by Ngaio Marsh
Ned came to say goodbye, looking strange in his uniform. He had missed Gallipoli. He sent his photograph when he was commissioned in Flanders, wrote that he felt depressed and uneasy and was killed in action a few days later. My mother worked in the Red Cross rooms and my father trained strenuously with the Citizen Defence Corps and wondered if the war would catch up with his age group. At the art school we made patriotic posters. The Casualty lists filled many pages of the newspapers.
It had never occurred to me that I would attempt to be anything else in life but a serious painter: there was no question of looking upon art as a sort of obsessive hobby – it was everything. I knew hope and despair, hesitancy, brief certitude and very occasionally that moment when one thinks: ‘How did the fool, who is I, do this?’ I trained myself to become so conscious of the visual element that I could scarcely look at anything without seeing it in terms of line, mass or colour. I find it impossible, now, to form any idea of my work as a whole. I think that perhaps it had a kind of vigour which may have been an unconscious expression of my sense of theatre. It was good enough to keep me going on scholarships and to reach exhibition level, but it seems to me, now, that I never drew or painted in the way that was really my way: that somehow I failed to get on terms with myself. I may be quite wrong about this: perhaps I had no more in me than the works that emerged but there will always be a kind of doubt about this. Our training at the art school was strictly academic. The instructors who sought to find a different approach were, unfortunately, not very articulate and I found their hesitancies and half-expressed generalizations frustrating. I wanted to be told flatly whether things I had drawn were too big or too small, too busy or too empty. I wanted to know, when I failed completely, exactly where I had gone wrong and how I might have avoided doing so. I didn’t mind how brutally I was told as long as the instruction was valid and specific. Richard Wallwork, the life master, was extremely specific and a dedicated teacher. I did not want to paint as he painted and I think I realized that his attitudes were those of a vigorous but conventional London school. Nevertheless, his students learned the fundamental elements of drawing and the necessity for exhaustive self-criticism. There was no chance, with that uncompromising little man, of disguising ineptitude under the cloak of artistic sensibility. The student who raised the protest: ‘But that’s how I see it’ was often left with the dismal suggestion that what had been seen had not been communicated. I think that even those who rebelled against his taste, his pronouncements and his instruction, afterwards came to realize their great debt to him. He was a most generous man and gave much of his own spare time to his students, staying behind after each class to teach one or two of us advanced anatomy and artistic perspective and taking us with him to paint out-of-doors.
I enjoyed best the nights when we made time studies from the nude. The model, for a long period, was Miss Carter, a dictatorial but good-tempered girl who came to us from show business. She had been the subject of a Professor Psycho’s expertise and during the rests liked to talk about her ordeal. The professor performed in a tent at agricultural fairs and in obscure halls. He used to wave his hands at Miss Carter and say ‘Sleep. Sleep.’ She would then shut her eyes and, faintly smiling, sustain an appearance of peaceful oblivion while he ran pins into her shoulders. She was exhibited in a shop window for three days with a notice beside her to say she was in a cataleptic trance; she was stealthily nourished by the professor in the small hours of the morning. We found the undoubted scars on her shoulders a great bore. A legend about the model related that during a series of sharp earthquakes in Christchurch she had lectured the students in a superior manner about the foolish behaviour of people who ran out into the street during a shock. They ought, she said, to remain indoors, standing quietly under doorways. While she was posing, a particularly sharp jolt shook the life room. The students, as usual threw down their palettes and rushed into the fairly busy street where they were joined by Miss Carter in the nude and quite unaware of it.
On time-study nights, the life room was crowded. The students, with the exception of one girl who acted as chaperone, stayed outside while Mr Wallwork set the pose. Miss Carter slid out of her kimono and with a sort of bovine good nature, eased herself into position. She was a big fair creature. If a twist of the torso or pelvis was asked of her she would grumble professionally and then grin. The gas heaters roared and the great lamp above the throne held the motionless figure in a pool of light. When the door was opened the students hurried in to manoeuvre for places. In a semi-circle round the throne sat people on ‘donkeys’ and behind them easels jockeyed for vantage points. ‘Have you seen it from over there?’ Mr Wallwork would mutter, with a jerk of his head, and one would hurriedly shift into the gap he indicated. The room looked like a drawing from Trilby: timeless, oddly dramatic, sweltering-hot and alive with concentration.
Each pose was maintained for three-quarters of an hour. It was a matter of catching hold of the movement and feeling and getting it down eloquently, rapidly and decisively: a feverish, hit-or-miss business that was enormously exciting.
Conventionally brought up though most of the girl students had been, I am sure it never occurred to one of us that there was anything remarkable, still less embarrassing, in these mixed classes for the nude. Nor can I suppose that the men were disturbed by frissons other than those associated with the technical problems offered by Miss Carter’s bones, muscles and skin and Mr Wallwork’s aphorisms upon them. These were pronounced in an incisive voice with the short vowels of the English midlands.
‘A câst shadow is influenced by the object which câsts it and the surface upon which it is câst.’
‘There are no concavities in the living body. All apparent concavities are built up by a series of convexities. Is that too big or too small?’
‘Too big,’ one bleated, suddenly aware of this.
‘Reduce it. Is the lower leg foreshortened or is it not?’
‘It is.’
‘Then why don’t you make it so? You have drawn what you know, not what you see. Look at the shape of the space between the legs.’
‘Unless you understand the structure – ‘
The white, muscular hand would make an anatomical drawing on the edge of the paper while Mr Wallwork’s firmly closed lips twitched convulsively.
His methods were academic but there was no nonsense about them. He was an instructor with a vocation.
At the end of the year there were examinations upon which the chance of a scholarship, and there were not many of these, largely depended. To me the examinations were anathema. The hand that had trembled under Miss Ross’s sardonic glance, shook again and most persistently.
‘Put it under the cold tap,’ said Mr Wallwork observing it before we started.
The anatomy and perspective papers gave no trouble and I usually did reasonably well in drawing from life but painting from the head and figure under these circumstances was diabolical: I veered about and produced works that were occasionally above and far more often a long way below my normal form. At half-past nine at night, dog-tired and either exalted or in the depths, with my paintbox slung over my shoulder, I trudged a half-mile to the tram stop in Cathedral Square and (after a wearisome ride) another half-mile along a dark road and up the lane to our house on the hills. ‘How did it go?’ my mother used to say and my father would look up from his book and listen.
In the mornings I had teaching jobs: first of all with Colin, a little boy who had been ill and of whom I grew very fond, and then, when he went to school, with Bet, a girl who was about four years my junior and whose brother and I had been schoolmates at Tib’s. She became one of my greatest friends. We ‘did lessons’ in her father’s library, and while she laboured at arithmetic and composition I read greedily through a pretty comprehensive field. It felt rather odd, after so short a time, to have turned into a sort of Miss Ffitch myself.
Colin’s father, one of New Zealand’s most distinguished surgeons, was the son of an earl
y Canterbury pioneer. Their family sheep station lies between a great and turbulent river and the alpine approaches to the West Coast. At that time it ran far back into the high country, embracing two mountains. The house and little church are built of bricks made from local clay and in some sort reflect the character of the family estates in Devonshire. When the men went out to muster the back country on the far side of Big Mount Peel, they were accompanied by a mule-train carrying their stores. In this house, while I was a student, I spent very happy holidays struggling to get down in paint the strange ambiguities presented by English trees mingled with native bush against the might of those fierce hills.
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.
IV
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 overh
ang 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.
V
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.
