Black Beech and Honeydew (19 page)

The second example of her prescience occurred when I was teaching the small boy Colin, to whom I was very much attached. His parents had taken a cottage near us for the holidays and Colin was in the habit of paying a morning visit, often bringing me one of those warm knots of decapitated geraniums which children like to present. My mother was engaged, with my help, in the annual task of dusting and re-arranging the books which we accumulated in great numbers. She was gently, if reprehensibly, slapping two of them together on the verandah when she remarked that Colin was coming up the garden path and that he had his usual bunch of geraniums and wore a smart new Norfolk jacket. She asked me to meet him and keep him out-of-doors as she was busy. I went down one path and up another. I called. I explored the gully. He was nowhere to be seen. ‘Funny little boy,’ said my mother, slapping her books. ‘He must have gone home again.’

The next morning he arrived saying that he had intended to come the previous day but had been a naughty boy and his nanny had forbidden him. ‘And,’ he said, ‘I’d got my new coat on and I’d picked you a bunch of ginraneums.’

These two incidents can, I suppose, be explained on assumption of thought-transference. Both Uncle Reggie, in his extremity, and Colin, in his childish frustration, might be held to have set up some kind of telepathic communication. The third event is difficult to rationalize.

It also concerns a small boy – a cousin called Beynham Pyne. My mother, during her afternoon siesta, looked up from her book and saw a bed in a strong light with a little boy in it. He turned his head and smiled. She wondered which of her nephews this might be and, as was her habit with these occurrences, dismissed the matter from her mind. Some weeks later my aunt Madeline sent a message to say Beynham was to have his tonsils removed. She asked my mother to sustain her during the operation which was to be performed in the house. When my mother arrived they went into the sick room and she thought: this will be what I saw. But it was all wrong. The bed was in the wrong place, the light was coming from the wrong direction. Beynham did not turn his head. She thought: so much for
that.
She and my aunt went into another room and presently the nurse came to say the operation was successfully over and they could come and see the patient.

When they re-entered the room the bed had been moved into a bay window where there was a better light. Beynham turned his head and smiled at them.

Normally, as I have suggested, my mother did not discuss these odd experiences but Mrs King’s hands blowing hot and cold had quite won her over. They beguiled our journeys with many an esoteric gossip.

This odd and companionable little tour concluded, we went our several ways: Jimmy to Australia where he joined the Marie Tempest Company and Tor, finally, to replace Vera St John with the Allan Wilkie Company. When I arrived home it was to a series of events that led at last to an enormous change.

Almost at once, I was asked to produce plays for several amateur societies. Our friend, Bill, who, like myself was equally concerned
with painting and the theatre (that same Bill with whom we had travelled down the West Coast) left off being a schoolmaster and, having equipped himself in England, opened a studio of Drama and Dancing in Christchurch. To this end he was joined by his brother, the Fred Reade Wauchop who had played with Ellen Terry. They asked me to take over the drama department at their school and here I began to feel my feet as a director and coach. Everything that had been absorbed from my mother, from Allan Wilkie and from those subsequent and rather ludicrous ventures, now began to make sense.

At about this time an organization was set up in Christchurch with the intention of producing large spectacular shows annually for charitable purposes. My parents and I were asked to attend the first meeting. It was held in the showroom of a music shop among a shrouded company of grand pianos and here I met the little girl whom I had last seen almost twenty years ago in a carriage with a crown on the door. She had married, in England, the son of that house in Fendalton which I had visited with such delight. She had returned to New Zealand with her husband and three children to whom she was about to add the fourth and had been invited to sit on the organizing committee for this new venture which was called ‘Charities Unlimited’.

In writing detective stories I have only once, with intention, based a complete family upon people I actually know. There can be no doubt, however much we may disclaim the circumstance, that fictional characters are pretty often derived, subconsciously or not, from persons of the writer’s acquaintance. One may not be aware of this until after one has done with the book. In this instance, however, I wrote deliberately. Although the ages, sex, circumstances and behaviour of my imaginary family were not precisely those of its prototypes, its members were, in their, I hope, inoffensive way, portraits. I shall, therefore, make no bones about calling their dear originators ‘The Lampreys’.

It so happened that a few days before the opening night of an elaborate pantomime launched by Charities Unlimited the producer
became too ill to carry on. There being nobody else available, I took over. On the strength of this panic action I was asked to direct the next year’s production. It was
Bluebell in Fairyland.

I daresay it is a tedious commonplace to remark that most people find in their affairs a constant recurrence of themes that would have seemed to have died out. It is as if, after all, a kind of economy orders the ingredients of a life: an unsuspected design: as if, however much we are shaken up, we belong to some kaleidoscopic arrangement of which there are a limited number of fragments that are bound to make one of a series of patterns. One is tempted to think that coincidence is the rule rather than the exception.

I don’t know who unearthed the script and score of this Edwardian piece fifteen years after Ned had taken me to see it as my first show but it was a happy augury that this was to be my first big production.

The senior Lampreys came to many rehearsals and became progressively involved with
Bluebell.
It is a children’s ‘musical’, was written by Sir Seymour Hicks and has all the cosy sentimental ingredients, in the Victorian mode, for a Christmas entertainment. I had a splendid musical director and a ballet mistress, Madeline Vyner, who had trained with the Russians. The orchestra was excellent and the wardrobe mistress an expert. It was wonderful to have crowds to manipulate as well as individual players. The afterglow of Ned’s and my delight seemed to reach over the years and shed an odd blessing on the venture. The two elder Lamprey children, who were about the same age as Ned and I had been, were also ravished by
Bluebell in Fairyland.

After the final performance I went dancing with the Lampreys. In the early hours of the morning we drove to their house, twenty miles away in the country. Its doors opened into a life whose scale of values, casual grandeur, cockeyed gaiety and vague friendliness will bewilder and delight me for the rest of my days. If one can be said to fall in love with a family I fell in love with the Lampreys. It has been a lasting affair.

I must not try to ring the changes upon what I have written about them elsewhere and yet it is necessary, I suppose, to enlarge upon this first encounter since from then onwards, for some six years, I may be said to have occupied a seat on the Lamprey bandwagon. If
I were able to make an animated cartoon of this vehicle I would, I think, represent it as a sort of cross between a Rolls-Royce and a Dodgem car such as one sees at the fair. It would be driven jointly in all directions by a nanny, a very smart chauffeur belonging to another branch of the family and a Negro gentleman. It would travel at an uneven pace, cutting its corners, run in and out of ditches, and avoid head-on collisions by the narrowest of margins. Sometimes a vital part would fall off. Nobody would know where it was going and all the Lampreys would be very gay. Even when their hearts were in their mouths, they would laugh a great deal, saying: ‘Isn’t it
too
awful!’ to each other. And they would be vaguely kind and stop for people who fancied a lift. These casual passengers would, if the Lampreys took a fancy to them, find themselves immensely flattered by information that the senior members of the family secretly confided in turn to each of them. Their eyes would open wider and wider as they learned of imminent financial and domestic disasters. They would feel self-important and would be scrupulous in maintaining the utmost discretion. If, by the accident of some unguarded remark, they found that they were all equally laden with identical Lamprey confidences their reaction would be one of bewilderment rather than resentment. They might observe that, with the Lampreys, seniority in years was in inverse ratio to conventional discretion. They would discover, if they stayed for any time on the bandwagon, that however frequently its parts disintegrated they would, after the fashion of all animated cartoons, be restored and the journey precariously maintained.

At the time of which I am writing, the Lampreys lived on a scale probably unmatched in any other New Zealand establishment except Government House. They were, however, tacking up towards one of their periodical financial crises when all the servants except the lady’s maid and soldier-servant would be sent away, to be replaced by untrained Cantonese greengrocers wooed from their shops by wages slightly higher than those paid to their predecessors. This was an economy measure.

I spent most of my weekends with the Lampreys and joined in the desultory efforts to instruct the Chinese, who laughed a great deal. They were charming to the children and gave them many presents such as a sword made of coins to the son and heir and flagons of
nauseating scent for the little girls who drenched themselves in it. They also invited us to interminable firework displays. Their names were Wong, Low and Percy Chew. They were baited by Mack, the soldier-servant, a difficult man whose wits had been a little turned by yellow fever. He was thought to be dangerous.

Percy Chew wrote a letter about Mack to their mistress.

Dear Madam,

Every morning he peep up his grim face of choler. Repeatedly ask what for breakfast. Reply egg. Constantly bang on saucepan loud hard noises. Continue to groan and grouch on daily. We wonder, madam, that you care to employ this churlish fellow.

Your Servant,
Percy Chew

Soon after this Mack hit Percy Chew and was dismissed. He became a hospital porter and bore, I believe, a grudge.

The ménage, apart from the peripatetic servants, consisted of Lamprey parents, occasional friends and relations from England, the Lamprey children (five after my godson was born), a nanny – Nanny Appleby who was the quintessence of everything that has ever been written on her species – a governess, French governess, and later a tutor. There were also two cadets who were said to be learning how to farm in the New Zealand manner.

Life with the Lampreys was enormously exciting and my weekends grew longer. Sometimes they met. There was always some project toward, usually theatrical, and often on a most elaborate scale, as when the then Duke of York, following his father’s earlier example, visited New Zealand. For this occasion we mounted a cabaret which he attended, having dined the previous evening with the Lampreys. They were involved in one of their recurrent financial crises and were down to a minimal staff. However, the English butler and cook came back for the dinner party. Little warning had been given and our preparations were hurried. Owing to the crisis the windows had not been cleaned for some time and the Lampreys argued a great deal about whether we should draw blinds and light lamps or allow the horizontal midsummer sun to reveal the imperfections. Finally, they settled for lamps but not blinds and so it came
about that when the ducal entourage drove past the drawing-room windows it was afforded an uninterrupted view of myself falling in a series of serio-comic curtseys at the feet of one of the English cadets. Mr Moriaty, the village constable, had been alerted for the occasion. The appointment went a little to his head and prompted him to take an overdramatic view of duties which should have been confined to wearing his uniform, standing in the avenue and saluting at the appropriate moment. It was disconcerting to see, through the dirty unveiled windows, this large man, helmeted, sweating and doubled over his own bulk, dart from shrub to shrub in the garden. Keeping observation.

It is typical of a Lamprey occasion that while all of the Lampreys and I were grossly unmusical, we were successful in entertaining the illustrious guest with a nursery song at the piano. I can only suppose that he too was unmusical or that we were bad enough to be funny: I know we were bad. The royal cabaret on the following night was a triumph and made a great deal of money for deserving orphanages. Indeed, it was remarkable that while the Lampreys did not seem able to earn anything for themselves they were enormously successful in raising princely sums for good causes. What with these cabarets and an amateur vaudeville group called ‘Touch and Go’ which they sponsored and I produced, it was reckoned that while they were in New Zealand they raised directly and indirectly £12,000 for charities.

For two years the Lampreys held me as irrevocably in thrall as if they had been The Lordly Ones Who Live In The Hollow Hills. The children attached me to themselves as firmly as their elders. I have never been able to give very much emphasis to the age gap between myself and any children or adolescents with whom I become well acquainted. This lack of attitude has been accepted – indeed I think it has never been noticed – by the Lampreys. Although the eldest is almost twenty years my junior, we established a friendship that has gained in texture but is otherwise unchanged. Children are not nearly as ‘childish’ as people think: they are only inexperienced.

As for their elders, one grew accustomed to the off-beat rhythm of their fortunes. It became increasingly obvious that the financial crises were drawing closer together and the passages of rest growing more and more illusory. Gestures were made; table napkins, to the surprise of the butler, were abandoned. In an effort to cut down the
laundry bills, enormously expensive washing and ironing machines were installed. The one, being insufficiently bedded, threatened to bolt and the other savaged many a handmade shirt and pair of Savile Row polo breeches before its intricacies were mastered. All the Lampreys made intermittent efforts to economize and then compensated for these bouts of abstinence by giving each other presents at the gold cigarette-case level. ‘After all,’ they would say to each other, ‘he (or she) must have
some
fun.’