Janet Frame's home 56 Eden Street

Janet Frame House
By James Littlewood

There can be a big difference between a house and a home. A house is a structure, a building project, an investment. But a home is a place where life plays out, a place where good meets bad and where mess and tedium compete - moment by moment - with fun and games. Chores, squabbles, meals, sex (maybe in that order): a house may be something you want, or don’t want. But your home, just as it is, wherever and whatever it is, is who you are.

When Janet Frame was six years old she moved with her family from Dunedin to Oamaru. The little house on the big property they bought at 56 Eden Street provided a home for Frame throughout all her school years. In other words, this is the place where one of New Zealand’s greatest novelists learned to read and write.

The writing of Janet Frame can move rapidly - often in a single sentence - from the plainly real to the vividly imagined, and this famously commanding voice gives considerable attention to the house at 56 Eden Street in a widely acclaimed autobiography. And here, in the very building, many of these passages adorn the walls of the rooms they describe:

And coinciding dramatically with our life’s upheaval, some months later there was the Napier earthquake with the news and the description being given full disaster treatment by Mother’s voice as she stood in the light of our new dining room window, in front of the silver-scrolled, brown-polished sewing machine (daring the lightning to strike)... The dining room was the large middle room with the big, rectangular sash window … , the only source of light in the room. In moments of family importance, Mother formed the habit of standing by that window, placing her feelings, like trophies, to be revealed and illuminated. That dining room … was used only on special occasions, for visitors and for feasts like Christmas and the New Year with its first-footing and for the announcement of family and national and world triumphs and disasters.

Janet Frame: To The Is-Land

Lots of people know the sensation of wandering through a big, famous museum and stumbling on a famous artwork you’ve only ever seen in books or postcards. You think of the artist standing before it in another place and time, and you cogitate upon the journeys traversed by both the art work and yourself, journeys that led to this moment in which you and it now stand face to face.

So it is with the Janet Frame house. Not only was it that place she’d written about so honestly and productively. More than that, I found it impossible to be within its walls without an overwhelming and profound sensation that this was a place which had made her, defined her. And also, a place which she survived.

You can marvel at the single (double) bed which she shared with no fewer than three sisters. Or consider the inequity whereby the sole brother had a bed - and a room - to himself. Explore the grounds (which are vast by today’s in-filled standards), gaze up the famous hill, or see if the plum tree overhanging the neighbour’s fence can still be found. You can behold the kitchen table around which so many arguments were held, and where perhaps young Janet completed her homework. She was both a precocious and dedicated student.

And finally, you can sit at Janet Frame’s own personal writing desk, upon which sits her own personal typewriter (she gifted them both back to the museum trust), and at this shrine whereat your pilgrimage has led you, you too can write. For here is the thing that makes poets of even the lousiest tourist: the visitors’ book.

The film "An Angel at My Table" by Director Jane Campion starred Kerry Fox as Janet Frame, with many poignant scenes filmed in a set representative of this pre-war New Zealand family home.

Image Credits: Katie Smith