Owen Marshall
“Although people were kind, looking back I think there was a certain sense of isolation, or self-sufficiency, and just getting on with it”
Owen Marshall’s mother died when the boy, who was to become one of New Zealand’s most esteemed writers, was only two. He has a single fleeting memory of a woman who might – or might not – have been his mother, and it’s stayed with him through the eighty-plus years since.
In Te Kuiti’s old cemetery is a headstone to Jane Ella Jones. Her name, as “the beloved wife of…” is blurred with lichen and age. Newer, added sixty-six years after the stone was first etched and erected, are the names of the three sons she knew only in their very first years – Hugh, Barry, and Owen Jones.
“We added our names in 2010, I think. We wanted to be associated with Mum even though none of us had many memories of her. We valued her in death, even though we couldn't remember her very well in life,” says Owen, the youngest of the sons of Jane Ella, who died nearly eighty years before we speak. Owen Jones is better known as Owen Marshall, his pen name, his middle name, and the maiden name of Jane Ella. He took the name when, as a teacher, approaching six decades ago, he started writing stories. But it’s also “a nice connection”, he says, to his mother who died in 1944, aged thirty-three, from breast cancer.
The cemetery isn’t a place Owen has visited much at all, as he’s lived far away in the South Island, in Blenheim, Christchurch, Oamaru and Timaru, for the past seventy years or so. But Te Kuiti is where he was born and lived for the first two and a half years of his life, with his mother, two brothers and his father, Alan Jones. “Maybe I’ve been to that cemetery three times? All in more recent years. But we've always been aware that that’s where Mum lies, and that's important as it’s one of the few definite places I know of that relates to her. Her grave is a specific place I can go to and remember her.”
Owen and I talk in the Wellington home of his youngest daughter, a very good friend of mine. I am a massive fan of Owen’s work, and I respect him both as my friend’s father and as a favourite writer. He’s created countless characters across his decades of fiction, all with enormous empathy and an enviable ability to see into others’ emotions and motivations, to put himself in the place of seemingly any kind of person – good, bad, or simply human.
I’d met him briefly a couple of times before but didn’t know this side to his story until my friend said “that’s my dad” when I put the call out for New Zealanders who’d had parents die too young. As we talk, his wife Jackie sits nearby, a cat on her lap, and she listens to stories she’s likely heard before. Or maybe not – as these aren’t usually the stories we tell about ourselves, in such detail, all at once.
Not that Owen believes he has much to tell. His memories of his mother are very few. A single memory, really. Maybe two.
“Very hazy memories. I have a very, very early recollection of a woman at the table coughing a lot and having to leave. But coughing doesn't seem to relate very much to breast cancer, so whether that was my mother or just some other person, I don't know, and I never asked for confirmation. But that's one of my very first memories – of this woman having a spasm of bad coughing and getting up and going away from the table.
“Most of the information I have of my mother has come from other people, from her relatives and from my family. My father married again several years after she died and I suppose it wasn't then appropriate to talk a lot about his former wife, so he rarely spoke of my mother. And I largely lost touch with the Marshall relations until much later in my life, although I did pick them back up as an adult. So, gradually, information came to me from them later in my life to add to what I know about her.”
Additional information was gleaned from his father's diaries, which Owen read after his father's death.
“Even towards his end he very rarely talked about her, and I suppose I never asked. I do remember him saying he took me to see her when she was in the hospital. He said the difference between my energy, climbing around, bouncing on the bed and so on, and my mother lying there very, very sick, was something he was sad to see, and it remained with him. She may very well have recovered if today’s cancer treatments had been available, but they weren’t, and so she died aged only thirty-three. So very sad.”
The diaries captured Owen’s father’s impressions of visiting her in hospital at other times, the bad news the doctor had to give him, and he set down his feelings from the day she died. He was a “Methodist minister, a strong Wesleyan and a zealous Christian”, says Owen, who read what his father wrote in his diary about the advice he gave others in grief – advice he must now follow.
“That advice was, ‘Turn to the Lord’, basically. And he did, because he was left with three young boys, and it was pretty difficult for him.” The diaries also recorded that Reverend Jones received a fair amount of support from his congregation – food and money and sympathy for a man and his motherless sons.
As an interim measure, after his mother’s death Owen was sent away to his Auntie Bertha, his father’s older sister, to make homelife slightly easier. His two older two brothers – two and a half, and five years older than Owen – stayed home.
Owen remembers the long car ride from Te Kuiti to somewhere near Dargaville, and some snatches of his time with his aunt. He’s not sure how long he stayed there, maybe eight or nine months, he guesses? Maybe more? One of Owen’s brothers thinks he was there a year. Certainly Owen had his next birthday away from his family.
“My father did send me a poem when I turned three – he was a keen writer himself – and I still have that poem. I think it started, ‘Now you are three’. That was nice. He was obviously thinking of me and cared about me.” While Owen was away, his father shifted the family to Whanganui, so Owen returned there when his father could take him back.
“After I came to Whanganui, for a time our father tried to cope by himself. According to my older brother, I was found wandering down the street at one stage, so we had housekeepers for a while. When I was five, Dad married Violet Kruse and we shifted to Blenheim. Violet was a kind, hard-working woman and a deaconess in the Methodist church. So, now I had a stepmother, and quite soon more children came along. Eventually, there were nine of us in total – although my older brothers had left home by the time the younger ones came along.”
If that all sounds a touch sad, maybe it is, but Owen recalls a happy, stable childhood for which he’s grateful. His father was a good dad, his stepmother he called ‘Mum’.
“I always knew she wasn’t my mother, but she was kindly, and it never worried me. The children that came along I always thought of as my brothers and sisters. We were just a family.” Young people generally accept the situation they find themselves in, he adds.
“To be honest, I didn’t think about my dead mother a lot. As an adult I’ve looked back and wondered if it was traumatic emotionally for me, whether a certain inwardness and self-sufficiency in my nature is partly as a result of that, but who knows? I’ve always had a sense of my being comfortable with my own company and in my own identity. I've never particularly disliked being by myself. I wouldn't like to be by myself all the time, but I'm accustomed to my own company, and I think partly that goes back to my childhood as I was shuttled about a bit.
“Although people were kind, looking back I think there was a certain sense of isolation, if you like, or self-sufficiency, and just getting on with it.” These are certainly useful tendencies for a writer, whose line of work requires hours alone, in one’s own head, drawing from memory and imagination.
Owen’s brothers, with their few more years with their mother, could tell him some things about her. Not so much when they were boys, but later in life they talked.
“I think Barry, my middle brother, had more memories than our older brother, Hugh. One of the things they recalled was being sung to at night – evidently my mother had a good voice. Several people said that, so I think she used to sing and read nursery rhymes to us. My brothers can remember that, but I can’t. They were good brothers, and they were protective of me, and I think that’s possibly connected to the loss of Mum. We remained close. I think they may have felt the loss even more than I did. As children, basically, you get on with it, and people expect you to get on with it.”
Owen’s father died in 1995, more than fifty years after his first wife. Violet lived into the early 2000s.
In his adult years, Owen made contact with the Marshalls, his mother’s family. It’s not that they were out of contact, exactly, but with their maternal connector gone, and with Owen living in the South Island, whereas the Marshalls were in the North Island, it was easy to lose touch. Through his fifties, Owen visited the family’s farm in Manawatū, travelled overseas to Britain from where the family’s ancestors migrated, and has attended Marshall family reunions. He was keen to find out more about the family in general, and his mother in particular.
“One of the Marshall relatives, Auntie Miriam, gave me a little white shoe ornament that was on my mother's wedding cake, so I've got that, and I've got a few other bits of memorabilia. Violet gave me a little pewter mug that was my mother’s, and I have a book with her signature, her name, on the fly leaf – I think it’s Charles Dickens, Great Expectations. I got those later in life. Obviously there were a few of her things still in the house and Vi was sensitive enough to keep them. I presume she gave the other boys some things as well, but we have never discussed it. It was considerate of her, and special to receive them.”
Seeing his mother’s handwriting was quite something, Owen agrees. “I got an emotional vibe over that, certainly. And another nice thing, judging from the photographs, my eldest daughter has a strong likeness to Jane Ella. Yes, that's a living reminder.”
From the Marshall family, Owen also found out a significant piece of information – that his mother’s mother had committed suicide when his mother was a teenager, so she had to take over the running of the house and the care of her younger brother.
“She took on that responsibility as a very young woman. We didn’t learn about that until many years later, as people didn’t talk about that sort of thing then. Whether my grandmother had postnatal depression, I don’t know. I also don’t know, but I can certainly imagine, that my mother was probably then particularly distraught leaving her own young family. You feel cheated, I suppose…”
If Owen himself felt cheated, he says it never struck him that way, especially as he had a strong attachment to his father.
“I presume part of that attachment was that I didn't have a mother to get attached to. I think I had an awareness that this was the lineage, that Dad was very important in my life. He was important for all of us, but I think partly that was a reflection of the absence of our mother. He wasn’t particularly demonstrative – I don't remember lots of hugs and kisses – but he read to us, he shared with us. He liked to go walking with us and, in particular, as I grew up he and I shared an interest in literature and writing, as he was an amateur writer himself, so we did have a strong bond.
“He tended to treat us quite early as almost equals. He didn’t baby us, he’d talk to us, and he’d expect us to milk the cow at twelve years old. While he never talked about it, I'm sure he was aware there was an absence and I'm sure he was trying to fill that gap, that need, as much as he could.”
Finishing school, Owen completed an arts degree in history, then taught for twenty years before leaving teaching to write full time, having married Jackie and had two daughters.
“I would look at Jackie with the girls and think what an important bond that is. It’s such an asset if people have both parents, a mum and dad, as then they have both sides of the coin. Whether you’re a boy or a girl it’s good to have those two role models – if they’re good role models – in your upbringing. I did admire what Jackie was able to do, and perhaps there was some slight sense of not having had that motherly role model and motherly affection when I was young.
“It's odd, isn't it, that you rarely go back and examine your own motivations and feelings about these things at the time? It's so difficult to draw any accurate deductions because you may have been exactly the same as you are now if your mother hadn't died or your father hadn't died, even though you suspect that this aspect or that trait are a consequence of what happened. I reiterate that my recollection in general of my childhood is that it was a happy childhood, running around in the Marlborough sun and swimming with my mates and all the rest of it. But behind it all, I suppose to some extent, was this sadness.”
Writers so often draw from their own lives in some shape or form, but Owen must think hard to recall if he’s ever written about a child losing their mother at an early age. No, he doesn’t think so.
“However, the role of mothers and fathers are important in my work, but whether that's partly as a consequence of my own upbringing, I’m not sure. But I do think it’s important to build a strong, supportive family, and I think our daughters, now both mothers themselves, have done the same. They’re very family-minded. Children need that stability, and I did get that even though I lost my own mother.”
Owen has written of his mother once, however. It’s in a beautiful poem, “Missing Person File – Ella Jane”. The final stanza encapsulates her loss with poetic precision:
“What grief is possible in those who can’t remember
yet wear an ache where a mother’s love should be.”
Story by Lee-Anne Duncan