Perhaps it was the relevance of some of the issues to Ngaio’s own life that gave the story its potency. Like Flossie, Ngaio felt the lack of a son and heir. In 1943, she had travelled to the North Island to stay with her Aunt Edith, whom she called Aunt Amy. This was her father’s eldest sister, who had immigrated to New Zealand with her husband Frederick Baker and five adult children in 1924. Aunt Amy now lived in Tauranga with Lill and Hal, her unmarried children. While Ngaio was staying with them, they drove to Hamilton to meet Aunt Amy’s daughter Stella, her husband John Mannings, and their children Jean, John and younger brother Roy. It would prove to be a life-changing visit. Lack of family in her life was something Ngaio felt keenly, and she always regretted not having children. In Stella she found the closest thing she would have to a sister and a ready-made family. Ngaio was drawn to the Mannings children whom she came to see as surrogates for her own. The boys captivated her, especially John, the more sedate and contemplative of the two brothers.
John was a well-mannered ‘Etonian’ boy, already suited to her notions of an upper-class son. As a child he was happy to sit at the piano while Roy, nicknamed Bear, ‘rough-and-tumbled and got grubby outside’. Ngaio really only saw the boys: ‘[Hers] was very much the Edwardian psyche even though she was a woman herself,’ remembers Jean Crabtree, Stella Mannings’s daughter. Blood relationships meant a lot to Ngaio, and she was generous to all her extended family, but ‘she definitely took a shine’ to John. For the Mannings children, Ngaio was something of a bombshell with her deep voice, international chic, and odd eating habits. She ‘produced a salad for lunch with oranges and garlic in it…she wiped the bowl with garlic’. This was extraordinary cuisine for Hamilton in the 1940s.
Later, the Mannings would stay with Ngaio in Christchurch, and in the early 1950s they lived at Marton Cottage for a number of years. When they stayed, Ngaio would take Stella on shopping expeditions to town and drag her into men’s clothing shops to buy shirts and jerseys. With her unusually long arms, Ngaio claimed these were the only things she could find to fit her. Stella Mannings was a self-taught typist, and when she stayed she translated Ngaio’s handwritten pages into typed manuscript. Ngaio loved the comforting buzz and activity of family life, but also the freedom to isolate herself and write. Stella became a confidante and source of practical assistance and advice. Ngaio was naïve about money. ‘Anyone could take her down and they did,’ Jean Crabtree recalled. She ‘lived for months with a huge hole in the kitchen’ when the workman just took off. ‘If she ever got anything done, she paid through the nose for it.’
Having seen the potential of Stella’s son John, Ngaio decided to foster it. She wanted a surrogate son who could benefit from the money she had made and in return give her affection and respect. In 1945 there was much heated discussion, particularly between Ngaio and Stella’s husband, John, about Ngaio paying for young John to go to high school at Christ’s College in Christchurch. In the end it was decided that John (whom she called ‘Johnny’) would become a boarder at the élite boys’ school, and he was enrolled in 1946.
Ngaio derived a huge amount of pleasure from knowing that young John was in Christchurch. He came for regular Sunday visits, biking over from Christ’s College and working in the garden while strains of music wafted from the windows of the sleepout or ‘whari’, where John was allowed to play Ngaio’s state-of-the-art gramophone. They enjoyed each other’s company. Like her father, Ngaio was capable of moving easily between generations. Cecil and Dundas Walker were often there until 1pm on Sundays, when they departed to return in the evening for a game of Lexicon. Ngaio would pour drinks, and inevitably some excellent apple cider would find its way into John’s glass. His bicycle ride back to Christ’s College for Evensong, Compline, and bed was anything but steady.
Ngaio, the indulgent, mild-mannered rule-breaker, was the perfect patron for a teenage boy. But John’s experiences at Christ’s College were not as positive as Ngaio had hoped. The school, with its internationally trained staff, opened a window for him on the world—‘When you took literature, your teacher actually knew T.S. Eliot’—but the emphasis was academic and sporting, rather than cultural. It was a macho atmosphere with well-bred trappings. John Mannings, musically inclined and from the provincial north, was out of step. Although he was joined at Christ’s College, and in his Sunday excursions to Ngaio’s, by his brother Bear in 1949, this did little to alleviate his sense of isolation.
It is the dark side of surrogate parenting that Ngaio explores in Died in the Wool. Flossie enrolled her farm manager’s son, Cliff, at the equivalent of the best English public school in New Zealand. Cliff’s father, Tommy Johns, raised objections and there were ructions at home, but eventually it was settled. Cliff’s precocious appetite for the piano and writing would be nurtured in the best learning environment money could buy. Cliff, ‘a full-sized enfant prodigé [sic]’, was taken out of his own environment to satisfy Flossie’s need for a child. She wooed him with books, a gramophone with specially selected records, and her Bechstein piano, but away from Mount Moon he faced the realities of life outside the familiar woolshed world of rouseabouts. Flossie planned a big future. Cliff was to go to university and, at the end of the war, to the Royal College of Music in London. But Cliff was miserable at school, and he and Flossie quarrelled. At the age of 16 he wanted to enlist and fight in the war. At 47, she wanted him to remain her protégé and to succeed. She was the parent-figure he rebelled against to become a man. Like a financial investment, Flossie tallied up her losses and railed against him. Her love was not unconditional. He owed her a huge debt. Flossie was bludgeoned and suffocated to the sound of Cliff playing Bach on an old piano in the shearers’ quarters. Or was he?
The links to Ngaio’s life are fascinating. It is almost as if she is teasing out potential scenarios fictionally, before the possibilities are unleashed in reality. The relationship between real life and her fictional creations is never in any way precise, yet she has a clever way of identifying and exploring the essential issues. Flossie is a dictator (Ngaio was not), so many more than just Cliff have a motive to kill her. As Fabian Losse observes about Flossie’s spouse, Arthur Rubrick, ‘it takes a strong man to be a weak husband. Matrimonially speaking, a condition of perpetual apology is difficult to sustain.’ Flossie’s life is littered with people unable to transcend her suffocating ego. Her husband, her ward, her nephews, and her surrogate son all have a stake in her death. She is likened to one of the weird sisters in Macbeth, because there is something uncannily clever about her ability to manipulate people. Flossie is ruthless to succeed. The ‘ambitious type’ is how Markins, manservant and special agent, describes her. ‘You see them everywhere. Very often they’re childless.’ Her political endeavours are insincere. When asked to contribute an article for a weekly journal, she explains: ‘I want to stress the sanctity of women’s work in the high country’. But her best platitudes ‘faltered before the picture of any cocky-farmer’s wife, whose working-day is fourteen hours long and comparable only to that of a man under sentence of hard labour’.
As writer and detective fiction commentator Carole Acheson points out, Mount Moon symbolizes ‘the multiple role the sheep station has played in New Zealand’s history: bringing settlers to the secluded hill country; making sheep the backbone of the nation’s economy; and creating a new landed gentry out of the wealthy station owners’.
Cliff’s generation will tackle the creation of a New Zealand National Identity in the arts, and his symphonies will capture the quintessence of the landscape and its history. In the meantime, though, this is a mystery and the murderer revealed at the end of Died in the Wool is a young man indoctrinated by a Nazi ‘youth training scheme’ with supremacist ideas. In a letter to Fox, Alleyn explains: ‘He was one of a clutch of young foreign Herrinvolk [sic]…who did their worst to raise Cain when they returned, bloated with Fascism, to their own country.’ Ngaio drew on her own experiences to create her killer, weaving into her plot threads of experienc
es in Germany in 1937. She was remembering the New Zealander who extolled the virtues of the Nazi Party, and the boys that shouted ‘Heil Hitler’ as they bathed with their master in the Mosel River. What kind of men would they become, and what would they be capable of?
Alleyn is thinking increasingly of home. As he builds up the fire in the study, he is caught ‘on a wave of nostalgia’. He has been away from his wife and London life for three years. He longs to be back in his own country and with his own people. His salve at Mount Moon has been the overpowering presence of the landscape, a presence that even at midnight comes through the windows and sends a shiver of excitement down his spine. But for Alleyn it is time to go.
From this point on, Ngaio would discuss the New Zealand accent, manners and cultural identity in newspaper and Listener articles, in letters to the editor and on the radio, but never again in such depth fictionally. It was hard to justify her detective’s presence in New Zealand. ‘Well I can’t keep on lugging old Alleyn out to New Zealand for this reason or that,’ she explained to a radio interviewer in 1978. The war had given her an excuse, but Japan surrendered in August 1945, and the fighting was over.
Died in the Wool was criticized for its slow plod through repetitious reminiscences. On the whole, though, critics commended it for its psychological insights and marvellous evocation of the High Country landscape. The most cutting criticism came from the reviewer for the Time and Tide. It was overly harsh, but there was an element of truth:
Died in the Wool, though competent, is heavy and, let’s face it, dull. The first half of the book is aptly described as ‘a verbal striptease before an investigating officer’, and before it is over one has long ceased to care which, if any, of these tedious characters is a Nazi agent. Nor are the technical details of New Zealand sheep-shearing very exciting to a layman. The whole thing lacks grip. Come back to England, Miss Marsh; you’ve been wool-gathering long enough.
The two-year gap between the publication of Colour Scheme and Died in the Wool was her longest so far. Between these books she entered a new phase in her life that would make detective fiction pale by comparison. In 1941, when the young drama students from the Canterbury University College Drama Society (CUCDS) had cycled up to her home and asked her to produce Outward Bound, she had agreed, on one condition: that the next year’s production was Hamlet and she would be the director.
CHAPTER FIVE
A Stage Set for Tragedy
Amidnight bell tolled as the curtain rose. The stage was simply lit and spartan. High contrasts of light and dark created long silhouettes that played across the plain backdrop. This was the freezing cold battlement of Elsinore Castle in Denmark.
‘Who’s there?’ cried Bernardo, stepping onto the narrow rampart.
‘Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself,’ challenged Francisco.
‘Long live the King!’ exclaimed Bernardo.
It was August 1943, and the opening night of a student production of Hamlet. Because it was wartime, ‘Long live the King!’ had a patriotic echo that reverberated around the room. The Little Theatre in Christchurch was packed to capacity. More tickets had been sold than there were seats, and as people’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkness the unseated overflow emerged, draped over beams and electrical boxes, and standing leaning against the stage. They crept into place as the lights went down to watch a spectacle, a cultural awakening that would keep Christchurch transfixed for six nights. This was the first time since Allan Wilkie had toured Hamlet over 20 years before that Hamlet had played to Christchurch audiences. The student players had been reluctant to do it and the audience reaction was impossible to predict. Staging Hamlet was a risk.
Francisco, the sentinel, was dressed in an army-issue greatcoat and tin hat. Under his arm he carried a service rifle with a fixed bayonet. The play programme warned audiences that the actors would be wearing modern dress, but the austerity of the stage, its eerie blue lighting, plus the costumes’ contemporary poignancy, gave the production a chill impact that few could have anticipated. Bernardo was also dressed in army uniform, and the two men loomed larger than life on the tiny stage. What began in those opening moments would keep the audience spellbound for nearly two hours. They watched Dundas Walker as King Hamlet’s ghost standing in bloodcurdling conversation with his son; they watched the young Hamlet, racked by fear and grief, crawling across the stage steps towards the spectre.
‘Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder,’ the ghost commanded his son.
‘Murder!’ cried young Hamlet.
‘Murder most foul, as in the best it is, but this most foul, strange and unnatural.’
‘Haste me to know’t,’ replied Hamlet, ‘that I, with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love, may sweep to my revenge.’
Jack Henderson was perfect as Hamlet. Dark-haired, sallow-skinned, seething and slightly petulant, he had stage presence before he opened his mouth. Henderson, who was 19 when rehearsals began, was the son of Justice Henderson, a High Court judge in Calcutta. He had been attending Westminster School in London when war broke out, and his parents arranged for him to finish his schooling at Christ’s College and continue on to Canterbury University. He had previous acting experience and planned to leave shortly for England to study at The Old Vic. Even then, Ngaio and Dundas Walker spent hours with him going over lines so that he got the timing, intonations and breathing correct. They spent a whole afternoon on the first 10 lines of his opening soliloquy. For a time he even stayed with Ngaio at Marton Cottage. Exhausted after rehearsals, they would creep in late at night and cook bacon and eggs, whispering so that they did not disturb Ngaio’s father. She thrived on the camaraderie and loved the intellectual exercise of translating the play script into dramatic action. Henderson, however, struggled to find his form. He had to learn how to speak in blank verse and hold some of his energy in reserve so that he could build to a climax. He found it hard to texture the delivery of his lines. At times, he unleashed emotion with an intensity that was as exhausting for those who listened as it was for him. But there was a power in his passion that would ultimately rivet the audience, and leave it marvelling that a young, relatively inexperienced actor could bring so much fire to one of Shakespeare’s most turbulent roles.
Some of the play’s impact came from the changes Ngaio made to the script. Hamlet was presented in prose rather than verse. This made it seem more immediate and accessible, and stopped students from falling into the pattern of reading it like a poem that paused ‘at the end of each line of verse, regardless of sense or punctuation’. The Christchurch audience was provincial; a purist version of the play could not be staged. It was imperative to capture and hold people’s interest, and the rhythms of the staid city must be considered. Ngaio cut the play with the precision of a surgeon, reducing it to 17 scenes with a shortened interval so that the theatre emptied before the last tram left Cathedral Square at 10.30pm. This distilled the action so everything that remained contributed to the dramatic climax. She kept the structure tight and the timing precise. In rehearsal she ran through the scenes, timing them so that they had speed and economy of delivery.
The script she worked from was heavily annotated and had illustrations of characters and action in the margins and on facing pages. She mapped the stage out in models to visualize how the production would work. The Little Theatre stage was tiny, and the challenge was to make it seem expansive enough to cope with the epic aspects of the play. The space easily evoked the intimacy of the soliloquy, but a grander canvas was harder to suggest.
Ngaio brought a degree of professionalism to student drama, and it was infectious. She took the productions seriously and she communicated her seriousness so that students felt compelled to rise to her expectations. Young people excited her. She loved their untried, easy confidence, and their willingness to learn. Ngaio, although flattered at being put on a pedestal, made sincere efforts to climb down from it. The play gave her a reason to be in the company of a generation who cou
ld have been her children, but always the work stood between them and close personal intimacy. It protected this shy, reserved woman from the glare of uncomfortable sentiment and youthful exuberance, but occasionally it was an unfortunate barrier to something more meaningful and revealing. Acting brings raw humanity before the gods. Its instrument is the human body and voice, and few things test people more than live performance. Inevitably, emotions are heightened and intense, and added to this were bristling juvenile egos, hormones and alcohol. Most single women of 48 would have blanched at the prospect, but Ngaio thrived. She had found her métier—another passion, another great love, a second life.
She stepped into the hurly-burly with her firm way of handling the cast. She was never gratuitously cutting or cruel, but she had an awesome presence that riveted young actors to the spot, sending a ripple of discomfort down their spines when they were not on the mark. Her voice ‘boomed like a bittern’, she gestured extravagantly, and she could leap onto the stage with an agility that left no one out of her reach. Physically, she was still young, able to flick her leg up behind her with flamboyant flexibility. To the students, she seemed as extraordinary in life as she was in print. Even the engineering students who shambled into rehearsals to do the lighting stiffened to her cue. She made them believe in something bigger than themselves: the play, the playwright and the production. All of these were more important than the individual, and the cast’s collective responsibility was to make it the best production possible.
Ngaio had the perfect psychology: she set high standards and encouraged people to reach them. The stick was not a rod but a carrot, and the energy to reach it was the actor’s own self-motivation. Ngaio led from behind. Interestingly, she hung back from putting her name to her first Shakespearian production. In the programme the producers were given as Jack Henderson and Marie Donaldson, but Canta, the student magazine, recognized her shadowy presence:
Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime Page 17