Renée

“My father clearly didn’t give a hoot about what would happen to us”

The writer Renée Taylor – known simply as Renée – endured a start in life as dramatic as one of her plays when her father inexplicably shot himself, leaving his wife and children homeless and penniless.

Over her more than four decades of writing, Renée published in virtually every genre from book reviews and essays, to poetry, plays and novels, and a memoir. As she approached her ninetieth birthday, she decided to give crime writing a go. She was good at that, too, and her first whodunnit was shortlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Award. But there’s one mystery Renée couldn’t solve – why her father shot himself. 

She knew in full detail, however, how his suicide when she was four years old reverberated through the plotline of her life. And it was a long life, as Renee died near the end of 2023, aged ninety-four. About a year earlier, I drove up to her Ōtaki home to interview her. I was delighted she’d accepted my out-of-the-blue request as she’s one of my favourite New Zealand writers, and I was eager to hear more from the woman whose memoir, These Two Hands, fascinated me so much. 

“We were living in Hawke’s Bay, around Pakowhai,” she begins, sitting in a comfy chair, surrounded by photographs of her children and grandchildren. “My father was working on a farm, so we got a house with the job. One day my father went into Napier where he bought bullets and a rifle, and got the rifle licensed at the police station. Then he came back to Hastings to catch the bus to Palmerston North. Somehow he got from Palmerston North to Wellington. We don’t know how he got there – no one knows how – but he got all the way to Wellington with his rifle and wasn’t challenged. There, on the hills just opposite the seafront as you come into Wellington, he lay down and shot himself.” As she tells me this it’s close to ninety years since her father took his life, and Renée is still angry. To be fair, she says she doesn’t actually think about it much, only when people ask her about her father, as I did, or she reads about a parent’s suicide. When that happens, yes, she’s angry. She mostly refers to him by his name, Stan, rather than ‘father’, definitely not ‘Dad’. Certainly, she has no memories of the man she has been told was his own mother’s favourite son.

In her second crime novel, Blood Matters – freshly launched when we talk – the suicide of not one but two parents drives the plot. In that book, the father, a Pākehā, shoots members of his Māori wife’s family in a racially motivated attack, then turns the gun on himself. A short time later, unable to take the shame and judgement of the community, his wife – the protagonist’s mother – overdoses on sleeping tablets as she lies beside her daughters. In doing so she leaves those two young girls to live with the shame – the whakamā – of a father who murdered members of their small New Zealand community then died by suicide. Puti, the book’s main character, thinks: “One thing for sure. He didn’t give a thought to how his wife, or his daughters, would survive.” [p 112] 

The passage voices Renée’s own thoughts. “My father clearly did not give a hoot about what would happen to us,” she says. “Kids in those days weren’t seen the same way as they are seen now, but he had fathered three kids and they were at least half his responsibility. Surely he could have seen that, without him earning money for the family, there was going to be, if not a disaster, we would at least be very hard up? Maybe he just didn’t think about us? I don’t know.” Renée also doesn’t know why he did what he did. He left no note, there were no debts, no affairs. All the details of the suicide and the subsequent inquest were splayed across the local and national newspapers, which also failed to uncover a motive as much as they searched for one. 

The dates printed in the mastheads of those newspapers was April 1934. While Renée’s father was Pākehā, her mother was Māori. Both were twenty-seven years old and had been married five years – an interracial marriage, unpopular with his parents. Driven by the racism and sexism of the time, Renée says her blameless mother Rose bore responsibility in the eyes of the Hawke’s Bay community. “My father had done it, but we suffered from the shame. There was a huge social shame around suicide. And, of course, it was illegal at that time. People blamed my mother – who else’s fault could it be? I don’t think anyone who wasn’t there could really understand how hard our lives were. We got shit from school, got shit from everywhere. We didn’t get shit from our neighbours but they didn’t talk to Mum or us. They just looked at us. Maybe it might have been easier if we’d known why he did it? Probably not, though. It still would have been very unfair.”

An inquest was held a fortnight or so after his death, which Rose travelled from Hawke’s Bay to Wellington to attend. The verdict reported in the Evening Post on 12 May 1934, just below the express train timetable for the day, indicated the “probability of suicide”. While that finding was all over the papers, and talked about throughout Napier and Hastings, Renée says through all that time and for years after no one told her what had actually happened. 

“Kids didn’t get told anything in those days. Nowadays, kids would get sat down and told something nice. Or I’d hope they would… I didn’t know my father had even gone. I knew he wasn’t there, but I didn’t know where he had gone. I had to work it out myself, because he never came back.”

Renée does remember an exchange between her father’s two brothers, but she didn’t know what it meant. “I remember one uncle saying to the other, ‘For goodness sake, stop that blubbering. The woman in there has enough to put up with without listening to your shit’.” 

Back at school, she also remembers a kid saying to her “something like, ‘Your mum’s a Māori and your dad’s shot himself’. I’m not sure which one they thought was worse.” 

What happened more immediately was that Rose and her three children – all under five – had to move out of their house as soon as she returned from the inquest. Their house came with their father’s job, so no father, no job, no house. No leniency was extended, no kindness offered. 

“The farmer couldn’t get rid of us quick enough. My mother had to try to find somewhere to rent, and no one wanted to rent to a Māori woman with three kids.” 

The houses Rose could afford, and those whose landlords would take her as a tenant, were terrible. The foursome was taken as boarders in a villa owned by a British immigrant whose husband was in and out of jail. As an outsider herself in “a similar predicament”, Renée remembers this woman as being comparatively accepting and kind. 

But life was tough without their father. Rose – who “knitted furiously” to keep her kids warm in winter – got the widow’s benefit, but that wasn’t much. She did work, and Renée says going to work was about the only time her mother left the house as she didn’t like the way people looked at her. Renée got those looks at school, too, and became a loner “because I had to be”. She couldn’t bring anyone home to play, not that anyone would want to, she says. 

“I got so used to people saying mean things, or looking at me, that it didn’t impinge on me, really. I expected people to be like that, and they were. We had terrible clothes. My winter shoes were sandshoes, with a hole in the toe. Girls would snigger about the way I was dressed. To me, that’s back then, that’s what it was like, and I had to put up with it and learn. What I learned was not to believe anyone, not to trust anyone.”

She adds it's something she still struggles with even in her nineties, even with her writing success, she’s doubtful when people say they enjoy her work – I experienced that first hand when I complimented her on her memoir and crime writing as I arrived for our interview. “I have a deliberate shell to protect myself so I won’t be hurt. That’s something that lingers from those times.”

But the aspect that, perhaps, most lingers and was certainly the most bitter for Renée at the time, was another piece of news her mother delivered around her twelfth birthday. Renée was bright, she was always second in the class – Renée adds she was second only as the teachers “couldn’t possibly have a Māori and a suicide’s child coming first” – and she expected to stay in school. But one day, after Renée mentioned going to high school, her aspirations were shattered. 

“Oh, no, when you turn twelve you have to go to work so your brother and sister can go to high school,” her mother told her. 

“There was no question of arguing. That was that,” says Renée. They had no father, so no money. No money meant no high school for Renée.

When that school year closed, Renée appeared at the local woollen mills to apply for a job. She was supposed to be fifteen years old to work there, but no one asked, so start work she did, putting in a forty-hour week. At twelve years old she was on the “workers’ bus” in the morning at half past seven to be at work by eight. She’d work until she bussed home at five o’clock “to have tea then go to bed”, a routine she kept up with only Saturday afternoons and Sundays off. As Renée writes in her memoir, “I didn’t have time to be depressed or to repine over missing out on high school – that came later.” [p 35] 

Even though school was over for Renée, she continued to read and read and read. Soon she left the woollen mill for work in a printer’s shop, and it was while she bussed to and from that job that this silent girl who always carried a book under her arm was noticed by a fellow passenger. He started passing on his copy of John O’London’s Weekly, a literary magazine. She never knew his name or anything about him – she was too shy to ask – and he never inquired about her circumstances. But he noticed her and must have seen a young girl who needed kindness.

Renée’s uncles also noticed and did what they could. Ormond was Renée’s favourite – he was the one who was told off for crying after Renée’s father’s death. “Orm was only seventeen or eighteen when my father died, and he could have just dived off and had his own life. But he didn’t. He went to the Second World War, then he came back and kept up contact even after he got married and had his own kids. I liked that. And I liked him. He was a well-meaning good guy who felt sorry for Mum. It was a duty, I suppose, but it never felt like that. My other uncle was very good to my brother.” 

It's tempting to assume he became a father figure to Renée. No, she says, she always saw him as an uncle, and she didn’t expect him to be around. He just was – and he was around for her. “I think I was probably steaming away inside. Nowadays, if you’re lucky, there’d be people around who’d weasel out of you how you were feeling, but back then we were just left to get on with it, with no one to talk to. At the same time, I’d have run 100 miles rather than tell anyone how I felt, but it was outside the bounds of possibility that anyone would ask me.”

None of this is to say Renée didn’t have her mother’s attention or love. As Renée says, Rose “had a shit of a life” on several fronts, especially without a husband around. And those were very different times. “I’m very grateful to Rose. She taught me to read. And she taught us manners. She did her best in the circumstances, especially as she was still getting over it all herself. In the fifteen years between Stan’s suicide and her death, which isn’t a long time when you think about it, she never got over it. That’s fifteen years filled with work and worry about feeding us and clothing us and all that sort of thing. I owe Rose heaps. Because of her we all became hard workers – disciplined and responsible people.” 

The work ethic Rose instilled stayed with Renée throughout her life, through bringing up her three sons and working hard in various jobs. Even in her nineties, she continued to work for most of the day, writing or reading. But it’s not the life she’d have had if her father hadn’t taken his own. 

“Who knows? But probably my life would have been a hell of a lot easier if I’d been able to go to high school and have the normal experiences kids should have. I do not have a high opinion of Stan. He wrecked our lives. It was a mean, mean thing to do. Everything changed. He’s the reason I didn’t go to high school and I had to go to work. If he’d lived, I’d have gone to high school. He would have had a job and we would have had a house. My mother died at forty-two of a brain haemorrhage, and who’s to say whether that would have happened or not if he’d been alive? She’d had years of terrible hardship and grief. Suicide tears a family to pieces.” 

With Rose’s death, Renée had lost both parents by the age of nineteen. With that example, she expected to die early. “I thought I was gonna die at forty-two like my mother. I just thought I would. But that didn't worry me. This is where I really surprised myself. I mean, you'd think if you thought you're going to die at forty-two, you’d be thinking all the time about dying at forty-two. But I didn’t. It became just a little bit of a question mark. My fifties were absolutely fantastic, one of the best decades of my life – of any woman's life. I hadn’t had an adolescence, so I had it in my fifties. It was brilliant.”

Renée hadn’t had much of a childhood either, but she made sure her three sons had a great one. Her husband, who she married just before her mother died, was a kind, steady man who was happy to follow Renée’s lead. “I suspect unconsciously I was looking for safety. I thought I’d be happy with Laurie, and I was for a long time because I started to have a life that was, I guess, like everyone else – kids, a house, not having to worry about rent.” Their home became the house where the local boys came to play, very unlike Renée’s childhood home. 

In her sixties, Renée did go searching for clues as to who her father was and why he might have done what he did. She had won the 1989 Robert Burns Fellowship, which took her to Dunedin, an easy drive to Gore where her father grew up. She writes in her memoir that through her research she would “make an attempt to forgive him, or at least stop hating him” [p 117]. About that time she wrote to her beloved Uncle Orm asking if he knew why her father had done it. He replied, saying Stan had always been good to him and their mother, but that what he did was “a mystery” to him, too. He added that Stan would be proud of her. [p 120] Renée found no answers in Gore, her feelings remained unaltered about her father and what he did. 

Renée herself was not immune to black thoughts, especially following the break-up of her second big relationship. But, thinking “one suicide in a family is enough”, she got a psychotherapist and pulled herself through. 

“I would never have done it. I just wanted to stop feeling how I was feeling. It basically boiled down to that I was carrying all this load from when I was a kid and I'd never let it go. I had never let anyone get too close, you know? Going to a therapist explained me to me, and she was right. It made me much happier with myself, in a way.”

Renée’s advice – Follow Puti and Bella Rose’s experience in Blood Matters

In her second crime novel, Blood Matters, Renée builds the relationship between Puti, the main character, and ten-year-old Bella Rose, the niece she has responsibility for after her sister, Ana, dies from cancer. I see it as a poignant and positive example of how to nurture a child after the death of a parent. 

As her death drew near, Ana made arrangements for Bella Rose’s ongoing care, and prepared the child for her death, leaving instructions and guidance for Puti. Puti doesn’t know Bella Rose particularly well before she moves into her sister’s house, but over the narrative of the story they build up a comfortable trust. Puti gives Bella Rose space but answers questions when asked, and is willing to talk about Ana, death, and whatever Bella Rose needs. 

Also, they have a rhythm set around making rēwena bread to a recipe handed down by Puti’s grandmother, which works as a metaphor for rebuilding a bereaved child. Together Puti and Bella Rose nurture the rēwena’s potato bug, gently but firmly knead the dough, then patiently wait out the fermentation until they can bake the loaf and eat it together, or share it with others. It’s a shared task the two can do together, perhaps creating opportunities to talk, which also links them to generations gone.

Story by Lee-Anne Duncan

Thank you to Renée’s literary executor for allowing the quotes from Renée’s work.

References: 

Renée. These Two Hands. New edition, Mākaro Press, 2020.

Renée. Blood Matters. The Cuba Press, 2022.