The Search for Anne Perry

by Joanne Drayton

  The course of events might have been changed by a plan for Juliet to stay with the Riepers while Hilda and Henry went back to England to attend the Congress of the Universities of the British Commonwealth in London and for a three-and-a-half-month lecture tour. Time together for the girls at the Riepers might have helped normalize things and reinstate a better relationship between Pauline and her parents. But the arrangement was derailed by the shocking revelation that Juliet had tuberculosis in one lung. On the eve of their departure, the Hulmes decided to admit Juliet to the Christchurch Sanatorium and continue with their plans. Once again, Juliet felt abandoned and betrayed.

  The sanatorium, perched on the tussock-covered windswept slopes of the Cashmere Hills overlooking the city, was a frightening place for a young teenager on her own. The low, flat verandah-edged buildings looked more like a collection of prefabricated army huts than a hospital. It was a stark, sterile environment in which people died. No one who visited could escape a pressing awareness of their mortality.

  New treatments, however, offered hope for a complete recovery. On his return to Christchurch in 1948, Dr FO Bennett ‘was re-appointed as Assistant Physician on the hospital staff and was given charge of the infectious diseases and thus was able to supervise the first treatments of tuberculous meningitis (TB) with streptomycin’.52 It was a ‘miracle’ treatment that might in time result in a complete eradication of the disease.

  In spite of these positive prospects, Juliet’s life at the Christchurch Sanatorium was bleak:

  Each morning I was woken up in this freezing open-air ward, where the water jugs had ice on top, to enormous pills and a needle in my backside. Sometimes they’d catch a nerve and you couldn’t walk all day.53

  In a bed close to Juliet was a classmate from 3A, Joan White, who was admitted almost at the same time. Juliet had visits from schoolmates and acquaintances, but no one who meant as much to her as Pauline. Honorah Rieper brought Pauline to visit three times, but the girls exchanged letters almost daily. Until then their writing had been done in exercise books and was distinct from their everyday experience. Now, in their correspondence, they wrote in role: Juliet became Antoinette and Deborah; Pauline was Gina and Paul. These characters came to life for them with a new poignancy and momentum because of their immediacy. This was not the first time Juliet’s mind had transported her from a hospital bed, but now she was not alone. Pauline was with her.

  Juliet went into the sanatorium on 21 May and left on 9 September 1953, a week after her parents returned home. Although she was not yet cured of TB, Juliet was released on the promise that Hilda would nurse her at home. In spite of being urged to communicate, in the whole time Juliet was in the sanatorium she wrote only a hurried note and two quick letters to her parents. ‘Both were short and appeared to have been written without care,’ Hilda recalled.54

  This lack of communication was followed by Juliet’s retreat from family life. She was ill and bed-ridden much of the time, but she stopped reading her books to her mother and involving her parents in her imaginative and psychological landscape. ‘When I returned to N.Z.,’ Hilda later observed, ‘I noticed a marked change in her personality. She seemed very much more withdrawn. I noticed the friendship with Pauline was the only thing that mattered to her.’55 She also noted a considerable acceleration in the amount of literature her daughter was producing.

  Juliet did not return to Christchurch Girls’ High School, and without her Pauline’s interest in her studies faltered. The excitement and the future lay with Juliet and their writing. In her diary she recorded her mood swings. One day she was ecstatically happy, and the next in despair. In a diary entry made in November 1953, she wrote: ‘To-day I felt thoroughly, utterly and completely depressed. I was in one of those moods in which committing suicide sounds heavenly.’56 These extremes were not incompatible with her stage of life, but there was no parent to mediate them. She had lost faith in the value of Herbert and Honorah’s decisions. Her life felt desperately out of control. The only thing she had power over was what she ate.

  Researcher in childhood and youth studies Mary Jane Kehily has argued that ‘the body is an important site for the exercise of power … [and it] becomes the expression of distress and of the contradictions and paradoxes girls experience around their bodies and sexualities’.57 Eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia occur at the highest rates between the ages of 15 and 19, and depression leading to self-harm is not uncommon in this age group. Depressive disorders have ‘a constellation of symptoms such as tearfulness, sleep disturbance, loss of appetite and suicidal thoughts’, all of which Pauline experienced to varying degrees.58 She needed help.

  She began to lose weight, and the drop was dramatic enough to worry her parents. Hilda noticed it, too. ‘Pauline had lost a great deal of weight during my absence and I advised her [Honorah] to seek medical advice.’59 Pauline had become withdrawn and sullen, and now, although it was not identified as such, she was probably suffering from bulimia. Honorah, concerned about the weight loss and its link to her ‘unhealthy’ friendship with Juliet, took Pauline in December 1953 to see Dr Bennett, the general physician recommended by the Hulmes. After his examination, he decided she was not in good health and that her weight was of concern. He made a classic diagnosis that the friendship had a homosexual overtone but that both girls were likely to grow out of it.

  Honorah had her own techniques for handling Pauline’s difficult behaviour. The most effective was the threat that Pauline would not be able to see Juliet. ‘The thought is too dreadful,’ wrote Pauline in her diary on 20 December. ‘Life would be unbearable without Deborah … I rang Deborah and told her the threat. I wish I could die. That is not an idle or temporary impulse, I have decided over the last 2 or 3 weeks that it would be the best thing that could happen altogether, and the thought of death is not fearsome.’60 Questioned later, Herbert said he did not think Pauline had missed any visits to Juliet.

  Pauline began her diary for 1954 with these words: ‘My New Year resolution is a far more selfish one than last year, so there is more probability of my keeping it. It is to make my motto “Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow you may be dead”.’61 This would be the year when Honorah decided to encourage Pauline to leave school. Whether it was an idle threat that snowballed into cold reality or a plan in which the antagonistic teenager was complicit, the outcome was disastrous. Without school, Pauline would lose her only possibility of escape from a life she found barren and oppressive. As Tess Ridge writes: ‘For these children school holds the potential to provide a new social milieu, the opportunity to encounter other people both similar to and different from themselves, and the chance to be securely embedded in an alternative social universe.’62

  Pauline’s contribution to the fifth-form speech competition right before she left was one her amused classmates never forgot. The instruction was to give a speech on the person students would most like to be. While classmates chose people like Tensing, much favoured after Edmund Hillary’s recent ascent of Everest, Pauline said ‘she would have liked to be Nero watching Rome burn’.63

  Her brilliance and all her high-minded aspirations seemed to have come to nothing now she was enrolled not at snobbish Girls’ High but at Digby’s Commercial College, where she would learn shorthand and typing.

  Classmate Margaret Tyndall remembers her predicament in the family and after she left school: ‘Pauline would have been injured: “death by a thousand cuts”. Not anything dramatic … She was human and passionate and blindingly angry.’64 The only place her ambition and energy had to go was into plans with Juliet for their novels. Their intentions for the future and the storylines they wrote escalated in grandeur and violence.

  Initially, their stories were ‘quite innocuous’ and ‘adventurous’, not unlike Anthony Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda in concept, but then the plots became more complex and involved and the characters more violent. ‘The first was quite ordinary,’ remembered Hilda. ‘I did not like the second book nearly
so well … I had long talks with [Juliet] about it. I wished she would not be so extreme in her feelings and that she would write about ordinary people.’65

  The girls planned to leave New Zealand and travel to New York to find a publisher for their books and subsequently a film company in Hollywood where they would ‘choose their actors and supervise the filming of their novels’.66 The movies would, of course, star the Saints. This was not an untypical teenage dream, but most 1950s adolescents did not have the audacity to believe they could make it come true.

  Early in March, Pauline visited shipping companies to enquire about making the journey by sea. As a consequence of this they decided in favour of air travel and began saving money for their tickets. One of the first people they approached to help them raise money was Major Walter Andrew Bowman Perry, who was a tenant at the Hulmes’ homestead in Ilam.

  Canadian-born Bill Perry, as he was known, was a twice-wounded war hero with Clark Gable good looks (complete with moustache), who had arrived in Christchurch on 22 July 1953. He came as an ‘industrial consultant employed by the Associated Industrial Consultants of London’ to work on assignment in the city. Henry Hulme met Bill and introduced him to Hilda, who saw him professionally because his marriage had recently broken up. As his friendship with the Hulmes grew, he moved from Church Lane, Merivale, to a self-contained flat with a housekeeper at Ilam.

  It was never made clear when the relationship between Hilda and the dashing Bill Perry began. Many marriages were damaged by the war and fell apart in the 1950s. Bill Perry’s marriage was already over and the Hulmes’ in trouble. Hilda lived life intensely and with passion, and Bill Perry became her intoxication. It was not long before she told Henry about the affair. He seems to have been prepared to accept the situation, at least in the interim.

  Bill Perry was an odd person for Juliet to approach about selling her horse to raise money for the trip to Hollywood. Perhaps he seemed more available, more vulnerable to pressure, or maybe he was a surreptitious ally. Undoubtedly she picked up that he had become the focus of her mother’s attention. Bill remembered it was March: ‘the horse was a thoroughbred and from my inquiries, I knew Juliet would be disappointed. I purchased the horse myself and gave her father £50 … Juliet approached me one morning and asked me how much the fare [to the United States] would be, I asked her by ship or by air, and she said by air. I told her I thought it would be abt £150. She said, “Oh good, that means we’ve only got another £50 to get. We’ve nearly got £100.”’67

  To raise the rest of the money they concocted a number of fanciful schemes that included blackmailing Bill Perry and stealing money from Herbert’s place of work. Pauline’s nocturnal attempt at burglary ended when she discovered a policeman standing outside the fish shop, and Juliet’s extortion was thwarted by an unresponsive Bill Perry. Another idea was prostitution: ‘We worked out how much prostitutes would earn and how much we would make in such a profession and “should” gradually changed to “shall”,’ wrote Pauline in her diary.68 The one thing they managed to pull off twice was shoplifting, but this was not a fund-raising strategy. They gave away the proceeds to ‘[delight] the hearts of other people by giving them unexpected presents’.69 According to Pauline’s diary, sister Rosemary was the happy recipient of slippers and socks. The shoplifting was justified as research for their writing: they wanted to experience the adrenaline rush and the criminality. But these were not the only sensations they considered. ‘I would like to kill someone sometime because I think it is an experience that is necessary to life,’ says one of Pauline’s characters.70 The girls were staying up very late at night, sometimes all night. Often they were only telling stories and giggling, but they were frequently surviving on just a few hours’ sleep.

  Much of Pauline’s and Juliet’s thinking and behaviour was disruptive and juvenile, but some of it was also dangerous. Without any firm connection to reality or the adult world of restraint, their skewed adolescent ideas were like pinballs that bounced and deflected until — as any game of chance allows — one bizarre idea scored a tragic hit.

  Following his resignation from his position, Henry was returning to England. He made a special effort in April to inform the Riepers that he was going. It came as a huge relief when he told them that Juliet would be accompanying him, and that on the way home he planned to leave her with his sister in South Africa to convalesce. Pauline was desperate to accompany Juliet, but to go she had to have her parents’ as well as the Hulmes’ permission. Ultimately, no one would give this. Of the four parents, Honorah had been most opposed to the girls’ friendship, so the eventual unequivocal and unconditional no was a weight off her shoulders.

  Pauline had almost completely rejected both her parents, seeing them as equal obstacles to a happy life. On 13 February 1954, she wrote in her diary:

  There seemed to be no possibility of mother relenting and allowing me to go out to Ilam. This afternoon mother told me I could not go out to Ilam again until I was eight stone and more cheerful. As I am now seven stone there is little hope … she is so unreasonable. Why could mother not die? Dozens of people are dying, thousands are dying every day. So why not mother and father too?71

  As pressure compounded, her focus shifted so that it was only her mother who seemed to be in the way. Another startling announcement probably contributed to this change, as Pauline recorded in her diary on 24 April. ‘Dr and Mrs Hulme are going to divorce. The shock is too great to have penetrated in my mind yet … Deborah and I spent the day soaring between hell and heaven … Such a huge amount has happened that we do not know where we are … But one thing Deborah and I are sticking through everything (We sink or swim together).’72

  Researcher and educationalist Jane Brown has described the significance of same-sex relationships and the phenomenon of girls sticking together:

  Same sex friendships are fundamental to understanding girls’ social worlds, and frequently described by girls ‘as the most important thing in their lives’ … The idea that friends should ‘stick together’, was paramount … For these particular girls ‘being a mate’ and ‘sticking together’ meant presenting a united cohesive front, in the event of threats or attack. As a result, ‘standing by your pals’ could be key to dealing with intimidation and threats from other young people, or from unwanted attention from adults … who were perceived to interfere unjustly in girls’ lives.73

  Surrounded by circumstances beyond their control, the girls clung to their friendship as the only constant in their disintegrating lives. Pauline had proven herself a loyal and reliable friend when Juliet’s parents went away, and now they were arranging to separate and leave her again. Juliet, on the other hand, stood in the place of Pauline’s unsympathetic parents.

  Pauline was beginning to see a desperate solution. Her diary entry for 28 April 1954 read:

  Mother went out this afternoon so Deborah and I bathed for some time. However I felt thoroughly depressed afterwards and even quite seriously considered committing suicide. Life seemed so much not worth the living, the death such an easy way out. Anger against Mother boiled up inside me as it is she who is one of the main obstacles in my path. Suddenly a means of ridding myself of this obstacle occurred to me. If she were to die—.74

  Her ideas quickly began to coalesce. The next day she wrote: ‘I did not tell Deborah of my plans for removing Mother. I have made no [illegible word] yet as the last fate I wish to meet is one in a Borstal. I am trying to think of some way. I do not [illegible word] to go to too much trouble but I want it to appear either a natural or accidental death.’75

  On 30 April she shared her idea with Juliet: ‘she is rather worried but does not disagree violently’.76 The strain on both girls had become unendurable. Their plan to murder Honorah was a release and a comfort, an extreme form of juvenile ‘acting out’ to relieve tension and anxiety. This often occurs when young people feel let down or betrayed by adults. The adolescent takes a breach of protocol or personal treachery as permission to act
in a way that is out of character, rebellious and anti-social. Usually the act is self-abusive, such as disruptive, attention-seeking behaviour, promiscuity, shoplifting, smoking and drug and alcohol abuse, and is often interpreted as a cry for help, but on occasions it can take the form of violence against others.

  Because the friendship was ending, both sets of parents were happy for the girls to spend time together. Pauline stayed at Ilam homestead for just over a week starting on Friday, 11 June. It was towards the end of her time there, on 19 June, that she again mentioned the idea of murder. ‘Our main [idea] for the day was to moider Mother. This notion is not a new one, but this time it is a definite plan which we intend to carry out. We have worked it out carefully and are both thrilled by the idea. Naturally we feel a trifle nervous, but the pleasure of anticipation is great.’77

  Herbert picked Pauline up on the afternoon of Sunday, 20 June. They went out to Templeton Farm to see Rosemary, who was now five years old. Pauline, who enjoyed her visits to see and play with her sister, was relaxed and talkative. She seemed to have come to terms with her imminent separation from Juliet.

  This, however, was far from the case. On 20 June she wrote in her diary: ‘I tidied the room and messed about a little. Afterwards we discussed our plans for moidering Mother and made them a little clearer. Peculiarly enough, I have no (qualms of) conscience (or is it peculiar, we are so mad).’78 That evening Pauline sat quietly in front of the fire, writing what she told her parents was an opera.

  Pauline’s mood seemed to lift dramatically, and she applied herself to household chores with new vigour. Honorah told Herbert she was ‘pleased … because Pauline was so bright and had done a lot of work’. At lunchtime on Monday, 21 June, Honorah suggested that she and Pauline ‘go out the next day for an afternoon together as [Pauline] was starting work the following Monday’.79 Pauline convinced her mother to include Juliet in their expedition. That night she recorded in her diary: