I was fourteen I fell in love.
The object of my passion was a retired Dean. He was remarkably handsome with the profile of a classic hero. His voice was deep and harsh, his manner abrupt and his conversation rather like that of the Duke of Wellington as recorded by Mr Phillip Guedella though, of course, without the expletives. He also reminded me of Mr Rochester; I cannot imagine why, as there was but little correspondence. He was in the habit of taking a Saturday afternoon walk on the Hills and would call on my mother for tea. My heart thumped obstreperously when I saw him approach. If he missed a Saturday I was desolate. I cannot remember that we ever conversed at great length but may suppose that he was not positively averse to my company since he sometimes came out of the Deanery which was in the same street as St Margaret’s and accompanied me as far as the school gate, actually carrying my satchel. These were tremendous occasions.
I was not alone in my obsession. The Dean was hotly pursued by members of a Ladies’ Guild who were said by my mother to lie in ambush for him on the Port Hills and so irritated him that he sought refuge in our house where he spoke in anger against them. She had many stories about him. When he was a parish priest she had been asked by his wife to luncheon at the vicarage. He was late and they did not wait for him. Just as they were about to help themselves from a side table, he strode in and without a word snatched up the cold joint and went away through the french windows.
‘That,’ said his wife, ‘is the third time this week. Will you have some ham?’
It was a poor parish and there was, in those days, a financial depression in New Zealand. The joint had gone to one of his flock.
By the time I adored him, the Dean had retired and become a widower. He was a great admirer of my grandmother and was, I think, 73 years old. At the very height of my passion he married Miss Tibby Ross.
On his honeymoon he encountered an acquaintance in the upstairs corridor of the hotel.
‘This is a rum go,’ he was reputed to have said.
III
For two afternoons a week I went to the School of Art and it was understood that when I left St Margaret’s I would become, not a full-time student, but at least a daily one. I would have to get a morning job of some sort and, if possible, a scholarship to pay for my fees. In the meantime, through the Burton sisters, the smell of greasepaint had entered into my system never to be expelled.
They turned St Michael’s parish hall into a workable theatre with an old-fashioned raked stage, an overhead grille and adequate lighting. Here they produced ‘costume’ comedies, rather nebulous miracle plays and fairy pieces garnished with mediaeval songs and ballets of the gay flat-footed kind. Nothing could point more sharply the difference in theatrical attitudes and taste between those days and the present time than these blameless entertainments. Nowadays my friends would no doubt have chosen plays by Harold Pinter, even Ionesco, even Beckett and would perhaps, by diligent application, have discovered in such works undertones of religious significance that would have astonished their authors if they had ever heard about them. With us all was sweetness, tabards, and tights.
The first of these productions was called Isolene. My father unkindly referred to it as ‘Vaseline’ . I was cast as the Prince. Aileen, the artist sister, designed and made the clothes and did so with imagination and ingenuity. I wore a white tabard, heavily emblazoned in great detail, and white ostrich plumes on my head. I have not the smallest recollection of the plot but can recall, as if it had been last evening, the wave of intoxication that came over me when I made my first entrance on to any stage. There is no experience to be compared with this: the call, the departure from an overheated room reeking of greasepaint and wet white, the arrival backstage into a world of shadows, separated only by stretched canvas from a world of light: a region of silence and stillness attentive to a region of sound and movement. Here the player waits, suspended between preparation and performance. He stares absently at a painted legend on the back of a canvas door through which he must enter. ‘Act II, Scene I, p. 2’, or into the prompt corner where a shaded lamp casts its light on a book and on a hand that follows the dialogue. He may look up at the perch. There is the switchboard man into whose watchful face is reflected light from the unseen stage. On the other side of the door they are building to his own entrance. The voices are pitched larger than life and respond to each other in a formal pattern. Beyond them, like an observant monster in a black void, is the audience. The player listens and with a sick jolt may ask himself, ‘Why, why, why did I subject myself to this terror?’ Then he steps back a pace or two and on his cue moves up to the door and enters.
This is his moment of truth. Even though the role he plays is insignificant, the play worthless and the actor himself of no great account, this first crossing of a threshold from one reality to another will stand apart from anything else that he does.
My introduction to the working half of a theatre was thus by way of an insipid little piece in a converted parish hall. Luckily I never thought of myself as, potentially, a dynamic actress. If I had cherished any such illusion my mother would very promptly have disabused me of it. It was the whole ambience of backstage that I found so immensely satisfying: the forming and growth of a play and its precipitation into its final shape. That wonderful phrase ‘the quick forge and working-house of thought’ was unknown to me then: I would have leapt at it as an exact expression of the living theatre.
I don’t know when I first realized that I wanted to direct rather than to perform: at this early stage I was equally happy painting scenery, mustering props, prompting or going on for a speaking-part. I was at home.
At school, also, there was dramatic endeavour. Antigone (in English), excerpts from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and, every year, a play in French composed and produced by M. Malequin. M. Malequin was an ardent monarchist and was rumoured to have been tutor to a scion of the Bourbons. His plays, mimeographed in purple from his own spidery hand, tended to reflect his opinions. One was about the Little Dauphin of the Terror, un-murdered and in durance. I was his gaoler – inevitably, since my voice and height always prompted M. Malequin to cast me for the ‘heavies’. I was very brutal and brought the Dauphin a meat pie. I think I had doctored it but that somehow or another a blameless pie had been substituted by a virtuous hand.
‘Eh bien!’ I rasped as the Dauphin attacked it. ‘Bon appetit!’
Monsieur was, of course, anti-Bonapartist and in another piece I was a servile and sinister agent.
‘Excusez-moi, Madame la Duchesse, mais je suis ici envoyé de l’Empereur, mon maître.’
There was nobody on the staff of St Margaret’s who had the slightest acquaintance with stage-production. My parents suffered these performances annually at the prize-giving and I cannot recall that either of them ever offered an opinion. In this they showed superhuman forbearance.
There was a Lower School at St Margaret’s. After I became head prefect, I went there twice a week in the luncheon break to amuse the very small girls: I read to them and began to write and illustrate stories for their entertainment. Then I wrote a play and rehearsed it with them. This was a popular move and our effort, having been passed by Sister Winifred, was introduced into the prize-giving ceremonies at the end of the year. The play was called Bundles and the title is all I can remember about it. A New Zealand authoress of those days – Miss Colburn-Veale – saw it and wrote to my mother, offering to show it to her English publisher for an opinion. He wrote back very kindly and sent me a book: Tristie’s Quest by Dr Greville Macdonald, the son of George Macdonald whose stories my father, having delighted in them as a child, had tried in vain to get for me. Tristie’s Quest was a wonderful children’s novel and I wish very much that I had not lent it to the little girl who never returned
