Sally Blundell reviews Mary Kisler’s book The Dark Dad: War and trauma — A daughter's tale for ReadingRoom:
‘On a tattered Red Cross map, four nearly-straight pencil lines track north from Capua, near Naples, to Chavari then Ubine. From here, over the border to Breslau in what was then German-occupied Poland, then on to Lübeck, north-east of Hamburg. Above each line a single handwritten word – “Train”, “Train”, “Train”, “Walk” The map of World War II prisoner of war camps, a pencilled circle marking Stalag VIII-A, is all we have of my father’s whereabouts as a POW between 1941 and 1945, an impersonal graphic for a four-year term of incarceration that would shadow the next 35 years of his life with its unforgettable but largely unspoken memories.
At war’s end, over 8000 former prisoners of war returned to New Zealand. Many came back to fiancées, wives, old jobs, new families – in 1947, a record number of nearly 50,000 births was registered – but many also returned with their blasted memories, nightmares and flashbacks. Inexplicable to families, frightening for children.
Mary Kisler begins her memoir Dark Dad with a story as a child, cowering in her bed with her mother. Her father, Jack Arnott, the ‘Dark Dad’ of the title, looms in the doorway: “In my mind, he roars like a bull, but my mother knows he will not come closer while her children are there to protect her … Only once does the dark dad cross the threshold, and in an instant we are out the narrow window, leaving the metal hasp dangling.”
Dark Dad roars, gets drunk, throws plates, rips the wig off his daughter’s new doll. On one occasion, when he pushes a lit cigarette into her mother’s eye: “We climb over the low fence to our neighbours’ house, and they tuck us into bed.”
Kisler and her siblings know their father had been hurt in battle – he keeps a shard of shrapnel dug out of his leg. But his psychological injuries are more nebulous. While he tells his children about his time in Egypt, “he said almost nothing about his time in the camps, apart from describing the death of a fellow prisoner who was shot when trying to make a dash for freedom. His body was left to hang on the wire as a salutary lesson to others.”
Kisler is an art historian and curator. For years she brought her indefatigable curiosity, her knowledge, her unashamed delight in discovery to her regular slot on Kim Hill’s RNZ Saturday morning programme discussing historic art. After co-editing Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys with Catherine Hammond, Kisler, then senior curator at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, tracked Hodgkins’ peripatetic travels across England, Wales, France, Spain, Morocco and the Netherlands. She must have been around 70 as she negotiated precipitous French trains, precarious pathways and a dodgy Fiat to find the exact cafe, street or bay that Hodgkins used in her art. The resulting book, Finding Frances Hodgkins, is a dedication not only to Hodgkins but also to the author’s unrelenting determination to pursue her subject.
Here, she brings again this exhaustive curiosity, this determination to put her feet on the ground, to the story of her father, the man who talked little, who fell into dark moods and drunkenness, who, when he died in Auckland’s Mercy Hospice 1987 (the date is also given as 1978), was “propped upright, like a Baroque painting of the death of Saint Jerome.”
Kisler is a thorough guide. She traces her father’s family from Scotland to Tasmania before grandfather Bill leaves the Plymouth Brethren fold to go to Dunedin, promptly followed by his ‘sweetheart’ Frances. When Frances became pregnant, Bill knows it is his brother’s child she is carrying. They marry, so avoiding a family scandal, but Bill does not forget or forgive: “Bill never lost any opportunity to beat my father’s bastardy into him; he would sit on his chest and strike him across the face, yelling that he was no child of his.”’
Read the rest of the review here.