Talking About Our Ancestors

FEATURE | WHENUA | TOUCHING GRASS

Written by Danielle Hutchinson (she/her) | @daniellelowenna | Contributing Writer

Edited & illustrated by Tashi Donnelly (she/her) | @tashi_rd | Feature Editor

You sit in quiet contemplation, lost in a book. Lost, too, in a new town, taking refuge on a park bench in the sunshine before you plot your next move. The estuary ebbs and flows before you, bristling where it meets the sea, reluctant to contend with the tides of Hawke Bay. 

The seagulls gather by Perfume Point, waiting for some crumbs to be thrown from your lunch. Not likely. You trekked too far through town to find that bakery for your pie to be wasted on some ‘thieving shitehawks’ as your dad would say. You pay them no mind and remain obstinately intent on the latest chapter of your murder mystery.

A stranger takes a seat beside you on the bench and flashes one of those invasive smiles that indicates they want to start a conversation with you, when you’d much rather they bugger off. She sidles up nonetheless. 

The conversation starts the same way that they always do. A brief greeting, some comment about the weather, before they notice your accent and make some sort of quip. 

“You’ve got a bit of Pom about you…” this lady says, pressing for more information. 

They like to do this. Find out a bit about you, so that they have something quirky to tell their families when they get home for dinner. A ‘guess who I met today…’ as the kids push peas around their plates. You usually give them a brief outline, some sort of self-deprecating remark about being from the middle of nowhere and how the mountains of New Zealand have far more character.

That tends to keeps them happy and they’ll be on their way – although not before imparting some unsolicited travel advice. 

This lady was different. 

You’d already dismissed her before she’d even approached you. A lady in her late sixties, wearing some hippie drawstring trousers that had seen better days, with a mismatched fleece. Long grey hair wound back into a bun and secured with a wooden pin thrust unceremoniously through the middle.  A little unconventional, but nothing wrong with that. She was just a bit too interested in the seagulls for your liking, as though the crazy cat lady had neglected her stereotype and imprinted on a flock of birds instead.

You didn’t think you’d be speaking for more than fifteen minutes. You were betting on her getting fed up of trying to get some novelty out of this solo Brit and wandering off to speak to the seagulls that she’d been feeding before she approached you. 

Things don’t always pan out how you expect.

You close your book politely, but keep your finger wedged into the pages to indicate your imminent return to that paragraph, promising Agatha Christie that your lapse in concentration will only be momentary.

“You’ve got a bit of Pom about you… I can say that because I’ve been looking up my ancestry,” she assures you.

You aren’t sure whether this is meant to be an endearing attempt at finding common ground or just a way to soften the insult slightly. 

Turns out it’s neither. She uses this as an opening to divulge her search for family, her vague recollections of her mother and the lasting legacy of her adoption. The gulls that were pattering on the pavement in front of us have decided that they’re no longer interested and have wandered off to pester an unsuspecting family sat further along on the pebble embankment. 

You share a sprinkle of details about yourself in response. Yes, you know your parents and have met your grandparents. Funnily enough, your family have recently downloaded Ancestry and taken an interest in tracing back the generations. You recall when the first of the cotton swabs and test tubes arrived in the post. You were never keen on the idea and secretly think that those DNA kits are just a way of getting your chemical components stored in some sort of database. It’s a throwaway comment, not something you’re particularly keen on pursuing. 

As it happens, she’s an avid Ancestry fan. Not just the one website either, with a token family tree here or there. No, this lady has been trawling through every archive she can find, paper and digital. Libraries, registry offices, cemeteries... 

She tells you about the way she can feel the ghosts of her past shivering up her sleeves when walking into a building she has never set foot in. How there’s always some kindly stranger to let her into an old courtyard or closed museum after hours. How these coincidences show that she’s on the path home. 

You glance down and notice that your finger has slipped out of your book. Sorry Agatha. You no longer feel the need for a placeholder in the mystery, now drawn into your own world of intrigue. 

You find yourself telling this lady about your ancestral village. It always held an idyllic charm in your early memories, fragments of light that drift in your subconscious. The babbling of the stream, a squashed frog on the lane, the chickens following you through the woods. How your feet always took you where you needed to go, even when you hadn’t wandered those particular rabbit runs before. 

But this wasn’t about the earlier trips to great-grandad’s house as a toddler. No, this was about the seminal trip, when you realised that the village held much more than a single aging relative. 

You’d swung open the wrought iron gates to the cemetery. Found the names of ancestors carved into the stones. Grandad was long gone by then, his name amongst his brothers, wife, and the generations that even he hadn’t known. All four centuries of them. You remember opening the doors to the small church; a single bell tower. No one was there, but the doors were always open in a place like that. 

A butterfly was trapped, fluttering futilely against stained-glass windows. On the floor in the centre of the aisle that had seen your grandmother’s wedding and your mother’s christening lay another butterfly. One that had clearly been trapped a little longer than last Sunday. Its wings were already crumbling. You’d scooped up the fragments that you could. Not knowing why. It just shouldn’t be left to turn to dust on the flagstones. As you took it outside and the wind swirled the fragments across the cemetery, the other butterfly found its way out through the doors and into the soft light of the afternoon. You tell her that you felt that something had been restored. Some element reunited.  

The lady’s eyes are sparkling. Perhaps through emotion. Perhaps just the eccentric twinkle that you hadn’t noticed until now.

For this piece you have carved of your heart, she promises to take you up a nearby mountain to see the land laid out bare before you, like the secret you have placed into her palm. She insists that you must see the bay from this vantage point. 

You’re not sure it’s a fair exchange.

Your mother always told you not to speak to strangers. Let alone get into her car. But this lady speaks of art. How she turns the ghosts into paintings, photographs the monuments that provoke a visceral reaction. How the shiver crawls into the canvas. She explains the composition so simply, so elegantly, that the turbulent estuary before you unravels, winding into a feline shape that could sit in your lap. 

She’s certain that it’s an intervention of fate that you met.

The bench trembles a little and the seagulls go momentarily silent.

“Earthquake,” she says.

She’s sure of it.

You couldn’t say either way, distracted by the turbulence of the water before you. You want the tide to consume these thoughts, but the water’s too grey, too choppy for a swim. No, definitely not fit for the bikini and suncream optimistically chosen earlier that afternoon.

How could you have known how it would end?

The swallows wheel against the sky, now shot with the colours of sunset sinking over the horizon. 

She tells you that you have a gift and it’s a blessing to have discovered it so young.

You don’t know how you feel about blessings. You have been seeking silence all your life, but seem to attract strangers and noise. Conversations and divulged confessions, as though you roam the streets in a priest’s attire. You guess you just have one of those faces. 

You carry the burdens of strangers and sometimes commit them to the page.