by Ngaio Marsh
A few miles away from us, round the hills, there lived a horse-coper called Mr McGuinnes. For him my father conceived an admiration (’Decent fellow, McGuinnes’) and with him, soon after we arrived, a bargain was struck. Mr McGuinnes would keep me supplied with a pony which would be grazed in the Top Paddock to which we had access. The pony would be changed from time to time and the outgoing mount sold, I now realize, as having been used by a child. I, who had never bestridden anything but my rocking horse, was madly excited.
In due course the first pony arrived. Dolly, she was called: a pretty, mettlesome little creature who sidled up the lane showing the whites of her eyes. When my father put the new slithery pad on her back she kicked him. This unsettled his temper. Mr McGuinnes, who held her firmly with both hands near the bit, made the classic observation that it was only her fun. I was put up. Before my feet could be set in the stirrups, Dolly went into a series of humpbacked bucks. Like Mr Winkle before me, I clung to her neck while Mr McGuinnes and my father shouted at each other. I would have liked to show the intrepid spirit of Little Lord Fauntleroy who, it may be remembered, gallantly trotted and cantered at his first venture. But the Earl of Dorincourt’s stables did not produce half-broken buckjumpers for the little heir to learn upon, nor did the Earl and his groom scream instructions at each other not to let her bolt.
‘I’m getting off,’ I said.
‘No, you’re not,’ shouted my father.
But somehow or another I did, and we had a row.
‘It doesn’t matter if you do fall off,’ roared my father. ‘It’d only be like falling off the kitchen table. You wouldn’t think anything of that. Get up again.’
Dolly snorted, reared and backed, and Mr McGuinnes fought with her head.
‘I don’t want to,’ I said. ‘It’s not a bit like the kitchen table.’
‘Good Lord!’ said my father in disgust. ‘Here. I’ll show you, you ass.’
He leapt into the saddle. ‘Let her go,’ he said sternly.
Dolly made a complicated bound and broke into a gallop. Halfway down the lane she threw him and the rest of the afternoon was spent in recapturing her.
My nerve, if not completely shattered, was far from secure. However, there were further equestrian attempts. Dolly was again ridden by my father and, after bolting with him for a considerable distance, came lathering back in what was held to be a chastened mood. I was led up and down the lane, whitely attempting to ride in my stirrups and hating it.
I doubt if I would ever have become a horsey child if we had not, at this juncture, paid one of our visits to Dunedin. Here, under the guidance of a very old and almost stone-deaf gardener-groom, I became acquainted with two elderly ponies, Tasman and Tommy. I fed them over the paddock rails, learnt to bridle them, climbed on them of my own accord and when nothing untoward occurred, began to bump bareback around the paddock. It seems to me, now, that there was no interval between this tentative experiment and early morning rides when I cantered along the sea front, a hardened but far from technically accomplished equestrienne. The Pacific thundered and crashed along the beach, seagulls screamed over the island they had whitened, and sometimes I rode up a steep and winding road to Cargill’s Castle. Up this same road my father, when he first came to New Zealand, had been driven with Uncle William and his wife to balls the Cargills gave in their antipodean highland castle. He told me how the lights of the carriages had glowed and turned in the night, how gay life was in the Eighties and Nineties. Sometimes on my early morning rides I remembered his stories.
On our return to Christchurch came Frisky, from whom I should have learned the facts of life.
She was a little chestnut mare, part Arab, and she stayed with me until my feet were a few inches from the ground. Other ponies and horses came and went (’Ridden by a child. Very quiet.’) but Frisky remained. I adored and bossed her, sometimes flinging my arms round her neck and burying my face in her celery-smelling hide, sometimes cramming her into prolonged gallops. After a time she was removed for a short period by Mr McGuinnes. When she returned, I was told that she was in a delicate state of health and must be taken quietly until further orders. I obeyed these injunctions tenderly and without question. My mother afterwards told me that, encouraged by this ready-made exemplar, she attempted to use it as a basis for biological instruction but that I paid no attention whatever to her carefully chosen phrases. I rode Frisky quietly, my legs spreading wider and wider apart, and concluded that as she was getting fatter she must be getting better. My father suggested, one morning, that I should accompany him to the Top Paddock. Nothing could have exceeded my astonishment when I found that Frisky was attended by a foal that wobbled round her like a sort of animated diagram. Delighted, I was: enlightened as to the facts of life, not at all.
To this day I cannot understand my idiocy in this respect; I behaved like a Goon. When one of my little girl friends from Miss Ross’s who was called Merta, told me that her mummy was fat because she was going to have a baby I thought she was spinning an extremely unconvincing yarn and didn’t believe a word of it. An intelligent and amiable child, Merta took no offence but merely said: ‘Well, anyway, that’s why she’s fat. You’ll see,’ and did not reopen the discussion. When another little girl confided specific, if not altogether accurate, information imparted by her brother, I was interested but never for one moment did I apply it to anybody I knew. When my mother asked me if I’d like a brother or sister because Dr Dick had said she might have one now, I merely said I wouldn’t and continued to think that our family physician concocted babies in his surgery. What is the psychiatrist’s explanation of such booby-like obstinacy? I have noticed it in other children whose mothers, spurred on by contemporary attitudes, have lost no opportunity to point the moral, if not adorn the procreative tale. In each case the reaction was unrewarding.
‘You see, darling, Mummy is keeping the new baby warm under her heart until it is ready – ‘
‘Yes, Mummy. Mummy, if I kept a penny for every day for a million years could it buy a bicycle?’
‘I expect it could, don’t you? And you see, darling, Daddy is really like a gardener – ‘
‘Can I have a garden of my own to grow mustard and cress?’
‘We’ll see. And it was just the same when you were born – ‘
‘When’s my birthday? Can I have a gun for my birthday?’
Heavy going.
III
After I left Tib’s, my mother struggled for a short time with my lessons and then I had a governess: Miss Ffitch. The capital F was used, I imagine, as a concession to colonial prejudice. Nowhere in the English-speaking world are proper names more arrogantly misused than in New Zealand. In retrospect, my heart bleeds for Miss Ffitch who, I am sure, would have been much happier with a conventional and nicely comported little girl. Invigorated by the fresh air of the hills, toughened by the companionship of neighbouring children and reacting, perhaps, from the complicated terrors that had beset my first decade, I had become a formidable, in some ways an abominable, child. My dear friend Ned, who in all other respects never led me into mischief, had taught me to smoke. We bought a tin of ten ‘Three Castles Yellow (strong)’, divided them equally, retired into a wigwam we had built among some gorse-bushes, and chain-smoked the lot without evil results. Encouraged by this success, we carved ourselves pipes from willow wood into which we introduced bamboo stems and in which we smoked tea. We also smoked red-hot cigars made of pine needles and newspaper.
Lessons ended at noon. On one occasion I retired into the trees outside my bedroom and lit my pipe. I had forgotten that Miss Ffitch adjusted her hat at a glass in the window. Wreathed in smoke and glancing hardily about me, I encountered her gaze: transfixed, blank, appalled, incredulous. For a second or two we stared at each other and then her face withdrew into the shadows. I awaited her displeasure but she said nothing, having decided, I suppose, like a sensible woman, that this sort of thing lay outside the pale of her authority and was better cut dead.
I tied an alarm clock under her chair, and set it for noon. On one occasion only, I blatantly cribbed to see if she would spot it, which of course she did, and very properly made me feel that I had been extremely unfunny. These were isolated acts of insubordination. As a general rule I think I was reasonably tractable but the overall effect of Miss Ffitch was positive only in respect of the amount of information she managed to inject.
Why, I wonder, did Miss Ffitch decree that my introduction to the plays of Shakespeare should be through King Lear? Remembering her mild exterior, her unexceptionable deportment, her ladylike constraint: why, I ask myself, did she so placidly launch a small girl upon that primordial, that cataclysmic, work? One would have said she was a sitter for the Forest of Arden or the Wood Near Athens. Hamlet or Macbeth would have been much less surprising: children are extremely responsive to both these tragedies. But Lear?
I cannot remember that Miss Ffitch uttered a word of exposition or drew my attention to anything but the notes. Upon these she laid great emphasis. The version was an expurgated one. No lechery. No civet. No small gilded flies. Just torture, murder and madness. Yet, as far as I could understand it, I lapped it up, and was, I remember, greatly surprised by its beauty. Kent’s speech in the stocks, the theadbare Fool. The recognition scene:
‘Do not laugh at me
For, as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child, Cordelia.’
‘And so I am. I am.’
This lovely grief was understandable. When told to read the scene aloud, my voice trembled. Perhaps after all Miss Ffitch was on the right lines.
For Christmas, Miss Ffitch very kindly gave me Carlyle’s French Revolution. I tried hard but failed. All that turgid, and at the same time bossy, excitability was too much for me. Nor did I respond with marked enthusiasm to the Lays of Ancient Rome or to a poem which maundered, in lachrymose pentameters, over Mary, Queen of Scots, or to another that said:
Watch where ye see my helmet shine amid the tanks of wah
And be your oriflamme today the White Plume of Navarre
Kipling, however, got under my tender diaphragm. I was already deeply committed to the Just So Stories which my father read superbly and to their end-poems which, with those of the Jungle Books, I learnt by heart without knowing I had done so. I still think them almost flawless for readers of seven to thirteen years.
Now Chil the Kite brings home the Night
That Mang, the Bat sets free
The herds are shut in byre and hut
For loosed till dawn are we.
and:
Oh hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us.
What is to be said of the taste of a child reader? From what half-formed preferences, what unrecognized instincts is it shaped? Why did the opening phrase of the Jungle Stories so captivate me that I must read it over and over again with such deep satisfaction? ‘It was seven o’clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills-’
This was magic.
Then came The Brushwood Bay, which I shall never dare to read again lest the recollection should crumble into disillusion, and some of the sea poems, particularly The Coast-Wise Lights of England.
Our brows are bound with spindrift and the weed is on our knees
And our loins are battered ‘neath us by the swinging, smoking seas.
By these I was ravished.
Unfortunately I found that I myself was capable of some morsels in Kiplingesque pastiche.
‘Up,’ I wrote with my tongue firmly gripped between my teeth:
Up from the rolling plains, up where the blue mist lies
and a little further on and even more regrettably
We must be nothing weak, Vallies and hills are ours
From the last lone mountain creek to where the rata flowers.
I really believe that in my heart I knew what dreadful stuff this was and can distinctly remember that on completing it I was discomforted by a sensation of embarrassment. I don’t think I ever showed it to my mother. At ten years, however, according to a note she made on it, I had presented her with a poem.
The sun is sinking in the west
The stars begin to shine
The birds are singing in their nest
And I must go to mine.
These lines preceded my Kipling period and are, I think, greatly to be preferred to it. Oddly enough, although it reads like a direct pinch from Blake, I had not, at that time, been introduced to the Songs of Innocence and therefore may be held, I suppose, to have perpetrated an infantile literary coincidence.
For one odd preference in reading I can find no explanation. This was a book by an, at that time, popular journalist called John Foster Fraser. It was about the trans-Siberian railway and it completely fascinated me. Perhaps my love of trains had something to do with this but I think that I had made some strange association between the word ‘Russia’ and an idea of the quintessence of adventure. This strange feeling was to reach a kind of climax after many years by the wharves of Odessa.
In addition to lessons with Miss Ffitch I went twice a week to Miss Jennie Black, Mus. Bac., for the piano. She was dark and incisive with flashing eyes behind her spectacles. She taught Mathey’s method and she stood no nonsense. I rode Frisky and my mother rode her bicycle as far as the tram stop. She sat on a grassy bank and read. Frisky often dropped off to sleep, resting her chin rather heavily on my mother’s hat and slightly dribbling. There they would be on my return, with Tip, now an old dog, panting in the shade of Frisky’s belly.
I must have been an infuriating pupil for the piano. I had a poor ear, little application and fluctuating interest, but I was not bad enough to be given the sack and even passed some Trinity College examinations. My mother, winning a perpetual series of rearguard actions, insisted on regular practice which I loathed. Yet every now and then I would suddenly become engaged by the current piece and work quite hard on it.
‘But you played that well. You played it quite well. Tiresome little wretch!’ exclaimed Miss Jennie Black, Mus. Bac., in an extremity of irritation.
We almost always referred to her by her full title because of its snappy rhythm. Indeed, I once absent-mindedly replied to one of her demands: ‘Yes, Miss Jennie Black, Mus. Bac.,’ and got an awful rocket for impertinence. It was impossible to explain.
In spite of Miss Ross’s stricture and with a hand that has always been slightly tremulous, I continued to draw and paint with great assiduity but not, I think, very marked talent. I had come upon one of the repellent soft leather booklets that people used to give each other in those days: The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Instantly enthralled, I tried to illustrate it, using a birthday box of pastels, a drawing board and an easel that made me feel very grown-up. The figure stealing at dusk through the marketplace, the potter moulding his wet clay, the Sultan’s turret in a noose of light – it was frustrating to a degree that, with such enthusiasm, I was able to express so little.
Watching my struggles, my mother asked me if I would like to have lessons and I said I would. I was too young to be a junior student at the Canterbury University College Art School but, after she had seen the Director, he allowed me to go twice a week for instruction in the Antique Room where I struggled with charcoal and Michelet paper, confronted by blankly explicit plaster casts. I also was permitted to slosh about with watercolours and rather depressing still-life arrangements. My drawing began to improve a little.
It seems to me that in our early years on the hills I was never at a loose end, that there was always something to do, and that these were halcyon days. Sometimes I would wake at dawn, steal from the sleeping house and climb up through the mist, chilling my bare legs in tussock that bent earthwards under its veil of dew. Frisky, hearing me call, would whinny, look over the hilltop and come to meet me. She shared the Top Paddock with Beauty and Blazer, two cows belonging to our nearest neighbour, Mr Evans. Jack Evans, a quiet self-contained boy who did three hours’ hard work before going to school, wo
uld plod up the hill, softly chanting.
‘C’mon, Beauty. C’mon, Blazer.
C’mo-on, c’mo-on.’
And we would all go down the track together, I to my dawn-ride and Jack to his milking.
Sometimes one or the other of my two particular friends from Tib’s would come to stay: Mina and Merta. Mina was an extremely witty and articulate little girl who wore grey dresses and immaculately starched pinafores. ‘O Ngaio, fool that I am, I have forgotten my book!’ she dramatically exclaimed when we were still at Tib’s and she about seven years old. Mina shared my passion for reading, but was cleverer and much more discriminating than I. When we were a little older, she confirmed my suspicions of Kipling in his extroverted manner. ‘I understand it,’ Mina said, ‘and I don’t care for poetry that I understand.’ She had a grand manner and for that reason, I suppose, we called her Dutchy.
On wet days we wrote stories and illustrated them. My mother would set a competition to last through the holidays and give us each a fat little book with delectable blank pages. Two days before Mina was to leave, we handed over our completed works and my mother retired to deliberate. The following day she gave a very detailed judgement with marks for every story and illustration and stringent comments. The result was a tie. My mother presented each of us with a book, explaining that if the contest had not been drawn the winner would have received both of them. We were, I suppose, rather precocious little girls but we were completely taken in by this transparent device. Our mutual admiration was extreme.