Author Barbara Sumner started searching for her mum, Pamela Sumner, at aged 23. Photo / Supplied
Author Barbara Sumner started searching for her mum, Pamela Sumner, at aged 23. Photo / Supplied
In December 1983, 93 people died after two planes collided in heavy fog on the runway in Madrid.
One of the victims was Kiwi Pamela Sumner, 42. She had been living in Spain with her young family but was on her way back to New Zealand to meet the daughter she'd given up for adoption 23 years earlier.
A mother of three in Runanga, a small town on the West Coast, Barbara Sumner had found her mother with only a vague memory to go on.
But their longed-for reunion ended in tragedy. Her connections with her half-siblings and search for her birth father then took her down a remarkable path.
In this extract below from her new book, Tree of Strangers, Sumner details the beginning of her journey, long before she became a writer and award-winning film producer in Auckland.
A memory rose up, precise and whole from nine years' before. Mavis' sister had been a nurse for the doctor who delivered me. She was consoling Mavis at the Formica table in our kitchen. I was fourteen at the time and surly.
Sumner as a child. Photo / Supplied
"What do you expect?" the aunt said, her voice hushed over teacups as I lurked in the hallway. "Her mother was a model. You've heard the stories . . ." She sucked on her cigarette when she saw me.
It was no more than a crumb.
Years later at the Greymouth Library, I took down the Auckland phone book and looked under M for Model. Nothing. But there was a Modelling Society in Wellington.
An extravagant toll call in the calm of early afternoon when the girls were napping and playing.
"Do you know anyone involved in modelling in the late 1950s?" I asked the blithe young woman who answered.
"You better call Maysie," she said. "Maysie Bestall-Cohen. You know."
I didn't know, but Maysie turned out to have been the doyenne of the emerging fashion industry. She sounded kind. The Modelling Society did not get going until the early 1960s, she said. "Write to Jeannie Gandar, she started everything at the Fashion Fiesta in Upper Hutt in 1961. She knew a lot of girls."
I wrote to Jeannie at the Wellington Polytechnic, where she taught clothing design. I included a family studio portrait Bruce had won in a raffle. We were standing together in front of a mottled background, new baby Ruth in my arms. Rachel, the middle one, smiling whimsically, while Bonnie gazed down the lens. With nail scissors I trimmed away Bruce and the girls, until I was alone against the painted backdrop.
Months passed, and I gave up any hope of a reply. After all it was an impossible task. I possessed just two facts about myself: my date of birth and "Her mother was a model".
I had the impression Jeannie was tall, imposing. The kind of woman everyone noticed. She explained she'd taken months to call because she'd been researching. She'd lost touch with Pamela but found Fred, Pamela's father, living in Waikanae. He remembered the name of the doctor in Napier.
When Jeannie was sure, she'd called Pam in Madrid.
Just the word conjured something in me. Madrid. Spain.
The opposite of coal-town Runanga with its shuttered mine, roaming dogs and born-again Christians.
"It's remarkable, spooky even," Jeannie laughed. "You writing to me, and me knowing your mother."
"You know my mother." More wonder than question. My mouth was dry.
"No need for nerves. Write a letter and send a photo."
"To Spain?" The idea of mailing a letter from Runanga to Madrid felt impossible. I took down Pamela's address.
Sumner's mother Pamela. Photo / Supplied
"I'll give your letter time to get there, and call Pam back, see if we can arrange a meeting."
I pressed my forehead to the cold window. Bruce's reading light reflected a bright spot against the native bush that enclosed us. I put down the phone and said nothing.
The bathwater was still hot. I caught my breath as though I was warm and the water cold. My hair floated over the surface and a picture of my mother formed. She would be tall with pale eyes and straight hair that hung thick and glossy, the opposite of my thin plait. I sat up in a rush. I never intended to stay under the water for so long. The stillness induced an amniotic slumber, until a frantic signal from my brain propelled me up, finally desperate for air.
The next morning, with the girls playing, I returned to a version of the letter that began with the wind and the bush.
Outside, in a patch of unexpected sun, I read about our lives.
Desperation soaked into every word. I tore the paper into tiny pieces. The chickens consumed the flakes before they realised it was not an early meal.
The next version was more natural.
Pamela Sumner during her modelling days. Photo / Supplied
My name is Barbara. I may be your daughter. I have three girls. I married young and had a family to keep from killing myself.
We live on the West Coast of New Zealand, in a small cottage. I'm not sure how we ended up here, but it seems to suit us. Bruce, my husband, drives the local bus and makes things from wood, for the tourists who find their way here. He is kind to us. Eking out our lives in the middle of nowhere and he is kind to us. We would love to meet you.
I rewrote the letter in my best handwriting, folded it over another photo and went out to mow the lawn.
What if it was a practical joke? What if Jeannie did not call back? The girls watched from the big window as I forced the push mower through the long wet grass.
It was Jeannie who phoned a few weeks after I'd sent the letter. "She's coming," Jeannie said, her voice full of cigarettes. "Your mother is coming. She's leaving soon. I'll call in a few days with the details."
The next morning I went to the library. I needed to know about the weather in Spain. To picture her there would make it real. In an endless wet summer in Runanga, I wanted to believe in the anointing of sun.
The British newspaper made it clear. Unseasonal fog over Madrid. A kata cold front favouring the development of low stratus clouds. Persisting until dawn.
Sumner as a young mum. Photo / Supplied
I lingered over those words. Our shared weather. I knew fog. Before Runanga, we lived on a side road beside the Grey River. We'd been there a week when the first fog rolled in. Worst in New Zealand, a neighbour said with pride.
The landlord had failed to mention "the barber". A katabatic wind, cold enough to "cut your hair", that invades the Grey Valley most winter mornings.
Tragedy strikes
I could hear the phone as we walked past the pool. The girls wanted to swim again. Anger at Bruce's persistence welled up.
But it was Jeannie. "I found you. Bruce gave me the name of the motel." She sounded as though she had been running.
I laughed. "We decided to come a couple of days early, to be on the safe side, in case the car broke down."
I could hear an echo in my voice. Something was wrong. I wanted to keep talking, to fill up all the gaps so she could not speak. The girls were in the next room, fighting over the towels, and I could hardly hear over their screams.
"Hold on." I closed the door to the bedroom and lay down on the couch and cradled the phone against my ear.
"Let's start again. Hi, Jeannie."
"Bad news."
I remember my fingers spread over my chest. The yelling from the bedroom intensified and then fell silent. My mother had changed her mind. She did not want me after all. I had no right to expect anything else.
Jeannie began to cry. Breathless sobs that drenched the gravel in her voice. I could not understand why she was crying. This was my loss, not hers. My brain switched to organisation mode. The curse of resilience, of glossing over emotion to ensure survival. I was never sure if it was flight or fight. Or perhaps it was freeze mode. The stagnation of all emotion.
"Okay," I said. "Maybe next year. Or the year after. It was probably too quick for her."
"No," Jeannie whispered. "That's not it. Her plane. It was on the news. On the radio. There was fog. On the runway. Her plane was taking off."
Firemen stand near the burned out engine of one of two Spainsh commercial jets which collided head-on in thick fog at Madrid's Barajas airport. Photo / AP
All winds are liars. "There's been a mistake. It must be a mistake," I said. But the weather report I'd read at the Greymouth Library had mentioned unseasonal fog over Madrid. A kata cold front favouring the development of low stratus clouds. Persisting until dawn.
"Her poor girls," Jeannie said.
"What girls?"
I could hear Jeannie's footsteps as she walked away. She blew her nose and came back.
"I'm here," she gulped. "Her daughters. I was going to tell you. They're eleven and fourteen. Oh God, and her husband. That poor man. Those poor girls."
I put down the phone. I had two sisters. My mother's plane had crashed on take-off. People talk about shock as mind-numbing. But an image of a burning aircraft came to me.
The smoke that filled the sky was indistinguishable from the fog, as acrid as burning coal.
Sumner is now an author and filmmaker. Photo / Supplied
I think of loss like the weight of a soul. When you dissolve loss into loss, nothing changes. Colour, texture, smell, everything remains the same. There is nothing to feel.
No sadness, no grief. Everything is a mirage.
At Bethany, the maternity home where I was born, they took the babies from their single mothers right away. Before their mothers laid eyes on them. Before they understood they could see love made flesh in their child's eyes.
Before they could make a fuss. Or scream down the ward.
Although I'm told they often did both as they tried to find their missing babies.
Had my mother died on the day I was born they would have swaddled me in sadness, a child of sorrow and loss.
Comforted by shared grief. But stranger adoption denies you that grief. One set of arms is considered as good as another.
To the baby, there is no such distinction. To me, my mother died on the day I was born. She came alive again for three short days — phone call to phone call. And then she died again. The opposite of Easter.
But even at that point, grief was denied me. I was not one of those "poor girls". I'd never met her, after all. I had no right to my racing heart or the black-filled sky. There was no acceptable place to take my grief. We were strangers created out of stranger adoption.
Barbara Sumner's mother was among 93 passengers and crew who died when two planes collided in thick fog on the runway at the Madrid–Barajas Airport on December 7, 1983.
A newspaper article about the plane crash.
A departing Iberia Boeing 727 bound for Rome's Leonardo da Vinci–Fiumicino Airport, struck an Aviaco McDonnell Douglas DC-9 bound for Spain's Santander Airport.
The New York Times reported at the time that the Iberia jet had been cleared for takeoff and was moving down the runway at 150 miles an hour (241km/h) when it crashed into the Aviaco plane, which had taxied onto the same runway and crossed its path.
Both aircraft caught fire and were destroyed. All 42 people on board the DC-9 were killed, while 51 (50 passengers, one crew member) of the 93 on board the Boeing 727 were killed.
The Boeing had about 40 Japanese on board. Among those killed in the DC-9 were Mexican actress Fanny Cano and South African pianist Marc Raubenheimer.
Sumner's new book, Tree of Strangers
Tree of Strangers By Barbara Sumner Published by Massey Press RRP: $35 Out now
