Black Beech and Honeydew (25 page)

‘Very well, Mrs B., you shall.’ And he took her there for a weekend to her amazement and delight.

The Jimmy of my own professional days (he of the scarlet fever) was in London, too, and playing with Sir Nigel Playfair in a piece called
Petticoat Influence.
He came often to the basement flat and so there was much talk of theatre. And after so long an interval my mother and I went to the early doors again. One of the most satisfying of all our matinées was Pirandello’s
Six Characters in Search of an Author
superbly directed by Tyrone Guthrie at the Westminster Theatre. I hadn’t read it. I knew nothing whatever about it and that is the ideal way of seeing this play for the first time. It takes you by the throat and shakes the daylight out of you. If you long above everything to be a director, this is the play that nags and clamours to be done. I was broody with it, off and on, for some eighteen years before I finally got it out of my system in a burst of three separate productions in three separate countries. It may be a phoney play, its theme – that reality exists only in the mind of the individual – may be inconsiderable, but it remains, to my mind, more absolutely the pure material of theatre than any other piece of twentieth-century dramatic writing. One may discount its philosophy and dismiss its metaphysics (I do not altogether do so) but tackle it simply as something that happens in a working theatre and it crackles with immediacy. We were greatly excited by it.

Throughout these months, my mother didn’t say much about the shop. She sat with us sometimes in our workroom while Charlot gummed maps on lampshades and I copied the patterns of glazed chintzes on to breakfast trays, firescreens and powder bowls. She enjoyed the jokes, was sceptical, I am sure, about the financial returns and indicated briefly that she thought I was on entirely the wrong tack. I think she worried about it and she certainly had cause to do so when the Great Depression came. We struggled on, appalled by the distress around us and horror-stricken by our inability to give work to the many, many people who appealed to us.

My mother watched and listened and said little. I am sure it was in some sort a comfort to her when, apart from the travel articles that kept going quite regularly, I began to write steadily in the evenings.

It started on a weekend when my mother was away on a motor trip with some friends. All day Sunday it rained and I read a detective novel from a little lending library in Bourne Street. I don’t remember the author now, but think perhaps it was Agatha Christie. I was not a heavy reader in the genre but I had, off and on, turned an idea for a crime story over in my mind. It had seemed to me a highly original idea.

The murder game was fashionable in those days. ‘Suppose,’ I had thought in a blaze of inspiration, ‘suppose instead of a pretence corpse, a real one was found.’ I imagine some round dozen of established practitioners had already discarded this
trouveau
as being too obvious but I thought it was just fine. And now, on this wet Sunday, I went to the newspaper shop that was always open in Bourne Street and bought several penny exercise books and some sharpened pencils.

I don’t think that before or since this weekend I have ever written with less trouble and certainly never with less distinction.

It was necessary, of course, to have a detective and having invented him to give him a name. The day before I began, we had visited Dulwich College Picture Gallery, interested in it, first of all, because my father was an Old Alleynian. I remembered how he had told me about the great Elizabethan tragedian who had founded the school and, of course, at Dulwich there were many references to him. ‘Very well,’ I thought, ‘as a sort of compliment to Popsie I shall call him Alleyn.’

I wrote until late on Sunday night and, from then onwards, regularly in the evenings. The weeks went by and the penny exercise
books grew into a pile. One afternoon when I got home from the shop I found my mother reading away at one of them. She took off her spectacles and stared at me with an air that I could not interpret.

‘Is it any good?’

Like me she was not a great addict of detective fiction.

‘It’s
readable,’
she said and rubbed her nose. She gave a singular little half-laugh. ‘I couldn’t put it down,’ she said and I don’t know to this day whether I only imagined an overtone of regret in her voice.

I had never shown her or anyone else the beginnings of the New Zealand novel I had laid aside. It was now abandoned for good. I cannot remember what I did with the manuscript: got rid of it in one way or another. I had carelessly left it lying about and had had to listen to it being read aloud in a funny voice, not by a Lamprey. For some reason this had sickened me. It should not have done so to the point of abandonment. I think if the thing had been as insistent and compulsive and as promising as I had imagined I would have swallowed the incident with a certain fury and gone underground with my work. Later on I became quite accustomed to the odd Lamprey child reading what I was writing over my shoulder and shouting: ‘Ha-ha-ha, listen to what silly old Ish’ (for so they call me) ‘has written now,’ and even to a Lamprey grandmama pinching my manuscripts and adding comic bits of her own. This is all good, healthy fun of an Irish inverted-public-school type. It is quite without malice and I daresay it prevents one from getting pompous about one’s job. The Lampreys have kind hearts as well as coronets.

I have heard it said that in everyone’s life there is a point of no return and if by this is meant any point beyond which one can never repeat certain patterns of behaviour then I think it is true. Perhaps a sudden confrontation with reality in a shape for which one is quite unprepared is not the least shocking way of passing this turning point. I am conscious that as it comes nearer I have tried to put mine off but here it is at last, no longer avoidable.

My mother and I knew, of course, that she would have to return to New Zealand but there was no settled date for this and we had been some months in our flat before my father wrote to say he felt that the time had come when a passage should be arranged.

She was wonderfully good about it. I knew she would like, above everything, for me to return with her but she didn’t say so until a short time before she sailed. We looked at each other and I felt a desperate pang of guilt, an agony of compassion when I said I couldn’t: that I would come before long but not yet: not now.

My mother stood by the rail with the other passengers and smiled brilliantly as the ship sailed. I returned to the flat and packed everything up for the carrier. I was to go to the Lampreys. When it had all been taken away and I looked at the dismantled room I was visited for the first and last time in my life by a complete emotional breakdown. It lasted, I think, for about three hours and then the Lamprey Nanny came. She always treated me as if I were a sort of extra charge. She rang and then rat-tatted. I had seen her grey cotton ankles and sensible shoes stump past the window and daren’t not answer. She was unembarrassing and when I sobbed out that I felt as if I would never see my mother again replied: ‘Stuff and nonsense’ and made me drink hot milk and promise to come home within the hour.

The book was finished and typed. I had been given an introduction to my present agents and had been told that they thought they could place it.

I can never remember exactly how long a time went by but it could only have been about two months, before I had a letter from my mother saying that she was not well and that it might be rather a protracted business. And again I cannot remember how long it was or how many letters we had exchanged before my father cabled to say that she was very ill indeed.

On the third day after this I sailed for New Zealand. I had been in England for nearly five years.

Three months later, on a warm evening, my father and I faced each other across my old schoolroom table and divided between us the letters of sympathy that we must answer.

There are people: Chekhovian innocents, simpletons and dedicated bad men of the tyrannical sort, who never reach a condition that could be called maturity but merely arrive at a state of self-repetition. Most of us, however, could point to a time, often long after physical maturity has been reached, and say to ourselves: ‘It was then that I, such as I am, grew up.’

My mother’s illness, as cruelly and as excruciatingly protracted as if it had been designed by Torquemada, marked I think my own coming-of-age. In turning over the idea of this book I have found myself thinking of any event that might be worth recording as of something that happened before or after that agonized time.

My father and I settled down, I to keep house for him and write detective fiction and he to go on with his secretarial job, his gardening and his tennis. He was extraordinarily young in looks, in vigour and in disposition and was often mistaken, rather provokingly, for my brother. My first book came out. He read it in the old way with his hand shaking and the pipe jiggling between his teeth when he came to the exciting bits. I sometimes felt, that what with his wonderful absences-of-mind, his sudden tempers and his delight in simple achievements, he was more like my child than my papa. But it was not so. When I was least expecting it, he would bring me up with a round turn and make me feel more than a little foolish. We got along very well together.

My second book
Enter a Murderer
was finished. I enjoyed trying to get the smell and feel of backstage. This was a vicarious satisfaction:
I had not yet returned to any work in the theatre but painted a little and with a group of old student friends returned sometimes to the mountains. My father generally came on these expeditions. When, during the summer months we built a hut in the Temple Basin above Arthur’s Pass, he carried weatherboarding with the best of us up steep flanks in a nor’ west gale.

One great solace to us both was the return of dear James to New Zealand and to the house on our hills where he and Cecil and their devout spinster sister were attended by old family servants in a manner that was surely unique in New Zealand.

During our dark time, Mivvy had come up from Dunedin and had been with us almost to the end. There was no one else who could have given us the comfort that she did. When midsummer came my father stayed with Mivvy and her husband at their fishing cottage by the lake. They asked me to come, too, but I felt that it was better for us to be away from each other for a little while before we settled down. For the first time I was alone in our house on the hill.

Presently, old associations began to re-assemble themselves.

There were Phyllis, my great student friend, and visits to the house in South Canterbury and painting expeditions into the back country. It seems now as if this was a curiously floating sort of time; a time of recovery. The closest analogy I can think of is the experience of returning from a faint or an anaesthetic.

I was now to become familiar with both these sensations.

Nothing can be more boring than an obsession with one’s ailments. There are far too many Ancient Mariners of the operating table. I shall merely recount that at this point a long-standing disability that hitherto I had contrived to live with, suddenly blew up in a rather nightmarish fashion and I spent three months in hospital undergoing a series of minor operations and a final snorter of a major one. After which I enjoyed such astonishingly improved health that I could scarcely recognize myself.

It was during my convalescence that I engaged in the only piece of fiction that I have ever written in collaboration. This was
The Nursing Home Murder
and my partner in crime was the extremely distinguished Dr Henry Jellett who was a member of the Lamprey group in the halcyon days and now lived in New Zealand. He had
been one of the two doctors who saw me through my illness. The other was Sir Hugh Acland, a great figure in New Zealand surgery and, with his wife, a very dear friend.

When
The Nursing Home Murder
was finished we thought we would have a shot at dramatizing it and when the play was written, we saw no reason why I shouldn’t produce it which I did with a group of experienced amateurs. This was great fun but an undertaking full of hazards. The last act is set in an operating theatre and involves the performance of an appendiectomy. Naturally, my collaborator – I was allowed to call him Papa Jellett – was a stickler for correct techniques. We rehearsed and rehearsed the actors who played the distinguished surgeon, his assistant, the anaesthetist (James) and the nurses, until they all said they would feel perfectly at home with any actual appendicectomy.

Papa Jellett himself made, out of felt, a startlingly realistic false abdomen with an incision and retractors to glut the horrified gaze of the circle. During the performance he sat in the stalls and secreted a small amount of ether. He stationed a genuine, fully-trained theatre sister in the wings to prepare the patient. Loud and frequent, during rehearsals, were our injunctions to the surgeons that if, by hideous chance, one of them should drop a glove he must NOT pick it up but say, ‘Glove, Nurse,’ in a bossy voice and Bet – the same Bet of Monte Carlo – would bustle up with a sterile replacement.

On the opening night there were many doctors in the audience which was a capacity one.

The performance, though warmly applauded, was not without its pretty disastrous moments. The assistant surgeon dropped a glove. He then picked it up. All the doctors laughed very heartily. Papa Jellett ground his teeth. The fully-trained theatre sister became so wrought up by what she could see of the action from the wings that she excitedly clipped her retractors, if these are the things I mean, into flesh instead of felt and the patient was wheeled on in the most exquisite agony which he had to support throughout the ensuing action while lying (like Miss Carter, the model) in simulated oblivion. Both ‘surgeons’ were too intent on passing the needle and tying off stitches to heed his muffled entreaties.

When in the earlier stages of this scene Papa Jellett released his ether, the abdomen was uncovered and the incision revealed, a professional actress from an English touring company screamed and fainted and was removed with difficulty from the auditorium.

Dear James ran a hypodermic needle into himself.

In all other respects it really went very well and played to full houses. We thought of sending it to my agent but our attention was drawn to
Men in White,
an American piece in a similar setting and we decided to allow our brainchild to sink into decent oblivion.

It was now that I learned to know the English cousins who had settled in the North Island with their parents. They came down one at a time and stayed with us; three sisters and two brothers. As I have already said, we grew very close to one another. My aunt was the eldest of my father’s sisters. It was with her French governess (afterwards unseated in her wits) that her Uncle Julius, it may be remembered, eloped. When I first met my aunt she struck me as being extremely Tennysonian: one felt that she should trail in perpetual slow motion across rectory lawns, wearing a tea gown and a picture hat and carrying a parasol. I soon discovered that she shared, not only my father’s ‘Spanish’ good looks but something of his absence of mind, his sense of fun and his stunning obstinacy. She was also an enthusiastic amateur actress. In the matter of religion, however, they were far from seeing eye to eye, my aunt being almost handwoven from the purest Anglican yarn and my father, as I hope I have suggested, a truculent rationalist.

When I stayed with my aunt we drove over a range of hills to visit Stella the married daughter and her husband and family; a girl and two boys. The elder of these boys was remote and dreamy; a vulnerable child, I thought, and was reminded of my own childhood. The younger was a tough, gay fellow, very alert, with a twinkle in his eye. I was much taken with my young cousins. In a few years the boys were to come down to boarding school in Christchurch and we were to know each other very well and establish a relationship that has been a delight to me. I had sometimes thought I would like to adopt a child. With the coming of the older of these boys I almost felt as if I had done so.

Perhaps, in the first instance, my older cousins and I agreed so well because they were still ‘English’ and I had been long enough in England to miss it when I returned to New Zealand.

We are often told by English people how very English New Zealand is, their intention being complimentary. I think that this pronouncement may be true but not altogether in the intended sense. We are, I venture, more like the English of our pioneers’ time than those of our own. We are doubly insular. We come from a group of islands at the top of the world and we have settled on a group comparable in size but infinitely more isolated, at the bottom of it. We are overwhelmingly of English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish stock and it seemed to me, when I came back after five years, that we had turned in on our origins. You might say, I thought, that if you put a selection of people from the British Isles into antipodean cold storage for a century and a half and then opened the door: we are what would emerge. There have been internal changes but they have not followed those of our islands of origin. And I thought: it is the superficial changes, the things that matter least, which leap most readily to the notice of non-New Zealanders. Our voices and our manners have deteriorated to such an extent that many fourth-generation New Zealanders have a strong, muddled instinct that prompts them to regard any kind of a speech but the indigenous snarl as effeminate and even the most rudimentary forms of courtesy as gush. It is good honest kiwi to kick the English language into the gutter and it shows how independent you are if you sprawl in armchairs when old women come into their own drawing rooms. I refuse to say lounges.

And then, I thought, how complacent we are and yet how uncertain of ourselves! Why do the young ones say so often and so proudly that they suppose New Zealand seems crude and then, if you agree: ‘Well, in some ways, perhaps,’ why do they look so furious? I had forgotten what we are like, I thought. We really are rum. Or so it seemed to me when I returned.

I remembered that a young Etonian in England had said lightly to me: ‘I hear we’re not very popular in New Zealand.’ I had been surprised by this and had said with perfect conviction that it was not so at all. Many of my friends in New Zealand had been English. My father and grandparents were English: it seemed a ridiculous
remark. Now, on my return, I began to think about the bloody pommy thing and to speculate on the kind of within-the-family friction that has developed in my country. I tried to sort these attitudes out.

At once an over-familiar figure appeared: two-dimensionally, as if from the story-page of some early colonial newspaper. He was dressed in worn clothes of impeccable cut, his face showed signs of alcoholic indulgence, his voice was cultured and his manners charming. He was, in fact, the taxi-driver of Durban in the early stages of his decline. The Remittance Man. The chap whose people used the colonies as a wastepaper basket. Sometimes he was ‘nobody’s enemy but his own’ and was treated with compassion. Sometimes he had pale eyes, slightly impudent, an amusing tongue and taking ways. He would stay too long: borrow too often. Sometimes he would not be the scion of nobility that he gave himself out to be and would go too far and land in gaol. Occasionally he would be all that he claimed and still go far too far and land in gaol. He appears from time to time, meets with hospitality and a certain degree of success, and inconsiderable figure though he is, carries far more weight than he should as a ‘typical’ Englishman. His legend has been, out of all proportion, a damaging one.

I began to wonder if the Remittance Man started our young men off on what they would call their ‘independent’ social habits. Perhaps. ‘Polish is phoney, posh talk hides shifty ingratitude. Don’t be polite – it’s
plausible.’
Plausible is a deadly word in New Zealand.

And then, of course, there is the English immigrant. New Zealanders tend to take for granted the ninety-nine who settle in their jobs, are good mechanics, labourers, clerks, farmers or professional men. But they are too ready to cite as a prototype the one exception: the neighbour who borrows tools, leaves gates open and doesn’t look after his fences. Bloody pommy.

I knew these generalizations were worth very little. I kept remembering how after a few mulish and disgruntled months in Britain my young fellow countrymen would begin to feel their history moving in their veins and would identify with the English scene. I remembered the warmth and intensity of their feeling for London. I contrasted this spontaneous absorption with the intractable way some of the untravelled ones behaved in New Zealand.

The New Zealand-Great Britain ambience is essentially a family affair. It has all the characteristics: the taking-as-read attitude to British ties and the spontaneous outbursts of irritation: the progression in the colonies from original involvement to casual acceptance and from there to adolescent rebellion with an awareness of the bond that exacerbates rather than reduces the conflict. I knew, too, that nothing could be more false than a pretence that the original attitudes have not changed. These are elements in a complex of which the family is a microcosm and the Commonwealth an enlargement.

I thought that, just as children who have been energetically bickering with their parents will close the family ranks with a bang against an outsider, so, if there should be another war, will the average New Zealander behave. But, of course, I thought, uneasily, there will never be another war. This was in 1933.

Like Bully Bottom, I could gleek upon occasion and to no better purpose.

The Arts in New Zealand, particularly the art of writing, have followed much the same pattern of development as the one I have tried to suggest. But whereas with the non-aesthetic New Zealander, the attitudes are instinctive and naïve, the writers have approached problems of their advance to national maturity with extreme self-consciousness, anxious analyses and an intensive and industrious taking-in of each other’s washing. They are acutely sensitive to their position, greatly concerned, and rightly so, with the emergency of an indigenous genre but often disinclined to look beyond it for wider standards of comparison.