Passengers were paralysed with fear until the going finally became calmer and the coach pulled up in the sleepy West Coast settlement of Otira.
There they found ‘a straggle of huts, a large pub and a little station’ that was the West Coast railroad terminus. At the pub, which was coming alive after the day’s hibernation, they ate cold mutton, yellow pickles and a loaf with butter and black tea. The smell of beer mixed with the smell of pungent bush. That night they slept on blanket-covered bracken in tiny two-bunk logging huts standing in a row overlooking a railway bridge at Te Kinga. Richard Wallwork had to commandeer a railway jigger to carry their gear. The rent was 5 shillings a week. At dawn they were woken by the sound of logging teams leaving for their camp deep in the bush. They were invited by the timber men to visit the camp, and watch gigantic tree trunks being winched out. At the mill at Te Kinga, they saw the logs thundering down the skids. ‘I did a painting of this and would have liked to call it “Too Bloody Big,” for that was what the mill-hands said repeatedly of the giant we had seen felled.’ In the mornings and evenings they painted with great concentration. ‘We learned about the behaviour of trees, about the anatomy of mountains, how to lay out the ghost of a subject and then, at the fleeting hour of sunset, seize upon it.’ The afternoons were free to take expeditions into the bush.
During her art school days, Ngaio returned three times to Westland. Each visit gave them a reminder of the region’s cruelty. There was the timber man’s snigger horse, blind in one eye from the whiplash of a bush; the farmer’s three young sons drowned in the cruel waters of Lake Brunner; and the thin, refined hermit woman who lived in a shack near Lake Kaniere. They stumbled across her hut one day in a clearing. She was dressed in rags and ruined workingman’s boots, but still she invited them in. As she poured the tea, they noticed the faded photographs on the wall behind her. One of them was of a ‘very pretty woman in full Victorian evening dress’; another of a group of three children with a boy in an Eton suit. As they were leaving, Rose Marsh said, ‘Did you recognise the photograph on the wall?…She must have been lovely as a girl.’
This was remittance country, and when remittance men and women ran out of money Nature was unforgiving. It was on the West Coast that Ngaio and her fellow student Phyllis Bethune encountered the drunken revellers who became the subject of ‘The Night Train From Grey’, her first piece of professional writing for the Sun, under its progressive editor Edward Huie, who was also president of the Canterbury Society of Arts. The rugged, New Zealand landscape and its solid, self-contained, sometimes bush-crazed people were an inspiration for Ngaio.
Her own paintings in New Zealand were dry east coast scenes typical of the Canterbury School. In Mount Goldie, three singlet-clad athletic stockmen stand looking across a rural landscape dotted with sheep to the etched forms of distant foothills. It is a cleverly composed but conventional picture, ideally suited to its illustrative purpose. Ngaio began her New Zealand story like one of her novels, introducing the various groups of people attending an agricultural fair. ‘To find such a slice of local colour a stranger would do well to visit one of the cities during a carnival week. These festivals take place in the spring, and, in most towns at this time, a race-meeting coincides with an agricultural…show.’ The first people mentioned were the runholders, described as the ‘squattocracy’ of New Zealand.
New Zealand also contained reproductions of 19th-century engravings and a selection of contemporary black-and-white photographs. The initial batch of the latter, sent to London to be included in the book, were lost at sea, and the colour film that was to be used instead could not be processed, but this did not mar the experience for English critics, who were enthusiastic in their praise. Reflecting on all the Commonwealth titles produced to that point, the reviewer for Time and Tide, writing in April 1942, stated: ‘I confess it was Miss Ngaio Marsh’s New Zealand which caught my attention most of all. And here perhaps it was partly by means of the pictures.’ Ngaio’s slice of New Zealand was an affirming rather than provocative view of the empire and colonization. ‘Most English people…have the feeling that New Zealand is a kind of business-like fairyland, and Miss Marsh left me with the conviction that most English people are right,’ wrote The Observer.
It may have been the New Zealand book that shifted Ngaio’s focus to Rotorua and Colour Scheme, but how could she explain Alleyn’s presence Down Under? Then it occurred to her.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought war to the Pacific. On 19 February 1942, Japanese aircraft bombed Darwin, in the first of about 100 air raids against Australia carried out between 1942 and 1943. In that first attack, the Japanese dropped more bombs on Darwin than they did on Pearl Harbor. It was a huge psychological blow, not only to Australia but also to New Zealand. These were countries stripped of able men—over 140,000 New Zealanders were fighting in Europe and North Africa—and now there was the possibility of a homeland invasion. New Zealand’s isolation did not automatically make it impregnable.
A spy theme could justify Alleyn’s being in New Zealand and give the novel a contemporary flavour. Ngaio gathered her characters around a health spa owned and run by the Claires at fictional Wai-ata-tapu Springs near Rotorua. The vague and incompetent Colonel Claire, his wife, and two children, Simon and Barbara, are English emigrants who have lived here for 12 years, just long enough for the Antipodean dream to fade and curl at the edges. The money has gone, and their energy is as dilapidated as the flyblown posters that hang by a single drawing pin on the notice board.
As he approaches the spa by road, renowned Shakespearian actor Geoffry Gaunt thinks it is a dosshouse. Gaunt and his secretary Dikon Bell are guests, along with Mrs Claire’s brother, retired London doctor James Ackrington. Gaunt hopes he will find a cure for the ravages of the stage in the murky thermal waters of the spa. In his spare moments he is dictating his autobiography to his secretary. Thermal activity seethes around the Claires’ jaded bathhouse, producing pyrotechnic displays of geysers, gas and steam, and pools of scalding mud. Close by is the Maori village of Te Rarawas, and behind it, looking across the fictional Harpoon Harbour, the extinct volcanic cone of Rangi’s Peak. Two miles (5 kilometres) off the coast from Harpoon Inlet, a fully laden warship has been torpedoed. A seemingly coded series of flashing lights from Rangi’s Peak seemed to have precipitated the attack, and espionage is suspected. Who in the Wai-ata-tapu Hot-Springs Spa is a spy?
Dr Ackrington decides to report these strange events to Roderick Alleyn, who is in New Zealand looking for leaks of classified information. Alleyn disguises himself as the elusive Septimus Falls: bent, but still good-looking and lean, seeking treatment for a bogus case of lumbago. The leading spy suspect is the gauche Maurice Questing, who holds the Claires’ hot pools to ransom over an unpaid debt. His disappearance, and subsequent reappearance as a boiled skull bubbling in the briny waters of a mud pool, lays the case wide open. Who is the murderer? Who is the spy?
This thin plot is brilliantly thickened by Ngaio’s investigation of two cultures undergoing dislocation and change. The most ravaged and therefore sympathetically presented is the Maori facing the consequences of colonization. It is not a flaky liberal, but cantankerous old Dr Ackrington who explains the ‘criminal imbecility’ of the Pakeha to Geoffry Gaunt:
We sent missionaries to stop them eating each other and bribed them with bad whisky to give us their land. We cured them of their own perfectly good communistic system…We took away their chiefs and gave them trade-union secretaries. And for mating-customs…we substituted…disease and holy matrimony.
Through the character of Eru Saul, Ngaio explores the dilemma of the young Maori ‘half-breed’ caught between cultures—a ‘bad Pakeha and a bad Maori’—trouble for both peoples. She saw the loss of Maori language, beliefs and values as destabilizing and tragic, and despised the exploitation of Maori culture through merchandising and appropriation.
Maurice Questing is a speculator whose programme of enhancing the
tourist value of his property includes organizing groups of ‘poi girls’ and young Maori children who dive for pennies, and the sale of curios. He is the least likeable character in the book. It is Questing who violates the laws of tapu when he climbs Rangi’s Peak and desecrates a Maori burial ground by removing the magnificent adze of great chief Rewi, grandfather of aging rangatira Rua. And Questing who comes to one of Ngaio’s stickiest ends. His scream across the blackness of the night as he boils echoes the sad end, years before, of a young Maori woman who inadvertently ate food near her grandfather’s grave and broke tapu. She crept back to her village at night, fell into the boiling mud of Taupo-tapu, and her blood-curdling scream was heard across the village. The next morning, all that the pool would relinquish was her dress.
Is Questing’s end the judgment of Tane, protector of Rewi’s adze, or a cover-up for espionage? Perhaps it is a bit of both. In both New Zealand and Colour Scheme, Ngaio describes Maori as being like the easygoing generous Scottish Highlander or Irishman. They are tribal like the Celts, family-orientated, war-like at times yet extremely hospitable—and they have their own mysticism and law, which she respects. In Black Beech, Ngaio wrote of her mother’s ability to sense things, to anticipate events, to see into the future: if she had been a Highlander, it would have been called second sight. Ngaio was never the complete sceptic that her father was, and there was always room in her imagination for the unknowable.
What grates for modern readers, though, is Ngaio’s representation of Maori as the noble savage. All her most admirable Maori characters, such as Dr Rangi Te Pokiha in Vintage Murder and chief Rua Te Kahu in Colour Scheme, have a European crust of education, manners, breeding and dress, beneath which seethes their essential savagery, waiting to erupt like the plume of a geyser. As well as her usual ‘Cast of Characters’ routinely listed at the beginning of her books, in Colour Scheme she included a list of Maori words so readers could understand them in context. Ngaio was hoping the novel would promote an interest in Maoritanga overseas.
The Claire family represents another cultural group under siege. They came to New Zealand for vague and misguided reasons. Their business has languished because of their incompetence and the tough conditions. Colonel Claire puffs and procrastinates over bad manners and bad form, but does nothing. His heyday was his time in the Indian army. Mrs Claire’s hands are callused and stained, as are her daughter’s. For years God’s Own Country has delivered the slimmest margins, and now they are in debt to a charlatan property developer who has possibly committed treason. Isolated in New Zealand by their old-fashioned Edwardian ideas, they turn away dubious guests in order to maintain standards that have no relevance in the New World. The Claires have run out of money and hope, but it is the next generation who will pay the proper price of their misplaced idealism.
Like Eru Saul, their son Simon is caught between two cultures—he is neither a proper Englishman nor a proper New Zealander. Simon has become introverted and uncouth. He is aggressive and speaks with an unpleasant twang. Ngaio, with her superb ear for spoken dialogue, delights in putting the most banal sayings and brutal slang into his mouth. His sister Barbara, who has escaped her brother’s state school ‘education’ at Harpoon High, has not integrated like her brother. Without her parents’ background, she has become shy and awkward, the unsophisticated product of a genteel poverty that is becoming less genteel by the day. Geoffry Gaunt observes her deprivation with such sympathy that he secretly instructs his secretary to order a new black dress from a fashion store in Auckland. It arrives with an anonymous Shakespearian quotation written in green ink. There are shoes, gloves, and stockings to match—even underpants, because Gaunt shudders to think what the old ones were like. In England, the Claires had the class system to tell them they had something and were something. In New Zealand, they merely survive.
Ngaio understood the difficulties of biculturalism, and knew that it was permeated with prejudice on both sides. The night Questing is killed there is a village concert. Guests from the Claires’ Wai-ata-tapu spa, plus the locals, cram into a medley of seats in the meeting house. ‘It became very hot and the Maori people thought indulgently that it smelt of pakeha, while the pakehas thought a little less indulgently that it smelt of Maori.’ Ngaio saw the relationship between Maori and Pakeha as a partnership, if unequal and flawed. She also acknowledged that colonization created victims. For both Maori and Pakeha, cultural and geographical displacement had truncated the historical and social roots that defined people’s place and identity.
Colour Scheme explores this in an entertaining and thought-provoking way. In the dénouement of Colour Scheme, Ngaio brings attention to a piece of New Zealand legislation she thought long overdue. As Dikon Bell says of the book’s murderous spy, ‘It’s no good asking me to work up a grain of sympathy for him…There’s no capital punishment in this country now. He’ll spend the rest of his life in jail.’ On 17 September 1941, the Labour government abolished the death penalty for murder, commuting sentences to life imprisonment with hard labour. To Ngaio, this seemed a substantial humanitarian victory, and she did not miss the opportunity to point this out.
Colour Scheme was generally well received by critics, the only major difficulty being the implausibility of the spy theme. The reviewer for The New York Times commended Ngaio for her ‘marvellous sense of comedy’ and gift for ‘crazy characterisation’, and went on perceptively to identify the book’s major strength and its central problem:
Alas for my desires, however: I never will know the destiny of the Claires, for Miss Marsh just had to make Colour Scheme into a mystery story, and the establishment of the Claires is just so much background for a spy hunt. But I, for one, would like to see Miss Marsh write a real book about the Claires.
In some respects, Ngaio was too successful in her efforts to create realistic characters experiencing the real consequences of colonization. She gave them an imaginative life that made them linger longer in the reader’s mind than the circumstances of the death. The murder was resolved, but their lives were not. They were still there like a haunting after-image. What happened to the truculent Simon and his shabby sister, Barbara, or to Eru Saul and his girlfriend? The perfect exorcism would have been a serious New Zealand novel, but Ngaio steadfastly resisted the challenge. The structure of detective novel was too appealing and she was too successful to give it away.
Ngaio’s next novel, Died in the Wool, published in 1945, was also set in New Zealand. But this time it was located in the South Island High Country where issues of cultural displacement and integration were less central to the plot. Overpoweringly present in this novel is its sense of brooding landscape, in the awesome amphitheatres of treacherous mountains. Visions of Died in the Wool’s grizzly murder steal along the dark passages of the imagination to the primal depths of horror. The suffocation and subsequent rotting of Florence Rubrick in a wool bale echoes the chilling claustrophobia of the setting. Everyone is a suspect and everyone feels trapped in this mausoleum of frozen rock.
Flossie Rubrick is attending an auction of Mount Moon’s wool clip. She is in her late 40s, with dyed blonde hair; is short and finely built, but clumsy in her movements. In fact, everything about Flossie Rubrick is rough and abrasive. She is not supposed to be there, yet she forces her way backstage so she can look into the faces of the buyers. She is ecstatic when her Japanese friend, Kurata Kan, buys Mount Moon’s clip. ‘Top price!’ she shouts shrilly, to the mortification of her husband, Arthur Rubrick, who is sitting politely in the audience.
It is one of those stinking-hot nor-west days in February 1942, when wool buyer Sammy Joseph and the storeman set about checking the bales. There is a terrible smell. They wonder if it is dead wool, but that smell usually diminishes over time. Sammy Joseph thinks it is more likely a dead rat. The storeman, wearing a canvas glove, reaches an iron hook into a large cut they have made in the offending bale. When he draws the hook out, it is covered in rust-coloured gore and a strand of metallic-gold hair. Th
e stench is unbelievable, but not a whiff is left when Alleyn arrives at Mount Moon to investigate the murder in May 1943.
He is still in the country chasing spies. Flossie Rubrick’s unsolved murder alone would not have drawn him into the mountains. She was a member of parliament and much too free with her wartime information. There has been a leak through a Portuguese journalist that has been traced back to Mount Moon, where Flossie’s nephew, Douglas Grace, is working with Arthur Rubrick’s nephew, Fabian Losse, on the development of a secret magnetic fuse for antiaircraft shells. The fuse is designed to explode when it approaches anything metallic. Was Flossie Rubrick a German spy? Has she been killed to cover up the activities of a double agent? These are the questions Alleyn is hoping to answer 15 months after Flossie was murdered, bound in the foetal position with ropes, and pressed into a wool bale. This is Alleyn’s first cold case.
Ngaio had never used a timeframe of recollection that went so far back; nor had she had a victim dead in the first few pages of the book. Almost every aspect of Flossie Rubrick, and the events of the night she died, is remembered by suspects at Mount Moon. Alleyn refers to the group’s need to unburden itself about Flossie as ‘verbal striptease’. ‘You are using this room as a sort of confessional,’ he tells them, ‘but I’m bound by no priestly rule.’ There is very little action in the present until close to the end of the book, when it becomes suspense-ridden and the criminal is caught in the act of cleaning up the woolshed after a second murder attempt. Vivid recollections of the unpalatable Flossie Rubrick save the narrative from suffocating in its own inertia. Once again, Ngaio’s set of characters take on lives that are fascinating in their own right.
Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime Page 16
