At 13, Eileen was abandoned by her mother, but she would go on to beat the odds

My grandmother’s life changed forever one day when she arrived home from school and found her mother wasn’t there. The man waiting for 13-year-old Eileen when she stepped in the door was her uncle — or so she’d been told.

Eileen Mansfield (far right) in her 80s with (from left) the author’s sister, Madeleine Carlyle; the author, Rose Carlyle; and her brother, David Carlyle, circa 1993.

Born in Wales, Eileen had immigrated with her mother to Greymouth, a town on New Zealand’s South Island, when she was four. Eileen had never known her father and had begun to be sceptical that she could have so many uncles, who kept coming to stay for a few days or weeks and sleeping in her mother’s room.

“Now you’ll get what’s coming to you,” the man said. Or something like that — Eileen could never recall his exact words. What she did remember was that he started to take off his belt. Instinct made her turn and flee.

She ran all the way down the street to the constable’s house. Even at 13, she understood the momentousness of her decision to knock on his door and ask for help. She knew she would never go back home.

And so Eileen was taken into state care. It seems her mother Harriet did not fight this decision. Harriet came to the train station to say goodbye when Eileen was sent away. They never saw each other again.

Eileen Mansfield (left) in 1947 with her husband and three oldest children (from left) Christina (the author’s mother), John and David.

Once, when I was fretting over whether to resign from my work, a friend told me, “Leaving a job is like taking your hand out of a bucket of water.” In other words, my colleagues would barely notice I had gone. Yet there is one job that, if you leave, people will still be talking about in 100 years’ time. That job is motherhood. Harriet didn’t finish the job of raising Eileen, and here in 2024, I am still grappling with the consequences.

Eileen was a bright girl. She had written an essay that so impressed her teachers that they sent it to the local newspaper, and it was published. On the strength of that essay, Eileen was granted entry to high school without being required to sit the usual exams. But the year was 1920, and in those days, state wards were not sent to high school. Eileen was sent to live in the home of a wealthy farming couple in Central Otago – not as their foster child, but as their maid.

Eileen never acquired any further education, never had anything else published, and never held any paid job except as a maid. In her late 30s, she moved to Auckland and met my grandfather, and they soon had twin boys, followed by two girls.

Motherhood was hard back then, especially since my grandfather, a fisherman, was away at sea all week. Eileen didn’t own a car or a fridge, so she had to walk to the shops each day with four preschoolers in tow to buy fresh food. Automatic washing machines hadn’t been invented, and wives living on a fisherman’s wages had to knit and sew their children’s clothes. Life was tough enough for any young woman, and when you add in what we know about intergenerational trauma and the cycle of abuse and neglect, it seems Eileen faced overwhelming odds.

Yet, she was a wonderful mother – cheerful, kind and involved. She carried out her domestic duties to the same high standard she had learnt as a maid working in grand houses. But she wasn’t stiff and formal. She created a real home for her family, cosy and full of love. Eileen had a life outside motherhood, too. She became both secretary and treasurer of the parent-teacher committee of the local primary school. She found time to read all the classics and many other books. When grandchildren came along, she shared her love of literature with us all. For me, her influence was life-changing.

For my 15th birthday, Eileen gave me a hardcover copy of Victor Hugo’s classic, Les Misérables. In the car on the way home, Mum apologised to me for the inappropriate gift, which was more than 1000 pages long: “Nanna meant well. You don’t have to read it.” Mum knew my usual reading fare was teen romance and comic strips.

I kept the book in the car and read it on the way to and from school, until I got to the point where three-year-old Cosette is left in the care of the abusive Monsieur and Madame Thénardier. Unable to wait to find out Cosette’s fate, I read at every chance I got. All too soon, Les Misérables was finished. My appetite for classic literature had been whetted. Soon, I was ploughing through A Tale of Two Cities, followed by War and Peace. Two years later, I enrolled in an English degree. After a few of life’s twists and turns, I became an author myself when The Girl in the Mirror was published in 2020, exactly 100 years after Eileen’s essay.

When I sat down to write No One Will Know, my second novel, I didn’t realise at first that I was writing about my grandmother. My heroine, Eve, was orphaned at a young age and placed in a series of foster homes. Eve finds herself mothering a child without having been mothered herself. At first, she is hopelessly naive, but something changes inside her. No longer content to do what she is told by her domineering employers, she becomes a lioness fighting for the safety of her child.

I often fall into a trance when I’m writing, and I found that Eve was speaking with my grandmother’s voice. Eve was determined to be the best mother she could, despite the odds stacked against her. When a woman raises children without her own mother to guide her, she becomes her family’s “Eve”. Like the biblical figure, she is the origin of everything.

I can’t imagine what a superhuman task it must be to learn to be a mother from scratch. Yet, I know it can be done, because Eileen did it.

No One Will Know (Text Publishing) by Rose Carlyle is out now.

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