Black Beech and Honeydew

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.