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.
III
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?
