by Peter Graham
Mrs Grinlaubs, who worked for the Hulmes until Christmas 1953, watched the friendship develop to the point where the girls became inseparable. When Pauline first started coming to the house, Mrs Hulme was happy for the two girls to be friends—even though, she felt it necessary to explain to the housekeeper, “Pauline is not from our social strata.” Grinlaubs observed Juliet’s domineering character. “Juliet,” she said later, “could only love herself. Her main consideration was to completely take over someone.” Pauline was “a shadow person following in Juliet’s footsteps”.
This was not surprising. When Pauline first rode her bicycle up the sweeping driveway to Ilam, she discovered a new and wonderful world. The house was like something you only ever saw in films. And she had never met people so upper class as Dr and Mrs Hulme. Mrs Hulme was lovely, beautifully dressed, and spoke to her in a friendly way without asking a lot of embarrassing questions. Dr Hulme said less but was also very welcoming. They even had a housekeeper!
According to Hilda, the friendship seemed at first “quite normal”, but early on something happened that was perhaps not quite so normal. Juliet and Pauline left Ilam on their bicycles, found a quiet bit of countryside, took off their shoes and socks and windcheaters and danced around madly, working themselves into a state of ecstasy. According to Pauline, that afternoon their friendship became an indissoluble bond.
As their friendship blossomed Pauline came to spend nights, days and even whole weekends at Ilam. Everything about the Hulmes impressed her. Dr and Mrs Hulme drank wine at the table. They had boxes of French wine in a cupboard under the stairs, shipped out from England and with wonderful names like Châteauneuf-du-Pape and Nuits Saint Georges. Sometimes they would have a sherry in the drawing room before supper, in tiny crystal glasses no bigger than an egg cup. “Drawing room” and “supper” were what they said. Mrs Hulme would often have several more generous glasses of sherry as she sat smoking cigarettes and talking to Mrs Sutherland in the late afternoon. The Hulmes had beautiful paintings, and more books than Pauline had seen in anyone’s home before. She hungrily observed and absorbed all the minutiae of life in a household so different from her own, so greatly more sophisticated, so much better in every way.
For her part, Hilda Hulme regarded Pauline with the patronising kindness of a social worker. “When she came out to Ilam she was obviously happy to be with us,” she recalled. “She told Juliet and me many times that she was very unhappy at home. She felt her mother did not understand her and did not love her. She felt happier at Ilam among our family than she had ever felt before. Sometimes after a … quarrel with her mother she would be in great distress. Juliet would then be upset, often to the point of weeping, and that is one of the reasons Pauline was invited to come to Ilam, I always understood with her mother’s permission, as often as she wished. Pauline gave me to understand quite clearly that her mother often subjected her to severe corporal punishment.”
In general the account was probably true, even the part about corporal punishment. Nora’s stressful life, together with Pauline’s rudeness, may have led her to vent her frustration and anger by walloping her willful daughter on a reasonably frequent basis, at least until Pauline began attending Girls’ High. This would help explain the girl Pauline became, and the feelings she had about her mother.
Much of the fun the two girls had in the first year of their friendship was innocent enough. Both loved riding: Juliet kept a horse in a paddock over the river from her home and Pauline took regular lessons. At Ilam they loved dressing up and performing plays, even if, as Nancy Sutherland observed, Pauline was usually in a subordinate role—an attendant, or a maid-in-waiting. Juliet had to be the star, the centre of attraction.
As the school year came to an end their amusements became wilder. Pauline would sneak away from her home at night and cycle over to Ilam, Juliet would steal wine and food, and they would picnic outside in the dark, shimmying unseen in and out of the house via the upstairs verandah. Sometimes they would saddle up Juliet’s horse and go for midnight gallops. One night they rode their bikes to the beach at New Brighton. By the end of their third-form year, they were going off the rails. They were now Nigel and Philip.
CHAPTER 12
Two Beautiful Daughters
Henry Hulme joined the Christchurch Club in 1951, probably put up for membership by the barrister Terence Gresson, who lunched there every day when not in court. Increasingly, it became a place of refuge. Most of the university council were now openly hostile and Henry’s relations with the professorial board ever more strained. Nor could he any longer count on a friendly reception in the senior common room. His social contacts with his university colleagues were mostly on formal occasions or compulsory parades.
When he was in no hurry to rush home to the unwelcoming arms of Hilda and the histrionics never far away when Juliet was around, Henry could enjoy smoking his pipe, reading Punch, The Illustrated London News, or two-month-old issues of The Times over a peaceful whisky and water. The atmosphere in the smoking room, with its Thorburn gouaches of grouse and ptarmigan and its mildewed prints of almost forgotten Derby winners, was pleasantly nostalgic. Apart from newspapers and magazines, the only reading matter was leatherbound volumes of New Zealand Turf Register.
The members were mainly businessmen from old Canterbury families and convivial sheep farmers. These decent uncomplicated men, fond of a drink and an amusing story, were a blessed relief from the academic world where people were forever plotting and planning, forever discontented, always wanting things. Henry even became a member of the Agricultural and Pastoral Society, which allowed him access to the members’ tent at the annual show.
The wives of the men at the club were not really Hilda Hulme’scup of tea. She thought them stuffy, insular, cliquey and afflicted with deplorable clothes sense. Among their sins was most likely an unwillingness to kowtow to the rector’s wife. Who was she to them?
Hilda had her own set of friends. As well as Nancy Sutherland, she was drawn to women who were active in the arts, broadcasting and theatre. She became friendly with Eileen Saunders, who was the same age. Both, with a few exceptions, “despised colonials”, as one acquaintance put it. Another friend, Helen Holmes, was a trim, pretty young woman who had made a name in amateur dramatics and become involved in radio broadcasting. Her husband, Lyall Holmes, lectured at the School of Civil Engineering.
By 1951 Hilda, Helen and Eileen had become radio personalities on Candid Comment, a regular women’s radio programme on the local radio station, 3YA. Listeners wrote in with domestic problems and the panellists proffered advice. Hilda, by then a prominent member of the Christchurch branch of the Marriage Guidance Council, spoke as an expert on marital relations and raising children. Not everyone was persuaded. Christchurch’s old guard regarded the three women, as well as Nancy Sutherland and others of their coterie, as a fast crowd who were far too modern in their ideas. They were known to read risqué books and talk a lot about sex and self-fulfilment. For some it was more than just talk. People were shocked to hear there was sunbathing in the nude at Nancy’s family farm in the Marlborough Sounds.
In 1952 a tragedy befell Nancy and her family. Nancy’s husband Ivan, who suffered bouts of depression, went missing. Days passed and a search was mounted. While Nancy stayed at Ilam with Hilda and Henry, the five Sutherland children were billeted with various family friends. The search continued until all hope was gone. After nearly three weeks Sutherland’s body was found near a lonely beach. He had taken his own life.
Jan Sutherland, then fifteen, would never forget what happened next. After her father’s body was found, she and her sisters and brother were taken to Ilam, where Henry Hulme broke the news. Jan was desperate to go to her mother to comfort her and be comforted, but Hilda insisted that Nancy was resting and could not be disturbed. Jan never forgave her. Hilda was not wilfully unkind, but where children were concerned she could be heartless and clueless.
Through Candid Comment Hild
a became friendly with a well-known Māori broadcaster, Airini Grennell. Airini was a granddaughter of Teone Taare Tikao, a high-born member of the southern tribe Ngāi Tahu. On her father’s side, she was descended from an American whaler who had been shipwrecked on the remote Chatham Islands in 1859. Soon after World War I, Airini’s family had moved from the Chathams to Port Levy, a small coastal settlement twelve miles south of Christchurch on Banks Peninsula known to Māori as Koukourarata. Airini had attended Christchurch’s Sacred Heart College and Canterbury University College. She had a glorious singing voice: she and her sister Hinemoa were members of the famous Waiata Methodist Choir that toured New Zealand, Australia, England, Ireland and Wales during the 1930s, even singing for King George VI at Buckingham Palace.
In 1953 Airini Grennell had returned to live in Christchurch, accompanied by a struggling expressionist painter called Rudi Gopas, whom she would eventually marry. Gopas came from a town on the Baltic coast that had been part of east Prussia but was later annexed by Lithuania. He called himself Lithuanian: had it been known he had served in the German army in the Second World War he would never have been allowed into New Zealand as an immigrant.
Like a lot of painters, Gopas had to paint portraits for a living, something he resented. Perhaps as a way of preserving his artistic self-respect, he sometimes painted two portraits: one a fairly agreeable likeness that would be acceptable to the sitter, and another, expressing his true vision of the person, for himself. He would in time paint portraits of Hilda, Henry and Juliet Hulme. When Helen Garrett, the wife of one of Henry Hulme’s colleagues, saw Gopas’s second, secret portrait of Hilda, she was shocked to see how successfully the painter had captured on canvas Hilda’s “rather ruthless character”.
Airini Grennell’s father, Harry Grennell, lived in Port Levy, where he ran the post office and skippered a launch that provided the fastest connection between the bay and the nearby port of Lyttelton. The Hulmes learned that next to Harry’s place on the shorefront was an unoccupied bach. Harry told them they could use it as a holiday place whenever they liked.
Port Levy is separated from Lyttelton by Adderley Head and a dusty potholed road winding across the Purau Saddle. It is a beautiful place. The narrow bay that probes four miles inland is enfoldedby rugged hills. “The hills iron, the quiet tides below” was how the poet Denis Glover described it. Unlike Akaroa or Church Bay, other settlements on the peninsula, Port Levy was not at all fashionable. The scruffy dwellings clustering around the head of the bay housed an assortment of down-to-earth Europeans such as Dirty Mick, a deserter from the Royal Navy, full of salt-flavoured yarns and advice about fishing. Most of the small Māori population lived in or about Puari, a settlement on the eastern side of the bay, on land reserved for them by the Crown in 1849.
Port Levy had an interesting past. In about 1700, when Ngāi Tahu conquered Banks Peninsula, its chief, Moki, had kept his prisoners there to be devoured at leisure, or used as slaves if they were lucky. In the 1820s, during what came to be called the kai huanga—“eat relation”—feud, a war party stole over the hill from Little River and killed a number of people, including an elderly chief. For a time in the 1840s, Port Levy was the most populous settlement in Canterbury, and a favourite place for whaling captains to get wood and water and rest their men. The first Anglican church in the South Island was built there.
At the end of 1952 the Hulmes spent their summer holiday at the Port Levy bach, which Hilda dubbed “Christmas Cottage”. Pauline Parker was having a rather different holiday: two weeks at a bible class camp in the north Canterbury countryside. The young Methodists mustered sheep and sang around the campfire. Pauline endured it with surprisingly good humour.
When the school holidays ended, Nora Rieper announced that now Rosemary was living at Templeton Farm the family was going to start taking in boarders. The first intake consisted of four young men, Harry, Ross, Ron and John, also known as Nicholas, all students at the university or teachers’ training college. Pauline was enthusiastic. “I do hope Ross turns out to be nice,” she wrote in her diary. “I have been looking forward to his coming so much that I will probably be disappointed.”
The flurry of excitement was shortlived and life returned to stultifying normality. “This evening after tea we decided to go to the beach,” she recorded. “Mother and Nana did the dishes. Ron came with us. Ross was out to tea so naturally he did not come. We went to Brighton. Ron, Wendy and I went for a swim. Mother bought some chocolate and biscuits which we had in the car on the way home…”
Pauline made a resolution to work hard in the fourth form, but for the more academically gifted Juliet success that could be achieved only by hard work was not worth bothering about. She preferred to display her dramatic talent, making a big impression as a murderess in a production of Ghost Train. Jill Taylor, who produced the play, remembered that “you couldn’t read what was on her face … she was very self-contained, and dismissive of other people”.
She was not dismissive of Pauline; the pair were now inseparable, walking around the school hand-in-hand and sitting together having long conversations in low voices. “You were allowed to have a special friend,” Jan Sutherland remembered, “as long as it was kept within bounds.” But what were those bounds? Whenever they could, Pauline and Juliet withdrew from school activities. At the annual sports day in March, when the entire school marched to nearby Lancaster Park, they found a quiet place under the grandstand where they could sit and write poetry together. Juliet composed a sonnet while Pauline wrote three songs to Carmelita, one of her fictional characters.
The intensity of their involvement with each other was so obvious it was talked about, but for one of their classmates “it was considered normal for girls to have crushes on each other. It was all part of life at a single-sex school … Lesbians were something we didn’t know or think about.”
The headmistress, Miss Stewart, was less relaxed and had a talk with Hilda Hulme. She was concerned the girls’ relationship might be going beyond normal healthy friendship. Hilda, the liberal-minded expert on child raising, reportedly replied that she was not prepared to interfere with her daughter’s friendships. This would surely have infuriated Stewart, who was trying to tread gently in a delicate matter, made even more delicate by the fact that Hilda Hulme was now a member of the school’s board of governors.
By this time Pauline was blissfully proclaiming Juliet and herself geniuses. “We have decided,” she wrote in her diary, “how sad it is
for other people that they cannot appreciate our genius. But we hope the book will help them do so a little, though no one could fully appreciate us.”
“The book”, a proposed collaboration, didn’t get far but the girls continued to produce poetry. The one surviving example, Pauline’s “The Ones That I Worship”, was puerile yet strangely disturbing:
There are living among two beautiful daughters
Of a man who possesses two beautiful daughters
The most glorious beings in creation;
They’d be the pride and joy of any nation.
You cannot know nor try to guess,
The sweet soothingness of their caress.
The outstanding genius of this pair
Is understood by few, they are so rare.
Compared with these two, every man is a fool.
The world is most honoured that they should deign to rule,
And above us these Goddesses reign on high.
I worship the power of these lovely two
With that adoring love known to so few.
’Tis indeed a miracle, one must feel,
That two such heavenly creatures are real.
Both sets of eyes, though different far, hold many mysteries
strange.
Impassively they watch the race of man decay and change.
Hatred burning bright in the brown eyes, with enemies for fuel,
Icy scorn glitters in the grey eyes, contemptuous and cruel.
&nb
sp; Why are men such fools they will not realise
The wisdom that is hidden behind those strange eyes?
And these wonderful people are you and I.
*
Hilda encouraged the fantasy swirling around pleasantly in Pauline’s brain that she and Juliet were sisters, “beautiful daughters of a man who possesses two beautiful daughters”. Pauline did everything she could to win favour with Juliet’s mother, and was overcome with happiness when Hilda kissed her twice in thanks for a gift of cigarettes. Hilda, for her part, seems to have got mischievous pleasure out of making remarks that were so dearly prized.
Pauline was invited to stay at the Port Levy bach for the Easter holidays. These days, she wrote, were the most heavenly she hadever experienced. “Mrs Hulme did my hair. She calls me her foster daughter.” And a few days later: “Mrs Hulme says she wished I was her daughter too.” It was unfair: she would have traded her mother for Mrs Hulme without a second’s hesitation. She was besotted with Juliet, in love with Mrs Hulme, in love with Dr Hulme, in love with the whole world of the Hulmes. Even the little beast Jonty was, by association, bathed in a golden light.
The two girls wandered the beach and hills day and night, not wanting to sleep, thinking thoughts that grew more and more bizarre. On Good Friday, April 3, they rose before dawn and walked up the hill behind the cottage. Pauline described in her diary a “queer formation of clouds” underlit by moonlight reflected off the sea, and a vision appearing as the sun rose: “Today Juliet and I found the key to the 4th World. We realise now that we have had it in our possession for about six months but we only realised it on the day of the death of Christ. We saw a gateway through the clouds. We sat on the edge of the path and looked down the hill out over the bay. The island looked beautiful. The sea was blue. Everything was full of peace and bliss. We then realised we had the key. We now know that we are not genii as we thought. We have an extra part of our brain which can appreciate the 4th World. Only about ten people have it. When we die we will go to the 4th World—but meanwhile on two days every year we may use the key and look into that beautiful world which we have been lucky enough to be allowed to know of on this Day of Finding the Key to the way through the Clouds.” There were echoes of Queenswood, of Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophism, of a spiritual world accessible only to the initiates, the enlightened, the chosen few.