoes or apples from her trees. Crocks lined up below the bench. Shelves of jars above. Soap curing on special racks. Herbs and flowers hanging in bunches to dry. 

With doors on either end this was a cool drafty room in the summer. We worked here as often as we worked in the kitchen. But the kitchen was warmer in the winter. 

I imagine it was a hive of activity when the house was filled with people. But there was never anyone else in the years I would visit Mrs Van. 

On the other side were two big concrete wash-tubs where Mrs van washed her clothes.  There was a mangle with two rollers mounted between them. She turned the mangel by hand, the hot soapy laundry was fed between the rollers and all the water squeezed out. It had a lever on it that switched the way the rollers would go so once the washing was rinsed in the second basin she would roll the washing back through the other way.

The copper was still in the corner but I don’t think she used it anymore. It had a little place for a fire underneath and a lid on top. 

The racks for drying clothes on rainy days were pulled up into the ceiling with a rope.

Sometimes, after a storm, we would go to the beach in our gumboots and collect seaweed. We would haul it home and wash the salt off then chop it into the compost pile or pile around the base of the fruit trees. 

Her vegetable garden was not huge - there was only one person to feed after all but there were always greens, rhubarb, herbs and parsley. My job was to pick off the snails and throw them to the chickens. There were apple trees, lemon trees and an old avocado. 

When it was time for me to walk home after the visit she would follow me to the gate that stood in her high picket fence, and she would stand there on the footpath to watch me walk home. I would walk down the road, carefully looking for cars as I crossed over to our block, wave as I entered my own gate and she would wave back - she would wave with her whole arm above her head like waving a flag, then she would go back through her gate and disappear back down her path.

She did this without fail, making sure I got home ok. Even when I was a teenager she would watch me walk home. I always wondered whether she had lost someone, walking. Whether she was afraid I would be taken. Whether she had been taken. 

If you are expecting a story with a beginning and a middle and an end and some drama and a resolution. There isn’t one here.

I wanted to introduce you to my Godmother, is all.  And her home.

But I never saw her at Mass on Sunday and I have always been mystified as to how she became my Godmother.

Unless you think to ask a certain question a child misses out on a lot of detail. We almost never hear the backstory and just accept that this person or that person is there. I never thought to ask why she and Mum never visited each other. Or what the Van in Mrs Van stood for. Or how she came to live alone in such a big house without any of the modern things that my mother had. I have wondered if her husband had been lost in the war or was only missing in action, never confirmed dead or something, which left her in a kind of limbo that she never fully came out of. Or never wanted to come out of maybe.  I sometimes wondered if there even had been a husband. There were no pictures of him. Maybe she was the housekeeper waiting for someone who never came back. Or maybe she had escaped the war, maybe she had escorted the Jewish orphans from Poland who boarded with my fathers mother during the war and she came to this place to hide. Maybe she had seen enough. And wanted to sit out the rest of her life. 

I would never have asked. You did not ask those kinds of questions. Especially when you were a kid. 

I just accepted that she was there and that she was my person. Just for me.  I loved her unhurried gentle lifestyle for its simplicity and peacefulness.

And all my life I have wanted a coal range like hers with the teensy spy window beside the chimney where I could secretly look out and keep watch across the garden down the back.

. . .

Letters to My Mother, The Collection, is a series of stories from my early childhood. They are interesting to untangle because they are written by an adult (me) using the memories of a child (me).

It take hours to to put words on paper and I write alone so I would be ever so grateful if you were able to throw a few dollars into my hat via the paid subscription.

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