Black Beech and Honeydew

by Ngaio Marsh

  It is strange, I think, that with this fierce concentration on the New Zealand element, so few of our major writers have concerned themselves in depth with the greatest problem and surely the most interesting aspect of life in New Zealand today: the process of integration between two races and the emergence of many formidable difficulties that must be overcome before we can honestly claim to have realized the intention of our forefathers: that the Maori and Pakeha shall be as one people.

  Four years ago, when I was in America and about to be interviewed for radio I realized from a remark inadvertently dropped by the questioner that she had expected me to be dark brown. When I said that I had no Maori blood but would be proud of it if I did, she looked politely incredulous. It did not at once occur to me that my first name had misled her: so many Europeans have Maori names in New Zealand. And then I wondered if ours is the only country where white parents give their children native names. If so, it is perhaps not too fanciful to see in this habit a reflection of the attitude which, however much we may blunder, has been ours from our first entry into these islands.

  It is often said that we have no right when colour problems of Britain, Africa or America are discussed to argue from our own experience: it is on too small and insignificant a scale. I think we have every right. The very differences are significant. Our problems of integration, and they are real and cumulative, have developed out of a background of anxious determination to have the Maori people digest almost at one meal, our own slowly evolved habits of thought, behaviour and culture. We are what happens when certain attitudes are adopted towards a stone-age people who, officially, have never been regarded as an inferior race. The frictions and prejudices that undoubtedly exist spring from differences of behaviour and not from past injuries on the scale of the gigantic infamies in America and Africa. We are a picture in miniature of what happens when the dominant race adopts a civilized attitude and, inevitably, blunders from time to time in the efforts to realize its ideals. This seems to me to be wonderful material and it surprises me that it has not been searched in depth by one of our distinguished younger novelists.

  On my return to New Zealand after five years, I found myself looking at my own country, however superficially, from the outside, in.

  II

  From that time until this evening, life has fallen for me into a constant though irregular rhythm. So many years in New Zealand, so many in England or abroad. Half the year in the theatre and half writing detective fiction.

  In 1937 I returned for a year to England with Bet and another New Zealand friend. There was a joyful reunion with the Lampreys who were having a crisis, a meeting with Edmund Cork, my agent, and three months in Germany, Austria and Northern Italy. One German incident steps out very clearly from this adventure.

  We were becalmed in Beilstein because Bet had pleurisy. It is a mediaeval town no bigger than an English village. It is flawless in its kind. The houses are joined together, there are windows in the roofs and even trees that grow like eyebrows over them. Little cars are drawn by oxen or cows and hay is hauled up and stored in attics. Hard by the little town flows the River Mosel which in those days was crossed by a ferry, propelled by the stream. All the people in Beilstein except the very old and very young worked from dawn to sunset on the vines and came down in the evening dyed a bright cerulean blue with copper sulphate. The oldest couple of all were Frau and Herr Koppel. They lived in two rooms, were very poor and sold stamps, faded postcards and wild strawberries which they gathered in the woods. They were too old for the vines. Koppel is a Jewish name.

  We stayed in the house of the leading wine-growers, the widow Lippmann and her son. At one time it was a fortress and belonged to the Metternichs. Herr Lippmann spoke English very slowly and solemnly and was fat and in awe of his mama. I was writing and used to stay up late over my work, sitting out on the terrace among boxes of carnations and night-scented stocks. The river lapped and slapped at the landing and the air was very still, warm and heavy. When his mama had retired for the night, Herr Lippmann sometimes appeared rather timidly with a bottle of wine. One evening, the bottle was encrusted in mud because the Mosel had overflowed twice since that vintage. It was a glorious Bernkastler. Herr Lippmann, after ceremoniously doing a sort of ‘Hoch!’ thing and clinking glasses, entertained me with a conjuring trick involving a piece of string and a ring. As he had no patter it was all a little laborious. Gramp would have despised it.

  By day, river craft carried hoards of Kraftdurchfreude up the Mosel. They flaccidly waved their handkerchiefs at nobody in particular, played concertinas and did Heil Hitler at the drop of a hat. Some rich people from Mannheim stopped for dinner on their way to a motor rally and the men, who had been prisoners of war in England during the Great War, introduced themselves to us and spent a long time telling us how wonderful was the régime and how you only had to say Heil Hitler to a stranger and he would embrace you like a brother. One of them cried a little out of pure fascist sentiment. It was wunderbar – like a miracle – what had happened, and all owing to the Führer. We were embarrassed and made noises. We had been told over and over again how punctual the trains were in Italy all because of the Duce and how clean and honest and joyous everyone was in Germany because of the Führer and how superb we would find the autobahns and autostrade: all because of totalitarianism.

  One day, as I was writing on the terrace, I saw two brownshirts. They crossed by ferry and their jackboots made a clatter on the stone steps. Beilstein was noisy in the afternoons. The very small kinder yelled and fought and the old ladies screamed orders at them. German village children are very tough and noisy. Women shouted in neighbourly fashion from upper windows and in the schoolhouse the older children bellowed out a chanted table. ‘Ein, zwei, drei –’ while their teacher screeched at them. Now, suddenly, all was quiet except for the sound of shutting doors and approaching jackboots. I went up to the girls’ room which overlooked the little market square and we watched from the windows. The two brownshirts tramped in and out of the houses, and the whole of the little town seemed to echo with jackboots. They nailed something up on the notice board and tramped away. The doors opened quietly one by one and sound returned but in a subdued fashion.

  That night the bell in the Rathaus was rung and all the Beilsteiners collected in the square. The Mayor read a notice and papers were handed out. I can see, now, cerulean fists crushing papers and thrusting them into pockets as the men turn away and go silently indoors.

  Next morning I worked on one of the old battlements, approached only by a winding stair inside the wall. Herr Lippmann came out and was so white in the face that I asked him to sit down. We looked at each other across the small iron table and he said in his slow fashion that he believed he could trust me and that it would be a relief to speak. So I heard that yesterday’s visitation was about the old Koppels. ‘They are to be ostracized. No one is to enter their room or befriend them or speak to them.’ They were not clean; they were Jews. It would be better if there were no Jews contaminating the pure Nordic air of the Mosel. The thing that had been nailed up on the town notice board was a printed diatribe against Jews. ‘Juden.’ ‘Juden’ ‘Juden.’ in black type with a hideous Svengali-like face glaring out of it. Something out of the most debased kind of sadistic comic strip; an obscene thing.

  ‘So now,’ said Herr Lippmann, ‘they will starve or perhaps they will be taken away in the night. It has happened many times before,’ and he told me of dreadful things, all the time looking nervously about him and listening in case there should be anyone on the stairs. He said that in the Metternichs’ time they put a Jewish factor in charge of their property in Beilstein and his children married local peasants and thus introduced a dram of Hebrew blood into the community. I read in Herr Lippmann’s face what we afterwards saw above his father’s name on a gravestone in a hidden plot up in the hills-interlaced triangles.

  After this I slept badly. A few nights later at about two o’clock on a stifling morning I heard t
he unmistakeable tinkle of the Koppels’ shop bell and thought: ‘Is that it? Have they come for them?’ But there were no footsteps. I got up and looked down into the square towards the Koppels’ door. A full moon had risen but I stared into an inky pool of shadow. After a time it cleared a little and there emerged the large, hopeless face of Frau Koppel, upturned to the night sky. She kept absolutely still and so did I. As the moon rose its light discovered her face and I suppose that warned her to hide because she went indoors and the bell rang again, very faintly. On several nights after this I heard it and once, a subdued murmur of voices. I think the Haus Lippmann was sending food into the Haus Koppel during the small hours.

  Soon afterwards we left Beilstein. On our last day I went for a walk in the woods and by one of those long coincidences that one would never dare to use in a novel, I ran into a fellow New Zealander. He was a hiker – a student type and he was full of enthusiasm for the régime. ‘I reckon,’ he said, ‘they tell you a lot of tripe about this outfit. I reckon it’s great. Clean. Honest. Wonderful spirit. And look at the roads – wonderful!’

  I returned to New Zealand in the following winter and a year later war was declared.

  III

  For seventeen years after my mother’s death, apart from this journey in 1937, I enjoyed the vague, loving companionship of my father and we were very happy together. On the whole ours was a masculine household. For days on end the only other woman in it was our much-loved housekeeper, Mrs Crawford, who looked after my father when I was away. Sometimes, as in the old days, Mivvy came up from Dunedin to stay and sometimes, of course, Phyllis and other old student-friends, but by and large it was a male establishment with the emphasis on my father’s generation rather than my own.

  On Sundays there were the Walker ‘boys’, James and Cecil (no longer bearded), in the mornings and again to supper in the evenings when they were often joined by Papa Jellett and Unk. There was the same party, as a rule, for dinner on Tuesday nights. After dinner we played Lexicon which James was dreadfully bad at.

  Unk must now be reintroduced. He was my uncle by marriage, a widower, a geologist of great distinction with wild hair, a startled eye, a strange nervous manner and a mad disregard for the niceties of wearing apparel. In these respects he was like a Professor in a Whitehall farce and he was, I think, one of the most innocent beings I have ever known. He used to camp out on our interesting volcanic hills with a fellow savant for days on end adding to the rich sum of geological research in New Zealand. When my aunt was alive, she once invited me to look in Unk’s rucksack. ‘Would you like to see what your uncle has packed for camping in the back country?’

  A hammer, some rocks, a pair of knickerbockers and, tightly screwed up and rammed into a crevice, his dinner jacket, wrapped round a pair of hobnailed boots.

  On one occasion, when he was to attend an international scientific dinner he fell into even greater sartorial extravagances. Because some of the visiting scientists had not brought evening dress with them, a compromise had been arranged. My aunt laid out all the appropriate garments in Unk’s dressing-room and sternly forbade him to open any drawers or doors when he came in to change. He was making a bonfire in the garden. She herself was dining out an an earlier hour than he and she left full of misgivings.

  When she returned and looked into his room she found chaos. Clothing littered every surface. All drawers and doors were open and their interiors in hideous confusion. She sorted things out and the conclusion she was obliged to draw from what seemed to be missing was so appalling that she was stricken into a kind of fateful immobility. She waited. At midnight Unk returned like Cinderella. He came through the house, having seen she was at home, shouting ‘All right, all right. Very well. Very good. You need say no more.’ (She had not uttered.) ‘I am perfectly well aware. Very good.’ The door opened and he stood shouting on the threshold dressed in the Donegal tweed trousers he kept for bonfires, a Paisley tie, an orphan waistcoat and his tails.

  ‘You need say no more. My attention was otherwise engaged. Very good.’

  One of his brother-scientists who knew him pretty well, afterwards told my aunt that about halfway through the party he was seen to be vaguely trying to pull his tailcoat over the lining of his waistcoat and presently, becoming aware of what ailed him, retired behind an armchair from where he upheld an animated conversation with a visiting savant.

  His was an entirely different absence-of-mind from that of my father who used to laugh gently at Unk.

  My father was particular in his dress and liked to wear a flower in his coat. He could never remember that he was getting at all elderly and remained extremely active, playing tennis until his eightieth birthday when I persuaded him to stop as it really was exhausting him. Soon after this his appendix perforated and Sir Hugh Acland removed it – his last operation before he retired. I could see, to my terror, that everybody except Sir Hugh expected my father to die and indeed he was awfully ill for several days. Thanks, as people say in agony columns, to skilful surgery, to the most devoted nursing and to a constitution that amazed everyone except himself, he recovered and took up bowls. When the war came he joined the Home Guard and ran about the hills hurling hand grenades and throwing himself flat on his face until his doctor forbade it. He then made camouflage nets but insisted upon using his own stitch which led to arguments. I became a Red Cross Transport Driver and did fortnightly duties on a hospital bus and also met returned wounded and drove them home. My male cousins enlisted: Richard, the day war was declared. He spent his last leave with us, wrote gaily from Egypt and died of wounds on Crete.

  New Zealanders did not for a moment think there was any immediate threat to their own country. Again, the entire fit manhood of a small population was emptied out of these islands and it was not until after Singapore had fallen that it gradually became certain, as it seemed, that the Japanese would mount a full-scale invasion against us. We began to practise evacuating the hospitals and people built themselves retreats in the foothills. My father dug a funk-hole in the garden. Carried away by the creative urge, he roofed it with enormous pine logs which would have fallen on our heads at the smallest disturbance. We could hear and feel blasting under our hills where, it was rumoured, munitions were being secreted. Tank-stops went up along the Summit Road. A total blackout was imposed and by this time we were quite sure they would come.

  A Lamprey cabled to me. ‘Don’t forget Japanese mothers nurse their children for seven years.’

  My father put down four bottles of champagne against the peace but when it came and we opened them, their life had gone. They had been kept too long.

  Now that the time has come when I must part with him, I wonder if I have managed to convey anything of my father. He was naïve and he seemed to many people, I daresay, to be a very straightforward, rather comical man, not madly successful in life. He was excitable and in minor crises was inclined to get himself into what my mother called fluffs but he was extraordinarily understanding and there was nothing I could not say to him. Even after his appendix he was able to do quite a lot of things he enjoyed. He played two small character parts in plays I directed. I used to walk round the set every night just before his entrance and there he would be, listening, with his ear at the door, for his cue. He would look at me and his eyes would snap and we would nod happily at each other and on he would go.

  It was his heart that played up at last. He detested the disabilities of old age and was bewildered that they should be inflicted upon him. Not long before he died, being at my wits’ end for something he could ‘do’ – old age is like childhood in this respect – I suggested that he might write down some of his considered opinions. He rather took to the idea. I fixed him up with one of my unused manuscript books and a pen and he sat out in the garden. I would look down and see his hand moving across the paper. For a time he wrote collectedly and with excellent precision. Granny Marsh. The Georgian House. Uncle William. South Africa. New Zealand. Marriage. Me. ‘Our only child – our dau
ghter: Edith Ngaio.’ There was a wonderful broadside at the baleful consequences of organized religion.

  And then the excellent clerkly hand began to waver. Sentences are a little confused. One day he looked up at me and said: ‘I don’t know, darling. This book seems so heavy.’ I took it from him. ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Never mind.’

  It was a great sorrow when he died but there was no bitterness. I missed him dreadfully but wouldn’t have had him to go on any longer than he desired. He died in the spring of 1949.

  IV

  It was strange to be the only one of our little family. To begin with I was desolate. For some years everything (and it was fortunate that writing is a housebound job) had been ordered to meet the condition of having someone increasingly dependent upon me. This was no hardship. With our improving resources I had found understudies, young friends as well as Mrs Crawford, who could take over for a day or two, or on rehearsal nights if I was engaged in the theatre. I had a secretary, Pam, who lived with us and was a great help and solace during my father’s illness. She was a graduate of Canterbury University College and her arrival in our household was tied up with a series of ventures that have, I believe, brought greater satisfaction to me than anything else that has come my way. In order to write about them I must go back a little in time.

  Immediately before and during the first years of the war, while my father was still extremely active, I had, between books, begun to do a good deal of direction for various soi-disant repertory societies in New Zealand. There were no resident professional companies in this country but the leading amateur bodies employed, as they still do, professional directors, staff, secretary, premises and theatres. The name repertory is an accepted misnomer since none of these highly developed societies ever presents a repertoire. They offer perhaps as many as seven separate major productions at intervals during the year and depend largely upon their membership to keep them solvent. Many of them play safe with box-office successes from England or America but most are prepared to risk one or two rather more venturesome pieces to appease the intelligentsia in their audiences and satisfy immortal longings in the odd administrative breast.