Black Beech and Honeydew

by Ngaio Marsh

  I continued as Jimmy but I still suffered the agony of the wig.

  I was also Assistant Stage Manager and since the Stage Manager was inclined to drink, the responsibility of ‘packing in and packing out’ on one-night stands was generally mine.

  We played a remote town called Wairoa. After the show and with the help of the mechanist, I saw the set struck, packed on a lorry with wardrobe and props and taken down to the wharf. It was a warm, overcast night. My personal friend, the other girl in the company, was called Kiore (Tor) King and had been at RADA. With her I boarded a little coastal steamer at two o’clock in the morning. A single light showed the legend: ‘Ladies’ Cabin’. We groped our way into it, found empty bunks and crept into bed in the dark, thinking we were the only passengers.

  I was just dropping off when a rich voice close beside me said profoundly: ‘Wahine pakeha.’ (White women.)

  A number of other voices answered. We had stumbled upon the only two empty bunks. The others were occupied by Maori ladies on their way to Napier.

  They were companionable and handed round a bottle of port which Tor and I, not to be unfriendly, made as if to share.

  The ship put out and when it grew light, the seas being heavy, we were all sick.

  II

  During this adventure the new Wilkie Shakespeare Company visited Christchurch. When my mother told Mr Wilkie of my inexplicable behaviour he said, ‘I shouldn’t trouble yourself. It won’t last – I give the venture three months.’ He was right, almost to the day. The Rosemary Rees English Comedy Company, like its successors, yielded to high costs and a small population and quietly folded.

  I returned home but not to settle. Tor King came to stay with us. Tor was what my mother’s generation (though not my mother, who did not relish such phrases) called ‘a thoroughly nice girl’, with beautiful manners and a ‘thoroughly nice’ background. She was also a great dear and as bright as a button. We talked endless theatre and presently I started to write sketches and we both began to think they might do and that it would be fun to try them out if we could find someone for the men’s parts. Then we thought of the real ‘Jimmy’, now recovered from his fever and marking time at home in the North Island. We wrote to him and he replied saying he thought he could fix up a contract with one of the film managements for us to take half the programme on a North Island circuit.

  My mother was perfectly complacent about all this talk and, without any thought for the extra trouble it must give her, readily agreed that Jimmy should be asked to stay. I think she was pleased that I was writing, particularly when I now essayed a one-act play.

  This was, to me, a serious matter. I was still at the stage bypassed, one supposes, by modern youth, when the nebulous-romantic-picturesque-Borrowesque attracted me. Pierrot was not a dirty word and Granville-Barker’s Prunella had wrought its blameless spell. So much so that my one-acter was a sort of Prunella in reverse.

  I have not kept a copy of this play but I remember it pretty well. The plot is simple and derivative. There is, as the present idiom goes, this Boy and he is a Woodman and he is Kind of Restless and feels the call of the Great Forest and the World Outside and there is this Girl he is going to marry and she is frightened of the World Outside and so when she has prepared his supper she drops off to sleep in front of the fire and her boyfriend has a soliloquy while he listens to the wind going ‘ohé’ round the hut and he gets to thinking there is Somebody Out There, abroad in the forest. So he opens the window and calls out for whoever it is to come in and so Pierrot comes in, all wet with the Rain Outside and is very fey and talks about the Stroller’s life and says it is Gay, in the original sense. Pierrette comes in and she is also very gay and fey, although damp, and speaks broken English but not the same kind as Anna the spy in The Luck of the Navy. And she fascinates the Boy and she and Pierrot tell him he is One of Them and she looks at the sleeping Girl and makes disparaging remarks about her. So the Boy feels the Call of the Outside which is somewhat heavily symbolized by Pierrot and Pierrette, and is tempted and works up to a climax and they forget to keep their voices down and the Girl wakes up and is frightened by their white faces. And they go silent and symbolic and stare at the Boy as they move backwards into the window and he says to the Girl not to be frightened, he will never leave her, no, no, no, staring at Pierrot and Pierrette. So they vanish through the window and the storm dies down. The Boy speaks the tag, ‘They are singing. They will soon be up the shoulder of the hill.’ Curtain. The piece was called Little Housebound.

  When Jimmy arrived we read the play and he and Tor looked at each other and with one voice ejaculated: ‘Havelock North.’

  This was, and I suppose still is, a small and exclusive district in Hawkes Bay which was Tor and Jimmy’s native province. By one of those curious runnings-together of affinities, Havelock North had become a cultural centre and thought of itself as such. There was an architect whose house was constructed of axe-hewn timber with enormous axe-hewn beams supporting nothing in particular and though the floor was not actually strewn with rushes their presence was implicit. There was a poetess in Havelock North and yoga regulated many of the families. Rudolf Steiner was a name to conjure with and handicrafts abounded. The esoteric found a fertile soil there. Eurhythmics flourished and psychic research was not ignored. In short, Havelock North would have provided the late E. F. Benson, whose ‘Lucia’ books are too little known today, with wonderful raw material.

  There are girls’ boarding schools in Havelock and Tor was an old girl of perhaps the most rarefied of these establishments. She and Jimmy both agreed that Little Housebound was the very stuff upon which Havelock North culture blossomed. We found that with this play and the sketches and Tor’s repertoire of recitations which she performed with all the expertise of her RADA equipment, we had a full evening’s programme within our grasp. We rehearsed like mad and I blench when I ponder on the outcome. It seems to me that now, as before, my mother must have exercised superb self-control during this period but still she did not discourage us: I was writing.

  At last we all went north and I stayed with Tor and her parents, who were charming. It was arranged that we should do our show in Hastings, the nearest city; at two girls’ schools and, of course, at Havelock North. I don’t remember what the financial arrangements were but Jimmy managed them and we actually made some money. He then interviewed the cinema management and we were given a tour, taking half the programme and a share of the house.

  Jimmy discovered that touring companies of five or more were allowed first-class railway accommodation at second-class fares. We therefore suggested to our respective mothers that they should accompany us, which, rather to our astonishment, they agreed to do. My mother arrived looking amused and away we went. Mrs King was the daughter of a general and gifted with the psychic powers that frequently manifest themselves, I have noticed, among ladies with martial backgrounds. She passed her hands downwards on either side of my mother without touching her and my mother agreed that from one hand there was wafted a cooling draught of air and from the other a hot gust. Upon this atmospheric basis they raised a friendship and my mother confided her own extramundane experiences, which, since I can vouch for them, may now be introduced.

  My mother possessed a faculty which, if she had been a Highlander, would have been called the second sight. Can it, I ask myself, have stemmed from the great-uncle with Scottish estates who so disastrously expired in his family chaise? She was not at all proud of this attribute and generally preferred to ignore it but occasionally it manifested itself with such inconsequent emphasis that we were obliged to take notice of it. I shall give three instances of her powers, if powers they were.

  It may be remembered that in my earliest childhood we were visited by my father’s ‘wild’ brother, tubercular Uncle Reggie. He returned to England in due course. Some considerable time afterwards my mother, in the small hours of the night, roused up my father with the strange remark that: ‘Reggie is about and I think he wants us.’
My father assured her that she had been dreaming and himself returned to unconsciousness. My mother, however, reenacting in some measure her role as Lady Macbeth, rose from her bed, lit her candle, took a pencil, consulted her clock and tore the current leaflet from the day-to-day calendar that stood on her dressing table. Having written the exact time upon this leaflet, she folded it, tucked it behind the bulk of the calendar, returned to bed and to sleep and, in due course, forgot the incident. She remembered it some weeks later when my grandmother wrote from England that at that very hour, sitting in a garden chair in the heat of the day, Uncle Reggie had incontinently expired.

  The second example of her prescience occurred when I was teaching the small boy Colin, to whom I was very much attached. His parents had taken a cottage near us for the holidays and Colin was in the habit of paying a morning visit, often bringing me one of those warm knots of decapitated geraniums which children like to present. My mother was engaged, with my help, in the annual task of dusting and re-arranging the books which we accumulated in great numbers. She was gently, if reprehensibly, slapping two of them together on the verandah when she remarked that Colin was coming up the garden path and that he had his usual bunch of geraniums and wore a smart new Norfolk jacket. She asked me to meet him and keep him out-of-doors as she was busy. I went down one path and up another. I called. I explored the gully. He was nowhere to be seen. ‘Funny little boy,’ said my mother, slapping her books. ‘He must have gone home again.’

  The next morning he arrived saying that he had intended to come the previous day but had been a naughty boy and his nanny had forbidden him. ‘And,’ he said, ‘I’d got my new coat on and I’d picked you a bunch of ginraneums.’

  These two incidents can, I suppose, be explained on assumption of thought-transference. Both Uncle Reggie, in his extremity, and Colin, in his childish frustration, might be held to have set up some kind of telepathic communication. The third event is difficult to rationalize.

  It also concerns a small boy – a cousin called Beynham Pyne. My mother, during her afternoon siesta, looked up from her book and saw a bed in a strong light with a little boy in it. He turned his head and smiled. She wondered which of her nephews this might be and, as was her habit with these occurrences, dismissed the matter from her mind. Some weeks later my aunt Madeline sent a message to say Beynham was to have his tonsils removed. She asked my mother to sustain her during the operation which was to be performed in the house. When my mother arrived they went into the sick room and she thought: this will be what I saw. But it was all wrong. The bed was in the wrong place, the light was coming from the wrong direction. Beynham did not turn his head. She thought: so much for that. She and my aunt went into another room and presently the nurse came to say the operation was successfully over and they could come and see the patient.

  When they re-entered the room the bed had been moved into a bay window where there was a better light. Beynham turned his head and smiled at them.

  Normally, as I have suggested, my mother did not discuss these odd experiences but Mrs King’s hands blowing hot and cold had quite won her over. They beguiled our journeys with many an esoteric gossip.

  This odd and companionable little tour concluded, we went our several ways: Jimmy to Australia where he joined the Marie Tempest Company and Tor, finally, to replace Vera St John with the Allan Wilkie Company. When I arrived home it was to a series of events that led at last to an enormous change.

  Almost at once, I was asked to produce plays for several amateur societies. Our friend, Bill, who, like myself was equally concerned with painting and the theatre (that same Bill with whom we had travelled down the West Coast) left off being a schoolmaster and, having equipped himself in England, opened a studio of Drama and Dancing in Christchurch. To this end he was joined by his brother, the Fred Reade Wauchop who had played with Ellen Terry. They asked me to take over the drama department at their school and here I began to feel my feet as a director and coach. Everything that had been absorbed from my mother, from Allan Wilkie and from those subsequent and rather ludicrous ventures, now began to make sense.

  At about this time an organization was set up in Christchurch with the intention of producing large spectacular shows annually for charitable purposes. My parents and I were asked to attend the first meeting. It was held in the showroom of a music shop among a shrouded company of grand pianos and here I met the little girl whom I had last seen almost twenty years ago in a carriage with a crown on the door. She had married, in England, the son of that house in Fendalton which I had visited with such delight. She had returned to New Zealand with her husband and three children to whom she was about to add the fourth and had been invited to sit on the organizing committee for this new venture which was called ‘Charities Unlimited’.

  In writing detective stories I have only once, with intention, based a complete family upon people I actually know. There can be no doubt, however much we may disclaim the circumstance, that fictional characters are pretty often derived, subconsciously or not, from persons of the writer’s acquaintance. One may not be aware of this until after one has done with the book. In this instance, however, I wrote deliberately. Although the ages, sex, circumstances and behaviour of my imaginary family were not precisely those of its prototypes, its members were, in their, I hope, inoffensive way, portraits. I shall, therefore, make no bones about calling their dear originators ‘The Lampreys’.

  III

  It so happened that a few days before the opening night of an elaborate pantomime launched by Charities Unlimited the producer became too ill to carry on. There being nobody else available, I took over. On the strength of this panic action I was asked to direct the next year’s production. It was Bluebell in Fairyland.

  I daresay it is a tedious commonplace to remark that most people find in their affairs a constant recurrence of themes that would have seemed to have died out. It is as if, after all, a kind of economy orders the ingredients of a life: an unsuspected design: as if, however much we are shaken up, we belong to some kaleidoscopic arrangement of which there are a limited number of fragments that are bound to make one of a series of patterns. One is tempted to think that coincidence is the rule rather than the exception.

  I don’t know who unearthed the script and score of this Edwardian piece fifteen years after Ned had taken me to see it as my first show but it was a happy augury that this was to be my first big production.

  The senior Lampreys came to many rehearsals and became progressively involved with Bluebell. It is a children’s ‘musical’, was written by Sir Seymour Hicks and has all the cosy sentimental ingredients, in the Victorian mode, for a Christmas entertainment. I had a splendid musical director and a ballet mistress, Madeline Vyner, who had trained with the Russians. The orchestra was excellent and the wardrobe mistress an expert. It was wonderful to have crowds to manipulate as well as individual players. The afterglow of Ned’s and my delight seemed to reach over the years and shed an odd blessing on the venture. The two elder Lamprey children, who were about the same age as Ned and I had been, were also ravished by Bluebell in Fairyland.

  After the final performance I went dancing with the Lampreys. In the early hours of the morning we drove to their house, twenty miles away in the country. Its doors opened into a life whose scale of values, casual grandeur, cockeyed gaiety and vague friendliness will bewilder and delight me for the rest of my days. If one can be said to fall in love with a family I fell in love with the Lampreys. It has been a lasting affair.

  I must not try to ring the changes upon what I have written about them elsewhere and yet it is necessary, I suppose, to enlarge upon this first encounter since from then onwards, for some six years, I may be said to have occupied a seat on the Lamprey bandwagon. If I were able to make an animated cartoon of this vehicle I would, I think, represent it as a sort of cross between a Rolls-Royce and a Dodgem car such as one sees at the fair. It would be driven jointly in all directions by a nanny, a very smart chauffeur belongin
g to another branch of the family and a Negro gentleman. It would travel at an uneven pace, cutting its corners, run in and out of ditches, and avoid head-on collisions by the narrowest of margins. Sometimes a vital part would fall off. Nobody would know where it was going and all the Lampreys would be very gay. Even when their hearts were in their mouths, they would laugh a great deal, saying: ‘Isn’t it too awful!’ to each other. And they would be vaguely kind and stop for people who fancied a lift. These casual passengers would, if the Lampreys took a fancy to them, find themselves immensely flattered by information that the senior members of the family secretly confided in turn to each of them. Their eyes would open wider and wider as they learned of imminent financial and domestic disasters. They would feel self-important and would be scrupulous in maintaining the utmost discretion. If, by the accident of some unguarded remark, they found that they were all equally laden with identical Lamprey confidences their reaction would be one of bewilderment rather than resentment. They might observe that, with the Lampreys, seniority in years was in inverse ratio to conventional discretion. They would discover, if they stayed for any time on the bandwagon, that however frequently its parts disintegrated they would, after the fashion of all animated cartoons, be restored and the journey precariously maintained.

  At the time of which I am writing, the Lampreys lived on a scale probably unmatched in any other New Zealand establishment except Government House. They were, however, tacking up towards one of their periodical financial crises when all the servants except the lady’s maid and soldier-servant would be sent away, to be replaced by untrained Cantonese greengrocers wooed from their shops by wages slightly higher than those paid to their predecessors. This was an economy measure.

  I spent most of my weekends with the Lampreys and joined in the desultory efforts to instruct the Chinese, who laughed a great deal. They were charming to the children and gave them many presents such as a sword made of coins to the son and heir and flagons of nauseating scent for the little girls who drenched themselves in it. They also invited us to interminable firework displays. Their names were Wong, Low and Percy Chew. They were baited by Mack, the soldier-servant, a difficult man whose wits had been a little turned by yellow fever. He was thought to be dangerous.