I quite fell in love with Mr Stuart, his descriptions were so vivid and his ideas so strange and complicated. But teachers were always far more impressed by Jane than they ever were with me. Indeed, Mr Reid mortified me by complaining about my untidiness, and asking me why I couldn’t be more like my sister Jane, who was always so neat. I felt as bad as did Helen Burns in Jane Eyre, wearing the nameboard, with ‘slattern’ written upon it for all to see. But Mr Stuart did look me up and down once and observe that I was quite a clever little girl for my age. I have a feeling that Mr Stuart was a Trotskyist and Mr Reid a Leninist.
We sent food parcels to my grandmother Isobel in England and she sent us clothes parcels in return. Jane and I viewed these with trepidation. She’d send combinations, cast-offs from nameless cousins, scratchy all-in-one flannel undergarments with flaps for personal functions, which fastened with little rubber buttons. If my mother decided the day was cold, we were obliged to wear them.
The ship on which my mother sent her latest manuscript was torpedoed. Her publisher’s offices in London were bombed. There was no spare newsprint for fiction anyway. That was the end of another dream. Now how were we to make our living? But the men were at war: women were able to take the jobs. They ran the farms and the industries: Mary Glover, wife of poet Dennis Glover, who ran the Caxton Press in peacetime but killed men in time of war, delivered our daily milk from an electrified float. My mother, who had been working as a typist in the Albion Wright advertising agency, took over when her boss was called up. She wore a little grey business suit, functioned perfectly if anxiously, kept the agency in profit, earned seven pounds a week – and once actually spent four pounds on a new suit.
In 1944 we had a special assembly in the Girls’ High School to celebrate the end of the war in Europe, VE Day. Some 400 of us were crammed into the assembly hall on the first floor. The building began to tremble and the floor to tilt. Earthquakes were not meant to happen in Christchurch but this quite definitely was one, and a bad one too. We continued with Henry Vaughan’s hymn to peace:
My soul, there is a country, Far beyond the stars, Where stands a wingèd sentry, All skilful in the wars…
But we sang shakily, an inch away from panic…The earthquake calmed, the building steadied. We were lucky. People trusted far more to luck then than they do today.
Still the young men did not come back from the wars: they were moved on to the Japanese front. The Japanese were not playing the same game as we were, or else the goalposts had moved. The enemy just would not say ‘pax’.
One day that same year my mother came home from work white faced. The Allies had dropped an atom bomb on Japan. It had destroyed a whole city, women, children, everyone. It didn’t seem the kind of thing our side did, but we’d done it. No one knew much about the effects of radiation: it was just a very big bomb. Simple loss of civilian life was enough to horrify. But at least very soon after that the Japanese said they were giving in, war stopped, and we celebrated VJ Day in school assembly, concluding with hymnody in proper spirit of vigour and triumph. ‘And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace…’
The great day came and the men came back from the war. Albion Wright took over the reins of the advertising agency: my mother was demoted to typing and making the coffee once again, and her wages were cut by half. Indignant at her treatment she handed in her notice, and took a job in the biscuit factory whose broken products I had eaten while at the convent. This earned her a couple of shillings more than had she stayed at the agency. She would come home from work with blistered fingers: her job was to lift hot biscuits from the oiled conveyer belt and place them on wire racks to cool. I was sorry that hostilities had ended.
And that was the course of the war for Margaret, Jane and Fay. After that flags went out of fashion, and we no longer marched in from school playgrounds but simply took our places at our desks when the bell went.
When Jane and I returned from Coromandel in the autumn of 1938 we found that our mother had moved house again. Turn your back for a moment and she was off. Mostly we lived in furnished houses, so moving was not a big deal. She has always believed there is somewhere better round the corner, and by and large she was right. This little house was surrounded by green trees and was dark and damp, but I could walk to school and I liked that.
We were not there long because my mother became ill with jaundice, and Jane and I were sent to stay with friends in Sumner, a seaside town a few miles out of Christchurch. It was thought we would enjoy being on the beach but we had been spoiled by Coromandel and were not grateful. It was a flat dull beach, its only feature a large rock with a tunnel cut through its middle for the fun of it, but it always smelt of pee. So did the school we were now sent to: Jane hated it, I didn’t mind it, but I was shaky on past participles and you got the strap if your homework had too many mistakes in it. The trouble with moving schools was that some things you knew too well and other things you didn’t know well enough: but at least your past had no time to catch up with you. The strap was a leather thong: it did your hand less damage than the cane, but the hurt went on for days, or so they said. At least it was not the paddy, which was a flattish long-handled wooden spoon with a hole in the shallow bowl, to raise a blister in the palm of the hand. Only the boys got that: girls were spared. There were some advantages, I could see, to being female.
Once my mother was better Jane and I became ill. We caught whooping cough, quite badly, and were taken to recuperate on a farm at a little place called Kowai Bush.
We collected pails full of warm milk from the cows and warm eggs from the hens. By day I read and by night I coughed. I read all the Hans Andersen stories and as many of Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books as I could. I began on E. Nesbit and Rider Haggard. The cough kept coming back at night, and was frightening, because sometimes I felt I would never breathe again, and die, like the Little Mermaid. When we were ill my mother was really attentive. She would get up in the night and bring us honey and lemon drinks. Jane and I became adept at presenting her with short intensive illnesses. I try to do as much for my children, but after three days’ nursing I begin to lose patience, and the flow of tender loving care becomes erratic, and they by some miracle, or instinct for self-preservation, get better at once.
Jean Stephenson and Helen Shaw came to visit us, forgiven by my mother for any sins they might or might not have committed. They seemed to want to please. Jean took pride in knitting us Fair-Isle jumpers, made in lengths of different coloured wool to a traditional Scottish pattern. They were scratchy and ugly. If you chose the right place, snipped a single strand with the scissors or with your teeth, and pulled, the garment would fall in half. This seemed to me immeasurably funny and I took pleasure in doing it. Jean would patiently knit the pieces together again, I would snip, she would knit, until she finally gave up. This is the only piece of gratuitous naughtiness I can remember having committed through my entire childhood. Life was too precarious: we lived on a knife-edge, financially and socially: we knew better than to rock the boat. We were two very good, very polite and docile little girls. I was discovered weeping over The Snow Queen. It was the sliver of ice in Kay’s heart that frightened me, which stopped him loving Gerda. I foresaw a life full of Ice Queens swooping down with the wind and freezing my beloved’s heart towards me. I was not far wrong.
In the