Note from Helga: “Many another older member of the community can tell a story just as (or more) varied and interesting as I hope mine might be.”

Sandringham, Auckland - October 2024.

The biscuits we bought from the dairy are no match for the ones Helga has baked. A dozen decadent, black chocolate chip cookies sit on the dining table overlooking the garden. Her world is a well-lit space filled with ceramics and mismatched chairs, nothing two of the same. She can’t decide where to sit: outside among her potted plants or indoors beneath the skylights?

She lives in a single-storey transitional villa a few minutes from Sandringham Village. In a few weeks, the streets around her will be buzzing with locals during the annual Sandringham Spring Festival. Helga Arlington, one of the founding trustees for the Sandringham Project in Community Empowerment, will be volunteering at a stall. But for now, the streets are quiet. Built in the 1910s, her home’s exterior, heavily influenced by Australian Federation architecture and Californian bungalows, is modest compared to the more ornate Victorian villas down the road. A certain romanticism is associated with the Victorians, an era of European artistic and scientific breakthroughs, conquest, and wealth. It feels distant enough for us to gloss over some of the more unpleasant events of that era and remember it by the elegant spindles and stained glass it left behind. When she was younger, Helga thought that her parents were rather Victorian, that is, fitting the mould of Victorians in mid-century literature. In one sense, that is not so far-fetched; after all, they were as close to the Victorians as Helga is now to her childhood.

On Helga’s dining table is a stack of books often categorised under the umbrella of “feminist literature”, despite some of the authors’ attempts to distance themselves from that label (the feminist icon Doris Lessing repeatedly insisted that she has “nothing in common with feminists”). Among them are worn copies of Lessing’s Matha Quest and Fay Weldon’s My Mother My Self, which Helga had first read in the 80s. When Helga recounts her involvement in the “feminist movement”, it is with resistance to the second half of that now-ubiquitous term. “The thing that was quite odd about it was that there was no real sense of doing it together as a group,” she said. “There were no templates for it.” But what Helga and the millions of other women who inadvertently engaged in political action through their domestic lives did have were books. Doris Lessing, Simone de Beauvoir, Audre Lorde, and Marilyn French—the great 20th-century feminist writers—instilled a feeling that it was not only possible to reach beyond the confines of the heteropatriarchal order, but there was something worth reaching for.

After graduating from the University of Auckland in 1970 with an MA in English, Helga married and moved down to Wellington to complete a diploma in librarianship. After working for a stint in school libraries in Wellington, Helga, her husband, and their newborn daughter moved to Waimauku in 1974. During that decade, women were slowly allowed to obtain mortgages and credit cards without a male co-signer. However, the transition was slow, and women continued to be asked for a husband or father’s signature well into the 1980s. “When I was married, and we bought a house as a couple, the bank manager said—and I was actually earning quite a bit more than my husband—‘Oh, but we can’t count your [income], you’ll just go away and have babies!’” Helga did in fact “go away and have babies”: two girls, the first born in 1974, and the second in 1976, but that did not stop her from separating from her husband and moving to Auckland in 1980 with her children. Solo parenting was hard, but the ability to make her own decisions, particularly around money, was freeing. However, being divorced, single, and a mother came with complications, particularly when such a situation was frowned upon. “I did find it slightly odd that my kids would go to their father every second weekend,” Helga added. “I would get a whole weekend free, and I’d think, ‘I don’t know any other mothers or couples who get a block of free time like this.’ That complete break was quite nice.”

In her 1985 essay, Poetry is Not a Luxury, Audre Lorde wrote, “The quality of light by which we scrutinise our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live…That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.” But which came first? The inklings of wanting a divorce or the feeling that something was to be sought beyond what was expected of her? It is difficult to say. Although Helga was never religious, marriage for life was an expectation, a dictum of the times. These mental hurdles, rather than any physical obstacle—the bank manager, for instance—proved the most challenging. It was like attempting to undo a knot someone had tied behind your back without you noticing.

“The feminist stuff was quite useful,” Helga explained. “It was bolstering to have those ideas. Walking around the supermarket, I remember buying only mince because I didn’t have any money, and I remember thinking to myself, ‘Yeah, there’ll be a time—because I did have a degree and a library qualification—when I can afford better stuff than this.’ I think it would have been much harder without those ideas.”

Her favourite “feminist” book, Martha Quest by Doris Lessing, tells the story of a girl growing up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and coming to terms with the oppressive social environment women and people of colour face, respectively. At the novel’s end, she convinces herself she is in love and marries, only to be plagued by a feeling that her marriage is doomed. The novelist C. P. Snow praised Martha Quest and called Lessing “one of the most powerfully equipped young novelists now writing.” Perhaps Lessing was so “powerfully equipped” because Martha Quest is based on her own life. In 1943, Lessing left her husband and two children to join a communist group. She married the group’s leader in 1945, and the two shared a child. Four years later, Lessing divorced again, taking her youngest son to London as she pursued her literary career. “Leaving my children—that is something I could never have done,” Helga says.

Helga was participating in a movement but all on her own. The history of feminism in New Zealand is filled with heroic figures like Kate Sheppard and organisations like Broadsheet magazine. But day-to-day, it was driven by women coming to terms with their autonomy and political power within their domestic lives. They were “responding to the zeitgeist.” After Helga’s separation, she recalls several acquaintances calling her and saying, “Psst, how did you do it?” Even Helga’s children at school were peppered with questions: “My parents are getting divorced, your parents are divorced, what’s it like? How does it work?”

We were really quite a pushy lot back then…We were all feeling our way, and nobody knew how to do it. And so we read books

She spent the last years of her marriage in Waimauku, a small village 30 km west of Auckland. The couple knew little about farming, but her husband was a competent woodworker and built furniture, including the seats we sat on now. Their house was initially in Papatoetoe and transported to the small northern village. While the house was being moved, Helga and her husband stayed with her mother in Birkenhead, but they grew tired of living in such cramped quarters and moved out before their new home was ready. “My strongest memory of that is having no boards around the bottom of the house,” Helga said. “Someone was grazing sheep on that [land] at the time, and so we’d be woken up by the sheep in the middle of the night with their coughing and baa’ing, directly underneath us!” Living in Waimauku was often a lonely experience; the isolation of the countryside, coupled with looking after two young children, meant making friends was a challenge. Furthermore, Helga’s library qualification was not being put to use, and the family’s meagre income reflected her childhood in Marton, living with her sister and mother on a widow’s pension.

“Escaped” is the word Helga used to describe her arrival in Auckland, aged seventeen, to study at the University of Auckland. Helga had been to the City of Sails several times before on holidays and to visit her mother’s family in Narrow Neck. The train from Marton to Auckland took over ten hours, passing through Taihape and Taumarunui on the North Island main trunk line. On Christmas Eve 1953, when she was a three-year-old, New Zealand’s worst railway disaster occurred on that same route when an Auckland-bound train plunged into the Whangaehu River, killing 151 of the 285 passengers and crew aboard.

Of course, Helga wasn’t thinking about Christmas Eve, 1953, when she arrived in Auckland in 1967. She was thinking about the future and what she would do now that she had escaped the confines of a small farming community known mainly for its railway junction. “I didn’t know what I was going to do when I went to university, but I got a summer job, perchance, at the medical library at Auckland Hospital. After a summer there, I thought, ‘Oh, this is what I’d like to do!’” The centrepiece of the librarians’ workroom was the Index Medicus, which was published in annual volumes from 1879 to 2004. To find information, librarians had to search for journal articles by keywords, not just in a single copy of the Index Medicus but also in previous years’ editions. “It seemed like a kind of mystery that the qualified librarians could find things out,” Helga said.