Margaretta Pos – Letters
It was my eighth birthday and my mother was reading the first letter I received from my father. I was in bed with her and my elder brother and sisters from her first marriage, and squirming with embarrassment, I dived under the bedclothes.
My congratulations with your eighth birthday. I do hope that it will be a fine day, as splendid as it was when you were celebrating your first birthday. Ask your mother about it; you were having a nice little party and you looked exactly as a princess ought to look. It is a pity that Dutch Guiana is so far from Tasmania, otherwise I could make a little trip and come to your birthday. Anyhow, love to you, your mother, Roy, Angela and Dimity, and a kiss from your Daddy.
I have eighteen letters from my father, Hugo Pos, written between my eighth and seventeenth birthdays. Some were from Paramaribo in South America where he lived, but most were posted elsewhere, from The Hague, St Maarten, New York, Miami, Curacao. There are postcards too, from Jamaica, Milan, Rome and the Lascaux caves in France. I loved the one from Jamaica, of Fire Eating Pete, an exotic figure in brightly coloured clothes, a maraca in either hand, blowing rings of fire out of his mouth as he danced on the beach. The message on the back says my father wasn’t visiting Jamaica, that his plane had stopped there for twenty minutes. Like anyone away from home, he sent postcards to his family – including his distant daughter.
The first postcard arrived when I was a toddler. My father was in Amsterdam; I was in England with my mother. They were in the process of getting divorced, after which my mother and I returned to Tasmania and he to Dutch Guiana, as Suriname was then called. The postcard was ‘The Dreamer’ in the Rijksmuseum, Maes’ painting of a beautiful, contemplative young woman. He wrote on the back: I have not been to the museum lately but this card serves only to remind you of my existence, efforts and hopes. Love Hugo. It was addressed to me, but I was only two and perhaps the message was for my mother. I remember him once telling me that you should never write anything that can’t be read by others, but you can write in such a way that only the person for whom it is intended will understand what it is you want to say.
Postcards aside, letters were rare until I was about twelve, by when I had started writing to him and thereafter he wrote more often. I remember writing the first letter, starting ‘Dear Daddy’ because I thought I should even if it seemed very strange. In one letter from The Hague, he said his mother had just celebrated her 79th birthday in Paramaribo, and he asked for a recent photograph. As she is your grandmother, I should like to show her your picture. And I myself am quite curious too, to know and find out what my Australian daughter looks like. Please, send me one! My mother sent some photos and a letter arrived from St Maarten in the Netherlands Antilles, saying he felt a little embarrassed when he saw them because I looked so different from the small child he remembered. We sent some more and he wrote again, saying it would be impossible for me to understand how much he enjoyed them.
My father remarried soon after the divorce, my mother some years later. Time passed and she wasn’t sure how many children he had, so I wrote to ask him. The post was delivered to our country home three times a week and we collected it from a box on the farm gatepost about a kilometre from the house. I remember the day a letter arrived with photographs of three children. And I remember being surprised: all my Australian brothers and sisters were fair, but I had black hair like my father. While the youngest of this unknown family in Dutch Guiana was fair, the elder two had my black hair. Staring at the photos, I could see the stamp of my father’s genes on us.
Growing up in a big family – in her third marriage my mother had four more children – I couldn’t imagine any other life, nor did I hanker for one. I had no idea why my parents had separated and I wasn’t curious. Whenever the subject of my father came up, my mother always said nice things about him – that he was very clever, a lawyer who wrote poetry and plays – while my grandmother said she had liked him because he made her laugh. My grandmother had a great sense of humour and when she was really amused would rock with infectious laughter, so this was high praise. When she died, my father wrote to say how much he had enjoyed her company. Tell your mother I was really deeply touched when I received the news.
While I was always eager to get his letters, I didn’t miss my father. Like Fire Eating Pete he was a figure from another world and it wasn’t one in which I had any real interest. My world revolved around my mother, stepfather, my brothers and sisters, around relatives and family friends. My cousin Felicity had a faraway father too, if not so foreign as mine since he was English, and it didn’t seem strange to have a parent living in South America. Decades later, after my father died in Amsterdam while I sat at his bedside with his Dutch family, Felicity was at the airport to meet me when I came home. Her father had died in England not long before and she understood what it was like to come home but to feel alone.
My life was centred on my home at Nile in Tasmania, summer beach holidays at my grandmother’s old cottage at Falmouth on the east coast and boarding school; first as a weekly boarder in Launceston and then as a full-boarder in Melbourne on the Australian mainland. I didn’t like school but nothing awful happened to me although I was often in trouble and frequently homesick. Toorak College was a private girls school with daygirls and boarders. On Sundays we went to nearby churches, either Church of England, which I attended, or Presbyterian, while one girl went to a Roman Catholic Church with a Catholic member of staff. It wasn’t a church school but a Latin grace was said before meals, while there were hymns and Bible readings at assembly every school-day morning.
There was nothing exceptional in this for the time but looking back, the boarding house was Dickensian. We slept in dormitories open to the weather on one side, with canvas blinds to pull down when it rained and canvas bedspreads to keep our beds dry. We weren’t allowed hot water bottles in winter, which could be bitter, although bed socks were permitted. It was only an hour by plane between Tasmania and Melbourne and I was able to go home in the school holidays – unlike my father. When he was fourteen, his parents sent him on the three-week sea voyage from Paramaribo to Holland to go to school, and then to Leiden University, the oldest university in The Netherlands, to study law. It was seven years before he returned home. During this time his mother visited him, and his older brother, twice, but he didn’t see his father again until he was twenty-one. When I saw my father again, after an absence of fifteen years, I had no memory of him at all.
Everyone I knew was of white, British, Protestant descent and I rarely saw anyone different. I don’t think I saw an Aborigine, I don’t remember seeing anyone Indian or African, I didn’t know any Jews and didn’t know my father was one. The only Asians I came across were at the Chung Gon green grocer in Launceston, although the family was second and third generation Australian, and at the Kan Hoy café where very occasionally we had sweet and sour pork. We rarely had pork at home, or beef; chicken was a treat, usually as a roast for Sunday lunch, geese were for special occasions such as Christmas Day, while we ate mutton almost daily. We had a flock of old sheep my stepfather called the Killers and these were slaughtered, hung and quartered on the property – the workmen getting a quarter every week. Far from hating mutton, I regret now that butchers stock only lamb, which I find tasteless by comparison.
We had fowls, geese, ducks – the last were more like pets and we couldn’t eat them – fruit trees and a vegetable garden, with milk, cream and butter from our cows. We had fish sometimes, which we caught, and occasionally eels that were hooked by deadlines left overnight in the river. Our wool growing property was on a plain with mountains to the east and west; it was and is a beautiful landscape and I would go for long rides on my horse. It sounds idyllic but there were tensions: my mother had eight children over twenty years with three different fathers and while we weren’t poor there were financial strains and my stepfather was an alcoholic. My mother didn’t have an easy time but I wasn’t troubled; I felt cherished and enjoyed living in the country and being in the middle of a big family.
One day a Chinese girl from Singapore arrived at school as a boarder and this was the first time I got to know anyone from a foreign culture. We were asked to help her settle in and told she might have difficulty adjusting; for example, she might not know how to make her bed. It was true – but only because she had servants who made it for her at home. Fluent in English, she was a sophisticated girl the like of whom I had never met and she must have wondered why her parents were paying a lot of money to send her to such a primitive place. In my last year, a second Chinese girl arrived. Several years later, a new boarding house was built with central heating and today all the boarders are from Asian countries, the Chinese New Year is celebrated and at weekends, the girls are encouraged to cook dishes from their home countries and invite their Australian school friends to dine with them.
In one of his letters my father wondered how I would like his country where he was Attorney General and where his family had lived for generations as my mother’s had in Tasmania. Given I knew only people of British origin, with the exception of the two Chinese girls, his was an unimaginable world. I am living in Paramaribo, the capital, where about 100,000 people live. You’ll find here all races; the original Red Indians, Negroes, the former slaves, whites, Javanese from the island of Java, Indians from India, Chinese and the most remarkable mixtures you can imagine. It is very interesting and if, later on, you might be interested in ethnology, sociology or anthropology, you’ll find here a wonderful working field.
Until my last year at school I hugged a big secret to myself – my father’s existence.
After their divorce my mother had resumed her previous married name, Gatenby, which I assumed and kept after she married for a third time. Her first husband was killed in 1942 in World War II in action against the Japanese in Timor and although he couldn’t have been my father because I was born in 1946, no one ever questioned it at school. Of course, it was no secret in Tasmania but the truth didn’t cross Bass Strait, over which I flew to school in Melbourne, and if a letter from my father arrived at home during term time, my mother would take it out of the envelope and send it to me under cover of one of her weekly letters.
I once confided in a school friend that my father wasn’t who she thought he was, that he was alive, and that he was a Dutchman. In my final year – after it was decided that I would visit him when I left school – I revealed the truth. No-one was more surprised than the girl in whom I had confided.
“I thought you said your father was a dustman,” she exclaimed.
I realised then that it was a measure of her friendship that she had kept my ghastly secret.
After a conference about the cultural relationship between the Netherlands and former colonies, there was a letter from St Maarten. I didn’t know anyone who had been to the Caribbean and I had never heard of St Maarten but it was, he wrote, one of the nicest islands in the region with a sea that is green and blue and carries a cool breeze over the beaches. St Maarten is one of the so-called Leeward Islands and has a Netherlands and a French part. To make it more intricate, the people all speak English, in the way the West Indians speak it, slow and rolling their words.
In Washington to attend an Interpol congress, he wrote about the American presidential election between John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Until now foreign affairs were never a real issue for the election of a president, people were more interested in local problems and did not bother much about political questions. But now all they are talking about is Russia and China and Cuba and Latin America. It was really fun in a way. I also noticed that men are not wearing loud ties any longer; the American nation gets serious it seems.
My father always began with the date, but never the year and it’s only through references such as to the American election that I can properly date his letters. They are both philosophical and personal, yet with little that is private about his life, work, his parents, his wife or children. Nevertheless, they say much about him. Congratulating me on my sixteenth birthday, he wrote: Apart from the framed photograph of you which I have on my desk, I have to fall back on my old and rather weak memory of what you were really like. For you it will be more difficult. There is a man somewhere in the Guianas, rather thin, rather bald, with glasses and the more or less forlorn look of an intellectual, whose English is not as good as it used to be and who does not like writing. Writing letters I mean … for in those letters you often want to communicate something that is precious to you to the other, the receiver of the letter, and nothing is harder than to express really and truly your inner feelings.
This is typically Hugo, from the humorous picture of himself to the desire to express his inner feelings. I found it a little embarrassing because it was so different from the British tradition in which I was raised, that of keeping one’s feelings to oneself and as a child I was unaware that I was more akin to him in nature than I knew. For the rest of his life he would continue to write letters in this personal but philosophical vein, all of which I kept. When we were together it was different: he would talk with candour, perhaps because I had no role in his daily life.
My father often expressed a wish for us to be able to see each other. Despite being safely anchored in Tasmania with my mother, I also wanted to see him and there are several letters about a reunion, with one suggestion, when I was fourteen, that I might go to school in Holland when he was on leave. I’m not sure what happened, but I didn’t go. In December 1962, however, he wrote to say he was going to Holland for eight months on extended leave the following August, during which time he would seek a permanent appointment as a judge. If successful, he and his family would settle there. Either way, as I was leaving school in December 1963, it would be the perfect opportunity for me to visit him.
I think it will be good for both of us to meet again, after all these years of separation … I have been looking forward to this for many years … I want us to know each other and enjoy each other’s company … to walk and talk and laugh together … We can explore the Low Countries together … the only thing I worry about is that you might have too high an expectation of our life in Holland. It is very simple and probably far more sober than you are used to in Australia.
Reading his letters again after so many years, I am struck by his view of me as the lost child, rather than the distant daughter.
In July1963 he wrote from Curacao. He was on his way to Caracas on a work related trip, from where he would go by Italian boat to the south of France and then take a train to Holland to join his family who had gone ahead. He had paid for my return airline ticket and I was going to join him in February 1964: It will be a great experience. Don’t get nervous about it. Let us meet … an almost lost father and his young daughter from another continent. It is something worthwhile, something to look forward to.
I wasn’t to know that he hadn’t discussed it with his wife. He had written to her when she was already in Holland and told her I was coming to join them. I didn’t know their relationship was volatile and my arrival would cause another fissure, one into which I was going to drop like an innocent abroad.
There was a flurry of letters before I left. In November: It is no use to worry too much about the things to come, it is more or less like a great adventure for both of us. I always wanted to see you again, but Australia being so far away and I not being rich, made it seem almost impossible. In December: This will be an adventurous year for you, to leave the well known background for awhile and to meet your almost unknown father, who feels very old since he – rather suddenly to his idea – became fifty. In February, just before I left: Are you nervous? I am not. Love, a good trip and a happy landing, from your father, Hugo.
Apart from that first postcard, he had signed most of his letters as ‘Daddy’, but my mother had always referred to him as Hugo, and while I thought of him as my father, I didn’t think of him as Daddy. This letter was signed ‘Hugo,’ and from then on I called him Hugo.
He wasn’t alone in being given a new name. I had a nickname, Puffi, by which I had been known by everyone since I was a baby. Two months before we met, he wrote to say that he thought it sounded too childish and suggested he call me Margaretta. I didn’t mind because I had a bigger problem, one he knew nothing about: my surname. For ten years I had gone by another man’s name, but now, I was going to meet him. Who was I? It wasn’t a metaphysical question but a practical one.
The first time I wrote my real name – and sealed my identity – was when I applied for a passport. And with one signature, Puffi Gatenby, aged seventeen, became Margaretta Pos.
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