The Age for Love

Sheela Tree is the “strange name, a name for keeping strangers company”, chosen for her career in theatre by Marie Cassegrain. Marie is the only daughter of Neils, a New Zealander whose parents are Danish-born Lutheran, and Leila, born in Taranaki and steeped in the traditions of Irish Catholicism.
It’s a mix described by a prominent psychologist, consulted by her parents on behalf of her brother Laurence, as a recipe for disaster - an opinion echoed by Sheela’s analyst Max Hatfield, “who thinks she’s just a lush”.
Her childhood with herfive brothers, inside what amounts almost to a pale - their Catholic parish in a Hawke’s Bay town in the ’50s - is revealed during Sheela’s treatment in her 20s for addiction to drugs and alcohol.
The “strangers” she comes across include aspiring thespian Barrie Gore, with whom she becomes only too familiar, whose father Cosmo is “chairman of the vestry at St Cuthbert’s and a pervert”, and whose mother Violet is “a collector, a bully and a snob”.
There’s the mystic Graham Mikes, who reads Juvenal and experiences “divine dazes”; Patrick Blackmoor, director of the NZ Theatre Company and “a pimp of the sophisticated kind”; Father Edmund, a monk given to giggling; Xavier, a French set designer and “man of passions” and Dr Grayson Lamb, who finds the women and girls he refers for illegal abortions in Christchurch “passive, even submissive” - and takes advantage.
Even the Cassegrain family are strangers, or so they seem to “the broom brigade”, the shopkeepers and accountants of the local Chamber of Commerce and the farmers on the Power Board, Neils’ employer in Potangotango, “a quintessential Nazareth”.

Her mother Leila’s forte is fainting, sometimes rehearsed, sometimes not; her engineer father Neils might be described as charming, if charming were “a word with currency in Potangotango”; her difficult, disruptive brother Laurence is bipolar and bisexual.

The Catholic Church is examined at a time when, like bulimia and hate speech (not yet invented), there was no whiff of sex abuse. A priest can be ‘fab’ or “choleric”, wear a roman collar and get away with it. Sex outside marriage is sinful – and indulged. “You knew people did it, and incredible though it seemed – imagine Mrs Redmond-Hogg, so thin and mild, or Mr Rozbicki with his gumboots, his accent and harelip – even Catholics did it.”

We glimpse New Zealand’s academia in the days of Roger Hall’s Middle-Age Spread and its runaway success; Germany during WWII, and the hidden life of a little monastery which looks anything but.

Seen through the eyes of a family like the Cassegrains, the social mores of small-town New Zealand in the ‘50s are anything but boring.

Incidents of a troubled childhood – one, her mother forbids her to mention - prefigure a teenage pregnancy and illegal abortion. Years later, at the Mas de l’Ange, a commune in France frequented by theatrical types and governed in the spirit of Eros by her lover Xavier, Sheela is confronted by the same dilemma, this time resolved in that same spirit by Xavier, in the US.

But Sheela, who in New Zealand had barely registered the existence of a tangata whenua, is eventually surprised by a “yearning for something unique to Maori” which brings her home again, to the hill where her father had said the sun always came out, in “the most beautiful place in the world”.

Making a vineyard here, guided by the mystic Graham Mikes and an unlikely newcomer, Sheela finds the lives she had lost and new life for herself - but one which those earlier losses mean she may still lose.