Читать книгу Black Beech and Honeydew - Ngaio Marsh, Stella Duffy - Страница 11

After I left Tib’s, my mother struggled for a short time with my lessons and then I had a governess: Miss Ffitch. The capital F was used, I imagine, as a concession to colonial prejudice. Nowhere in the English-speaking world are proper names more arrogantly misused than in New Zealand. In retrospect, my heart bleeds for Miss Ffitch who, I am sure, would have been much happier with a conventional and nicely comported little girl. Invigorated by the fresh air of the hills, toughened by the companionship of neighbouring children and reacting, perhaps, from the complicated terrors that had beset my first decade, I had become a formidable, in some ways an abominable, child. My dear friend Ned, who in all other respects never led me into mischief, had taught me to smoke. We bought a tin of ten ‘Three Castles Yellow (strong)’, divided them equally, retired into a wigwam we had built among some gorse-bushes, and chain-smoked the lot without evil results. Encouraged by this success, we carved ourselves pipes from willow wood into which we introduced bamboo stems and in which we smoked tea. We also smoked red-hot cigars made of pine needles and newspaper.

Lessons ended at noon. On one occasion I retired into the trees outside my bedroom and lit my pipe. I had forgotten that Miss Ffitch adjusted her hat at a glass in the window. Wreathed in smoke and glancing hardily about me, I encountered her gaze: transfixed, blank, appalled, incredulous. For a second or two we stared at each other and then her face withdrew into the shadows. I awaited her displeasure but she said nothing, having decided, I suppose, like a sensible woman, that this sort of thing lay outside the pale of her authority and was better cut dead.

I tied an alarm clock under her chair, and set it for noon. On one occasion only, I blatantly cribbed to see if she would spot it, which of course she did, and very properly made me feel that I had been extremely unfunny. These were isolated acts of insubordination. As a general rule I think I was reasonably tractable but the overall effect of Miss Ffitch was positive only in respect of the amount of information she managed to inject.

Why, I wonder, did Miss Ffitch decree that my introduction to the plays of Shakespeare should be through King Lear? Remembering her mild exterior, her unexceptionable deportment, her ladylike constraint: why, I ask myself, did she so placidly launch a small girl upon that primordial, that cataclysmic, work? One would have said she was a sitter for the Forest of Arden or the Wood Near Athens. Hamlet or Macbeth would have been much less surprising: children are extremely responsive to both these tragedies. But Lear?

I cannot remember that Miss Ffitch uttered a word of exposition or drew my attention to anything but the notes. Upon these she laid great emphasis. The version was an expurgated one. No lechery. No civet. No small gilded flies. Just torture, murder and madness. Yet, as far as I could understand it, I lapped it up, and was, I remember, greatly surprised by its beauty. Kent’s speech in the stocks, the theadbare Fool. The recognition scene:

‘Do not laugh at me

For, as I am a man, I think this lady

To be my child, Cordelia.’

‘And so I am. I am.’

This lovely grief was understandable. When told to read the scene aloud, my voice trembled. Perhaps after all Miss Ffitch was on the right lines.

For Christmas, Miss Ffitch very kindly gave me Carlyle’s French Revolution. I tried hard but failed. All that turgid, and at the same time bossy, excitability was too much for me. Nor did I respond with marked enthusiasm to the Lays of Ancient Rome or to a poem which maundered, in lachrymose pentameters, over Mary, Queen of Scots, or to another that said:

Watch where ye see my helmet shine amid the tanks of wah

And be your oriflamme today the White Plume of Navarre

Kipling, however, got under my tender diaphragm. I was already deeply committed to the Just So Stories which my father read superbly and to their end-poems which, with those of the Jungle Books, I learnt by heart without knowing I had done so. I still think them almost flawless for readers of seven to thirteen years.

Now Chil the Kite brings home the Night

That Mang, the Bat sets free

The herds are shut in byre and hut

For loosed till dawn are we.

and:

Oh hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us.

What is to be said of the taste of a child reader? From what half-formed preferences, what unrecognized instincts is it shaped? Why did the opening phrase of the Jungle Stories so captivate me that I must read it over and over again with such deep satisfaction? ‘It was seven o’clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills-’

This was magic.

Then came The Brushwood Bay, which I shall never dare to read again lest the recollection should crumble into disillusion, and some of the sea poems, particularly The Coast-Wise Lights of England.

Our brows are bound with spindrift and the weed is on our knees

And our loins are battered ‘neath us by the swinging, smoking seas.

By these I was ravished.

Unfortunately I found that I myself was capable of some morsels in Kiplingesque pastiche.

‘Up,’ I wrote with my tongue firmly gripped between my teeth:

Up from the rolling plains, up where the blue mist lies

and a little further on and even more regrettably

We must be nothing weak, Vallies and hills are ours

From the last lone mountain creek to where the rata flowers.

I really believe that in my heart I knew what dreadful stuff this was and can distinctly remember that on completing it I was discomforted by a sensation of embarrassment. I don’t think I ever showed it to my mother. At ten years, however, according to a note she made on it, I had presented her with a poem.

The sun is sinking in the west

The stars begin to shine

The birds are singing in their nest

And I must go to mine.

These lines preceded my Kipling period and are, I think, greatly to be preferred to it. Oddly enough, although it reads like a direct pinch from Blake, I had not, at that time, been introduced to the Songs of Innocence and therefore may be held, I suppose, to have perpetrated an infantile literary coincidence.

For one odd preference in reading I can find no explanation. This was a book by an, at that time, popular journalist called John Foster Fraser. It was about the trans-Siberian railway and it completely fascinated me. Perhaps my love of trains had something to do with this but I think that I had made some strange association between the word ‘Russia’ and an idea of the quintessence of adventure. This strange feeling was to reach a kind of climax after many years by the wharves of Odessa.

In addition to lessons with Miss Ffitch I went twice a week to Miss Jennie Black, Mus. Bac., for the piano. She was dark and incisive with flashing eyes behind her spectacles. She taught Mathey’s method and she stood no nonsense. I rode Frisky and my mother rode her bicycle as far as the tram stop. She sat on a grassy bank and read. Frisky often dropped off to sleep, resting her chin rather heavily on my mother’s hat and slightly dribbling. There they would be on my return, with Tip, now an old dog, panting in the shade of Frisky’s belly.

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.