delight.
Of her — when she died, in 1918, with the same high and delicate courage with which she had lived, slipping off without telling a soul to a nursing-home for an operation which she knew might be, and which was, fatal — Katherine wrote:
“She lived every moment of life more fully and completely than anyone I’ve ever known — and her gaiety wasn’t any less real for being high courage — courage to meet anything with. Ever since I heard of her death my memories of her come flying back into my heart — and there are moments when it’s unbearable to receive them. But it has made me realise more fully than ever before that I love courage — spirit — poise (do you know what I mean? all these words are too little) more than anything.”
Was it the ambiguous look of helplessness in Hal Beauchamp’s eyes that drew her to him? He seemed always to need her: to help him find his things; to reassure him; to support and companion him in so many ways. With her slimness, and small, finely-cut features beneath heavy chestnut hair, she looked frail beside his vigorous ruddiness, especially when (as at their first appearance at a “recital”) he sat leaning heavy against her shoulder.
The younger sister, Bell, the “family beauty,” had the attitude naturally accompanying this distinction; but in “Grandmother” (Margaret Mansfield Dyer) was the flexible adaptability of a dramatic artist. But it was instinctive and unconscious: she adjusted herself naturally to the parts for which she was cast. She had married when very young, and worked as hard as the pioneer woman must for an eccentric husband, one son and three daughters. But her difficult, active life had not altered her. She was exquisite in personal habits — in old age — exquisite in person, immaculate, with clear fair skin and hair soft under her cap, which she wore as though it were an ornament.
Annie had been “delicate,” and “had a heart”; she was different from the other two girls. Grandmother Dyer easily stepped into the way of doing necessary things in the furnished house in Hawkstone Street.
Vera Margaret was born the following year, and Charlotte Mary, the next. They all moved to Hill Street in 1886. Shortly before Kathleen Mansfield was born, in 1888, Harold Beauchamp built his first home, at 11 Tinakori Road, next door to Walter Nathan’s big one, No. 13, on the corner. (Walter Nathan was Mr. Beauchamp’s business partner in an importing firm.) No. 11 was the standardised earthquake-proof style: a square, wooden box-like house; but with the distinction of a stained-glass door let into the little front porch. It was through this coloured glass that Kezia looked out at a “little Chinese Lottie” on that last night before they moved from Tinakori Road to Karori.
“Tinakori” is a Maori phrase — not a place name at all, but a phrase meaning “lunchless,” or “unsatisfied,” from the Maori’s complaint:”O! tin a kore, tin a kore,” when the overseers suggested working through the noon hour to finish laying the last lap of road. Tinakori Road, upon which Kathleen Beauchamp was to live for ten years of her life and which was to be the scene of two of her finest stories, ran down the hill, past the Botanical Gardens, toward Lambton Quay and the windy Esplanade. It seemed to have bit into the gardens of the box-like houses, robbing them of all but a small square of grass between the front porch and the fence of painted palings or iron rails. A patterned balustrade, like lace, stretched across the second storey; often a matching web dripped down from the eaves. Running parallel with the road, the Tinakori Hills rose abruptly to a thousand feet — wooded heavily toward Karori beyond the Botanical Gardens; mottled with brown and fresh green, splashed yellow with gorse toward the Harbour.
The house at 11 Tinakori Road where Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was born and lived for her first six years, faced these hills. Behind it lay a deep rift, a gorge cutting toward the Harbour. Overgrown with “a wild tangle of green,” bordered with pines twisted by winds blowing up from the sea, it was the first thing she looked upon (uncomprehending) on the day of her birth.
That Harold Beauchamp should have owned — should have had built for him — a home in 1888 indicated no little activity in one who had started with “nothing”; for those had been years of unbroken depression in New Zealand. When the world depression of 1879 struck the colony, New Zealand fairly reeled before it. The older generation, in many cases, paid with all they had. The depression in New Zealand was to last for sixteen years; yet to those born there it was a challenge by which to test their fighting strength. Curiously enough, the hardest year of all was 1888, in which Kathleen Beauchamp was born. In that year the Bank of New Zealand (with which Sir Harold was later to be identified) was tottering, involved by heavy mortgages on lands which had sunk in value. Only the legislation of Richard Seddon saved it in 1894, by procuring Government aid and control.
Here, obviously, was neither time nor chance to cultivate the arts. Isolated at the bottom of the world, the New Zealand of Kathleen Beauchamp’s childhood had no “leisure” — no “cultured class.” When talent did appear, the artist was sent to study at “home” where — for one reason or another — he usually remained. Yet New Zealanders were proud, justly and sensitively proud, of what they had built up; so a situation arose which was to make it difficult for Katherine Mansfield, as she grew older — and difficult, indeed, for New Zealand to comprehend her, afterward.
Years later,”the little Colonial” still, looking back with longing from the various points of her exile, she was to rediscover the heritage she had received from the Pa Men. If England was to teach her how to write, New Zealand — Wellington, the Sounds, Karori — had given her what she was to write about.
CHAPTER II
WELLINGTON: 11 TINAKORI ROAD
“Coming continually on the spirit with a fine suddenness.” — Keats.
1
THE True Original Pa Man coined a phrase which became part of the Beauchamp heritage:
“The umbrageous hills kissed the waters of the South Pacific.” This was “very Pa,” Katherine Mansfield thought, and she laughed at it as one laughs at things because one likes them. She herself had a “special” feeling for certain places that she knew in New Zealand: Day’s Bay, and “the ferny paths” through the manukas and tree ferns; Anikiwa on Marlborough Sounds; Karori. As she looked back, they became “a kind of possession.” She belonged to that Island. Her navel string had been fastened to it, and from it she was nourished.
The grandmother had so often told her of the storm on the day of her birth, that she more than half believed she remembered it, herself:
“She had come forth squealing out of a reluctant mother in the teeth of a ‘Southerly Buster.’ The Grandmother, shaking her before the window, had seen the sea rise in green mountains and sweep the esplanade. The little house was like a shell to its loud booming. Down in the gully the wild trees lashed together and big gulls wheeling and crying skimmed past the misty window.”
She was born at eight o’clock on Sunday morning, October 14th, 1888. It was early spring in Wellington, and azaleas were out in the Botanical Gardens.
She might have been born of the wind and the sea on that wild morning.”The voice of her lawless mother the sea” called to her all of her life; she was “the sea child” of her early poem.
“Into the world you sent her, mother,
Fashioned her body of coral and foam
Combed a wave in her
