The liver-coloured, coal-burning Balranald was making a last long sea voyage to the wreckers’ yard, and Ngaio’s berth was cramped, yet shipboard life appealed to her. She eagerly participated in deck games and dressing up for performances and parties, and delighted in the company of the other passengers. Already Ngaio was fascinated by the pursuit of people-watching, especially in a confined space. ‘I have always had a vague and ill-informed interest in crowd-psychology, and never was there a better opportunity of studying it.’ She could watch people with impunity—‘Australians who wanted to see the world, Americans who have seen it and insisted on telling you about it, Swedish, Greek, Armenians and Italian wanderers…South Africans’—and share her amusing observations with her Christchurch readers. It took three weeks to reach the coast of Africa, and by then much of the food on board was stale or bad. The water made people sick and, opening a folded slice of cold meat, she ‘found it encrusted with small shells’. Ngaio decided ‘to cut loose’ and eat in Durban.
She was enchanted by the city’s strangeness. ‘The first excitement we [Ngaio and a fellow passenger] encountered was a row of Zulu rickshaw men with their amazing headdresses of quills, feathers, and horns, their fur tippets and painted legs.’ The rickshaw ride to the hotel through sunny streets that thronged with ‘Hindoos, Kaffirs, Zulus…white people…[and] beautiful Indian women in ample robes of vivid blue and scarlet and cerise’ was as colourful as it was exhilarating. On a hill, the driver drew himself onto the shafts of the rickshaw and ‘we free-wheeled at an alarming speed while he rang his cow bell at the crossings’. They recovered from their ordeal by drinking coffee on the loggia of the hotel ‘and looking on at the pageant of the streets’. Ngaio saw Sybil Thorndike, her husband Lewis Casson, and their small daughter in a revival of The Liars by Henry Arthur Jones, and in a packed Indian market she bought the food she had promised herself. For sixpence she filled a colossal basket with pineapples, oranges, pawpaws, succulent tangerines and gigantic grapefruit. Ngaio ached to paint the scene, with its bustle of humanity and kaleidoscope of costumes, produce, deeply shaded little shops and brilliant lengths of silk, but she had time only to take a photograph and make a quick sketch on the back of an envelope. She wrote about the market in her ‘Pilgrim’ article before she painted it. Increasingly she was capturing the world around her in words rather than paint, but she pictured it vividly with an artist’s eye.
Durban’s racism troubled her. She had qualms about taking a rickshaw ride, and described with contempt the treatment of a black man who ‘ran in front of three sullen-looking Dutch youths, who turned on him savagely’. She concluded: ‘I remember Mr J H Curle’s contention that it is the under-bred white who, at bedrock, is responsible for the “colour question”‘, and this is what she believed. Ngaio was sensitive about race and culture. As a Pakeha in New Zealand, she had seen the plight of Maori in the face of colonization, and she felt for their loss of culture, language and land. She saw pathos in the position of the ‘aboriginals who have seen the coming of the English and the changing of their ways’. Ngaio was born a Victorian, her liberalism was flawed and limited, and her thinking sometimes straitjacketed by convention and class, but she despised racial prejudice. The final picture she painted of Durban was one that disturbed her. It was the fading image of ‘a grinning kaffir boy’ dancing on the wharf. He had made friends with children on the boat. ‘“He’s a nice nigger boy,” said a little girl. “He does what I tell him, ‘Dance boy’.” He danced and waved his arms obediently…till we slid away and the children lost interest in him.’
From Durban, the Balranald sailed in heavy seas down the coast of Africa to Cape Town, where Ngaio met Uncle Freddie, one of Henry Marsh’s six brothers. Their father, a tea broker in the days of clipper ships, had died suddenly leaving his widow in a small Georgian house near Epping with a family of 10 children to bring up. The sons, desperate for financial independence and opportunity, left England for Canada, South Africa and New Zealand, adventurers out to make their fortunes. ‘There seems to have been no thought of university or profession for any of them,’ Ngaio later wrote. ‘The Colonies, it was felt, were the thing.’
Henry learned Chinese at London University for a position in the Hong Kong-Shanghai Bank, but this plan was cut short by a bout of pleurisy and an invigorating year on the veldt of South Africa. A solution to his employment problem came from his father’s eldest brother, who was Governor of Hong Kong. While this uncle was staying in New Zealand, he secured the offer of a good position for his nephew with the Colonial Bank. When Henry arrived, however, the unthinkable happened: the bank crashed and he was forced to take a humble clerk’s job with the Bank of New Zealand. He remained in the same position for the rest of his life. Ngaio’s Uncle Freddie, now permanent secretary to the Governor-General’s Fund in Cape Town, was luckier. He and his family proudly escorted Ngaio around the sights of the city, which included the museum, the ancient colonial house of Koopmans-de Wet, the ‘old Curfew bell that…call[ed] the slaves in from their work’, and the ‘ill-tailored statue’ of former prime minister and colonizing magnate, Cecil Rhodes.
A sultry yellow sun beat unrelentingly down as they steamed along the Gold Coast. ‘When the land breeze gets up it fans us with the accumulated heat of all Africa,’ Ngaio wrote, ‘but tomorrow we turn away towards Las Palmas, and sail out of the tropics.’
When she finally reached the silver-grey misty seas of England she could hardly believe it. ‘Just before dawn the cabin steward made an isolated gesture. For the first time on the voyage he brought me a cup of tea. He said…the water had been filtered…I thanked him warmly and had drunk half the tea when I found the rest of the cup was full of a thick, viscid, grey silt.’
It was with a huge sense of relief and excitement that she met the Rhodes family on the wharf. They drove her through streets that were noisy monuments to history after the colonial outposts and cicada-serenaded towns she knew. She was infatuated. Her first excursions from Alderbourne Manor into London were dream-like. ‘There is the same fascination here,’ she wrote, ‘as there was in the brilliance and heat of the Indian market in Durban.’ One of the early stage shows she saw was Agatha Christie’s Alibi, which was a ‘detective drama, remarkable for the really brilliant acting of Mr Charles Laughton as M. Poirot’. She emerged afterwards onto warm summer-evening streets to see ‘men in their evening dress, not wearing over coats or hats…[looking] exotic and important’ and women with cloaks tied around their necks who seemed ‘to move as though they are walking across a stage’.
London was a wonderland above and below ground. She was thrilled by the thronging Strand, and by Trafalgar Square, where humming multitudes of people pushed past iconic stone buildings and vast public sculptures. She delighted in Piccadilly Circus, where scarlet buses and black taxis hurtled. ‘This, Londoners say, is the hub of the world, and it is here that I love to stand, my feet on London stones, in the very heart of that amazing labyrinth.’ She relished the experience of diving down moving stairways, travelling through ‘strangely scented warm tunnels’ and coming out on subterranean platforms, to take the tube. ‘As we gathered way, all these figures moved very slightly and spasmodically, for all the world like…masked jiggling puppets…As one does in the tubes, I sat idly speculating about my fellow travellers for three miles under the earth.’ Mesmerized by people and places, she was looking at the city with the eyes of an outsider and it set her imagination on fire.
Ngaio was with the Rhodeses only a matter of months before the ‘bandwagon’ carried her off to Monte Carlo. She watched in astonishment as the family planned to spend a windfall given to them by Nelly’s mother. Money worries hung over Alderbourne Manor, but Monte Carlo was chosen