Black Beech and Honeydew (9 page)

Sister Winifred, our headmistress, was a tiny woman with blue eyes, a large, pink, inquisitive nose, a wide mouth and excellent
large teeth. I think her age could have been little over forty. It may have been less: the veil and wimple are great levellers in this respect. On a single occasion, a short wisp of hair showed itself briefly under the cambric that bound her forehead. It was ginger. Her manner was extremely austere but her smile engaging and rather boyish. Her voice was clear and her style patrician. She had immense authority and a highly developed sense of humour. The only daughter in a long family of boys, she had been brought up in France where her father held a diplomatic post. She told me that when she announced her intention of taking vows her brothers all laughed till they cried and said she’d be back in a fortnight. Her French was exquisite. If she had taken us in this subject we would have undoubtedly gained a much more civilized notion of the language than the extraordinary jargon that emerged from unruly classes held by poor Monsieur Malequin who had no discipline and a most baffling squint.

I had arrived at the age for hero-worship and upon Sister Winifred, in the ripeness of time, did I lavish my homage. It is easy enough to laugh at ‘schoolgirl crushes’ and it is easier still, in these days, to overburden with heavy psychological implications an essentially fleeting, often delicate and always tenuous emotion. No doubt disturbing undertones sometimes appear but when the child’s bewildered devotion meets with a temperate and uncomplicated response there is nothing to regret.

By the time I had begun to admire Sister Winifred so ardently, I had been made head prefect and my duties sent me quite often to her office. It was during those visits that she occasionally told me something of her childhood, discussed school affairs, received my own stumbling and difficult confidences and spoke, once or twice, of the aims and hopes of her Order.

Out of these brief conversations there was to arise, in my final term, a great embarrassment. I called at her office on some prefectorial errand. When it had been dispatched, I tried to express my desire to do something specific for the Church after I left school. I suspect that in doing this I was as much moved by the hope of pleasing Sister Winifred as I was by a devotional intention: if so, I was most effectively hoist on my own petard. Her response was immediate and alarming. To my amazement, she opened wide her arms and, with a delighted smile, exclaimed ‘You are coming to us!’

Nothing could have been farther from my thoughts. Never in my most exalted moments had I imagined myself to have a vocation for the Sisterhood. Immersed in the folds of her habit, I was appalled and utterly at a loss. It was impossible to extricate myself saying: ‘Not at all. Nothing of the sort. No, no!’ I listened aghast to her expressions of joy and left in a state of utmost confusion. It was an appalling predicament.

During the next two or three days, I managed to snarl up an already sufficiently complicated situation. I began to wonder if I was right in thinking it was all a hideous misunderstanding. Suppose that, all unknown to myself, I was indeed called to take the veil and Sister Winifred had been elected as a sort of harbinger and prologue to the omens coming on. Perhaps, after all, she had made no mistake and this acutely embarrassing moment had been one of divine revelation. Which? It was a nice dilemma and I made no attempt to resolve it. I trod water and continued to do so until my last term expired.

My adolescence, as I have suggested, was taken out in religious fervour rather than in any abrupt onset of boy-consciousness. I did not, however, escape the awakening of those emotions proper to my age.

When I was fourteen I fell in love.

The object of my passion was a retired Dean. He was remarkably handsome with the profile of a classic hero. His voice was deep and harsh, his manner abrupt and his conversation rather like that of the Duke of Wellington as recorded by Mr Phillip Guedella though, of course, without the expletives. He also reminded me of Mr Rochester; I cannot imagine why, as there was but little correspondence. He was in the habit of taking a Saturday afternoon walk on the Hills and would call on my mother for tea. My heart thumped obstreperously when I saw him approach. If he missed a Saturday I was desolate. I cannot remember that we ever conversed at great length but may suppose that he was not positively averse to my company since he sometimes came out of the Deanery which was in the same street as St Margaret’s and accompanied me as far as the school gate, actually carrying my satchel. These were tremendous occasions.

I was not alone in my obsession. The Dean was hotly pursued by members of a Ladies’ Guild who were said by my mother to lie in
ambush for him on the Port Hills and so irritated him that he sought refuge in our house where he spoke in anger against them. She had many stories about him. When he was a parish priest she had been asked by his wife to luncheon at the vicarage. He was late and they did not wait for him. Just as they were about to help themselves from a side table, he strode in and without a word snatched up the cold joint and went away through the french windows.

‘That,’ said his wife, ‘is the third time this week. Will you have some ham?’

It was a poor parish and there was, in those days, a financial depression in New Zealand. The joint had gone to one of his flock.

By the time I adored him, the Dean had retired and become a widower. He was a great admirer of my grandmother and was, I think, 73 years old. At the very height of my passion he married Miss Tibby Ross.

On his honeymoon he encountered an acquaintance in the upstairs corridor of the hotel.

‘This is a rum go,’ he was reputed to have said.

For two afternoons a week I went to the School of Art and it was understood that when I left St Margaret’s I would become, not a full-time student, but at least a daily one. I would have to get a morning job of some sort and, if possible, a scholarship to pay for my fees. In the meantime, through the Burton sisters, the smell of greasepaint had entered into my system never to be expelled.

They turned St Michael’s parish hall into a workable theatre with an old-fashioned raked stage, an overhead grille and adequate lighting. Here they produced ‘costume’ comedies, rather nebulous miracle plays and fairy pieces garnished with mediaeval songs and ballets of the gay flat-footed kind. Nothing could point more sharply the difference in theatrical attitudes and taste between those days and the present time than these blameless entertainments. Nowadays my friends would no doubt have chosen plays by Harold Pinter, even Ionesco, even Beckett and would perhaps, by diligent application, have discovered in such works undertones of religious significance
that would have astonished their authors if they had ever heard about them. With us all was sweetness, tabards, and tights.

The first of these productions was called
Isolene.
My father unkindly referred to it as ‘Vaseline’ . I was cast as the Prince. Aileen, the artist sister, designed and made the clothes and did so with imagination and ingenuity. I wore a white tabard, heavily emblazoned in great detail, and white ostrich plumes on my head. I have not the smallest recollection of the plot but can recall, as if it had been last evening, the wave of intoxication that came over me when I made my first entrance on to any stage. There is no experience to be compared with this: the call, the departure from an overheated room reeking of greasepaint and wet white, the arrival backstage into a world of shadows, separated only by stretched canvas from a world of light: a region of silence and stillness attentive to a region of sound and movement. Here the player waits, suspended between preparation and performance. He stares absently at a painted legend on the back of a canvas door through which he must enter. ‘Act II, Scene I, p. 2’, or into the prompt corner where a shaded lamp casts its light on a book and on a hand that follows the dialogue. He may look up at the perch. There is the switchboard man into whose watchful face is reflected light from the unseen stage. On the other side of the door they are building to his own entrance. The voices are pitched larger than life and respond to each other in a formal pattern. Beyond them, like an observant monster in a black void, is the audience. The player listens and with a sick jolt may ask himself, ‘Why, why, why did I subject myself to this terror?’ Then he steps back a pace or two and on his cue moves up to the door and enters.

This is his moment of truth. Even though the role he plays is insignificant, the play worthless and the actor himself of no great account, this first crossing of a threshold from one reality to another will stand apart from anything else that he does.

My introduction to the working half of a theatre was thus by way of an insipid little piece in a converted parish hall. Luckily I never thought of myself as, potentially, a dynamic actress. If I had cherished any such illusion my mother would very promptly have disabused me of it. It was the whole ambience of backstage that I found so immensely satisfying: the forming and growth of a play and its precipitation into its final shape. That wonderful phrase ‘the quick
forge and working-house of thought’ was unknown to me then: I would have leapt at it as an exact expression of the living theatre.

I don’t know when I first realized that I wanted to direct rather than to perform: at this early stage I was equally happy painting scenery, mustering props, prompting or going on for a speaking-part. I was at home.

At school, also, there was dramatic endeavour.
Antigone
(in English), excerpts from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and, every year, a play in French composed and produced by M. Malequin. M. Malequin was an ardent monarchist and was rumoured to have been tutor to a scion of the Bourbons. His plays, mimeographed in purple from his own spidery hand, tended to reflect his opinions. One was about the Little Dauphin of the Terror, un-murdered and in durance. I was his gaoler – inevitably, since my voice and height always prompted M. Malequin to cast me for the ‘heavies’. I was very brutal and brought the Dauphin a meat pie. I think I had doctored it but that somehow or another a blameless pie had been substituted by a virtuous hand.

‘Eh bien!’ I rasped as the Dauphin attacked it. ‘Bon appetit!’

Monsieur was, of course, anti-Bonapartist and in another piece I was a servile and sinister agent.

‘Excusez-moi, Madame la Duchesse, mais je suis ici envoyé de l’Empereur, mon maître.’

There was nobody on the staff of St Margaret’s who had the slightest acquaintance with stage-production. My parents suffered these performances annually at the prize-giving and I cannot recall that either of them ever offered an opinion. In this they showed superhuman forbearance.

There was a Lower School at St Margaret’s. After I became head prefect, I went there twice a week in the luncheon break to amuse the very small girls: I read to them and began to write and illustrate stories for their entertainment. Then I wrote a play and rehearsed it with them. This was a popular move and our effort, having been passed by Sister Winifred, was introduced into the prize-giving ceremonies at the end of the year. The play was called
Bundles
and the title is all I can remember about it. A New Zealand authoress of those days – Miss Colburn-Veale – saw it and wrote to my mother, offering to show it to her English publisher for an opinion. He wrote back
very kindly and sent me a book:
Tristie’s Quest
by Dr Greville Macdonald, the son of George Macdonald whose stories my father, having delighted in them as a child, had tried in vain to get for me.
Tristie’s Quest
was a wonderful children’s novel and I wish very much that I had not lent it to the little girl who never returned it.

Encouraged by these events, I now wrote a full-length piece based on one of George Macdonald’s fairy tales as related by my father. It was called
The Moon Princess.
There were long chunks of very torrid blank verse and a good deal of theeing and thouing. For songs, I wrote new verses to old music and got very worked up over the whole affair. When it was finished I showed it to my friends, the Burtons, and they bravely decided to produce it on quite an imposing scale at St Michael’s.

‘I hear, Ngaio,’ said Miss Hughes, shouting down the length of the luncheon table, ‘you have written a play.’ Her manner was friendly but I was seized with embarrassment and muttered churlishly at my plate: ‘Yes, Miss Hughes.’

I would have done much better to show it to her and take what no doubt would have been a devastating opinion.

In the event, it went quite well and drew good audiences. Perhaps, after all, it was not too bad since my mother agreed to play the witch. She made a splendidly frightening thing of the curse:

‘In the dark nights that follow the old moon – ‘

Her big scene was with Helen Burton, the director and star of the production, and they both let fly with everything they had, lifting my dialogue into a distinction that it certainly did not possess. This feat, it occurs to me, illustrates in miniature one of the strange paradoxes of the Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian theatres. It can be seen at all levels from our remote New Zealand amateurism up to the great actor-managers. Irving’s most successful roles were in pieces that today reveal themselves as unbelievable fustian. These strange monsters of the theatre poured the charged stream of their personality and technique into dialogue which, by its very mediocrity, gave them the freedom which they needed. Irving was an intelligent man with a strong vein of irony but he seems to have been quite uncritical of his material except in so far as it provided him with a vehicle. Ellen Terry was different. ‘A twopenny-ha’penny play,’ she said of their enormously successful travesty on
Faust.
If
there were adequate recordings or a film of Irving I wonder what we would think of them. Grotesque helpings of ham and corn? Or would some tingle of the electricity he generated in a theatre still make itself felt? Ellen Terry lived to a great age and people who remember her performance as the Nurse in
Romeo and Juliet
tell us that it was timeless in its perfection. But Irving?