It’s 100 years today since Britain declared war on Germany, with New Zealand and other Commonwealth countries quickly following suit. I’m on the ferry heading off Island to Devonport, a seaside Auckland village, where there will be a candlelit vigil for peace.
I’m very interested in the centenary and have written about the issue of how women should commemorate WW1, noting that the quite generous NZ government funding for centenary projects has almost all gone to men and projects focusing on heroes and memorials. Sure, there has been a lot of talk about the pointlessness and unbelievable destructiveness of that war, but women tend to be almost completely overlooked. Let’s hear it for Kiwi author Robin Hyde who wrote our greatest WW1 novel, Passport to Hell, and who said that wars make men contemptuous towards women as women have little scope for acts of bravery in conflicts.
I was ready to be interested because of my writing project on Naomi Mitchison, the Scottish writer, who was a young woman in WW1 and like so many feminists, became a pacifist in the interwar years. My book focuses on her WW2 experience, but my reading has primed an interest in the earlier war.
This has led to a project on my great-Auntie Cal, a WW1 army nurse who served in Egypt and France. I recalled a story about her sending her war medals back when the RSA wouldn’t let the nurses march on Anzac Day. So I emailed my brothers and cousins for information and did some online research as well. I got some beautifully described memories from the family – we all loved her – and snippets from the research, including her war record. There are no personal memoirs in any of this, so we don’t hear her voice. But the NZ army nurse experience has been well described by Anna Rogers (NZ) and Peter Fitzsimons (Oz & NZ), as well as in fiction by Maxine Alterio. And of course the British experience of VADs led to the classic Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth. So I can know quite a lot about where Auntie Cal was and what it was like.
I know, by instinct, that my aunt was lesbian in her nature – though most likely not by self-definition, given the era. But I’d never discussed it with my brothers and cousins. When Miriam asked me to give a talk on my aunt at the Charlotte Lesbian Museum I thought, here goes, and emailed the family about my forthcoming “expose”. Of course no one really believed that I was right, but an interesting correspondence and set of silences ensued. Because there wasn’t much info on my great-aunt, in the end I made the focus of my talk “Outing Auntie Cal”, focusing on the family correspondence. It went down quite well with the small audience and I’m thinking of trotting it out again and maybe writing it up. I wonder how the family will take it when I tell them. I have commandeered their words (and there are some very good writers amongst them) and have I made them look unfairly homophobic? Oh well, outing Hilary the opener of family closets. I know for sure my great-aunt would NOT have been amused. But needs must, when creative licence is at stake.
Island Time of Life 