The Crime of Huey Dunstan by James Mcneish Page B

think of Quakers as slightly trembling Anglicans who had run amok; after pumping Lisbeth about me, she had evidently persuaded herself that a blind Quaker who had seduced his landlady’s niece at fourteen and later smuggled her aboard an Admiralty cruiser in Plymouth dock must have the potential of a Dan Brown. “Don’t hold back,” she telephoned. “Let it all hang out.” The woman rang when I was in the bath. I was affronted.
    Little does she know how I hate writing about my emotions!
    However, I said I would try. I drafted a couple of early chapters and showed them to Lisbeth. “How interesting,”Lisbeth said. “You realise you haven’t said a word about your mother?”
    “Nonsense. There’s pages and pages.”
    “No, hardly anything. It’s all about your beloved grandfather.”
    My mother [I had put] was a gentle creature. She gave me my first book. I don’t remember her ever smiling, except once when she was sitting down one day to peel the vegetables for the Sunday lunch and she saw me looking at her across the kitchen table. “What are you looking at?” she said. “You,” I said. I had caught her smiling secretly to herself and was waiting for further developments. “What is it?” I said to her, and she stopped smiling. Smack. Like that. As if smiling were forbidden, as if she were committing some immoral act.
    But that was all I’d said about her. (Lisbeth was right.) The memory of my mother’s dear face had suddenly metamorphosed into her father’s, my maternal grandfather—into the half-smile that was always playing about his lips. And I had begun writing about my grandfather instead. In the writing, something stranger still had happened:
    My grandfather [I had written] was a ganger. He told me about his time on the lighters andworking with gangs cleaning up after the bargees had unloaded their cargoes of coal and jute and tanning extracts. He loved the docks. His stories were so vivid, the sounds and smells he brought to life so penetrating and pungent, that even today nearly seventy years on I can not only recall them but can also hear and smell them upon recollection—the noise of dray horses striking the cobbles, the cries of the lightermen in the fog-filled air, the oppressive odour of boots and dog dung and the sharp stinging smell of vinegar from a pickle factory.
    The air was saturated with pungent smells [I continued], the warm fetid breath expelled from the nostrils of the animals as the shearers paused in the early morning watching the mist clear over the valley through the rows of tall kahikateas…
    I stopped, puzzled. I was listening to the words coming from my screen reader in the study. I walked out of the study and into the living room. Lisbeth was on the phone, talking to her friend Miriam. I went back into the study and reviewed the text again, hearing in a state of some bewilderment the lines I had dictated played back to me. How to explain it? Blackwall Pier had become a sheep farm in Pikipiki. George Woodhouse’s woolshed near Pikipiki overlooked a wide valley of kahikatea trees ranged like torsoes running almost to the horizon. At somesubliminal level my mind had allowed a scene by a clutch of dockside streets in London to be displaced by an image of Huey’s father bending over with the hand-piece shearing for George Woodhouse in the early morning in central New Zealand. I had fast-forwarded everything seventy years without realising.
    “I’m going bats,” I said, out loud.
    Still, I persevered. I went on with my memoirs, even though I knew they would be of little interest to anyone but myself and unlikely ever to be published.
     
    It was in April that the change occurred. Shift, I suppose, is a better word. I am referring now to Lisbeth. She too went into a forward gear.
    She came into the study. I was singing a little ditty to myself, “ Pharaoh had a daughter with a most bewitching smile —”
    “I’ve thought of something,” Lisbeth said.
    “So have I.