Katherine's childhood was never penurious, and her father made money fast and in large quantities from 1890 onwards; but he had a severe initial struggle. His own father had left London for Australia in the middle of the century to make his fortune with gold or sheep or salesmanship, succeeding at nothing, though always a lively and amusing man, and blessed in his wife, Elizabeth, a Lancashire orphan despatched like a parcel to the antipodes by an aunt, as young women often were at the time. She bore him nine sons and a daughter, all delivered by a Maori midwife once they had moved to New Zealand. When Harold was eleven, his father, in Dickensian style, wanted him to leave school, but the boy pleaded to stay on until he was fourteen. He helped his mother with all the housework, and swept and clerked and auctioned for his father, often working until eleven at night, travelling through the bush on horseback. Sir Harold Beauchamp's Reminiscences and Recollections is a discreetly worded book throughout, but it is clear that, while he considered his mother an ‘earthly saint’, he saw his father as the principal drain on her saintly patience.
All this had a decisive effect on his attitude towards his own wife and daughters. They were shaped, deliberately and determinedly, into the mould of late Victorian ladies whose activities are confined to giving orders to servants, flower-arranging, party-giving, travel, tennis, a little music, a little reading, a little French and German, a little hypochondria and much choosing of hats and camisole ribbons. It gave him evident pride and pleasure to toil first at his insurance business, then as he prospered at the Wellington Harbour Board, and at the boards of frozen meat and chemical and gas companies and banks, in order that these women for whom he was responsible should never go through what he had seen his mother endure.
His insistence on decorous and conventional behaviour may have had a further spur. If his own father was a trial, his first cousin Fred was another, for he settled in New Zealand also, and there begot at least five sons upon a Maori ‘wife’, giving them the family names of George, Sam, John, Henry and Arthur. Katherine, fascinated by the exoticism of the Maoris and happy to pretend to Maori blood herself on occasion, seems never to have been told of these cousins, who are not recorded in her father's memoirs, despite its elaborate genealogical charts.6
Beauchamp's choice of wife was very different from Fred's. Annie Burnell Dyer was the sister of a clerk in the insurance firm in which young Harold, once he had resolved to part from his father, began his climb to affluence. Annie was always considered delicate, although this did not stop her from bearing children or travelling round the world time and time again; so perhaps her ‘weak heart’ was a version of the invalidism of so many Victorian ladies with reasons of their own for wishing to be spared domestic demands.
Joseph Dyer, Annie's father, had come to Australia in the 1840s, married a Sydney girl, Margaret Isabella Mansfield, and in 1871 was sent to Wellington to be the first resident-secretary of the Australian Mutual Provident Society. Six years later he died; but his widow was a capable woman, his children prospered, and when Harold Beauchamp married Annie in 1884 they were pleased to have Mrs Dyer to live with them, together with her two youngest daughters. Granny Dyer, who was only in her forties, took over the running of the house and much of the care of the children; Katherine's youngest sister, Mrs Jeanne Renshaw, recalled that most of her childhood meals were eaten with Granny and not with her parents.7
Harold prospered steadily. He made himself indispensable to his firm, so that by 1889 he was a partner, and five years later in sole charge. In the 1890s he began to be offered directorships, and joined the Wellington Harbour Board and the board of the Bank of New Zealand. He revelled in his own success and was thoroughly confident in the world of business. His wife is a more elusive character altogether. We can see from photographs that she was beautiful. She is also described as fastidious and delicate, and what we know of her behaviour suggests that she was cool – or possibly cold – and could be formidable. Appearances were very important to her. She knew she had married well, and that New Zealand was a snobbish place in which the families of businessmen, however successful, were not accepted as the social equals of professional people and that, however rich they became, the old settler families would continue to look down their noses at them as arriviste. Katherine noted early in her journal how her mother told her father ‘what he must do and not do’ in a social setting.8 In her home, Mrs Beauchamp lavished money on clothes for herself and her daughters, on flowers, on entertaining, but she was not a housewife. She was good at giving orders to her servants; her pleasures were reading, letter-writing and travel.
Whenever she could, she accompanied her husband on his journeys, and she was perfectly happy to travel alone, given the chance. Another note in Katherine's journal (made after her mother's death, in 1921) describes Mrs Beauchamp most arrestingly, sitting down to button her boots, wearing short frilled knickers, with her fine, springy hair standing out round her head, and saying she wished she had never married. If her own father had not died, Katherine remembered her saying, she would have liked to have become a traveller, an explorer even.9 The key to Annie Beauchamp was, perhaps, that she craved and felt herself capable of independence; but since the world was organized along lines that made such independence impossible, she determined at least to order her life as efficiently as possible. She was not a natural mother, but she was good at organizing and commanding her children. Her youngest daughter, Jeanne, told the author that her mother never spoke to any of them about their bodies and advised her eldest daughter, Vera, to bring her children up by ‘teaching them to control themselves’.
Emotionally, Annie appears to have held herself aloof from her family, and, if we allow ourselves to judge by Katherine's fictionalized versions of her parents (particularly in ‘Prelude’ and ‘The Stranger’), her attitude towards her husband's sexual needs was that she satisfied them out of pity tinged with resentment, and a sense of what was due to the master of the house: not much more.
These were the parents to whom, on 14 October 1888, Katherine was born. The birth took place at home, at 11 Tinakori Road, a long, high, winding street with a view over the sea, for Wellington Harbour is set amid hills. Her two elder sisters, aged three and one, were Vera and Charlotte, or ‘Chaddie’ (all the Beauchamps were passionate for nicknames). When Katherine was just one, her parents set off for their first visit to England. Her mother was away for six months, returning alone to give birth to a fourth daughter, who died. Then there was a fifth, Jeanne; and in 1893 the family moved to Karori, outside the city, to give the children the experience of country life. This move is recorded in Katherine's story ‘Prelude’; the Karori house was Chesney Wold and here the last Beauchamp child was conceived, a boy, Leslie (or Boy, or Chummie, or Bogey). Mrs Beauchamp had borne six children in nine years, and now that she had provided a son she stopped and bore no more, although she was only thirty. Here, too, she was clearly an efficient organizer.
The parents set off for England again early in 1898. Again, Granny took charge. Katherine remembered her mother bringing her back a tiepin from Switzerland, ‘made like a violet, and one shut one's eye and looked through it at the “Lion of Lucerne’”.10 Evidently they had taken in a Continental tour, and they also spent several weeks in America on their way back – a total absence of nine months, which must have seemed an eternity to the children. They brought back with them a newly published book by Harold's cousin ‘Elizabeth’ (née Mary Annette Beauchamp, now von Arnim): Elizabeth and Her German Garden, which was already on its way to becoming a best-seller. Ten-year-old Katherine was hugely impressed. According to family legend, it inspired her with the wish to become a writer also.
The family now moved back into Wellington. Their new house, again in Tinakori Road, had a billiard room and a tennis court in the garden: ‘a big, white-painted square house with a slender-pillared verandah and balcony running all the way round it’.11 We are entering the world of Edwardian middle-class luxury, and it is the setting for Katherine's story �
�The Garden Party’, one of the best evocations ever written of that phenomenon. As in ‘The Garden Party’, the small, shabby houses of the poor – half-castes with too many children, washerwomen – were only a step away; but, ‘as Father said… there was no doubt that land there would become extremely valuable… if one bought enough and hung on’.12
Beauchamp's success made him an increasingly important, if not much loved, figure in the small community: Wellington's population was about 40,000, the equivalent of Tunbridge Wells or Scarborough today. A childhood friend of Katherine's remembered spending Christmas with the Beauchamps in the 1890s and described how the socialist Prime Minister, Richard Seddon, visited them, impressing the little girls with his frock coat and top hat – despite the heat – and above all the diamond stud on his shirt front. Beauchamp too was a stickler for correct appearances; it is said that when he went ashore at Honolulu under a burning tropical sun, on his way to England, he invariably kept his bowler hat on his head and carried an umbrella. His children were obliged to take a cold bath every day, and he himself, with his prominent blue eyes and ruddy complexion, ‘had the fresh look of a man who, having recently emerged from a cold bath, had anointed himself liberally with Eau de Cologne’.13 Katherine herself described him as ‘thoroughly commonplace and commercial’, but in a more affectionate moment she wrote:
Father's a Tolstoy character. He has just the point of vision of a Tolstoy character. I always felt that Stepan in Anna Karenina reminded me of someone – and his well-nourished, fresh body was always curiously familiar to me – of course – it is my Papa's… the smile and the whiskers.14
The ambivalence about her father remained throughout her life. He might be vulgar, crass, tight-fisted, but he was also strong, reliable and magically rich. In fantasy, at any rate, whenever she felt like a small child herself, he appeared as glamorous and omnipotent.
The children did not lack for fresh air, exercise, good food and kindly care; Granny Dyer was a much loved figure in their lives. The girls were often dressed alike, but in character they were markedly different. Vera took her position as eldest seriously and had a strong sense of decorum and responsibility; Chaddie was merry and easy-going; Katherine (always known in the family as Kathleen or Kass) was difficult, the odd one out, intense in her feelings, given to outbursts of rage, jealous of the success or friendships of others, and humiliated by being fat. Her Canadian friend, Marion Ruddick, who travelled with the Beauchamp parents in 1898 and heard about the girls from Mrs Beauchamp before she met them, said that she, ‘in her decisive manner, completely overlooking Kathleen, decided that Chaddie was the one I would like best.’15 She went on to describe how, as the girls came out to the boat to greet their long-absent mother,
she gazed down in a detached way at the group and to my mind didn't seem overjoyed as I thought she would be after such a long absence. Finally it was to Kathleen she spoke first, for everyone to hear. ‘Well, Kathleen,’ she said, ‘I see that you are as fat as ever.’ And in my first glimpse of Kathleen I saw her eyes flash, and her face flush with anger as she turned away with a toss of her ringlets.16
Marion became Katherine's best friend; and both she and her sister Jeanne stressed her separateness from the rest of the family. ‘Kathleen was silent as she so often was when her sisters were present,’17 wrote Marion. Jeanne talked of ‘old’ and ‘young’ souls to explain the undoubted difference between Katherine and the others, and said that her mother did not talk about her at all after she left for England in 1908 except to say with a sigh, ‘My poor child.’*18
Whatever gulfs and rifts there were below, it was a family with a good deal of surface manner. The girls called their parents ‘father dear’ and ‘mother dear’; their grandmother was ‘gran dear’, and ‘darlings’ and ‘dearests’ flew around animatedly. Even in her eighties Jeanne still spoke with tremendous verve, articulating as distinctly and beautifully as an actress. She also sprinkled French and German phrases very freely in her conversation, just as Katherine did in her letters. The habit belongs to a generation of women with leisure to dabble in languages for fun, the leisure supplied by an enormous servant class. Katherine was quick to identify with servants in her writing, and to offer them special imaginative sympathy, although she grew up in a society in which the social division between maids and masters seemed absolute.
The luxury of her upbringing, with visiting sewing maids as well as house parlour maids, gardeners and people to do the washing and ironing, had its drawbacks later. Katherine virtually never saw her mother labour with her hands – either make a meal or sew a garment – and she herself was not expected to learn how to clean or cook anything: she was Miss Kathleen. She did know how to handle and charm servants, and was always served very willingly, but when she suffered from poverty as a grown woman, the practical deficiencies in her education made things more difficult for her, and at the end of her life she turned to the idea of manual work as salvation.
Katherine saw herself as ‘the odd man out of the family – the ugly duckling’.20 But to be the odd one, the difficult one, not understood, separate, the ‘thundercloud’,21 is also a privileged position, the position of Cinderella. ‘She had vague notions that it was always, would always be the third who was the favourite of the gods. The fairy-tales that she devoured voraciously during her childhood helped to stimulate the thought,’22 she wrote in one of her adolescent notebooks. Vera and Chaddie, both from general testimony good-natured enough girls, never gave their version of childhood in the Beauchamp family – publicly at any rate – and were reluctant to speak of their sister; if they partly disliked or feared her, they did not say so. ‘The family was very conventional, Kass was the outlaw,’ said one of her teachers.23 Part of the convention of such a family is that all its members love one another; but the convention is denied, of course, in fairy-tales, which allow for all the other feelings of hatred and jealousy. No wonder they appealed so strongly to Katherine.
There was something else at work too. Katherine was always a performer. She needed to enchant an audience, but there was no one in her family on whom she could successfully cast a spell. They simply did not see her as she wished to be seen.
Katherine attended three schools in New Zealand. First, Karori primary school, where all the local children went, and where she learned to read, to write with a slate and to enjoy memorizing poetry. She also began to divide the world into people she liked, ‘her’ people, those who knew she understood and responded, and all the others. Much of her life was spent in sorting people in this way, seeking ‘her’ people, reviling the rest.
Reading quickly grew into a passion. When she was eight she was put into steel-framed spectacles, of which she was rather proud; but whatever they were meant to do for her sight, she soon outgrew any need for them, and she was never myopic. Quite the contrary: her observation was as acute as though she had trained herself to examine and retain everything she saw. She called herself a squirrel, storing up her impressions. ‘Nothing has happened until it has been described,’ said Virginia Woolf, but Katherine's capacity to take in visual detail was exceptional, to be drawn on, sorted and selected later, as if from a box of prints.
The next school was Wellington Girls' High School, where she went in 1898, and where she met Marion Ruddick. She proclaimed Marion one of her people, and loved her with a dominating and possessive love. In the mornings the girls did formal work, while the afternoons were given to drawing, poetry and sewing; the little girls worked on chemises for the Maori mission. Katherine had a brief moment of enthusiasm for the idea of becoming a missionary among the Maoris, but she detested sewing. She chose whenever possible to read aloud instead and claimed later that she could always make the other girls cry when she read Dickens to the sewing class.24 Swimming was another afternoon activity – in New Zealand it was compulsory for all children to learn to swim – and it was at the swimming pool that Marion discovered the degree of jealousy of which Katherine was capable, receiving a covert but mem
orable thump when she talked too much to another girl. It was by no means the last such thump Katherine was to give.
Marion's parents were moved to another posting, and Katherine lost her friend; and in June 1900 Harold Beauchamp moved his daughters to their first fee-paying school, Miss Swainson's. Like most girls' schools of the period, Miss Swainson's aimed to turn out young ladies who fitted in, not combatants: ‘It was one of those snobby semidiocesan schools where the dear Vicar was always hanging around. Education was not so much of a feature but you didn't eat peas with a knife or dip your bread in the gravy,’ explained Katherine's cousin Burney Trapp later.25 She was not popular there, and the teachers disapproved of her. At the high school she had been praised for her contributions to the school magazine, stories of children's holiday amusements and Christmas; but at Swainson's she was told her essays were too long, too untidy, badly spelled (her spelling was never good) and too self-centred. With some spirit, she produced her own ‘school magazine’, full of jokes and stories. She was imaginative, but ‘imaginative to the point of untruth’, according to the headmistress.26
Miss Swainson's had another unusual pupil in Martha Grace, or Maata Mahupuku, a few years older than Katherine, whose forebears were Maori chiefs and uncle a friend of the Prime Minister, Richard Seddon. Through her uncle she was heiress to a considerable fortune. She was dark-skinned and exotically beautiful, and she was sometimes called Princess Martha, to emphasize just how little she had in common with the ‘half-castes’ in the squalid houses in Tinakori Road, with their gardens full of empty jam tins and old saucepans.
Martha was constantly at the Beauchamps' house. The girls who were not allowed much money were pop eyed with the amount Maata always had to spend. All the same she was very pretty, bright and generous and nothing of a snob herself. She and Kathleen were particularly friendly.27
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