Black Beech and Honeydew (11 page)

It was maddening for Cecil. He glanced coldly at my father and said: ‘Well I was wrong,’ in a loud and angry voice. For a little while he was greatly put out, especially, I think, because his brother Colin made no comment and avoided looking at him.

Colin, who had the appearance of a Velázquez grandee, was gentle but quietly sardonic. I loved and respected him more, I think, than anyone else and, although he never criticized or scolded I would have hated to do anything that he might have thought shabby. It was clear to us all that he and Mivvy had fallen in love and we were delighted. I don’t know if he told her of the, by that time, incurable disease from which he suffered. During the year after our first camp he became very ill. I visited him in hospital one hot, windy afternoon. My school uniform, my shoes and my satchel were powdered with dust. I sat by his bed and wondered what to say to him, so beautiful and strange did he look with the bones of his face precariously veiled by his olive skin; his eyes and beard, dark and exotic against the pillows. He seemed glad to see me but for the first
time I experienced that sense of exclusion which removes us from the dying. One morning, a few weeks later, Cecil came to our house with a black band on his arm. I ran to my room and refused to come out and was unable to cry.

Aileen and Helen Burton had firmly announced that whoever in the ripeness of time they married, it would never be a ‘curick’. They occasionally employed and I picked up from them, a cockney dialect. In those days it was not considered arrogant or reactionary to think of cockney as a comic form of expression. The Burtons, who politically inclined to the left, were brilliant mimics of the women in their father’s English parish. Their impersonations were not patronizing exaggerations, but authentic and extremely funny. They also had a private town called Burleyrap which they inhabited as consistent though fantastic characters about whom they had made an epic poem. These alter egos were so firmly defined and had such distinctive voices and mannerisms that they were instantly recognizable. ‘She’s in Burleyrap’ they would say and at once follow suit.

In spite of their determination not to do so, both Aileen and Helen, in the event, married their father’s curates. John, Helen’s husband, was an Englishman: a delicate and scholarly young man who at Oxford had become an ardent member of the High Church group and a devoted and active adherent of the Labour Party. He had a bookish wit and was a poet of distinction. Kennedy, Aileen’s husband, was a New Zealander; an athletic giant with a slow smile. When he was first ordained he had been sent by his bishop to a very tough parish in a gold-prospecting and lumbering district of the West Coast. On Saturday nights he used to walk down the railway track, pick up the drunks and dump them on their doorsteps. He would haul them out of the pub and if they showed fight placidly knock them senseless. When he came to Glentui he walked from the railhead carrying his pack. He was the gentlest and simplest of men, and I don’t think a doubt about anything except the control of alcohol on the Coast ever crossed his mind.

Strangely as it may seem, my father got on quite happily with these two young parsons. He did not refer them to Winwood Reade
or to Draper’s
Intellectual Development of Europe
and when, during the critical General Strike, he became a special constable, this circumstance made no difference to his friendly relations with John who was actively associated with the Unions. When, on the first Christmas Eve at Glentui, he learned that John would celebrate Holy Communion next morning at dawn, my father cut down some more poles and built an altar in a little glade above the river, placing it in an eastward position between two trees so that the sky would brighten behind it. He made a very good job of this and slept peacefully in his tent throughout the celebration.

As soon as dawn was established we got up and washed in the cold river. Then we walked through bush to the glade. There was not a breath of wind. The candle flames stood as still as spearheads on the altar and John’s vestments glinted in the half-light. We knelt on dry leaves, crumbling earth and little twigs. The bellbirds, detached and silvery, tinkled in the bush. Afterwards John wrote a very scholarly sonnet about it.

For each Christmas, while I was at St Margaret’s, we went for a long summer camp and the recollection of those days is of pure delight. And then Helen and Aileen married and left Christchurch. Friede and Joan returned to England and we followed new ways.

I believe Glentui is now a popular resort with a car park and barbecues and that on public holidays an ice-cream and Coca-Cola van fills to overflowing the trippers’ cup of happiness. I have never revisited the valley.

Canterbury University College School of Art was conducted on an established pattern. An antique room smelling of mice and Michelet paper, a still-life room smelling of stale vegetables, a modelling room smelling of clay, an architectural room and, exclusively at the top of its own flight of stairs, the life room, smelling very strong indeed of paint, turpentine and hot stoves. To the life room, on most afternoons and nights of the week, I now penetrated. Here we drew and painted from the head, the draped figure and the nude. The classes were mixed, the male students, because of the war, being over forty
or under eighteen or not up to army medical standards. There were no entirely fit young men in New Zealand. Those who survived Gallipoli, the Middle East and Passchendaele did not return on leave. Those who came back (and they seemed very few) were too badly injured to be any more use in the army. My partners at school-age dances and my particular young men all vanished in turn and there were no coming-out balls after all.

Ned came to say goodbye, looking strange in his uniform. He had missed Gallipoli. He sent his photograph when he was commissioned in Flanders, wrote that he felt depressed and uneasy and was killed in action a few days later. My mother worked in the Red Cross rooms and my father trained strenuously with the Citizen Defence Corps and wondered if the war would catch up with his age group. At the art school we made patriotic posters. The Casualty lists filled many pages of the newspapers.

It had never occurred to me that I would attempt to be anything else in life but a serious painter: there was no question of looking upon art as a sort of obsessive hobby – it was everything. I knew hope and despair, hesitancy, brief certitude and very occasionally that moment when one thinks: ‘How did the fool, who is I, do this?’ I trained myself to become so conscious of the visual element that I could scarcely look at anything without seeing it in terms of line, mass or colour. I find it impossible, now, to form any idea of my work as a whole. I think that perhaps it had a kind of vigour which may have been an unconscious expression of my sense of theatre. It was good enough to keep me going on scholarships and to reach exhibition level, but it seems to me, now, that I never drew or painted in the way that was really my way: that somehow I failed to get on terms with myself. I may be quite wrong about this: perhaps I had no more in me than the works that emerged but there will always be a kind of doubt about this. Our training at the art school was strictly academic. The instructors who sought to find a different approach were, unfortunately, not very articulate and I found their hesitancies and half-expressed generalizations frustrating. I wanted to be told flatly whether things I had drawn were too big or too small, too busy or too empty. I wanted to know, when I failed completely, exactly where I had gone wrong and how I might have avoided doing so. I didn’t mind how brutally I was told as long as the instruction was
valid and specific. Richard Wallwork, the life master, was extremely specific and a dedicated teacher. I did not want to paint as he painted and I think I realized that his attitudes were those of a vigorous but conventional London school. Nevertheless, his students learned the fundamental elements of drawing and the necessity for exhaustive self-criticism. There was no chance, with that uncompromising little man, of disguising ineptitude under the cloak of artistic sensibility. The student who raised the protest: ‘But that’s how I see it’ was often left with the dismal suggestion that what had been seen had not been communicated. I think that even those who rebelled against his taste, his pronouncements and his instruction, afterwards came to realize their great debt to him. He was a most generous man and gave much of his own spare time to his students, staying behind after each class to teach one or two of us advanced anatomy and artistic perspective and taking us with him to paint out-of-doors.

I enjoyed best the nights when we made time studies from the nude. The model, for a long period, was Miss Carter, a dictatorial but good-tempered girl who came to us from show business. She had been the subject of a Professor Psycho’s expertise and during the rests liked to talk about her ordeal. The professor performed in a tent at agricultural fairs and in obscure halls. He used to wave his hands at Miss Carter and say ‘Sleep. Sleep.’ She would then shut her eyes and, faintly smiling, sustain an appearance of peaceful oblivion while he ran pins into her shoulders. She was exhibited in a shop window for three days with a notice beside her to say she was in a cataleptic trance; she was stealthily nourished by the professor in the small hours of the morning. We found the undoubted scars on her shoulders a great bore. A legend about the model related that during a series of sharp earthquakes in Christchurch she had lectured the students in a superior manner about the foolish behaviour of people who ran out into the street during a shock. They ought, she said, to remain indoors, standing quietly under doorways. While she was posing, a particularly sharp jolt shook the life room. The students, as usual threw down their palettes and rushed into the fairly busy street where they were joined by Miss Carter in the nude and quite unaware of it.

On time-study nights, the life room was crowded. The students, with the exception of one girl who acted as chaperone, stayed outside
while Mr Wallwork set the pose. Miss Carter slid out of her kimono and with a sort of bovine good nature, eased herself into position. She was a big fair creature. If a twist of the torso or pelvis was asked of her she would grumble professionally and then grin. The gas heaters roared and the great lamp above the throne held the motionless figure in a pool of light. When the door was opened the students hurried in to manoeuvre for places. In a semi-circle round the throne sat people on ‘donkeys’ and behind them easels jockeyed for vantage points. ‘Have you seen it from over there?’ Mr Wallwork would mutter, with a jerk of his head, and one would hurriedly shift into the gap he indicated. The room looked like a drawing from Trilby: timeless, oddly dramatic, sweltering-hot and alive with concentration.

Each pose was maintained for three-quarters of an hour. It was a matter of catching hold of the movement and feeling and getting it down eloquently, rapidly and decisively: a feverish, hit-or-miss business that was enormously exciting.

Conventionally brought up though most of the girl students had been, I am sure it never occurred to one of us that there was anything remarkable, still less embarrassing, in these mixed classes for the nude. Nor can I suppose that the men were disturbed by frissons other than those associated with the technical problems offered by Miss Carter’s bones, muscles and skin and Mr Wallwork’s aphorisms upon them. These were pronounced in an incisive voice with the short vowels of the English midlands.

‘A câst shadow is influenced by the object which câsts it and the surface upon which it is câst.’

‘There are no concavities in the living body. All apparent concavities are built up by a series of convexities. Is that too big or too small?’

‘Too big,’ one bleated, suddenly aware of this.

‘Reduce it. Is the lower leg foreshortened or is it not?’

‘It is.’

‘Then why don’t you make it so? You have drawn what you know, not what you see. Look at the shape of the space between the legs.’

‘Unless you understand the structure – ‘

The white, muscular hand would make an anatomical drawing on the edge of the paper while Mr Wallwork’s firmly closed lips twitched convulsively.

His methods were academic but there was no nonsense about them. He was an instructor with a vocation.

At the end of the year there were examinations upon which the chance of a scholarship, and there were not many of these, largely depended. To me the examinations were anathema. The hand that had trembled under Miss Ross’s sardonic glance, shook again and most persistently.

‘Put it under the cold tap,’ said Mr Wallwork observing it before we started.

The anatomy and perspective papers gave no trouble and I usually did reasonably well in drawing from life but painting from the head and figure under these circumstances was diabolical: I veered about and produced works that were occasionally above and far more often a long way below my normal form. At half-past nine at night, dog-tired and either exalted or in the depths, with my paintbox slung over my shoulder, I trudged a half-mile to the tram stop in Cathedral Square and (after a wearisome ride) another half-mile along a dark road and up the lane to our house on the hills. ‘How did it go?’ my mother used to say and my father would look up from his book and listen.

In the mornings I had teaching jobs: first of all with Colin, a little boy who had been ill and of whom I grew very fond, and then, when he went to school, with Bet, a girl who was about four years my junior and whose brother and I had been schoolmates at Tib’s. She became one of my greatest friends. We ‘did lessons’ in her father’s library, and while she laboured at arithmetic and composition I read greedily through a pretty comprehensive field. It felt rather odd, after so short a time, to have turned into a sort of Miss Ffitch myself.

Colin’s father, one of New Zealand’s most distinguished surgeons, was the son of an early Canterbury pioneer. Their family sheep station lies between a great and turbulent river and the alpine approaches to the West Coast. At that time it ran far back into the high country, embracing two mountains. The house and little church are built of bricks made from local clay and in some sort reflect the character of the family estates in Devonshire. When the men went out to muster the back country on the far side of Big Mount Peel, they were accompanied by a mule-train carrying their
stores. In this house, while I was a student, I spent very happy holidays struggling to get down in paint the strange ambiguities presented by English trees mingled with native bush against the might of those fierce hills.