My best friend at art school was Julie. One of the things that had attracted me to her was that she knew all about colour and texture. This impressed me as instinctual and innate because she was herself all colour and texture. With glowing gold skin and shining black hair, she wore clean red lipstick revealing pearly white teeth. She also had lovely eyes with a languorous glance. Her clear yellow linen shirt was a stroke of inspiration, and her dull purple corduroy trousers were the texture of the underside of a mushroom. Her choice of clothes was the perfect complement to her own colours and textures. How come this was so unusual with art students in the late forties and early fifties? You could quite easily have imagined that students off to the art school were in fact heading for a prayer meeting. One day in pure frustration Russell Clark announced, ‘Tomorrow you must come to your life class looking like art students!’ It didn’t work; the result was simply embarrassing. Style doesn’t happen overnight, and people who don’t have any don’t know what it is. Russell Clark gave up.
I was not consistent, but there were times when I was happy and popular. These were not, however, times when I came up with ideas or did any worthwhile reading. It seemed I could only pay serious attention to my creativity when I felt alone and rejected. Then, as if coming to my rescue, my visual intelligence would click in.
Reading also sustained me when I was being punished for my own silliness. I read voraciously, as if searching for the final revelations. Fortunately, my two women friends at Connon Hall, where I went after Bishop Julius, guided my reading. Marg Richardson, a few years older than me, was doing her post-grad degree in English and she talked about books the way other girls would talk about their love affairs. She was lovely: tall, blonde and beautiful. The war had directed the lives of her family in New Zealand. Her mother and these three really amazing-looking daughters hid out in Wellington after Singapore fell. Marg’s father was flown back into the jungle behind Singapore to organise resistance. When the city fell, Marg’s father walked into the Japanese general’s house to accept his surrender and found his own furniture there.
As I was in exile from Marchwiel, so Marg was from pre-war Singapore. This allowed her to experiment with her image, so that she appeared to be the opposite of the academic woman. Most of the well-born women at Connon Hall followed the well-born girl’s drill: Pringle twinsets and pearls, well-cut skirts and brogues. Hair: sometimes still war hair, tortured into weird lumps around the face or a knotted plait on top of the head and stuff hanging down to the neck; sometimes perms. Younger women wore shoulder-length hair turned up at the ends. This involved sleeping in curlers.
As time went on Marg’s strange transformation became more polished, but at Connon Hall it was wildly experimental; she was like Jean Harlow roughed up. This was the second half of the forties and she was as new as punk in the seventies. A star of the Little Theatre, she was in quite a number of Ngaio Marsh’s productions, so the theatrical came naturally to her. She was inventing herself in a self-conscious way. I was random, unaware of what the reaction to my behaviour and my appearance would be.
Barb Moore was the third member of our group, and a little older again. She had been in the Navy in the war and was studying to be some sort of veterinary scientist. Elegant, tall and with a natural good taste, she just assumed she was looking fine. Barb was one of the dispossessed too. Her father fled England for New Zealand in the thirties after he lost everything in the Depression. As a member of the British aristocracy he did not wish to embarrass his relations by being poor and hanging around. I remember when the Queen married, one of Barb’s cousins was a bridesmaid. Barb was pained by this, had an acute sense of this other life she might have lived. I tried to comfort her with her shining future, assuring her that being the scientist, gaining satisfaction from one’s own achievements, was surely a superior destiny. That destiny she did achieve, but whether she felt it a superior one I do not know.
Young people may contain all their prejudices intact inside them but for long periods not be too bothered by them. It is extraordinary that my two best friends at Connon were English. Marg, with a family tradition in the Colonial Service and Barb by rights a member of the British aristocracy. Why was I attracted to them and, more curiously, why were they attracted to me?
It is true that we were in fact very alike. The sorts of conversations we had were completely relaxed and pleasurable; they came quite naturally. However, it was during our conversations after dinner in their study that I began to understand that Irish God who looks three ways. That what you see depends on where you are looking from. For instance, the South American history I had learnt at boarding school included Raleigh the Pirate. Marg’s and Barb’s American history was about Raleigh the Hero. I knew of him as the despoiler of Ireland; they knew of him as the glorious conqueror of Ireland. Then there was Catherine of Aragon and her daughter Mary: to me they were victims of Henry’s greed and duplicity, to them murderous bigots. We didn’t of course even begin to touch on the IRA or the Black and Tans, as we understood that we could lose our friendship in those desperate complications. But it made a shift in my perceptions, having to understand that an historical truth is something glimpsed at rare moments but mostly born out of self-interest. That historical truths are mostly the interpretations of those who are controlling society.
However, despite all these subterranean broodings, Marg’s generosity, sweetness of nature and her great intelligence buoyed us both up. She had no money at this stage because the British government was putting off deciding just what it owed her father for his heroism. Her mother was teaching in Wellington and Marg waitressed at StudAss to help herself through university. Despite this, she did an excellent MA and played that ditsy blonde to the hilt while she did it. She made her own clothes, always slightly askew: Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop with a Brit accent – although, come to think of it, Marilyn hadn’t really happened by then either.
Ten years later and there is that clear memory flash from ’58. My husband Fraser and I are watching Marg descending from an aeroplane from Singapore. Believe me, the whole airport was watching. A member of the Colonial Service, a polished version of Connon Hall’s Marg: she’s tall, beautiful, blonde as usual, but her act is joyously perfected. She’s wearing a fitting cream silk tropical suit, elegant high heels and – the telling inspiration – delicate black silk gloves to the elbow. Lovely long real pearls and make-up to die for. Grace Kelly in High Society, and she hadn’t happened yet either. We gasped in admiration.
What courage Marg had to adjust her fate, to go back to her parents’ country, England, to find her own Singapore. To sit the Colonial Service exams, to win through in a selection as brutal as any, and get an appointment in Singapore. But it didn’t turn out to be as simple as that – not for me, I mean. For it was Marg’s return that illustrated not just how she had become whole, but how I was beginning to find my own direction. For the two nights she stayed with us I let her rip. I didn’t want to fight with her as she revealed what she had become. She was part of the organisation to put down the communists in Singapore. The very people whom her father had organised to kill the Japanese invader Marg must now kill. I don’t mean she actually went around with a gun shooting people, although I would think she often did have a gun. She went about in an armoured car with guards and, asking no questions, assumed the white man’s burden energetically. Marg also went on to explain to us how the Labour Party in England had corrupted a noble way of life. Coarse and tasteless working-class people were to be observed talking loudly, behaving badly, in places they would once have had the good sense to stay away from. They were so stupid they no longer knew where they were not welcome. Fraser and I went in for long pauses after statements like this – statements that Marg made with enormous confidence and good humour. At Connon Hall, had I simply chosen to ignore this aspect of Marg’s mentality? Or had these attitudes, which she once suppressed, now come to the forefront? She was certain of her values, certain about where she belonged, but I understoo
d talking to her again that I too had begun to seriously define myself. Marg could easily have mistaken Fraser and me for communists that she was obliged to kill off. After all, we were trying to give personhood to the most dispossessed: the mad people in New Zealand. Their behaviour in privileged places would indeed be loud and unseemly, and they certainly would not have had the good sense to know they shouldn’t be there.
Meantime, I was still misbehaving at Helen Connon Hall, and in 1950 Miss Candy rightly and properly expelled me. The curfew for week nights was ten; I got in at three.
As usual none of it was my fault, but Miss Candy had had enough. Clutching my toothbrush, I bicycled off up Fendalton Road against the morning traffic. My friend Julie’s warm-hearted mother gave me a bed for the night? The day? When the coast was clear, I sneaked back to Connon to collect the rest of my things.
For the following month Miss Candy painstakingly unpicked my name from her sampler. This sampler was very special. Only the names of favoured girls featured. This unpicking was carried out in full view of the student body. Like the Reverend Mother at Teschemakers, Miss Candy sat on a raised platform at the end of the refectory. A few chosen senior girls shared her table. They practised their conversational skills and perfected their table manners. They also reported to me the painful obliteration of my name from Miss Candy’s sampler and the history of Helen Connon Hall.
After my early-morning exit, I was fortunate to find the ideal place to live – a cluster of studios built by Sydney Thompson on Cambridge Terrace. These studios faced on to a green verge, willow trees and the Avon River itself. It was just lovely. I only had to walk around the corner and there was the art school. Across the bridge was an Italian fish place with the most delicious oysters and whitebait, cheap and scrumptious. I was in bohemian heaven and just about made it to the end of that year. Sydney Thompson’s sister lived in the studio next door – the same one, I think, that Rita Angus had lived in ten years earlier.
My flatmate, Ann Flannery (who was at that time always called Flan), had a degree in literature but was consumed with an ambition to play the lead roles in the great classic dramas. She looked like Vermeer’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’, and her voice was superb, rich and expressive. She was learning voice from Maria Dronke, a famous actress in Austria before Hitler cleaned out all the talent in that country.
The Christ’s College boys made their routine snide remarks about Flannery and Fahey: were we a music-hall dance team and wasn’t it true how Micks stick together? Ann was totally confused by all this; she didn’t seem to know that Flannery was an old Irish name. She had been at school with Marg Richardson at Queen Margaret’s in Wellington and was in complete denial, but surely she would have stumbled on, say, Flannery O’Connor, and the name in Irish literature. It was Ann who had given me Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer the Christmas before. Did she believe, because she was an Anglican, that prejudice shouldn’t apply to her? Years later, she confessed to me that in fact her people were of Irish Catholic background and Flannery was a southern Irish name. ‘Yes, I know,’ I said, and she seemed surprised. But it wasn’t as if Ann believed in an Anglican God. She didn’t believe in God at all; she was by her very generous nature socialist. Having been brought up in an Anglican society and having absorbed their prejudices, was she prejudiced against herself? Did she imagine in herself those weaknesses and faults her Anglican classmates perceived in Irish Catholics?
At the end of the year, despite the distraction of living with me, she won a scholarship to the London School of Drama – and, under the name Kate Flannery, became highly acclaimed as an actress both in the UK and in New Zealand. I was so relieved because I felt guilty about her. It was entirely my fault we were thrown out of that prestigious studio about bang on exam time.
In my last year at university, 1950, I had given up acting astonished victim when bad things happened to me. I understood that something in my own nature messed my life around. If I was determined to do as I wished, I could, I had learnt, expect trouble. At this time I had imagined that somehow or other I had extricated myself from the private-dances lot – those debs. But one weekend at the end of that year there was a wedding and Hugh Richards hit town, down from the back country and hell-bent on mischief. When eventually television happened and The Virginians featured, I was reminded of Hugh and his mates. Hugh was a cowboy with style, reckless and handsome. When he blew himself up a few months later there were quite a few sobbing young women at the funeral who believed he intended to marry them. Right on, Hugh.
Anyway, I wasn’t asked to the wedding, so when a bunch of debs turned up at my flat I was confused. Then the guys turned up with the booze, and I said, ‘Look, out of here! You’re not messing my studio around, thank you.’
But, ‘No, no,’ they said. ‘Hugh’s told us. Hugh’s arranged a party on an island with you. He’s just gone to get food and more booze. You know it’s all your idea about parties and meaningful places. Hugh said it was about Vile Bodies’ – a reference to Evelyn Waugh’s novel about the frivolity of the post-First World War generation – ‘that we are the vile bodies. Remember?’
I screamed, ‘I am no longer a vile body and this is not happening,’ but of course it did, because Hugh turned up and it did sound like a real blast.
When we arrived at Lyttelton, Hugh organised a ferry to the island. The suitable-for-debs young man whose family owned the island felt pretty good about his contribution to the party, but had he told his parents? I think not. On the ferry I remember an hilarious dance with Hugh, and Dick trying to punch him. I sang a song for us to dance to, ‘Who’s sorry now’, and then we arrived at the wharf and Hugh paid the ferryman. It did occur to me that you would think he would pay him after the return trip.
The wool shed, a lovely wooden cathedral smelling of sheep, was simply ideal for a party. Yes, it was a perfect Vile Bodies scenario. But that night I understood that I was old. This new batch of debs with their suitable Christ’s College boyfriends were appallingly young. I was twenty-one, this was my fifth year at art school, and I could see they thought I was a woman of the world. They sat about more like the audience than participants, while we of ‘the hard core that never breaks’ – a good quote from Vile Bodies – performed like performing seals. Their navy-blue edge-to-edge coats, their stud dresses in pastel tones, their pearls, their navy-blue court shoes were a uniform. Some of the young men who had a family role in the wedding were wearing morning dress. Most of the young women were overweight. (There is a carry-on now about how we are getting fatter and fatter, but have they checked out forties and fifties wedding photographs? A fat bride, often with six fat bridesmaids.) But their faces were sweet with hope, scrubbed clean with a light coating of Milk of Roses and a touch of Helena Rubenstein pink lipstick. They thought it all was madly exciting – that is, until there was an almost imperceptible change in the density of the dark. I stepped outside on to a wooden platform overlooking the bay, and the silence had a tension to it. The tension in the atmosphere just before dawn breaks.
Hugh followed me out and, grabbing my arm, said, ‘Don’t argue, please. Let’s go, let’s get out of here while we still can. I have found a boat. Quick, come on!’ and he ran me down the dunes towards the sea. Wading out to the small boat, Hugh said, ‘I cancelled the ferry. They will kill us.’
Already I could hear the noise of a mob pursuing us. Fowler and Fitts, my mates who escorted me to things to piss their mothers off, weren’t so drunk they missed anything that I was up to – they were wading close behind Hugh and me. As we all scrambled into the boat, very large Madge, the hostess with the mostest we called her, fell messily into the sea and then somehow collapsed into the bottom of the boat. With Hugh yelling instructions, we were off. The partygoers, screaming abuse and shaking their fists, lined the shore. Dick, in a last-minute effort, tried to reach the boat more to sink it than to join us.
As dawn broke we pulled away from the island and headed towards the ocean. I do believe it was Madge
lying in the bottom of the boat who saved our lives. She acted as ballast. At one point, out in the open sea, Fowler and Fitts lost the trick of rowing, and for a while we just went round and round in circles. Hugh produced a bottle of brandy and that got the boys back on course. Unfortunately, it also inspired Hugh to declare a poem to the dawn and he felt it necessary to stand to do this. But for Madge’s weight in the bottom of the boat we would all have been thrown into the sea.
The dawn was quite glorious. How much we miss in life not being there when dawn breaks. I was rowing through a world of light and magic, of birds and sound. I was not aware that we were putting our lives at risk, because I was a participant in a transcending process. We finished the brandy as the ferry from Wellington passed us. People on deck waved and yelled as if they had spotted a whale and we all felt hilarious again. We beached in front of someone’s brother’s house, and Madge, a remarkable young woman, stood up as good as new. We ate breakfast in someone’s brother’s house and then Hugh found his truck.
The drive over the Port Hills was a nightmare. I had often found that after a night out on the town or, in this case, on an island, a large breakfast brings you right down. All I wanted now was my bed and sleep. I climbed in the back with Fowler and Fitts; Madge got in the front with Hugh – I was too scared. Hugh drove like a wild drunk man, which is exactly what he was. I clung desperately to the iron bar across his rear-view window as he sped and swerved and then braked suddenly, as if determined to throw us off out of the truck on to the road. It was horrendous, and my nerves were shredded anyway. When Hugh stopped for cigarettes, I climbed off and started walking.
Something for the Birds Page 12
