Black Beech and Honeydew (10 page)

‘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.

‘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.

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.

The men cut poles for the tents. We unpacked the stores, stuffed the mattresses, cut pegs for guy ropes, made a temporary fireplace and collected wood. Presently a spiral of aromatic smoke rose like a thank-offering for pleasures to come. I climbed down the bank with a clanking kerosene-tin bucket and now the mingled voices of the river were loud. Talk, talk, talk and always one significant insistent voice that muttered beneath the multiple colloquy. I squatted at the water’s edge, leaned out, and felt the tug of the stream as it filled my bucket. When I returned, the first tent was hanging from its ridge pole and we began to drive in the pegs. My mother hung a billy from a forked
green stick over the fire and prepared to make tea. My father was magnificent on these occasions. He was in his natural element and seemed to give off a glow of profound satisfaction. If one caught his eye he would grin or make a droll grimace.

‘Good. Splendid. We’ll be shipshape before sunset. Get all the gear under canvas: that’s the first thing. Always make sure you’ve got a dry camp.’

Indoors, doing the accounts or arranging some matter of business, he was a fusspot and used to drive us into a frenzy with his antics but out in the open, his natural element, he was peaceful and, as one might say, came to himself.

There is, of course, no such thing as a norm in human behaviour: inside every conventional man there’s an eccentric refusing to come out. The real eccentric – the ‘character’ – is the person whose other self doesn’t sulk but comes out boldly and lets fly. Such a one, to some extent, was my father. When he was cross he shouted and kicked things. When he was gripped by a book he read it, under the very nose of his visitors. When he was happy, his whole person bore witness to his satisfaction.

Such a one too, though in an entirely different vein, was Cecil Walker, the youngest of the bearded Boys. He was, in common with his brothers, possessed of a private income, a family house and servants. He, therefore, did not seek employment of any kind and this, in New Zealand, was already extraordinary. He was extremely ingenious and of a mechanical and inventive turn of mind and he spent a great deal of his time in a little workshop in the garden where he made, among other curiosa, a clockwork egg-beater which he presented to my mother. Like my father’s ginger beer, it went off with a bang and in its brief frenzy covered them both with agitated albumen.

‘There has been a miscalculation,’ Cecil said coldly. ‘I shall have to revise my original conception.’

In our Glentui days the preoccupation of the year for Cecil was the construction of a camper’s stove. He began making it in the winter, using the ubiquitous kerosene tin as raw material. It was his
oeuvre:
his triumph. We all recognized that in setting up camp he must be excused from any other job than the installation of his stove. Slowly and with infinite care, he dug out the emplacement in
a meticulously chosen bank. The stove was unpacked and displayed in all its splendour of chimney, oven, flues and shining trays. It was packed round with earth. Kindling of exactly the correct length was arranged by Cecil as if for a votive offering. We all attended the lighting of the stove except my father who could be heard singing at the top of his voice in the bush as he chopped down another tent pole.

The stove worked superbly. In it my mother would bake scones and cakes and roast wild suckling pig. Cecil did not openly exult in his achievement but when we congratulated him gave a series of little sniffs which were his substitute for laughter.

‘There was a kind of dedication about his stoves, a purity of intention and an artist’s disregard for the fugitive nature of his work. Each stove would serve its purpose nobly for eight weeks and at the end, already showing signs of decay, would be given decent burial. In six months’ time he would begin to make another stove.

He was an oddity in looks as well as in character. As a model, he would have been a
trouvaille
for an illustrator of Don Quixote. The long narrow head, the beard, the height and sparseness of frame and above all, the glint of fanaticism in the eyes: they were all there. He was argumentative and shouted a good deal when roused. His brothers found him rather trying in this respect. They were men with a gift of irony and great reserve. They came of an old and, I suspect, rather inbred Scottish family to which they seldom referred. One of their aunts was a duchess with whom Colin and his mother stayed during a trip to England. Colin, on his return, spoke dryly of the experience. There had been a dinner party for which he wore his new tails and white tie. On this occasion he had behaved, for the only time on record, rather in the manner of my father. At seven o’clock he appeared in a state of agitation at his mother’s door. ‘Some bastard,’ he said, ‘has pinched my pants.’

Mrs Walker said: ‘They are being pressed. And don’t speak like that.’

He raised his eyebrows and withdrew.

The men at this party, he related, had only one thing to say to him. It was: ‘By Jove! Come a long way!’

His aunt sent him out in the mornings for some ‘rough shooting’. Colin was used, in New Zealand, to no other kind and he was a brilliant shot. Accustomed to the rigours of the high country, his stroll
with an attendant gamekeeper through his aunt’s well-kept preserves made him feel foolish. ‘I didn’t know what to do with the damn’ chap,’ he said.

‘What did you shoot?’ asked my mother.

‘Bunnies,’ said Colin, bitterly.

Cecil refused to go on this jaunt to England.

Cecil had a number of stock observations which became catch phrases in my own family. ‘They didn’t ask me,’ and ‘I should have to look it up,’ were two of the most familiar. He pronounced his a’s as in ‘lack’. ‘They didn’t âsk me.’ When the war came he did not enlist but waited huffily for his name to be drawn in the ballot. ‘When they want me they can âsk for me.’ He was wounded in the ankle and suffered himself to be anaesthetized, probed and manipulated.

‘They wanted to find out whether it was broken. I could have told them it wasn’t, for I ran a couple of chains after I was hit. But they didn’t âsk me.’

He had one, to me, very endearing trait: he loved stories for children. Every Christmas until he died at an advanced age, I gave him one. He never pronounced upon them. Once, pleased with my choice, I ventured to ask him if he had enjoyed it. He sniffed three times. ‘I return to it,’ he said, ‘upon an average, once every two months.’ Success!

Cecil met with a strange adventure at Glentui. The men had been out all day on a wild pig hunt and were returning empty-handed to camp, their rifles already unloaded. With Cecil some distance in the van, they plodded in single file along a narrow track above a cliff-face. Cecil turned a corner and approached an outcrop of rock. A gigantic boar walked round it and confronted him. It was an old-man-tusker, a most formidable and dangerous creature. For a second or two they glared at each other. Cecil’s pig-hunting weapon was slung behind his shoulder but he carried a small .22 bore rifle which was still loaded. The boar made an uncompromising noise. Its eyes glowed, it lowered its head and prepared to attack. Cecil madly discharged his pea-rifle. He heard the bullet ricochet off his opponent’s hide and spatter on the rock face. The boar gave an ejaculation of the utmost savagery, launched itself full at him and fell down dead.

No wound was found upon the carcass. There was no explanation.

‘Unless, my dear chap,’ my father said, ‘you frightened him to death.’

Cecil removed the tusks and returned to camp flushed with his ambiguous victory.

‘It is,’ he said haughtily, ‘a perfectly well-recognized phenomenon. The details escape me. I should have to look it up.’

When the nights were warm, we girls dragged our hay-stuffed mattresses out of the hot canvas-smelling tent and slept under the trees. Starlight darted and winked behind the branches and when the moon was high it looked as if it had been crackle-glazed with twigs. The open fire alongside Cecil’s stove pulsed and faded. Inside the glowing tents quiet voices exchanged a few desultory remarks, wished each other goodnight and went out with the candles. Then the bush and hills possessed the night. Moreporks called to each other across the valley, sounding very lonely in a silence that was compounded of small rustling movements, unnoticed by day, and the undertone of hurrying water.

During the night, wekas, flightless and inquisitive birds who in those days lived in the foothills, would explore the camp looking for anything bright they might steal. They would go off with a spoon or tin lid making a strange mumbling noise and when they were safe in the bush would give a vainglorious screech. One of them stole my confirmation cross from beside my pillow. My mother, who happened to be awake, saw him hurdling over our sleeping bodies with the chain dangling from his beak.

In the bush everything stirs at the first light and we too would wake and hear the bellbirds. Their dawn-song is, in fact, exactly like the tinkle of a very small melodious bell:
‘Tink. Ding.’
Native pigeons, fat and unwieldy, whirred and flopped about over the tents. ‘Morning is beginning to happen’ one would think with satisfaction and go to sleep again.

We dammed the river with turf and boulders and made a swimming pool. We had a private glade downstream where the girls could rid themselves of their neck-to-knee bathing clothes and receive exultantly the sun and the springing pleasure of young grass. One day we climbed the mountain to Blowhard and looked across a great valley into the back country: range after naked range with a glitter of snow on the big tops.

‘My country,’ I thought.

And yet, so young and at the same time so primordial was this landscape, that the sense of belonging to it was disturbed by a doubt that, for all our adoptive gestures, our presence here was no more than a cobweb across the hide of a monster, that in spite of our familiarity with its surface we had made no mark upon our country and were still newcomers. I do not know if other New Zealanders are visited by this contradictory feeling of belonging and not-belonging but it came upon me very vividly when I first looked into the high country from the top of Blowhard and it has returned many times since then. It is a feeling that deepens rather than modifies one’s attachment to New Zealand.

Cecil was at his most pontifical on Blowhard. When he saw us making a fire for the billy, he put his head on one side and gave the three-sniff laugh.

‘Judging by the general configuration of the country and the overall appearance of the scrub I am afraid I must tell you that you are wasting your time. Unless’ (sniff-sniff-sniff) ‘you are prepared to climb down a thousand feet for it, you won’t find any water.’

‘Here you are, old feller,’ said my father coming through the stunted manuka scrub with a billy-full of spring water.