Black Beech and Honeydew Read online

  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.

  IV

  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 a
ttempt 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.

  I have no idea when I left off believing in Father Christmas. It was a completely painless transition. The pretence was long kept up between my father and me as a greatly relished joke. He would come out to the verandah in the warm dark when I was still awake and would growl in a buffo voice: ‘Very c-o-o-o-ld in the chimney tonight. Who have we here? A good little girl or a bad little girl? I must consult my notes.’

  I would lie with my eyes tight shut, rejoicing, while he hung up my stocking.

  At some appallingly early hour, I took their presents into my parents’ bedroom. The only ones I can remember were an extremely fancy paua-shell napkin ring engraved with a fisherman’s head, which I gave my mother, and a pipe (it must have been a cheap one!) which my father obligingly put in his mouth before going to sleep again.

  The morning ripened to distant squeaks and blasts from tin trumpets in the house at the foot of the hill where my friends, the Evanses, had opened their stockings. My mother and I trudged up and over a steep rise to an Anglican Service held in the Convalescent Home, the first building of any size to be built in these parts. Soon after our return came The Boys, walking up the garden path in single file: tall, and with the exception of Alexander, bearded: sardonic and kind. How well they chose their presents: books, when they could get them, that were reprints of ones they had liked when they were really boys: Jules Verne, Uncle Remus, the Boys’ Own Paper. Colin, after a visit to England, brought back the complete works of Juliana Horatia Ewing, producing them one by one from a Gladstone bag. On the following Christmas he gave me The Scarlet Pimpernel and my mother began reading it aloud that same afternoon. It was decreed that we should go for a walk and the interruption at a crucial juncture when M. Chauvelin contemplated the sleeping Sir Percy Blakeney, was almost unendurable.

  This, I think, was the Christmas when I wrote and produced my first play, Cinderella, in rhymed couplets with a cast of six. It was performed before an audience of parents by three of my cousins, two friends and myself on a large dining-room table in a conveniently curtained bay window of my cousins’ house. I remember the opening scene: Cinderella, discovered in rags before the fire, soliloquized.

  O dear, O dear, what shall I do,

  Of balls I’ve been to such a few

  Just once I’ve seen that handsome Prince

  And I have never seen him since.

  Her predicament having been thus established, the Ugly Sisters made a brief and brutal appearance and I came on as The Fairy Godmother, croaking offstage:

  Knock at the door and lift the latch

  And cross the threshold over.

  The rest of the dialogue escapes me.

  I am conscious that I am vague about dates and the order of events during these early years and have dodged backwards and forwards between my tenth and thirteenth birthdays. The passage of time had not the same significance in those days. The terrors of childhood receded. Other people became more complicated and the firm blacks and whites of human relationships mingled and developed passages of grey. One grew taller. Frisky went into retirement and was replaced by a large rawboned horse called Monte. And then, one day in 1910, Miss Ffitch said goodbye and bicycled down the lane for the last time. I was to go to school.

  CHAPTER 3

  School

  St Margaret’s College was only six months old when I became a pupil there. It was one of a group of schools established in the Dominions by the Kelburn Sisters of the Church, an Anglo-Catholic order of nuns. These ladies already conducted St Hilda’s College in Dunedin. With funds raised by their Colonial exertions they supported their work amongst the poor in the East End of London.

  On the face of it, the choice of St Margaret’s would seem to have been an odd one on the part of my parents. My mother certainly respected and subscribed to the Anglican faith but she was not an ardent churchwoman. Occasionally she would let fall a remark that suggested not doubt so much as a sort of ironical detachment. ‘Apparently,’ she once said, ‘the Almighty can see everything except a joke.’

  This was not the sort of quip that would have gone down well at St Margaret’s.

  As for my father, he seldom missed an opportunity of pointing out the devastation wrought by ‘religion’ (usually undefined) upon the progress of mankind. He would invite my mother and me to look at the Crusades. ‘Bloodiest damn’ business in history. Look at Evolution! You want to read. Read Haeckel!’ he would shout. ‘Or Darwin. Or Winwood Reade. They’ll show you.’

  My mother had hidden Haeckel’s Evolution of Man in the lockers under the living-room windows, mainly, I suppose, because of its rather surprising illustrations. There it lay, cheek-by-jowl with Three Weeks. These were the only books that were ever withdrawn from my attention, and I found them both in due course. I was but mildly engaged by the first, thought the second pretty silly and didn’t get farther than the first chapter of either. She needn’t have bothered.

  It does seem strange that, holding such rationalistic views, my father should have sent me to a school where every possible emphasis was placed upon high-church dogma and orthodox observances. Moreover his attitude to the Sisters, although he occasionally referred to them as Holy-Bolies, was one of amused respect. He did their banking for them and knew their real names. Once, in an absent-minded moment, he let fall to my mother that one of them was a lady of title in her own right. He caught sight of me and was disconcerted.

  ‘Pay no attention,’ he said, ‘that sort of thing doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have said anything.’

  He made less of class distinctions than anybody I have ever known, not self-consciously, I think, but because they were of no interest to him and he had a talent for forgetting anything that bored him. My mother, nowadays, would probably have been thought of as an ‘inverted snob’, a term which, if it means anything at all, indicates, I imagine, somebody who is inclined to suspect and give battle to snobbish attitudes where none exist. It is true, however, that they both intensely disliked what they considered vulgar turns of speech, oafish manners or slipshod utterance. They came down remarkably crisply if I showed any signs of backsliding in these respects. ‘Rude,’ said my mother, ‘is Never Funny.’ The aphorism was shortened into ‘R is Never F’ and constantly employed.

  ‘Ju
mp up,’ she would mutter when grown-ups approached, and when they left: ‘Up. Run and open the door.’

  ‘I was going to!’ I would furiously mutter back, but I jumped to it.

  Such was her authority that it involved a trigger-reaction. It was not enough to rise. One leapt.

  Perhaps it was because of their views on civilized behaviour that they made what must have been a great sacrifice to send me to St Margaret’s. I took it all as a matter of course but remember now, with something like heartache, how long my mother’s coats and skirts lasted her.

  I now realize that she refused many invitations because she had no appropriate dress for the occasion. My father thought she looked beautiful, as indeed she did, but he was vague to a degree about clothes and it never entered his head that she was hypersensitive in matters of economy.

  ‘Good Lord!’ he would ejaculate on being told the probable cost of some painfully rare necessity. ‘Thirty bob! It can’t be as much as that, can it? Are you sure, Betsy?’

  He would grin incredulously at her and she would shrink inside herself and do without. He was far from being ungenerous, but he was singularly blind to certain forms of vulnerability and so, alas, at that time, was his daughter.

  Economies that would have seemed irksome to other children were unnoticed by me. I remember how we used to leave the tram (now on an extended route) a half-mile stop before our own because it was the end of a section. My mother was not very robust. She must have often longed for the extra lift. We were, because we had to be so, a thrifty family, and if my parents had been content, as many parents in their circumstances were, to send me to a high school, there would have been a much wider margin for those small luxuries which their friends enjoyed without thinking about the cost.