a good shot and allowed to go out with the guns. This was wonderful. To kill rabbits was an honourable procedure. And then, on an autumn morning, I wounded a hare. The landscape blackened and cried out against me and that was the end of my active part in field sports.
These expeditions alternated with boating on the quiet river where one glided through unknown people’s gardens, under willows and between the spring-flowering banks of our curiously English antipodean suburbs. The oars clunked rhythmically in their rowlocks, weeping willows dipped and brushed across our faces. If you nibbled the pale young leaves they were surprisingly bitter. Sometimes our keel grated on shingle or sent up a drift of cloudy mud. One trailed one’s fingers and felt grand and opulent. It seems to me that it was always late afternoon on the river.
Until my schooldays came and, with them, camping holidays in the mountains, the great adventure, undertaken on several occasions by my mother and me, was a journey to Dunedin. It lasted all day. Up before dawn, we dressed by lamplight while cocks crew in the darkness beyond the window-pane. We seemed to have taken our house by surprise while it was still leading a night life of its own. In the hall stood our corded boxes and the coats we would wear. Breakfast was a strange hurried business eaten by the light of an oil lamp with a clock on the table. Presently the front door had banged behind us.
My father took us to the station and put us into our carriage (second-class after the financial setbacks). It had wooden benches running lengthways and spittoons along the floor. Now began a period of frightful anxieties. Suppose we stayed too long on the platform and the train suddenly went away without us? Suppose, as I was getting in, my mother should be left behind, mouthing after me on the platform while I was carried rapidly south? Suppose we were in the wrong train and would be swept up through the mountains to Westland or that my father, having established us in our seats, foolishly dallied and was borne away in the train with us and financially ruined.
When we were on our way these apprehensions faded, most of them recurring when my mother decided that we should stretch our legs at the longer stops. The journey became fascinating. We racketed across the Canterbury Plains while in the world outside the Southern Alps advanced, retired and slowly looked over each other’s snowy shoulders, and mad loops of telephone wires dipped and leapt in front of them. ‘Dun-e-DIN. Dun-e-DIN’ said the hurrying train and ‘No-you-DON’T. No-you-DON’T,’ sometimes breaking out into a violent excitable clatter as we roared through a cutting: ‘Rackety-plan. Rackety-plan.’ We crossed great rivers and saw men and vast mobs of sheep on lonely roads. A long day.
There were three little parcels to be opened at appropriately spaced stations. They were always books. There were the lurching hazards of an endless stagger through other carriages and over-shifting footplates in a roaring wind, to the dining car. There were Other People to speculate upon and at evening when one was very tired indeed there was a final treat: my mother’s dressing case to be explored. It was lined with deliciously-smelling leather and fitted with crystal, silver-topped bottles. Soap, eau-de-Cologne with which one’s face was cleaned and freshened. A tiny phial of real attar-of-roses sent out by my grandmother from England. Papier-poudré, which was a little book of leaflets that my mother rubbed over her eau-de-Cologned nose and chin. An ivory-backed brush and comb. A looking glass from which one’s face stared back like a ghost in the murky lamplight. Now we were hurtling round the high cliffs of the Otago coast. If there was a moon outside it shone on the Pacific, far below. Lonely patches of bushland and ranges of hills moved against the sky behind cadaverous nodding reflections of Other People’s faces.
At last, at the end of a lifetime and late at night: Dunedin, the smell of Mivvy’s fur coat and the familiar sound of her voice. The platform heaved under one’s legs. I cannot remember, on any occasion, the drive out to St Clair and suppose I must always have fallen asleep. One entered the house through a conservatory smelling of wet fern. We were near the sea and the last thing one heard was the roar of surf on a lonely coast.
One day, at St Clair, it rained so heavily that I was not allowed to put my nose out-of-doors. Under the dining-room bay-window seat was a system of lockers. Mivvy said they were full of old magazines and suggested that I might like to explore them. They were of two kinds. The Windsor, which was lettuce green with the Castle, I think, in brown, and The Strand with a picture of that thoroughfare on the cover. All day I hunted and devoured, tracing the enchanting series from one edition to the next. The rain beat down, not on the windows of a New Zealand house but across those of a gas-lit upstairs room in a London street. It glistened on the roofs of hansom-cabs and bounced off cobblestones. It mingled with the cries of newsboys and eccentric improvisations upon the fiddle. A solitary visitor was approaching: there was a peremptory double-knock at the street door. Someone came up the stairs and entered.
‘Hullo,’ said Mivvy, looking over my shoulder, ‘you’ve discovered Sherlock Holmes.’
Miss Sibella E. Ross was a gentlewoman of Highland descent. She was also a cousin of my adored Dundas. Her shape was firm, her bust formidable, her eyes blue and, like her face, surprisingly round. Her teeth were slightly prominent. She lived with her highly respected family in a large house generally known, though not I think to the Rosses, as ‘The Tin Palace’, since it had been constructed in pioneering days from galvanized iron and had a tower. In premises conveniently adjacent, Miss Ross kept school: a select dame school for about twenty children between the ages of six and ten years. Miss Ross’s family and immediate friends called her Tibby and her ex-pupils referred to her school as Tib’s.
To this establishment I was sent when I was, I suppose, six years old. I have no doubt whatever that it was a wise decision but the experience in its initial stages was hellish.
In the morning I was put into a horse-drawn bus where there were already three fellow pupils. We were met at the other end by Miss Irving, the governess at Miss Ross’s, and escorted to school.
‘Good morning, children.’
‘Good morning, Miss Ross. Good morning, Miss Irving.’
For the first time I found myself one of a group of children and, for the first time, I was conscious of being tall for my age. This made the simple business of standing up to answer questions an embarrassing ordeal. Miss Ross had invented an ‘honour’ system which decreed that at the end of the morning each child must stand up and proclaim how many times he or she had spoken unlawfully in class. When my immediate neighbours discovered, with the terrible prescience of children, that this observance frightened me, they determined, gleefully, to enhance its terrors by forcing me to talk. They would hiss questions. If I didn’t answer, they would make jabs at me, for all the world as hens peck at a sick bird. They would peck and jab until I made some kind of response and then stare accusingly at me when the moment for public confession arrived. One could not always ask to ‘leave the room’ at the crucial moment. I cannot think that this was a good practice: it engendered, in a single operation, elements of guilt, fear, loneliness and inferiority, and, indeed, provoked a sort of Freudian extravaganza in the reactions of a little girl who was unprepared for it. The follow-up treatment took place in playtime and was set in hand by the nine-year-olds. They organized themselves and their juniors into something that was called a ‘secret army’ and from it excluded two stalwart little boys and myself. The boys were called Charles and Roderick and were kind. Roderick became a soldier and Charles a man of letters. Both of them left New Zealand. When, on separate occasions and about thirty years afterwards, I met them again, something of the intense gratitude I had felt for them returned. We talked about our first term at Tib’s.
I did not say anything at all about these miseries to my parents but I think my mother must have known that all was not well and decided that I should
