against the problem of the only child. It is true that by some process of adaptation the picture gradually changed. I was no longer bullied. I formed heartening friendships with other small girls. I toughened.
As time went on I was even given certain responsibilities at Tib’s. When Ian, a fighting boy in a kilt, was brought at eleven o’clock every morning by his nanny, I was one of two sent to take delivery of him in the porch. He yelled, bit and kicked, while his nurse recommended that he should go with the nice young ladies to his lesson. We led him, roaring, to his desk, rather impressed than otherwise by the extremity of his passion. Dick, a fat boy, was more vulnerable and wept sometimes. He was jeered at by my former tormentors and I’m glad to remember that I was sorry for him and didn’t join in. I was out of the wood by that time. Rightly or wrongly, however, I still think that my first term at Tib’s was far from being all to the good. It does not improve the character to be bullied. Children are microcosms of people. Treat them badly for long enough and then give them a little power and they will punctually repeat with greater emphasis the behaviour to which they have been subjected. Fear is the most damaging emotion that can be inflicted on the character of any child and on one already as morbidly prone to inexplicable terrors as I was, the early torments I underwent at Tib’s were pretty deadly. When they moderated and I was no longer in thrall, I reacted predictably. I don’t think that on the whole I was all that much more obnoxious than any other little girl of my age but for a time I became so: bossy, bullying, and secretive, paying back however unconsciously, I am sure, for what had been dealt out to me. I don’t think it lasted very long but it happened and in my old age I still remember and am sorry about it.
Fear can be perhaps the most corrupting of our basic emotions and fear without the possibility of release, the worst of all. The child who has been overtaken by it is a microcosm of the mob. If you rule a people by fear and treat them as an inferior race and then give them power, don’t expect them to use it like angels. You have corrupted them and many of them will abuse it.
One day, while I and other Fendaltonians waited for Miss Irving to put us on the bus, we heard a clatter of hooves in the quiet street and mounted policemen rode splendidly by, followed by a carriage with a crown on the door.
‘The Governor,’ gabbled Miss Irving in a fluster. ‘Girls curtsey and boys bow. Off with your caps. Quick.’
We bobbed and nodded, eyeing each other sideways and then looked up to see the Governor smiling and bowing very pointedly to us. With him was his wife and unless I am at fault, a little girl of about my own age of whom there will be much more to say.
Away rolled the carriage and up came the bus.
One other incident sticks in my memory. Miss Ross, rather ominously smiling, asks her pupils what they wish to be when they grow up. She concentrates upon the boys since the girls are destined for matrimony: an employment not to be examined in detail with propriety. I, however, hold up my hand. ‘I want,’ I venture, ‘to be an artist.’ ‘Ho!’ Miss Ross atrociously says, ‘you’ll never do that, my dear. Your hand shakes.’
I suppose I had attended Miss Ross’s school for about a year when the great change came. We went to live on the hills.
II
When I looked south from the higher branches of my wellingtonia tree in suburbia, I saw, above park, roofs and Cathedral spire, the Port Hills. They were only four miles away but to me they seemed as romantically distant as those snowy Alps that stood to the north beyond the Canterbury Plains. The hills were rounded and suave in outline with occasional craggy accidents. They would be called mountains in England. The tussock that covered them gave them a bloomy appearance as blonde hair does to a living body. I was told that a long time ago they had moved gigantically and heaved themselves into their present form and then grown hard, being the overflow of a volcano.
The crater of this volcano is now a deep harbour into which a hundred and fifteen years ago, sailed the First Four Ships: Sir George Seymour, Randolph, Cressy and Charlotte Jane, bringing the founders of the Canterbury Settlement. These intrepid emigrants landed at the port of Lyttelton, wearing stovepipe hats, heavy suits, crinolines and bonnets. They climbed the Port Hills and reached the summit where, with a munificent gesture, their inheritance was suddenly laid out before them. Whenever I return to New Zealand I like to come home by the hills and still think that an arrival at the pass on a clear dawn is the most astonishing entry one could make into any country. There, as abruptly as if one had looked over a wall, are the Plains, spread out beyond the limit of vision, laced with early mist, and a great river, bounded on the east by the Pacific, on the west by mere distance, and from east to west by a lordly sequence of mountains, rose-coloured where they receive the rising sun.
Gramp came this way in, I think, 1853 and looked down at swamps and a little group of huts and wooden buildings. When he was eighty he still used to go for a Sunday walk on the Port Hills and glare sardonically at the city of Christchurch.
In our Fendalton days there was only a scatter of about twenty houses on the hills. We were lent one of these for a summer holiday – a house amidst tussock with nothing but clear air between it and the foothills of the Alps, forty miles away on the other side of the Plains. It was this visit, I think, that decided our move. My father bought the nose of the same hill; some three-quarters of an acre of ground, already fenced, partly cultivated and set about with baby trees – pinus radiata and limes, not much higher than the surrounding tussock. A sou’-wester is blowing this morning and I look anxiously at the tops of my pines, a hundred feet tall, and hope they have enough sap in their old bodies to withstand the gale.
As soon as the momentous decision was taken, it was communicated to an architect cousin of my mother’s. He at once caused to be set aside a stack of seasoned timber and exposed it to further weathering. It had come out of the mountains, horse-drawn through virgin forest to a bush tramway, or had been floated across a lake and broken down in Westland timber mills. When I made some alterations in this house, the carpenters were unable to drive a nail into the old joists; the wood, they said, was like iron rather than timber.
Perhaps the lease of our house in Fendalton expired before the new one could be built or perhaps there was a delay in the building. For whatever the reason, it was decided that we should camp in tents near the site of our future home and stay there until it was completed. I fancy that we adopted this hardy adventuresome procedure partly because my father considered it would be an advantage if he were at hand to keep an eye on the workmen.
‘You never know,’ he said darkly, ‘with those chaps.’
It was on an early summer’s day that we left Fendalton, seated on top of our tents and boxes in a spring-wagon. My father’s closest friend of those times had a motor-car, one of the first in Christchurch, and had offered to drive us to the hills, but I think the recollection of innumerable breakdowns and hour-long unproductive explorations of its less accessible mysteries decided my mother against this vehicle. She felt that the important thing was to arrive.
So, on what seems to me to have been an interminable journey, we plodded through the borders of Fendalton, round the parks, past a region of drafting-yards and sheep pens where, once a week, livestock was sold, down a long highway and into Wilderness Road, an endless stretch between gorse hedges. It is now a main suburban street. This brought us at last to the hills; to a winding lane, a rough track and our destination. I remember that a hot nor’ wester raged across the plains and when we tried to pitch our bell tents, got inside them and threatened to blow them away like umbrellas. We settled at last upon the sheltered end of a valley, below our section and within sight of the scaffolding that had already been set up.
There we lived throughout the summer. It was the beginning of a new life for all of us.
I
