In Kipling’s autobiography Something of Myself, there are a number of unresolved contradictions. One is that he adored his clever, witty parents and yet these same parents, following British Empire practice, sent him and his even younger sister Trix back from India to England to the paid care of a family in Southsea where, for five and a half years, he and his sister were abused, physically, emotionally, psychologically and religiously. Kipling’s ‘revenge’, taken in his early twenties while his parents were still very much alive, was to publish the harrowing, thinly fictionalised story, ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’. At the same time, he never stopped adoring his parents.

I found myself recalling Kipling’s horror childhood and its literary and emotional consequences while reading Belinda Robinson’s at times equally harrowing account of the seven years of abuse she and her young siblings suffered, in Henry Street in Wellington, at the hands of the family’s nanny, Lili. Lili was envious, embittered and a pethidine addict, and her moods and treatment of the children yo-yoed alarmingly. Her control, however, seems to have been absolute, her cruelty heart-turning. And, unlike Kipling’s and his sister’s situation, all this happened with the parents – playwright Bruce Mason (Pa) and high-profile obstetrician Diana Mason (Docky) – also living in the house.

How, Robinson constantly asks herself, could this situation have been allowed to go on for so long? It’s a question the reader is likely to ask, too. Surely, the parents must have noticed something was wrong, and why on earth didn’t the children say anything? Kipling’s explanation for why, as a child, he hadn’t spoken out was that “badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it.” Robinson’s response is much the same: for the victims, a reign of terror breeds compliance and silence.

Eventually, however, Robinson (nearly 13) and her brother Julian (10) hit on a solution. While on holiday with their parents and away from Lili, each would separately take the chance – she with Docky, he with Pa – to reveal what was really going on. Despite initial parental resistance, some part of the horror was accepted, and Lili banished. A substantial portion of the rest of the memoir (while relating much else) is devoted to how Robinson has faced up to and tried to rectify (or at least come to some sort of terms with) the ongoing damage of the Lili years. In that sense, this is a survival-and-recovery memoir, and an admirable one, not least in its lack of self-pity and self-excuse.

The ’much else’ that is related includes: a consciousness-raising semester in 1966 at Berkeley High (terrific); glimpses of the 1950s and 60s Wellington cultural scene and the setting up of Downstage Theatre; doing an MA(Hons) at Victoria University on The Lord of the Rings; Robinson’s early and enduring marriage to muso Steve (some fascinating insights into the Kiwi band Tamburlaine); quasi-commune life on Waiheke; being a mother herself (not easy); working for advertising firms; exploring Buddhism; setting up a company with Sue Reidy; her son Luke’s marriage and career in film; eventually being employed as ‘brand manager in Central Communications and Marketing at the University of Auckland’….

Robinson’s has been a busy life, hectic with incident, travel, encounters, friendships, and is crisply told. However, I imagine most readers will, in addition to the Lili sections, be most compelled by two other intertwined strands: the story of Robinson’s long and difficult relationship with Docky and the discovery, long after Pa’s death in 1982, that he was gay.

In the chapter ‘Loose Parenting’, Robinson quotes the opening quatrain of Larkin’s ‘This Be the Verse’:
  They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
  They may not mean to, but they do.
  They fill you with the faults they had
  And add some extra, just for you.

(Larkin once lamented that these would probably be the only lines of his anyone would ever remember, and, forty years after his death in our very differently tuned world, that’s probably true.) As with many memoirs and autobiographies, the lines might stand as an epigraph to Unforgetting – great title, incidentally, and the golden family cover photo is all too ironic.

While Pa and Docky were clearly a devoted couple, Docky was a terrible mother. Highly skilled and much revered in her profession, she also had a joint PhD in narcissism and gas-lighting. At any social occasion, she was always flamboyantly overdressed and made absolutely sure she was the centre of attention. At home, she held the monopoly on the big emotions and, after Lili’s removal, seems to have persistently blamed Belinda for what had happened. Two dismaying sentences in ‘Mindfulness’, the chapter about Robinson’s ‘exploration of Buddhism’, bring you up with a jolt:

“I just did not understand how my mother could have left her children in the care of someone she knew was psychotic and addicted to opioids, and then tried to shift the responsibility on to one of those children. I still don’t.”

If such dereliction of parental care can be explained, the next line of Larkin’s poem may offer a clue:
  But they [ie mum and dad] were fucked up in their turn.
That said, a subsidiary motif of the memoir is showing that cycles of intergenerational ‘fucked-upness’ needn’t be as inexorable as Larkin’s poem claims.

On the Lili front, Pa gets off relatively lightly, Robinson suggesting that his reason for “never admit[ing] culpability either, [was] undoubtedly out of loyalty to Docky.” Or, this reader at least wonders, because that was simply how the marriage worked: Docky controlled the ‘authorised version’, and the best Pa could subsequently do (and he clearly did) was provide heaps of fatherly love and engagement.

In some respects, Unforgetting offers a portrait of a marriage not unlike that of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West – although, in Harold and Vita’s case, both were ‘so’, as the secret code once had it. Pa apparently told Docky about his male affairs before the marriage, and she (reluctantly) accepted subsequent ones as long as he kept them quiet. The revelation of all this only came to Robinson more than thirty years after Pa’s death when she was reading through his voluminous correspondence held in the Beaglehole Room at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington.

The revelation itself produced no revulsion, only retrospective sorrow. Robinson had adored her father and plainly continues to do so, although, as she writes: “what has been my great sadness in the decade since that visit to the Beaglehole Room is that he hid his sexuality from me, when I thought we were so close.” It’s an understandable reaction, but doesn’t necessarily mean the two weren’t as close as she remembers: closeness isn’t only defined by degrees of disclosure. Besides, homosexuality remained a criminal offence here until a few years after Pa’s death in 1982, and you still don’t have to go far outside the main centres to be reminded that there can be a considerable time-lag between decriminalisation and widespread acceptance. It is an irony not lost on Robinson that Docky’s many affairs (which were obviously no great secret) aroused little or no opprobrium.

Robinson’s vignettes of her father light up the memoir wherever they appear. He had a keen wit and grasp of post-war Pākehā culture: “He once said that being a playwright in this country was akin to being a cobbler in a land whose people wore no shoes.” Of John Lennon’s In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, he remarked: “Alice in Wonderland strained through Finnegan’s Wake and stuffed with chillies”.

One of Docky’s many obstinacies after Pa’s death was her refusal to allow ‘dozens of requests by amateur theatrical group to perform Pa’s plays, because she felt they would not do the works justice … It’s much more important to keep the plays alive and relevant, surely?’ Just so. I was theatre critic for the New Zealand Listener (1999-2007) and only remember seeing one (very memorable) production at Circa of The End of the Golden Weather, starring Peter Vere-Jones, and, I think, one school production (at Wellington High?) of The Pohutukawa Tree. Fluent in te reo, Mason was an important (arguably key) ground-breaker in the emergence of so much brilliant Māori theatre over the last thirty-to-forty years. It is, as Robinson says, saddening that some of his best work is “now considered to be cultural misappropriation.” A forerunner’s lot is rarely a happy one.

Robinson warmly acknowledges, as crucial to the writing of Unforgetting, the spur of reading Charlotte Grimshaw’s The Mirror Book: A Memoir and of later attending a memoir workshop run by Grimshaw. This is handsome, credit in these matters not always given where it’s due. It is perhaps also no coincidence that Unforgetting, like The Mirror Book, is very much a pro-dad-and-anti-mum memoir: Pa no doubt deserves it, but he does receive a favoured run, as does Karl Stead in The Mirror Book. The gaps and silences in Something of Myself make clear that Kipling, on the other hand, was never able to ‘unforget’, nor quite to forgive, either of his parents.

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Distributor: Nationwide Books
https://www.nationwidebooks.co.nz/product/Unforgetting
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