A Communist in the Family: Searching for Rewi Alley

By Elspeth Sandys

A Communist in the Family: Searching for Rewi Alley is a beautifully written multi-layered narrative centred on New Zealander Rewi Alley and his part in the momentous political events of mid-twentieth-century China. Part-biography, part-travel journal, part-literary commentary, A Communist in the Family brings together Alley's story and that of his author cousin, Elspeth Sandys. In 2017, Sandys travelled to China with other family members to mark the ninetieth anniversary of Rewi's arrival in Shanghai in 1927. One strand of this book follows that journey and charts Sandys' impressions of modern China. Another tells the story of Rewi's early life, in an insightful meditation on the complex and always elusive relationship between memory and writing. By placing the man, Rewi, and his work in the context of his time, Sandys is able to illuminate the life of this extraordinary New Zealander in a way that is both historically vivid and relevant to the world of today. Her focus on the role poetry played in his life—both his own and that of the Chinese poets he translated so prolifically—provides moving glimpses of the man behind the myth. Threaded through A Communist in the Family are Sandys' evolving insights into a nation that looms ever larger in the day-to-day realities of New Zealand and the world. The strange—and strangely intimate—link between the two countries Rewi regarded as home is one in which he played, and continues to play, a crucial role.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Otago University Press
• Release date: Dec 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781988592800

Elspeth Sandys

Elspeth Sandys writes predominantly historical fiction and her long experience as a stage and radio playwright, an author of adaptations for the BBC, and an actor inform the craft of her dialogue. She has published short stories as well as long fiction and she won a UK award for her novel River Lines. Her memoir, What Lies Beneath, was published by Otago University Press in 2014.

Book preview

To my fellow travellers, April 2017

‘Every traveller wants to find the place where being what he is will matter, and that place is home.’ Robert Dessaix, Corfu

‘Wasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you were from

but where you were wanted.’

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

‘It is not hard to do a bit of good; what is hard is to do good all one’s life.’

Wang Bingnan, president of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, speaking about Rewi Alley¹

‘What is it about China that gets people from the rest of the world?

The answer is a single word – warmth.’

Rewi Alley diary 1952–55

Published by Otago University Press

Level 1, 398 Cumberland Street

Dunedin, New Zealand

[e-mail]

www.otago.ac.nz/press

First published 2019

Copyright © Elspeth Sandys

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

ISBN 978-1-98-853160-1 (print)

ISBN 978-1-98-859280-0 (epub)

ISBN 978-1-98-859281-7 (Kindle mobi)

ISBN 978-1-98-859282-4 (ePDF)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand. This book is copyright. Except for the purpose of fair review, no part may be stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including recording or storage in any information retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. No reproduction may be made, whether by photocopying or by any other means, unless a licence has been obtained from the publisher.

Published with the assistance of Creative New Zealand

Editor: Jane Parkin

Index: Diane Lowther

Design/layout: Fiona Moffat

Cover: Rewi in Shandan, 1982. From Rewi Alley , a commemorative photo album compiled by the Research Office for Rewi Alley’s Works of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries and China Reconstructs magazine, 1988, Beijing: China Reconstructs Press.

Ebook conversion 2020 by meBooks

CONTENTS

AUTHOR’S NOTE

TIMELINE OF THE LIFE OF REWI ALLEY

CHINESE POLITICAL CHRONOLOGY

PROLOGUE

CHAPTERS ONE TO SIXTY-ONE

PICTURE SECTION

GLOSSARY OF MĀORI WORDS AND NEW ZEALAND SLANG

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INDEX

Author’s Note

This is the story of a relationship with a man, Rewi Alley, as family member, writer, humanitarian and unwitting myth-maker. It is also the story of a relationship with a country, China, where he lived for 60 years, from 1927 to 1987, about which I now know enough to acknowledge how little I know. Whoever said ‘You can never come to the end of China’ said a true thing.

Rewi Alley’s long life in China has been the subject of many books, films and documentaries, in both Chinese and English, yet he remains known to only a few in the West. That this man, friend of peasants and presidents, founder of the movement known internationally as Gung Ho, honoured as one of the top ten foreign friends (guoji youren ) of China, has been largely ignored by the English-speaking world is the puzzle I have set out to try to solve.

As an excuse (explanation?) for my audacity in writing this book, I could offer up the fact that it was a condition of the costs of my trip to China being paid, but that begs the question of why I should think I am in any way qualified to write about the country, home to over a quarter of the world’s population, that I have visited only once. All I can say in my defence is that Rewi Alley, my mother’s first cousin, has always loomed large in my life. And I can’t write about him without writing about China.

‘A person goes to China for a week and writes a book. A person goes to China for a year and writes an article. A person goes to China for two years and stays silent.’ Words often quoted by old China hands, quoted here in acknowledgement of the impossible task I have set myself.

*

In the interests of creating a dramatic narrative I have taken some liberties in my depiction of Rewi’s relationships with friends and family. At times, based on what I know of the facts, I have imagined meetings and conversations, but I have been careful not to stray from the written record. ‘Imagine it,’ Richard Ford instructed his readers in his 2017 memoir of his parents, Between Them . ‘You have to, because there is no other way.’ So that, as a writer, is what I have done. I hope readers will forgive any mistakes made in daring to imagine Rewi Alley’s life in a country so far from his birthplace, and mine.

A note on the English form of Chinese words

When Rewi Alley went to China, the system in use for expressing Chinese words in English was the one devised by the British after the Opium Wars. It was known as the Wade-Giles system. Not surprisingly it didn’t survive the War of Liberation (capital letters will be used for this war, in which the communists triumphed, as they are in China). In the early 1950s Chinese linguists started working on a new system that would come to be known as Pinyin. Adopted by the Chinese government in 1958, it was acknowledged as the international form of the romanisation of Chinese words in 1982.

Ahead of his times in so many ways, Rewi Alley never quite managed the transition from Wade-Giles to Pinyin. So as late as 1980 he is still calling Beijing Peking, and Baoji Paochi. So when I quote him, it’s the old system I’ll be using. Elsewhere, apart from in quotes from the pre-Pinyin period, the modern form will be used. Though contradictions, especially in the spelling of personal names, linger on. Mao Tse-tung became Mao Zedong when the Pinyin system was adopted, but the old spelling persists, as does the form Mao Tsetung. The same applies to Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai, Chou En lai), Soong Chingling (Soong Ching-ling, Soong Qingling) and Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kaishek, Chiang Kai-shek). Jiang Jieshi is the correct Pinyin form for China’s defeated nationalist leader but because he is mostly known in the West as Chiang Kaishek that is the form I will use.

Other variations in spelling occur as a result of crossovers from Mandarin to Cantonese and vice versa. When quoting I will use the form given in the quoted passage; otherwise I have tried, as far as possible for a non-Chinese speaker, to standardise to Pinyin.

Acronyms, the blight of so much modern journalism, are kept to a minimum. I have, however, used: CCP for the Chinese Communist Party; Corso for the Council for the Organisation of Relief Services Overseas; CPNZ for the Communist Party of New Zealand; ICCIC for the International Committee for the Promotion of Chinese Industrial Co-operatives; INDUSCO for the fundraising arm of ICCIC founded by Ida Pruitt; KMT for the Chinese nationalist government, the Kuomintang (also spelt Guomintang); NZCFS for the New Zealand–China Friendship Society; and NZSIS (shortened to SIS) for New Zealand’s Security Intelligence Services.

Timeline of the life of Rewi Alley

*Gung Ho – Work Together – was a co-operative movement founded by Rewi Alley and others in 1938 to help the Chinese in the war against Japan. Based on the principles of co-operation, it succeeded in establishing over 500,000 co-operatives throughout unoccupied China that produced goods essential to the survival of the 8th Route Army

Chinese political chronology

Prologue

It’s called the Breakfast Room, though no one ever eats breakfast there. It’s large and oddly shaped, with hidden corners and curved windows and a ceiling decorated with laurel leaves. From the large bay window seat you look out on a goldfish pond, favourite haunt of both kingfishers, with their eyes on the fish, and my cat Basil with his eyes on the kingfishers. Beyond the pond is my father’s greenhouse where he grows – and I suspect talks to – his prize begonias.

There’s a fireplace in the room, active, of course – this is 1952. The Romans invented underfloor heating 2000 years ago but I doubt my parents know this. Even if they did they would have considered this expensive alternative to a good fire indulgent. In this house children grow up wearing hand-knitted jerseys and scratching their chilblains. Opposite the window is an alcove with a built-in, L-shaped seat. It’s my favourite place in the house, the place I escape to when I want to read, or hide. It has an overhead light and a curtain that can be drawn to shut it off from the rest of the room.

Right now my hiding place is occupied. My mother is entertaining – no, that’s the wrong word – my mother is talking earnestly to a man called Colin Morrison. He’s the head of an organisation called Corso. I don’t know at age 11 what this stands for, but I know it’s something to do with sending money and sheep to China.

I’m not supposed to be in the room. My job is to answer the door, then disappear to make tea. I’m mostly an obedient child, but there are times when something stronger than the fear of disapproval takes over. Today it’s the word Rewi that has me rooted to the spot. Rewi is my uncle. (So I believed at the time: later I would learn he was my mother’s first cousin, not her brother; later still I would work out that, as an adopted child, I wasn’t related to him at all. Not that this made any difference. In his diaries he refers to me as his ‘writer niece’, and I, to this day, think of him as ‘Uncle Rewi’.)

Your uncle, my mother has told me, is doing heroic work in China, saving hundreds if not thousands of lives. Uncle Rewi has two adopted sons, Alan and Mike. Mike is my pen-pal. He’s told me my name in Chinese means Shining Lake. But there’s another name, one that is spoken only when my father is out of the room. Communist . I don’t know what it means. All I know is it makes my father unhappy – and gets me into trouble. ‘Your uncle’s a filthy commie!’ In attempting to defend my family honour in the school playground I have suffered a bloody nose. Other insults have followed, but so far no more blood has been spilt.

Ours is a Presbyterian household. Pictures of a blue-eyed, fair-haired Jesus surrounded by multi-coloured children, of the Eye of the Needle Gate in Jerusalem, of Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus in the manger at Bethlehem, line the walls of the corridors and living rooms. There are also – because this is a Scottish Presbyterian household – pictures of Highland cattle, of the mist-bound mountains of Glencoe, of tartan-clad emigrants boarding a sailing ship at Greenock. But there are other things not on such prominent display – a chest carved out of mulberry wood, a tiny jade horse, a lidded vase designed to hold singing crickets – trophies of my father’s travels as a young man, when the ‘lure of the Orient’ drew him to Shanghai, the ‘Paris of the East’, and Peking, the ancient imperial capital. These tucked-away treasures, and their accompanying pictures – a strange building that looks like lots of beehives one on top of the other, a garden with an arched stone bridge and trees laden with blossom, a scroll painting of huntsmen with bows and arrows – are my mother’s favourite things in the house. The mostly unused (and unheated) living room in which they are stored is her hiding place. It’s where she goes to read Millions Know Him – Do You? , a booklet about Uncle Rewi with the word Corso on the cover, and China Reconstructs , the magazine founded by Madame Sun Yatsen, a very important lady. There have only been two issues so far but there will be more. They are very shiny, with lots of pictures of smiling people working in factories and hospitals and schools.

Mr Morrison is talking now. He’s telling my mother how cold it is in Shandan, where Uncle Rewi lives. ‘Minus 40 some days,’ he says, in the kind of voice preachers use to scare you into being good. Pictures start to form in my mind: Uncle Rewi’s school, dwarfed by the snow-covered mountains of Shandan; the boys in their padded coats and caps with long ear flaps, learning how to make tools and tractors; the games of basketball when lessons are over; the horses and camels; the starving children – Uncle Rewi calls them ‘ants’ because of their stunted growth – rescued from coal mines; the dusty mud-brick buildings that might have sheltered Marco Polo seven centuries ago when he went to meet Kubla Khan, the Mongol ruler of China; the river where, in summer, the Shandan boys swim naked, something I would never be allowed to do; the Buddhists temples converted to workshops. ‘ Out come the Buddhas, in comes the boiler, ’ my mother quoted, reading one of Uncle Rewi’s poems aloud. My eye travels to the sideboard where a tiny brass Buddha – ‘my little fat daddy’, my uncle’s first gift to me – sits in solitary splendour. Had the Buddha come from anyone but him it would, out of deference to my Presbyterian father, have been hidden away as idolatrous.

‘… almost impossible to find out what’s happening,’ Mr Morrison is saying. ‘Seems Rewi’s been moved on, or the school has …’

My mother’s hushed voice fills the gap Mr Morrison has left. ‘Is he in trouble?’

‘I don’t think so. I think we’d know if …’

‘There’s been nothing in his letters. Just the usual things. The cold, the shortages, news of the boys …’

‘I think we just keep going. That’s what I’m telling my committee. Unless we hear otherwise we assume the school is still operating and Rewi is in charge.’

A silence opens up. I can’t do anything about my heart, which is acting as if a firecracker has been lit under it, but I can at last get my feet moving. As I carefully open the door to the kitchen I hear my mother say, ‘Make no mistake, Rewi can be pig-headed. I know him too well. If what’s he’s doing is pitting himself against the government …’

Mr Morrison makes a spluttering sound, the kind it’s okay for adults to make but if children do it they’re accused of being rude. ‘Well, he is an Alley. What can you expect?’

*

So who are the Alleys? And why, as an adopted member of the family, am I so drawn to them? My father once told me I’d be glad when I grew up to know I didn’t have Alley blood in my veins. He was, of course, thinking of my mother, whose mental breakdowns blighted my childhood and – in ways I’ve struggled to imagine – his marriage. He may also have been thinking of my grandfather, Henry Alley, a fierce Old Testament figure whose only love seems to have been for horses – he broke in the famous racehorse Phar Lap – and the unforgiving God he worshipped. I doubt he would have been thinking of Rewi’s father. Frederich Alley, like his brother Henry, was a stern disciplinarian, but unlike Henry he was a rationalist, with a strong sense of justice and a keen political awareness. Henry published one small book in his lifetime – The Education of the Horse . Frederich, who earned his living as a teacher and part-time farmer, published several, in which he addressed the problems of land reform, social justice and education. Rewi, whose relationship with his father was anything but warm, clearly owed much to his father’s ideas. As I, brought up by an unloving mother, owe much to her ideas. Both, to paraphrase Rewi, were ‘socialists before their time’.

Frederich and Henry were in a direct line of descent from Captain John Alley, whose four sons emigrated to the New World in the mid-1850s, two to the United States – both fought in Lincoln’s Army in the Civil war; a grandson went on to become a general in the US National Guard – two to New Zealand. If this were fiction I would want to say that Captain John, progenitor of the Alley diaspora, whose bones lie buried in the Lough Hill Vaults in Kings County, Ireland, was a staunch supporter of Irish independence. It would fit so neatly with Rewi’s eventual rejection of imperialism. But the opposite is almost certainly true. Kings County, now known as Offaly County, was part of the notorious Tudor plantations set up during the reign of Elizabeth I to re-establish England’s control over Ireland. The population introduced in the wake of that invasion would have been staunchly loyal to the Crown.

The name Alley suggests that the family were originally French, possibly, like my adoptive father’s family, arriving in Britain as part of the Norman invasion. Seven centuries later France was no longer a conquering power but a country haunted by the guillotine and the blood-curdling cries of the mob. Captain John, an officer in the British Army, who had fought against the French following the revolution of 1789, would have regarded the rag-tag collection of Irish revolutionaries opposing British rule as little better than the French sans-culottes. And since we know he is buried in the Lough Hill Vaults, it follows that he was not impoverished. There may not have been enough land to support his family – why else would four of his sons have had to emigrate? – but there can be little doubt that this was a middle-class, Anglo-Irish, Protestant family. Indeed, Rewi’s sister Gwen remembers their grandmother, a widow who never wore anything but black, and made her abhorrence of sex apparent at every opportunity, talking wistfully of titled relatives back ‘home’ in Ireland. My own mother told me with what sounded like pride that she was related to a bishop. (That my closet-communist mother should have thought this a matter of pride is not something I can explain.)

Again, if this were fiction, I would be tempted to characterise Rewi’s great-grandfather as either a rebel – which he clearly was not – or a tenant farmer reduced to near starvation by the disastrous potato famines of the mid-nineteenth century. The parallels, given Rewi’s passionate commitment to the cause of the Chinese peasantry, would have made for a pleasing symmetry. But this is not fiction. Rewi’s background was one of Anglo-Irish respectability, not suffering on a mythical scale.

What did come down through those three generations is something far more subtle than worldly fortune or inherited political views. It’s something I saw in my tormented mother and recognised in others in the family. I see it still in my cousins. Independence is the obvious word, but that fails to convey the feistiness, the occasional bloody-mindedness that, in my mind, typifies the genus Alley. ‘I don’t care,’ the child Rewi would say when he got into trouble, as he frequently did. ‘Well, that’s it, I don’t care.’¹ A mantra that would serve him well through the years of war and revolution in China when trouble of a more serious nature came calling. Rewi’s sister Kath once told me that it was all very well to keep a clean and tidy house, as my mother commanded, but if you didn’t sweep the dirt under the carpet from time to time you weren’t really living. It was one of several lessons in subversion (another name for bloody-mindedness) subtly conveyed to me by my Alley relatives.

I can’t claim to have inherited Alley characteristics, though my mother routinely described me as ‘cussed’ and ‘uppity’, but I like to think that some at least of the Alley talent for overcoming obstacles and failing to follow orders has, along with their (more recent) left-leaning politics, rubbed off on me. They certainly rubbed off on Rewi. In the rebellious child raging at the injustices of his father’s punitive regime lay the seeds of the revolutionary raging against the injustices of imperial China. The famous ‘Alley temper’ – I can still see Kath’s infant son Bruce kicking the wall, screaming, ‘I’ve got the Alley temper!’ – would occasionally get Rewi into trouble, but more often it would do the opposite, overcoming whatever or whoever stood in his way. ‘Rewi gets things done,’ his friends in China boasted. I suspect they were being polite. What they were really saying was, ‘When Alleys want you to do something, they just keep talking till you give in and do it’: words I had heard before, and would hear again on our journey across China.

Chapter One

Auckland, 8 April 2017

I’m standing, as instructed, by the Cathay Pacific check-in sign, searching the faces of passers-by to see if any of them are my Alley cousins. Ten of us, 21 if you count spouses, partners and family friends, are headed for China to attend the celebrations marking 90 years since Rewi Alley’s arrival in Shanghai. (Nine is a sacred number in Chinese lore, being one of two numbers – nine and five – associated with the majesty of the emperor. There hasn’t been an emperor in China for over a century, but the significance attached to those numbers remains.)

I’m an hour early. A friend recently predicted that the day would come when my fear of missing planes – and trains and buses – would take off into the stratosphere, and I’d end up sleeping at the airport to be sure I didn’t miss my flight! Even when, as today, the journey has been meticulously planned, not by me but by my redoubtable first cousin Jocelyn, anxiety hovers like a threatened headache. Have I packed the right clothes? Did I remember to bring a sleeping pill for the journey? My cellphone is where it’s supposed to be in my handbag but where did I put the charger? Did I even pack it? (I needn’t have worried. The Great Firewall of China will render my phone redundant.)

That this journey, three years in the planning, is happening at all is something of a miracle. ‘When Alleys want you to do something they just keep talking till you give in and do it’ probably had something to do with it. Jocelyn may not have had the same hurdles to surmount as our famous cousin, but she was dealing with a bunch of highly independent individuals with built-in resistance to doing what they’re told! That she got us all into line with our fares paid and visas stamped is testament to her good-natured persistence. Whether we will come up to scratch over the next two and a half weeks is not so certain. We’ve been told to pack formal gear for a banquet in the Great Hall of the People and other official occasions. Some of us have agreed under pressure to give speeches. I suspect it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Still no sign of the familiar Alley face: the long nose (Rewi was called high nose, gao bizi , in China); the spiky red-gold hair; the intense gaze (many people remarked on Rewi’s intense blue eyes). On my mother’s side, the Alley side, I have 56 first cousins. The Alleys are famous, some might say notorious, for many things, including an enthusiasm for breeding. My grandfather sired 18 children, which I used to think was a world record till I discovered that Johann Sebastian Bach had 20. Four of my 56 cousins should be appearing any minute: Jocelyn and Zeke (Philip), children of Uncle Digger, my mother’s youngest brother; and Carol and Christine, daughters of the next youngest, Uncle Bert. Digger’s youngest son, Ross, a music lecturer and pianist who lives in England, will join us, along with his friends Peter and Irene, in Beijing. Also on the trip are four cousins less closely related to me: Maurice, son of Rewi’s brother Pip (Philip), a professor at Massey University and active member of the New Zealand–China Friendship Society (NZCFS); Maurice’s niece Sarah; Rachel, granddaughter of my mother’s brother John; and Alison, who is related to Rewi on both sides of the family tree.

Together we will travel, by plane, bus and train, from one side of China to the other, a distance of 6000 kilometres. We will stay in Beijing, Shanghai, Xi’an, Fengxi’an, Lanzhou, Zhangye and Shandan. Multiple events are planned for every day. We will have almost no free time. My anxiety, usually associated with travelling on my own, has shape-shifted to a worry that I won’t be up to the task that has been allotted to me. Most of my costs have been paid (see Acknowledgements) on the understanding that I will write a book. Not a travelogue, but a book about Rewi, the man to whom we are all, in our different ways, connected, in whose footsteps we are ostensibly walking. (In fact we will be following a circuitous route of our own, ending in Shanghai where Rewi started, doubling back on our tracks to meet the requirements of a complex schedule.) For the last six months I have been reading everything I can lay my hands on by and about him. I have put myself through a crash course in Chinese history. Not enough, the voice in my head accuses. You will never know enough …

Someone is waving. Zeke and his wife Judy. Hurrah! Two hours and some panicked moments later – Carol and Christine couldn’t be found: they’d disobeyed instructions and checked in early – we are all assembled in the departure lounge. Jocelyn does a head count. With the addition of Maurice’s wife Dorothy, Rachel’s husband Stewart, Carol’s husband Laurie, Alison’s partner David, and friends Maurice Beeby, Betty Gray and Helen Foster, the number is 21. This ritual of counting will be repeated every day from now on. On two occasions people will go missing – not for long, but long enough to conjure up images of police searches and diplomatic embarrassment.

We’re a motley lot. Clutching bags and bottles of water, we rummage for our boarding passes and talk, in the way of people who don’t know one another very well, about things common to travellers – past experiences, the best ways to get to sleep in economy class, the prospect of catching up on a film or two. Ahead of us is a 12-hour flight to Hong Kong, a two-hour stopover, then a four-hour flight to Beijing. As it turns out, 18 hours of travel stretches to 22 and we reach Beijing four hours behind schedule. We have five hours to shower and rest before kick-starting our itinerary at noon Beijing time.

On the other side of the world the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, has just arrived at Palm Beach to meet with the American president, Donald Trump, in his opulent summer residence, Mar-a-Lago in Florida. The New York Times is describing it as ‘a vital meeting for the two nations, the Asia and Pacific region, and the globe as a whole’. The focus of these high-level talks was to have been trade, but the situation has changed. Top of the agenda now is North Korea.

Chapter Two

Rewi was born in the small Canterbury settlement of Springfield on 2 December 1897. There were two older siblings, Eric and Gwen. Four more would follow: Geoff, Pip, Kath and Joy. ‘Mother never wanted to have so many children,’ the adult Rewi writes in his memoir, ‘but Dad was the wife-possessive kind, old style, that allowed the woman no say.’ No say about conjugal rights, perhaps, but Clara Alley (née Buckingham) was no victim. She was a passionate suffragist, one of the first to sign the petition to parliament which led, in 1893, to the passing of a Bill giving adult women the right to vote. That New Zealand was the first country in the world to introduce female suffrage was due in large part to a regular visitor to the Alley family home – Kate Sheppard, leader of the suffrage movement. (One report I read claimed that Clara was the movement’s secretary, but I’ve not been able to verify this.)

‘The wife-possessive kind’. Running beneath that characterisation of his father is something Rewi never openly expressed but several times implied – criticism of the man who, according to Rewi’s younger brother Pip, was capable of hating his own children. Pip never lost the conviction that his father, having dismissed him as a disappointing specimen, not tall enough, not obedient enough, insufficiently malleable, hated him. ‘I Was Fortunate in My Parents’ is the title Rewi gave to the first chapter of his memoir. Fortunate in his mother, yes – he described her in a poem as ‘more than food, more than all else’¹ – but in his father Frederich, whose legacy shaped so much of his life? I’m not so sure.

‘Dad was a good bloke according to his lights,’ the adult Rewi wrote in a letter to his sister Gwen, qualifying that ambiguous statement with, ‘I guess the stock was a bit in-bred, easy to fly into rages’.² It’s the nearest he gets to open criticism of the man who regularly thrashed his sons, sometimes twice for the same offence, once as headmaster of the school they attended, and again, after school was out, as a father. ‘But if one hollered a bit [the thrashings] were always a bit lighter,’ Rewi joked, turning what could have been a source of bitterness into a story told to raise a laugh.³ As adept at escaping punishment by making himself scarce as he was at lining his trousers with rabbit skins to soften the blows, he also made light of being locked in the tool shed – another regular punishment. Time away from the list of chores and exercises devised by his disciplinarian father, even if it had to be spent locked in an outhouse, was time gained for the imagination.

Not that Fred Alley had everything his own way. When, on one occasion, he lifted his hand to Gwen, his usually placid wife leapt to her child’s defence. ‘If you ever touch her again I’ll leave you,’ she said in a voice that left no room for doubt.⁴ Likewise 10-year-old Rewi, the designated ‘scamp’ of the family, catching his father about to thrash Pip, threatened to cut his throat if he went ahead. There must have been something fierce not just in Rewi’s words but in his demeanour, because Fred stopped what he was doing. Though he didn’t stop the insults. Rewi would always be the ‘no-hoper’, the ‘Norfolk dumbbell’.

A few years later the boys would combine to attack their father, just as my uncles combined to attack their father, Henry. ‘Look what my sons have done to me!’ Fred yelled at Clara as he walked into the house, blood streaming from his nose.⁵ No one knows what Clara, accustomed to making excuses for her husband, said or did. But Fred never thrashed the boys again. (In the case of my grandfather his sons threw him off his horse and told him never to darken their mother’s doorstep again. He never did.)

So what, apart from the regular beatings, was Rewi’s childhood like? Can we see the man in the boy? A case could be made for seeing Rewi, the middle child, as the outsider. Since more attention is often paid to the older and younger members of the family, a middle child is frequently left to his own devices. He, or she, becomes adept at creating an alternative universe into which he can conjure up the family he wishes he had. Though Rewi in many ways fits this profile – he was a rebellious school pupil and an errant family member, skilled at hiding in trees or in the riverside cave he and his older siblings had erected – everything he has written about his childhood makes it clear he never felt neglected by his mother, nor did he ever want to run away from her. ‘A few words from her would do wonders’, he says in his memoir. ‘How often as a boy she has taken me by the hand and drawn me over to show me the tracery of twigs against the winter sky, the beauty of a rosebud, or the glory of apple blossoms.’

But Rewi did run away, many times. As a runaway child myself, I can understand the complex emotions that jolted him into these dangerous acts of defiance. If found in one of his many hiding places by one of his siblings he would explain that he wasn’t running away at all, he was ‘just finkin’.⁶ So long as Fred didn’t get wind of it, nothing more would be said.

Did Clara sense in her rebellious son a love of beauty that would find expression years later in his enthusiasm for the art of China’s past? Did she know when she encouraged him to cut out pictures of the old masters from the magazines, Windsor and Graphic , that she was nurturing a passion that would last a lifetime?

When the New Zealand politician Warren Freer travelled to China in 1955 – only the second Western politician, post-Liberation, to do so (the first was British Prime Minister Clement Attlee) – he visited Rewi at the Peking Hotel where he was then living. ‘I was amazed to find that it resembled a museum more than living quarters,’ Freer wrote. ‘It was simply crammed with artefacts of every possible type.’⁷ Rewi the lover of beautiful things, who as a boy described a new silk blouse his mother was wearing as ‘the most wonderful and beautiful garment ever’, is not the Rewi of the public record.⁸ But just as he learned, under Clara’s indulgent eye, to appreciate the beauty of apple blossom, distinguish a Raphael from a Rubens, a Titian from a Tintoretto, so he would learn, as a settler in China, to identify a jade seal from the Han dynasty, a pottery horse from the Tang, a bronze warrior from the Ming …

I am drawn to this Rewi. I see him holding a jade thumb protector from the Qin dynasty, picked up, more than likely, from the ruins of a Buddhist temple, or from beneath the walls of one of the many abandoned imperial palaces, and dreaming his way back into the past. One of the things he collected was a porcelain baby-shaped pillow from the Ming period. What dreams did that poignant object release? Ancient maps of China, thousand-hand Buddhas, a bronze dragon from the Warring States period, neolithic stone axes, Qing dynasty snuff bottles, scroll paintings, a bronze Tang dynasty dancer discovered in the dust of Shandan – Rewi’s appetite for the past seems to have been as boundless as his belief in the future. ‘One could look at it for hours,’ he wrote of a Buddhist reliquary carved on a portion of elephant tusk.⁹

‘I am very glad I never grew up,’ Rewi confided to his first biographer, Willis Airey. What he meant was that the boy who was moved by the beauty of trees and sky, who could be absorbed for hours looking at paintings, who noticed when his mother wore a new silk blouse, was part of the man. As was the teenager who skipped school so he could sneak into the city museum to gaze at its wonders.

This is the man I want to get to know: a man who saw the past in the present and the old in the new. A man who would become an art ambassador for China, following the lead of his friend Zhou Enlai, who championed people’s diplomacy over militarism.