Even at Christmas our celebrations were of a casual family kind, except for the Tree, for which I made elaborate preparations.
There was a little black japanned cabinet in my room with painted figures on the doors. Into this I put the Christmas presents I assembled for my friends, starting early in the year and gradually adding to the collection. Pink sugar pigs, I can remember, a pin-cushion and wooden Dutch dolls costing from fourpence to tenpence according to size. These I sometimes attempted to clothe but I had and have, rather less aptitude than a bricklayer for sewing. The result was lamentable. I bought shiny fairy tales at threepence a book, a Jacko, which was a tin monkey that climbed a string, a jack-in-the-box, and a thumb-sized china fairy for the top of the tree. I would squat, absorbed, in front of my cabinet, arranging these presents under stuck-on-labels bearing the names of my friends. My pocket-money was sixpence a week. The English grandmother sent me a sovereign and an English godmother half-a-sovereign. These were saved in a scarlet tin postbox.
In the mind of a small New Zealander, Christmas was a strange mixture of snow and intense heat. All our books in those days were English. Christmas annuals were full of middle-class sleighs and children. Reindeer, coach horns, frozen roads, muffled boys coming home from boarding school, snapdragons and blazing fires were strongly featured. These were Christmas. But so, too, were home-made toboggans that shot like greased lightning down glossy, midsummer tussock: hot, still evenings, the lovely smell of cabbage-tree blossom, open doors and windows and the sound, far away, down on the flat, of boys letting off crackers. I settled this contradiction in my own way. For as long as I thought I still believed in Father Christmas, I climbed a solitary pine tree that stood on the hillside and put a letter in a box that I had tied near the top. Being a snow-minded person, Father Christmas, I thought, probably lived in the back country, out on the main range where there were red deer, and he would know about my letter and pause in his night-gallop through the sky to collect it. I suppose my father climbed up and retrieved the letters. They always disappeared.
On Christmas Eve, I sat under this tree and wrote in a book that was kept secretly for that one occasion. It was started, I think, when I was about seven years old and the first entry was in a round, unsteady hand. I tried to put down the enchanted present and this was my first attempt at descriptive writing. I also gave a morbidly accurate summary of my misdeeds and tribulations throughout the year. These portions should perhaps count as a first attempt at subjective analysis. The entries always ended with a quotation: ‘The time draws near the birth of Christ.’ The last one was made when I was thirty-five years old and unhappy. After that I burnt the book.
In the summer I slept on the verandah and on Christmas Eve went to bed in ecstasy. The door into the living room was open. Mixed with the smell of sweet-scented tobacco, night-flowering stocks, freshly watered earth and that cabbage-tree blossom, was the drift of my father’s pipe. I could hear the crackle of his newspaper and the occasional quiet murmur of my parents’ voices. At the head of my bed hung one of my long black stockings. I fingered its limpness two or three times before I went to sleep. Sometime during the night I would wake for a bemused second or two, to reach out. On the last of these occasions there would be a glorious change. My hand closed round the fat rustling inequalities of a Christmas stocking. When dawn came, I explored it.
I remember one stocking in particular. A doll, dressed, as I now realize, by my mother, emerged from the top. She had a starched white sun-hat, a blue gingham dress and a white pinafore. Her smirk differed slightly from that of Sophonisba whom she replaced. Sophonisba was a wax doll sent by my English grandmother in the Fendalton days and so christened by my mother. Her end had been precipitate and hideous: I left her on the seat of the swing and her face melted in the New Zealand sun. Under my new doll were books making tightly stretched rectangles in the stocking and farther down – beguiling trifles: a pistol, a trumpet, crayons, a pencil box and an orange in the toe. Placed well away from the stocking were books from my parents, grandmother and Mivvy.
I have no idea when I left off believing in Father Christmas. It was a completely painless transition. The pretence was long kept up between my father and me as a greatly relished joke. He would come out to the verandah in the warm dark when I was still awake and would growl in a buffo voice: ‘Very c-o-o-o-ld in the chimney tonight. Who have we here? A good little girl or a bad little girl? I must consult my notes.’
I would lie with my eyes tight shut, rejoicing, while he hung up my stocking.
At some appallingly early hour, I took their presents into my parents’ bedroom. The only ones I can remember were an extremely fancy paua-shell napkin ring engraved with a fisherman’s head, which I gave my mother, and a pipe (it must have been a cheap one!) which my father obligingly put in his mouth before going to sleep again.
The morning ripened to distant squeaks and blasts from tin trumpets in the house at the foot of the hill where my friends, the Evanses, had opened their stockings. My mother and I trudged up and over a steep rise to an Anglican Service held in the Convalescent Home, the first building of any size to be built in these parts. Soon after our return came The Boys, walking up the garden path in single file: tall, and with the exception of Alexander, bearded: sardonic and kind. How well they chose their presents: books, when they could get them, that were reprints of ones they had liked when they were really boys: Jules Verne, Uncle Remus, the Boys’ Own Paper. Colin, after a visit to England, brought back the complete works of Juliana Horatia Ewing, producing them one by one from a Gladstone bag. On the following Christmas he gave me The Scarlet Pimpernel and my mother began reading it aloud that same afternoon. It was decreed that we should go for a walk and the interruption at a crucial juncture when M. Chauvelin contemplated the sleeping Sir Percy Blakeney, was almost unendurable.
This, I think, was the Christmas when I wrote and produced my first play, Cinderella, in rhymed couplets with a cast of six. It was performed before an audience of parents by three of my cousins, two friends and myself on a large dining-room table in a conveniently curtained bay window of my cousins’ house. I remember the opening scene: Cinderella, discovered in rags before the fire, soliloquized.
O dear, O dear, what shall I do,
Of balls I’ve been to such a few
Just once I’ve seen that handsome Prince
And I have never seen him since.
Her predicament having been thus established, the Ugly Sisters made a brief and brutal appearance and I came on as The Fairy Godmother, croaking offstage:
Knock at the door and lift the latch
And cross the threshold over.
The rest of the dialogue escapes me.
I am conscious that I am vague about dates and the order of events during these early years and have dodged backwards and forwards between my tenth and thirteenth birthdays. The passage of time had not the same significance in those days. The terrors of childhood receded. Other people became more complicated and the firm blacks and whites of human relationships mingled and developed passages of grey. One grew taller. Frisky went into retirement and was replaced by a large rawboned horse called Monte. And then, one day in 1910, Miss Ffitch said goodbye and bicycled down the lane for the last time. I was to go to school.
St Margaret’s College was only six months old when I became a pupil there. It was one of a group of schools established in the Dominions by the Kelburn Sisters of the Church, an Anglo-Catholic order of nuns. These ladies already conducted St Hilda’s College in Dunedin. With funds raised by their Colonial exertions they supported their work amongst the poor in the East End of London.
On the face of it, the choice of St Margaret’s would seem to have been an odd one on the part of my parents. My mother certainly respected and subscribed to the Anglican