Black Beech and Honeydew (2 page)

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.

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.