Divorce, violence and violets
By Lynn Davidson
Persephone was picking violets when Hades kidnapped her and took her to the underworld.
I am looking for my great aunt Vida, my Scottish grandmother’s sister. I was looking for her in Edinburgh, during lockdown, and I am looking for her now, in Wellington. Last night, in the 1941 February 11 issue of the Aberdeen Press and Journal, I discovered a piece headed ‘Bieldside Divorce,’ where Vida wins a decree of divorce against her husband Henry on the grounds of cruelty. The shock of seeing it written on the page is tempered by a small bolt of gratitude for an honest use of language – I’d already found out some things about Vida’s violent husband. The persistent Nor ’westerly shrieks and my Brooklyn Airbnb feels very ‘airy’ and fragile as it creaks and shakes. I close my computer and tuck down further into bed where the slippery, shiny red quilt does nothing to keep the cold out.
The wind drops and I take a bus to Glen Road in Kelburn where a student who I’m mentoring has offered for me to stay at her house while she and her husband go to Auckland to welcome their new grandchild. I am going to have a look around the house and be shown where things are. It’s a generous and very welcome offer. The house is beautiful, with wood panelling and deep windows looking out onto a garden dense and shimmery under a soft rain. There are drawings and paintings by John Drawbridge, Russell Drysdale, Robin White. I stand in the house relishing its quiet, its solid roof, its beauty, the bookcases full of New Zealand books. My friend makes tea which we drink in the TV room where photos of children and grandchildren are dotted between books and paintings. I relish the thought of two weeks here after the noise and activity of the Brooklyn house, but an awkward feeling comes. My friend who I hardly know, and her husband who I don’t know at all, are letting me stay in their home with a home’s vaults of deep privacy. I struggle to receive favours with any sort of comfort, and thought this was a failing in me that ran in co-dependent parallel with my tendency towards over-politeness (which can end up seeming rude) until recently when I read Rachel Cusk’s essay collection Coventry. In the essay ‘Aftermath,’ about her separation from her husband, she writes: ‘Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude’. That sentence, on first reading, sang out to me in multiple harmonies worthy of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Help can feel tangling, as though the balance of the relationship has tipped. And yet, and yet, I am very grateful to be helped. And doesn’t help keep the wheels turning in this difficult, divide-and-conquer human world? And while help is dangerous, in the way that Cusk points out, could we turn ourselves slightly differently towards the help, understanding it as part of the knitting together of community, could we think – can I think – differently about it? I breathe, trying to access this less difficult possibility that my friend and I are helping each other; that help is kept live, radically live, by being passed along. I breathe. But then I think of my recent home, rented but my own, my fourth floor Edinburgh flat, and something flies into my side with a sharp twinge, leaving a feeling of bareness. I feel water closing over my head. I have lost the space I made for myself in Edinburgh. My friend shows me her garden, and we breathe in its different delicate scents. I follow behind her, exhausted by feeling at-home and homeless and homesick all at the same time.
I shift into the Kelburn house. There are clouds of heart-shaped violet leaves in the garden, and I can’t resist parting them to look for flowers even though they are a late-winter and early-spring bloom, and it’s summer now – although the weather would have you think otherwise. How many single violets have I picked for a tiny glass bottle placed on the edge of a windowsill or in the centre of a table in a multitude of baches and cottages in this country. How long have I stood looking at the single violet, or leaned towards it to smell its high, dry, sweet, ethereal scent which is there and then it isn’t. It disappears as if by magic, but it’s not magic; there’s a compound called ionone which gives violets their scent but also, after a few moments binds the scent receptors and shuts them down. Moments later, after you have turned your head away, and then turned it back, you can smell the scent again.
I feel a rush of exhaustion and impatience at myself when I tell people how lucky I feel to be back, when really I’m unmoored, missing the landscape of Scotland, and worrying about my friends. It annoys me slightly, all the conversation about the luck of being here; the humorous Twitter hashtag ‘Hellhole’ with its gorgeous photos of New Zealand. I feel sad and tired and bad tempered. I realise it’s unreasonable to be irritated when I have escaped the horrors of the virus, and the potential terrifying scenario of being unable to breathe, alone, a million miles from the people who love me best. I realise it’s just very wrong. But it brings up other times when being protected from life’s dangers and thus potentials made me feel desperate. I know that this virus, its breath-taking worldwide disruption, cannot be compared to parts of my life – it resists metaphor and simile – but the requirement to stay home to be safe can shake up oppressive memories and set them walking.
A long time ago when I was twenty-four, pregnant and nauseous, and somewhat unexpectedly living deep in the country, I found some respite from complicated feelings by building a herb garden. My new husband Kester and I had shifted from Pukerua Bay, close to Wellington, to River Road in the isolated North Taranaki countryside, for his work. I was looking for an anchor point, something to hold me. I’d left behind a herb garden, and I would make another one. I would make a small, fragrant place that was mine, inside the unfolding countryside with its naked paddocks, its shelter belts of rustling eucalyptus, its milk trucks and the cold breath from Mt Taranaki. My mother, who was visiting, stood watching me dig and plant as the wind whipped across fields and wrapped itself around us. The wind was blowing my long hair into my face and my hands were covered in dirt; I asked Mum to move the tentacle of hair that had drifted into my mouth, and she did. Then she stood there, hugging her beige jacket around her, watching me plant sage and rosemary, mint and marjoram, feverfew and tansy, borage and lavender, vervain and violets. Like the binary that produces the Madonna or whore roles for women, another binary allows for women to be sorted along botanical lines; the arranger of flowers or the gatherer of herbs. Women have arranged flowers for so long; flowers in the church, flowers in the house, flowers for weddings, flowers for funerals. With their wide-open faces, their colours, their on-display sex organs, their pollen, their beauty, their scent, and the cut-ness of their stems, flowers are traditionally women’s work. Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself, opens Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. It is a strange moment of namelessness (Mrs somebody) and agency. It is the walk, of course, that is important. It is being out in the beautiful, regretful, dangerous world. Buying the flowers is Mrs Dalloway’s portal into the world on that beautiful London morning in 1923; a world in which she will quickly become Clarissa. On the day that I was building the herb garden, when my hair drifted into my mouth, I was also doing some urgent work outside of the house. My mother, who loved me, stood there in the wind, holding the line between womanliness and witchcraft; holding it, and holding me, calling me back, asking if I was cold, meaning I am cold standing here watching you. Asking if I wanted to go inside, meaning I want you to come inside with me.
Mrs Dalloway steps outside of her house, where she is preparing to host a party, giving the reason that she is going to buy the flowers (for the party) herself. Although she is using the currency of upper-class wife who must personally view the flowers that will decorate her party, it seems to me that she is using the power available to her, the undisputed territory of flowers, to get out of the house so that she can, for a moment, in that sunny mid-June day between the wars, become Clarissa. Call it a spell. Call it an uncovering (the cut flowers lifting away to reveal the rooted ones, herself).
The great lie visited upon women is that the world is dangerous and it’s safer to stay home. That has not been my experience. When the world really is dangerous, like when there is a rapidly spreading and mutating virus, we go inside, all of us, because it is actually dangerous out there. There is no gender divide to this danger, it doesn’t just get women, we all have to be inside. When women across the world are forced or frightened into staying inside for their own safety, what, or who, are women being protected from? The others of us (men), who also go home at some point? There is no logic to it, except the logic of oppression. And what about those who don’t fit into the gender divide. Is a nonbinary person safe to be outside? Are they safer inside? It’s a ridiculous question.
I have been called a shrinking violet. But it’s not true. I love the beautiful, regretful, dangerous world. I like being out in it. It suits me.
On a cold, frosty pre-Christmas night in Edinburgh, I caught the bus to a course I was taking on witchcraft called Toil and Trouble, and run by writers and witches Alice Tarbuck and Claire Askew. I loved the frosty Christmassy night, my warm coat, the bus ride down from Princes Street into Stockbridge with its ancient and quiet atmosphere through which the Water of Leith sang old songs. There was an excited babble in the room. We were going to make charms. The long table was green and silver and fragrant with twigs and moss and sage and rosemary and birch and hawthorn, cloves, and nutmeg and saffron, and the bright-coloured thread to bind them together. We made charms to ward off fear or illness or lostness, for protection, to enhance love and belonging. We made charms for our children, our friends, our lovers, ourselves. We focused on our intentions and hopes as we bound the small, fragrant bundles with thread. When we had finished and cleared the table, we put our charms in front of us and made a charging spell, to bring them to life. Thirteen of us stood up, holding hands around the table, then drummed our feet while repeating a chant. It was powerful and exciting. Exciting to claim and name those things we have never stopped knowing about – intuition, connection, our relationship with the non-human world, and the power of language – and call it spell. How alternative to the divide and conquer story of scarcity that saps and ruins us.
In Alice Tarbuck’s beautiful book, A Spell in the Wild, A Year (and Six Centuries) of Magic, she writes that witches ‘exist partially outside, and partially in response to, political systems and contemporary cultures.’ She goes on:
…the witch has an important role to play in imagining a fairer society, and in asking difficult questions of our current society. Witches can offer the world meaningful alternatives: alternative value systems, beliefs, and means of operating in the world. These are important regardless of whether or not the witch attends protests. To live in relation to a power that exists outside of our normal relations is to understand the world and its systems differently.
On the first night of Toil and Trouble when we gathered around the long table, I looked at some of the young women in fabulous ‘witchy’ dresses and makeup, and listened to the talk about ceremonies I’d never heard of, such as hand-fastings. I felt like the new girl at school. I felt that perhaps this wasn’t what I’d been looking for. I wanted something scholarly, I thought, something quieter. Something more about paper and less about bodies! But being a witch is absolutely an experience of embodiment. And embodiment means connection.
I stepped back into my body when I planted herbs into the ground that Kester had prepared for me, in a circle, as I’d asked, and not far from the house. Despite Taranaki’s mountain and its powerful, wild shoreline, I found the farming landscape of scraped back earth, pregnant cows, thundering milk trucks and roadkill terrible to live amongst. I felt that the land didn’t want me, and when I think of its history, why should it? There are places where you can be your best self; where you can be useful. And there are places where you flounder. I floundered in Taranaki. I was not my best self. Almost without knowing, but really knowing exactly, I called on the herbs to protect me, to look after my pregnancy, to ground me, to find me. The only way back into form at that time was through getting outside and tending to the actual world. Alice writes:
We must learn the cry of the world, and how to join it ethically, and to challenge its oppressions through our work. And we must learn, too, to ask for help when we need it.
Along with the announcement of Vida’s divorce on the grounds of cruelty, I found two other entries that named Vida in the Aberdeen Press and Journal. In May 25, 1922, Vida, who would have been twelve, is named as taking part in a production of ‘Sleeping Beauty.’ Madame Isabel Murray’s Dance School had put on a performance of the ‘old ever-new tale from Grimm,’ that, the article says, is designed to ‘delight “grown-ups” as well as young people in the audience.’ We are told that the King was dressed in purple, and the Queen wore ‘a dazzling dress of sunlight gold.’ There are fairies in shimmering silver and ‘flimsy violet chiffon’. It is described as a brilliant spectacle. I can’t resist doing some research into Madame Isabel Murray and find that she was a well-known dancer and dance teacher in Aberdeen who supplemented her income by fitting corsetry and also by teaching rifle skills at a shooting gallery in her home. Making a living in the arts has never been a straightforward affair. Just over six years after the piece about Sleeping Beauty, there is another article that mentions Vida. It is about Henry and Vida’s wedding that had taken place the day before, on June 4, 1928, Vida’s 19th birthday. It includes an ornate description of Vida’s wedding dress. The colour of the bridesmaids’ dresses is love-in-a-mist blue and they carried bouquets of sweet peas. Vida carried a bouquet of pink carnations and her veil was held in place by a lover’s knot of orange blossom.
