Hayley Westenra

by Hayley Westenra

  When I was as young as three years old, I can remember sitting on Grandad's lap as he played the piano accordion. When he played the piano, I would jump up and perform my latest ballet moves alongside him. His talent was all the more remarkable, since he would play all these instruments by ear, never having had any formal lessons. I loved the way his fingers would run up and down the piano keyboard. He played with such ease. I really don't know how he did it.

  Mum and Dad are polar opposites – very much yin and yang. Mum is constantly on the go. It always seems to me that, even when she should be taking it easy, she is still flying around at rocket speed. There's always something which needs to be done urgently, so she is permanently busy and bustling. There is the odd occasion where she will sit down at the dining room table for a moment with a cup of coffee and a couple of squares of chocolate, while she reads a newspaper or magazine. But then, after just a few minutes, she will be out of the door again, racing off to pick something up or to see someone.

  Right now, while I am writing this book, it is the renovation of our house that is occupying a considerable amount of Mum's time. She puts a lot of thought into all of her projects and, at the moment, every conversation I have with her includes a good proportion of house talk. Mum invests so much effort in things. She will never go into a shop and make a snap decision over buying, say, a skirt. She will always ask, 'Will it work with this top? Does it go with these shoes?'

  Dad, on the other hand, is very laid back. To be honest, I don't think they would still be together if either Mum were as laid back as he is, or Dad were on the go as much as Mum. She is the worrier, but he is very chilled. Me? I think I'm lucky enough to be a mixture of the best bits of the two of them!

  When they first got together, Dad was a surfer dude and Mum says he was eating terribly, with his diet consisting of virtually nothing other than milk shakes. She was always very interested in natural medicine and health, so she taught him about the benefits of healthy eating. He took the advice to heart and nowadays he is the one sticking to the healthy-eating regime fairly religiously, which Mum finds just a tad frustrating, as she succumbs to yet another chocolate craving. I am on Mum's side for this one. I think it's a woman thing!

  After they were married, Dad took a job in a jewellery shop and worked his way up to being the manager. He decided to study gemmology, as he figured it would be a little more stimulating than simply climbing the business ladder. He learned a range of skills, including identifying precious stones and grading diamonds for insurance policies. These skills were put in practice when he opened his jewellery-valuation business around thirteen years ago.

  Mum was training to be a teacher when she became pregnant with me. This was a great opportunity for her to put all of her interest in healthy eating and naturopathy into practice. She did all of her research on what food to eat to increase the probability of having a healthy baby, becoming something of an expert on the subject in the process. She really is one of those people who, if they are going to do something, do it properly, whatever it is.

  I was born on 10 April 1987 and named Hayley Dee Westenra. My parents felt that Hayley Dee had a nice ring to it. Hayley was chosen because Mum and Dad were fans of the actress Hayley Mills. I was a very contented child and am told that I was very undemanding.

  My sister, Sophie Larelle Westenra, came along three years after. Our little brother, Isaac Ireland Westenra, was born three years after Sophie. His unusual middle name was in tribute to Mum's maiden name.

  I love my brother and sister very much; they are both wonderful people. I find it hard to believe that Sophie is seventeen and is already in her final year of high school. It is quite scary really, because in my mind she is still 'little Sophie', still very vulnerable and very small, which is really not the case at all any more.

  Sophie is lucky to be both musical and intellectual. I'm very proud that she's always been near the top in nearly all of her classes. At the same time, she has a brilliant singing voice. Her biggest dilemma is deciding which direction to take in terms of a future career. Either way, I know she is going to make her mark on the world, so watch this space.

  Isaac, who is fourteen, is very much a cross between Mum and Dad. Because there are six years between us, we have never fought or squabbled. I was very much his 'big sister'. He's very laid back, but at the same time he's a real detail person. Growing up, he was always very interested in inventing things. He liked to draw intricate little diagrams of his inventions and then talk me through them in great detail.

  Isaac was quite a shy kid, but he's recently come right out of his shell. Growing up, he's always had a beautiful voice. He would join in with Sophie and me, but he was always quite a reluctant performer. When I was last at home, he spent the whole time singing and playing his guitar. I was left in awe of my little brother's newfound skill and pizzazz. He has become a great rock performer and gives some brilliant renditions of the hits of bands such as Nickelback and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

  Christchurch was a great place to grow up. These days it would not be ideal for me to live there because it's so far away from the other countries where I perform most often. But, when I was a youngster, it had everything I could possibly want, and living there gave me the chance to have a really wholesome upbringing.

  The weather in that part of New Zealand is very mild. The winters are never too harsh and the summers are never too hot, making it a very enjoyable climate. Even in the depths of winter, I used to get up early and run outside. I loved the sound of the frost scrunching under foot. Although the air was very crisp, the sun was nearly always still shining. When I was very small, Mum would often take me out to feed the ducks in the local park, which was just a short walk down the road.

  One of the many benefits of living in New Zealand is that Kiwis tend to lead a very outdoor sort of life. Children have a very free lifestyle and it's quite normal to have a playhouse or tree house in your backyard.

  New Zealand is a big enough place with a small enough number of inhabitants to mean that most people are lucky enough to be able to have a decent patch of land to call their own. Our backyard was big enough for us to run around in to our hearts' content. We still had space for a trampoline and a playhouse, as well as jungle bars (a sort of metal climbing frame). We built tree huts at the end of the garden and we happily spent hours clambering in and out of them, creating imaginary worlds as we went. Behind our house, we had yet another hut – this one built among the firewood. There were holes in the fences between our garden and those of our neighbours each side, meaning that all the children could run between the houses without ever having to venture outside the safety of our backyards.

  Underneath my bedroom window, I had my own little area of garden, which I would lovingly tend. In our vegetable garden, we planted parsley, garden peas, silver beets and lettuce – all the 'easy-to-grow' vegetables.

  I desperately wanted a pet and plagued Mum and Dad. It turned out that our record of animal ownership was not a fantastic success to begin with. First, we had a cat called Tammy, but Sophie proved to be allergic to cats, so poor old Tammy was shipped off to live with Auntie Carol.

  I was besotted with rabbits when I was small and had a collection of soft toy bunnies. Perhaps it's because I was born in the Chinese Year of the Rabbit that I've such affinity to them. The decision was taken that I would be given a pet rabbit for my eighth birthday. Being a little sister, Sophie wanted everything that I had when we were kids, so she had a rabbit too. At just five years old, she was too small to look after hers, so the rabbit-care duties fell to me. We were never keen on keeping them locked up in their cage all day every day, so we had Dad build some special rabbit runs, putting his famous Kiwi ingenuity to use. I always ended up in charge of keeping an eye on the rabbits, Peter and Snowdrop, as they pottered about their grassy patch. On one occasion, when I didn't have my eye on them, they escaped, much to my horror. We managed to catch them, but after that scare Dad blocked off all the rabbit-si
zed escape routes from the back garden. We gave up on the runs and instead let the rabbits run free around the yard when we were out with them. But our rabbits just kept on growing and the bigger they became, the faster they seemed to be able to run away from us.

  We had the best of intentions because we didn't want to keep them cooped up in a cage, but, every time we let them run free, we then had to spend hours running after them trying to put them back into the safety of their cage for the night time.

  Eventually we gave both of the rabbits away, and mine, Snowdrop, was last heard of eating the cabbages and flowers in the gardens neighbouring her new home.

  Our quest to find a suitable pet was not yet over, though. We opted for something a little smaller and so bought two mice – one for me and one for Sophie. My mouse, who went by the name of Snoopy, developed a scab on its back, so we used to have to put ointment on it every day.

  In the end, the mice were handed on to new homes as well. After we'd tried a cat, rabbits and mice, you might have thought that we would have given up on pet ownership altogether – but then we alighted on our perfect pet, who arrived on my eleventh birthday. Zac, the cockatiel, still lives with the family today. He is a small grey bird and he can talk a little, although I think he might be envious that he cannot sing. At least, whenever I sing and he's nearby, he makes a terrible racket. It's possible he might be trying to join in, but, equally, he could be voicing his disapproval.

  We thought it was very normal at the time, but looking back I realise now that we enjoyed a very creative childhood. Mum definitely encouraged it, putting into practice what she had learned when she trained to be a teacher. She knew all about child development and I'm sure it was no accident that, in the corner of our house, we had a box filled with all sorts of arts-and-crafts materials so that we could make anything that our imaginations could come up with. Next to it was another box full of different outfits and clothes for us to dress up in. These were things that I took for granted as a child. The one thing we definitely didn't do was to sit in front of the television during all our spare time.

  I always had a fascination with making things. In one way, I was a bit of a tomboy. Although I loved fairies and was utterly convinced that a group of them lived at the end of our garden, I definitely didn't like Barbie dolls. I loved using sticking tape, scissors and glue to create random bits and pieces that, back then, I thought needed to be created. I was a big fan of modelling clay and it was always top of my list of Christmas-present requests. When I get time even now, I still make some of my own jewellery. Whenever we went to the beach, I would pick up the shiniest or most interesting-looking shells and stones and would keep them in little collections in my bedroom.

  Once, I even dug out a pond in our backyard. I used my toy spade to dig a hole, before lining it with a plastic sheet. I placed dirt around the top of the plastic to keep it in place and to hide it from view. Then I filled it with water. There were one or two design faults in my little pond and, very quickly, it ended up as a big pool of mud. But that didn't matter, because it was my pond. Mum and Dad had given me the freedom to make it all by myself.

  One of my favourite movies as a child was The Secret Garden. As soon as I watched it, I knew that I just had to have a secret garden all of my own. One of my friends helped me to cut a hole in a bush below my bedroom window among the shrubs. That allowed me to get into a tiny clearing about the size of a doormat that would become my secret garden. Or, at least, that was what we set out to do. Instead, we ended up hacking off half the bush, killing it in the process. I was in big trouble! I'm not sure that Mum has ever quite forgiven me. So, although we were given the freedom to be creative, there were definitely parameters. We knew where the line was and we knew when we had crossed it.

  Some of my favourite memories of my entire childhood are of being in the backyard at home. Whether we were up in the tree house, hiding in the playhouse, climbing through the fence to next door, jumping on the trampoline or splashing around in the paddling pool, it was just a great existence. And I will always be indebted to Mum and Dad for that.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE LITTLEST STAR IS BORN

  When I was growing up, I was constantly surrounded by music. Mum would play classical music to me when I was a baby, because she had read the research suggesting that listening to classical music can help a very young child's brain development. Later, as a youngster, due to my troubled sleeping, Mum and Dad bought me a collection of classical-music tapes to play in the background as a way of gently lulling me to sleep each night.

  Those tapes were filled with classical favourites, such as Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and Tchaikovsky's ballets Nutcracker and Swan Lake.

  I can't remember my earliest performance, but I'm told that it happened when I was a flower girl at Auntie Carol's wedding. I was still a toddler, but apparently I sang a nonstop stream of Christmas carols right the way through the service. Singing to myself became more and more of a habit, but my parents didn't pick up on my voice as being in any way special. They just assumed that all kids sang the way I did.

  When I was five years old, I went to Fendalton Primary School. To be honest with you, Fendalton is quite a posh area and our house's location made us borderline cases to be allowed to go there. Mum was never a typical Fendalton parent. There were a lot of students from very wealthy homes there and Mum was probably the only parent among them who would regularly go off to other school fairs to buy cheap clothes. She planned these buying trips with military precision, getting up at the crack of dawn and then arriving back home a few hours later with plastic bags full of clothes for each of us. During our childhoods, most of our clothes were second-hand because, although we were not what you would class as needy, there was never loads of cash to go around. That meant that Mum and Dad needed to budget very carefully. Without doubt, I've inherited that thriftiness and I'm still very conscious of not wasting money today.

  Fendalton Primary was a lovely school at which to be a student. I was quite shy as a child, but it was my classroom teacher when I was six years old, Lesley Compton, who noticed that I could sing. It goes to show what a good teacher she was, because, even though I didn't say much, she still homed in on the fact that this was the thing that I was good at, even though there were around thirty other children vying for her attention every day. She gave me the solo in the Christmas school play, singing 'The Littlest Star'.

  Now, not only was I shy at school, but I didn't say that much at home at the time either. I've certainly made up for that since, but back then I was not the greatest communicator.

  'I need to take my ballet gear to school today,' I told Mum on the morning of the big performance.

  'Here you go,' she replied. Mum and Dad turned up to watch the school play that afternoon, as all conscientious parents would do. They sat down and got a huge shock when they opened up their programmes to read 'The Littlest Star – Hayley Westenra'.

  I really didn't understand that it was in any way a big deal. I was very calm about the performance and was not even the slightest bit worried. At that age, you tend not to realise that performing in public could possibly be frightening. I went on stage and sang my song faultlessly. The audience applauded very warmly and I beamed out from the stage at Mum and Dad. I couldn't understand why they seemed to have tears in their eyes.

  At the end of the concert, Mrs Compton approached Mum and Dad and commented on my musical nature, suggesting that I should start learning a musical instrument. We went through the options. I didn't like the idea of learning something brassy and loud such as the trumpet one little bit, so in the end we settled on the violin, which makes a wonderfully melodic sound, a little like singing.

  Music really became my thing at primary school and, although I was still shy, I was very driven in a quiet and understated sort of way. Even my family were sometimes quite surprised when I exhibited signs of steely determination. I do remember becoming frustrated that I suffered a little from 'tall-poppy syndrome' at
school, where, as soon as one pupil started to shine at something, he or she would be cut back down. I struggled to understand why I was sometimes not chosen for singing roles, when I knew, based on a rational judgement, that I had a better voice than those who were picked. When I look back on it now, I realise that I was frighteningly focused for someone who was still so small. I also noticed that the one exception to the 'tall-poppy syndrome' was sport. If you excelled at sport, that seemed to be nurtured to a greater extent.

  I was never great at sport, but I always gave it a go. I played netball for a while. I was always the shortest in my class, so it was not the best option. On the athletics field, I hated the high jump and was terrified of this bar looming towards me as I ran up and took off.

  For a short period, I tried karate because it was something that Dad and Sophie were keen on doing, but it was much more their kind of thing than mine. Dad was keen that we learn it for self-defence. Sophie was far more determined to work her way through the belts ahead of me. Being the younger sister, she's quite competitive with me in that respect. She was delighted when she became a yellow belt before I did.

  If I had a sporting forte, it was on the cross-country running course. This is quite a solitary individual sport and it fitted my personality far better than a team game. Even now, I'm far happier working as a soloist than in an ensemble. There are good and bad points about being part of a group, but I feel that, if you work in a group situation, you can sometimes be swayed in the wrong direction by the views of others in the group. I much prefer having my own space; I like to be in control of my life and to be able to plan my days around what I want to do. Mum always gives me a hard time about it, saying, 'What happens when you meet a guy? Eventually, you'll have to compromise.' I'm sure that I will in the end. It's not that I'm stuck in my ways, but I do like to be in charge of my own life.