It is unclear what decision the court in Rotorua came to when it heard the case against Jack Wawatai. Even if Noeleen had been able to prove he was the baby’s father, any maintenance award would have been pitiful given his finances and other responsibilities. The court case only underlined the hopelessness of Noeleen’s predicament. She knew she would eventually be forced to return to Tokomaru Bay and her mother. Yet she also knew that Thelma’s hostility towards her – and the child of an adulterous affair with a Maori man – would be hard to bear.
A few weeks after baby Claire’s birth, Noeleen – perhaps influenced by her friendship with Kura Beale – decided to put her up for adoption and headed back up to Tokomaru Bay where she picked up her life with her mother and her son Jimmy. There she maintained a steadfast silence about the dramas of that year for the rest of her life.
Within weeks of Noeleen Rawstron’s departure back to Tokomaru Bay, a member of Gisborne’s social services staff took baby Claire to a house at 161 Grey Street, a short walk from the ocean. There the social worker introduced her to a Maori, Atama ‘Tom’ Te Kanawa, and his wife Nell.
The middle-aged couple had been married for four years. While Tom ran a successful trucking company, Nell was in the process of completing the purchase of the Grey Street property which she was already running as a thriving boarding house.
Approaching her forty-seventh birthday, Nell, the mother of two children from a previous marriage, was now too old to bear Tom a child. The couple had decided to adopt instead. According to their own account, passed on to their daughter later, Tom Te Kanawa was particularly keen to adopt a boy and rejected Claire on first meeting her. Unable to find another home for the baby, however, the social worker persisted. When Claire was taken to Grey Street for a second time Tom had been smitten by the dusky-skinned little girl with huge limpid eyes. He and Nell agreed to adopt her as their daughter.
As the legal formalities were completed Tom and Nell were asked to choose the child’s new name. Nell had agreed with Tom’s idea of calling the little girl Kiri, after Tom’s father, a Maori name meaning ‘bell’ or ‘skin of the tree’, depending on the dialect. For her other names they chose Jeanette, one of Nell’s own middle names, and Claire, the only name they had heard the social workers use when referring to the child. For decades to come, the name her birth mother had chosen for her would remain Kiri Jeanette Claire Te Kanawa’s sole link with her troubled past.
As she handed her baby over to the town’s social services, Noeleen Rawstron had accepted that she could have no say in choosing the family who would become Claire’s parents. As she dwelled on her daughter’s fate back in Tokomaru Bay, she would have hoped for a life filled with love and security. On a deeper level, her instincts may have wished for a home and a family background that fitted the little girl’s own complex beginnings. In time Noeleen would come to discover the identity of the couple who had taken her daughter in, but she would never appreciate quite how alike Claire’s real and adopted parents were.
In the course of a colourful and eventful life, the redoubtable Mrs Tom Te Kanawa had found herself addressed by any number of names, not all of them charitable. At birth on 14 October 1897, she had been christened Hellena Janet Leece. Since then she had been addressed at different times, and with varying degrees of happiness, as Mrs Alfred John Green and Mrs Stephen Whitehead. In electoral and postal directories around the North and South Islands of New Zealand, her unusual Christian name had been rearranged as Ellenor, Eleanor and even Heleanor. It was little wonder she insisted new friends simply call her Nell. To her family and the boarders she took in at her guest house there was little cause for confusion, however. To them she was The Boss – and she always would be.
A boisterous, ruddy-cheeked woman with a heart – and a temper – to match her oversized frame, Nell Te Kanawa cast her considerable shadow over every aspect of life at the house that became baby Claire Rawstron’s new home. During the formative years of her new daughter’s life she would be its dominant – and at times overwhelmingly domineering – force. She would not thank her for it until later in life. Yet without The Boss, it is unlikely Kiri Te Kanawa would have left the town of Gisborne, let alone the North Island of New Zealand.
Like Thelma and Noeleen Rawstron, Nell Te Kanawa had endured a life of early hardship. She was born in the gold-mining town of Waihi in the Bay of Plenty. Nell’s mother, Emily Leece, née Sullivan, was the daugter of a miner, Jeremiah Sullivan. She was one of fifteen children Emily bore with her husband, another miner, John Alfred Leece, originally from Rushen on the Isle of Man. Like many men of his generation, John Leece dreamt of making a fortune at Australasia’s largest gold mine. Instead, however, his life seems to have disintegrated there. It is unclear whether Emily Leece was widowed or divorced her husband. What is certain is that when Hellena was a teenager her mother uprooted the family to the town of Nelson, at the northerly tip of the South Island, where she set up a new life without John Leece.
‘Nell’, as everyone called Hellena, was less than lucky in her own relationships with men. It was certainly not for the lack of trying.
She had wasted little time in finding a husband. She had been just eighteen when she married Alfred John Green, a twenty-year-old labourer from Hobart. Nell had been employed as a factory worker in the town and living with her mother, now re-married to a Nelson labourer called William John Staines. Emily and her new husband were the witnesses at the wedding, held at the town’s Catholic Church on Manuka Street on Monday, 1 November 1915.
Within four years, the Greens had two children; Stan, born in 1916, and Nola, born three years later. Around the time of Nola’s arrival in the world the family moved to a farm in the remote community of Waimangaroa, outside Westport on the stormy west coast of the South Island where Nell’s parents had been married. Life on the land seems to have proven too hard and soon the family were living in the tiny village of Denniston, where Alfred had found work as a carpenter. The move was no less of a failure. With Stan and Nola, Nell left her husband and Denniston for Gisborne on the East Cape of the North Island. She and Alfred Green were divorced in October 1933.
The divorce inspired a new energy in Nell’s life. In the years that followed, she often proclaimed that she had arrived in Gisborne with nothing but ‘two suitcases and two kids’. With the determination that would characterise her later years, she began the process of building a more secure life for herself and her family.
With Stan and Nola and a relation of her mother’s, Irene Beatrice Staines, she moved into a large boarding house at 161 Grey Street. It was while lodging here that, according to some, Nell began performing illegal abortions. Her services were much in demand in the busy coastal town where too many young women found themselves compromised by visiting sailors and other transient workers. As discreet as she was efficient, she apparently found much of her custom within members of the Gisborne’s growing Greek and Italian immigrant population.
Nell had soon found herself a new husband too. Around the time her first marriage was dissolved she met Stephen Whitehead, a forty-eight-year-old widower from Gisborne. Nell and Whitehead, a bicycle dealer and mechanic, were married at the registrar’s office in Gisborne on 8 August 1935. The marriage proved childless, short-lived and somewhat scandalous. It was Kiri herself who later suggested Nell’s second marriage had left her in disgrace, both with her family and the Catholic Church. ‘There had even been talk of excommunication,’ she remembered. If the exact details of Nell’s shame are