Liz Jamieson-Hastings - Still Standing: From Debutante to Detox

And who the fuck are you?

Two coal-black, defiant, fearful eyes challenged mine as, seated on the swivel chair at the front of the room, I scanned the faces in front of me.

He must have been thirty-something. The coffee-coloured hands were pock-marked with old-fashioned tattooschains, love and hate, a bird between the thumb and forefinger. Slouched in the chair, legs splayed, what caught my eye was the nerve twitching on his face below the left eye, and his right leg which appeared to suffer from St Vituss dance. The body never lies unless the owner has a PhD in the art of super-intelligence espionage, and this one had no chance of that. The brown face, the tattoos, the fiery eyes had far from the desired effect on me. Kindly, sympathetically and compassionately, I held the gaze as I replied calmly: Well, if you stay here for the time they suggest, I will help you to discover who the fuck I am. He blinked. This was not what he had expected from the mature, redheaded, confident, obviously well-educated woman from the other side of the tracks calmly relaxed in front of himbut then alcohol and drug treatment centres are always full of surprises.

How was I confidently able to deal with a brown-skinned ex-prison-inmate in a drug and alcohol treatment centre when my background was obviously one of white, upper-middle-class, well-educated debutante society? Thats my story.

I lived in a suburb like any upmarket suburb in Auckland. Mine was where the men who had fought in World War II lived with their wives; the ones who had been the officers and had married the soft-petalled, delicate-skinned English girls and brought them proudly home, like trophies after a cricket match. How English these girls were. They seemed old to me, because I was so young and my mother was one of them. She had come 12,000 miles with a husband she barely knew. In the war, you see, they never knew how long anybody would live; particularly people like my father, a lieutenant on a destroyer in the Mediterranean. So they married, because nice girls did not sleep with men out of wedlock in those days. These ladies arrived with all the accoutrements of an English country house upbringing. Their lives had been with nannies and governesses, cooks and servants. Meals appeared at appropriate times, and as children they had always eaten in the nursery, seeing their parents for twenty minutes or so before bedtime. When later in life I met my grandfather in England, I found him austere, authoritative and intimidating, even when I was aged twenty. My mother hardly ever talked about him.

New Zealand was an adventure for many of these women, and they arrived believing that the trappings of the life they had left behind would be available in the new colonies. The culture shock for most of them must have been horrendous.

My mother had never boiled an egg, never ironed a shirt, and rarely made her own bed. War rationing had limited the menu and taken care of any possible idea of wastage. To the day she died, the remains of the evening meal went into the blender and either became soup or sauce. Sixty years later, I cannot break this habit I learnt from her.

I didnt meet my father until I was eighteen months old, as he was in Gibraltar when he received the message that he had a daughter, and on his return I would have nothing to do with him. He was a stranger; and this initial lack of emotional bonding was to influence my relationship with him for the rest of my life.