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.
IV
I think the greatest difference in convention between the children of my time and those of today may be seen in the amount of money spent on their entertainment and this, I believe, was a consideration not only of necessity but of principle. Books and toys were a fraction of their present cost but they were not casually bestowed. Gifts were largely restricted to special occasions and to open a parcel was a matter of burning excitement.
I am glad my friends and I were less indulged than children are nowadays. Even if my parents could have afforded to give me lots of expensive presents I am sure they would not have done so. If birthdays and Christmas had brought a succession of grand parties with everybody getting a great many impersonal gifts at each of them, I really do not believe these occasions would have held the same enchantment. There were very few formal parties. In the early affluent days in Fendalton, there had been journeys in hansom-cabs to fancy-dress balls in large houses. At one of these, I, dressed as a tiny Marion de Lorne, walked in procession with a fairy whose face fascinated me by growing more and more scarlet with each promenade. A day or two later I developed measles.
On the hills there were, for the most part, only impromptu festivities. My mother and her sisters and my father were superb in charades. One of my uncles (Unk), a distinguished geologist, also liked to take part. He always insisted, regardless of subject matter, on being dressed up and on carrying their parrot in its cage. This odd piece of business struck Unk as being exquisitely comical.
Even at Christmas our celebrations were of a casual family kind, except for the Tree, for which I made elaborate preparations.
There was a little black japanned cabinet in my room with painted figures on the doors. Into this I put the Christmas presents I assembled for my friends, starting early in the year and gradually adding to the collection. Pink sugar pigs, I can remember, a pin-cushion and wooden Dutch dolls costing from fourpence to tenpence according to size. These I sometimes attempted to clothe but I had and have, rather less aptitude than a bricklayer for sewing. The result was lamentable. I bought shiny fairy tales at threepence a book, a Jacko, which was a tin monkey that climbed a string, a jack-in-the-box, and a thumb-sized china fairy for the top of the tree. I would squat, absorbed, in front of my cabinet, arranging these presents under stuck-on-labels bearing the names of my friends. My pocket-money was sixpence a week. The English grandmother sent me a sovereign and an English godmother half-a-sovereign. These were saved in a scarlet tin postbox.
In the mind of a small New Zealander, Christmas was a strange mixture of snow and intense heat. All our books in those days were English. Christmas annuals were full of middle-class sleighs and children. Reindeer, coach horns, frozen roads, muffled boys coming home from boarding school, snapdragons and blazing fires were strongly featured. These were Christmas. But so, too, were home-made toboggans that shot like greased lightning down glossy, midsummer tussock: hot, still evenings, the lovely smell of cabbage-tree blossom, open doors and windows and the sound, far away, down on the flat, of boys letting off crackers. I settled this contradiction in my own way. For as long as I thought I still believed in Father Christmas, I climbed a solitary pine tree that stood on the hillside and put a letter in a box that I had tied near the top. Being a snow-minded person, Father Christmas, I thought, probably lived in the back country, out on the main range where there were red deer, and he would know about my letter and pause in his night-gallop through the sky to collect it. I suppose my father climbed up and retrieved the letters. They always disappeared.
On Christmas Eve, I sat under this tree and wrote in a book that was kept secretly for that one occasion. It was started, I think, when I was about seven years old and the first entry was in a round, unsteady hand. I tried to put down the enchanted present and this was my first attempt at
