by Peter Graham
Latvian refugees from displaced persons’ camps in Germany had begun to be resettled in New Zealand, and the Hulmes employed one as a housekeeper. Mrs Grinlaubs lived in the flat at the back of the house with her husband and two young children. She was flabbergasted when one morning, over a cup of coffee, Hilda Hulme confided, “Of course, we belong to the top of the tree.” The housekeeper was able to observe Juliet’s behaviour from close range. The girl, she thought, was “in a class of her own—very spoilt, precocious and very arrogant. She was rude at times to everyone, including her parents”. Hilda would defend her daughter by explaining how gifted she was. Mrs Grinlaubs was never convinced.
At Ilam the Hulmes held frequent dinner parties, as well as memorable Sunday lunches and receptions for university staff and visiting VIPs. Lady Rutherford, the widow of the New Zealand’s Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ernest Rutherford, came for dinner one
evening, but perhaps the greatest coup was the English actor Anthony Quayle, whom the Hulmes entertained in March 1953. Quayle was in Christchurch leading the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company
in Othello and As You Like It at the Theatre Royal. The thirty-nine year old was forging a successful career as a Shakespearean actor and manager—later he would branch into films, playing virile, stiff-upper-lip officer types—and he and the exquisitely beautiful Barbara Jefford, who was playing Desdemona to his Othello, were hugely in demand. Hilda must have been in heaven.
CHAPTER 9
“Sapienta et Veritas”
The novelist Fay Weldon, then Fay Birkinshaw, attended Christchurch Girls’ High School between 1944 and 1946 while living in New Zealand with her mother and sister.
She would later remember it as a “deeply serious and miserable place … [at] the wrong end of Cranmer Square, where the building shook with every earth tremor”. The place was “uneasy … Classrooms would darken for no reason: no one ever wanted to be alone in the locker room”. The panelled walls were “redolent with doom” and the pupils sometimes felt like “extras in some kind of horror film”. There were places in the playground where nobody ever played and which everyone avoided. The school, she claimed, was haunted by the yet-to-occur murder of Honorah Parker, and there was a “hum of repressed lesbianism … a heavy atmosphere of unexplored passions”.
These moody recollections prove only that memory is unreliable and even distinguished novelists are capable of foolishness. The red-brick neo-Gothic building stood at the sunny end of Cranmer Square. Former pupils fondly remember pleasant strolls around the square at morning interval and the sight of towering chestnut trees in Rolleston Avenue, bright green against the clear blue sky fromthe Montreal Street gate. Earthquakes were not regular occurrences in the 1940s, when Weldon attended the school. The cloakroom is remembered with nostalgic affection for the smell of damp felt hats on rainy days, implanted in the mind forever, along with the taste of acid drops in small white paper bags from Proudlock’s tuck shop. And Weldon’s contemporaries deny the hum of lesbianism, repressed or otherwise. “There may well have been some very good solid friendships,” one said, “but if any lesbianism went on I am sure it was extremely well concealed.”
Girls’ High was a great place for rules. The headmistress, Jean Isobel Stewart, who lived in the school’s boarding establishment, was a traditionalist who issued an unrelenting stream of directives. Prefaced with the words “No girl at any time will”, they governed virtually every aspect of human behaviour. There were places you couldn’t run, places you couldn’t walk, couldn’t eat, couldn’t talk, couldn’t sit. There were places in town where no girl at any time could be seen. There were rules about the wearing of hats, the wearing of gloves, and the polishing of shoes. Gym tunics had to cover the knee, and hair could be no longer than two inches above the collar, unless secured in a plait or ponytail.
Miss Stewart’s prescriptive code was enthusiastically enforced by the teaching staff. When the Latin teacher, Miss Waller, was taking a third-form class one day, she glanced out the window and announced in a tone of horror, “That is something I hope never to see any girl of this school do!” The girls rushed to the window, eager to see the nature of the offence. The young woman standing below in Montreal Street was putting on her gloves in the street.
That was Girls’ High. You sat up straight in assembly, recited the Lord’s Prayer, and stood, chest out, shoulders back, to sing “Gaudeamus Igitur”, “Jerusalem”, “Nymphs and Shepherds”, and “Among the Leaves So Green-O”. The school motto—in Latin, naturally—was “Sapientia et Veritas”, “Wisdom and Truth”, and the school song, lively, in marching time, was of the usual banality:
High School forever!
Sing, girls, that never
Our hearts shall sever
From her dear rule!
Years ring their fleeting chime,
Still at our meeting time
Raise we this greeting rhyme
God speed the School!
In England Juliet might have attended a private, fee-paying school.
In New Zealand, however, there was nothing unusual about the daughter of a senior academic attending a state school. Diony and Jan, the twin daughters of Professor Sutherland, also went to Girls’ High. The school had a reputation for scholastic excellence unrivalled in Christchurch. Its private counterpart, St Margaret’s College, was content to produce well-mannered, nicely spoken young ladies, versed in the rituals of the Anglican Church, not over-burdened with learning, and certainly not expected to earn their own living.
In her Form Two year at Ilam School, which she had briefly attended after Queenswood, Juliet had been given an IQ test and scored 170 on the Stanford-Binet scale. The average was 110, so 170 was exceptionally high. Intelligence was thought to be both measurable and immutable—something doled out unequally at birth. Given the brilliance of Henry Hulme, it was considered not surprising that Juliet, too, should have great ability. Her imaginative stories and plays had made a great impression on her teacher and classmates at Ilam. The Hulmes considered their daughter far too gifted for the type of education St Margaret’s offered.
Some of their friends and acquaintances saw things differently.
To many, it was unthinkable to send a girl anywhere other thanSt Margaret’s or another private school, Rangi Ruru, or to Craighead Diocesan School in Timaru. Girls’ High was perfectly decent in its way but there were all sorts of girls there, from who knew what backgrounds. Wasn’t it more important for a girl to make the right friends than worry about what marks she got in School Certificate? After the murder plenty of people said Henry and Hilda Hulme had made a shocking mistake. If only they hadn’t been such inverted snobs. If only they had sent her to St Margaret’s, where she would have mixed with her own sort, not got tied up with the fish shop girl whose people weren’t even married, the whole thing would have been avoided.
On February 4, 1952, Juliet Hulme began her secondary schooling in Form 3A. She was turned out in the summer uniform: a cotton frock with a cream panama hat, fawn gloves and white ankle socks. Two days later King George VI died. In Britain his death was announced at 10.45 on the morning of February 6, late in the evening New Zealand time. Next day Christchurch Girls’ High, like schools all over New Zealand, closed for the day. It was as though everyone had lost a distant but much-loved uncle.
Form 3A was in Room 9, first on the landing up the stairs with the polished brass rail. The class was made up of the bright girls on a fast track to sit School Certificate in the fifth form; less able students would take the exam in the sixth. The curriculum included Latin, French, English, mathematics, general science and social studies. There was also physical education, music, sewing and, in the fourth form, cooking.
“We all loved Juliet,” one of the 3A pupils recalled. The girl who had arrived in New Zealand four years earlier gangly and awkward was now willowy and graceful, with a self-composure that set her apart. She was clever and knowledgeable, good at English, French and maths particula
rly. She spoke with a beautiful English accent, wore her hat with the brim pulled down all around, in defiance of school rules, and was much admired. “We all looked up to her and wanted to be her friend,” a classmate remembered.
Juliet, though, was somehow unattainable. She treated her classmates with an airy bemused dismissiveness: it was as if they were barely to be taken seriously as human beings. One day when Form 3A had, for some reason, congregated in the cloakroom, she walked in and in her imperious voice proclaimed, “You girls look so positively mid Victorian.” No one was exactly sure what she meant, but it was tremendously impressive. So funny and so like Juliet! It would be remembered forever.
Then, as the year progressed, something utterly unexpected happened: Juliet became friendly with a girl in the class called Pauline Rieper. A strange girl and something of a misfit, Pauline liked to be called “Paul”, like George in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, who wanted to be a boy and was hot-tempered, brave and adventurous. Also like George, Paul Rieper had curly black hair cut shorter than most girls’.
She was stockily built. A scar, a legacy of childhood osteomyelitis, ran down her right leg from just below the knee to the ankle. She walked with a slight shuffle, pitched forward, with her hands thrust into her blazer pockets. Her face bore a perpetually cross expression; she was bolshie, hated discipline, and at times seemed to crackle with anger. She spoke sarcastically to her teachers, some of whom seemed a little afraid of her. She was, as one classmate put it, “a bit creepy”.
Not everyone saw Pauline Rieper that way. One 3A girl thought her better-looking than Juliet. “I loved her wild gypsy look. … Her dark flashing eyes would knock you dead.”
It was obvious the Riepers were not well off. One of the girls who visited their home just over the back fence from Girls’ High found it scruffy, and was shocked by how rudely Pauline spoke to her mother, who was “so nice to us—a little care-worn, hard-working woman”.
Like many, she was mystified by the attachment between Pauline and Juliet. “They were a very unlikely pair. There was definitely some attraction between them but what the heck was it?”
CHAPTER 10
Family Secrets
When, on the night of the murder, Bert Rieper told Senior Detective Brown he and Nora were not married he had said a few other things too, but he hadn’t really been thinking straight. When Brown and Detective Sergeant Archie Tate talked to him again later they got more information. About twenty years earlier he had been an accountant with his own firm in Feilding, a small country town, and married to Louisa McArthur, a woman he had met when on service with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in Cairo during the war. Louisa was a widow, eight years older than him, and had been born in India.
He and Louisa had no children, he said, and she had made his life living hell. One night he woke up to find she had a strap around his neck and was trying to throttle him. Shortly after that he found a cut-throat razor under the mattress. Fearing for his safety, he moved to another room. She broke the panels of the door. That was when he decided to leave for good.
Intending to drive to his office, he got his car out of the garage, but she rushed at it with a broom and smashed the windows. Then she lay down in front of the car so he couldn’t drive away. He gotout and walked to his office. He was so disturbed by all this that he decided to end his life. Luckily, though, his confidential secretary Miss Parker returned to the office to finish some typing and found him about to top himself. After calming him down, she suggested they go away together. She would look after him, she promised, and they decided there and then to leave Feilding. They fled to the South Island and began living as husband and wife. Louisa would not give him a divorce, and he had paid maintenance to her ever since he left. Now she was dying of cancer.
It was an extraordinary story, and for the most part it was lies. Bert Rieper had never lived in Feilding. He lived in Raetihi, a small town one hundred miles away. He was not a public accountant—as chartered accountants were then called—and did not have his own firm: he had a job looking after ledgers. Honorah Parker worked in the same office, but Bert’s position was unlikely to have been senior enough to require a “confidential secretary”. And far from havingno children, he and Louisa had two sons, Kenneth and Andre. Kenneth lived in the Hawke’s Bay city of Napier with his wife, Marie, and was a motor mechanic. Andre was on his way to becoming a public accountant in Lower Hutt, near Wellington. Louisa, whohad lived in Napier since 1941, was not dying of cancer. There isno way of knowing if there was any substance to Bert’s account of her violent and threatening behaviour. It could have been the instinctive reaction of a wife who learned her husband was having an affair with a younger woman from the office and was about to abandon her.
Why did Bert concoct this story? Quite obviously he had not been paying maintenance for Louisa and his sons. This was a serious matter: it explained why he had never been able to get a divorce from Louisa and marry Nora—and why, as it turned out, their houses were always registered in Nora’s name. Now, because of Nora’s death, he had come to the police’s attention, and adding to his misery was terror that his guilty secret might be uncovered. He seems to have been trying to enlist the sympathy of the police and discourage them from contacting Louisa—a dying woman—to investigate whether or not he had been supporting her. If they were of a mind to do so, the mention of Feilding might put them off the track.
It was a shabby thing to have done, abandoning his wife and sons in the depths of the Great Depression, and Bert knew it. The sorrow that now afflicted him must have seemed like retribution. There were secrets in the Rieper household. The family had not had a lot of luck from the word go.
*
Herbert Detlev Rieper had been born in 1893 in Strahan, on the west coast of Tasmania. His father, a shop assistant, had emigrated to Australia from Holstein on Germany’s southern Jutland Peninsula. As a young man, Bert had left Tasmania and made his way to New Zealand. By 1915, when he enlisted as a private in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, he was working in the office at Merson’s Mill in the small alpine settlement of Ohakune. In army records his mother, Mrs Claude Rieper of Bellerive, Tasmania, was named as his next of kin.
Today Ohakune has a certain chic. Close to the southern slopes of Mount Ruapehu in the central North Island, it attracts well-heeled Aucklanders for skiing. Many buy holiday homes. Modish cafés supplying basic necessities such as pinot noir and café latté prosper. The town’s bright orange, ten-metre-tall, fibreglass carrot honouring the area’s thriving market gardens is justly famous. But before the First World War Ohakune was a tinpot little place, scarcely a town at all, in the middle of nowhere. Until the Main Trunk railway connected it to Wellington in 1908, the only access was up the Whanganui River to Pipiriki, then overland by dray or Royal Mail coach.
The Main Trunk brought a new industry, the logging and milling of vast stands of native forest. Thirty sawmills, one of which was Merson’s, stood within an eight-mile radius of the town. The amusements of the bushmen, mill hands and farm boys in the public bar of the Ruapehu Hotel were as wild and boozy as anywhere in the young country.
On August 23, 1915, Bert enlisted with the Second Battalion of the New Zealand Rifle Brigade at Trentham Camp near Wellington. On November 12 he was shipped on SS Willochra to Egypt, where he was attached to brigade headquarters. Bookkeepers were harder to come by than fighting men. Bert—twenty-one years old, five foot six, nine stone ten pounds, Germanic-looking, with fair complexion and fair hair—became a base wallah. He must have impressed someone with his usefulness: when the Rifle Brigade was shipped to Franceas part of the newly formed New Zealand Infantry Division, he remained in Egypt, having been transferred to the New Zealand Army Service Corps. He missed the action on the Western Front—the Somme, Messines Ridge, Passchendaele and the other battles in which the Rifle Brigade would distinguish itself—seeing out the war in Egypt and rising to the rank of corporal in the Pay Corps.
According to some ac
counts he married Louisa McArthur, née Mackrie, in Cairo in 1915. The 1915 date is almost certainly incorrect: the Willochra did not disembark at Suez until December 20 thatyear, rather late for Bert to form an attachment and get married. The following February the troops were transferred to Ishmailia, a city ninety miles southwest of Cairo. Leave to Cairo was strictly rationed, particularly for privates.
At some stage, though, he did marry Louisa. Eight years his senior, she was most likely a nurse attached to one of the base hospitals. She may also have been pregnant with his child: she was dispatched to New Zealand, took a house at 107 Marine Parade, Napier, and gave birth to Kenneth Roy Rieper on July 17, 1917. It would be nearly two more years before Corporal Herbert Rieper marched out of Cairo to Suez and sailed for New Zealand on the troopship Devon.
Not long after Bert returned to New Zealand, flush with his overseas war service gratuity of £97.14.6, he took Louisa and his young son Ken from the pleasant coastal city of Napier to Raetihi, a dreary inland town near Ohakune, where the main economic activities were sawmilling and dairy farming. Here Louisa gave birth to the couple’s second son, Andre, but whatever prospects Bert and Louisa had for a long and happy marriage came to an end with the arrival in the town of a young English woman.
Honorah Parker’s family came from Moseley, a pleasant Worcester village long since absorbed by the southward expansion of Birmingham. When Nora was born on December 18, 1907, the family was prosperous. Their home at 12 Alcester Road—one of a terrace of nine houses known as St Leonard’s Place—was a substantial two-storied red-brick dwelling with double bay windows and a large garden, a suitable house in a desirable location for a professional man whose practice was thriving.