Black Beech and Honeydew

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.