from jumping from the top windows. And I don’t know why it happened, or what exactly the move to the town precipitated, but I began to be conscious of a kind of trouble that ran through the house. I would wake in the night to sounds of discord. Jane frowned a lot. One day my mother put on her hat and gloves to go shopping and came back crying, with an empty basket. We owed money and it was my father’s fault. She’d had no idea.
The King (that was my father) was in his counting house, Counting out his money. (But there wasn’t enough of it) The Queen (that was my mother) was in the parlour Eating bread and honey. (If she was lucky) The maid was in the garden, Hanging out the clothes, Along came a blackbird and pecked off her nose.
The words haunted me. It seemed all too possible. Jane and I had a nursemaid who hung out the clothes and I beseeched her to be careful. Sudden and disagreeable things could happen. I knew that by now. Had we not moved from Amberley to Christchurch? And were there not blackbirds in the walnut tree? I had seen them. I met her fifty years on when I was visiting New Zealand, and I was glad to see she still had her nose. She remembered me more clearly than I remembered her. She said I’d say the oddest things. She’d offered to tell me a story and I said, ‘How can you? You haven’t got a book.’ She said she’d make the story up in her head, and I’d replied, ‘Then your head must be made of paper.’
The sudden and disagreeable things might have had something to do with Ina. Ina was the daughter of my mother’s friend Winifred. Winifred had come to New Zealand as an immigrant foundling at the age of sixteen and been apprenticed to a milliner. She’d met and married a man forty years older than herself, on the understanding that she would nurse him through his terminal illness. This she had done, conceiving Ina on the way. Now she was free, with her husband’s money in the bank. She was plain, practical and very kind. Her daughter Ina was always a trouble to her: beautiful, nervy, arty and spendthrift, running up debts her mother had to pay. She had a long neck and often wore a turban, and when my father read Aristophanes to us, and in one of the plays there was a bird called a Hoopoe, I thought he was probably describing Ina. She would turn up quite a lot at the house and when she did my mother would look baleful.
But nobody, surely, could compete with my beautiful mother? She was so special. She wrote a masque: I was not sure how that could be done, but whatever it was everyone dressed up in flowing robes and did what she told them to do. She spoke from the balcony of the Bishop’s Palace, which looked over green lawns and the River Avon, and everyone clapped. Then there was strawberries for tea. I was very proud of her. But I was proud of my father too. He took Jane and me to Hagley Park, to watch a man with a parachute drift out of the sky. The world was full of marvels. But the marvels and the nightmares had begun to run side by side, racing to see which would win.
There was a night of bangings and crashings, shrieks and slamming doors, during the course of which I was told to go back to bed. In the morning my mother was not there to get me up. My father did it instead and said she’d gone home, for a time. That was strange. Surely where someone lived was their home? On further enquiry home turned out to be another country, up at the top to the right on a page of the atlas. Home was England. We came from England which was why we were called homies.
But if the world was round like an orange, as people tried to tell me, why was it flat on the map? The orange theory did not make sense. Half the people in the world would be going round upside-down if it were true. I did not much like being tucked away at the bottom of the flat page, so far from anywhere else, tiny little lengths of red, set in a pale blue sea, so far from my mother on her way to the top of the page, but it was better than being on some huge orange. And at least now I had my father to myself.
But why had she gone and when would she be back? I couldn’t get much sense out of Jane: all anyone said, including her, was that I was too young to understand. Without my mother in it, the house seemed curiously light and free, as if we could all now just have a good time. But within days, my father, Jane and I had moved out of the house, said goodbye to our nursemaid, and were living in a private hotel near Cranmer Square.
Cranmer Square was not actually a square but an oblong, its grass intersected by paths in the pattern of the Union Jack. In this city of boxy bungalows set in neat gardens it seemed to me a significant place, if sloppily named. Nearly all the buildings which lined it had stairs: that is to say they were more than one storey high. There was the Girls’ High School at the north end, and St Margaret’s to the west and the Normal School to the south. In between were boarding-houses and hotels. On wet days, when heavy rain drummed on the ground and made the corrugated-iron roofs rattle, slugs and snails would come out in enormous number to cover the stripes of the Union Jack, making walking hazardous. The crack of a snail beneath the shoe or the sight of a squashed worm strikes horror into the little-girl heart. There were few wet days, of course: winter in Christchurch was an eight-week affair and then it was over. The nor’wester was a worse affliction; wake up to see the arch of cloud in a heavy sky, and know that within hours the hard, hot, strong wind would get up and blow for days, making everyone cross and tired.
Our winter was England’s summer: that was strange. In the conservatory of the private hotel which was now our home the apples and the oranges would come out as my father and his friends tried to prove to me that the earth was round, not flat, and circled the sun, like this, and the moon went round the earth, like that, and why night happened and so on. It still did not seem convincing. As well claim we were all living in the fruit bowl.
Jane and I shared a high damp steamy bed in the front ground-floor room. The bedspread was made of bright green artificial silk which was chilly and slippery to the touch. I cried a little on the first night we slept in it, and was proud of Jane, who didn’t cry at all. There wasn’t a pot under the bed and we didn’t know where the lavatory was, so that night Jane wee-ed on the round Chinese carpet. She said it was their fault, not hers, and I wondered as I have often wondered all my life, who ‘they’ were. I didn’t like to witness her desperation, but marvelled at her pride and determination.
We ate our meals in the dining room with the other guests. I could see there were advantages to this situation. There was no one to fuss about washing your hands or combing your hair or worrying what you were doing. If there was anything you didn’t know Jane probably would, and at least in an emergency she could be relied upon to tell you. My father took much more notice of us now my mother was out of the way, and I resolved to look after him properly, and make him happier than she had. I would never go off and leave him the way she did: I could see I was too small to take her place but I would do my best.
But my father had other ideas. I was not allowed into his bed, for one thing. Ina came in and out, wearing her absurd silk turbans and heavy strings of wooden beads, hooting and chirping away. Rita Angus the painter would drift palely in, look sad and drift out again. Then there was Jean Stephenson and Helen Shaw. Jean was thin and clever and edited the New Zealand Listener. How on earth did you edit a person and what was he listening for, I wondered. It sounded very important, like being Prime Minister. Helen was rounded and creamy skinned: I thought she was like Helen of Troy, in the Walter de la Mare poem my mother used to murmur.
Helen of Troy was beautiful,
