6 days Ago By Rose Carlyle
This story is part of the November 17 edition of Sunday Life. See all 14 stories . My grandmother’s life changed forever one day when she arrived home from school and found her mother wasn’t there.
The man waiting for 13-year-old Eileen when she stepped in the door was her uncle — or so she’d been told. Eileen Mansfield (far right) in her 80s with (from left) the author’s sister, Madeleine Carlyle; the author, Rose Carlyle; and her brother, David Carlyle, circa 1993. Born in Wales, Eileen had immigrated with her mother to Greymouth, a town on New Zealand’s South Island, when she was four.
Eileen had never known her father and had begun to be sceptical that she could have so many uncles, who kept coming to stay for a few days or weeks and sleeping in her mother’s room. “Now you’ll get what’s coming to you,” the man said. Or something like that — Eileen could never recall his exact words.
What she did remember was that he started to take off his belt. Instinct made her turn and flee. She ran all the way down the street to the constable’s house.
Even at 13, she understood the momentousness of her decision to knock on his door and ask for help. She knew she would never go back home. And so Eileen was taken into state care.
It seems her mother Harriet did not fight this decision. Harriet came to the train station to say goodbye when Eileen was sent away. They never saw each other again.
Eileen Mansfield (left) in 1947 with her husband and three oldest children (from left) Christina (the author’s mother), John and David. Once, when I was fretting over whether to resign from my work, a friend told me, “Leaving a job is like taking your hand out of a bucket of water.” In other words, my colleagues would barely notice I had gone.
Yet there is one job that, if you leave, people will still be talking about in 100 years’ time. That job is motherhood. Harriet didn’t finish the job of raising Eileen, and here in 2024, I am still grappling with the consequences.
Eileen was a bright girl. She had written an essay that so impressed her teachers that they sent it to the local newspaper, and it was published. On the strength of that essay, Eileen was granted entry to high school without being required to sit the usual exams.
But the year was 1920, and in those days, state wards were not sent to high school. Eileen was sent to live in the home of a wealthy farming couple in Central Otago – not as their foster child, but as their maid. Eileen never acquired any further education, never had anything else published, and never held any paid job except as a maid.
In her late 30s, she moved to Auckland and met my grandfather, and they soon had twin boys, followed by two girls..
