Black Beech and Honeydew

by Ngaio Marsh

  It seems to me that almost always a play was toward in our small family and that my nightmare, The Fool’s Paradise, was only one of a procession. As a child I did not really enjoy hearing my mother rehearse. She became a stranger to me. If the role was a dramatic or tragic one, I was frightened and curiously embarrassed. When as a very small girl, she asked me if I would like to walk on for a child’s part in – I think – a Pinero play, I was appalled. Yet I loved to hear all the theatre-talk, the long discussions on visiting actors, on plays and on the great ones of the past. When I was big enough to be taken occasionally to the play my joy was almost unendurable.

  One was made to rest in the afternoon. Blinds were drawn and one lay in a state of tumult for the prescribed term, becoming quite sick with anticipation. When confronted with food at an unusual hour, one could eat nothing.

  ‘Good Lord!’ said my father. ‘Look at the child. She’d better not go if she gets herself into such a stink over it.’

  Frightful anxieties arose. Suppose the tickets were lost, suppose we were late? Suppose, from sheer excitement, I were to be sick? In the earliest times, I seem to remember hansom-cabs, evening dress, long gloves and a kind of richness about the arrival but later on, when economy ruled, we waited in queues for the early doors. It was all one to me. There I was, sitting between my parents, in an expectant house. It was no matter how long we waited: the time came when the lights were dimmed and a band of radiance flooded the curtain fringe, when the air was plangent with the illogic of tuning strings, when my heart was either in my stomach or my throat, when a bell rang in the prompt corner and the play was on.

  Which came first: Sweet Nell of Old Drury or Bluebell in Fairyland? Perhaps Bluebell. To this piece I was escorted by my great friend, Ned Bristed: a freckled child, perhaps a year my senior. We were taken to the theatre by his mother who saw us into our seats in the dress circle and then left us there, immensely important, and collected us at the end when we returned in a rapturous trance to Ned’s house where I spent the night. Ned and I were in perfect accord. Some twenty years later, long after he had been killed in action, it fell to my lot to produce Bluebell in Fairyland. I stood in the circle and watched a dress rehearsal and was able for a moment to put into the front row the shadows of a freckled boy and a small girl: ecstatic and feverishly wolfing chocolates.

  My mother took me to a matinée of Sweet Nell of Old Drury. I saw the whole thing in terms of a fairy tale and fell madly in love with Charles II in the person of Mr Harcourt Beatty. How kindly he shone upon the poor orange girl (Miss Nellie Stewart), how beastly was the behaviour of the two witches, Castlemaine and Portsmouth, how menacing and how superbly outsmarted was the evil Jeffreys. The company returned, we went again and I became even more deeply committed. Later on, when I began to do history, it was irritating to find so marked a note of disapproval in the section on Charles II: Mr Harcourt Beatty, I felt, and not the pedagogue Oman, had the correct approach.

  Our visits to the play were not always so successful. When Janet Achurch came, with Ibsen, I was not taken to see her and wish that I had been but, unless I have confused the occasions, her company, or one that came soon after it, also played Romeo and Juliet. To this my mother and I went one afternoon. She was immensely stimulated: too much so, for once, to notice my growing alarm. When the Montagues and Capulets began to set about each other in the streets of Verona I asked nervously: ‘They aren’t really fighting, are they?’

  ‘Yes, yes!’ she replied excitedly. I dived into her lap, surfaced at long intervals and upon finding that people seemed to be dreadfully unhappy, hurriedly submerged again. Worst of all, of course, there was Poison and a girl was Taking It. I vividly remember one final appalled glance at the Tomb of the Capulets and what was going on there and then a shaken return to Fendalton.

  ‘I expect I should have brought you away,’ my mother used to say long afterwards, ‘but it was a good company. The Mercutio was wonderful.’ I know exactly how she felt: it couldn’t have been expected of her. She was always very loving and patient over my fears and a constant refuge from them.

  She read aloud quite perfectly: not with the offhand brio of my father but with a quiet relish that was immensely satisfying. One was gathered into the book as if into a lap and completely absorbed by it. Her voice was unforced and beautiful.

  Whatever I may write about my mother will be full of contradictions. I think that as I grew older I grew, better perhaps than anyone else, to understand her. And yet how much there was about her that still remains unaccounted for, like odd pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Of one thing I am sure: she had in her an element of creative art never fully realized. I think the intensity of devotion which might have been spent upon its development was poured out upon her only child, who, though she returned this love, inevitably and however unwisely, began at last to make decisions from which she would not be deflected.

  IV

  It so happened that my two constant companions when I was very small and before I met Ned, were also boys: another only child called Vernon, and my cousin Harvey. They were both older than I and good-naturedly bossed me: always I was the driven horse, obediently curvetting and prancing, always the seeker and never the hider. I accepted their attitude and listened with the deepest respect to their stories of other little boys to whom they ‘owed a hiding’. On a seaside holiday with our parents, Harvey and I discovered a religious affinity. We built a sand-castle and on the top moulded a cross. This gave us an extremely complacent and holy feeling.

  Of all my parents’ circle I loved best the friend who was present on the occasion of the saddle-tweed trousers. His name was Dundas Walker. He acted in most of their plays and made a great success of ‘Cis’, the precocious youth in Pinero’s farce The Magistrate. Finding Dundas rather difficult to say I called him by this Victorian nickname but afterwards changed it to ‘James’. Destined by his people for the church, he became instead a professional actor. In this choice he was egged on by my mother: was this one of her contradictions or did she realize, quite correctly, that he would be happy in no other sphere?

  He invented the most entrancing games: ‘Visiting’, for instance, when he was always Mrs Finch-Brassy and I, Mrs Boolsum-Porter. ‘Forgive me, my dear,’ he would say, ‘if I borrow your poker. A morsel of your delicious cake has lodged in a back tooth and I must positively rid myself of it.’ I always handed him the poker and he then engaged in an elaborate pantomime. ‘Ah!’ he would say, ‘there’s nothing like a poker for picking one’s teeth. Do you agree?’

  I agreed so heartily that on observing an elderly uncle engaged in a furtive manoeuvre behind his napkin I said loudly and confidently: ‘Uncle Ellis, Cis says there’s nothing like a poker for picking one’s teeth.’

  ‘I think, Rose,’ my grandmother said to my mother, ‘that Mr Walker goes too far with the child.’

  He gave me my nicest books, made me laugh more often than anybody except my father and never spoiled me. When he found me trying to dragoon one of Susie’s kittens into being harnessed to a shoe box he was so severe that I was stricken with misery and while being bathed that evening burst into tears, tore myself from my mother’s hands and fled, roaring my remorse, to the drawing room where I flung myself, dripping wet, into his astonished embrace.

  Nothing could exceed the admiration he inspired.

  ‘When I am grown up,’ I said warmly, ‘I shall marry you.’

  ‘Very well, my dear, and you shall have the family pearls.’ He went on the stage and to England. My mother and I met him in London twenty years later and the friendship was taken up as if it had never been interrupted. I don’t think he was ever a very wonderful actor – he always had great difficulty in remembering his lines – but he was fortunate in that he played the leading role in a farce called A Little Bit of Fluff that broke all records by running for about eight years up and down the English, Scottish and Irish provinces, so that he had plenty of time to make sure of the lines. He was entirely a man of the theat
re and was, I believe, the happiest human being I have ever known and one of the best loved. When he retired in the 1930s he came out to New Zealand and lived with his unmarried sister and brother in a rambling house full of family treasures. The pearls, he once told me, were kept in a newspaper parcel, on the top of his wardrobe.

  In 1943, when I began to produce Shakespeare’s plays for the University of Canterbury, James helped in all of them, sometimes playing small parts. As he grew older and memorizing became more and more of a difficulty, he concentrated upon make-up for which he had a wonderful gift. He was like a gentle spirit of good luck and was much loved by my student-players. When he died, which he did at an advanced age, and with exquisite tact and the least possible amount of fuss, a group of undergraduates asked to carry him and that must have pleased him very much if he was aware of it.

  Our other close friend was Mivvy, daughter of that family with monies in Chancery who lived in Dunedin. In age she was almost midway between my parents and me: old enough to be slightly deferred to and young enough to confide in and to cheek. She has told how I burst in upon her privacy with a howl, having committed some misdemeanour. Tears poured from my eyes into my open mouth.

  ‘Mummy’s cross of me!’ I bawled. ‘But I don’t care, Mivvy, do I?’

  Mivvy was the kind of friend whose visits can never be long enough and to whom everyone turns at moments of distress without feeling that they ask too much of her. I hope we didn’t ask too much: I don’t think we did. She was very easy to tease and she was also extremely and comically obstinate. During one of her visits, which we all so much liked, my mother sprained her ankle. Mivvy was determined to administer fomentations, my mother, equally formidable on such issues, was adamant that she should do no such thing. Mivvy set her jaw. The siege of the fat ankle, to my infinite enjoyment, lasted all through one day. Suddenly, at nightfall, my mother yielded. Mivvy, triumphant, became businesslike. Saucepans were set to boil. Linen was torn into strips. Lint and aromatic unguents were displayed. A footbath was prepared. For about an hour my mother suffered her extremity to be alternately seethed and chilled while Mivvy, neatly aproned, bustled vaingloriously. Finally, the ankle was anointed and elaborately bound.

  ‘There!’ she cried. ‘Now! Doesn’t it feel better?’

  ‘It feels perfectly all right, thank you, Mivvy dear,’ said my mother and from beneath the hem of her Edwardian skirt displayed the other ankle: still swollen.

  ‘If there had been any scalding water left,’ Mivvy said, ‘I would have hurled it at you.’

  Of all the other grown-up friends and relations who came and went during my earliest childhood the outlines are blurred. There were facetious gentlemen who pretended to be staggered by my voice which was rather deep, and an offensive musical gentleman who insisted, like Svengali, on looking at my vocal cords. Luckily he was not possessed of Svengali’s expertise. Nothing short of deep and remorseless hypnosis would ever have induced me to sing in tune. There was Captain Sykes who became famous, and Mr Parkinson who collected china and committed suicide, there were numbers of ladies who came to my mother’s ‘day’ and to whose ‘days’ I was boringly taken, since I could not be left at home. One of them kept swans on an ornamental pond and these arrogant birds rushed, hissing, at me, when I was sent to play in the garden.

  Across the lane in a very big house with a long drive, a lodge at the gates, a horse-paddock, carriages and gigs, a motor, grooms, servants and a nanny, lived a boy and girl with whom I loved to play when my mother visited there. It seemed to me to be a magical place filled with the scent of flowers. The boy, who was asthmatic and often confined to a wheeled chair, was some three or four years my senior: his sister about my own age. This was the beginning of an established friendship. Into the dawn of it, floatingly recollected, come the Duke and Duchess of York (afterwards King George V and Queen Mary) to stay at this house. I remember being lifted on a high evergreen fence to watch my friend’s uncle wire-jumping his horse for the Duke’s entertainment and I remember my parents making ready for a royal reception. Was it on that occasion or a later one that I so laboriously picked violets, bound them, limp and intractable, with a piece of fencing wire out of the gardening shed and presented them to my mother? I see them, wilted, slithering from their confine and weighty to a degree and I see my mother anchoring them in the black lace of her corsage. They must have all disappeared, this way and that, long before the ducal assemblage and I suppose that by some means or other, she rid herself of an embarrassment of stout wire.

  I am convinced that recollections of childhood go much further back than we are accustomed to suppose. I realise that mine are based in some measure upon what my parents and friends afterwards told me but for all this I know that many of them have stayed in my conscious memory and that these are the most vivid. The smell, for instance, of newly shot game birds and the glossy slide of their feathers: with this, a shooting hut near the shores of a lake, the song of larks, dry cowpats that were burned in the open fire and, especially, some domestic pigs whose personal hygiene, for some reason, I determined to improve. I remember perfectly well the indignant screams of one of these creatures and the difficulty of retaining my hold on its ear, the depths of which I explored with my own soapy bath-flannel. I have a snapshot taken at the time: it displays my mother graceful and long-skirted, Mivvy and my father in oilskins and sou’westers with shotguns under their arms, the spaniel, Tip, and a stout truculent child of four who is myself.

  I have grown, in theory at least, to dislike blood sports but how superb were those sunny mornings when I was allowed to walk behind my father and Tip through the plantation where he and his friends went quail-shooting. On these occasions he was completely and explicitly himself. He would imitate the cry of a Californian cock-quail, make little clucking noises to Tip and even quiver very slightly as Tip did. One had to keep perfectly silent and walk lightly behind the guns. The click of the hammer when he cocked his gun, the sudden whirr of wings, the deafening report and the heady cordite reek of the ejected cartridge-case: these were the ingredients of pure happiness.

  When we had followed the guns as far as our picnic place my mother and I would stay there, make a fire of heaven-smelling dry bluegum, and await their return for luncheon. Every now and then we would hear the guns. Shockingly, as one may now feel, my father loved the creatures he shot. Once he described to me very vividly the flight of an English pheasant and the heavy, dark abruptness of its fall. He thought for a moment. ‘Awful, really,’ he said in a surprised voice, ‘isn’t it? Awful, I suppose.’ As a boy, he saw Ellen Terry play Beatrice and of course fell in love with her. ‘When she had to run “like a lapwing, close to the ground” she did it like a henpartridge, trailing her wing to draw attention away from her nest. Beautiful!’ It was the highest praise he could have given Miss Terry.

  He was a purist in the management of field sports. When I stumped behind him with a heeled stock in the crook of my arm I had to behave exactly as if it was a real gun: ‘uncocking’ it at fences or gates, ‘unloading’ it before I put it down and never pointing it at anybody. To do otherwise was ‘loutish’. He was dealt one of those strokes of malevolent ill-fortune that so punctually overtook him when he loaded his walking-stick air gun to shoot a fruit-robbing blackbird, was called away and put it in a corner unfired and, for once, forgotten. Weeks later, my mother, who was alone in the house, knocked the gun sideways and it discharged into her middle finger. We had no telephone then and no near neighbours. She bound it up as best she could and waited all day for us to come home. A dreadful episode.

  When I was still a small girl I was given a Frankfurt single-bore rifle. I practised, under stern supervision, on suspended tins and cardboard targets until I was a good shot and allowed to go out with the guns. This was wonderful. To kill rabbits was an honourable procedure. And then, on an autumn morning, I wounded a hare. The landscape blackened and cried out against me and that was the end of my active part in field sports.

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nbsp; These expeditions alternated with boating on the quiet river where one glided through unknown people’s gardens, under willows and between the spring-flowering banks of our curiously English antipodean suburbs. The oars clunked rhythmically in their rowlocks, weeping willows dipped and brushed across our faces. If you nibbled the pale young leaves they were surprisingly bitter. Sometimes our keel grated on shingle or sent up a drift of cloudy mud. One trailed one’s fingers and felt grand and opulent. It seems to me that it was always late afternoon on the river.