Black Beech and Honeydew Page 9

  In the late afternoon we reached Glentui and turned up the valley to find a camping ground. The carts jolted down a rough track and we ran ahead of them into the bush.

  On our side of the ranges the bush is hardy: not gigantic and lush like the Westland forests but tenacious and resistant to sun and wind. Most of the trees are native ‘beech’ with an undergrowth of flowering-creepers, mosses and fern. The smell is glorious. As we entered, we heard the little Glentui river. It flowed through the silence like some cool and preoccupied conversation. We found a clearing and below it, at the base of a steep bank, the stream itself, emergent from a small gorge.

  The men cut poles for the tents. We unpacked the stores, stuffed the mattresses, cut pegs for guy ropes, made a temporary fireplace and collected wood. Presently a spiral of aromatic smoke rose like a thank-offering for pleasures to come. I climbed down the bank with a clanking kerosene-tin bucket and now the mingled voices of the river were loud. Talk, talk, talk and always one significant insistent voice that muttered beneath the multiple colloquy. I squatted at the water’s edge, leaned out, and felt the tug of the stream as it filled my bucket. When I returned, the first tent was hanging from its ridge pole and we began to drive in the pegs. My mother hung a billy from a forked green stick over the fire and prepared to make tea. My father was magnificent on these occasions. He was in his natural element and seemed to give off a glow of profound satisfaction. If one caught his eye he would grin or make a droll grimace.

  ‘Good. Splendid. We’ll be shipshape before sunset. Get all the gear under canvas: that’s the first thing. Always make sure you’ve got a dry camp.’

  Indoors, doing the accounts or arranging some matter of business, he was a fusspot and used to drive us into a frenzy with his antics but out in the open, his natural element, he was peaceful and, as one might say, came to himself.

  There is, of course, no such thing as a norm in human behaviour: inside every conventional man there’s an eccentric refusing to come out. The real eccentric – the ‘character’ – is the person whose other self doesn’t sulk but comes out boldly and lets fly. Such a one, to some extent, was my father. When he was cross he shouted and kicked things. When he was gripped by a book he read it, under the very nose of his visitors. When he was happy, his whole person bore witness to his satisfaction.

  Such a one too, though in an entirely different vein, was Cecil Walker, the youngest of the bearded Boys. He was, in common with his brothers, possessed of a private income, a family house and servants. He, therefore, did not seek employment of any kind and this, in New Zealand, was already extraordinary. He was extremely ingenious and of a mechanical and inventive turn of mind and he spent a great deal of his time in a little workshop in the garden where he made, among other curiosa, a clockwork egg-beater which he presented to my mother. Like my father’s ginger beer, it went off with a bang and in its brief frenzy covered them both with agitated albumen.

  ‘There has been a miscalculation,’ Cecil said coldly. ‘I shall have to revise my original conception.’

  In our Glentui days the preoccupation of the year for Cecil was the construction of a camper’s stove. He began making it in the winter, using the ubiquitous kerosene tin as raw material. It was his oeuvre: his triumph. We all recognized that in setting up camp he must be excused from any other job than the installation of his stove. Slowly and with infinite care, he dug out the emplacement in a meticulously chosen bank. The stove was unpacked and displayed in all its splendour of chimney, oven, flues and shining trays. It was packed round with earth. Kindling of exactly the correct length was arranged by Cecil as if for a votive offering. We all attended the lighting of the stove except my father who could be heard singing at the top of his voice in the bush as he chopped down another tent pole.

  The stove worked superbly. In it my mother would bake scones and cakes and roast wild suckling pig. Cecil did not openly exult in his achievement but when we congratulated him gave a series of little sniffs which were his substitute for laughter.

  ‘There was a kind of dedication about his stoves, a purity of intention and an artist’s disregard for the fugitive nature of his work. Each stove would serve its purpose nobly for eight weeks and at the end, already showing signs of decay, would be given decent burial. In six months’ time he would begin to make another stove.

  He was an oddity in looks as well as in character. As a model, he would have been a trouvaille for an illustrator of Don Quixote. The long narrow head, the beard, the height and sparseness of frame and above all, the glint of fanaticism in the eyes: they were all there. He was argumentative and shouted a good deal when roused. His brothers found him rather trying in this respect. They were men with a gift of irony and great reserve. They came of an old and, I suspect, rather inbred Scottish family to which they seldom referred. One of their aunts was a duchess with whom Colin and his mother stayed during a trip to England. Colin, on his return, spoke dryly of the experience. There had been a dinner party for which he wore his new tails and white tie. On this occasion he had behaved, for the only time on record, rather in the manner of my father. At seven o’clock he appeared in a state of agitation at his mother’s door. ‘Some bastard,’ he said, ‘has pinched my pants.’

  Mrs Walker said: ‘They are being pressed. And don’t speak like that.’

  He raised his eyebrows and withdrew.

  The men at this party, he related, had only one thing to say to him. It was: ‘By Jove! Come a long way!’

  His aunt sent him out in the mornings for some ‘rough shooting’. Colin was used, in New Zealand, to no other kind and he was a brilliant shot. Accustomed to the rigours of the high country, his stroll with an attendant gamekeeper through his aunt’s well-kept preserves made him feel foolish. ‘I didn’t know what to do with the damn’ chap,’ he said.

  ‘What did you shoot?’ asked my mother.

  ‘Bunnies,’ said Colin, bitterly.

  Cecil refused to go on this jaunt to England.

  Cecil had a number of stock observations which became catch phrases in my own family. ‘They didn’t ask me,’ and ‘I should have to look it up,’ were two of the most familiar. He pronounced his a’s as in ‘lack’. ‘They didn’t âsk me.’ When the war came he did not enlist but waited huffily for his name to be drawn in the ballot. ‘When they want me they can âsk for me.’ He was wounded in the ankle and suffered himself to be anaesthetized, probed and manipulated.

  ‘They wanted to find out whether it was broken. I could have told them it wasn’t, for I ran a couple of chains after I was hit. But they didn’t âsk me.’

  He had one, to me, very endearing trait: he loved stories for children. Every Christmas until he died at an advanced age, I gave him one. He never pronounced upon them. Once, pleased with my choice, I ventured to ask him if he had enjoyed it. He sniffed three times. ‘I return to it,’ he said, ‘upon an average, once every two months.’ Success!

  Cecil met with a strange adventure at Glentui. The men had been out all day on a wild pig hunt and were returning empty-handed to camp, their rifles already unloaded. With Cecil some distance in the van, they plodded in single file along a narrow track above a cliff-face. Cecil turned a corner and approached an outcrop of rock. A gigantic boar walked round it and confronted him. It was an old-man-tusker, a most formidable and dangerous creature. For a second or two they glared at each other. Cecil’s pig-hunting weapon was slung behind his shoulder but he carried a small .22 bore rifle which was still loaded. The boar made an uncompromising noise. Its eyes glowed, it lowered its head and prepared to attack. Cecil madly discharged his pea-rifle. He heard the bullet ricochet off his opponent’s hide and spatter on the rock face. The boar gave an ejaculation of the utmost savagery, launched itself full at him and fell down dead.

  No wound was found upon the carcass. There was no explanation.

  ‘Unless, my dear chap,’ my father said, ‘you frightened him to death.’

  Cecil removed the tusks and returned to cam
p flushed with his ambiguous victory.

  ‘It is,’ he said haughtily, ‘a perfectly well-recognized phenomenon. The details escape me. I should have to look it up.’

  When the nights were warm, we girls dragged our hay-stuffed mattresses out of the hot canvas-smelling tent and slept under the trees. Starlight darted and winked behind the branches and when the moon was high it looked as if it had been crackle-glazed with twigs. The open fire alongside Cecil’s stove pulsed and faded. Inside the glowing tents quiet voices exchanged a few desultory remarks, wished each other goodnight and went out with the candles. Then the bush and hills possessed the night. Moreporks called to each other across the valley, sounding very lonely in a silence that was compounded of small rustling movements, unnoticed by day, and the undertone of hurrying water.

  During the night, wekas, flightless and inquisitive birds who in those days lived in the foothills, would explore the camp looking for anything bright they might steal. They would go off with a spoon or tin lid making a strange mumbling noise and when they were safe in the bush would give a vainglorious screech. One of them stole my confirmation cross from beside my pillow. My mother, who happened to be awake, saw him hurdling over our sleeping bodies with the chain dangling from his beak.

  In the bush everything stirs at the first light and we too would wake and hear the bellbirds. Their dawn-song is, in fact, exactly like the tinkle of a very small melodious bell: ‘Tink. Ding.’ Native pigeons, fat and unwieldy, whirred and flopped about over the tents. ‘Morning is beginning to happen’ one would think with satisfaction and go to sleep again.

  We dammed the river with turf and boulders and made a swimming pool. We had a private glade downstream where the girls could rid themselves of their neck-to-knee bathing clothes and receive exultantly the sun and the springing pleasure of young grass. One day we climbed the mountain to Blowhard and looked across a great valley into the back country: range after naked range with a glitter of snow on the big tops.

  ‘My country,’ I thought.

  And yet, so young and at the same time so primordial was this landscape, that the sense of belonging to it was disturbed by a doubt that, for all our adoptive gestures, our presence here was no more than a cobweb across the hide of a monster, that in spite of our familiarity with its surface we had made no mark upon our country and were still newcomers. I do not know if other New Zealanders are visited by this contradictory feeling of belonging and not-belonging but it came upon me very vividly when I first looked into the high country from the top of Blowhard and it has returned many times since then. It is a feeling that deepens rather than modifies one’s attachment to New Zealand.

  Cecil was at his most pontifical on Blowhard. When he saw us making a fire for the billy, he put his head on one side and gave the three-sniff laugh.

  ‘Judging by the general configuration of the country and the overall appearance of the scrub I am afraid I must tell you that you are wasting your time. Unless’ (sniff-sniff-sniff) ‘you are prepared to climb down a thousand feet for it, you won’t find any water.’

  ‘Here you are, old feller,’ said my father coming through the stunted manuka scrub with a billy-full of spring water.

  It was maddening for Cecil. He glanced coldly at my father and said: ‘Well I was wrong,’ in a loud and angry voice. For a little while he was greatly put out, especially, I think, because his brother Colin made no comment and avoided looking at him.

  Colin, who had the appearance of a Velázquez grandee, was gentle but quietly sardonic. I loved and respected him more, I think, than anyone else and, although he never criticized or scolded I would have hated to do anything that he might have thought shabby. It was clear to us all that he and Mivvy had fallen in love and we were delighted. I don’t know if he told her of the, by that time, incurable disease from which he suffered. During the year after our first camp he became very ill. I visited him in hospital one hot, windy afternoon. My school uniform, my shoes and my satchel were powdered with dust. I sat by his bed and wondered what to say to him, so beautiful and strange did he look with the bones of his face precariously veiled by his olive skin; his eyes and beard, dark and exotic against the pillows. He seemed glad to see me but for the first time I experienced that sense of exclusion which removes us from the dying. One morning, a few weeks later, Cecil came to our house with a black band on his arm. I ran to my room and refused to come out and was unable to cry.

  II

  Aileen and Helen Burton had firmly announced that whoever in the ripeness of time they married, it would never be a ‘curick’. They occasionally employed and I picked up from them, a cockney dialect. In those days it was not considered arrogant or reactionary to think of cockney as a comic form of expression. The Burtons, who politically inclined to the left, were brilliant mimics of the women in their father’s English parish. Their impersonations were not patronizing exaggerations, but authentic and extremely funny. They also had a private town called Burleyrap which they inhabited as consistent though fantastic characters about whom they had made an epic poem. These alter egos were so firmly defined and had such distinctive voices and mannerisms that they were instantly recognizable. ‘She’s in Burleyrap’ they would say and at once follow suit.

  In spite of their determination not to do so, both Aileen and Helen, in the event, married their father’s curates. John, Helen’s husband, was an Englishman: a delicate and scholarly young man who at Oxford had become an ardent member of the High Church group and a devoted and active adherent of the Labour Party. He had a bookish wit and was a poet of distinction. Kennedy, Aileen’s husband, was a New Zealander; an athletic giant with a slow smile. When he was first ordained he had been sent by his bishop to a very tough parish in a gold-prospecting and lumbering district of the West Coast. On Saturday nights he used to walk down the railway track, pick up the drunks and dump them on their doorsteps. He would haul them out of the pub and if they showed fight placidly knock them senseless. When he came to Glentui he walked from the railhead carrying his pack. He was the gentlest and simplest of men, and I don’t think a doubt about anything except the control of alcohol on the Coast ever crossed his mind.

  Strangely as it may seem, my father got on quite happily with these two young parsons. He did not refer them to Winwood Reade or to Draper’s Intellectual Development of Europe and when, during the critical General Strike, he became a special constable, this circumstance made no difference to his friendly relations with John who was actively associated with the Unions. When, on the first Christmas Eve at Glentui, he learned that John would celebrate Holy Communion next morning at dawn, my father cut down some more poles and built an altar in a little glade above the river, placing it in an eastward position between two trees so that the sky would brighten behind it. He made a very good job of this and slept peacefully in his tent throughout the celebration.

  As soon as dawn was established we got up and washed in the cold river. Then we walked through bush to the glade. There was not a breath of wind. The candle flames stood as still as spearheads on the altar and John’s vestments glinted in the half-light. We knelt on dry leaves, crumbling earth and little twigs. The bellbirds, detached and silvery, tinkled in the bush. Afterwards John wrote a very scholarly sonnet about it.

  For each Christmas, while I was at St Margaret’s, we went for a long summer camp and the recollection of those days is of pure delight. And then Helen and Aileen married and left Christchurch. Friede and Joan returned to England and we followed new ways.

  I believe Glentui is now a popular resort with a car park and barbecues and that on public holidays an ice-cream and Coca-Cola van fills to overflowing the trippers’ cup of happiness. I have never revisited the valley.

  III

  Canterbury University College School of Art was conducted on an established pattern. An antique room smelling of mice and Michelet paper, a still-life room smelling of stale vegetables, a modelling room smelling of clay, an architectural room and, exclusively at the top of i
ts own flight of stairs, the life room, smelling very strong indeed of paint, turpentine and hot stoves. To the life room, on most afternoons and nights of the week, I now penetrated. Here we drew and painted from the head, the draped figure and the nude. The classes were mixed, the male students, because of the war, being over forty or under eighteen or not up to army medical standards. There were no entirely fit young men in New Zealand. Those who survived Gallipoli, the Middle East and Passchendaele did not return on leave. Those who came back (and they seemed very few) were too badly injured to be any more use in the army. My partners at school-age dances and my particular young men all vanished in turn and there were no coming-out balls after all.