Rose and Henry Marsh were in their early 40s by the time they had finally saved enough money to build their own home. They bought a steep section on the Cashmere Hills close to Christchurch, and employed Rose’s architect cousin, Samuel Hurst Seager, to design a four-roomed bungalow with a large verandah, which they called Marton Cottage. A horse-drawn wagon was loaded with their belongings, and they journeyed from Fendalton to the Cashmere Hills, camping in bell-tents near the site for three months. They were so eager, they moved in before it was completed. ‘From the beginning we loved our house,’ wrote Ngaio. ‘It was the fourth member of our family.’ At last they were homeowners in a town that made property a criterion of status.
Marton Cottage was a brilliant piece of Marsh family foresight. At the time they bought the section, the Cashmere Hills were a blank canvas of heathery tussock, low bush, and the occasional stand of trees with an isolated homestead. As Christchurch grew, Cashmere became one of its most desirable suburbs. On a clear day, the view from the cottage across the city to the distant Southern Alps was breathtaking. But in the opening decade of the 20th century the city had not yet begun lapping at the edges of the honey-coloured hills, and the trip into town to Miss Ross’s school involved a long walk and then a protracted tram ride. Rose took Ngaio each day. On the way home, they always got off a stop early and walked to save paying for another section.
When Ngaio became too old for the dame school, her mother struggled with lessons at home for a while before deciding to employ a governess, Miss Ffitch. Ngaio was more of a challenge now. The outdoor life of the Cashmere Hills had instigated a Huckleberry Finn phase. Her constant companions were boys: Vernon, who lived locally, and her cousin Harvey, and later there was Ned Bristed. They made rafts and sailed them up the Heathcote River, they lit campfires, played primal games of hunt and chase across the tussock, and ran wild.
Henry Marsh did not exactly stem the tide. He secured Ngaio a succession of ponies, which were being broken in, so she could ride bareback along the beach. When she was still a young girl, he gave her a Frankfurt single-bore rifle. ‘How superb were those sunny mornings when I was allowed to walk behind my father and Tip [the family dog] through the plantation where he and his friends went quail-shooting. On these occasions he was completely and explicitly himself.’ It was Henry in his mellow easy moments with whom Ngaio identified; but it was Ned who taught her how 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.
For a time Ngaio was out of control. ‘I had become a formidable,’ she later admitted, ‘in some ways an abominable, child.’ It was little wonder that Miss Ffitch chose to ignore the sight, from a bedroom window, of Ngaio under the trees with her head wreathed in pipe smoke. ‘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.’ In addition to formal lessons, Miss Ffitch had the unfortunate job of dragging her reluctant charge twice a week to piano lessons with ‘Miss Jennie Black, Mus. Bac.’, a title Ngaio delighted in chanting ‘because of its snappy rhythm’. According to Ngaio herself, she ‘had a poor ear, little application and fluctuating interest’, but at other marriage-worthy accomplishments she was even worse: ‘I had and have, rather less aptitude than a bricklayer for sewing’. She was beginning to show real promise at art, but it was the shining light of Miss Ffitch’s Shakespeare that first penetrated the smoky haze of Ngaio’s adolescence. She began with King Lear. Despite the fact that it was a censored version with every possible sexual reference or innuendo removed (’just torture, murder and madness left’), and even though Miss Ffitch delivered it primly without ‘a word of exposition’ other than the notes (which she overused), Ngaio ‘lapped it up’. She could understand it. She loved the poetry of its language.
It was probably with a sense of relief that Rose Marsh watched as ‘Miss Ffitch said goodbye and bicycled down the lane for the last time’: Ngaio was going to school. It would cost them a fortune for fees and the expensive uniform, but Rose felt certain that it would be worthwhile. Ngaio needed taming.
It was 1910, and St Margaret’s College had just opened and was run by a strict order of Anglo-Catholic nuns. Only the best families could afford to send their daughters there. Rose would have to scrimp and save even more, but the school had the values and status she wanted. It was not that she was an avid Christian, or even a great snob; what impressed her most was the school’s serious attitude towards young women’s education. The curriculum was heavy in literature, history and the arts, but what they taught promised to be equal to that of any good boys’ school. She knew Ngaio had potential and believed that Ngaio could realize it there. She was right. ‘From the first day, I loved St. Margaret’s.’
Ngaio swapped Huck Finn for High Anglicanism. ‘To say that I took to Divinity as a duck to water is a gross understatement. I took to it with a sort of spiritual whoop and went in…boots and all.’ St Michael and All Angels was the school’s parish church. She adored its theatre: the sermons denouncing sin and promising retribution; the processions; the banners; the dressing-up—the stoles, the copes and the cassocks; and the ‘drift of incense’ mingled with the smell of waxed wood and coir matting. The vicar’s children, the ‘Burton sisters’, became special friends. They were English and loved acting and the theatre. The other close friend was Sylvia Fox.
Then there was the drama of her English classes. ‘Eng. Lit. with Miss Hughes was exacting, and absorbing, an immensely rewarding adventure…she gave me a present that I value more than any other: an abiding passion for the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare.’ But Ngaio felt guilty about Miss Hughes. After winning a Navy League Empire Prize ‘with an essay containing thirty-one spelling mistakes’, she got the distinct impression that her teacher was not amused and would have liked to have read this, and other things her pupil wrote. Ngaio’s diffidence about her work made it hard for her to ask for assistance. She was very independent, but also painfully shy at times.
However, Ngaio’s interest in literature, creative writing, drama and art was fostered, so she distinguished herself, becoming head prefect in her senior year. This brought her into regular contact with her ‘schoolgirl crush’, the headmistress, Sister Winifred. They began swapping confidences, Ngaio trying awkwardly one day to express her wish to do something for the Church. ‘To my amazement,’ Ngaio recalled,
she opened wide her arms and, with a delighted smile exclaimed, ‘You are coming to us!’
Nothing could have been farther from my thoughts. Never in my most exalted moments had I imagined myself to have a vocation for the Sisterhood. Immersed in the folds of her habit, I was appalled and utterly at a loss. It was impossible to extricate myself…I listened aghast to her expressions of joy and left in a state of utmost confusion. It was an appalling predicament.
But Ngaio did find a calling at St Margaret’s. In fact, she found two: art and the theatre. While still at high school, she studied part-time at the Canterbury College School of Art, taking classes two afternoons a week in the antique room from 1909 to 1914. The results were encouraging. She believed art would become her occupation, and the theatre her leisure. In her lunchtimes, twice a week she went to the lower school at St Margaret’s to entertain the small girls by writing stories and enacting them. This evolved into the play Bundles, which was deemed good enough by Sister Winifred (who harboured no hard feelings) to be performed at the end-of-year prizegiving.
Encouraged, Ngaio wrote a full-length play called The Moon Princess, based on a fairy story by George Macdonald. ‘I showed it to my friends, the Burtons and they bravely decided to produce it on quite an imposing scale at St. Michael’s.’ Her mother agreed to take a leading role, as the witch. Rose played her heart out. She screeched the ‘dark nights’ curse so