Far Sighted

North and South, Family Ties, Four Corners by Nicola Shepheard October 2005 Don Smith, 71, was a popular professor of English at the University of Auckland for 26 years. A top runner in his athletic prime, he represented New Zealand in the 800 metres on the track at the 1958 Empire and 1960 Olympic Games. Now retired, he lives with wife Jill in Mission Bay, Auckland. They have three adult children. Caitlin Smith, 34, is a jazz singer/songwriter and leading voice coach. She’s featured on five albums, the latest of which, Aurere by The Caitlin Smith Group, is the first almost totally self-penned. She lives in Grafton, Auckland. Don Smith Here’s my diary entry from the day Katy was born: “Jill with contractions, drove into hospital, girl born by caesarean section, six pounds one ounce, both appear to be fit. No training. The Rehearsal Transpros’d published.” That was a book I edited, so I had two births in one day. We were living in Toronto, and I was lecturing at the university. When Katy was two months old we came back to New Zealand during my sabbatical and the Plunket nurse noticed she couldn’t see very well. A few months later we went to London and a keen young researcher decided she had a terrible condition called Leber’s syndrome, which can cause blindness and mental deficiency. We were absolutely shattered, but then my brother referred us to a brilliant East End doctor and he said she’s certainly got some sight and the defect is probably genetic. Back in Toronto a top eye specialist confirmed this and said she had some useful sight � 3/60 in one eye and 6/60 in the other. We were tremendously heartened. But, after the shock Jill wanted to come home for motherly support and we moved back to Auckland in 1972. Nothing was ever easy for Katy. What that meant was she was extraordinarily positive: it was never her fault. If she tripped, it was the fault of the stone. And tremendously gung-ho. People from Homai [the national School for the Blind and Vision Impaired] trained her in things like crossing the road, and organised for text and music to be blown up so she could read it. They gave her a white cane, but she didn’t like it. When she started going to Selwyn College she had to cross Kepa Road, a particularly busy road, and we’d worry, but she just made fun of us. Jill asked her, how do you do it? She replied, I get down on my hands and knees and sniff my way across. I suspect the disability has focused her sense of identity and determination. She had tremendous independence, she was never stopped by anything. One just respected that. She’d be completely fearless, which would drive her poor mother wild. Occasionally we’d walk along the concrete sewage pipe across Hobson Bay, and Jill would be in stitches as Katy bolted ahead. She couldn’t see the water below, so it didn’t bother her. She didn’t do brilliantly at school but she did well. She had piano lessons and I was impressed when she composed a little piece at 10 or 11. At Selwyn she was lead singer in a punk rock band, the Sound of Mucus. As an adolescent she marched in every possible march up Queen Street. It was fortunate she was only 10 when she and I marched against the Springbok Tour, otherwise she’d have been arrested. Jill and I hoped she’d be all right. I have no idea what drugs she took over those years but I assumed she’d have some common sense. But there were no sermons. And because she has such a powerful sense of identity, you tended to back off. On occasion we’d argue fiercely. I believe the theory about youngest children needing to be increasingly revolutionary and radical to gain their parents’ attention � Katy ‘s the youngest of three and continues to be the most revolutionary thinker of our family. Jill and I took her overseas with us in 1988-89. She’d finished college and we thought she was too young to go to university. I worked on research in London, while Jill and Katy went to theatre, films, the film archives. Katy did a course at Morley College, one of the top music schools in England. We also found out she was completely colour blind and extremely light-sensitive, which means in bright sunlight she can’t see anything. She comes to life in twilight. The only time I’ve seen her cry was when she got turned down for parliamentary jobs after she graduated with a first-class MA in political science. The fact she couldn’t get the kind of jobs she thought she was qualified for made her finally decide she’d make a life out of music. We go fairly regularly to hear her at gigs. Her latest album is very fine. She’s an enormously gifted singer, and through and through a performer, just like her parents. She’s also a marvellous teacher. She has teaching in the genes � Jill and I are both teachers, as were both our parents and my mother’s parents. As someone with a disability, she has empathy, and she has passion. It’s all been a lovely journey: I remember her as a tiny wee scrap, she was something really special. It’s probably got better as she’s got older, much easier to understand as an adult than an adolescent. It’s been lovely to see her growing up feisty and independent. Caitlin Smith My parents tried for several years to have kids and couldn’t, so they adopted my brother, Matthew. But then me and my sister Penelope came along. My closeness with Pa came from the sight condition. Because of it, my parents have always had a respect for me, the difficulties I faced, more than for my siblings, which I feel guilty about. Pa’s an amazingly good father. Once, our art class was taken up One Tree Hill to sketch and I couldn’t go because of my sight, and was feeling ostracised. Then Pa, a gifted artist, sketched me a little picture of One Tree Hill to make me feel better. He never helped with homework � he was very much the liberal parent allowing kids to do their own thing and shine in their own way. School holidays we’d go up to my great-uncle’s Whangarei Heads farm. I remember scrambling up rocks with him and being quite fearless because I couldn’t look down. And Pa picking pieces of glass and splinters out of my feet � he’s always been a teacher and a healer, he can fix anything. I have incredibly fond memories of my parents recounting their days to each other at exactly the same time every evening, sitting in the same seats, having Bell Tea leaves mixed with Twinings Earl Grey. I think those rituals were very powerful for them. A lot of my friends couldn’t understand the ritualistic, Victorian way my house operated: shared breakfast and dinner every day. (I became a vegetarian in ’89 and my sister is now militantly vegan; my father still reckons all I need is a good steak.) I was very political from my teens. At 14 I had the androgynous look, later I had purple hair. But Pa didn’t care, sitting in his chair in the front room reading. The world of books is where he lives. And he had faith we were all going to turn out OK. When I think back he gave me so much freedom. Pa’s got a lot of mana in the academic community, and people he taught still come up and rave about how wonderful a lecturer he was. He’s got this ability to appraise a situation really fast and come to a clear decision. He doesn’t write prose though, and that was difficult for me to come to terms with as I didn’t see my writing songs was legitimate. But then, I used to write poetry and Pa was hugely supportive of that, taking me to recite my work at Poetry Live evenings at the Albion Hotel at 16, turning a blind eye to the fact I was insanely underage. At university I avoided English because I didn’t want to be compared with him. I did politics instead, and that’s when the big issues arose between us. My father’s an old-school Labour supporter and I’d bang on about socialism and call myself an anarchomarxist ecofeminist. And Pa was, what’s feminism? Bloody Greenies. He laughed at me: it wasn’t a loud disapproval, just a snigger. Still, one of my strongest memories is holding his hand on the anti-Springboks tour march. I remember him running every evening, 5.30, come rain or snow. As kids, we were surrounded by his trophies. We didn’t understand what they meant, but we were amazingly proud. He got really bad rheumatic fever in 1978-79 when we went back to Toronto. I remember him trying to crawl to the toilet; I’ve never seen a person so sick. Now, I like to think of him as bionic: he’s got two hips replaced, he always walked with a limp, and he’s had a quadruple bypass and bits of skin cancer removed. I take after my father with my masochism and seriousness about things I’m passionate about, and my mother with my gregariousness. Pa’s running is his form of masochism, pushing himself to the limit, which I have a great deal of respect for. My parents didn’t push me, they let me find for myself why I needed to work hard. Music has been another real connection between us. Often we’ll play songs for each other and just listen. Pa will cry listening to music that moves him � not that I knew this when I was younger, because I can’t see tears � and I share that visceral response. For both of us, music is transcendental. Over the years I’ve given him mixed tapes of music because I know he’s going to get it. But he’s also very perverse and you can’t suggest outright he’ll like a piece of music; he has to approach it his way. He wants me singing country and western music, though he likes jazz. My father’s given me a wide berth around everything I do: my political beliefs, my music. Which is good. Though he has bought 30 copies of my latest CD. I know secretly he’s proud of my singing career � he just doesn’t say it to my face!