Black Beech and Honeydew (20 page)

As we have seen, it is characteristic of the bandwagon that it never entirely collapses. It will show every sign of being about to do so and then suddenly set off in a new direction: downhill, and at a tidy clip. I suppose it wasn’t really a great surprise when I heard that it was now to carry the Lampreys back to England.

We had discussed such a move often enough during those long, cosy, gossips that, however horrific their content, I so greatly enjoyed. Did Sullivan Powell cigarettes go out with the Second World War? If I were to find an unopened tin in some neglected corner and if I were to light one of them, should I not return to the enchanted house that smelt of them and of roses and a sweet-scented oil that was burnt in the drawing room?

It had always been understood that the children must be educated in England and the great obstacle was held to be the impossibility of raising funds for the move, let alone the schooling. It was perhaps a little confusing to learn that now, when financial disaster stared the Lampreys blankly in the face, their only possible means of salvation lay in the instant transference of the whole family, Nanny, a lady’s maid and a tutor, by first-class liner via Panama to England.

So the house and farm were sold. The difference, a considerable one, between the price offered and the price required was settled by a billiards match played by the principals at a club in Christchurch and this, although they lost, greatly cheered the Lampreys. While the two men and their fellow club members were occupied with this contest, the wives and women-friends assembled elsewhere and made plans about how we would all meet in London.

At last the day came when our voices echoed through empty rooms. Sunshine poured in at the blank windows and dappled barefaced walls and naked floorboards. Everything was gone except, very faintly, the smell of a house that had been loved by a number of people.

When the Lampreys had gone, their friends looked blankly at each other and felt rather as children do when the plug is pulled out of a swimming pool and summer goes down the drain. We told each other that it was no good being dismal and set about our lawful occasions. We even produced a cabaret in the grand manner.

I painted, and wrote verses, articles and short stories some of which found local publication. At that time, I had two ideas in my head: one for a full-scale novel with a New Zealand background and one for a detective story as an exercise, or so I thought, in technique. I wrote one or two short stories that I have never shown to anyone and have long forgotten. The manuscripts are lost and well lost, too. But there was one, influenced by E. M. Forster’s earlier tales and perhaps by Walter de la Mare, which I have remembered. In it a benighted traveller found himself driving interminably down an unknown road into a valley too deep to be true. He came to a halt at last and was entertained in a submerged house by a hostess whom he took to be maimed in some way, since she lay on a very wide couch overspread with rainbow silks. She dismissed him and he was shown to his room. In the night he woke and heard the sound of wings. He looked out of his window and saw that she flew in great upward sweeps between him and the stars which appeared distantly above the walls of the abysmal ravine. Perhaps it is as well that this story is lost. I might find it foolish now and that, I suddenly realize, is a sensation I would not enjoy.

As for the novel, I wrote two chapters into which I tried to put mountains and a handful of people. In those days there was no talk, as there has been persistently in later years, of ‘the New Zealand novel’. Or if there was, I was not by way of hearing it. The mountains and people chose me rather than I them and I found I wanted, quite passionately, to write about them. Perhaps if I had stayed in New Zealand I would have finished this book. I am almost sure that I would.

I did not stay. The Lampreys wrote gaily and affectionately from England saying that they were settled now and why couldn’t I come? It was a lovely house, with lots of rooms, set in the woods and
hills of Buckinghamshire. ‘Do come, darling,’ they said. ‘Tell Betsy and Popsy’ (for so they insisted on calling my parents) ‘they
must
say yes.’

‘Well,’ my father said slowly, ‘you’ve always wanted to go Home, haven’t you?’

Not only had I always wanted to go but I had always felt quite sure that sooner or later it would happen. When I was about twelve years old, a silent film called
Living London
came to New Zealand and we went to it several times. It ravished me. It was extremely long, jerky and rather dim and it was not at all surprising. It did not contradict anything I had imagined about London but seemed rather to confirm my dreams. I mean real dreams as well as waking ones. I had dreamt often and vividly of The Strand and Piccadilly, of Ludgate Hill and Threadneedle Street. Always it was night time and I was alone in the crowded streets, exhilarated. Perhaps these dreams were engendered by my father and Gramp when they gossiped about Old Smoky and perhaps by
David Copperfield, Bleak House
and
Our Mutual Friend,
all of which I read when I was very young indeed. You may say it was a foredone, romantic and unreal London that I conjured up for myself.

I’m a compulsive spendthrift by nature but I had contrived to save some of my earnings, I had sold some paintings and I was commissioned to write a series of travel articles which, if they turned out well, would be syndicated through the New Zealand press. My father said he could manage the fare, if it was not more than £100, and also a modest allowance to supplement what I was able to earn. ‘We have always lived quietly,’ he said. ‘We can do this. It would be a pity for you not to go.’

My mother agreed. I looked at her and saw a kind of anguish in her smile. I fell into an inward rage of compassion and love and resentment and, as so often before, hated myself for ever wanting to escape. It was terrible to know how good they were to me and how little I could do in return. This, I suppose, is the classic predicament of an only child. I have no doubt there are any number of surprising explanations and that Freud and the Greeks had a word for each of them and every one a
mot juste.
Is there such a thing as a daughter fixation? If so, I suppose it could be argued that my beloved mother was afflicted with it and I wasn’t, under those terms, as beastly as I
sometimes thought myself. A soothing exposition but not one which I find entirely persuasive.

There was no talk of when I should return and I was glad of that. I remember that we even speculated about a permanent family move to England but in a tentative, unreal sort of way. We seemed, almost, to be under some kind of spell.

Time went by and I started to pack about two months before there was any need to so much as think of doing so. I had taken a passage in a one-class ship called the
Balranald
of the P. & O. Branch Line, sailing to London from Sydney by way of South and Western Australia and South Africa. The voyage would take about ten weeks. Mine was a single berth cabin and cost £85. Its equivalent today would be thirty times as much, I imagine. I would cross to Sydney by trans-Tasman liner: first-class since it was widely held that any other accommodation was unsuited to a young female travelling alone on that line.

Encouraging cables and vague, pleased or funny letters came from the Lampreys. My ex-pupil, Bet, had already left by more conventional means of transport to stay with the Lampreys in England. Time seemed alternately to gallop and stand still.

The day of departure suddenly rushed upon us. I was to leave in the evening by the now familiar inter-island ferry steamer to await the trans-Tasman ship in Wellington.

‘I really don’t know why she’s going,’ said my father looking at my mother’s and my own blubbered faces, ‘if it makes you both so miserable.’

We had agreed that they should not come to the station. A friend was calling to drive me there. After dinner my father settled in his chair, opened his paper and lit his pipe. He caught my eye, nodded and made a hideous grimace which I ineffectually returned. My mother and I tried to behave unemotionally. When I saw headlamps coming up the lane, I hugged my parents and ran down the hill.

At once, as it seems to me now, with the closing of the house door and the slam of the garden gate, I moved into a new life.

In the antipodean autumn of 1928 the trans-Tasman steamer sailed down Wellington harbour between bush-dappled hills and through the Heads into Cook Strait. There are late afternoons in our part of the South Seas when the air is clear and the colour so lucid that it hurts. It was like that now. The South Island, although softened by the haze along the coast, was elsewhere brilliantly defined. The Seaward Kaikouras, those emphatic ranges, cobalt against a cerulean sky, floated above a Reckitt’s Blue Pacific.

Our course was north-west. We sailed close in to the north coast of the South Island, passing D’Urville Island, Tasman Bay, Golden Bay and then Cape Farewell. As we stood out to sea and the land diminished, it collected itself into a country, something to be looked at from a distance, a discovery: New Zealand. Its colour intensified: it was now an astonishment. These were the last islands at the bottom of the world. One saw them that evening as the first canoe voyagers and Tasman and Cook saw them. They receded quickly, turned dark and presently were gone. I thought: ‘How lovely they are. I wonder when I shall see them again.’ I did not regret them.

Having never taken a sea voyage before but having suffered many a violent passage through Cook Strait, it did not astonish me when the next day proved stormy. The passengers, muffled and queasy, assembled in deck chairs and looked but greenly upon a mountainously heaving Tasman Sea and upon cups of beef tea. The elements seemed to get much rougher very quickly which I supposed to be normal and in the manner of Joseph Conrad, but it was nevertheless
a surprise when quite suddenly all our deck chairs shot into the scuppers and discarded their occupants. An elderly gentleman’s arm was broken. Beef tea was poured down bosoms. Several ladies screamed. A young man disengaged me from my chair and asked me if I would like to come and hear some of his records. We climbed, slid and ran down swinging passages and crawled up a companionway to a smoking room where the young man played ‘Hallelujah!’, a very good jazz piece, on his gramophone. Several times the needle skidded across the surface and it was difficult to hear very well because of the thunder of the seas against our beam and the almost ceaseless crash of crockery as well as the incessant, ambiguous, basic hullabaloo. I hurried away once to be sick but I was enjoying myself and returned as soon as possible to my companion. We could only converse in shouts and all I can remember about him is that he screamed out that he was an old boy of the Merchant Taylors School.

When I went below to make some gesture towards dinner, I found a commotion of stewards in the corridor. The porthole in the cabin next to mine had been stove in. There was a general notice out that passengers were not to go on deck. One of the stewards said we were sailing in ballast and that it might have slipped a bit.

I attended dinner with perhaps a dozen other passengers but did not remain there long. The second officer and I were the only members of his table present. I rejoined my friend and we had quite a gay time of it in the deserted bar, drinking brandy and dry ginger which he said was a good thing and clinging to the tables when our anchored chairs threatened to decant us. I found that the brandy and dry ginger was not really a success and said goodnight. People always do tell one the Tasman Sea can be rough, I thought hardily, as I wedged myself down in my bunk. The noise was frightful but I think I slept quite a lot and I hoped that by the next day I would have found my sea legs. In the morning the stewardess said we had been hove-to in the night but I wasn’t sure what that meant. ‘Hove to
what?’
I asked myself as the Tasman thumped, crashed and hissed on the other side of the wall.

It continued violent all the next day but by the following morning was less so. Before dawn, on the fourth day, we came into Sydney Harbour. It never entered my head, until I heard other people saying so, that the passage had been in any way exceptional.

Sydney was my first big city and as unlike New Zealand, I thought, as it could possibly be. Remarkable, for instance, at dawn to see a lady on the wharf whose general aspect instantly recalled Sadie Thompson in Mr Somerset Maugham’s
Rain.
She was encased in black satin and actually wore white boots with an overlap of calf and much jewellery. Her hair was the colour of new bricks and her face not so much painted as impastoed. She stood down there, all alone, and gazed through a black nose veil at the forward portholes below decks from which presently emerged the heads of stewards and able seamen. Words were exchanged. Presently she nodded, turned her back and with rhythmic jerks and alternating flash of highlights, hipped and thighed herself down the wharf. Life!

I had ten days in Sydney, staying with friends who were extremely kind to me. The Carl Rosa Opera Company was there and I was taken to the first night of
Turandot,
superbly presented and, or I thought so, gloriously sung. Sydney was
en fête
for the occasion – tails and white ties, orchids, jewels, dazzling décolletages: opera hats, even. But far, far better for me than all this splendour was the news that the Allan Wilkie Company was opening with
Henry VIII
at a big theatre in the academic quarter of Sydney. I felt a little as if I was in a picaresque novel where, however far I travelled, key figures would appear at rhythmic intervals.

Since we had last heard of them, Mr Wilkie had been the victim (if victim is the right word) of a disastrous (if disastrous is the right word) fire. It had consumed a block of buildings in one of which his entire wardrobe and property had been stored in readiness for a tour of New Zealand. At first this really did look like ruin: the insurance was far below the amount needed to set the company up again and, being a man of integrity, Mr Wilkie felt obliged to replace any personal belongings lost by his actors. They were asked to let him have a list of the contents of their cases and I am afraid that some very minor bit parts and spear carriers laid claim to astonishingly sumptuous raiment. Indeed, the elderly, rather raffish, gentleman who had not, in living memory, been known to appear offstage in anything but a seedy blue suit and a pair of wicked yellow boots, now turned out to have been possessed of a wardrobe calculated to set him up with credit in the Diplomatic Service.

While Mr Wilkie was still wondering what drastic action he would be forced to take, a splendid gesture had been made by his Australian audiences who raised a public subscription in grateful recognition, they said, of his making the plays of Shakespeare a living reality in their country. Be sure, he was off to London as fast as he could go and there, still in storage and for sale, was the superb wardrobe, and lavish scenery of the late Beerbohm Tree. So now, here he was, rustling in pure silk robes of Cardinal red to a full house and with a most superior company. ‘Best thing that ever happened to me,’ he would say, ‘that fire.’

I had only a very sketchy notion of this play and had no idea what a rewarding actors’ vehicle it is. I have seen it since, directed by Sir Tyrone Guthrie and cast up to the hilt, but there was a touch in Allan Wilkie’s production that sticks in my memory as one of those moments of illumination that sometimes visit a performance and bless it. When Buckingham launched on his speech before execution and said to the hushed crowd: ‘All good people: pray for me’ they knelt, crossed themselves and began, just audibly, a prayer in Latin. It continued through to the end of the speech and I hear now a beautiful voice saying: ‘when the long divorce of steel falls on me’ and the slight upsurge of that background of prayer. The actor was an Englishman, Alexander Marsh, whose only fault was lack of inches. When my mother asked Mr Wilkie why he didn’t put him on elevators, he ejaculated: ‘My God, if I perched him any higher he’d fall off.’

Of course, I went behind after the show and it was lovely to see the Wilkies again. That was the last time I was ever to sit in front at one of their productions.

For ten days I wandered excitedly about Sydney. Flowers and fruit stalls blazed in the streets, the sun glittered on the famous and magnificent harbour which is a great deal bigger but less lovely, I swear, than more than one of ours in New Zealand. Sydney wears a brash, handsome, cocky look and has the air of knowing what it wants and going for it. Sydneysiders make New Zealanders look, I daresay, a bit dull, sheepish and provincial. This is the most positively antipodean city in the South Pacific. Neither geographically, ethnologically nor even historically do Australia and New Zealand resemble each other. We quite like each other: our common interests and our isolation from the rest of the world draw us together but there’s nothing New
Zealanders enjoy less than being called Australians. Perhaps this is because we are insular and they are continentals.

The
Balranald
was to sail before dawn and I thought I would give less trouble to my hosts if I went aboard the night before. I was driven down in the evening by their chauffeur and I remember feeling, as he escorted me to the gangplank and handed my overnight bag to a brightly familiar steward, that this was not an appropriate mode of embarkation in the
Balranald.

My cabin was forward on the port side and was exactly twice the size of its bunk. There was a washing-unit, three pegs, a porthole and no other means of ventilation apart from a small grille in the bulkhead. The only place for my cabin trunk was beneath the bed. To get it under, one opened the door, sat in the corridor and shoved with one’s feet. When it was safely stowed I went up on deck. Why is it that on the beginning of a voyage, passengers look so objectionable to one another? Why is each dismayed at the sight of someone with whom, in a day or two, he or she will have struck up a pleasant acquaintance and later on, very likely fall in love? What, pray, has he or she subconsciously expected in the way of fellow voyagers? Argonauts and Nereids? The narrow decks of the
Balranald
were crowded with passengers all of them, no doubt, entertaining the strongest misgivings about each other. We herded into a dining saloon with strips of coconut matting on the floor and, sitting mum at long tables, consumed cold meat and beetroot. At about eleven o’clock I went to bed.

On that sweltering Sydney night the port was hermetically shut: a foretaste of many more nights in harbour. Watersiders were loading the forward hold about two feet away, as it seemed, from my head. Whine, judder, clunk, thump, rattle. I lay panting on top of the bedclothes and wondered when it would get light and I could go on deck. In the end, I fell asleep.

Strangely, I remember nothing of our departure but have an idea it was delayed. She was an old, coal-burning, freight-cum-passenger ship and we soon discovered that she was on her last voyage. Her liver-coloured sides would have done with a coat of paint. Her appointments were far from smart. I doubt if there are any one-class ships today at a comparable fare, offering such Spartan accommodation. Her master was an ex-naval commander who had been
stationed in Constantinople at the same time as a cousin of mine in the Royal Scots. Eric wrote to him about me and after we had been two days at sea I was commanded to the presence. Here was another player of records, this time, appropriately, sea shanties, which were less remorselessly canvassed in those days and sounded their best in that setting. The master would give his guests liqueurs while robust gramophone voices roared: ‘Fa-a-r away you rolling river’ and ‘Spanish Ladies’. The night seas streamed past us and stars careened across the portholes. It was all wonderfully consistent in tone and so was the Owner himself. He was so like an RN officer in an Ian Hay farce that he was scarcely credible. His face was red, his eyes blue and, so it was rumoured, his temper exceedingly short. He was an implacable disciplinarian and not greatly loved by his officers who were forbidden to fraternize with passengers to any greater extent than could be contained by a brisk walk round the deck at stated times of the day. They must not sit or play games. He was obeyed but his object, at least in one instance, was defeated since an ardent romance developed between his fourth officer and a tough, bronzed and cheerful young lady from Sydney. Everybody discussed this affair including the lady, but nobody knew how such a degree of complicated infatuation could be induced by the prescribed number of circuits, eight to the mile, at a gruelling clip and under strict observation from the bridge.

There were any number of delightful passengers. Mrs Robertson, a pianist, for example, the bones of whose left hand had been broken by Dame Clara Butt. Dame Clara, it will be recalled, was a famous contralto of Edwardian and early Georgian days whose superb voice has been unfairly compared to a foghorn and who was enormously tall and possessed a formidable physique. She had been a student with Mrs Robertson and one afternoon, in merry pin, had gaily rapped her over the knuckles with a ruler and at a single blow transformed her from a concert pianist into her own accompanist. Generously, Mrs Robertson seemed to bear no grudge but undertook any number of tours with Dame Clara who did not appear to be tortured with undue remorse. Her husband had the wonderfully satisfying Lear-like name of Kennerly Rumford and sang duets with his powerful wife: accompanied, of course, by Mrs Robertson.

There were two amusing ex-public-school boys returning to England on what was left of their allowance, an English girl who was disembarking at Durban to marry a doctor and two young men whom she and I chummed up with. All I can remember of these pleasant fellows is the Christian name of one of them – Esmond. He was an enthusiastic British Israelite and lent me several books about the inscriptions in the Pyramids which I found profoundly unconvincing. There was an English actor of a lively disposition who organized ship’s entertainments and invited me to help him and there were a retired naval officer who did sums all day and his wife who wasn’t allowed to interrupt him.

Slowly and dirtily we steamed across the Indian Ocean and so infatuated with the voyage did I become that the increasingly dubious food and the stifling condition of the cabin did little to subdue my pleasure. With about a dozen others I used to haul my mattress along a corridor and up a companionway and heave it on the amidships hatch. There we lay, not perhaps very comfortably, listening at first to the sounds that a ship makes within herself; a complex of bells, the pulse of her engines, the hiss of her flanks through the night sea and the quiet movements of the watch. The stars were steady and luminous in the tropics and vague ideas about navigation made one feel they were important. I would fall asleep watching them and the night would go by in a little grey flash. Almost at once, it seemed, the quartermaster’s voice was saying:
‘Toyme
ter get up-er.
Toyme
ter get up’ reminding me of Fred Scully and his ‘Over-ture and beginners’. Bare feet thudded along the decks. Already hoses spurted and fanned and sloshed into the scuppers. We would fumble up our unwieldy mattresses with fingers still nerveless from sleep and blunder off to our cabins which were already oven-hot.