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Black Beech and Honeydew
Ngaio Marsh


A series of Ngaio Marsh editions concludes with an edition of her autobiography.With all the insight and style her readers came to expect of her, Ngaio Marsh's autobiography captures all the joys, fears and hopes of a spirited young woman growing up in Christchurch, and charts her theatre and writing careers both in New Zealand and the UK. This sanguine, unpretentious and revealing book has been acclaimed for telling her most distinguished mystery - who was Ngaio Marsh?








The Ngaio Marsh Collection




Black Beech and Honeydew

Ngaio Marsh












In remembrance of my mother




Table of Contents


Cover Page (#uaa70476f-1a07-5d9a-a2f2-6521a2e3fd00)

Title Page (#u1111b694-bd1d-5348-a098-749f3cef7c1f)

Dedication (#u5b6d5804-eaab-55e7-a6d7-149fffef08e4)

CHAPTER 1 ‘All Kind Friends and Relations’ (#u16862342-1bde-5bf8-94b8-6c8d7e6d35ad)

CHAPTER 2 The Hills (#ue5b86749-c00c-571e-9f16-1be3fe5325ef)

CHAPTER 3 School (#u652a9056-8729-5902-b58b-e438415b643d)

CHAPTER 4 Mountains (#uc3ef97e5-dda5-55c1-bef2-6e3ea9c0aa29)

CHAPTER 5 The Coast (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 6 Winter of Content (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 7 Enter the Lampreys (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 8 Northwards (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 9 Turning Point (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 10 New Ways (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 11 Exercise Heartbreak and Recovery (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 12 Second Wind (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER 13 A Last Look Back (#litres_trial_promo)

Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)

By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)





CHAPTER 1 ‘All Kind Friends and Relations’ (#ulink_ddef8fea-51a7-5f4b-bff5-2ffd4bb79923)


In 1912, on a midsummer morning in the foothills of the Southern Alps, I experienced a moment of absolute happiness: bliss, you might call it, only I don’t want to kill the recollection with high words.

Whenever I travel backwards, as of course one inclines to do as one grows older, it is at this point that I find an accent, a kind of halt, as emphatic as one of those little stations that interrupt the perspective of railway lines across the Canterbury Plains in New Zealand. I am almost afraid to stop there because, as everybody knows, one may return too often to past delights; to the smell of a book, of a crushed geranium leaf, of a box-tree hedge, hot with sunshine: or of honeydew in summertime.

This was a morning that would soon grow very warm. At that early hour – about half-past six – one could already smell the honeydew. It is exuded by a tiny insect and sweats in transparent globules through a black, mossy parasite that covers the trunks of native beech trees in New Zealand. Chip-dry twigs snapped under my feet. Bellbirds, exactly named, absent-mindedly prolonging their dawn-song, tinkled in the darker reaches of the bush. From our hidden tents, the smell of woodsmoke and frying bacon drifted through the trees. Someone climbed down to the river for water and a bucket clanked pleasantly. I came to a halt and there at once was the voice of the river filling the air in everlasting colloquy with its own wet stones.

It was then abruptly that I was flooded by happiness. In an agony of gratitude, I flung my arms round the nearest honeyed tree and hugged it. I was fourteen years old.

An impressionable age, of course, but, if this was a moment of typical adolescent rapture, I can only say that for me it was unique. One anticipates or remembers happiness; one feels but does not define, responds but does not pause to say, of the present delighted moment: ‘How astonishing! I am perfectly happy.’

I have recorded this sensation because I recognized it when it happened. For that reason it might be said to have been a moment of truth. With this trip to an isolated station I move down the parallel lines of my backward journey until they meet at the point where remembrance seems to begin.

In the first decade of this century, Fendalton was a small, genteel suburb on the outskirts of Christchurch in the South Island of New Zealand. Large Edwardian houses stood back in their own grounds masked by English trees. Small houses hid with refinement behind high evergreen fences. Ours was a small house. There was a lawn in front and an orchard behind. To me they were extensive but I don’t suppose they amounted to more than a quarter of an acre. I remember the trees: a pink-flowering, glossy, sticky-leafed shrub that overhung the garden gate, a monkey-puzzle which I disliked and a giant (or again so it seemed to me) wellingtonia that I was able to climb. From its branches I looked south across rooftops and gardens to a plantation of oaks with a river flowing through it where we kept our rowing-boat. Behind that was Hagley Park with a lake, sheep and playing fields, then the spire of Christchurch Cathedral and in the far distance, the Port Hills. I might have been an English child looking across a small provincial city except that when I turned to the north, there, on a clear day, forty miles across the plains, shone a great mountain range.

Outside my bedroom window stood a lilac bush, a snowball tree and a swing. In the orchard I remember only a golden pippin, currant bushes, a throbbing artesian well, hens and a rubbish heap. The rubbish heap is appallingly clear because in it one afternoon, when I was about six years old, I buried a comic song which I had previously stolen from the drawing room and torn to pieces. It was called ‘Villikins and His Dinah’ and the last line was ‘a cup of cold poison lay there by her side’. My father, who had an offhand, amused talent in such matters, used to sing this song in Dickensian cockney with mock heroics and whenever he did so struck terror to my heart. The paper-chase fragments of this composition must have been found, I think, that same evening. I remember my mother’s very beautiful troubled face and her saying rather despairingly, ‘But why? Why did you?’ I must have shown, or tried to express, my fear because I was not in deep disgrace and only had to say I was sorry to my father and promise to tell my mother about things that frightened me. In the end, but it seems to me it must have been a long time afterwards, I did manage to tell her of my terror of poison and how, without believing them, I constantly made up fantasies about it being spread like invisible butter on handtowels or inserted slyly into the porridge one was made to eat for breakfast.

‘But do you think I put it there?’ asked my gentle mother.

‘Not truly,’ I wept. ‘Not really and truly.’

With her arm sheltering me, she said profoundly, to herself, not to me: ‘It must have been The Fool’s Paradise.’

This, I should explain, was a play. Was it by Sutro or perhaps a translation from Sardou? My parents, who were gifted amateurs, had recently played in the piece and had, I imagine, rehearsed their scenes together in my hearing, never supposing that I understood a word of them. The theme was that of a femme fatale who slowly poisoned her husband and was suspected and finally accused of her crime by the family doctor. I have no idea whether it ended in her arrest or suicide but rather think the latter. I am sure my mother was right and that it was this highly coloured drama that engendered the terror which obsessed me, in the validity of which I did not believe and which took so long to evaporate. To this day, on the rare occasions that I use poison in a detective story, I am visited by a ludicrous aftertaste of my childish horrors.

It may be seen from this episode that I supported the theme, so indefatigably explored by psycho-novelists, of the anguish of the only child. I was, I am afraid, a morbid little creature.

For all this, there were raptures, delights and cosy satisfactions.

Here are my parents, standing before the range in an old-fashioned colonial kitchen. My father, an amateur carpenter, has been building a boat. He carries his pipe in his hand and wears a red tam-o’-shanter on his head. His arm is round my mother. They are smiling at me. I am in a sort of fenced baby swing that has been slung from the ceiling. I swoop towards them and my father says delightfully, ‘We don’t want you.’ He gives me a shove and I am swung away from them, shouting with laughter. He has me on his shoulders. The doors have been shut and we are in a dark passage but perfectly secure. He gives a leap and we are in the roof. He is talking to the friendly house-pixies who reply in falsetto voices. Do I know that it’s an act? I think I do, but am enchanted all the same. He tells me, for the hundredth time, his original story of Maria and John who bought a piglet called Grunter which, in trickery, was replaced by a terrier pup. If he changes a word I correct him. He tries Alice in Wonderland but is too dramatic with ‘Off With Her Head’ and frightens me. He reads Pickwick Papers and The Ingoldsby Legends. I am enraptured, particularly with Mr Winkle with whom, for some reason, I feel I have much in common: timidity perhaps. Even the discovery, when I look into the book myself, of the awful picture of a dying clown in a four-poster, although it appals me, doesn’t put me off Pickwick Papers. Worse than this is the cut of the Dead Drummer in Ingoldsby. The book is in our Edwardian drawing room, a tiny peacock-blue and white place. I sneak in there, and for the sheer compulsive horror of it, turn the pages until the ghastly lamps of the dead drummer’s eyes are turned up at me. Further on and still worse is the Nun of Netley Abbey being walled up by smug-faced monks. Yet neither of these diminishes my relish of the Witches Frolic, of the macabre, the really ghastly, but strangely enjoyable reiterations of ‘The Hand of Glory’ or the rollicking wholesale slaughters of Sir Ingoldsby Bray. I am enchanted by the legend of The Leech of Folkestone and gratified when my father points out that the description of Thomas Marsh’s Arms correspond with our own. These, with the Teutonic brutalities of the brothers Grimm, leave me engaged but unmoved – yet a story of Hans Andersen is so dreadful that even now I don’t enjoy recalling it. Who can tell what will frighten or delight a child, or why?




II


It seems to me now that in those early days my father was a kind of a treat: that I enjoyed him enormously without being involved with him. It was my mother who had the common but appalling task of ‘bringing me up’ and who had to steer an uncharted course between the nervous illogic of a delicate child, prone to fear, and the cunning obstinacy of a little girl determined to give battle in matters of discipline. Here she is, suddenly, running in a preoccupied manner across the lawn from the garden gate where she has said goodbye to a caller. She runs with a graceful loping stride, unhampered by her long skirt: brown stuff with brown velvet endorsements. I watch her from the dining-room window and twiddle the acorn end of the blind cord. She looks up and sees me and a smile, immensely vulnerable, breaks over her face. How dreadfully easy it is to love and hurt her. I adored, defied and finally obeyed my mother and believed that she understood me better than anyone else in my small world.

It was a very small world indeed: a nurse called Alice, whom I don’t remember and who must have left me when I was still a baby, a maid called May who had a round red face and was considered a comic, my maternal grandparents, my parents and their circle of friends. A cat called Susie and a spaniel called Tip.

Quite early in the day I learned to laugh at my father: not unkindly but because it was impossible to know him well and not to think him funny. He thought himself funny when his oddities were pointed out to him. ‘I didn’t!’ he would say to my mother. ‘How you exaggerate! I did not, Betsy.’ And break out laughing. It was, in fact, impossible to exaggerate his absent-mindedness or the strange fantasies that accompanied this comic-opera trait in his character.

‘My saddle-tweed trousers have gone!’ he announced, making a dramatic entrance upon my mother and a luncheon guest.

‘They can’t have gone.’

‘Completely. You go and look. Gone! That’s all.’

‘How can they have gone?’

My father made mysterious movements of his head in the direction of the dining room and May.

‘Taken them to give that chap,’ he whispered. May had a follower.

‘Oh, no, Lally. Nonsense.’

‘All right! Where are they? Where are they?’

‘You haven’t looked properly.’

He stared darkly at her and retired. Doors and drawers could be heard angrily banging. Oaths were shouted.

‘Are they gone, do you suppose?’ asked our visitor who was a close friend.

‘No,’ said my mother composedly.

My father returned in furious triumph. ‘Well,’ he sneered, ‘that’s that. That’s the end of my saddle-tweed trousers.’ He laughed shortly. ‘You won’t get cloth like that in New Zealand.’

‘They must be somewhere.’

He stamped. His eyes flashed. ‘They are not somewhere,’ he shouted. ‘That damn’ girl’s stolen them.’

‘Ssh!’

My father’s nostrils flared. He opened his mouth.

‘What are those things on your legs, my dear chap?’ asked our guest.

My father looked at his legs. ‘Good Lord!’ he said mildly, ‘so they are.’

Early one morning he met Susie, our cat, walking in the garden. He carried her to my mother who was not yet up.

‘Look, Betsy,’ he said. ‘I found this cat walking in the garden. Isn’t she like Susie?’

‘She is Susie,’ said my mother.

‘I thought you’d say that,’ he rejoined, delightedly. Susie purred and rubbed her face against his. ‘She’s awfully tame. You’d think she knew me, wouldn’t you?’ asked my father.

‘It is Susie,’ said my mother on a hysterical note.

He smiled kindly at her and put Susie down. ‘Run along, old girl,’ he said. ‘Go home to your master.’

My mother was now laughing uncontrollably.

‘Don’t be an ass, Betsy,’ said my father gently and left her.

It must not be supposed that he was an unintelligent man. He was widely read, particularly in biology and the natural sciences, was an enthusiastic rationalist and a member of the Philosophical Society. He was also an avid reader of fiction. Of the Victorians, he most enjoyed Dickens and Scott. My mother disliked Scott because of his historical inaccuracies and bias. None of his novels was in the house. She deeply admired Hardy and once told me that after reading the end of Tess, she sat up all night, imprisoned in distress and unable to free herself. In later years we all three read and discussed the Georgian novelists. My mother’s favourites were Galsworthy (with reservations: she thought Irene a stuffed dummy) and Conrad. Almayer’s Folly she read over and over again. Somehow her copy of this novel has been lost. I would like to discover why it so held her. My father’s favourite was Aldous Huxley though he often remarked that the chap was revolting for the sake of being revolting and that Point Counter Point gained nothing by its elaborate form. He was more gregarious in his reading than my mother and would sometimes devour a ‘shilling shocker’. His hand trembled and his pipe jigged between his teeth as he approached the climax. ‘Frightful rot!’ he would say. ‘Good Lord! Regular Guy Boothby stuff,’ and greedily press on with it.

When I was about four years old, I was given a miniature armchair made of wicker and a children’s annual. I remember dragging the chair on to the lawn, seating myself, opening the book and thinking furiously, ‘I will read. I will read.’ After some boring, but I fancy, brief, struggles with The Dog Has Got a Bone and a beastly poem about reindeer, I went forward under my own steam and became an avid bookworm.

My parents never stopped me reading a book though I believe my mother was at pains to see that nothing grossly ‘unsuitable’ was left in my way. The criterion was style: ‘He could write well,’ my mother said of the forgotten William J. Locke, ‘but he pot-boils. Very second-rate.’ I became something of an infant snob about books, and, like my father, felt a bit below par when I read Chums and Buffalo Bill, but continued, at intervals, to do so.

My father was English and my mother a New Zealander. She was the one, however, who doggedly determined that I should not acquire the accent. ‘The cat,’ I was obliged interminably to repeat, ‘sat on the mat and the mouse ran across the barn.’ ‘The cart,’ my father would interrupt in a falsetto voice, ‘sart on the mart arnd the moose rarn across the bawn.’ I thought this excruciatingly witty and so did my mother but by these means the accent was held at bay.

In spite of his anti-religious views my father can have made no objection to my being taken to our parish church or taught to say my prayers. These I found enjoyable. ‘Jesustender. Shepherdhearme.’ ‘Our Fatherchart’ and a monotonous exercise beginning ‘God bless Mummy and Daddy and All Kind Friends and Relations. God bless Gram and Gramp and – ’ It was prolonged for as long as my mother could take it. ‘Susie – and Tip – ’ I would drone, desperate for more objects of beatitude to fend off the moment when I would be left to set out upon the strange journeys of the night. These were formidable and sometimes appalling. There was one uncouth and recurrent dream in which everything Became Too Big. It might start with one’s fingers rubbing gigantically together and with a sickening threepenny piece that swelled horrifically between forefinger and thumb. Then everything swelled to become stifling and I awoke sobbing in my mother’s embrace. With a strangely logical determination, I learned to recognize this nightmare while I was experiencing it and trained my sleeping self to force the strangulated dream-scream that would deliver me.

‘I know,’ my father said. ‘I used to have it. Beastly, isn’t it, but only a dream. One grows out of it.’

My cot with its wooden spindle sides was brought into my parents’ room. In it, on more propitious nights, I sailed and flew immense distances into slowly revolving lights, rainbow chasms and mountainous realms of incomprehensible significance, through which my father’s snores surged and receded. Asleep and yet not asleep, I made these nightly journeys: acquiescent, vulnerable, filled with a kind of wonder.

There were day dreams, too, some of them of comparable terror and wonder, others cosy and familiar. I cannot remember a time when I was not visited occasionally, and always when I least expected it, by an experience which still recurs with, if anything, increasing poignancy. It is a common experience and for all I know there may be a common scientific explanation of it. It comes suddenly with an air of truth so absolute that one feels all other times must be illusion. It is not a sensation but a confrontation with duality. One moves outside oneself and sees oneself as a complete stranger and this is always a shock and an astonishment although one recognizes the moment and can think: ‘Here we go again. This is it.’ It is not self-hypnotism, because there is no loss of awareness as far as everyday surroundings are concerned: only the removal of oneself from the self who observes them and the overwhelming sensation of strangeness. It seems that if one held on to this moment and extended it one would make an enormous discovery but, for me, at least, this is impossible and I always return. Is this, I wonder, what was meant originally by being ‘beside oneself’. It is an odd phenomenon and as a child I grew quite familiar with it.

My grandmother considered that my religious observances were inadequate. When she came to stay with us she brought a Victorian manual which had been the basis of my mother’s and aunts’ and uncles’ dogmatic instruction. It was called Line Upon Line and was in the form of dialogue, like the catechism: Q. and A.

‘“Who,”’ asked my grandmother, beginning at the beginning, ‘“is God?”’

I shook my head.

‘“God,”’ said my grandmother, taking both parts, ‘“is a Spirit.”’

Reminded of the little blue methylated flame on the tea tray I asked: ‘Can you boil a kekkle on Him, Gram?’

She turned without loss of poise to Bible Stories: to Balaam and his ass. I suggested cooperatively that this was probably a circus donkey. My father was enchanted.

My grandmother told my mother that it was perhaps rather too soon to begin religious instruction and, instead, read me the Peter Pan bits out of The Little White Bird.

When I was about twelve my father brought home the collected works of Henry Fielding. ‘Jolly good stuff,’ he said. ‘You’d better read it.’

I began with the plays and was at once nonplussed by many words. ‘What is a “wor"?’ I asked my father who said I knew very well what a war was and mentioned South Africa. ‘This is spelt differently,’ I said, nettled. ‘It seems to be some sort of girl.’ My father quickly said it was a ‘fast’ sort of girl. This was good enough. I had heard girls stigmatized as being ‘fast’ and certainly these ladies of Fielding’s seemed to behave with a certain incomprehensible alacrity. My father suggested that I try Tom Jones. I did so: I read it all and also, since Smollett turned up at this juncture, Roderick Random. It bothered me that I could not greatly enjoy these works since David Copperfield, whom I adored, had at my age or earlier, relished them extremely. I, on the contrary, still doted upon Little Lord Fauntleroy.

We were, as I now realize, hard up. On both sides I came from what Rose Macaulay called ‘have-not’ families. My father was the eldest of ten. When he was still a schoolboy his own father (the youngest of three) died, leaving his widow in what were called reduced circumstances. He was a tea broker in the days of the clippers. This was considered OK socially for a younger son but then ‘an upstart called Thomas Lipton’ came along with his common retail packets and instead of following suit like a sensible man and going into ‘trade’ my grandfather remained genteelly aloof and his affairs went into a decline. His elder brother, William, was in the Colonial Service and became a Vice Admiral and Administrator of Hong Kong. Upon him, a childless man, the hopes of my grandmother depended.

Having begun in a prep school at Harrow and been destined, I suppose, for the public school, my father declined, with the family fortune, upon a number of private establishments but finally was sent to Dulwich College. He used to tell me how it was founded in Elizabethan times by a wonderful actor called Alleyn. The name stuck in my memory. My grandmother had inherited a small Georgian house near Epping and there she coped vaguely with her turbulent sons and three docile daughters with whose French governess one of my great-uncles soon eloped. This was Uncle Julius, a ‘wag’ as his contemporaries would have said and an original: much admired by his nephews, especially by my father. His wife had a markedly Gallic disposition, according to her legend, and unfortunately went mad in later life and used to send flamboyant Christmas cards to my father addressed to H. E. Marsh Esq., General Manager, The Bank of New Zealand, New Zealand. This, as will appear, was a gross overstatement. My father, who had a deep and passionate love of field sports, used to poach with his Uncle Julius on the game preserves of his more richly possessed second cousin. I still have the airgun he bought for this purpose. It is made to resemble a walking-stick. Perhaps his propensity for firearms led him into joining the Volunteers who preceded the New Zealand Army. Before he married he had already received a commission from Queen Victoria in which he was referred to as her ‘trusty and well-beloved Henry Edmund’. He continued with his martial activities until the Volunteers dissolved into a less picturesque organization. I used to think he looked perfectly splendid in his uniform.

The family is supposed to derive from the reprobate de Mariscos of Lundy. Whether this is really so or not, the legend is firmly implanted in all our bosoms. When, as a girl, I read of Geoffrey de Marisco who had the effrontery to stab a priest in the presence of the King, I asked myself if my father’s anticlerical bias was perhaps hereditary. By the reign of Charles II we are on firm historical ground for there is Richard Stephen Marsh, an Esquire of the Bedchamber, a direct forebear and almost the only really interesting character, apart from the de Mariscos, that the family has thrown up. He concerned himself with the trials and misfortunes of Fox, the Quaker, and actually persuaded the King so far out of his chronic lethargy as to intercede very mercifully between Fox and his savage persecutors. It is a curious and all too scantily documented affair. Apparently not only Esquire Marsh, as he is invariably called, but Charles himself responded to the extraordinary personality of this intractable Quaker. Although Marsh died an Anglican and an incumbent of the Tower (or should it be ‘Constable’) there seems to have been some sort of Foxian hangover because his descendants became Quakers and remained so until my great-great-grandfather married out of the Society of Friends and returned to the Church of England. My father was never rude about the Society of Friends.

In Uncle William’s day, the Governor of Hong Kong – a Pope-Hennessey – was often absent and twice, for long stretches, Uncle William was called upon to administer the government of the Colony. Yellowing photographs portray him in knickerbockers and sola topee, seated rather balefully under a marquee among ADCs in teapot attitudes and ladies with croquet mallets. One of his nieces (’Imported,’ my father used to say, ‘for the purpose.’) was married to Thomas Jackson, the founder of the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank. (’Good Lord! They’ve stuck up a statue to Tom Jackson!’)

These connections were supposed to settle my father’s future. On leaving school he was sent to learn Chinese at London University and banking at the London office of the Hong Kong-Shanghai. From here, aided perhaps by nepotic shoves, he was to mount rapidly into the upper reaches of Head Office. Instead, he went, as the saying then was, into a consumption and was sent to South Africa where, after a stay on the bracing veldt, he came out of it again. What was to be done with him?

Uncle William, now in retirement, visited New Zealand where his brother-in-law had founded the Colonial Bank. Indefatigable in good works, he sent for my father. The pattern was to be repeated in a more favourable climate. No sooner were my father’s feet planted on the ladder than, owing to political machinations, the Colonial Bank broke. Uncle William returned to England. My father got a clerkship in the Bank of New Zealand and there remained until he retired. I can imagine nobody less naturally suited to his employment. He might have been a good man of science where absence-of-mind is tolerantly regarded: in a bank clerk it is a grave handicap. When I was about ten years old, very large sums of money were stolen from my father’s desk and from that of his next-door associate. I can remember all too vividly the night he came home with this frightful news. Sensible of my parents’ utter misery I tried to cheer them up by playing ‘Nights of Gladness’ very slowly with the soft pedal down. I was not musical and in any case it is a rollicking waltz.

It was an inside job and the thief was generally known but there was not enough evidence to bring him to book and the responsibility was my father’s. Uncle William, always helpful, died at this juncture and left him a legacy from which he was able to replace the loss. The amount that remained was frivolously invested for him in England and also lost. He was a have-not.

His rectitude was enormous: I have never known a man with higher principles. He was thrifty. He was devastatingly truthful. In many ways he was wise and he had a kind heart, and a nice sense of humour. He was never unhappy for long: perhaps, in his absent-mindedness, he forgot to be so. I liked him very much.




III


My mother’s maiden name was Rose Elizabeth Seager. Her paternal grandfather was completely ruined by the economic disturbances that followed the emancipation of slaves in the West Indies. As the Society of Friends was in a considerable measure responsible for this admirable reform, it is not too fanciful, perhaps, to suggest that one great-grandfather may have had a share in the other’s undoing. There is a parallel in the later history of the two families. Among the Seagers also, there appears briefly an affluent and unencumbered uncle to whom my great-grandfather was heir. The story was that this uncle took his now impoverished nephew to Scotland to see the estates he would inherit and on the return journey died intestate in the family chaise. His fortune was thrown into Chancery and my great-grandfather upon the world. He got some extremely humble job in the Middle Temple and my grandfather went to the choir school of the Temple Church. None of the family fortunes was ever recovered.

These misadventures sound like the routine opening of a dated and unconvincing romance and I think were so regarded by my mother and her brothers and sisters. Perhaps they grew tired of hearing their father talk about the fortune lost in Chancery and more than a little sceptical of its existence. Indeed stories of ‘riches held in Chancery’ have a suspect glint over them, as if the narrator had looked once too often into Bleak House. Moreover, my grandfather – Gramp – had a reputation for embroidery. He was of a romantic turn, and extremely inventive and he had a robust taste in dramatic narrative. The story of the lost fortune was held to be one of Gramp’s less successful excursions into fantasy and his virtuoso performance of running back at speed through his high-sounding ancestry to the Conquest was tolerated rather than revered.

He died when I was about eighteen. My mother and aunts went through his few possessions and discovered a trunkful of letters which turned out to be a correspondence between his own father and a firm of London solicitors. They were chronologically assembled. The earlier ones began with references to ancient lineage and ended with elaborate compliments. The tone grew progressively colder and the last letter was short.

‘Dear Sir: We are in receipt of your latest communication which we find impertinent and hostile. We have the honour to be your obedient servants…’

They were all about estates in Scotland, a death in a family chaise and monies in Chancery. The sums mentioned were shatteringly large.

Even then my mother was incredulous and I think would have remained so had not she and I, sometime afterwards, gone to stay with friends in Dunedin. Our host was another victim of the courts of Chancery and, like my great-grandfather, had written to his family solicitors in England to know if there was the smallest chance of recovery. They had replied extremely firmly that there was none but, for his information, had enclosed a list of the principal – is the word heirs? – to monies in Chancery. There, almost at the top of the list, which was a little out of date, was Gramp. For once, he had not exaggerated.

He had come as a youth to the province of Canterbury in New Zealand in the early days of its settlement. He too was a ‘have-not’ and also a spendthrift but he enjoyed life immensely. He met my grandmother – Gram – in Christchurch. They went for their honeymoon in a bullock wagon. Canterbury in the 1850s was still a swamp.

One of my grandfather’s acquaintances of the early days was Samuel Butler who had taken up sheep-country in a mountainous region which is now sometimes called after his Utopian romance – Erewhon. ‘Odd chap, Sam Butler,’ Gramp used to say and then he would tell us of the occasion when he went to stay with Butler who met him at the railhead somewhere out on the Canterbury Plains and drove him over many miles of very rough country, through water-races and a dangerous river up into Mesopotamia which is the true name of this part of the Alps.

While Gramp was staying there, Butler received a letter from an acquaintance, inviting himself as a guest. Butler took this in very bad part and did nothing but grumble. He would not allow Gramp to relieve him of the long and tedious journey to the rendezvous but settled angrily on their both going. Hour after hour their gig bumped and jolted over pleistocene inequalities. When they achieved the railhead and the train arrived with the self-invited guest, Gramp proposed to transfer to the backward-looking rear seat of the gig.

‘No you don’t, Seager!’ Butler shouted, irritably slamming his guest’s valise under the seat. ‘Stay where you are, God damn it.’ His wretched guest climbed up behind.

They set off for Mesopotamia. Butler became excited by some topic and talked and drove vigorously. He touched up the mare and they staggered through a watercourse at an inappropriate pace and drove rapidly on over Turk’s heads and boulders. My grandfather felt sorry for the guest. He turned to include him in the conversation and found that he was no longer there.

‘Butler – your visitor! He has fallen off. That last water-race-’

Butler broke out in a stream of vituperation, and could scarcely be persuaded to turn back. He did so, however, and presently they met the guest, wet and bruised and plodding desperately towards the Southern Alps. Butler abused him like a pickpocket and could scarcely wait for him to climb back on his perch.

Like all Gramp’s stories this should, I suppose, be taken with a pinch of salt but he used to laugh so heartily when he told it and stick so closely to the one version that I feel it must have been, like the blue blood and monies in Chancery, substantially true.

Of Gram’s family I know next to nothing except that they lived in Gloucestershire and that her great-grandparents were friends of Dr Edward Jenner. Gram’s great-grandmother kept a journal which a century after it was written Gram showed to my mother. It set out how Dr Jenner became interested in the West Country belief that persons who had had cowpox never developed smallpox and he asked my great-to-the-fourth-power grandmother if she would have a record kept of her own dairymaid’s health. She became as interested as he and the journal was full of his theories. Finally, between them, they persuaded a dairymaid called Sarah Nelmes to let Dr Jenner take lymph from a cow poxvesicle on her finger. With this, on 14th May, 1775, he vaccinated a boy called Phipps and from then onwards his advances were excitedly recorded by his friends. My mother did not know what became of her great-great-grandmother’s journal and indeed the only other piece of information she had about Gram’s people was that some of them are buried in Gloucester Cathedral where she looked them up when she was in England. Gram was rather austere and extremely conventional but she had a twinkle.

On Gramp’s immigration papers he appeared as a ‘schoolmaster’ but never practised as one. Instead, he gave his romantic streak full play. He joined the newly formed police force, took a hand in designing a dashing uniform which he wore when he made a number of exciting arrests including those of a famous sheep-stealer and a gigantic Negro murderer. He was put in charge of the first gaol built in the Province but left this job to become superintendent of the new mental asylum: Sunnyside. He was not, of course, a doctor (I imagine there were not enough to go round), but he was strangely advanced in his methods, playing the organ to his ‘children’ as he called the patients, whom he loved, and using a form of mesmerism on some of the more violent ones. If any of his own family had a headache my grandmother would say crisply: ‘Go to your father and be mesmerized.’ Gramp would flutter his delicate hands across and across their foreheads until the headache had gone. He did this with the full approval of the visiting medical superintendent, Dr Coward, who was very interested in Gramp’s therapeutic methods.

He had a good stage built in the hall at Sunnyside, no doubt as part of the treatment but also, I suspect, because theatre was his ruling passion. Here he produced plays, using his children, his friends and some of the more manageable patients as actors. He also performed conjuring tricks, spending far too much of his own money on elaborate and costly equipment. His patter was magnificent. One by one as each of my aunts grew to the desirable size, she was crammed into a tortuous under-suit of paper-thin jointed steel, and, so attired, walked on the stage, seated herself on a high stool at an expensive trick-table, adopted a pensive attitude, her elbow on the table, her finger on her brow and, like Miss Bravassa, contemplated the audience. A spike in the elbow of her armour engaged with a slot in the table. ‘Hey presto!’ Gramp would say, waving his wand and turning a secret key in his daughter’s back. The armour locked. Puck-like, Gramp snatched the stool from under her and there she was: suspended. My Aunt Madeleine, at the appropriate age, was plump. The armour nipped her and she often wept but as the next-in-order was still too small, she was squeezed into service until Gram forbade it. Gramp busily sawed his daughters in half, shut them up in magic cabinets and caused them to disappear. The patients adored it.

I can just remember him doing some of his sleight-of-hand tricks at his grandchildren’s birthday parties and playing ‘See Me Dance the Polka’ while we held out our skirts and bounced.

Of all his children, only my mother inherited his love of theatre and she did so in a marked degree. I know I am not showing partiality when I say that she was quite extraordinarily talented. From the time I first remember her acting it was never in the least like that of an amateur: her approach to a role, her manner of rehearsing, her command of timing and her personal impact were all entirely professional. My grandfather used to organize productions in aid of charities and his daughter became so well known that when an American Shakespearean actor, George Milne, brought his company to New Zealand he asked my mother, then nineteen years old, to play Lady Macbeth with him in Christchurch. She did so with such success that he urged her to become an actress. I cannot imagine what Gram thought of all this. One would suppose her to have been horrified but perhaps her built-in Victorianism worked it out that her husband knew best. There can be little doubt that Gramp was all for the suggestion. The real objections appear to have come from my mother. Strangely, as it seems to me, she had no desire to become a professional actress. The situation was repeated when the English actor Charles Warner, famous for his role in Drink, visited New Zealand. He was a personal friend of my grandfather who, I supposed, caused my mother to perform before him. Warner offered to take her into his company and launch her in England. She declined. He and his wife suggested that she should come as their guest to Australia and get the taste of a professional company on tour. In the event, she did cross the Tasman Sea under Mrs Warner’s wing. She stayed with family friends in Melbourne, and saw a good deal of the company while she was there. This adventure, though she seemed to have enjoyed it, confirmed her in her resolve. The life, she once said to me, ‘was too messy’. I have an idea that the easy emotionalism and ‘bohemian’ habits of theatre people, while they appealed to her highly developed sense of irony, offended her natural fastidiousness. In many ways a pity, and yet, such is one’s egoism, I get a peculiar feeling when I reflect that if she had been otherwise inclined I would have been – simply, not. She returned to New Zealand and after an interval of a year or two met and married my father.

It seems to me that almost always a play was toward in our small family and that my nightmare, The Fool’s Paradise, was only one of a procession. As a child I did not really enjoy hearing my mother rehearse. She became a stranger to me. If the role was a dramatic or tragic one, I was frightened and curiously embarrassed. When as a very small girl, she asked me if I would like to walk on for a child’s part in – I think – a Pinero play, I was appalled. Yet I loved to hear all the theatre-talk, the long discussions on visiting actors, on plays and on the great ones of the past. When I was big enough to be taken occasionally to the play my joy was almost unendurable.

One was made to rest in the afternoon. Blinds were drawn and one lay in a state of tumult for the prescribed term, becoming quite sick with anticipation. When confronted with food at an unusual hour, one could eat nothing.

‘Good Lord!’ said my father. ‘Look at the child. She’d better not go if she gets herself into such a stink over it.’

Frightful anxieties arose. Suppose the tickets were lost, suppose we were late? Suppose, from sheer excitement, I were to be sick? In the earliest times, I seem to remember hansom-cabs, evening dress, long gloves and a kind of richness about the arrival but later on, when economy ruled, we waited in queues for the early doors. It was all one to me. There I was, sitting between my parents, in an expectant house. It was no matter how long we waited: the time came when the lights were dimmed and a band of radiance flooded the curtain fringe, when the air was plangent with the illogic of tuning strings, when my heart was either in my stomach or my throat, when a bell rang in the prompt corner and the play was on.

Which came first: Sweet Nell of Old Drury or Bluebell in Fairyland? Perhaps Bluebell. To this piece I was escorted by my great friend, Ned Bristed: a freckled child, perhaps a year my senior. We were taken to the theatre by his mother who saw us into our seats in the dress circle and then left us there, immensely important, and collected us at the end when we returned in a rapturous trance to Ned’s house where I spent the night. Ned and I were in perfect accord. Some twenty years later, long after he had been killed in action, it fell to my lot to produce Bluebell in Fairyland. I stood in the circle and watched a dress rehearsal and was able for a moment to put into the front row the shadows of a freckled boy and a small girl: ecstatic and feverishly wolfing chocolates.

My mother took me to a matinée of Sweet Nell of Old Drury. I saw the whole thing in terms of a fairy tale and fell madly in love with Charles II in the person of Mr Harcourt Beatty. How kindly he shone upon the poor orange girl (Miss Nellie Stewart), how beastly was the behaviour of the two witches, Castlemaine and Portsmouth, how menacing and how superbly outsmarted was the evil Jeffreys. The company returned, we went again and I became even more deeply committed. Later on, when I began to do history, it was irritating to find so marked a note of disapproval in the section on Charles II: Mr Harcourt Beatty, I felt, and not the pedagogue Oman, had the correct approach.

Our visits to the play were not always so successful. When Janet Achurch came, with Ibsen, I was not taken to see her and wish that I had been but, unless I have confused the occasions, her company, or one that came soon after it, also played Romeo and Juliet. To this my mother and I went one afternoon. She was immensely stimulated: too much so, for once, to notice my growing alarm. When the Montagues and Capulets began to set about each other in the streets of Verona I asked nervously: ‘They aren’t really fighting, are they?’

‘Yes, yes!’ she replied excitedly. I dived into her lap, surfaced at long intervals and upon finding that people seemed to be dreadfully unhappy, hurriedly submerged again. Worst of all, of course, there was Poison and a girl was Taking It. I vividly remember one final appalled glance at the Tomb of the Capulets and what was going on there and then a shaken return to Fendalton.

‘I expect I should have brought you away,’ my mother used to say long afterwards, ‘but it was a good company. The Mercutio was wonderful.’ I know exactly how she felt: it couldn’t have been expected of her. She was always very loving and patient over my fears and a constant refuge from them.

She read aloud quite perfectly: not with the offhand brio of my father but with a quiet relish that was immensely satisfying. One was gathered into the book as if into a lap and completely absorbed by it. Her voice was unforced and beautiful.

Whatever I may write about my mother will be full of contradictions. I think that as I grew older I grew, better perhaps than anyone else, to understand her. And yet how much there was about her that still remains unaccounted for, like odd pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Of one thing I am sure: she had in her an element of creative art never fully realized. I think the intensity of devotion which might have been spent upon its development was poured out upon her only child, who, though she returned this love, inevitably and however unwisely, began at last to make decisions from which she would not be deflected.




IV


It so happened that my two constant companions when I was very small and before I met Ned, were also boys: another only child called Vernon, and my cousin Harvey. They were both older than I and good-naturedly bossed me: always I was the driven horse, obediently curvetting and prancing, always the seeker and never the hider. I accepted their attitude and listened with the deepest respect to their stories of other little boys to whom they ‘owed a hiding’. On a seaside holiday with our parents, Harvey and I discovered a religious affinity. We built a sand-castle and on the top moulded a cross. This gave us an extremely complacent and holy feeling.

Of all my parents’ circle I loved best the friend who was present on the occasion of the saddle-tweed trousers. His name was Dundas Walker. He acted in most of their plays and made a great success of ‘Cis’, the precocious youth in Pinero’s farce The Magistrate. Finding Dundas rather difficult to say I called him by this Victorian nickname but afterwards changed it to ‘James’. Destined by his people for the church, he became instead a professional actor. In this choice he was egged on by my mother: was this one of her contradictions or did she realize, quite correctly, that he would be happy in no other sphere?

He invented the most entrancing games: ‘Visiting’, for instance, when he was always Mrs Finch-Brassy and I, Mrs Boolsum-Porter. ‘Forgive me, my dear,’ he would say, ‘if I borrow your poker. A morsel of your delicious cake has lodged in a back tooth and I must positively rid myself of it.’ I always handed him the poker and he then engaged in an elaborate pantomime. ‘Ah!’ he would say, ‘there’s nothing like a poker for picking one’s teeth. Do you agree?’

I agreed so heartily that on observing an elderly uncle engaged in a furtive manoeuvre behind his napkin I said loudly and confidently: ‘Uncle Ellis, Cis says there’s nothing like a poker for picking one’s teeth.’

‘I think, Rose,’ my grandmother said to my mother, ‘that Mr Walker goes too far with the child.’

He gave me my nicest books, made me laugh more often than anybody except my father and never spoiled me. When he found me trying to dragoon one of Susie’s kittens into being harnessed to a shoe box he was so severe that I was stricken with misery and while being bathed that evening burst into tears, tore myself from my mother’s hands and fled, roaring my remorse, to the drawing room where I flung myself, dripping wet, into his astonished embrace.

Nothing could exceed the admiration he inspired.

‘When I am grown up,’ I said warmly, ‘I shall marry you.’

‘Very well, my dear, and you shall have the family pearls.’ He went on the stage and to England. My mother and I met him in London twenty years later and the friendship was taken up as if it had never been interrupted. I don’t think he was ever a very wonderful actor – he always had great difficulty in remembering his lines – but he was fortunate in that he played the leading role in a farce called A Little Bit of Fluff that broke all records by running for about eight years up and down the English, Scottish and Irish provinces, so that he had plenty of time to make sure of the lines. He was entirely a man of the theatre and was, I believe, the happiest human being I have ever known and one of the best loved. When he retired in the 1930s he came out to New Zealand and lived with his unmarried sister and brother in a rambling house full of family treasures. The pearls, he once told me, were kept in a newspaper parcel, on the top of his wardrobe.

In 1943, when I began to produce Shakespeare’s plays for the University of Canterbury, James helped in all of them, sometimes playing small parts. As he grew older and memorizing became more and more of a difficulty, he concentrated upon make-up for which he had a wonderful gift. He was like a gentle spirit of good luck and was much loved by my student-players. When he died, which he did at an advanced age, and with exquisite tact and the least possible amount of fuss, a group of undergraduates asked to carry him and that must have pleased him very much if he was aware of it.

Our other close friend was Mivvy, daughter of that family with monies in Chancery who lived in Dunedin. In age she was almost midway between my parents and me: old enough to be slightly deferred to and young enough to confide in and to cheek. She has told how I burst in upon her privacy with a howl, having committed some misdemeanour. Tears poured from my eyes into my open mouth.

‘Mummy’s cross of me!’ I bawled. ‘But I don’t care, Mivvy, do I?’

Mivvy was the kind of friend whose visits can never be long enough and to whom everyone turns at moments of distress without feeling that they ask too much of her. I hope we didn’t ask too much: I don’t think we did. She was very easy to tease and she was also extremely and comically obstinate. During one of her visits, which we all so much liked, my mother sprained her ankle. Mivvy was determined to administer fomentations, my mother, equally formidable on such issues, was adamant that she should do no such thing. Mivvy set her jaw. The siege of the fat ankle, to my infinite enjoyment, lasted all through one day. Suddenly, at nightfall, my mother yielded. Mivvy, triumphant, became businesslike. Saucepans were set to boil. Linen was torn into strips. Lint and aromatic unguents were displayed. A footbath was prepared. For about an hour my mother suffered her extremity to be alternately seethed and chilled while Mivvy, neatly aproned, bustled vaingloriously. Finally, the ankle was anointed and elaborately bound.

‘There!’ she cried. ‘Now! Doesn’t it feel better?’

‘It feels perfectly all right, thank you, Mivvy dear,’ said my mother and from beneath the hem of her Edwardian skirt displayed the other ankle: still swollen.

‘If there had been any scalding water left,’ Mivvy said, ‘I would have hurled it at you.’

Of all the other grown-up friends and relations who came and went during my earliest childhood the outlines are blurred. There were facetious gentlemen who pretended to be staggered by my voice which was rather deep, and an offensive musical gentleman who insisted, like Svengali, on looking at my vocal cords. Luckily he was not possessed of Svengali’s expertise. Nothing short of deep and remorseless hypnosis would ever have induced me to sing in tune. There was Captain Sykes who became famous, and Mr Parkinson who collected china and committed suicide, there were numbers of ladies who came to my mother’s ‘day’ and to whose ‘days’ I was boringly taken, since I could not be left at home. One of them kept swans on an ornamental pond and these arrogant birds rushed, hissing, at me, when I was sent to play in the garden.

Across the lane in a very big house with a long drive, a lodge at the gates, a horse-paddock, carriages and gigs, a motor, grooms, servants and a nanny, lived a boy and girl with whom I loved to play when my mother visited there. It seemed to me to be a magical place filled with the scent of flowers. The boy, who was asthmatic and often confined to a wheeled chair, was some three or four years my senior: his sister about my own age. This was the beginning of an established friendship. Into the dawn of it, floatingly recollected, come the Duke and Duchess of York (afterwards King George V and Queen Mary) to stay at this house. I remember being lifted on a high evergreen fence to watch my friend’s uncle wire-jumping his horse for the Duke’s entertainment and I remember my parents making ready for a royal reception. Was it on that occasion or a later one that I so laboriously picked violets, bound them, limp and intractable, with a piece of fencing wire out of the gardening shed and presented them to my mother? I see them, wilted, slithering from their confine and weighty to a degree and I see my mother anchoring them in the black lace of her corsage. They must have all disappeared, this way and that, long before the ducal assemblage and I suppose that by some means or other, she rid herself of an embarrassment of stout wire.

I am convinced that recollections of childhood go much further back than we are accustomed to suppose. I realise that mine are based in some measure upon what my parents and friends afterwards told me but for all this I know that many of them have stayed in my conscious memory and that these are the most vivid. The smell, for instance, of newly shot game birds and the glossy slide of their feathers: with this, a shooting hut near the shores of a lake, the song of larks, dry cowpats that were burned in the open fire and, especially, some domestic pigs whose personal hygiene, for some reason, I determined to improve. I remember perfectly well the indignant screams of one of these creatures and the difficulty of retaining my hold on its ear, the depths of which I explored with my own soapy bath-flannel. I have a snapshot taken at the time: it displays my mother graceful and long-skirted, Mivvy and my father in oilskins and sou’westers with shotguns under their arms, the spaniel, Tip, and a stout truculent child of four who is myself.

I have grown, in theory at least, to dislike blood sports but how superb were those sunny mornings when I was allowed to walk behind my father and Tip through the plantation where he and his friends went quail-shooting. On these occasions he was completely and explicitly himself. He would imitate the cry of a Californian cock-quail, make little clucking noises to Tip and even quiver very slightly as Tip did. One had to keep perfectly silent and walk lightly behind the guns. The click of the hammer when he cocked his gun, the sudden whirr of wings, the deafening report and the heady cordite reek of the ejected cartridge-case: these were the ingredients of pure happiness.

When we had followed the guns as far as our picnic place my mother and I would stay there, make a fire of heaven-smelling dry bluegum, and await their return for luncheon. Every now and then we would hear the guns. Shockingly, as one may now feel, my father loved the creatures he shot. Once he described to me very vividly the flight of an English pheasant and the heavy, dark abruptness of its fall. He thought for a moment. ‘Awful, really,’ he said in a surprised voice, ‘isn’t it? Awful, I suppose.’ As a boy, he saw Ellen Terry play Beatrice and of course fell in love with her. ‘When she had to run “like a lapwing, close to the ground” she did it like a henpartridge, trailing her wing to draw attention away from her nest. Beautiful!’ It was the highest praise he could have given Miss Terry.

He was a purist in the management of field sports. When I stumped behind him with a heeled stock in the crook of my arm I had to behave exactly as if it was a real gun: ‘uncocking’ it at fences or gates, ‘unloading’ it before I put it down and never pointing it at anybody. To do otherwise was ‘loutish’. He was dealt one of those strokes of malevolent ill-fortune that so punctually overtook him when he loaded his walking-stick air gun to shoot a fruit-robbing blackbird, was called away and put it in a corner unfired and, for once, forgotten. Weeks later, my mother, who was alone in the house, knocked the gun sideways and it discharged into her middle finger. We had no telephone then and no near neighbours. She bound it up as best she could and waited all day for us to come home. A dreadful episode.

When I was still a small girl I was given a Frankfurt single-bore rifle. I practised, under stern supervision, on suspended tins and cardboard targets until I was a good shot and allowed to go out with the guns. This was wonderful. To kill rabbits was an honourable procedure. And then, on an autumn morning, I wounded a hare. The landscape blackened and cried out against me and that was the end of my active part in field sports.

These expeditions alternated with boating on the quiet river where one glided through unknown people’s gardens, under willows and between the spring-flowering banks of our curiously English antipodean suburbs. The oars clunked rhythmically in their rowlocks, weeping willows dipped and brushed across our faces. If you nibbled the pale young leaves they were surprisingly bitter. Sometimes our keel grated on shingle or sent up a drift of cloudy mud. One trailed one’s fingers and felt grand and opulent. It seems to me that it was always late afternoon on the river.

Until my schooldays came and, with them, camping holidays in the mountains, the great adventure, undertaken on several occasions by my mother and me, was a journey to Dunedin. It lasted all day. Up before dawn, we dressed by lamplight while cocks crew in the darkness beyond the window-pane. We seemed to have taken our house by surprise while it was still leading a night life of its own. In the hall stood our corded boxes and the coats we would wear. Breakfast was a strange hurried business eaten by the light of an oil lamp with a clock on the table. Presently the front door had banged behind us.

My father took us to the station and put us into our carriage (second-class after the financial setbacks). It had wooden benches running lengthways and spittoons along the floor. Now began a period of frightful anxieties. Suppose we stayed too long on the platform and the train suddenly went away without us? Suppose, as I was getting in, my mother should be left behind, mouthing after me on the platform while I was carried rapidly south? Suppose we were in the wrong train and would be swept up through the mountains to Westland or that my father, having established us in our seats, foolishly dallied and was borne away in the train with us and financially ruined.

When we were on our way these apprehensions faded, most of them recurring when my mother decided that we should stretch our legs at the longer stops. The journey became fascinating. We racketed across the Canterbury Plains while in the world outside the Southern Alps advanced, retired and slowly looked over each other’s snowy shoulders, and mad loops of telephone wires dipped and leapt in front of them. ‘Dun-e-DIN. Dun-e-DIN’ said the hurrying train and ‘No-you-DON’T. No-you-DON’T,’ sometimes breaking out into a violent excitable clatter as we roared through a cutting: ‘Rackety-plan. Rackety-plan.’ We crossed great rivers and saw men and vast mobs of sheep on lonely roads. A long day.

There were three little parcels to be opened at appropriately spaced stations. They were always books. There were the lurching hazards of an endless stagger through other carriages and over-shifting footplates in a roaring wind, to the dining car. There were Other People to speculate upon and at evening when one was very tired indeed there was a final treat: my mother’s dressing case to be explored. It was lined with deliciously-smelling leather and fitted with crystal, silver-topped bottles. Soap, eau-de-Cologne with which one’s face was cleaned and freshened. A tiny phial of real attar-of-roses sent out by my grandmother from England. Papier-poudré, which was a little book of leaflets that my mother rubbed over her eau-de-Cologned nose and chin. An ivory-backed brush and comb. A looking glass from which one’s face stared back like a ghost in the murky lamplight. Now we were hurtling round the high cliffs of the Otago coast. If there was a moon outside it shone on the Pacific, far below. Lonely patches of bushland and ranges of hills moved against the sky behind cadaverous nodding reflections of Other People’s faces.

At last, at the end of a lifetime and late at night: Dunedin, the smell of Mivvy’s fur coat and the familiar sound of her voice. The platform heaved under one’s legs. I cannot remember, on any occasion, the drive out to St Clair and suppose I must always have fallen asleep. One entered the house through a conservatory smelling of wet fern. We were near the sea and the last thing one heard was the roar of surf on a lonely coast.

One day, at St Clair, it rained so heavily that I was not allowed to put my nose out-of-doors. Under the dining-room bay-window seat was a system of lockers. Mivvy said they were full of old magazines and suggested that I might like to explore them. They were of two kinds. The Windsor, which was lettuce green with the Castle, I think, in brown, and The Strand with a picture of that thoroughfare on the cover. All day I hunted and devoured, tracing the enchanting series from one edition to the next. The rain beat down, not on the windows of a New Zealand house but across those of a gas-lit upstairs room in a London street. It glistened on the roofs of hansom-cabs and bounced off cobblestones. It mingled with the cries of newsboys and eccentric improvisations upon the fiddle. A solitary visitor was approaching: there was a peremptory double-knock at the street door. Someone came up the stairs and entered.

‘Hullo,’ said Mivvy, looking over my shoulder, ‘you’ve discovered Sherlock Holmes.’





CHAPTER 2 The Hills (#ulink_e6504927-101c-5463-a9cc-7401437a148e)


Miss Sibella E. Ross was a gentlewoman of Highland descent. She was also a cousin of my adored Dundas. Her shape was firm, her bust formidable, her eyes blue and, like her face, surprisingly round. Her teeth were slightly prominent. She lived with her highly respected family in a large house generally known, though not I think to the Rosses, as ‘The Tin Palace’, since it had been constructed in pioneering days from galvanized iron and had a tower. In premises conveniently adjacent, Miss Ross kept school: a select dame school for about twenty children between the ages of six and ten years. Miss Ross’s family and immediate friends called her Tibby and her ex-pupils referred to her school as Tib’s.

To this establishment I was sent when I was, I suppose, six years old. I have no doubt whatever that it was a wise decision but the experience in its initial stages was hellish.

In the morning I was put into a horse-drawn bus where there were already three fellow pupils. We were met at the other end by Miss Irving, the governess at Miss Ross’s, and escorted to school.

‘Good morning, children.’

‘Good morning, Miss Ross. Good morning, Miss Irving.’

For the first time I found myself one of a group of children and, for the first time, I was conscious of being tall for my age. This made the simple business of standing up to answer questions an embarrassing ordeal. Miss Ross had invented an ‘honour’ system which decreed that at the end of the morning each child must stand up and proclaim how many times he or she had spoken unlawfully in class. When my immediate neighbours discovered, with the terrible prescience of children, that this observance frightened me, they determined, gleefully, to enhance its terrors by forcing me to talk. They would hiss questions. If I didn’t answer, they would make jabs at me, for all the world as hens peck at a sick bird. They would peck and jab until I made some kind of response and then stare accusingly at me when the moment for public confession arrived. One could not always ask to ‘leave the room’ at the crucial moment. I cannot think that this was a good practice: it engendered, in a single operation, elements of guilt, fear, loneliness and inferiority, and, indeed, provoked a sort of Freudian extravaganza in the reactions of a little girl who was unprepared for it. The follow-up treatment took place in playtime and was set in hand by the nine-year-olds. They organized themselves and their juniors into something that was called a ‘secret army’ and from it excluded two stalwart little boys and myself. The boys were called Charles and Roderick and were kind. Roderick became a soldier and Charles a man of letters. Both of them left New Zealand. When, on separate occasions and about thirty years afterwards, I met them again, something of the intense gratitude I had felt for them returned. We talked about our first term at Tib’s.

I did not say anything at all about these miseries to my parents but I think my mother must have known that all was not well and decided that I should stick it out. Very properly so, I expect. After all, she was up against the problem of the only child. It is true that by some process of adaptation the picture gradually changed. I was no longer bullied. I formed heartening friendships with other small girls. I toughened.

As time went on I was even given certain responsibilities at Tib’s. When Ian, a fighting boy in a kilt, was brought at eleven o’clock every morning by his nanny, I was one of two sent to take delivery of him in the porch. He yelled, bit and kicked, while his nurse recommended that he should go with the nice young ladies to his lesson. We led him, roaring, to his desk, rather impressed than otherwise by the extremity of his passion. Dick, a fat boy, was more vulnerable and wept sometimes. He was jeered at by my former tormentors and I’m glad to remember that I was sorry for him and didn’t join in. I was out of the wood by that time. Rightly or wrongly, however, I still think that my first term at Tib’s was far from being all to the good. It does not improve the character to be bullied. Children are microcosms of people. Treat them badly for long enough and then give them a little power and they will punctually repeat with greater emphasis the behaviour to which they have been subjected. Fear is the most damaging emotion that can be inflicted on the character of any child and on one already as morbidly prone to inexplicable terrors as I was, the early torments I underwent at Tib’s were pretty deadly. When they moderated and I was no longer in thrall, I reacted predictably. I don’t think that on the whole I was all that much more obnoxious than any other little girl of my age but for a time I became so: bossy, bullying, and secretive, paying back however unconsciously, I am sure, for what had been dealt out to me. I don’t think it lasted very long but it happened and in my old age I still remember and am sorry about it.

Fear can be perhaps the most corrupting of our basic emotions and fear without the possibility of release, the worst of all. The child who has been overtaken by it is a microcosm of the mob. If you rule a people by fear and treat them as an inferior race and then give them power, don’t expect them to use it like angels. You have corrupted them and many of them will abuse it.

One day, while I and other Fendaltonians waited for Miss Irving to put us on the bus, we heard a clatter of hooves in the quiet street and mounted policemen rode splendidly by, followed by a carriage with a crown on the door.

‘The Governor,’ gabbled Miss Irving in a fluster. ‘Girls curtsey and boys bow. Off with your caps. Quick.’

We bobbed and nodded, eyeing each other sideways and then looked up to see the Governor smiling and bowing very pointedly to us. With him was his wife and unless I am at fault, a little girl of about my own age of whom there will be much more to say.

Away rolled the carriage and up came the bus.

One other incident sticks in my memory. Miss Ross, rather ominously smiling, asks her pupils what they wish to be when they grow up. She concentrates upon the boys since the girls are destined for matrimony: an employment not to be examined in detail with propriety. I, however, hold up my hand. ‘I want,’ I venture, ‘to be an artist.’ ‘Ho!’ Miss Ross atrociously says, ‘you’ll never do that, my dear. Your hand shakes.’

I suppose I had attended Miss Ross’s school for about a year when the great change came. We went to live on the hills.




II


When I looked south from the higher branches of my wellingtonia tree in suburbia, I saw, above park, roofs and Cathedral spire, the Port Hills. They were only four miles away but to me they seemed as romantically distant as those snowy Alps that stood to the north beyond the Canterbury Plains. The hills were rounded and suave in outline with occasional craggy accidents. They would be called mountains in England. The tussock that covered them gave them a bloomy appearance as blonde hair does to a living body. I was told that a long time ago they had moved gigantically and heaved themselves into their present form and then grown hard, being the overflow of a volcano.

The crater of this volcano is now a deep harbour into which a hundred and fifteen years ago, sailed the First Four Ships: Sir George Seymour, Randolph, Cressy and Charlotte Jane, bringing the founders of the Canterbury Settlement. These intrepid emigrants landed at the port of Lyttelton, wearing stovepipe hats, heavy suits, crinolines and bonnets. They climbed the Port Hills and reached the summit where, with a munificent gesture, their inheritance was suddenly laid out before them. Whenever I return to New Zealand I like to come home by the hills and still think that an arrival at the pass on a clear dawn is the most astonishing entry one could make into any country. There, as abruptly as if one had looked over a wall, are the Plains, spread out beyond the limit of vision, laced with early mist, and a great river, bounded on the east by the Pacific, on the west by mere distance, and from east to west by a lordly sequence of mountains, rose-coloured where they receive the rising sun.

Gramp came this way in, I think, 1853 and looked down at swamps and a little group of huts and wooden buildings. When he was eighty he still used to go for a Sunday walk on the Port Hills and glare sardonically at the city of Christchurch.

In our Fendalton days there was only a scatter of about twenty houses on the hills. We were lent one of these for a summer holiday – a house amidst tussock with nothing but clear air between it and the foothills of the Alps, forty miles away on the other side of the Plains. It was this visit, I think, that decided our move. My father bought the nose of the same hill; some three-quarters of an acre of ground, already fenced, partly cultivated and set about with baby trees – pinus radiata and limes, not much higher than the surrounding tussock. A sou’-wester is blowing this morning and I look anxiously at the tops of my pines, a hundred feet tall, and hope they have enough sap in their old bodies to withstand the gale.

As soon as the momentous decision was taken, it was communicated to an architect cousin of my mother’s. He at once caused to be set aside a stack of seasoned timber and exposed it to further weathering. It had come out of the mountains, horse-drawn through virgin forest to a bush tramway, or had been floated across a lake and broken down in Westland timber mills. When I made some alterations in this house, the carpenters were unable to drive a nail into the old joists; the wood, they said, was like iron rather than timber.

Perhaps the lease of our house in Fendalton expired before the new one could be built or perhaps there was a delay in the building. For whatever the reason, it was decided that we should camp in tents near the site of our future home and stay there until it was completed. I fancy that we adopted this hardy adventuresome procedure partly because my father considered it would be an advantage if he were at hand to keep an eye on the workmen.

‘You never know,’ he said darkly, ‘with those chaps.’

It was on an early summer’s day that we left Fendalton, seated on top of our tents and boxes in a spring-wagon. My father’s closest friend of those times had a motor-car, one of the first in Christchurch, and had offered to drive us to the hills, but I think the recollection of innumerable breakdowns and hour-long unproductive explorations of its less accessible mysteries decided my mother against this vehicle. She felt that the important thing was to arrive.

So, on what seems to me to have been an interminable journey, we plodded through the borders of Fendalton, round the parks, past a region of drafting-yards and sheep pens where, once a week, livestock was sold, down a long highway and into Wilderness Road, an endless stretch between gorse hedges. It is now a main suburban street. This brought us at last to the hills; to a winding lane, a rough track and our destination. I remember that a hot nor’ wester raged across the plains and when we tried to pitch our bell tents, got inside them and threatened to blow them away like umbrellas. We settled at last upon the sheltered end of a valley, below our section and within sight of the scaffolding that had already been set up.

There we lived throughout the summer. It was the beginning of a new life for all of us.

I continued at Tib’s. Every morning, with my father, I left our tents, climbed up and over a steep hill, or as an alternative, walked a mile round the foot of it to the terminus of a steam-tramway and was carried into Christchurch. In winter I was dressed in a blue serge sailor suit with braid on the collar and skirt and an anchor on the dicky. I also wore a sailor’s cap with HMS Something on it. In summer this nautical motif was carried out in cotton or piqué and the hat was of straw. We had friends living near us in a large house with plantations and a rambling garden – the Walkers: mother, sister and four enormously tall brothers of Dundas, who was now on the stage in Australia. Three of the brothers were bearded, which in those days was unusual, and they were all extremely handsome: Graham, Colin, Alexander, Cecil. I transferred much of my devotion to them, particularly to Colin. Although they were cousins of Miss Ross, they held her so little in awe that on one occasion, finding me alone on the top of the double-decker steam-tram, they rifled my satchel and extracted an exercise book. Alexander gripped my arms while Colin wrote on a virgin page:

Kids may come and kids may go

But Tib goes on forever.

We were not permitted to tear leaves out of our books.

‘You can say we did it,’ they told me. ‘It won’t be splitting. We’d like you to.’

We had to lay our exercises on Miss Ross’s desk. I watched her work her way down the pile until she came to mine. For the first time in my life I saw a woman turn red with anger.

‘Who,’ she asked with classic economy, ‘has done this? Ngaio?’

‘The Boys,’ I faltered, for so I called these bearded giants, and she knew who I meant. With a magnificent gesture she ripped out the page. She then strode to the fire, committed the couplet to the flames and returned to her desk.

‘The hymn,’ she said in a controlled but unnatural voice, ‘We are but little children weak. Open your books.’

Soon after this incident I became ten and had grown out of Tib’s.

By that time our house was almost built. We struck camp, climbed our hill and moved into it.

‘This,’ said my father, referring to the workmen, ‘will hurry them up,’ and indeed I think it must have done so, for they disappeared quite soon.

The new house smelt of the linseed oil with which the panelled walls had been treated and of the timber itself. It was a four-roomed bungalow with a large semi-circular verandah. The living room was biggish. There were recesses in its bronze wooden walls and there was a pleasant balance between them and the windows. My mother had a talent for making, out of undistinguished elements, a kind of harmony in a room. At once it became an expression of herself and the warmth she always lent to human relationships: newcomers used to exclaim on this and often said that they felt as if they had been there before.

At a little distance below the house was a big bicycle shed which, by a heroic concerted effort made by my father and his friends, had been actually hauled up the hill on sleds and then turned over and over until it was brought into position. It was then floored and lined and fitted with bunks like a cabin and became a guest room. From the beginning we loved our house. It was the fourth member of our family and for me, who still lives in it, has retained that character: it has been much added to but I think its personality has not changed. A city has spread across the open country where sheep and cows were grazed: the surrounding hills where I and my friends tobogganed and rode our ponies, are richly encrusted with bungaloid or functional dwellings. An enormous hospital covers the old mushroom-paddock: Cashmere, which is our part of the Port Hills, is now a ‘desirable suburb’. But no skyscraper out on the plains can ever be tall enough to hide the mountains and, strangely enough, the little river Heathcote, where we used to sail on rafts that we built ourselves, has scarcely changed. Children still paddle about on it in home-made craft.

A few miles away from us, round the hills, there lived a horse-coper called Mr McGuinnes. For him my father conceived an admiration (’Decent fellow, McGuinnes’) and with him, soon after we arrived, a bargain was struck. Mr McGuinnes would keep me supplied with a pony which would be grazed in the Top Paddock to which we had access. The pony would be changed from time to time and the outgoing mount sold, I now realize, as having been used by a child. I, who had never bestridden anything but my rocking horse, was madly excited.

In due course the first pony arrived. Dolly, she was called: a pretty, mettlesome little creature who sidled up the lane showing the whites of her eyes. When my father put the new slithery pad on her back she kicked him. This unsettled his temper. Mr McGuinnes, who held her firmly with both hands near the bit, made the classic observation that it was only her fun. I was put up. Before my feet could be set in the stirrups, Dolly went into a series of humpbacked bucks. Like Mr Winkle before me, I clung to her neck while Mr McGuinnes and my father shouted at each other. I would have liked to show the intrepid spirit of Little Lord Fauntleroy who, it may be remembered, gallantly trotted and cantered at his first venture. But the Earl of Dorincourt’s stables did not produce half-broken buckjumpers for the little heir to learn upon, nor did the Earl and his groom scream instructions at each other not to let her bolt.

‘I’m getting off,’ I said.

‘No, you’re not,’ shouted my father.

But somehow or another I did, and we had a row.

‘It doesn’t matter if you do fall off,’ roared my father. ‘It’d only be like falling off the kitchen table. You wouldn’t think anything of that. Get up again.’

Dolly snorted, reared and backed, and Mr McGuinnes fought with her head.

‘I don’t want to,’ I said. ‘It’s not a bit like the kitchen table.’

‘Good Lord!’ said my father in disgust. ‘Here. I’ll show you, you ass.’

He leapt into the saddle. ‘Let her go,’ he said sternly.

Dolly made a complicated bound and broke into a gallop. Halfway down the lane she threw him and the rest of the afternoon was spent in recapturing her.

My nerve, if not completely shattered, was far from secure. However, there were further equestrian attempts. Dolly was again ridden by my father and, after bolting with him for a considerable distance, came lathering back in what was held to be a chastened mood. I was led up and down the lane, whitely attempting to ride in my stirrups and hating it.

I doubt if I would ever have become a horsey child if we had not, at this juncture, paid one of our visits to Dunedin. Here, under the guidance of a very old and almost stone-deaf gardener-groom, I became acquainted with two elderly ponies, Tasman and Tommy. I fed them over the paddock rails, learnt to bridle them, climbed on them of my own accord and when nothing untoward occurred, began to bump bareback around the paddock. It seems to me, now, that there was no interval between this tentative experiment and early morning rides when I cantered along the sea front, a hardened but far from technically accomplished equestrienne. The Pacific thundered and crashed along the beach, seagulls screamed over the island they had whitened, and sometimes I rode up a steep and winding road to Cargill’s Castle. Up this same road my father, when he first came to New Zealand, had been driven with Uncle William and his wife to balls the Cargills gave in their antipodean highland castle. He told me how the lights of the carriages had glowed and turned in the night, how gay life was in the Eighties and Nineties. Sometimes on my early morning rides I remembered his stories.

On our return to Christchurch came Frisky, from whom I should have learned the facts of life.

She was a little chestnut mare, part Arab, and she stayed with me until my feet were a few inches from the ground. Other ponies and horses came and went (’Ridden by a child. Very quiet.’) but Frisky remained. I adored and bossed her, sometimes flinging my arms round her neck and burying my face in her celery-smelling hide, sometimes cramming her into prolonged gallops. After a time she was removed for a short period by Mr McGuinnes. When she returned, I was told that she was in a delicate state of health and must be taken quietly until further orders. I obeyed these injunctions tenderly and without question. My mother afterwards told me that, encouraged by this ready-made exemplar, she attempted to use it as a basis for biological instruction but that I paid no attention whatever to her carefully chosen phrases. I rode Frisky quietly, my legs spreading wider and wider apart, and concluded that as she was getting fatter she must be getting better. My father suggested, one morning, that I should accompany him to the Top Paddock. Nothing could have exceeded my astonishment when I found that Frisky was attended by a foal that wobbled round her like a sort of animated diagram. Delighted, I was: enlightened as to the facts of life, not at all.

To this day I cannot understand my idiocy in this respect; I behaved like a Goon. When one of my little girl friends from Miss Ross’s who was called Merta, told me that her mummy was fat because she was going to have a baby I thought she was spinning an extremely unconvincing yarn and didn’t believe a word of it. An intelligent and amiable child, Merta took no offence but merely said: ‘Well, anyway, that’s why she’s fat. You’ll see,’ and did not reopen the discussion. When another little girl confided specific, if not altogether accurate, information imparted by her brother, I was interested but never for one moment did I apply it to anybody I knew. When my mother asked me if I’d like a brother or sister because Dr Dick had said she might have one now, I merely said I wouldn’t and continued to think that our family physician concocted babies in his surgery. What is the psychiatrist’s explanation of such booby-like obstinacy? I have noticed it in other children whose mothers, spurred on by contemporary attitudes, have lost no opportunity to point the moral, if not adorn the procreative tale. In each case the reaction was unrewarding.

‘You see, darling, Mummy is keeping the new baby warm under her heart until it is ready – ‘

‘Yes, Mummy. Mummy, if I kept a penny for every day for a million years could it buy a bicycle?’

‘I expect it could, don’t you? And you see, darling, Daddy is really like a gardener – ‘

‘Can I have a garden of my own to grow mustard and cress?’

‘We’ll see. And it was just the same when you were born – ‘

‘When’s my birthday? Can I have a gun for my birthday?’

Heavy going.




III


After I left Tib’s, my mother struggled for a short time with my lessons and then I had a governess: Miss Ffitch. The capital F was used, I imagine, as a concession to colonial prejudice. Nowhere in the English-speaking world are proper names more arrogantly misused than in New Zealand. In retrospect, my heart bleeds for Miss Ffitch who, I am sure, would have been much happier with a conventional and nicely comported little girl. Invigorated by the fresh air of the hills, toughened by the companionship of neighbouring children and reacting, perhaps, from the complicated terrors that had beset my first decade, I had become a formidable, in some ways an abominable, child. My dear friend Ned, who in all other respects never led me into mischief, had taught me to smoke. We bought a tin of ten ‘Three Castles Yellow (strong)’, divided them equally, retired into a wigwam we had built among some gorse-bushes, and chain-smoked the lot without evil results. Encouraged by this success, we carved ourselves pipes from willow wood into which we introduced bamboo stems and in which we smoked tea. We also smoked red-hot cigars made of pine needles and newspaper.

Lessons ended at noon. On one occasion I retired into the trees outside my bedroom and lit my pipe. I had forgotten that Miss Ffitch adjusted her hat at a glass in the window. Wreathed in smoke and glancing hardily about me, I encountered her gaze: transfixed, blank, appalled, incredulous. For a second or two we stared at each other and then her face withdrew into the shadows. I awaited her displeasure but she said nothing, having decided, I suppose, like a sensible woman, that this sort of thing lay outside the pale of her authority and was better cut dead.

I tied an alarm clock under her chair, and set it for noon. On one occasion only, I blatantly cribbed to see if she would spot it, which of course she did, and very properly made me feel that I had been extremely unfunny. These were isolated acts of insubordination. As a general rule I think I was reasonably tractable but the overall effect of Miss Ffitch was positive only in respect of the amount of information she managed to inject.

Why, I wonder, did Miss Ffitch decree that my introduction to the plays of Shakespeare should be through King Lear? Remembering her mild exterior, her unexceptionable deportment, her ladylike constraint: why, I ask myself, did she so placidly launch a small girl upon that primordial, that cataclysmic, work? One would have said she was a sitter for the Forest of Arden or the Wood Near Athens. Hamlet or Macbeth would have been much less surprising: children are extremely responsive to both these tragedies. But Lear?

I cannot remember that Miss Ffitch uttered a word of exposition or drew my attention to anything but the notes. Upon these she laid great emphasis. The version was an expurgated one. No lechery. No civet. No small gilded flies. Just torture, murder and madness. Yet, as far as I could understand it, I lapped it up, and was, I remember, greatly surprised by its beauty. Kent’s speech in the stocks, the theadbare Fool. The recognition scene:

‘Do not laugh at me

For, as I am a man, I think this lady

To be my child, Cordelia.’

‘And so I am. I am.’

This lovely grief was understandable. When told to read the scene aloud, my voice trembled. Perhaps after all Miss Ffitch was on the right lines.

For Christmas, Miss Ffitch very kindly gave me Carlyle’s French Revolution. I tried hard but failed. All that turgid, and at the same time bossy, excitability was too much for me. Nor did I respond with marked enthusiasm to the Lays of Ancient Rome or to a poem which maundered, in lachrymose pentameters, over Mary, Queen of Scots, or to another that said:

Watch where ye see my helmet shine amid the tanks of wah

And be your oriflamme today the White Plume of Navarre

Kipling, however, got under my tender diaphragm. I was already deeply committed to the Just So Stories which my father read superbly and to their end-poems which, with those of the Jungle Books, I learnt by heart without knowing I had done so. I still think them almost flawless for readers of seven to thirteen years.

Now Chil the Kite brings home the Night

That Mang, the Bat sets free

The herds are shut in byre and hut

For loosed till dawn are we.

and:

Oh hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us.

What is to be said of the taste of a child reader? From what half-formed preferences, what unrecognized instincts is it shaped? Why did the opening phrase of the Jungle Stories so captivate me that I must read it over and over again with such deep satisfaction? ‘It was seven o’clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills-’

This was magic.

Then came The Brushwood Bay, which I shall never dare to read again lest the recollection should crumble into disillusion, and some of the sea poems, particularly The Coast-Wise Lights of England.

Our brows are bound with spindrift and the weed is on our knees

And our loins are battered ‘neath us by the swinging, smoking seas.

By these I was ravished.

Unfortunately I found that I myself was capable of some morsels in Kiplingesque pastiche.

‘Up,’ I wrote with my tongue firmly gripped between my teeth:

Up from the rolling plains, up where the blue mist lies

and a little further on and even more regrettably

We must be nothing weak, Vallies and hills are ours

From the last lone mountain creek to where the rata flowers.

I really believe that in my heart I knew what dreadful stuff this was and can distinctly remember that on completing it I was discomforted by a sensation of embarrassment. I don’t think I ever showed it to my mother. At ten years, however, according to a note she made on it, I had presented her with a poem.

The sun is sinking in the west

The stars begin to shine

The birds are singing in their nest

And I must go to mine.

These lines preceded my Kipling period and are, I think, greatly to be preferred to it. Oddly enough, although it reads like a direct pinch from Blake, I had not, at that time, been introduced to the Songs of Innocence and therefore may be held, I suppose, to have perpetrated an infantile literary coincidence.

For one odd preference in reading I can find no explanation. This was a book by an, at that time, popular journalist called John Foster Fraser. It was about the trans-Siberian railway and it completely fascinated me. Perhaps my love of trains had something to do with this but I think that I had made some strange association between the word ‘Russia’ and an idea of the quintessence of adventure. This strange feeling was to reach a kind of climax after many years by the wharves of Odessa.

In addition to lessons with Miss Ffitch I went twice a week to Miss Jennie Black, Mus. Bac., for the piano. She was dark and incisive with flashing eyes behind her spectacles. She taught Mathey’s method and she stood no nonsense. I rode Frisky and my mother rode her bicycle as far as the tram stop. She sat on a grassy bank and read. Frisky often dropped off to sleep, resting her chin rather heavily on my mother’s hat and slightly dribbling. There they would be on my return, with Tip, now an old dog, panting in the shade of Frisky’s belly.

I must have been an infuriating pupil for the piano. I had a poor ear, little application and fluctuating interest, but I was not bad enough to be given the sack and even passed some Trinity College examinations. My mother, winning a perpetual series of rearguard actions, insisted on regular practice which I loathed. Yet every now and then I would suddenly become engaged by the current piece and work quite hard on it.

‘But you played that well. You played it quite well. Tiresome little wretch!’ exclaimed Miss Jennie Black, Mus. Bac., in an extremity of irritation.

We almost always referred to her by her full title because of its snappy rhythm. Indeed, I once absent-mindedly replied to one of her demands: ‘Yes, Miss Jennie Black, Mus. Bac.,’ and got an awful rocket for impertinence. It was impossible to explain.

In spite of Miss Ross’s stricture and with a hand that has always been slightly tremulous, I continued to draw and paint with great assiduity but not, I think, very marked talent. I had come upon one of the repellent soft leather booklets that people used to give each other in those days: The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Instantly enthralled, I tried to illustrate it, using a birthday box of pastels, a drawing board and an easel that made me feel very grown-up. The figure stealing at dusk through the marketplace, the potter moulding his wet clay, the Sultan’s turret in a noose of light – it was frustrating to a degree that, with such enthusiasm, I was able to express so little.

Watching my struggles, my mother asked me if I would like to have lessons and I said I would. I was too young to be a junior student at the Canterbury University College Art School but, after she had seen the Director, he allowed me to go twice a week for instruction in the Antique Room where I struggled with charcoal and Michelet paper, confronted by blankly explicit plaster casts. I also was permitted to slosh about with watercolours and rather depressing still-life arrangements. My drawing began to improve a little.

It seems to me that in our early years on the hills I was never at a loose end, that there was always something to do, and that these were halcyon days. Sometimes I would wake at dawn, steal from the sleeping house and climb up through the mist, chilling my bare legs in tussock that bent earthwards under its veil of dew. Frisky, hearing me call, would whinny, look over the hilltop and come to meet me. She shared the Top Paddock with Beauty and Blazer, two cows belonging to our nearest neighbour, Mr Evans. Jack Evans, a quiet self-contained boy who did three hours’ hard work before going to school, would plod up the hill, softly chanting.

‘C’mon, Beauty. C’mon, Blazer.

C’mo-on, c’mo-on.’

And we would all go down the track together, I to my dawn-ride and Jack to his milking.

Sometimes one or the other of my two particular friends from Tib’s would come to stay: Mina and Merta. Mina was an extremely witty and articulate little girl who wore grey dresses and immaculately starched pinafores. ‘O Ngaio, fool that I am, I have forgotten my book!’ she dramatically exclaimed when we were still at Tib’s and she about seven years old. Mina shared my passion for reading, but was cleverer and much more discriminating than I. When we were a little older, she confirmed my suspicions of Kipling in his extroverted manner. ‘I understand it,’ Mina said, ‘and I don’t care for poetry that I understand.’ She had a grand manner and for that reason, I suppose, we called her Dutchy.

On wet days we wrote stories and illustrated them. My mother would set a competition to last through the holidays and give us each a fat little book with delectable blank pages. Two days before Mina was to leave, we handed over our completed works and my mother retired to deliberate. The following day she gave a very detailed judgement with marks for every story and illustration and stringent comments. The result was a tie. My mother presented each of us with a book, explaining that if the contest had not been drawn the winner would have received both of them. We were, I suppose, rather precocious little girls but we were completely taken in by this transparent device. Our mutual admiration was extreme.

Merta lived near us and we met frequently. I think it must have been on the occasion of her mother’s confinement, which Merta generously refrained from throwing in my teeth, that she came to stay with us. I have a vivid recollection of the day her father arrived to fetch her. By some mischance Merta and I got ourselves locked in the lavatory and in a state of rising panic, hammered and roared until we made ourselves heard by my mother, who was entertaining Mr Fisher, a shy man, to tea. She was unable to effect our release and was obliged, in the end, to ask for help. Through the keyhole, Mr Fisher begged us to keep our heads and follow his instructions, which we did at last, and emerged to find him scarlet in the face and walking rapidly away.

On my tenth birthday I had a party.

For many years my father had boasted about the excellence of the ginger beer brewed by their gardener and his assistant at Woodside, Essex.

‘Jolly good stuff, Old Jo’s and The Boy’s ginger beer. Totally different from the rotgut they sell out here.’

He wrote to my grandmother about it and she sent out the recipe. My father bought half a used brandy cask and a great many ingredients and set himself up in the cellar under our verandah. It was a long and elaborate process and for many days the house was suffused with pungent fumes. Occasionally, muffled oaths could be heard beneath the floorboards and my mother made remarks like: ‘Well said, Old Mole, cans’t work i’ the earth so fast’ and ‘You hear this fellow in the cellarage.’ She also asked him if Old Jo and The Boy had sent any incantations or runes to be muttered in the Essex dialect over his seething cauldron.

‘Don’t be an ass, Betsy,’ said my father, grinning happily. He had reached the bottling phase. On my birthday the proper time had elapsed for the brew to be mature.

The party was in full swing. Gramp played ‘Sir Roger de Coverley’ on the piano and gaily shouted instructions. My mother and aunts and uncles sedately chasséd and swanned down the dance while we children hopped, linked arms and became hot and excited. Some of the little boys went mad and made exhibitionist faces. The moment had arrived for refreshment.

My father had retired to the kitchen from whence presently there came a formidable explosion. He appeared briefly, looking rather like a mythical sea-god, being wreathed, bearded and crowned with foam.

‘Is it Old Father Christmas?’ an awestruck child asked. ‘Is it Christmas-time?’

My father went into the garden. A feu de joie of reports rang out and we eyed each other in wild surmise. He returned triumphant with a great trayload of buzzing drinks.

The response was immediate and uproarious. In next to no time my aunts and uncles and acquaintances were screaming with laughter in each other’s faces while their children, unreproved, tacked about the room, cannoned into each other, fell, threw cream cakes or subsided on the floor in a trance. I remember particularly a nicely mannered boy called Lewis who zig-zagged to and fro and offered a tilted plate of sandwiches to wild little girls. The sandwiches, one by one, slid to the floor but Lewis continued to present the empty plate. I must have been quite overcome because I have no recollection whatever of how the party ended.

‘Can’t make it out,’ my father said the next day. ‘It’s no good you thinking it was my ginger beer, Betsy. Absolute rot! Jolly wholesome stuff.’

Some weeks later we were visited by a hot nor’ wester, a very trying and enervating wind in our part of New Zealand.

‘Shall we,’ my mother limply suggested, ‘have some of Daddy’s ginger beer?’

She poured out two small glasses. We spent the rest of the morning lying quietly side-by-side on the carpet, looking at the ceiling. In the afternoon I had a bilious attack.

My father, concerned, said: ‘It might be the brandy I suppose.’

And so, of course, it was. The fermenting ginger beer had drawn into itself the overproof spirits with which the cask was saturated. In future, this heavily fortified beverage was offered only to grown-ups and, at that, it was dynamite.

‘Damn’ good stuff,’ my father would say. ‘Ginger beer. Old Essex recipe you know. M’mother’s gardener – ‘

To this day I cannot bear the smell, much less the taste of ginger beer.




IV


I think the greatest difference in convention between the children of my time and those of today may be seen in the amount of money spent on their entertainment and this, I believe, was a consideration not only of necessity but of principle. Books and toys were a fraction of their present cost but they were not casually bestowed. Gifts were largely restricted to special occasions and to open a parcel was a matter of burning excitement.

I am glad my friends and I were less indulged than children are nowadays. Even if my parents could have afforded to give me lots of expensive presents I am sure they would not have done so. If birthdays and Christmas had brought a succession of grand parties with everybody getting a great many impersonal gifts at each of them, I really do not believe these occasions would have held the same enchantment. There were very few formal parties. In the early affluent days in Fendalton, there had been journeys in hansom-cabs to fancy-dress balls in large houses. At one of these, I, dressed as a tiny Marion de Lorne, walked in procession with a fairy whose face fascinated me by growing more and more scarlet with each promenade. A day or two later I developed measles.

On the hills there were, for the most part, only impromptu festivities. My mother and her sisters and my father were superb in charades. One of my uncles (Unk), a distinguished geologist, also liked to take part. He always insisted, regardless of subject matter, on being dressed up and on carrying their parrot in its cage. This odd piece of business struck Unk as being exquisitely comical.

Even at Christmas our celebrations were of a casual family kind, except for the Tree, for which I made elaborate preparations.

There was a little black japanned cabinet in my room with painted figures on the doors. Into this I put the Christmas presents I assembled for my friends, starting early in the year and gradually adding to the collection. Pink sugar pigs, I can remember, a pin-cushion and wooden Dutch dolls costing from fourpence to tenpence according to size. These I sometimes attempted to clothe but I had and have, rather less aptitude than a bricklayer for sewing. The result was lamentable. I bought shiny fairy tales at threepence a book, a Jacko, which was a tin monkey that climbed a string, a jack-in-the-box, and a thumb-sized china fairy for the top of the tree. I would squat, absorbed, in front of my cabinet, arranging these presents under stuck-on-labels bearing the names of my friends. My pocket-money was sixpence a week. The English grandmother sent me a sovereign and an English godmother half-a-sovereign. These were saved in a scarlet tin postbox.

In the mind of a small New Zealander, Christmas was a strange mixture of snow and intense heat. All our books in those days were English. Christmas annuals were full of middle-class sleighs and children. Reindeer, coach horns, frozen roads, muffled boys coming home from boarding school, snapdragons and blazing fires were strongly featured. These were Christmas. But so, too, were home-made toboggans that shot like greased lightning down glossy, midsummer tussock: hot, still evenings, the lovely smell of cabbage-tree blossom, open doors and windows and the sound, far away, down on the flat, of boys letting off crackers. I settled this contradiction in my own way. For as long as I thought I still believed in Father Christmas, I climbed a solitary pine tree that stood on the hillside and put a letter in a box that I had tied near the top. Being a snow-minded person, Father Christmas, I thought, probably lived in the back country, out on the main range where there were red deer, and he would know about my letter and pause in his night-gallop through the sky to collect it. I suppose my father climbed up and retrieved the letters. They always disappeared.

On Christmas Eve, I sat under this tree and wrote in a book that was kept secretly for that one occasion. It was started, I think, when I was about seven years old and the first entry was in a round, unsteady hand. I tried to put down the enchanted present and this was my first attempt at descriptive writing. I also gave a morbidly accurate summary of my misdeeds and tribulations throughout the year. These portions should perhaps count as a first attempt at subjective analysis. The entries always ended with a quotation: ‘The time draws near the birth of Christ.’ The last one was made when I was thirty-five years old and unhappy. After that I burnt the book.

In the summer I slept on the verandah and on Christmas Eve went to bed in ecstasy. The door into the living room was open. Mixed with the smell of sweet-scented tobacco, night-flowering stocks, freshly watered earth and that cabbage-tree blossom, was the drift of my father’s pipe. I could hear the crackle of his newspaper and the occasional quiet murmur of my parents’ voices. At the head of my bed hung one of my long black stockings. I fingered its limpness two or three times before I went to sleep. Sometime during the night I would wake for a bemused second or two, to reach out. On the last of these occasions there would be a glorious change. My hand closed round the fat rustling inequalities of a Christmas stocking. When dawn came, I explored it.

I remember one stocking in particular. A doll, dressed, as I now realize, by my mother, emerged from the top. She had a starched white sun-hat, a blue gingham dress and a white pinafore. Her smirk differed slightly from that of Sophonisba whom she replaced. Sophonisba was a wax doll sent by my English grandmother in the Fendalton days and so christened by my mother. Her end had been precipitate and hideous: I left her on the seat of the swing and her face melted in the New Zealand sun. Under my new doll were books making tightly stretched rectangles in the stocking and farther down – beguiling trifles: a pistol, a trumpet, crayons, a pencil box and an orange in the toe. Placed well away from the stocking were books from my parents, grandmother and Mivvy.

I have no idea when I left off believing in Father Christmas. It was a completely painless transition. The pretence was long kept up between my father and me as a greatly relished joke. He would come out to the verandah in the warm dark when I was still awake and would growl in a buffo voice: ‘Very c-o-o-o-ld in the chimney tonight. Who have we here? A good little girl or a bad little girl? I must consult my notes.’

I would lie with my eyes tight shut, rejoicing, while he hung up my stocking.

At some appallingly early hour, I took their presents into my parents’ bedroom. The only ones I can remember were an extremely fancy paua-shell napkin ring engraved with a fisherman’s head, which I gave my mother, and a pipe (it must have been a cheap one!) which my father obligingly put in his mouth before going to sleep again.

The morning ripened to distant squeaks and blasts from tin trumpets in the house at the foot of the hill where my friends, the Evanses, had opened their stockings. My mother and I trudged up and over a steep rise to an Anglican Service held in the Convalescent Home, the first building of any size to be built in these parts. Soon after our return came The Boys, walking up the garden path in single file: tall, and with the exception of Alexander, bearded: sardonic and kind. How well they chose their presents: books, when they could get them, that were reprints of ones they had liked when they were really boys: Jules Verne, Uncle Remus, the Boys’ Own Paper. Colin, after a visit to England, brought back the complete works of Juliana Horatia Ewing, producing them one by one from a Gladstone bag. On the following Christmas he gave me The Scarlet Pimpernel and my mother began reading it aloud that same afternoon. It was decreed that we should go for a walk and the interruption at a crucial juncture when M. Chauvelin contemplated the sleeping Sir Percy Blakeney, was almost unendurable.

This, I think, was the Christmas when I wrote and produced my first play, Cinderella, in rhymed couplets with a cast of six. It was performed before an audience of parents by three of my cousins, two friends and myself on a large dining-room table in a conveniently curtained bay window of my cousins’ house. I remember the opening scene: Cinderella, discovered in rags before the fire, soliloquized.

O dear, O dear, what shall I do,

Of balls I’ve been to such a few

Just once I’ve seen that handsome Prince

And I have never seen him since.

Her predicament having been thus established, the Ugly Sisters made a brief and brutal appearance and I came on as The Fairy Godmother, croaking offstage:

Knock at the door and lift the latch

And cross the threshold over.

The rest of the dialogue escapes me.

I am conscious that I am vague about dates and the order of events during these early years and have dodged backwards and forwards between my tenth and thirteenth birthdays. The passage of time had not the same significance in those days. The terrors of childhood receded. Other people became more complicated and the firm blacks and whites of human relationships mingled and developed passages of grey. One grew taller. Frisky went into retirement and was replaced by a large rawboned horse called Monte. And then, one day in 1910, Miss Ffitch said goodbye and bicycled down the lane for the last time. I was to go to school.





CHAPTER 3 School (#ulink_f8f6fc8d-8c2d-5320-bbd0-34a2a64c0ec8)


St Margaret’s College was only six months old when I became a pupil there. It was one of a group of schools established in the Dominions by the Kelburn Sisters of the Church, an Anglo-Catholic order of nuns. These ladies already conducted St Hilda’s College in Dunedin. With funds raised by their Colonial exertions they supported their work amongst the poor in the East End of London.

On the face of it, the choice of St Margaret’s would seem to have been an odd one on the part of my parents. My mother certainly respected and subscribed to the Anglican faith but she was not an ardent churchwoman. Occasionally she would let fall a remark that suggested not doubt so much as a sort of ironical detachment. ‘Apparently,’ she once said, ‘the Almighty can see everything except a joke.’

This was not the sort of quip that would have gone down well at St Margaret’s.

As for my father, he seldom missed an opportunity of pointing out the devastation wrought by ‘religion’ (usually undefined) upon the progress of mankind. He would invite my mother and me to look at the Crusades. ‘Bloodiest damn’ business in history. Look at Evolution! You want to read. Read Haeckel!’ he would shout. ‘Or Darwin. Or Winwood Reade. They’ll show you.’

My mother had hidden Haeckel’s Evolution of Man in the lockers under the living-room windows, mainly, I suppose, because of its rather surprising illustrations. There it lay, cheek-by-jowl with Three Weeks. These were the only books that were ever withdrawn from my attention, and I found them both in due course. I was but mildly engaged by the first, thought the second pretty silly and didn’t get farther than the first chapter of either. She needn’t have bothered.

It does seem strange that, holding such rationalistic views, my father should have sent me to a school where every possible emphasis was placed upon high-church dogma and orthodox observances. Moreover his attitude to the Sisters, although he occasionally referred to them as Holy-Bolies, was one of amused respect. He did their banking for them and knew their real names. Once, in an absent-minded moment, he let fall to my mother that one of them was a lady of title in her own right. He caught sight of me and was disconcerted.

‘Pay no attention,’ he said, ‘that sort of thing doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have said anything.’

He made less of class distinctions than anybody I have ever known, not self-consciously, I think, but because they were of no interest to him and he had a talent for forgetting anything that bored him. My mother, nowadays, would probably have been thought of as an ‘inverted snob’, a term which, if it means anything at all, indicates, I imagine, somebody who is inclined to suspect and give battle to snobbish attitudes where none exist. It is true, however, that they both intensely disliked what they considered vulgar turns of speech, oafish manners or slipshod utterance. They came down remarkably crisply if I showed any signs of backsliding in these respects. ‘Rude,’ said my mother, ‘is Never Funny.’ The aphorism was shortened into ‘R is Never F’ and constantly employed.

‘Jump up,’ she would mutter when grown-ups approached, and when they left: ‘Up. Run and open the door.’

‘I was going to!’ I would furiously mutter back, but I jumped to it.

Such was her authority that it involved a trigger-reaction. It was not enough to rise. One leapt.

Perhaps it was because of their views on civilized behaviour that they made what must have been a great sacrifice to send me to St Margaret’s. I took it all as a matter of course but remember now, with something like heartache, how long my mother’s coats and skirts lasted her.

I now realize that she refused many invitations because she had no appropriate dress for the occasion. My father thought she looked beautiful, as indeed she did, but he was vague to a degree about clothes and it never entered his head that she was hypersensitive in matters of economy.

‘Good Lord!’ he would ejaculate on being told the probable cost of some painfully rare necessity. ‘Thirty bob! It can’t be as much as that, can it? Are you sure, Betsy?’

He would grin incredulously at her and she would shrink inside herself and do without. He was far from being ungenerous, but he was singularly blind to certain forms of vulnerability and so, alas, at that time, was his daughter.

Economies that would have seemed irksome to other children were unnoticed by me. I remember how we used to leave the tram (now on an extended route) a half-mile stop before our own because it was the end of a section. My mother was not very robust. She must have often longed for the extra lift. We were, because we had to be so, a thrifty family, and if my parents had been content, as many parents in their circumstances were, to send me to a high school, there would have been a much wider margin for those small luxuries which their friends enjoyed without thinking about the cost.

Having made their decision, they might have settled on one of the other private schools less extreme in their religious attitudes than St Margaret’s and, one would have thought, more acceptable to my father if not to both my parents. Perhaps they considered that the, as it were, personified focus given by a Church school to pure ethics, would be salutary. If so, I think they were right. The fervour, the extremes and the uncertainties of adolescence must find some sort of channel. I took mine out in Anglo-Catholic observance.




II


‘Good morning, girls.’

‘Good morning, Sister. Good morning, Miss Fleming.’

Every morning after prayers we performed this ritual, bobbing first to Sister Winifred, our headmistress, and then, on a half-turn, to our form mistress who, with a sort of huffy grandeur, returned our greeting.

From the first day, I loved St Margaret’s. All the observances that had terrified and haunted me at Tib’s were now enthusiastically embraced. It was superb to be one of a crowd. Appeals to Honour produced a reaction as instantly responsive as a knee jerk under a smart tap.

Several of my schoolfellows at Tib’s were now at St Margaret’s and turned out to be so unalarming that one wondered why they had ever seemed formidable. And here, after a long interval, was the friend of that magic house in Fendalton. She asked me to stay with her and the old enchantment was revived; the delight, quite untouched by envy, of a visit to another world.

Among my closest friends was Friede Burton. She was one of four daughters of a newly arrived English vicar at the Highest of Anglican churches in Christchurch. The eldest of these girls, Aileen, who had been at the Slade school, made sensitive drawings of birds and painted miniatures. The second, Helen, had been a student at Tree’s School, afterwards The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Friede came third and Joanie fourth. There were two older sisters in England.

All the Burtons were knowledgeably interested in the theatre and as soon as they were established in their father’s parish began to organize plays. He was himself an extremely good actor both in and out of the pulpit. His sermons were tours-de-force. In a darkened church he would thunder doctrinal anathemas and blinded by the very knowledgeably placed light that shone upwards into his face, would point accusingly at some unseen trembling old lady or startled vestryman. ‘You know what I mean. Yes, You!’

‘Even a little child –’ he would say and single out some gratified infant. ‘Even a little child – Friede, Helen, Ngaio, I have left my spectacles on my desk. Go and fetch them.’

Whichever of us was nearest to the aisle would then rise, hurriedly bob to the east and bolt over to the vicarage. On our return we would hand the spectacles up to him. Though I would not have put it like that, he was a great loss to the stage.

For the first time I found myself among contemporaries who shared my own enthusiasms and from whom I could learn. I stayed with them often, tumbling out of bed when the huge bell of St Michael’s in its separate belfry shook the vicarage windows with a summons to seven o’clock Mass. My memory of those mornings is so vivid that I can almost smell the drift of incense mingled with coir matting and the undelicious aftermath of Sunday School children. Candles shone like gold sequins above the altar, dawn mounted behind the east window, the celebrant’s level but immensely significant monotone was punctuated with imperative interjections from – the analogy though instantly rejected was inescapable – something rather like a giant bicycle bell. We were rapt. From this it will be seen that I had become an ardent Anglo-Catholic.

To say that I took to Divinity as a duck to water is a gross understatement. I took to it with a sort of spiritual whoop and went in, as my student-players would say, boots and all.

I was still at school when the first volume of Sir Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street appeared. The other day, after almost half a century, I took down my copy of this novel and re-read it. The book, tattered and stained, is encased in a dust jacket that I made for it. Michael Fane is seated on the top of a library stepladder with Lily and the appalling Meates peering over his shoulders. It is not a very good drawing but it does express something of the extraordinary attraction this romance of adolescence held for adolescents. It never occurred to me to draw a parallel between Michael’s Anglo-Catholic raptures and my own but, in point of fact, there was an extremely close one. To revisit the book was to look again at a faded photograph of myself, at the wraiths of impressions that had once been most strongly defined, to catch at the memory of evaporated emotions and remain gently, regretfully, unmoved by them.

In retrospect it is impossible not to smile at many of the excesses and solemnities of one’s behaviour during those intensely awkward years. How illogical, how dogmatic, how comically arrogant, one mutters, and how vulnerable! Perhaps the Roman Catholic Church is wise to offer its members for confirmation while they are still children and so avoid the complications of later transitional years. This church believes, no doubt, that calm, thorough and early saturation is better than a delayed-action plunge and the illogical anticlimax of experiencing nothing in particular except the firm pressure of the bishop’s hands on one’s head.

‘I didn’t feel anything,’ the honest girl next to me whispered. ‘Not anything.’

I, less honest, would not allow myself to say, ‘Nor did I’.

All the same, at the very moment when the intemperances and egoism of those years are most vividly recollected there follows an acknowledgement: the failures and blind spots were often one’s own, the exalted teaching, even if one no longer can accept it, remains exalted.

I felt other things: longueurs, unheralded gusts of joy that arose out of nothing and drove one to run the length of the room and launch oneself, exultant, face downwards, on one’s bed. Onsets of love that were for some undefined object – the world, a flower: a storm of tears, unexpected and agonizing, when my mother asked me what I would like for my fifteenth birthday.

‘I don’t know, I don’t want anything, I don’t know.’

‘What’s the matter? Just crying? For nothing in particular?’

‘For nothing at all.’

‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter. It won’t last,’ said my mother.

Here are three persons to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. The first is Canon Jones. He was precentor at Christchurch Cathedral and a man of learning. Once a week he lectured on Church History to the fifth and sixth forms at St Margaret’s. He was a white-faced Welshman with rich curls, burning, pitch-ball eyes and an excitable manner. He wore decent black canonicals and a shovel hat, tilted forward as he himself was tilted, being usually burdened with an armful of books. He was reputed to have the most distinguished private library in New Zealand. Canon Jones walked with a feverish pace and would enter our formroom abruptly, almost at a run.

‘Morning, Sister,’ (we were, of course, chaperoned), ‘Morning, girls,’ he would pant, and dump his books on the desk. On one occasion, he then screamed: ‘Sister! Spiders!’ and Sister Winifred composedly removed a suspended creature while Canon Jones, grinning desperately, backed into a corner.

He lectured to us as if we were adults and we learned more secular history from him than from any of our history mistresses. We followed him avidly, took frenzied notes, since he was very fast in his delivery, and were always chagrined when his period came to an end. He led us down many rococo byways of history.

‘A rooster!’ he ejaculated, ‘a cock, a barndoor chanticleer! Solemnly excommunicated, girls, and I quote, “for the heinous and unnatural offence of laying an egg.’ “ And Canon Jones gave a crowing laugh appropriate to his subject. He spent an entire period over the death of William the Conqueror, dwelling on its horrors with the utmost relish and baring his splendid teeth at us in a final triumphant grimace. In spite of these excursions he was extremely thorough and searchingly critical of our essays. ‘Padding!!!’ he would write in an irritable neo-gothic script in the margin. ‘Not lucid. The line of argument is not sustained.’ Thus from Canon Jones I learned that things which are thought of together should be written together and that they should be stated with becoming economy.

In his cassock, seated to one side of the altar in our chapel during Lenten instruction, he was a different being. He spoke quietly then, without emphasis and with wisdom. He was a person of authority.

Miss Hughes was an Englishwoman with round, rather staring and indignant eyes and pouting lips. She taught English and mathematics and she taught them very well. With her we read Julius Caesar, Hamlet, The Faerie Queene, The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, and a certain amount of English Augustan prose. She did not dramatize like Canon Jones, she was not excitable, and she had a cool voice. Everything we read with her was firmly and at the same time vividly examined. I do not remember that she ordered us to learn great chunks of the plays and poems we studied but somehow or another one found that they were there in one’s memory and they remain there to this day. She was a dragon on the notes and introduced us to considerably more scholarship than they embraced but there was no hardship in this: we hunted after her like falconers, flying at anything we saw. Eng. Lit. with Miss Hughes was exacting, and absorbing, an immensely rewarding adventure. I don’t think she particularly liked me and indeed, during the first onset of devotional fervour, I must have been hard to suffer. Moreover it was a matter of understandable irritation for Miss Hughes that, when I won a Navy League Empire Prize, I did so with an essay containing thirty-one spelling mistakes. For all the time I was at school I think Miss Hughes scarcely spoke three sentences to me out of class and yet she gave me a present that I value more than any other: an abiding passion for the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare.

Sister Winifred, our headmistress, was a tiny woman with blue eyes, a large, pink, inquisitive nose, a wide mouth and excellent large teeth. I think her age could have been little over forty. It may have been less: the veil and wimple are great levellers in this respect. On a single occasion, a short wisp of hair showed itself briefly under the cambric that bound her forehead. It was ginger. Her manner was extremely austere but her smile engaging and rather boyish. Her voice was clear and her style patrician. She had immense authority and a highly developed sense of humour. The only daughter in a long family of boys, she had been brought up in France where her father held a diplomatic post. She told me that when she announced her intention of taking vows her brothers all laughed till they cried and said she’d be back in a fortnight. Her French was exquisite. If she had taken us in this subject we would have undoubtedly gained a much more civilized notion of the language than the extraordinary jargon that emerged from unruly classes held by poor Monsieur Malequin who had no discipline and a most baffling squint.

I had arrived at the age for hero-worship and upon Sister Winifred, in the ripeness of time, did I lavish my homage. It is easy enough to laugh at ‘schoolgirl crushes’ and it is easier still, in these days, to overburden with heavy psychological implications an essentially fleeting, often delicate and always tenuous emotion. No doubt disturbing undertones sometimes appear but when the child’s bewildered devotion meets with a temperate and uncomplicated response there is nothing to regret.

By the time I had begun to admire Sister Winifred so ardently, I had been made head prefect and my duties sent me quite often to her office. It was during those visits that she occasionally told me something of her childhood, discussed school affairs, received my own stumbling and difficult confidences and spoke, once or twice, of the aims and hopes of her Order.

Out of these brief conversations there was to arise, in my final term, a great embarrassment. I called at her office on some prefectorial errand. When it had been dispatched, I tried to express my desire to do something specific for the Church after I left school. I suspect that in doing this I was as much moved by the hope of pleasing Sister Winifred as I was by a devotional intention: if so, I was most effectively hoist on my own petard. Her response was immediate and alarming. To my amazement, she opened wide her arms and, with a delighted smile, exclaimed ‘You are coming to us!’

Nothing could have been farther from my thoughts. Never in my most exalted moments had I imagined myself to have a vocation for the Sisterhood. Immersed in the folds of her habit, I was appalled and utterly at a loss. It was impossible to extricate myself saying: ‘Not at all. Nothing of the sort. No, no!’ I listened aghast to her expressions of joy and left in a state of utmost confusion. It was an appalling predicament.

During the next two or three days, I managed to snarl up an already sufficiently complicated situation. I began to wonder if I was right in thinking it was all a hideous misunderstanding. Suppose that, all unknown to myself, I was indeed called to take the veil and Sister Winifred had been elected as a sort of harbinger and prologue to the omens coming on. Perhaps, after all, she had made no mistake and this acutely embarrassing moment had been one of divine revelation. Which? It was a nice dilemma and I made no attempt to resolve it. I trod water and continued to do so until my last term expired.

My adolescence, as I have suggested, was taken out in religious fervour rather than in any abrupt onset of boy-consciousness. I did not, however, escape the awakening of those emotions proper to my age.

When I was fourteen I fell in love.

The object of my passion was a retired Dean. He was remarkably handsome with the profile of a classic hero. His voice was deep and harsh, his manner abrupt and his conversation rather like that of the Duke of Wellington as recorded by Mr Phillip Guedella though, of course, without the expletives. He also reminded me of Mr Rochester; I cannot imagine why, as there was but little correspondence. He was in the habit of taking a Saturday afternoon walk on the Hills and would call on my mother for tea. My heart thumped obstreperously when I saw him approach. If he missed a Saturday I was desolate. I cannot remember that we ever conversed at great length but may suppose that he was not positively averse to my company since he sometimes came out of the Deanery which was in the same street as St Margaret’s and accompanied me as far as the school gate, actually carrying my satchel. These were tremendous occasions.

I was not alone in my obsession. The Dean was hotly pursued by members of a Ladies’ Guild who were said by my mother to lie in ambush for him on the Port Hills and so irritated him that he sought refuge in our house where he spoke in anger against them. She had many stories about him. When he was a parish priest she had been asked by his wife to luncheon at the vicarage. He was late and they did not wait for him. Just as they were about to help themselves from a side table, he strode in and without a word snatched up the cold joint and went away through the french windows.

‘That,’ said his wife, ‘is the third time this week. Will you have some ham?’

It was a poor parish and there was, in those days, a financial depression in New Zealand. The joint had gone to one of his flock.

By the time I adored him, the Dean had retired and become a widower. He was a great admirer of my grandmother and was, I think, 73 years old. At the very height of my passion he married Miss Tibby Ross.

On his honeymoon he encountered an acquaintance in the upstairs corridor of the hotel.

‘This is a rum go,’ he was reputed to have said.




III


For two afternoons a week I went to the School of Art and it was understood that when I left St Margaret’s I would become, not a full-time student, but at least a daily one. I would have to get a morning job of some sort and, if possible, a scholarship to pay for my fees. In the meantime, through the Burton sisters, the smell of greasepaint had entered into my system never to be expelled.

They turned St Michael’s parish hall into a workable theatre with an old-fashioned raked stage, an overhead grille and adequate lighting. Here they produced ‘costume’ comedies, rather nebulous miracle plays and fairy pieces garnished with mediaeval songs and ballets of the gay flat-footed kind. Nothing could point more sharply the difference in theatrical attitudes and taste between those days and the present time than these blameless entertainments. Nowadays my friends would no doubt have chosen plays by Harold Pinter, even Ionesco, even Beckett and would perhaps, by diligent application, have discovered in such works undertones of religious significance that would have astonished their authors if they had ever heard about them. With us all was sweetness, tabards, and tights.

The first of these productions was called Isolene. My father unkindly referred to it as ‘Vaseline’ . I was cast as the Prince. Aileen, the artist sister, designed and made the clothes and did so with imagination and ingenuity. I wore a white tabard, heavily emblazoned in great detail, and white ostrich plumes on my head. I have not the smallest recollection of the plot but can recall, as if it had been last evening, the wave of intoxication that came over me when I made my first entrance on to any stage. There is no experience to be compared with this: the call, the departure from an overheated room reeking of greasepaint and wet white, the arrival backstage into a world of shadows, separated only by stretched canvas from a world of light: a region of silence and stillness attentive to a region of sound and movement. Here the player waits, suspended between preparation and performance. He stares absently at a painted legend on the back of a canvas door through which he must enter. ‘Act II, Scene I, p. 2’, or into the prompt corner where a shaded lamp casts its light on a book and on a hand that follows the dialogue. He may look up at the perch. There is the switchboard man into whose watchful face is reflected light from the unseen stage. On the other side of the door they are building to his own entrance. The voices are pitched larger than life and respond to each other in a formal pattern. Beyond them, like an observant monster in a black void, is the audience. The player listens and with a sick jolt may ask himself, ‘Why, why, why did I subject myself to this terror?’ Then he steps back a pace or two and on his cue moves up to the door and enters.

This is his moment of truth. Even though the role he plays is insignificant, the play worthless and the actor himself of no great account, this first crossing of a threshold from one reality to another will stand apart from anything else that he does.

My introduction to the working half of a theatre was thus by way of an insipid little piece in a converted parish hall. Luckily I never thought of myself as, potentially, a dynamic actress. If I had cherished any such illusion my mother would very promptly have disabused me of it. It was the whole ambience of backstage that I found so immensely satisfying: the forming and growth of a play and its precipitation into its final shape. That wonderful phrase ‘the quick forge and working-house of thought’ was unknown to me then: I would have leapt at it as an exact expression of the living theatre.

I don’t know when I first realized that I wanted to direct rather than to perform: at this early stage I was equally happy painting scenery, mustering props, prompting or going on for a speaking-part. I was at home.

At school, also, there was dramatic endeavour. Antigone (in English), excerpts from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and, every year, a play in French composed and produced by M. Malequin. M. Malequin was an ardent monarchist and was rumoured to have been tutor to a scion of the Bourbons. His plays, mimeographed in purple from his own spidery hand, tended to reflect his opinions. One was about the Little Dauphin of the Terror, un-murdered and in durance. I was his gaoler – inevitably, since my voice and height always prompted M. Malequin to cast me for the ‘heavies’. I was very brutal and brought the Dauphin a meat pie. I think I had doctored it but that somehow or another a blameless pie had been substituted by a virtuous hand.

‘Eh bien!’ I rasped as the Dauphin attacked it. ‘Bon appetit!’

Monsieur was, of course, anti-Bonapartist and in another piece I was a servile and sinister agent.

‘Excusez-moi, Madame la Duchesse, mais je suis ici envoyé de l’Empereur, mon maître.’

There was nobody on the staff of St Margaret’s who had the slightest acquaintance with stage-production. My parents suffered these performances annually at the prize-giving and I cannot recall that either of them ever offered an opinion. In this they showed superhuman forbearance.

There was a Lower School at St Margaret’s. After I became head prefect, I went there twice a week in the luncheon break to amuse the very small girls: I read to them and began to write and illustrate stories for their entertainment. Then I wrote a play and rehearsed it with them. This was a popular move and our effort, having been passed by Sister Winifred, was introduced into the prize-giving ceremonies at the end of the year. The play was called Bundles and the title is all I can remember about it. A New Zealand authoress of those days – Miss Colburn-Veale – saw it and wrote to my mother, offering to show it to her English publisher for an opinion. He wrote back very kindly and sent me a book: Tristie’s Quest by Dr Greville Macdonald, the son of George Macdonald whose stories my father, having delighted in them as a child, had tried in vain to get for me. Tristie’s Quest was a wonderful children’s novel and I wish very much that I had not lent it to the little girl who never returned it.

Encouraged by these events, I now wrote a full-length piece based on one of George Macdonald’s fairy tales as related by my father. It was called The Moon Princess. There were long chunks of very torrid blank verse and a good deal of theeing and thouing. For songs, I wrote new verses to old music and got very worked up over the whole affair. When it was finished I showed it to my friends, the Burtons, and they bravely decided to produce it on quite an imposing scale at St Michael’s.

‘I hear, Ngaio,’ said Miss Hughes, shouting down the length of the luncheon table, ‘you have written a play.’ Her manner was friendly but I was seized with embarrassment and muttered churlishly at my plate: ‘Yes, Miss Hughes.’

I would have done much better to show it to her and take what no doubt would have been a devastating opinion.

In the event, it went quite well and drew good audiences. Perhaps, after all, it was not too bad since my mother agreed to play the witch. She made a splendidly frightening thing of the curse:

‘In the dark nights that follow the old moon – ‘

Her big scene was with Helen Burton, the director and star of the production, and they both let fly with everything they had, lifting my dialogue into a distinction that it certainly did not possess. This feat, it occurs to me, illustrates in miniature one of the strange paradoxes of the Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian theatres. It can be seen at all levels from our remote New Zealand amateurism up to the great actor-managers. Irving’s most successful roles were in pieces that today reveal themselves as unbelievable fustian. These strange monsters of the theatre poured the charged stream of their personality and technique into dialogue which, by its very mediocrity, gave them the freedom which they needed. Irving was an intelligent man with a strong vein of irony but he seems to have been quite uncritical of his material except in so far as it provided him with a vehicle. Ellen Terry was different. ‘A twopenny-ha’penny play,’ she said of their enormously successful travesty on Faust. If there were adequate recordings or a film of Irving I wonder what we would think of them. Grotesque helpings of ham and corn? Or would some tingle of the electricity he generated in a theatre still make itself felt? Ellen Terry lived to a great age and people who remember her performance as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet tell us that it was timeless in its perfection. But Irving?

‘I went to the Lyceum for Ellen Terry,’ my father said. ‘Irving’s mannerisms – ’ He thought for a moment. ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘there was something – ’ He gave a little chuckle. ‘Yes. There was something.’

And he went on to relate how Irving as Mephistopheles, in a scene with Martha, the character-woman played as a tiresome old village body, had an aside to the audience.

‘I don’t know where she’ll go when she dies. I won’t have her,’ which always brought the house down. It is hardly enough to set us falling about in the aisles nowadays but my father insisted that Irving gave out the line in such a droll, unexpected manner that it always ‘went’ tremendously in the Lyceum.

Irving’s mannerisms of course inspired every drawing-room entertainer of the day. In the Grossmiths’ Diary of a Nobody there is the egregious Burwin-Fosselton who, without being asked, insisted on giving his repertoire of Irving imitations after a meat-tea at the wretched Pooter’s house and to their dismay invited himself for the following evening to present the second half of his repertoire.

As for Irving’s extraordinary vocal eccentricities: ‘gaw’ for go and ‘god’ for good, and all the rest of them, they were meat and drink for his mimics.

It was while I was stemming the full tide of my devotional convictions that Irving’s son, H. B., visited New Zealand with an English company giving Hamlet, The Lyons Mail, Louis XIth and The Bells. This was an acid test, since the visit to Christchurch came in Lent and during those forty days and nights I had forsworn entertainment. The Burtons, very reasonably, decided that such an event, never to be repeated, might be granted an exemption. My parents were agog. Whether my decision was rooted in devotion, exhibitionism or sheer obstinacy I do not know but whatever the underlying motive, it was a difficult one to take and I can only hope I wasn’t insufferably smug about it. I listened avidly to their enraptured reports. My mother described in detail the ‘business’ of the play scene in Hamlet, the protracted death of Louis, the gasp of relief from the audience when he finally expired, the tap of Lesourque’s foot as the tumbrels rolled by. It seems probable that H. B. Irving suffered, in England, from inevitable comparison with his father. New Zealand audiences found him dynamic. I wish I had seen him.

It was not very long after this visit, I think, that Ellen Terry, now in her old age, came on a recital tour. It was said that her memory, always an enemy, had grown so faulty that the performance was riddled with prompts that often had to be repeated. My father preferred to remember Beatrice running like a lapwing close to the ground and my mother also felt that this might be a painful experience. So we missed Ellen Terry, and this was a mistake for she was so little troubled by her constant ‘dries’ that her audiences, also, were quite unembarrassed.

‘What?’ she would call out to her busy prompters: ‘What is it? Ah, yes!’ and would sail away again, sometimes on a ripple of laughter that my father used to say was never matched by any other actress.

A friend of ours called Fred Reade Wauchop played Friar John and stage-managed in the Romeo and Juliet of her Indian summer. He used to call for Miss Terry at her dressing-room, carry her lanthorn for her and see her on for her entrance as the Nurse. The production was by her daughter, Edith Craig, and the star was an American actress very young and beautiful but not deeply acquainted with Shakespeare. Miss Craig thought it best to spare her mother the early rehearsals but when the play was beginning to take shape, asked her to come down to the theatre. Miss Terry had taken a great liking to Freddie Reade Wauchop and invited him to sit with them in the stalls.

Juliet, alone, embarked upon the wonderful potion speech:

Farewell. God knows when we shall meet again.

I have a faint, cold fear thrills through my veins –

It is a long speech. The star had enunciated but half a dozen lines when a scarcely audible moaning sound began in the stalls. Ellen Terry rocked to and fro and gripped her daughter’s hand.

‘O Edy! Edy! Tell her she mustn’t. Tell her she mustn’t.’

In the event, it was the Nurse whom the audiences went to see in this production.

Stories of these and the more remote days of the Victorian actor-managers turned my interest to the past rather than to the contemporary theatre and this inclination was encouraged by Gramp. After the final performance of The Moon Princess he gave me two parcels. One was a book called Actors of the Century. It began with Kean and ended with The Second Mrs Tanqueray and was nobly illustrated. Almost every page was enriched by marginal notes in Gramp’s handwriting. ‘My father recollected this performance.’ ‘I saw him as an old man.’ ‘Drank.’ ‘No good in comedy.’ ‘Mannered and puerile.’ ‘Drank himself to death.’ ‘Noble as Coriolanus.‘ The most exciting of these remarks appeared in the chapter on Edmund Kean. ‘Old Hoskins’ it read ‘gave me Kean’s coat.’

The second parcel contained the coat. It was made of tawny-coloured plush-velvet and lined with brown silk that had worn to threadpaper and torn away from its handsewn stitching. Pieces of tarnished gold braid dangled from the collar and cuffs. It was tiny.

‘It’s very kind of Gramp,’ my mother said, ‘to give you Kean’s coat. You must take care of it.’

I wish we had asked him to write down the story of its coming into his hands. As far as I have been able to piece it together from memory, conjecture and subsequent reading, it should run something like this. ‘Old Hoskins’, who as I remember them, appears frequently in Gramp’s marginal comments, was a family acquaintance. He was the son of a Devonshire squire and became an actor of merit, often playing with Samuel Phelps. When a stuttering West Country lad called John Brodribb first came to London, Mr Hoskins, having seen him in an amateur performance, very kindly gave him lessons in speechcraft and technique and a letter of introduction to an actor-manager. In 1853 when Hoskins sailed for Australasia, young Brodribb changed his name to Henry Irving and went on the stage.

A few years later Mr Hoskins turned up in New Zealand and renewed his acquaintance with Gramp. It is in my mind that much of this was in the notes but they were so copious and diffuse and often so difficult to make out that I skipped a great many of them. Kean’s coat had been passed on to Mr Hoskins by somebody – Phelps? – and he gave it to my grandfather in gratitude for an obligation that he was unable to repay in any other way. It was an heirloom.

About thirty years after Gramp gave me the coat, Sir Laurence Olivier played Richard III in Christchurch. There are few, a very few, actors of today in whom there is a particular quality that is not a sport of personality or even, however individual in character, exclusively their own. Rather, one feels, it is a sudden crystallization, a propitious flowering of an element that is constant in the history of the English theatre: it appeared in Alleyn, no doubt, and in Garrick, in Siddons and in Edmund Kean. When the door on the prompt side opened in a New Zealand theatre and Crookback came on with his face turned away from his audience, this witness to the thing itself, the truth about great acting, was at once evident. When the final curtain had been taken I said to myself: ‘He shall have Kean’s coat.’ And so he did. Gramp was a good judge of acting: he would certainly have approved.

Vivien Leigh tried it on. She was small, slight and delicately shaped and it fitted her enchantingly.

As for the book, I shall relate what happened to it at the appropriate time.

One other of Gramp’s theatre stories sticks in my memory. When he was a very small boy he was taken with his father to call upon William Charles Macready in his dressing room. The production included a big crowd scene. Macready took the little boy by the hand and led him up to one of the bit-part actors who carried him onstage. All he could remember of this experience was being told by his father not to forget it. Stories about Macready abound, many of them authenticated by his own hectic diaries. Actors, perhaps obeying some kind of occupational chemistry, are frequently obstreperous but Macready takes, as we used to say, the buttered bun, for throwing ungovernable tantrums. I like best the stories that collected round his frightful rows in America. These culminated in a pitched battle with his audience during a performance of Macbeth. Articles of furniture were thrown about, armed troops were called in. People were shot. At the centre of this gigantic rumpus, Macready continued in his role but selected suitable lines (and there were many) to hurl in the teeth of one or another of his tormentors. One can see him advance to the footlights, squinting hideously at the audience and beside himself with rage, point a trembling finger at a jeering face and yell ‘The devil damn thee black thou cream-faced loon’. Speaking of buns, it is worth noting that his unfortunate manager in London was called Mr Bunn, a sort of Happy Family name that accorded ill with the insults Macready tended to throw at him.

In his old age Gramp was both energetic and cantankerous. After Gram died he stayed with each of his daughters in rotation. He still took long walks over the hills and on his return would sit on the verandah apostrophizing the city on the plains with as much energy as if it had been Gomorrah itself. His hat was tilted over his astonishingly blue eyes, his pince-nez was perched halfway down his formidable nose, his head was thrown back and his very moustache sneered.

‘Generation of vipers!’ he would groan. ‘Sycophantic dolts! Perfidious beasts! Bah!’

Nobody knew why he had taken up this attitude towards the city of his adoption. My mother said he merely enjoyed the sound of the phrases. Perhaps his elevated position reminded him of Mount Horeb and the mantle of the prophets fell across his shoulders or perhaps he was merely giving a final airing to his undoubtedly strong histrionic inclinations. At last he became very old and silent and it was not possible to guess at his thoughts or know if he listened to anything that was said to him. He died when he was over ninety years old and left behind him the trunk full of documents that I have already described and a great deal of material for the performance of conjuring tricks.




IV


‘Lord Dismiss Us With Thy Blessing – ’ I had expected to be torn with emotion when, for the last time and well off-pitch, I joined in this valedictory hymn. It was annoying to find oneself relatively unmoved. Perhaps if it had been a rather more inspiring composition – ‘Jerusalem’, for instance, or ‘Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones’ – I might have risen to the occasion with a poignant throb or two but as it was, the final break-up passed off quite calmly and we faced the world with equanimity.

It was a world on the brink of war and that seemed very odd to my schoolfellows and me. We had been taught by Miss Fleming, who took us in history, to look upon war between civilized peoples as an anachronism. It could never happen again, Miss Fleming had crisply decided. The appalling potential of modern weapons of destruction was a safeguard: no nation, she assured us, not even Germany, would dare to invoke it. In that cosy belief we went forward with our plans for growing up. One of my best friends was to have a coming-out ball. There were endless consultations.

In the meantime we went into the mountains for our fourth summer camp. I find I have caught up with the beginning of this book.





CHAPTER 4 Mountains (#ulink_b4663df6-5aeb-5564-9e6e-9cb043887ef5)


Glentui is a bush-clad valley running up into the foothills of the Southern Alps between Burnt Hill and Mount Thomas. The little Glentui river churns down this valley, icy-cold and swift among its boulders. The summit of Mount Richardson from which it springs is called Blowhard and from here one looks across a wide hinterland, laced by the great Ashley river, to the main range. The Alps are the backbone of the South Island. When, in comparatively recent geological times, New Zealand was thrust up from the bed of the Pacific, this central spine must have monstrously emerged while the ocean divided and its waters streamed down the flanks of the heaving mountains and across the plains until they found their own level and the coastline was defined in a pother of foam. Ours is a young country. Everything you see in the South Island leads up to the mountains. They are the leitmotif of a landscape for full orchestra.

Glentui is about thirty miles crow’s-flight from our hills. On winter mornings when the intervening plains are often blanketed in mist, it seems much closer and on a nor’ west evening in summer when a strange clarity, an intensity of colour, follows the sudden lapse of the wind, one can see in detail patches of bush and even isolated trees. So that we were, in a sense, familiar with Glentui long before we camped there in the first summer of my schooldays at St Margaret’s. We were a large party: two of the middle-aged Walker Boys – Colin and Cecil – Mivvy, the four Burtons, Aileen’s and Helen’s fiancés, who were called John and Kennedy, and Sylvia, another schoolfriend. To reach Glentui was an all-day business. We had to go roundabout: by train to Rangiora, a mid-plains town, and then by a meandering branch line to Oxford, where we lunched at a country pub. Here, in sweltering midsummer heat, we picked up two farm carts loaded with stores, tents, shooting equipment, and hay for our sleeping-sacks. Then came an eight-mile plod round the foothills and across the great bridge over the Ashley. The air, as clean as mountain water, smelt of sun-baked tussock and our load of hay. On hilly stretches we climbed down and walked to ease the horses. Tuis sang in the hills. Is the song of our native birds really as beautiful as we think? The tui, black-coated with a white jabot, has a deep voice and changes his tune with the seasons, often interrupting himself with a consequential clearing of his throat. Sometimes he sings the opening phrase of ‘Home to our Mountains’ and sometimes two liquid notes, a most melodious shake and a final question. I tried to suit words to his song: ‘Remote. Remote. Alone and fordone. Gone,’ but they didn’t really fit and I was left with that aftertaste of an acute pleasure that always resembles pain.

In the late afternoon we reached Glentui and turned up the valley to find a camping ground. The carts jolted down a rough track and we ran ahead of them into the bush.

On our side of the ranges the bush is hardy: not gigantic and lush like the Westland forests but tenacious and resistant to sun and wind. Most of the trees are native ‘beech’ with an undergrowth of flowering-creepers, mosses and fern. The smell is glorious. As we entered, we heard the little Glentui river. It flowed through the silence like some cool and preoccupied conversation. We found a clearing and below it, at the base of a steep bank, the stream itself, emergent from a small gorge.




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