Jan Williams

“I thought she’d died, but didn’t want to ask.”

Jan Williams grew up with her father and her four sisters, and the acceptance her mother was dead. It wasn’t until she was a teenager she realised the story she’d lived with – or built up around herself – wasn’t the full story.

Like many people in their later years, Jan Williams spends a good portion of her time tracking her ancestors.

Sitting at her computer, she searches through records, tracing the family of her father – who was born in Queensland to Swedish immigrant parents – and that of her mother, who grew up in Mōkihinui, on the South Island’s West Coast. Many, if not most, families generate some mysteries and misunderstandings over the generations, but Jan has lived her own family’s secret.

Except, it wasn’t exactly a secret – more a belief Jan constructed around herself.

Jan was born and raised in Granity, down the South Island’s West Coast from Mōkihinui, and north of Westport. Today Granity is a strip of a hamlet on a sliver of flat land between the steep ranges that hold the Stockton and Millerton mines, and the Tasman Sea – the force of its grey waves an eternal threat to the seaward homes.

In the 1940s, when Jan was a girl, the town was much bigger, thriving on the coal and timber harvested, at considerable physical and personal cost, from the rugged, resource-rich mountains. Steam trains puffed along a railway that mirrored Granity’s main road, carrying coal and timber to market.

Jan is the fourth of Rudolph and Joan Roskvist’s five girls. Jan remembers Granity – which 19th century miners named for the large quantities of granite in them thar hills – as being a “busy place with plenty going on. People made their own fun. There were lots of sports, balls, and carnivals. We had our own marching girls. Everyone knew everyone. It was such a community. Everybody looked out for each other”.

Jan’s Swedish grandfather had moved his family to Granity, via Australia, to work in the coal mines, and the family was certainly well known in the town. Roskvist senior took a stake in a coalmine and, through the 1930s, Jan’s father and his brothers came mining, too.

When their father – Jan’s grandfather – was killed after the rope snapped on a coal trolley he was catching a ride on, his sons lost the claim and had to find another living. 

It was the Depression. Finding any living was tough. By that stage Rudolph – now about thirty – had met eighteen-year-old Joan, and they’d married. He soon bought into a grocery shop and set about fixing up the attached house for Joan and for the three girls the couple had produced by that time – two years between each. 

“Then, after a gap of four years, I popped along in 1941,” says Jan. “Then, eighteen months later, Pam arrived. I think it was then that Mum started finding things really difficult. Dad had the new shop and was busy building up customers and working out how best to run it. He travelled all around the area delivering groceries, so he was away a lot.”

Being a very young mum who gave birth to five babies in quick succession took a toll on Joan. Jan believes her mother coped well with the first three and had time to bond with them. But when Jan was born, and then Pam so soon after, Joan was already suffering from what we’d now recognise and treat as postnatal depression, as well as thyroid issues.

Jan says her mother “was very particular about tidiness and starched clothes, and everything being tidy and clean”, which was next to impossible with five children and an always-working husband. 

The solution, at that stage, was to lessen Joan’s load. “When Pam was a baby she was mostly looked after by other people,” says Jan.

“Auntie Grace was a neighbour, and she became our go-to person, especially for me. She became part of our family and a lifelong friend. Auntie Grace took Pam for some time, too, and I remember her bringing Pam home saying, ‘I can’t keep her – she’s beginning to call me Mum’. The eldest, Claire, stayed at home to take over the household duties, while the rest of us spent a lot of time with other people.” 

When Jan was about four, she was sent to live with one of her father’s sisters in Christchurch, then about a seven-hour train journey. Her mother had become too unwell to stay at home.

“We had a great doctor, old Dr Jim. Our mum needed quite a bit of care by that stage, so he took her to his home, as the only other alternative was going down to Hokitika.” Going “down to Hokitika” meant going to Seaview Hospital, the closest psychiatric facility.

And, while Jan was in Christchurch, Joan was indeed taken “down to Hokitika”. Jan never saw her mother alive again.

Recalling these events nearly eighty years later, Jan’s timelines are understandably less than concrete, however, she’s sure she stayed in Christchurch until it was time for her to start school at five. And she’s sure her mother was not in the house when she arrived back in Granity. Instead she found her older sisters capably running the house with the help of a housekeeper. 

“I missed Dad like heck while I was away. I don’t remember missing Mum. To me, after I came back, Mum had disappeared and that meant I had only one parent left, so Dad became very important. He became my whole focus and was much loved by all of us. 

“Pam had also been taken away to another aunt in Westport. Back in Granity, I remember walking hand-in-hand with Dad down to the beach and he told me Pam was coming home. He was very happy about that, and so was I. I think Pam stayed in about five different homes in the first two years of her life, so it’s no wonder she found it difficult to develop confidence in herself. She’d had no stability in her early years. She had no memories at all of Mum – she’d had no time to bond with her.”

Jan says, with her mother gone, her father’s sisters wanted to split up the girls among themselves and adopt them, but her dad wasn’t having it. “He was determined that we would stay together, and that's why we all felt so connected and grateful to him. We realised what a real effort it was for him.”

Staying together meant everything to the sisters and they remained close throughout their lives, getting much pleasure from their strong bonds, says Jan, now the only surviving sister. 

Looking back, Jan doesn’t recall being troubled by thoughts of where her mother might be, however, she was aware for a time that her mother was still alive and in the hospital. 

“Every couple of weeks Dad would get into his truck and drive to visit her in Hokitika, which is a long way now and was even farther away then. Whenever he went, we girls would get the house all tidy and cleaned up in case he brought her back. We were sure she would recover and come home.”

But she didn’t. And slowly her father’s trips south grew more sporadic, and eventually ceased. No one said why, and Jan’s sisters stopped talking about their mother. The silence left Jan and her younger sister to reach their own conclusions. 

“Pam and I thought she’d died. But we didn’t ask. We didn’t really want to know. And we didn't want to put Dad through talking about it, anyway, as he would have had to tell us the truth. These were questions that would have hurt, so we didn't ask. 

“I don't think we wanted it confirmed she was dead. While we didn’t know the truth, we could make up our own ending. We were protecting ourselves.” 

After that, Jan lived her young life in the belief her mother was dead so she focused on her father. “We all did well at school. All we wanted to do was make Dad proud of us, which we did, of course.” 

The older girls went their various ways as they finished school, although occupations offered to women in the 1950s were severely limited. Jan lists off the girls’ paths in descending order of age.

“Claire, as the eldest child, ended up taking on part of Mum’s role, so she missed out on any vocation she could have chosen. She was excellent at maths.

“Trish had determination, so she followed her own planned path to become a teacher. Kay had options, but sport and boyfriends got in the way. 

“I was lucky as I had Trish looking out for me, and I knew I didn’t want to stay in Granity. Pam, as the youngest, just got on by herself. Everyone was too busy dealing with their own problems to pay much attention to her.

“Dad was reluctant to lose us, so did not encourage us to continue with school. How different that all would have been if Mum had been available to us…”

Jan did receive some input from her mother when deciding her education – in a way. Trish was visiting Granity from Canterbury University just as Jan discovered she had failed School Certificate – the main school qualification at the time, taken in the third year of high school, after which most New Zealand teenagers left for the workforce.

“I’d thought, ‘Blow you!’ about failing the exams, and I was ready to up and leave school. But Trish said that Mum had wanted to be a teacher, and that she would be disappointed if I left because she wanted her girls to get an education. 

“I said something along the lines of, ‘Come on – she’s dead, she can’t be disappointed’. That’s when Trish said, ‘Well, actually, she's alive. She’s living down in Hokitika’. Well… 

“Thinking about it, I do think I might have had some inkling. The older girls did go and visit her sometimes, but I must’ve just chosen to ignore that.” 

There was a time when long-term patients were being released from psychiatric institutions, and Joan may have been able to come home. But by then Jan’s father had dissolved his marriage to Joan and quietly married the housekeeper when Jan was about twelve, so there was nowhere for Joan to go. Jan’s stepmother “did her best”, says Jan, and treated her and Pam well, but “it wasn’t like having a mother”.

Joan stayed in that hospital, living well into her seventies. Jan’s sisters continued to visit occasionally, and even Pam went. But Jan didn’t. She couldn’t. It wasn’t until her mother died that Jan saw her again – the first time Jan had seen her mother since she was a preschooler. 

“Even then I wanted to sweep it all under the carpet, but Trish would not let that happen. She piled us all into a van and we went down to Hokitika. I still wasn’t going to go and see her, but Trish said, ‘She’s laid out, she looks nice, come and see her’. I eventually did and it was weird to see her. She had Pam’s nose. Being in her seventies there wasn’t much left of her. She was so small. 

“We organised her funeral and had a lovely service in the chapel in Hokitika. Even Pam stood up and recited something.” Joan was buried in Mōkihinui Cemetery, near her family and beside the husband from whom her mental ill health had estranged her. (Jan’s father had died some years before Joan, and six weeks before Jan’s wedding.)

While Jan couldn’t connect with her mother in life, it’s clear she feels sympathy for the achingly young woman who found herself a mother to too many babies.

“I mean, she was only eighteen when she met Dad. She’d barely lived. And she was a bright girl but there was no money to continue her education, so she left school and got a job.”

Jan did go onto higher education. After her sister convinced her to stay at school, she matriculated and went onto teachers’ college in Christchurch, where she met her future husband. Together they had three boys, all of whom have presented her with grandchildren.

The Williamses are a close family, and that’s no accident as Jan is very determined to keep her family together. 

“You don’t want the same thing to happen to your own kids. That was my big thing, which I think a lot of people who grow up without a parent feel – we find family so important. I did not want my kiddies to miss out on their father or their mother.”

Jan and her sisters were very aware of maternal mental health when they had their own babies, knowing how her mother suffered. 

“We always had that in the background. My sister Trish had five children, and she also liked things ‘just so’, similar to Mum. We thought maybe what affected her could be inherited, but we had access to medical services that certainly weren’t available in those times. Today our mother would have received a proper diagnosis and help. And in those days there was no contraception, so the babies just kept coming. That damaged her mental health.”

While many women who grew up without their mothers miss them acutely when they have babies, Jan doesn’t feel that so much. “She didn’t really feature in my life much, did she? I thought of her sometimes in the background, but not much.”

But saying that does move Jan to think about her mother, and of the eulogy Jan’s brother-in-law gave at her mother’s funeral.

“He described Mum’s life, starting with the young woman who set out on a new journey to build a loving family. Then five little girls arrived so quickly, creating such a busy household. It all just built up on her.

“As he spoke, I realised just what we had all missed when her illness took over and wrenched her away from us. That was the moment I acknowledged her – what she started out as, with all that promise, and then what actually happened to her. 

“She had such lovely girls. We would have been so good for her, and she would have been so good for us, but we didn’t get her guidance. We all coped in our own way, but I do think about how much better all our lives could have been.”