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missionary. I was told my grandmother used to go door to door to try to persuade the Indian merchant families who had settled there to allow their girls to be educated. I’ve visited the property in Suva where my grandparents lived, a colonial-style house with a white, wooden gate and lush tropical garden. Early photos of my mother suggest she was a true child of the colonial empire – dressed to the nines in frilly, long-sleeved dresses and woollen socks in the tropical heat, posing coyly with her parasol. Like the children of wealthy white families in India at the time, my mother had an ayah or local woman who looked after her as a nanny, and there were probably other servants, too. But her father died suddenly when she was twelve and, immediately, her life changed. She was sent away to New Zealand alone, to board with family friends and be schooled. I imagine she was well looked after, but the sudden losses must have been traumatic, and I doubt she was happy from then on.
    As an adult, my mother always seemed miserable. Now I realize she must have suffered from depression, and she was also highly anxious. She knew she had poor mothering skills (she apologized to me about that a couple of years before she died). To be honest, I always felt she didn’t really like me. And the pervasive envy, bitterness and dismissiveness I felt from her – especially during my teenage years – constituted a deeply painful trauma I have only recently come to understand. It spurred a deep sense of unworthiness, guilt and fury that continues to plague me from time to time . . .
    Tell me more about that . . .
    My parents told me once that I was ‘an experiment’. Bastards. I was always afraid to ask just how far that went. Did they deliberately deprive me of love and comfort to see how I’d turn out? Sometimes it felt that way. They had huge expectations of me, partly because some clipboard-wielding IQ tester had turned up at my kindergarten and pronounced that I was way too smart for Plasticine, paper chains and Snap (I could read when I was three). I was whisked off to a more advanced classroom where all the kids were sprouting pubic hair and talking about dating and periods, which meant that, at seven, I was a social outcast. And even though I was still near the top of my class, my father made it clear that second place was unacceptable. Yeah, I was an experiment, all right; a miserable baby-monster whose classmates didn’t understand that my savage competitive streak was solely in the interests of receiving what every child deserves no matter what their exam results might be – appreciation. How I wish I’d felt loved for who I truly was, not just for what I might achieve.
    I know, I know – complaining about being bright seems like I’m perversely blowing my own trumpet but, as I learned when I was studying psychology, there are many different types of cleverness, and very few of them are teased out in standard IQ tests. I think it’s terrible that we expect everyone to perform the same way in school. Many absolutely brilliant people learn differently from the ‘norm’, but even though we now know more about learning differences than we did in the fifties, we still tend to value people who are, say, good at maths over those who are visually creative. And when it comes to dealing with life, I don’t even think IQ tests relate to success. I, for one, can be remarkably stupid—OMG, there I go again, apologizing for being smart. This has bugged me my whole life. It’s got more than a little to do with being female, but why exactly do I feel the need to beg your forgiveness when a) I’m sure you’re just as smart as me and b) you don’t catch Stephen Hawking saying, ‘OK, I can explain everything about the universe, but please don’t hate me cos in many ways I’m really an idiot’, do you?
    I had kind and helpful teachers at the Boronia Park Primary School but, because I was perceived as ‘brainy’, I was thoroughly