Black Beech and Honeydew (7 page)

I must have been an infuriating pupil for the piano. I had a poor ear, little application and fluctuating interest, but I was not bad enough to be given the sack and even passed some Trinity College examinations. My mother, winning a perpetual series of rearguard actions, insisted on regular practice which I loathed. Yet every now and then I would suddenly become engaged by the current piece and work quite hard on it.

‘But you played that well. You played it quite well. Tiresome little wretch!’ exclaimed Miss Jennie Black, Mus. Bac., in an extremity of irritation.

We almost always referred to her by her full title because of its snappy rhythm. Indeed, I once absent-mindedly replied to one of her demands: ‘Yes, Miss Jennie Black, Mus. Bac.,’ and got an awful rocket for impertinence. It was impossible to explain.

In spite of Miss Ross’s stricture and with a hand that has always been slightly tremulous, I continued to draw and paint with great assiduity but not, I think, very marked talent. I had come upon one of the repellent soft leather booklets that people used to give each other in those days:
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
Instantly enthralled, I tried to illustrate it, using a birthday box of pastels, a drawing board and an easel that made me feel very grown-up. The figure stealing at dusk through the marketplace, the potter moulding his wet clay, the Sultan’s turret in a noose of light – it was frustrating to a degree that, with such enthusiasm, I was able to express so little.

Watching my struggles, my mother asked me if I would like to have lessons and I said I would. I was too young to be a junior student at the Canterbury University College Art School but, after she had seen the Director, he allowed me to go twice a week for instruction in the Antique Room where I struggled with charcoal and Michelet paper, confronted by blankly explicit plaster casts. I also
was permitted to slosh about with watercolours and rather depressing still-life arrangements. My drawing began to improve a little.

It seems to me that in our early years on the hills I was never at a loose end, that there was always something to do, and that these were halcyon days. Sometimes I would wake at dawn, steal from the sleeping house and climb up through the mist, chilling my bare legs in tussock that bent earthwards under its veil of dew. Frisky, hearing me call, would whinny, look over the hilltop and come to meet me. She shared the Top Paddock with Beauty and Blazer, two cows belonging to our nearest neighbour, Mr Evans. Jack Evans, a quiet self-contained boy who did three hours’ hard work before going to school, would plod up the hill, softly chanting.

‘C’mon, Beauty. C’mon, Blazer.

C’mo-on, c’mo-on.’

And we would all go down the track together, I to my dawn-ride and Jack to his milking.

Sometimes one or the other of my two particular friends from Tib’s would come to stay: Mina and Merta. Mina was an extremely witty and articulate little girl who wore grey dresses and immaculately starched pinafores. ‘O Ngaio, fool that I am, I have forgotten my book!’ she dramatically exclaimed when we were still at Tib’s and she about seven years old. Mina shared my passion for reading, but was cleverer and much more discriminating than I. When we were a little older, she confirmed my suspicions of Kipling in his extroverted manner. ‘I understand it,’ Mina said, ‘and I don’t care for poetry that I understand.’ She had a grand manner and for that reason, I suppose, we called her Dutchy.

On wet days we wrote stories and illustrated them. My mother would set a competition to last through the holidays and give us each a fat little book with delectable blank pages. Two days before Mina was to leave, we handed over our completed works and my mother retired to deliberate. The following day she gave a very detailed judgement with marks for every story and illustration and stringent comments. The result was a tie. My mother presented each of us with a book, explaining that if the contest had not been drawn the winner would have received both of them. We were, I suppose, rather precocious little girls but we were completely
taken in by this transparent device. Our mutual admiration was extreme.

Merta lived near us and we met frequently. I think it must have been on the occasion of her mother’s confinement, which Merta generously refrained from throwing in my teeth, that she came to stay with us. I have a vivid recollection of the day her father arrived to fetch her. By some mischance Merta and I got ourselves locked in the lavatory and in a state of rising panic, hammered and roared until we made ourselves heard by my mother, who was entertaining Mr Fisher, a shy man, to tea. She was unable to effect our release and was obliged, in the end, to ask for help. Through the keyhole, Mr Fisher begged us to keep our heads and follow his instructions, which we did at last, and emerged to find him scarlet in the face and walking rapidly away.

On my tenth birthday I had a party.

For many years my father had boasted about the excellence of the ginger beer brewed by their gardener and his assistant at Woodside, Essex.

‘Jolly good stuff, Old Jo’s and The Boy’s ginger beer. Totally different from the rotgut they sell out here.’

He wrote to my grandmother about it and she sent out the recipe. My father bought half a used brandy cask and a great many ingredients and set himself up in the cellar under our verandah. It was a long and elaborate process and for many days the house was suffused with pungent fumes. Occasionally, muffled oaths could be heard beneath the floorboards and my mother made remarks like: ‘Well said, Old Mole, cans’t work i’ the earth so fast’ and ‘You hear this fellow in the cellarage.’ She also asked him if Old Jo and The Boy had sent any incantations or runes to be muttered in the Essex dialect over his seething cauldron.

‘Don’t be an ass, Betsy,’ said my father, grinning happily. He had reached the bottling phase. On my birthday the proper time had elapsed for the brew to be mature.

The party was in full swing. Gramp played ‘Sir Roger de Coverley’ on the piano and gaily shouted instructions. My mother and aunts and uncles sedately chasséd and swanned down the dance while we children hopped, linked arms and became hot and excited. Some of the little boys went mad and made exhibitionist faces. The moment had arrived for refreshment.

My father had retired to the kitchen from whence presently there came a formidable explosion. He appeared briefly, looking rather like a mythical sea-god, being wreathed, bearded and crowned with foam.

‘Is it Old Father Christmas?’ an awestruck child asked. ‘Is it Christmas-time?’

My father went into the garden. A
feu de joie
of reports rang out and we eyed each other in wild surmise. He returned triumphant with a great trayload of buzzing drinks.

The response was immediate and uproarious. In next to no time my aunts and uncles and acquaintances were screaming with laughter in each other’s faces while their children, unreproved, tacked about the room, cannoned into each other, fell, threw cream cakes or subsided on the floor in a trance. I remember particularly a nicely mannered boy called Lewis who zig-zagged to and fro and offered a tilted plate of sandwiches to wild little girls. The sandwiches, one by one, slid to the floor but Lewis continued to present the empty plate. I must have been quite overcome because I have no recollection whatever of how the party ended.

‘Can’t make it out,’ my father said the next day. ‘It’s no good you thinking it was my ginger beer, Betsy. Absolute rot! Jolly wholesome stuff.’

Some weeks later we were visited by a hot nor’ wester, a very trying and enervating wind in our part of New Zealand.

‘Shall we,’ my mother limply suggested, ‘have some of Daddy’s ginger beer?’

She poured out two small glasses. We spent the rest of the morning lying quietly side-by-side on the carpet, looking at the ceiling. In the afternoon I had a bilious attack.

My father, concerned, said: ‘It might be the brandy I suppose.’

And so, of course, it was. The fermenting ginger beer had drawn into itself the overproof spirits with which the cask was saturated. In future, this heavily fortified beverage was offered only to grown-ups and, at that, it was dynamite.

‘Damn’ good stuff,’ my father would say. ‘Ginger beer. Old Essex recipe you know. M’mother’s gardener – ‘

To this day I cannot bear the smell, much less the taste of ginger beer.

I think the greatest difference in convention between the children of my time and those of today may be seen in the amount of money spent on their entertainment and this, I believe, was a consideration not only of necessity but of principle. Books and toys were a fraction of their present cost but they were not casually bestowed. Gifts were largely restricted to special occasions and to open a parcel was a matter of burning excitement.

I am glad my friends and I were less indulged than children are nowadays. Even if my parents could have afforded to give me lots of expensive presents I am sure they would not have done so. If birthdays and Christmas had brought a succession of grand parties with everybody getting a great many impersonal gifts at each of them, I really do not believe these occasions would have held the same enchantment. There were very few formal parties. In the early affluent days in Fendalton, there had been journeys in hansom-cabs to fancy-dress balls in large houses. At one of these, I, dressed as a tiny Marion de Lorne, walked in procession with a fairy whose face fascinated me by growing more and more scarlet with each promenade. A day or two later I developed measles.

On the hills there were, for the most part, only impromptu festivities. My mother and her sisters and my father were superb in charades. One of my uncles (Unk), a distinguished geologist, also liked to take part. He always insisted, regardless of subject matter, on being dressed up and on carrying their parrot in its cage. This odd piece of business struck Unk as being exquisitely comical.

Even at Christmas our celebrations were of a casual family kind, except for the Tree, for which I made elaborate preparations.

There was a little black japanned cabinet in my room with painted figures on the doors. Into this I put the Christmas presents I assembled for my friends, starting early in the year and gradually adding to the collection. Pink sugar pigs, I can remember, a pin-cushion and wooden Dutch dolls costing from fourpence to tenpence according to size. These I sometimes attempted to clothe but I had and have, rather less aptitude than a bricklayer for sewing. The result was lamentable. I bought shiny fairy tales at threepence a book, a Jacko, which was a tin monkey that climbed a string, a jack-in-the-box, and a thumb-sized
china fairy for the top of the tree. I would squat, absorbed, in front of my cabinet, arranging these presents under stuck-on-labels bearing the names of my friends. My pocket-money was sixpence a week. The English grandmother sent me a sovereign and an English godmother half-a-sovereign. These were saved in a scarlet tin postbox.

In the mind of a small New Zealander, Christmas was a strange mixture of snow and intense heat. All our books in those days were English. Christmas annuals were full of middle-class sleighs and children. Reindeer, coach horns, frozen roads, muffled boys coming home from boarding school, snapdragons and blazing fires were strongly featured. These were Christmas. But so, too, were home-made toboggans that shot like greased lightning down glossy, midsummer tussock: hot, still evenings, the lovely smell of cabbage-tree blossom, open doors and windows and the sound, far away, down on the flat, of boys letting off crackers. I settled this contradiction in my own way. For as long as I thought I still believed in Father Christmas, I climbed a solitary pine tree that stood on the hillside and put a letter in a box that I had tied near the top. Being a snow-minded person, Father Christmas, I thought, probably lived in the back country, out on the main range where there were red deer, and he would know about my letter and pause in his night-gallop through the sky to collect it. I suppose my father climbed up and retrieved the letters. They always disappeared.

On Christmas Eve, I sat under this tree and wrote in a book that was kept secretly for that one occasion. It was started, I think, when I was about seven years old and the first entry was in a round, unsteady hand. I tried to put down the enchanted present and this was my first attempt at descriptive writing. I also gave a morbidly accurate summary of my misdeeds and tribulations throughout the year. These portions should perhaps count as a first attempt at subjective analysis. The entries always ended with a quotation:
‘The time draws near the birth of Christ.’
The last one was made when I was thirty-five years old and unhappy. After that I burnt the book.

In the summer I slept on the verandah and on Christmas Eve went to bed in ecstasy. The door into the living room was open. Mixed with the smell of sweet-scented tobacco, night-flowering stocks, freshly watered earth and that cabbage-tree blossom, was the drift of my father’s pipe. I could hear the crackle of his newspaper
and the occasional quiet murmur of my parents’ voices. At the head of my bed hung one of my long black stockings. I fingered its limpness two or three times before I went to sleep. Sometime during the night I would wake for a bemused second or two, to reach out. On the last of these occasions there would be a glorious change. My hand closed round the fat rustling inequalities of a Christmas stocking. When dawn came, I explored it.

I remember one stocking in particular. A doll, dressed, as I now realize, by my mother, emerged from the top. She had a starched white sun-hat, a blue gingham dress and a white pinafore. Her smirk differed slightly from that of Sophonisba whom she replaced. Sophonisba was a wax doll sent by my English grandmother in the Fendalton days and so christened by my mother. Her end had been precipitate and hideous: I left her on the seat of the swing and her face melted in the New Zealand sun. Under my new doll were books making tightly stretched rectangles in the stocking and farther down – beguiling trifles: a pistol, a trumpet, crayons, a pencil box and an orange in the toe. Placed well away from the stocking were books from my parents, grandmother and Mivvy.