Tell You What: Great New Zealand Nonfiction 2017

By Independent Publishers Group

With the arrival of the second volume of Tell You What, the sum total of New Zealand non-fiction anthologies damn near doubles,' noted the Sunday Star-Times when they picked up last year's edition. Well, we thought, let's damn near triple it. Because we've discovered that New Zealanders love their true stories. Last year's Tell You What was quite a ride . . . a gripping, thought provoking and inspiring reminder of how much talent is out there' (KiaOra), featuring some of New Zealand's best writers, covering subjects like bullies, Barbies, girl bands and grandads' (The Australian Women's Weekly). Take it and read it, as, one by one, each writer tells us their what' wrote John Campbell in the foreword. And this year? Third time lucky we say. The talent is assembling. The stories are rolling in. The 2017 edition of Tell You What once again promises an intellectually stimulating summer for New Zealanders up and down the country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Nov 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781775589044

Book preview

stop.

David Haywood

Høstens Vemod

¹

A few years ago, I was chatting with another father at a children’s playground in Trondheim, when the subject of høstens vemod came up.

‘Høstens vemod is a very important Norwegian concept,’ he told me. ‘Perhaps the most important concept in our entire national psychology. Believe me: to understand høstens vemod is to understand Norway.’

He watched as my children circumvented the safety barriers of the guaranteed-safe Swedish-designed playground and climbed precariously on to the roof of the slide tower.

‘The literal translation of høstens vemod might be something like autumn sadness,’ he continued. ‘Put simplistically, this is the sadness that you feel in autumn after the summer has passed. There is, of course, nothing wrong with autumn in Norway, it is perhaps our most pleasant season. But after autumn comes the oppressive horror of winter. Therefore we cannot enjoy the pleasures of autumn because of the unpleasant future event that lies ahead.

‘This, of course, can be extended to Norwegian life in general. How can you enjoy eating an ice cream, for example, when you know that death is inevitable? Dying in a cancer ward, perhaps? Your own death ahead of you like an inexorable freight train about to crush you – that is the worst thing. This is why we Norwegians lack confidence; why we can’t properly enjoy our vast sovereign wealth funds. Even Frida Lyngstad experiences høstens vemod. Did you know she is Norwegian? People don’t warm to her because of her melancholic nature; she is the most depressing member of ABBA.’

A long silence followed these words. Neither of us felt like talking. The sun had faded behind a cloud; the playground chilled as a damp gust of wind blew in from the sea. Perhaps this was the first hint of autumn, I thought. Why did I suddenly feel sad?

It is no understatement to say that this conversation has been a profound revelation to me. The høstens vemod of Norway finally put into words an emotion that I’ve suffered all my life. Perhaps not so much an obsession with the unavoidability of death, but certainly an Eeyore-ish inability to fully embrace happiness – purely as a consequence of the knowledge that, inevitably, all happiness must pass. It may even explain why my enjoyment of ABBA is only 25 per cent that of most other people.

Nevertheless – who knows how – I somehow manage to struggle on. For the last couple of years my little daughter, Polly, has been a great help with the building work to which fate has sentenced me. At first, I admit, her presence was a bit frustrating. But then she became rather useful: handing me tools, doing simple carpentry work, negotiating improved trade discounts with my suppliers. Eventually she became indispensable. In a few months, however, she will be going to school, and already I am overflowing with høstens vemod at the thought of her departure.

It is a fascinating thing, with your children, to be able to see another person’s life – a person who is often wholly different to yourself – in its full unedited format. Polly has a will of iron. Whereas her older brother had to be cajoled and persuaded (and, in some cases, threatened) through every stage of childhood development, Polly has been grimly determined to overcome every obstacle in her path. Toilet training was over in a flash; she demanded a grown-up girl’s bed before the thought had even occurred to her parents; afternoon naps were forsaken at the earliest possible opportunity.

It is perhaps only in her difficulty with bedtime that she resembles her brother. For several years Polly was unable to fall asleep except via the mechanism of an extended pushchair ride. There is a great deal of entertainment in the vicinity of our house: cows, sheep, horses, pigs, chickens, alpacas, a church, and a café where occasional ice creams are eaten. While we trundled along, Polly felt obliged to provide a travelogue of the various sights. Her disembodied voice would drift up from beneath the pushchair’s hood.

A streetlight flickering into illumination could provoke an interesting observation: ‘I am a lighthouse. Whenever you push this button, my light goes on. And whenever my light goes on I lay an egg. These are all my eggs. Most of them are for eating, but we have to look after this one because it has a baby lighthouse in it . . .’

The combination of church and café and a passing police vehicle could provide culinary inspiration: ‘Welcome to my café. Would you like some steeple pancakes? They are made from church steeples. Don’t worry, the church said they didn’t mind. And the police gave me some of their special potion that you sprinkle over things to make them good to eat. Your baby could have a bottle? We have real breast milk. It came from my mother who died when I was a baby and all her breast milk fell out. We use the special police potion to make it taste nice and fresh . . .’

As the kilometres rolled by (a 9-kilometre bedtime ride was not unexceptional), Polly’s travelogue would gradually begin to fade. Long periods of silence would ensue. As I finally began to hope that our nightly journey was over, her voice would re-emerge sleepily, often with a particularly recondite observation: ‘Gerry Brownlee came along and tried to knock down our chicken house. Then the chickens all got free so they came and pecked his eyes out. He couldn’t see so he stumbled around and around. Then he banged into his own house because he couldn’t see it. And he knocked his own house down. Ha ha.’

This last item touches upon the main source of unhappiness in Polly’s life: the government. I suppose that when the government has razed your entire former neighbourhood then you are inclined to view them in a less-than-charitable light. The blind on the window next to Polly’s bedroom must always be pulled tight at night ‘to prevent the government getting in’; a trip to Christchurch was ruined when a shop clerk mentioned that John Key was visiting the city, and Polly hysterically demanded to be taken home in order to protect our house from government demolition.

A year or so ago, Polly several times refused to leave the house at all. ‘I have to stay home in case Gerry Brownlee or John Key come with diggers,’ she protested tearfully. I attempted to counter her heartfelt arguments by explaining that our house was now under the jurisdiction of the district council, and therefore Gerry Brownlee or John Key had no power to make demolition orders (I admit to glossing over certain aspects of parliamentary sovereignty and the Public Works Act 1981). Polly countered my counter-argument by demanding to be taken to the district council in person for reassurances.

Our local councillor was thus proven to be a man of great flexibility in terms of job description. When Polly was ushered into his presence he immediately launched into a detailed explanation of the powers of his council in preventing Gerry Brownlee or John Key from demolishing houses. I think it was the man-traps baited with hamburgers that finally convinced Polly. We were both highly impressed by our local democracy in action.

Although Polly’s steely negotiation skills have been the source of much parental difficulty, they have certainly come in handy when visiting building and engineering suppliers. Employees in such establishments are psychologically unprepared for strong-willed customers wearing tiaras and fairy dresses. It is but a small step from praising Polly’s drawings to acceding to requests for the ‘junior builder’s trade discount’. Indeed I’ve had to ban Polly’s preferred farewell (‘Don’t send my dad a bloody bill, okay?’) from fear that a sales clerk might actually follow her instructions and lose their job.

Grandmotherly sales clerks present an unusual problem in their tendency to praise Polly for her beauty. ‘Aren’t you beautiful?’ is a common greeting (to which Polly would reply with devastating honesty: ‘I know’). This necessitated long speeches from me about the inconsequence of exterior beauty in comparison with the vital importance of interior beauty. The devastating logic of my speeches has now prompted Polly to offer the compromise response, ‘I’m beautiful on the inside, too’ (sometimes ungraciously adding: ‘I have a brother called Bob who’s beautiful as well – but he’s only beautiful on the inside’). A slight parental victory, I suppose.

The other awkward issue with grandmotherly sales clerks is their tendency to request too much information about Polly’s art works, which frequently produces distress in those unfamiliar with the macabre.

GRANDMOTHERLY SALES CLERK: What a beautiful picture of a flower!

POLLY: It’s a poisonous flower.

GRANDMOTHERLY SALES CLERK: (in a tone of slightly mystified disappointment) Oh . . .

Mind you, this is exceedingly mild in comparison with some other of Polly’s artistic works. I have mixed emotions with regard to an overheard conversation about the well-known painting Daddy Driving Lawnmower, With Two Flowers.

ADMIRING ADULT: What’s this lovely picture about, Polly? polly: This flower and this baby flower have just been to a ball, then after the ball they got nice and clean. But now it is nighttime and they are asleep snuggling up to each other, but now this big one is being struck by lightning, there, see? And now it is going to die. And the baby one is dying too. The flowers are us, actually. They turn into us when they die. Over here is a baby squirrel with only one arm that we are looking after. It is going to die from the thunderstorm too. And this is the handy helper. He’s watching but not doing anything. And this is Daddy, driving the lawnmower. He is driving it in the middle of the night because it has been raining and the grass keeps growing. There is more thunder coming and he is going to be dying too.

I feel a certain amount of guilt that my building work has deprived Polly of much of the attention that was lavished on her brother – there have been very few nature walks or rainy-day trips to museums in her pre-school years. But I suppose she has been educated in other ways. Polly recently built a stile of her own design between our property and the neighbours, and I had an embarrassing moment (half way through a lecture on how her planned structure could be improved) when I suddenly realised that her design was much better than the one that I was suggesting. It seemed a good sign that some sort of useful learning had taken place.

Polly attends the local kindergarten several days per week. I’m astonished by how much I miss her presence when she’s at lessons: the quirky observations, the surrealistic conversations, the fascinating details of her future plans. ‘When I go to school I shall build a beautiful gypsy caravan and live in our coppice. Then when I’m older – and if you’re not dead – I’ll live in the big house, and you and Mummy can live in my caravan. And then I’ll have children, and I’ll be the grown-up, and I’ll look after you!’ It’s rather sad to think of Polly going to all-day school, and of my lonely builder’s future without her.

The head teacher at Polly’s kindergarten is an immigrant from Norway, and I felt that she – of all people – would be culturally capable of understanding my melancholy at Polly’s approaching departure to primary school. ‘Of course, your people have a word for this anticipatory sadness,’ I added. ‘Høstens vemod.’

‘Høstens vemod?’ replied the head teacher. ‘Really? I’ve never heard of that. I mean the actual words make sense in Norwegian, but I’ve never heard of it as any kind of cultural thing.’

She sent a text message to her brother in Norway. Her brother is a high-school teacher who is known for his in-depth understanding of Norwegian culture and society. ‘He’ll certainly be able to clear up the mystery of høstens vemod for me,’ she said confidently.

A few minutes later she received a reply. ‘Well no,’ she said. ‘Apparently he’s never heard of it either.’

I now suspect that I’ve been a victim of the wry Norwegian sense of humour. My cultural informant at the children’s playground was perhaps indulging in a spot of Nordic hyperbole. All I can say is that it’s a shame to be suffering from a psychological phenomenon that doesn’t officially exist (though, if it doesn’t exist, then why does it make me so sad?). Perhaps there’s a word for it in Finnish.

¹First published on David’s blog Southerly at Public Address, 20 June 2016: publicaddress.net/southerly

Jane Phare

The Poisoning at the Lake

¹

It was never supposed to happen this way. In Marjorie Ellingham’s tortured, depressed state she reasoned that she alone would die. Her loved ones, including her husband and son, would assume she had died from food poisoning; the other adults who had eaten her arsenic-laced food would also fall sick but she knew they would recover, just like the other times. This way, her family would be spared the distress and shame, in those days, of a suicide. Any friends she poisoned along the way would recover, thanks to meticulous planning and experimenting over several years – lacing food she served to guests with small amounts of arsenic to test the result.

But a child? No, that was never the plan. Young David wasn’t even at the luncheon that day – Sunday, 10 April 1966. What Marjorie hadn’t factored into her warped plan was human nature – a loving mother taking a plate of the delicious party food home to her youngest son in a nearby Taupō bach. That simple act of motherly caring would inadvertently, and tragically, lead to the death of eleven-year-old David Davison, the son of Sir Ronald, then a barrister, and his wife Jacqueline.

What became known as the Easter poisonings left two families, who had socialised together regularly, torn apart, a mother without her son and a son without his mother; two families living under the shadow of unspeakable horror and sadness.

The Ellinghams were a sociable couple, often entertaining at their Wellington home or Taupō lakeside cottage. Marjorie Ellingham, the 54-year-old wife of Wellington lawyer, Lloyd, was by all accounts a gracious hostess and a good cook, well used to catering for friends and family at various functions. But the Easter weekend gathering at the Ellinghams’ Taupō home was different for two reasons.

The first was that by Easter Sunday the cottage and its grounds were brimming with legal royalty after a New Zealand Law Society conference in Dunedin had drawn together the country’s top lawyers and visiting overseas dignitaries.

Enjoying the Ellinghams’ hospitality were Britain’s Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning and his wife Lady Denning, Sir Victor Windeyer, an Australian High Court judge, and Lady Windeyer, and Hazen Hansard, the immediate past-president of the Canadian Bar Association.

The second was that Marjorie planned to kill herself – taking large amounts of arsenic to bring an end to her misery, and adding just enough to food served to a handful of guests so they too would become ill with suspected food poisoning.

That Sunday morning Marjorie insisted on preparing all the food herself, refusing repeated offers of help from her sister-in-law Jean Kronfeld. She shooed her husband, her brother and his wife out the door, urging them to join Lady Windeyer who planned to visit local hot pools. Alone in the kitchen, Marjorie was free to lace food with arsenic – food that, eleven days later, police would search for in a stinking Taupō tip.

Three adults fell ill that day – Marjorie, Jean, and David’s mother, Jacqueline. When their son started vomiting at their Taupō bach, the Davisons, knowing David had eaten some of the food from the party, assumed he too had food poisoning. Jean’s husband (Marjorie’s brother) was a doctor and he administered medicine from a Taupō pharmacy. While Ellingham remained ill, Kronfeld and Jacqueline Davison recovered after a few days. At first, it seemed David would too.

On the fifth day after the fateful Sunday luncheon, he was well enough to make a trip into Taupō. But later that day, frighteningly, he began to vomit blood and was admitted to Rotorua Hospital.

Marjorie was admitted the next day and became hysterical when she witnessed preparations to transfer David to Auckland as his condition deteriorated. At one stage she needed to be tranquilised.

Nursing staff said she seemed confused and talked about the food she had prepared, mentioning chicken stuffing and celery. She asked if David would live and told one nurse: ‘If anything should happen to him it will be my fault. I am to blame.’

By now seriously ill, Marjorie too was transferred to Auckland Hospital where she lay slowly dying of arsenic poisoning, undoubtedly tormented by what she had done to David. Mystified by what had caused the woman and boy to become so ill, DSIR analysts and Health Department staff worked overtime trying to identify the source.

It took eight days for David Davison’s small body to succumb. He died on 18 April and was buried at Purewa Cemetery two days later, leaving behind his distraught parents, older sister Verity and brother Paul. It was not until after David’s death that the police were called, launching what was to become one of the country’s most extensive investigations. Autopsy results showed David had died of liver failure due to arsenic poisoning and traces had been found on the critically ill Marjorie. But just how it was administered, and by whom, would take nearly fifty police and detectives tens of thousands of hours to establish.

•

Three days after David’s death, police were called in by the Auckland medical officer of health after learning ‘a chemical poison was a major factor in the boy’s death’. Police searched the Ellinghams’ Roseneath home in Wellington and began systematically visiting chemists in Wellington and Taupō to check the poison registers. They zeroed in on a person who, over the previous four years, had bought arsenic twelve times from four different outlets, each time giving slightly different addresses in Roseneath and Khandallah.

It would be another eleven days after David’s death that the tormented Marjorie finally got her wish – death by suicide. On the morning of 29 April, Lloyd visited his seriously ill wife, with their son Adrian, in hospital. She died at 4.15 p.m. that day, the evening paper the Auckland Star describing her as another ‘victim’ of Taupō’s mysterious Easter poisonings.

Jean Kronfeld was to later say that Adrian, learning of his mother’s death, ‘broke down completely and sobbed helplessly, and my brother’s grief was the saddest thing I have ever known’. Marjorie’s autopsy showed she had died of acute arsenic poisoning; the Auckland coroner would later hear evidence that she had administered ten times the amount of arsenic to herself as she had to her unsuspecting guests.

By the time Marjorie died, rumours had begun circulating, with newspapers covering updates almost daily. The investigation was not helped by the delay in identifying the arsenic – eleven days after the 10 April luncheon – by which time evidence such as food scraps had disappeared. Police interviewed more than 1400 people in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Britain. Many were tested for traces of arsenic, including Lord and Lady Denning in England. More than 1000 exhibits were collected and analysed, the Taupō tip was searched, houses – including the Ellinghams’ and Davisons’ Taupō homes – examined, septic tanks, drains and rubbish bins analysed. Traces of arsenic were found in both the Ellingham homes and a jar ‘suspected’ of containing the poison was found in their Wellington home. Traces of arsenic were found in the room David used at his family’s Taupō holiday home.

Gradually police would build up a picture of a middle-aged woman, a seemingly perfect wife and mother, who was intent on committing suicide, following in the footsteps of her mother and an uncle who took their lives. Marjorie had been planning her death for years. She set about experimenting, using her friends and guests as unsuspecting guinea pigs. Her aim, it appears, was to figure out how much arsenic would make an adult just sick enough to have symptoms resembling food poisoning.

Inviting her friends to luncheons and bridge parties, either at her Oriental Parade home or the Taupō cottage, she laced their food with arsenic on various occasions, causing them to feel ill and vomit. None of the guests connected the dots. They just assumed they had eaten something bad at lunch. They recovered and life moved on.

And who would have suspected? At the inquest seven months later, Jean Kronfeld described her brother’s family as devoted to one another, describing Marjorie as a woman who loved to please her husband and son. ‘She kept a spotless home. She was a very good cook, a perfect hostess and entertainer, charming, efficient, hospitable and generous.’ Kind words from a sister-in-law who, weeks after that fateful Easter luncheon, realised that she too had been deliberately poisoned.

But behind Marjorie’s serene face and neatly pinned hair was a tormented woman who confided in her doctor about bouts of depression, and an unhappy upbringing at the hands of a controlling mother and ‘neurotic’ father. Her parents, she had said, were unhappy and ill-suited. When English-born Marjorie left for New Zealand, her mother had been admitted to a mental home and had undergone shock treatment.

Marjorie’s doctor, Dr Guy Hallwright, told the inquest: ‘It was clear that these breakdowns (of her mother) were intended to influence Mrs Ellingham to give up a particular course of action.’

He described her mother as ‘a tyrannical person who interfered in a ruthlessly selfish way and tried to deviate the life of her daughter’.

After Marjorie’s mother took her own life, at the age of 74, a letter arrived from her brother describing their mother’s suicide in detail.

Feeling guilty over her mother’s suicide, Marjorie became depressed and, Hallwright theorised, this had caused her to want to end her life. She was referred to a psychiatrist to help with the depression and seemed to improve.

Hallwright told the inquest that she was a gentle woman who ‘I feel sure never intended by her actions to cause the death of others’.

But none of this was apparent when Jean and her husband arrived at the Taupō cottage on Good Friday. She was not to know that her sister-in-law would, in two days’ time, serve her and Jacqueline Davison plates of food laced with arsenic, or that Davison would unwittingly give some of the poisoned food to her young son.

The Sunday luncheon was a great success and later that evening the Davisons invited their friends the Ellinghams for pre-dinner drinks at their neighbouring Taupō home. Jean remembers feeling slightly unwell and having a headache but assumed she was over-tired. Back at the Ellinghams’, she and her