Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime

by Joanne Drayton

  When Mr Whipplestone shifts flats to No. 1 Capricorn Walk, Lucy Lockett moves in and life accelerates into a higher rather than lower gear. Astonishingly, he finds that his new cleaning lady and her husband, Mr and Mrs Chubb; Mr Sheridan, the man in Flat No. 1A downstairs; the Sanskrits, two morbidly obese sibling ceramicists living and working in a ceramics factory down the road; and his near-neighbours Colonel and Mrs Cockburn-Montfort are all involved in an attempted assassination of Alleyn’s old school friend and the subject of Troy’s latest portrait, His Excellency the President of the emerging African state of Ng’ombwana.

  How is Lucy Lockett involved? The fictional and real Lucy Locketts share a dubious propensity: they are cat burglars. The real Lucy stole a wooden fish; its fantastic counterpart slips into the Chubbs’ tiny apartment and disappears with a ceramic fish on a chain which is the emblem of this secret group of assassins. Lucy Lockett’s light-fingered escapades help to connect the pieces. Mr Whipplestone, who once served in the Foreign Office in Ng’ombwana and, by a strange quirk of fate, is also a friend of Alleyn’s, finds himself involved in stakeouts and international espionage, and Lucy Lockett becomes his batman.

  There are three murders in Black As He’s Painted. The Ng’ombwana ambassador is accidentally speared at a diplomatic function in London, and towards the end of the book the Sanskrits are found hideously murdered in their pig pottery. ‘The Oratory dome looks bland upon us,’ Ngaio had written to John Schroder in November 1960, ‘& in an old stable a strange girl sits modelling clay unicorns & firing them on the spot in an improvised kiln.’ In fiction 12 years later, unicorns become pigs, and the ceramicists are double agents who came to a sticky end. Black As He’s Painted is a well-written suspense-ridden murder mystery in the ilk of Ngaio’s best. She agonized over it, as she so often did, but all the time probably had a sneaking suspicion that she had hit on something good. Her descriptions of the retired but far-from-redundant Mr Whipplestone and his cat are spare and incisive. She is writing about what she knows.

  Ngaio continued to battle with Black As He’s Painted leading up to Christmas 1972 and into the New Year. Her Christmas tree party, planned for 15 December, and for 48 guests, was a major interruption. Reviews for Tied Up in Tinsel had filtered through as she was organizing Henry V and, in spite of her agent’s reservations, it had been very successful in the States, where it was picked up by Pyramid for a ‘guarantee $9000 straight 10% royalty’, along with three older titles: Vintage Murder, A Man Lay Dead and The Nursing-Home Murder at ‘$14,000 guarantee for the three…with 8% royalty’. Little, Brown, who sold them to Pyramid, was delighted.

  But there was sadness, too, as Christmas approached. ‘I’m afraid that poor little Nicola may very well have to have her amputation before then & will not be able to come.’ Nicola, the daughter of Judie and Malcolm Douglass, had been diagnosed with bone cancer. Ngaio had offered the money to send her to a private school, which she thought would be less stressful. To be fair, she also helped to pay the fees for the Douglass’s older daughter, Joanna. Ngaio’s players were an extension of her family, and she quietly advised and helped many of them behind the scenes. ‘Helen’s Emily has got a hole in her heart…so we have two rather tragic little girls in one company this year,’ Ngaio told Doris McIntosh. Helen Holmes’s daughter was due for an operation at Greenlane Hospital the day after the Christmas tree party.

  Annette Facer remembers the pattern of Ngaio’s Christmas gatherings.

  On the night we would arrive to be met at the door by Ngai or sometimes Crawsie and ushered in to the Blue Room (sometimes referred to as the Long Room). The adults would be provided with deadly cocktails/drinks and the children would sort themselves out [for their play]…Each year a different theme evolved, sometimes written by the parents with references to the latest Drama Soc Shakespeare production and latterly by the children themselves…The audience was always most appreciative with Ngai clapping and cheering.

  Then…the children were called to the dining table which was beautifully decorated with candles and Xmas things and name places and Ngai aided by Crawsie would enquire if each dish was to the child’s liking. If the response was no they weren’t served it. Most of Ngai’s special older friends like Betsy, Sylvia, Marjorie and Anita (all childless) were delighted observers of this ritual…When all the littlies were fed they had to wait until they heard the bells chiming. This was Ngai playing an ancient record, which did not always respond immediately to her instructions. Then they were released into the Blue Room to discover that the screens had been removed and there stood The Tree ablaze with real lit candles. Such was the power of our elegant hostess that the tree never caught on fire. Family names were called out by Ngai and those so named came forward to collect their boxes which were often bigger than the recipients.

  Nicola wrote the script for the play that year, and co-wrote it for a number of years to come. Emily was in charge of properties. Her health improved, but sadly Nicola’s did not, and she died of cancer in her mid-teens.

  Tied Up in Tinsel had been dedicated to Ngaio’s godson, the Dacres-Mannings’s older son, Nicholas. At Christmas the family visited from Australia. There were now three young children—‘They are such a happy family & Bet is such a splendid wife for him’—but Ngaio did not accept their invitation to visit Sydney. The youngsters were more than she felt able to cope with and she was under pressure with her writing of Black As He’s Painted.

  ‘The new book is giving me utter hell’ and had been ‘hideously difficult to pick up again’. She had no set structure, and was allowing the characters to evolve and interact, in the expectation that a pattern would emerge. This was not unusual, but when she was younger the structure had materialized earlier in the process. Ngaio had planned on taking a trip south with Doris McIntosh, but cancelled it in order to finish the book by midwinter, so it could reach her publishers in time for a Christmas release. The book presented some unexpected difficulties, which resulted in Ngaio taking professional diplomatic advice from Alister McIntosh. ‘A murder takes place during ‘a party on the occasion of the President’s visit at a new African Independency Embassy in London. The suspect is an African body guard. Alleyn & Troy are guests.’ The murder happens on Ng’ombwana soil. How would this affect Alleyn’s investigation?

  By April 1973, she had written 50,000 words and still did not know how it would end. There were other interruptions to the book’s progress. Ngaio had taken a fall. ‘[I] flung up both feet to quite a remarkable height above my head while descending the concrete path on a gusty morning.’ She had landed with all her weight on her right foot, which was twisted underneath. Her foot, which ‘resembled that of an elephant’, was badly bruised, and possibly broken. This was followed by a dose of flu. Ngaio admitted that things were much more difficult to get over when ‘one is old’.

  In the midst of her trials, she was visited by two of her oldest and dearest English friends, J.B. and Jacquetta Priestley. ‘I pulled myself together’ sufficiently to put on a dinner party in their honour. The Priestleys were anxious to see as much of New Zealand as they could in their limited time, and when an air strike grounded them in Dunedin they chartered a plane back to Christchurch to be there for the event. Helen Holmes took them all on a day-trip to Castle Hill, and the next day the Priestleys were gone. Ngaio wished she had been in ‘better form for the occasion’, but was delighted to see them. As soon as they had left, Ngaio was back into her book. With no plans to stage a production that year, she worked on in ‘purdah’.

  Her finger was still on the theatrical pulse, however, and she knew exactly what was said about the various productions in town. Some shows slipped by, but not the ‘new professional Court Theatre’s’ production of Home, which she described as superb: ‘no praise can be too high’. For years Ngaio had dreamed of a professional theatre in the city of her birth, and now it had happened.

  After finishing Black As He’s Painted in June and sending it off with a dedication to her cherished secre
tary, Roses Greene, and Roses’ husband Mike, Ngaio took a three-week break with the McIntoshes in Wellington. She arrived back at Marton Cottage to find the ‘South Pole whistling up through holes in the flooring, the sun-porch crammed to the ceiling with hardware & everything ground to a halt’. She was having underfloor heating installed and the workmen had created a gaping abyss, then disappeared.

  Then came a brief visit from Stella Mannings’s daughter, Jean. Her plane had circled a fog-bound Christchurch airport before diverting to Rangiora. ‘I wish she could have stayed & been looked after,’ Ngaio told Doris McIntosh. Jean’s husband had died unexpectedly. ‘She’s very thin & worn poor child…It’s tragic to see a still young & devoted wife left so desolate. But she has immense character & the heart of a lion.’ But Ngaio’s house was far from a warm refuge. After work recommenced, she moved into the attached flat.

  While she was still in renovation limbo, she received wonderful news from England: Edmund Cork was ecstatic about the new book. She had also sent off a short story that Dorothy Olding had asked her to write. Her relief was palpable. It was more of an incident than ‘murder & teckery’, but if they were not interested she was sure it would come in handy somewhere else. Ngaio did not enjoy the short-story form. She needed a substantial canvas on which to exercise her skills of character development, scene setting and the investigation of social mores. The short story, by definition, was a vignette, dependent on a tight and cleverly delivered conceit.

  It was mid-August before heating was restored to Marton Cottage, and it would have been bliss if only she could have worked the controls. ‘I’m getting myself trained to manage the manipulation & avoid plunging from the tropic of Capricorn to the Antarctic Circle at irregular intervals all day.’ She was sick of workmen. Nothing was returned to the kitchen, they slopped tea and coffee on the carpet, and broke her bedroom window, but as far as she could ‘make out they haven’t stolen anything’. But the heating was worth the wait. ‘It makes a noise rather like a tiger purring but that I don’t mind.’

  She was pleased to hear in September that the Woman’s Journal had bought the pre-production rights of Black As He’s Painted for £2,000, ‘which is better than a poke in the kisser with a wet rag, isn’t it?’ She worked on proofs for her American short story, which she found harrowing because of a new editing process. Ngaio lightened the burden by going out with Sylvia to see English comedian Frankie Howerd live in concert. ‘We laughed ourselves sick at his deep blue jokes,’ she admitted. Sylvia’s recovery from cancer had been nothing short of miraculous. It was years since her radiation treatment, and she continued to do an immense amount for Ngaio, welcoming guests and cooking for people who visited when the semi-retired Crawsie was not available. ‘Syl is marvellous & does an amazing amount but we all tremble a bit,’ Ngaio admitted. ‘She does have bad days…but her tests are still in the clear.’ When Ngaio went out to shows, films or the theatre, it was usually with Sylvia. She was Ngaio’s most constant companion.

  But Ngaio was restless again for a change of scene. Before her Christmas tree party—‘40 this year, ye, Gods!’—she made plans to leave in March the following year, on the Oriana. After some disappointments, ‘I’ve found a tenant—my little hairdresser!’ The process of packing began. What was ordinarily an ordeal turned into a nightmare. Her health was patchy and she had a massive reaction to a series of injections. ‘Over the past three decades vaccination has been a mere formula’, but now her left arm blew up like ‘a glowing purple tennis ball’. Writing was a ‘non-starter & I a semi-cot-case’. In February she began ‘phase 2’ of house and personal packing, with a nasty throat virus that lingered. She did manage to see some of the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch, ‘which were a howling success’, and to have dinner aboard HMS Britannia, where she enjoyed ‘a long & very hilarious conversation with Prince Philip’.

  She asked if Alister and Doris McIntosh had been involved with the opening of Parliament fiasco. ‘It was agony watching it on T.V. “Ourpin the dor-ers” commanded a hidden voice.’ Then there was the ceremonial bang, bang on the door. ‘ “It looks as if there’s a hitch” observed the commentator & there sat the Royals, splendidly po-faced, but seething, I dare say, with repressed giggles.’ To the horror of government officials, the doors had jammed.

  Ngaio stayed with the McIntoshes at the end of February, and her ship departed on 1 March 1975. ‘Yours is a second home to me in N.Z. my dear,’ she wrote to Doris, once onboard the Oriana. ‘At the moment [I] am seated at an open-air tavern by a swimming pool with a glass of lager on a glorious morning.’ The Oriana was fun but incredibly hard to navigate. ‘There is a migrant band of us wanderers. We pass & re-pass, giving each other…misdirections.’ It was little wonder. There were no maps, the signage was poor and the ship was huge: there were three shops, four swimming pools, five bars and three restaurants.

  ‘Dear Jonathan Elsom was on the wharf at Southampton & has been like an attentive son ever since,’ she wrote after her arrival in early April. She was immediately involved in promotional activities. Black As He’s Painted was receiving great reviews and was ‘on the Sunday Times best seller list’. Ngaio was delighted. Instead of taking her usual flat in London, she stayed with Maureen (née Rhodes) and John Balfour at Walnut Tree Farm in Birling, Kent. Ngaio was relieved not to be thrown on her own resources. ‘Thank the Lord, the cost of living being what it is—astronomical!’ She commuted to the various Collins events, and to a lunch at the BBC, followed by a stint on Woman’s Hour.

  There were IRA bombs in London. She could not believe how calm people were. ‘Nobody mentions bombs’, yet their reality faced people in the newspapers every morning. It did nothing to dampen her ardour for the city. London flourished with spring tulips and the ‘Mall is vivid with banners & one gets the old up lift in the old way’. She saw as much theatre as she could: John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, Pirandello’s Henry IV, John Gielgud in The Tempest, a Jacobean masque called The Aerial, all of which she liked, plus The Califon, which she found disappointing.

  She interrupted her theatre fest with a trip to Laura and Bernard Ballantrae’s new residence in Auchairne, Scotland. ‘Hollywoodhouse was something out of a fairytale,’ she told Doris McIntosh. At dinner a pipe major in full regalia ‘played his way in through pair after pair of folding doors until there he came in full blast’, to be offered a whisky, which he ‘downed at one draught’, and then continued at full steam. She went up to Edinburgh and spent four days walking through the magnificent streets. The Ballantraes offered her their flat in London, but she had the use of a friend’s Chelsea flat over summer. Ngaio noticed the price of rents with horror. A basement flat in Montpelier now cost three times more than a whole house in 1961.

  In July, she took a cruise through the Worcestershire canals with Mizzy and Bob Stead, who owned their own houseboat; for them this was a weekend pastime. Bob, who had been in commercial television for 25 years, had gained considerable seniority as an administrator and editor. ‘At the moment he’s editing The World at War for distribution overseas.’ Not many months before Ngaio arrived, the couple were involved in a serious car accident, which left Bob ‘scalped, (literally) & hurt in the leg’ and Mizzy with permanent head injuries. She became desperate to return home, and Bob Stead was under pressure to repatriate and take work at New Zealand television. The position of director general was mooted but he wanted to know more about the job.

  While she waited for the Chelsea flat to become available, Ngaio stayed at the Basil Street Hotel. ‘I’m amusing myself trying my hand at an episode for “Crown Court” on Thames Television,’ she explained to Doris McIntosh. ‘My Jonathan Elsom has a leading role in the series & is very keen that I should, but it may come to nothing.’ She found the series concept fascinating. The jury was recruited from people on the street so the actors never knew the verdict. It necessitated an excellent knowledge of the script because the proceedings could not easily be halted, and actors were required to ad lib.
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  Ngaio visited the Priestleys, ‘saw the current repertoire’ at Stratford-upon-Avon, which she thought too Symbolist, and in August moved back to stay with the Balfours at Walnut Farm. She was to have tests. ‘I’ve got to pop into King’s College Hospital this week to be plumbed by a gynaecologist,’ she casually told Doris McIntosh. Her specialist, one of Britain’s leading gynaecologists, suspected polyps on the neck of the uterus. Ngaio thought she would be back at the end of the week, and was planning trips to New York, and to Jersey in the Channel Islands. This was far from what happened. Her minor surgery turned into a complete hysterectomy for cancer of the uterus. She was four weeks in hospital. ‘But [it] has been dealt with so promptly & was so well enclosed, that the likelihood of a recurrence is remote.’ Ngaio was confident about her prognosis. The Balfours, Jonathan Elsom and the Steads visited her regularly in hospital, and she asked Bob to ring the McIntoshes to give them a fuller picture.

  Her trip to North America was off, but she still hankered after a Jersey excursion before the depths of winter hit. Ngaio returned to Walnut Farm to convalesce. She was resilient in spite of her ordeal, and expected that life would continue unchanged. ‘Will have to begin thinking about a book before too long.’ Jersey might be a perfect place to start.

  Before Christmas, Ngaio, Maureen Balfour and her sister-in-law hired a car to take them into London to shop for presents. Because Ngaio was frail, Maureen Balfour assigned her Dorothy, a sewing maid who had been a family retainer for years. Dorothy travelled with a medicinal flask of brandy, which she flourished whenever Ngaio wilted. ‘She also accompanies me to hospital for my check-ups, similarly & quite un-necessarily equipped.’ Walnut Farm was full of family for Christmas. Before festivities began they decorated the house with evergreen branches and white chrysanthemums. On Christmas Eve, they went to a carol singing and communion service. ‘We came out to a brilliant night sky & a sleeping village’ and Ngaio was overwhelmed by the sense of continuity and history ‘that pervades this countryside’.