Black Beech and Honeydew (12 page)

It was while I was at Art School that I made one of those satisfying friendships that crop up at rare intervals and have a lifelong vitality. Phyllis and I exchanged all the usual confidences about our young men, shared the same iconoclastic views of our contemporaries and at the end of a day’s work, glared in companionable silence at what we had done.

She lived in South Canterbury near a settlement in the foothills that was so English in character that visitors from England couldn’t get over it. Here was the antipodean equivalent set in an uncompromising landscape almost without history, of county and village, of Sunday morning service, of tennis parties, calls, house parties and neatly defined class-distinctions, and overall a kind of feudalism that I think could have had no exact equivalent anywhere else in New Zealand.

I first went to stay with Phyllis in midwinter. She met me at the railway station in a gig and we drove some ten miles up into the frosty hills. It was dark before we got there and the stars burnt above the snowy ranges. From the moment I went into the house I loved it: the smell of a pinewood fire and the indefinable character of rooms that had grown quietly around the people who lived in them. This house, too, was on the fringe of the mountains and to me, therefore, on the edge of adventure.

Until now the country beyond the Southern Alps – Westland, or the Coast as it is often called – was unknown to me. The very name held overtones of romance. It had all the ingredients: it lay beyond the mountains that were often in my mind and, from our windows at home, before my eyes. It was remote. It had a history of gold rushes, bushrangers, unexplored forests, glaciers, hidden lakes of unplumbed depths and ghost towns. People who had been there came back with stories of its strangeness and fascination. I would look, on clear days, across our plains at the entry to the great Waimakariri Gorge through which the West Coast train was pulled by two engines, deep into the ranges as far as Arthur’s Pass. I knew that beyond the Gorge was the great divide and the road into Westland.

After I had been for a year at Art School, Mr Wallwork suggested that we should accompany him and his wife, also a painter, to the West Coast.

My mother, a schoolboy cousin called Robin and the two Wallworks made up the party.

The train left at 8 o’clock on a midsummer morning. For a short distance it followed the familiar Dunedin route and then, at a junction out on the plains, curved away to the west and bucketed towards the mountains. At noon their foothills closed about us and we began to climb in earnest: up into the outer ramparts of the Main Divide, shingle-scarred and drained of colour by the noonday glare. Place names were hard and explicit. Craigieburn. Castle Hill. The Cass. Broken River.

‘The tunnels are coming,’ Robin said. ‘Let’s go out on the platform.’

The platform jerked and bucked under our feet. There was a sooty rail to cling to and one was glad of it. Out here, the clamour of our progress was deafening.

We hurtled through a kaleidoscopic world. Tunnels blinked on and off like shutters. We were suspended for an unreal second or two high above Staircase Gulley with the river no more than a thread beneath us. It was gone and the next picture bore no kinship to it.

There are many tunnels on the railroad to the Coast but at that time the greatest of them was still under construction. The railhead was at Arthur’s Pass.

Here we walked out of the stale-smelling train into the mountain air: we were over three thousand feet up in the world and for all the heat, you could fancy you smelt snow and the ice of the Rolleston Glacier.

Arthur’s Pass was a group of railway sheds, tunnel-workers’ galvanized iron huts and a pub where we ate cold meat and yellow pickles and drank black tea in a room buzzing with flies. We came out, hung round our baggage in the blazing sun and looked about us.

This was the true high country; above and far beyond the foothills and the middle ramparts that I had seen from Blowhard and from the windows of our house. I was visited again by an ambiguous ache of separation and belonging. Not for long, however.

We heard a clatter before we saw the first sign of it beyond a bend in the road: a moving cloud of dust. Then the first one swung into view, scarlet and superb, and was followed by five others: Cobb and Co.’s Royal Mail coaches.

In a little while the tunnel would go through and the coaches would be gone for ever from the Pass. One or two would turn up in museums or be brought out for historical pageants with people dressed-up, old-fashioned, to ride in them. We were only just in time.

They wheeled in the yard and pulled up. The reek of horseflesh and leather was on the air and the horny, ugly smell of hot brakes. Passengers from the Coast climbed down and presently we moved in to take their places.

There was a tendency to put the ladies inside and the gentlemen on top. By dint of asking first one driver and then another, I was allowed a box-seat on the nearside and clambered up by small iron discs on curved legs. Once precariously established up there, the world was ours. Our driver returned from the pub and nodded to his mate.

The leading coach was ready and away it went with its passengers looking self-important and superior: then the second and third. The driver, a lean man, mounted to the box and gathered the reins. He sat easily, his right foot handy to a lever that controlled the curved shoe of the brake. His mate looked over the horses and their harness. There were five: two wheelers and three leaders. They were half-clipped rangy animals: not at all smart but tough-seeming. The nearside leader showed the white of its eyes, laid back its ears and fidgeted.

‘She’ll be right,’ said the driver.

His mate climbed up to his seat. ‘G’dap,’ said the driver and with a scrape, a strain and a rattle we were off.

The road climbed steadily to the Pass. The bush grew more stunted and finally petered out in a grey mottle of low-growing scrub. The country is now as it was then – a sun-bleached hinterland: arid and down to its bones. We clattered through it at a fine clip and soon reached the top. The road flattened out and then, suddenly, dived into a new world.

We were plunged into a region of wet forest and dark mountains. We looked into a chasm where treetops were no bigger than green fungi and the great Otira river, a cold shimmer. Heavy rain had fallen on this side and the blue zinc skies of Canterbury were gone. Loaded clouds hung over the tops and waterfalls jetted from the bush. We splashed across shallow races and slowly bumped and ground through deep ones. The air was cool on our faces as we began the descent into Otira Gorge.

It opens with a series of hairpin bends. I am badly affected with height vertigo. Edges are anathema to me and I find it difficult to believe those psychiatrists who tell us that people who think: ‘If I should leap!’ never do so. I am firmly persuaded that for tuppence, I would.

Being so constituted, I was not an ideal subject for the notorious zig-zag in the Otira Gorge.

The technique in approaching the bends was to drive straight at them as if we were about to launch ourselves into Wagnerian flight. At the last second, the driver braked and swung his team. The leaders seemed, to my transfixed gaze, to wheel at right angles. Then we were around the bend and never was a colloquialism more vividly illustrated. So sharp were the turns that the coaches on the reaches above and below us looked, when we caught sight of them through the bush, as if they drove towards us.

On the outside seat one seemed, literally, to overhang the edge. I gripped a ridiculously small curved rail with my left hand and watched the horses. The nearside leader pulled away from her companions and her feet were so close to the lip that they induced a feeling of sickening incredulity. Once, her forefoot actually dislodged a stone into the gulf. The man who sat next to me kept giving little coughs. Nobody spoke. From time to time the brakes screamed and stank.

I have forgotten how many bends there were in the zig-zag. When we had completed them we were already sunk deep in the gorge, unmenaced by knife edges and chasms. The passengers began to tell each other how enraptured they had been by the scenic beauties of the descent. With this relief came a sense of exhilaration, and awareness of the smell of wet earth, moss and fern and of the voices of bellbirds. The valley had filled with shadow like a cup with wine and the thunder of the river was loud in our ears. Soon we
were beside it and, the road now being level, the drivers whipped up their horses. With a clatter, a flourish and a drumming of hooves, Cobb and Co.’s Royal Mail coaches bowled into Otira.

It lies at the bottom of the Gorge as if in a well and even in midsummer sees little of the sun. It is always possessed by the voice of the river, the shadow of mountains and the smell of wet bush. All the ramshackle, casual flavour, the beauty and the human raffishness of the Coast, is there at Otira. Again, we found a straggle of huts, a large pub and a little station: the terminus of the West Coast railroad. A string of the oddest looking carriages stood alongside the platform: little boxes on wheels that dated back to the beginning of rail on the Coast.

We had a long wait before we left and went into the pub which, evening being now advanced, was coming to life. The reek of beer met us in the doorway. Nobody was about but a great noise issued from the bar. Presently a door opened at the end of the passage and the publican’s wife came through, a handsome, casual woman. The voices in the bar swung in and out with the door. She showed us into a parlour that looked as if it staggered under her colossal indifference, and lit a pile of brushwood in the fireplace. We sat on a broken-down horsehair sofa and two chairs. Presently the inevitable cold mutton, yellow pickles, cruet, loaf and butter were brought in with a pot of black tea. We had no idea when we would reach our destination and it seemed a long time back to Arthur’s Pass. We drew up to the table.

When we had eaten this odd meal we went to the station. Evening comes early in the Gorge and the air was cold. One or two of our fellow travellers who were going through to Greymouth sat in the little waiting room by a wonderful log fire. Perhaps the long day with its changes of landscape, its alarms and excitements had made me rather sleepy. The glow from the fire, the multiple voices of the river, and occasional cascade of song from the bush and the murmur of conversation: I remember it all vividly, and yet rather as if it were a dream.

Presently an elderly engine was backed up to the little row of carriages. We got into the train and in a casual sort of way, were pulled out of Otira.

Now, I began to see how beautiful this country was. Our train ambled through the valley between Otira and Lake Brunner at the best part of the day; the hour when its extreme darkness is briefly visited by shafts of horizontal light and by explicit colour. The mantled hills that at midday oppress one by their heaviness and uniformity, are now articulate. Their bones show through the forests which, themselves swept by wings of sunlight above translucent wells of shadow, start up in a new and emphatic brilliance. As for the sky: it would make sails for Cleopatra’s barge.

We had been told that at Te Kinga, fifteen to twenty miles down the line, there was a sawmill, a store, a pub and a number of unoccupied huts. The train would stop there but we could leave it at Moana, the next station but one along the line, spend the night there at the pub and return to Te Kinga by slow train in the morning. As the train approached Te Kinga there came a break in the trees and we saw Lake Brunner: a looking glass sunk in the mountains. Two narrow arms forming a lagoon carried ranks of delicate trees. Far out on the waters, suspended between incandescent skies, a launch towed a flotilla of logs. Behind them, like some accomplished calligraphist, they traced their progress on the surface of the lake.

Moana turned out to be less entrancing than Te Kinga and the pub looked and sounded rather forbidding.

My mother said: ‘Let’s walk. It’s not far. I’m game.’

She sometimes used schoolboy colloquialisms and they always came oddly from her. ‘Don’t kid yourself,’ she would say when she found me out in some gloss over a misdeed. She had a lovely voice quite at variance with these occasional essays in slang.

Richard Wallwork compounded for a railroad jigger whose crew he ran to earth in the bar. They would bring our luggage to Te Kinga sometime during the evening.

The sun was behind the mountains when we set out and dusk had fallen when we trudged round the last bend and made Te Kinga. Lights shone in the windows of the pub and the store.

‘You girls go up to the huts,’ Richard said. ‘Robin and I will find out if it’s all right.’

‘How?’

‘At the pub.’

The huts stood in a row on the hillside above the railway and between the sawmill and a slag heap. They were one-room shacks built of raw wood that had weathered grey. They had galvanized iron chimneys serving enormous open fireplaces. Several of them were unoccupied. We inspected one of these. It contained two bunks, a table and some benches, all made of offcuts from the mill. It smelt of old woodsmoke. We found a broom, a bucket, a shovel and a cloth like a dead rat. Two half-consumed candles had guttered over the shoulders of beer bottle containers.

In the light that remained, I fetched dry bracken from the hillside, filled the bunks and collected firewood from the slag heap. Elizabeth Wallwork and my mother swept out three of the huts.

They overlooked a railway bridge spanning the Brunner River. Presently, in the half-light, we saw Robin sickeningly negotiating a loaded wheelbarrow over loose footplanks that lay between the rails. He was followed by Richard, heavily laden, and a tall sloping figure who, when they arrived, turned out to be the foreman at the mill. He shook hands all round and in the slow, guarded manner of the Coasters, told us we were welcome to the huts. There was a rent, he said. Five bob a week. He looked at our painting gear. ‘You’ll be taking pictures,’ he said. ‘There was another bloke done that. Paid his way at the pubs, like. Well, anything I can do.’ We thanked him effusively. ‘She’ll be right,’ he said. ‘Hooray, all. Be seeing you.’