Black Beech and Honeydew (5 page)

At last, at the end of a lifetime and late at night: Dunedin, the smell of Mivvy’s fur coat and the familiar sound of her voice. The platform heaved under one’s legs. I cannot remember, on any occasion, the drive out to St Clair and suppose I must always have fallen asleep. One entered the house through a conservatory smelling of wet fern. We were near the sea and the last thing one heard was the roar of surf on a lonely coast.

One day, at St Clair, it rained so heavily that I was not allowed to put my nose out-of-doors. Under the dining-room bay-window seat was a system of lockers. Mivvy said they were full of old magazines and suggested that I might like to explore them. They were of two kinds.
The Windsor,
which was lettuce green with the Castle, I think, in brown, and
The Strand
with a picture of that thoroughfare on the cover. All day I hunted and devoured, tracing the enchanting series from one edition to the next. The rain beat down, not on the windows of a New Zealand house but across those of a gas-lit upstairs room in a London street. It glistened on the roofs of hansom-cabs and bounced off cobblestones. It mingled with the cries of newsboys and eccentric improvisations upon the fiddle. A solitary visitor was approaching: there was a peremptory double-knock at the street door. Someone came up the stairs and entered.

‘Hullo,’ said Mivvy, looking over my shoulder, ‘you’ve discovered Sherlock Holmes.’

Miss Sibella E. Ross was a gentlewoman of Highland descent. She was also a cousin of my adored Dundas. Her shape was firm, her bust formidable, her eyes blue and, like her face, surprisingly round. Her teeth were slightly prominent. She lived with her highly respected family in a large house generally known, though not I think to the Rosses, as ‘The Tin Palace’, since it had been constructed in pioneering days from galvanized iron and had a tower. In premises conveniently adjacent, Miss Ross kept school: a select dame school for about twenty children between the ages of six and ten years. Miss Ross’s family and immediate friends called her Tibby and her ex-pupils referred to her school as Tib’s.

To this establishment I was sent when I was, I suppose, six years old. I have no doubt whatever that it was a wise decision but the experience in its initial stages was hellish.

In the morning I was put into a horse-drawn bus where there were already three fellow pupils. We were met at the other end by Miss Irving, the governess at Miss Ross’s, and escorted to school.

‘Good morning, children.’

‘Good morning, Miss Ross. Good morning, Miss Irving.’

For the first time I found myself one of a group of children and, for the first time, I was conscious of being tall for my age. This made the simple business of standing up to answer questions an embarrassing ordeal. Miss Ross had invented an ‘honour’ system which decreed that at the end of the morning each child must stand up and proclaim how many times he or she had spoken unlawfully in class. When my
immediate neighbours discovered, with the terrible prescience of children, that this observance frightened me, they determined, gleefully, to enhance its terrors by forcing me to talk. They would hiss questions. If I didn’t answer, they would make jabs at me, for all the world as hens peck at a sick bird. They would peck and jab until I made some kind of response and then stare accusingly at me when the moment for public confession arrived. One could not always ask to ‘leave the room’ at the crucial moment. I cannot think that this was a good practice: it engendered, in a single operation, elements of guilt, fear, loneliness and inferiority, and, indeed, provoked a sort of Freudian extravaganza in the reactions of a little girl who was unprepared for it. The follow-up treatment took place in playtime and was set in hand by the nine-year-olds. They organized themselves and their juniors into something that was called a ‘secret army’ and from it excluded two stalwart little boys and myself. The boys were called Charles and Roderick and were kind. Roderick became a soldier and Charles a man of letters. Both of them left New Zealand. When, on separate occasions and about thirty years afterwards, I met them again, something of the intense gratitude I had felt for them returned. We talked about our first term at Tib’s.

I did not say anything at all about these miseries to my parents but I think my mother must have known that all was not well and decided that I should stick it out. Very properly so, I expect. After all, she was up against the problem of the only child. It is true that by some process of adaptation the picture gradually changed. I was no longer bullied. I formed heartening friendships with other small girls. I toughened.

As time went on I was even given certain responsibilities at Tib’s. When Ian, a fighting boy in a kilt, was brought at eleven o’clock every morning by his nanny, I was one of two sent to take delivery of him in the porch. He yelled, bit and kicked, while his nurse recommended that he should go with the nice young ladies to his lesson. We led him, roaring, to his desk, rather impressed than otherwise by the extremity of his passion. Dick, a fat boy, was more vulnerable and wept sometimes. He was jeered at by my former tormentors and I’m glad to remember that I was sorry for him and didn’t join in. I was out of the wood by that time. Rightly or wrongly, however, I still think that my first term at Tib’s was far from being all to the good. It does not improve the character to be bullied. Children are microcosms of
people. Treat them badly for long enough and then give them a little power and they will punctually repeat with greater emphasis the behaviour to which they have been subjected. Fear is the most damaging emotion that can be inflicted on the character of any child and on one already as morbidly prone to inexplicable terrors as I was, the early torments I underwent at Tib’s were pretty deadly. When they moderated and I was no longer in thrall, I reacted predictably. I don’t think that on the whole I was all that much more obnoxious than any other little girl of my age but for a time I became so: bossy, bullying, and secretive, paying back however unconsciously, I am sure, for what had been dealt out to me. I don’t think it lasted very long but it happened and in my old age I still remember and am sorry about it.

Fear can be perhaps the most corrupting of our basic emotions and fear without the possibility of release, the worst of all. The child who has been overtaken by it is a microcosm of the mob. If you rule a people by fear and treat them as an inferior race and then give them power, don’t expect them to use it like angels. You have corrupted them and many of them will abuse it.

One day, while I and other Fendaltonians waited for Miss Irving to put us on the bus, we heard a clatter of hooves in the quiet street and mounted policemen rode splendidly by, followed by a carriage with a crown on the door.

‘The Governor,’ gabbled Miss Irving in a fluster. ‘Girls curtsey and boys bow. Off with your caps. Quick.’

We bobbed and nodded, eyeing each other sideways and then looked up to see the Governor smiling and bowing very pointedly to us. With him was his wife and unless I am at fault, a little girl of about my own age of whom there will be much more to say.

Away rolled the carriage and up came the bus.

One other incident sticks in my memory. Miss Ross, rather ominously smiling, asks her pupils what they wish to be when they grow up. She concentrates upon the boys since the girls are destined for matrimony: an employment not to be examined in detail with propriety. I, however, hold up my hand. ‘I want,’ I venture, ‘to be an artist.’ ‘Ho!’ Miss Ross atrociously says, ‘you’ll never do that, my dear. Your hand shakes.’

I suppose I had attended Miss Ross’s school for about a year when the great change came. We went to live on the hills.

When I looked south from the higher branches of my wellingtonia tree in suburbia, I saw, above park, roofs and Cathedral spire, the Port Hills. They were only four miles away but to me they seemed as romantically distant as those snowy Alps that stood to the north beyond the Canterbury Plains. The hills were rounded and suave in outline with occasional craggy accidents. They would be called mountains in England. The tussock that covered them gave them a bloomy appearance as blonde hair does to a living body. I was told that a long time ago they had moved gigantically and heaved themselves into their present form and then grown hard, being the overflow of a volcano.

The crater of this volcano is now a deep harbour into which a hundred and fifteen years ago, sailed the First Four Ships:
Sir George Seymour, Randolph, Cressy
and
Charlotte Jane,
bringing the founders of the Canterbury Settlement. These intrepid emigrants landed at the port of Lyttelton, wearing stovepipe hats, heavy suits, crinolines and bonnets. They climbed the Port Hills and reached the summit where, with a munificent gesture, their inheritance was suddenly laid out before them. Whenever I return to New Zealand I like to come home by the hills and still think that an arrival at the pass on a clear dawn is the most astonishing entry one could make into any country. There, as abruptly as if one had looked over a wall, are the Plains, spread out beyond the limit of vision, laced with early mist, and a great river, bounded on the east by the Pacific, on the west by mere distance, and from east to west by a lordly sequence of mountains, rose-coloured where they receive the rising sun.

Gramp came this way in, I think, 1853 and looked down at swamps and a little group of huts and wooden buildings. When he was eighty he still used to go for a Sunday walk on the Port Hills and glare sardonically at the city of Christchurch.

In our Fendalton days there was only a scatter of about twenty houses on the hills. We were lent one of these for a summer holiday – a house amidst tussock with nothing but clear air between it and the foothills of the Alps, forty miles away on the other side of the Plains. It was this visit, I think, that decided our move. My father bought the nose of the same hill; some three-quarters of an acre of ground, already
fenced, partly cultivated and set about with baby trees – pinus radiata and limes, not much higher than the surrounding tussock. A sou’-wester is blowing this morning and I look anxiously at the tops of my pines, a hundred feet tall, and hope they have enough sap in their old bodies to withstand the gale.

As soon as the momentous decision was taken, it was communicated to an architect cousin of my mother’s. He at once caused to be set aside a stack of seasoned timber and exposed it to further weathering. It had come out of the mountains, horse-drawn through virgin forest to a bush tramway, or had been floated across a lake and broken down in Westland timber mills. When I made some alterations in this house, the carpenters were unable to drive a nail into the old joists; the wood, they said, was like iron rather than timber.

Perhaps the lease of our house in Fendalton expired before the new one could be built or perhaps there was a delay in the building. For whatever the reason, it was decided that we should camp in tents near the site of our future home and stay there until it was completed. I fancy that we adopted this hardy adventuresome procedure partly because my father considered it would be an advantage if he were at hand to keep an eye on the workmen.

‘You never know,’ he said darkly, ‘with those chaps.’

It was on an early summer’s day that we left Fendalton, seated on top of our tents and boxes in a spring-wagon. My father’s closest friend of those times had a motor-car, one of the first in Christchurch, and had offered to drive us to the hills, but I think the recollection of innumerable breakdowns and hour-long unproductive explorations of its less accessible mysteries decided my mother against this vehicle. She felt that the important thing was to arrive.

So, on what seems to me to have been an interminable journey, we plodded through the borders of Fendalton, round the parks, past a region of drafting-yards and sheep pens where, once a week, livestock was sold, down a long highway and into Wilderness Road, an endless stretch between gorse hedges. It is now a main suburban street. This brought us at last to the hills; to a winding lane, a rough track and our destination. I remember that a hot nor’ wester raged across the plains and when we tried to pitch our bell tents, got inside them and threatened to blow them away like umbrellas. We settled
at last upon the sheltered end of a valley, below our section and within sight of the scaffolding that had already been set up.

There we lived throughout the summer. It was the beginning of a new life for all of us.

I continued at Tib’s. Every morning, with my father, I left our tents, climbed up and over a steep hill, or as an alternative, walked a mile round the foot of it to the terminus of a steam-tramway and was carried into Christchurch. In winter I was dressed in a blue serge sailor suit with braid on the collar and skirt and an anchor on the dicky. I also wore a sailor’s cap with HMS Something on it. In summer this nautical motif was carried out in cotton or piqué and the hat was of straw. We had friends living near us in a large house with plantations and a rambling garden – the Walkers: mother, sister and four enormously tall brothers of Dundas, who was now on the stage in Australia. Three of the brothers were bearded, which in those days was unusual, and they were all extremely handsome: Graham, Colin, Alexander, Cecil. I transferred much of my devotion to them, particularly to Colin. Although they were cousins of Miss Ross, they held her so little in awe that on one occasion, finding me alone on the top of the double-decker steam-tram, they rifled my satchel and extracted an exercise book. Alexander gripped my arms while Colin wrote on a virgin page:

Kids may come and kids may go

But Tib goes on forever.

We were not permitted to tear leaves out of our books.

‘You can say we did it,’ they told me. ‘It won’t be splitting. We’d like you to.’

We had to lay our exercises on Miss Ross’s desk. I watched her work her way down the pile until she came to mine. For the first time in my life I saw a woman turn red with anger.

‘Who,’ she asked with classic economy, ‘has done this? Ngaio?’

‘The Boys,’ I faltered, for so I called these bearded giants, and she knew who I meant. With a magnificent gesture she ripped out the page. She then strode to the fire, committed the couplet to the flames and returned to her desk.

‘The hymn,’ she said in a controlled but unnatural voice,
‘We are but little children weak.
Open your books.’

Soon after this incident I became ten and had grown out of Tib’s.

By that time our house was almost built. We struck camp, climbed our hill and moved into it.

‘This,’ said my father, referring to the workmen, ‘will hurry them up,’ and indeed I think it must have done so, for they disappeared quite soon.

The new house smelt of the linseed oil with which the panelled walls had been treated and of the timber itself. It was a four-roomed bungalow with a large semi-circular verandah. The living room was biggish. There were recesses in its bronze wooden walls and there was a pleasant balance between them and the windows. My mother had a talent for making, out of undistinguished elements, a kind of harmony in a room. At once it became an expression of herself and the warmth she always lent to human relationships: newcomers used to exclaim on this and often said that they felt as if they had been there before.

At a little distance below the house was a big bicycle shed which, by a heroic concerted effort made by my father and his friends, had been actually hauled up the hill on sleds and then turned over and over until it was brought into position. It was then floored and lined and fitted with bunks like a cabin and became a guest room. From the beginning we loved our house. It was the fourth member of our family and for me, who still lives in it, has retained that character: it has been much added to but I think its personality has not changed. A city has spread across the open country where sheep and cows were grazed: the surrounding hills where I and my friends tobogganed and rode our ponies, are richly encrusted with bungaloid or functional dwellings. An enormous hospital covers the old mushroom-paddock: Cashmere, which is our part of the Port Hills, is now a ‘desirable suburb’. But no skyscraper out on the plains can ever be tall enough to hide the mountains and, strangely enough, the little river Heathcote, where we used to sail on rafts that we built ourselves, has scarcely changed. Children still paddle about on it in home-made craft.