Читать книгу Black Beech and Honeydew - Ngaio Marsh, Stella Duffy - Страница 10

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.

A few miles away from us, round the hills, there lived a horse-coper called Mr McGuinnes. For him my father conceived an admiration (’Decent fellow, McGuinnes’) and with him, soon after we arrived, a bargain was struck. Mr McGuinnes would keep me supplied with a pony which would be grazed in the Top Paddock to which we had access. The pony would be changed from time to time and the outgoing mount sold, I now realize, as having been used by a child. I, who had never bestridden anything but my rocking horse, was madly excited.

In due course the first pony arrived. Dolly, she was called: a pretty, mettlesome little creature who sidled up the lane showing the whites of her eyes. When my father put the new slithery pad on her back she kicked him. This unsettled his temper. Mr McGuinnes, who held her firmly with both hands near the bit, made the classic observation that it was only her fun. I was put up. Before my feet could be set in the stirrups, Dolly went into a series of humpbacked bucks. Like Mr Winkle before me, I clung to her neck while Mr McGuinnes and my father shouted at each other. I would have liked to show the intrepid spirit of Little Lord Fauntleroy who, it may be remembered, gallantly trotted and cantered at his first venture. But the Earl of Dorincourt’s stables did not produce half-broken buckjumpers for the little heir to learn upon, nor did the Earl and his groom scream instructions at each other not to let her bolt.

‘I’m getting off,’ I said.

‘No, you’re not,’ shouted my father.

But somehow or another I did, and we had a row.

‘It doesn’t matter if you do fall off,’ roared my father. ‘It’d only be like falling off the kitchen table. You wouldn’t think anything of that. Get up again.’

Dolly snorted, reared and backed, and Mr McGuinnes fought with her head.

‘I don’t want to,’ I said. ‘It’s not a bit like the kitchen table.’

‘Good Lord!’ said my father in disgust. ‘Here. I’ll show you, you ass.’

He leapt into the saddle. ‘Let her go,’ he said sternly.

Dolly made a complicated bound and broke into a gallop. Halfway down the lane she threw him and the rest of the afternoon was spent in recapturing her.

My nerve, if not completely shattered, was far from secure. However, there were further equestrian attempts. Dolly was again ridden by my father and, after bolting with him for a considerable distance, came lathering back in what was held to be a chastened mood. I was led up and down the lane, whitely attempting to ride in my stirrups and hating it.

I doubt if I would ever have become a horsey child if we had not, at this juncture, paid one of our visits to Dunedin. Here, under the guidance of a very old and almost stone-deaf gardener-groom, I became acquainted with two elderly ponies, Tasman and Tommy. I fed them over the paddock rails, learnt to bridle them, climbed on them of my own accord and when nothing untoward occurred, began to bump bareback around the paddock. It seems to me, now, that there was no interval between this tentative experiment and early morning rides when I cantered along the sea front, a hardened but far from technically accomplished equestrienne. The Pacific thundered and crashed along the beach, seagulls screamed over the island they had whitened, and sometimes I rode up a steep and winding road to Cargill’s Castle. Up this same road my father, when he first came to New Zealand, had been driven with Uncle William and his wife to balls the Cargills gave in their antipodean highland castle. He told me how the lights of the carriages had glowed and turned in the night, how gay life was in the Eighties and Nineties. Sometimes on my early morning rides I remembered his stories.

On our return to Christchurch came Frisky, from whom I should have learned the facts of life.

She was a little chestnut mare, part Arab, and she stayed with me until my feet were a few inches from the ground. Other ponies and horses came and went (’Ridden by a child. Very quiet.’) but Frisky remained. I adored and bossed her, sometimes flinging my arms round her neck and burying my face in her celery-smelling hide, sometimes cramming her into prolonged gallops. After a time she was removed for a short period by Mr McGuinnes. When she returned, I was told that she was in a delicate state of health and must be taken quietly until further orders. I obeyed these injunctions tenderly and without question. My mother afterwards told me that, encouraged by this ready-made exemplar, she attempted to use it as a basis for biological instruction but that I paid no attention whatever to her carefully chosen phrases. I rode Frisky quietly, my legs spreading wider and wider apart, and concluded that as she was getting fatter she must be getting better. My father suggested, one morning, that I should accompany him to the Top Paddock. Nothing could have exceeded my astonishment when I found that Frisky was attended by a foal that wobbled round her like a sort of animated diagram. Delighted, I was: enlightened as to the facts of life, not at all.

To this day I cannot understand my idiocy in this respect; I behaved like a Goon. When one of my little girl friends from Miss Ross’s who was called Merta, told me that her mummy was fat because she was going to have a baby I thought she was spinning an extremely unconvincing yarn and didn’t believe a word of it. An intelligent and amiable child, Merta took no offence but merely said: ‘Well, anyway, that’s why she’s fat. You’ll see,’ and did not reopen the discussion. When another little girl confided specific, if not altogether accurate, information imparted by her brother, I was interested but never for one moment did I apply it to anybody I knew. When my mother asked me if I’d like a brother or sister because Dr Dick had said she might have one now, I merely said I wouldn’t and continued to think that our family physician concocted babies in his surgery. What is the psychiatrist’s explanation of such booby-like obstinacy? I have noticed it in other children whose mothers, spurred on by contemporary attitudes, have lost no opportunity to point the moral, if not adorn the procreative tale. In each case the reaction was unrewarding.

‘You see, darling, Mummy is keeping the new baby warm under her heart until it is ready – ‘

‘Yes, Mummy. Mummy, if I kept a penny for every day for a million years could it buy a bicycle?’

‘I expect it could, don’t you? And you see, darling, Daddy is really like a gardener – ‘

‘Can I have a garden of my own to grow mustard and cress?’

‘We’ll see. And it was just the same when you were born – ‘

‘When’s my birthday? Can I have a gun for my birthday?’

Heavy going.