Given the events that had led her to Grey Street a dozen years earlier, there was an added cruelty to the enforced farewells. It would only be later in life that she came to understand the significance of what had happened to her. ‘I basically lost my family when I lost that house,’ she would say.
With the proceeds from the sales of Grey Street and Tom’s truck company, Nell was able to put a sizeable deposit down on a new home in the Auckland suburb of Blockhouse Bay, about nine miles south of the city centre. The nine-year-old house at 22 Mitchell Street stood at the bottom of a steep drive overlooking the picturesque Manukau Harbour. Only a set of nearby electricity pylons marred the splendour of the view.
At £5,500 the house was double the average house price in the area. Fortunately Nell had made a healthy profit on the Grey Street house which she had sold to a Wellington hotelier for £6,000, at a profit of £4,600 in twelve years. Tom soon averted any future financial crises when he landed a contract installing underground petrol tanks for the giant Caltex company. Judy was at first put into a boarding school by Nola. It was only after smuggling out a letter expressing her unhappiness to her father in Gisborne that she was able to join Kiri at Avondale Convent Primary school, a short bus ride away from Blockhouse Bay.
To ease her admission there, and at St Mary’s where Nell intended enrolling her at the age of fourteen, Kiri had by now been confirmed. Immaculate and angelic in her white lace gown and veil, Kiri smiled sweetly for the family photographs in the spring of 1956. Yet, inside, she remained deeply unhappy at the upheaval she had been forced to undergo.
Kiri had been a poor student at St Joseph’s in Gisborne and showed even less interest in her studies at Avondale, where she steadfastly refused to fit in. ‘It was a child’s reaction to something new,’ she admitted later. ‘I hated every minute of it – and they hated me.’
Kiri’s unhappiness was understandable given the physical abuse she received at the hands of her new teachers. She recounted, years later, how her music teacher at Avondale repeatedly pulled at the flowing tresses she had been so proud of as a young girl in Gisborne. ‘I had lovely long black hair and she used to grab it by the roots and rock me from side to side,’ she said. ‘I used to work really hard for her because I was so frightened, but it didn’t change her behaviour.’
Eventually Kiri was driven to drastic measures. ‘I got so desperate that I persuaded my mother to let me have all my hair cut off, and I mean right off, real punk rock style,’ she said. ‘It looked awful, but even then the teacher managed to get hold of it.’
Kiri would constantly ask her mother to ‘lop off’ her hair in her time at Avondale. Her peculiar look only deepened the self-consciousness that was already taking root. Even before her decision to crop her hair short, Kiri’s sturdy, strong-boned features had always made her look gawky and boyish. She would never rid herself of the pubescent unhappiness she began to feel over her shape and size. ‘There is nothing that I like about myself. When I look at myself I see thousands of flaws from top to bottom,’ she said later in life. She particularly hated the heavy frame and legs bequeathed to her by her Maori father. ‘I have a very solid body – when you look at me you’d hardly get the impression that I couldn’t handle life,’ she complained once. ‘I hardly look delicate, do I?’ As she entered her adolescence, she seemed content living up to her tomboy reputation.
Away from the tortures of Avondale, Kiri remained happiest water-skiing, swimming or sailing on the waters of Blockhouse Bay, playing golf at the nearby Titirangi Club or practising archery up on One Tree Hill with her father.
In the company of the equally boisterous Judy, she frequently ran riot. Kiri and Judy’s earliest neighbourhood friends were the five Hanson boys, brothers who also lived on Mitchell Street. Their friendship blossomed from the most unpromising of beginnings.
According to Judy, she and Kiri would sometimes get involved in fights on their way home from Avondale. ‘We used to scrap on the bus,’ Judy recalled. As a convoy of buses dropped off their passengers on Mitchell Street one day, Judy had begun fighting with one of the younger Hansons, Mark. As the fight had spilled out on to the street, Kiri and Mark’s brother Andrew had jumped off their respective buses to join in. ‘It was all on. The four of us were having a full-on blue [fight],’ recalled Judy. By the time the four-way contest had progressed to its climax, onlookers were left in little doubt who had emerged victorious. One of the Hansons had been carrying an umbrella. ‘He ended up with the thing wrapped around his neck,’ smiled Judy.
Kiri and Judy inflicted sufficient damage for the boys’ mother Betty to berate Nell over the telephone. ‘It was then we found out there were another three of them. From then they became life long friends,’ recalled Judy.
Publicly Nell defended her headstrong daughter to the hilt. In private, however, such disappointments were only widening the distance between mother and daughter. Years later, a student of the greater psychological insight of another age, Kiri sympathised with the problems Nell must have had to contend with. ‘It was tough for my mother, because at that time people were never told that kids become terrorists at twelve and stay that way until they’re eighteen,’ she said. ‘And if you try to cover up and pretend everything’s OK, the trouble you’ve swept away under the carpet will come back at you – twice as hard.’
On another occasion she put it even more simply. ‘She didn’t understand me and I didn’t understand her.’
There were times when Nell’s frustration at Kiri boiled over into rage. On one occasion it fell to Judy to save her from being flailed by Nell with Tom’s leather belt. ‘Nana didn’t hit her much, and only for specific things,’ she recollected. ‘It wasn’t unfair, but I remember defending her when she was accused of doing something wrong and she was going to get a belt on the backside.
‘I grabbed uncle Tom’s belt and ran off with it. Then I got his other belts from the bedroom and hid them behind the wardrobe – where they stayed for years. In fact Tom ended up with a piece of garden twine holding up his trousers.’
Such moments only served to tighten the conspiratorial bond between the two ‘sisters’. Judy and Kiri spent much of their adolescent lives in defiance of Nell’s tyranny. They would spend evenings running up their own rough and ready clothes on Nell’s sewing machine. It was hardly haute couture. The cut and colour co-ordination left much to be desired. ‘If you had yellow material and green cotton then too bad,’ said Judy. Nell loathed seeing her girls, Kiri in particular, looking scruffy and frequently flew off the handle at the sight of their latest piece of crude needlecraft. ‘She would go crazy, screaming, “What are you doing? You do that properly or not at all!” She used to pull the things apart so the job could be done properly.’
Nell’s musical ambitions for her daughter provided the most frequent source of friction. Like Grey Street before it, the house at Mitchell Street quickly become a magnet for all manner of visitors. Nell had continued to coach Kiri at home and wheeled her out at every opportunity when entertaining guests. Whether or not Kiri complied or complained depended on her mood. ‘There were times when she would resent it, when she would feel like a prize pig,’ recalled Judy. ‘But there were others when she was happy as a sandboy. Kiri herself liked to sing.’
At times Kiri and Judy seemed to be fighting a constant war on Nell’s nerves. The menagerie of pets that had begun to accumulate at Mitchell Street provided another battleground. The by now aged black cat William had made the journey from Gisborne. Kettle had been replaced by another black cat called Two-Ten. ‘From the cost of having it neutered by the vet,’ said Judy.