The Way to Spell Love
by Nina Nola

Nina Nola’s memoir opens in 2008 with the author sitting beside her father in the last minutes of his life. She writes, ‘A fast-forward movie of our life together plays in my head: me a little girl in my flannelette pyjamas sitting on his knee for our nightly ritual.’ The nightly ritual, we discover later, was her father asking her ‘Što će Missy bit?’, which is Croatian for ‘What will my Missy be?’ If nothing else, this is a demonstration of paternal love, a father adoring his youngest child and casting himself into a reverie of her future.

In 2008, Nola has an exercise book on her knee, into which she is writing ‘frantically’. Later we learn that for the eight and a half weeks it took her father to die, she filled four of them recording ‘the highs and lows of each day.’ It is perhaps what you would expect of a writer and academic, a woman who knew early on that her life would revolve around words and expression. The Way to Spell Love is Nola’s first book, although she has written much in the academic world. In addition, she has been involved in film projects that concentrated on New Zealanders of Croatian heritage, including an adaptation of a story by the much-loved late Amelia Batistich.

The memoir takes the events of Steve Nola’s decline as scaffolding, around which Nola tells the story of her family, with the focus mainly tightened on her own experience. The larger Nola family was like many West Auckland Dalmatian immigrants of the period, in that they planted land with orchards and grapes and then worked every hour they could to make it a success.

Three children in just over three years and her husband one of three stubborn brothers working the same land, my mother put her head down and got to work, too, forgetting to look up, to look at my siblings, at me. New to New Zealand, to English, to backbreaking orchard work, my mother tackled her roles like the survivor she was. There was no Kiwi housewife my mother felt she could talk to, no one to show her how to slow down when she needed a rest, or how to cajole my father into getting what she wanted. All she had were my aunties – both Dalmatian and working as hard as her.

Vini, Nola’s mother, sewed all the children’s clothes and bore the entirety of the domestic burden. When they were small, the children spent a lot of time in the playpen while Vini worked. ‘Dad likes seeing us in the dresses, likes what they represent,’ Nola writes; women ‘should be busy with their hands.’ When she wasn’t in the house or on the land, Vini was in the packing shed rolling apples in paper and packing them in boxes. The daughter’s sympathy for the mother is palpable throughout the memoir, but there are also blind spots. In the quote above, Nola has it that Vini forgot ‘to look up at my siblings, at me.’  Here we see the child in her flannelette pyjamas, not the adult. It is the child who does not understand that her mother had not forgotten to look up; she simply could not.

In recent years many New Zealanders have published memoir, from Noelle McCarthy’s best-selling Grand to Diana Wichtel’s immensely popular Unreel to Dick Frizzell’s idiosyncratic Hastings to Jan Kemp’s Raiment to Harry Ricketts’ First Things and plenty of others. It is salutary to pause for a moment and consider the individual motivations for the work. Each writer is endeavouring to better understand themselves by exploring the circumstances of their birth, their families, their advantages and disadvantages. The reader walks alongside the memoirist, sharing their epiphanies and moments of forgiveness. Wichtel frames her journey with her career as a journalist and television reviewer; McCarthy gives us her mother’s life as much as she does her own. Self-pity is not in evidence.

The same cannot be said, unfortunately, for The Way to Spell Love. Many fathers of that generation, my own included, knew nothing but work. That was how they expressed their love, by putting food on the table and clothes on our backs. To say ‘I love you’ was not in their lexicon. That belonged to the movies, to Hollywood. Generally, men who worked with their hands had hard hands, which we knew from being smacked. That was 1960’s parenting, along with playpens, and for many generations before that.

It was easy to feel bitter and resentful towards these fathers, especially when as teenagers we were aware of the sexual revolution and women’s liberation movement going on in the outside world, and we wanted to be part of it. Fathers were the heads of the households and their word was law. Steve Nola did not allow chewing gum, a rule Nola amusingly circumvented by having a secret, well-chomped bit kept between the buttocks of her kewpie doll. He also cut their hair himself, rather brutal helmet do’s for his daughters and short-back-and-side for his son. The book includes many family photographs, where these haircuts are on display, as well as the carefully made home-made clothes.

There are also holiday snaps. The family were lucky enough to be treated to overseas travel – a trip to Yugoslavia, as it was called then. There, too, her father was a disappointment:

(He) was scathing of Yugoslavia and what he saw as small-minded village life … he berated my mother’s family for their lack of worldliness. They’d looked uncomfortably at our suitcases loaded with cheap things they couldn’t buy – there was so much it made our relatives feel poor, embarrassed them. My mother turned her head away, mortified.

Nola writes that when she was around thirteen years of age, she and her father ceased to speak to each other. He was emotionally inarticulate; she was furious with him for his treatment of her mother and his children. Later, while her husband was dying, Vini remembered the time on the family land in Henderson before the move to a second farm in Pukekohe:

‘We were so close then, the two of us. When we all worked together. Before you girls started growing up, before you started to rebel against your father, Nina, before all those nights of silence in the house when you and your father weren’t talking. It was you. When you and your father stopped talking… I couldn’t bear it.’

At seventeen, in order to escape home, Nola went nursing. It lasted ten weeks. Various jobs in bookshops and Auckland Library came after, until she left for London four years later, to stay with her sister. This is another relationship that comes under scrutiny. On arrival, Nola found herself alone for a weekend in Tanja’s flat because her sister had gone to Paris. ‘Perhaps the real awkwardness between us started there,’ she writes, and later: ‘Tanja and I did everything together, but it had a sharp edge that stabbed at us both.’ Elsewhere she states: ‘We continued to do many things together…but sometimes we were not comfortable with one another.’ This is normal for sisters, or any close human relationship, surely? Later, back in New Zealand, when Tanja tells her, woundingly, ‘I never really liked you, you know’, many readers will suspect there are profound lacunae, that the author has omitted some very real causes for this antipathy.

There are pitfalls that memoirists generally struggle to side-step, self-mythologising being one of them. In London, Nola bravely removes a parcel from her bookshop workplace that terrifies the rest of the staff, because it could be a bomb. She predicts that Keri Hulme will win the Booker and creates a window display of The Bone People long before the judges make their decision. These elements may well be true but are inconsequential.

On her return home from O.E, Nola goes to university and it is there that she meets her architect husband. Her life by any gauge is successful – a long marriage, a career, children, travel. When her father suffers a succession of strokes, he has already been struggling with dementia for some years. Nola steps tirelessly into the breach, lovingly helping her mother with his care in the hospital and then in the nursing home. With characteristic clarity, she describes her siblings’ resentment of her central position in her father’s care and of her close, intimate relationship with their mother.

It is Steve Nola’s detailed decline that fills the second half of the book, with frequent segues to his previous health battles. Nola finds herself able to express love for her father when he is dying. There are some genuinely moving passages describing her attempts to break through to him, late in the piece though it is.

After he dies, she visits a clairvoyant and ‘cries uncontrollably’. The clairvoyant assures her that her father is asking her for her forgiveness. Again, this sits a little uneasily. He was, by her description, autocratic and difficult, but not a bad man. Earlier in the book she describes him:

Dad was a freethinker, an individual who insisted on liberal potential, if not for his family, then for himself. He didn’t follow anyone’s rules but his own.

Writers are often enjoined by publishers to define their readership. If this is at all possible, it comes after the book is written because we write mostly for ourselves. The Way to Spell Love is certainly deeply personal but it will also resound with many older New Zealanders who share Nola’s ancestry and who will feel kindred to her. Many others will remember their similar hardworking fathers and their strict rules and ready punishment, now deeply unfashionable in this era of gentle parenting.