Nell posed almost as great a danger. ‘We had this green carpet in the lounge and Peter started to eat holes in it,’ said Judy. ‘Kiri and I kept moving the furniture over the holes but eventually Nana found out and the rabbit was in big trouble.’
Almost half a century later, a mother of five herself, Judy cannot condemn Nell’s overbearing behaviour towards Kiri. ‘My grandmother was just very proud of her,’ she said. The more she heard of Kiri’s confident, commanding voice, the more Nell was convinced her decision to move the family to Auckland had been justified. Her conviction only deepened in the summer of 1958 as Kiri finally began making the daily bus trip across Auckland to the most celebrated music school, and the most feted singing teacher, in New Zealand.
Shortly after her fourteenth birthday, dressed in her new, navy-blue uniform, Kiri became one of the 500 or so girls entrusted to the care of the Order of the Sisters of Mercy at the Convent of St Mary. The Order’s nuns liked to claim that one in every four of their pupils remained with them for life. Kiri would never be a candidate for holy orders. Yet in her own way she would keep faith with St Mary’s and its principles as devotedly as any nun. ‘The poetry of earth is never dead. And the music of St Mary’s never really sleeps,’ read a two-line verse in the 1958 St Mary’s Annual, summing up the alternative gospel for which the Order were rightfully famous. Kiri would embrace it like no other pupil in the hundred-year history of the college.
The Order of the Sisters of Mercy had arrived in Auckland from Ireland around 1850. They had erected an elegant, wooden church on a hilltop overlooking the middle-class suburb of Ponsonby soon afterwards. By now the striking, Spanish-style buildings erected on the site dominated the skyline. However, it had been the achievements of Sister Mary Leo that had lifted its profile not just in Auckland but all over New Zealand.
As Kiri arrived at St Mary’s the achievements of the teacher’s latest crop of prodigies filled the pages of St Mary’s Annual. Lengthy reports described the successes of Mary O’Brien, the soprano who had won that year’s John Court Memorial Aria in Auckland, and the former pupil Betty Hellawell who had sung that year in Boris Godunov opposite Boris Christoff at Covent Garden. Artistic portraits of St Mary’s prize-winning choirs and orchestras, star instrumentalists and singers seemed to feature on every page.
The main musical event of March 1958 had been a gala concert held inside the college chapel in aid of the Hard of Hearing League. The event would have offered the young Kiri her first glimpse of the legendary Sister Mary Leo and her stable of stars. Afterwards the Archbishop of Auckland, James Liston, addressed the audience. His words were directed particularly at St Mary’s prized performers. ‘Music is a wonderful gift which God has bestowed on you to give pleasure to others,’ he said. As she settled into college life, however, Kiri found her own gifts overlooked.
The Sisters of Mercy lived a less rigid existence than other orders within the Catholic Church. Its nuns were among the first in New Zealand permitted to wear the looser, less stifling ‘modern’ habit. Yet, as she settled into the rhythms and rituals of college life, her days dictated by the muffled toll of the church’s bells and their seemingly endless calls to prayer, Kiri could not help but absorb the powerful influence of her surroundings. The faith she discovered there would never desert her. Somehow her belief in God filled the void she still felt when she thought about her uncertain past. ‘I was brought up a Catholic and I know there is a God,’ she said once. ‘You need to believe it when you’ve been given a pretty sticky start, being adopted – as I was – by a couple who didn’t have very much. Sometimes I feel strongly that there is somebody looking after me personally. It gives me an extra strength.’
Kiri joined a third-form class led by an Irish nun, Sister Mary Leila. For the first year her timetable was dominated by English, Arithmetic, Social Studies, Art, Sport, School Singing and, naturally, Christian Doctrine.
Under St Mary’s ‘parental preference’ system, however, Nell and Tom were soon required to chose the direction Kiri would take for the remainder of her two years there. The choice was a simple one – Kiri could take the academic path, learning languages and preparing for New Zealand’s equivalent to the British O level, ‘school certificate’, or else opt for the ‘commercial’ curriculum in which girls were prepared for business college or secretarial jobs with classes in typing, shorthand and book-keeping.
Kiri, a self-confessed non-academic, remained an underwhelming performer in the classroom. If Kiri shone anywhere during her early months at St Mary’s it was as a sportswoman. In 1958 Kiri made her first noteworthy appearance in the school annual not as a singer but dressed in a gymslip and plimsolls as a member of the ‘Post Primary C’ basketball team. The accompanying report described her as ‘the mainstay of the team’.
In later life she blamed her lack of academic progress on the demands of her musical education. In a 1990 television profile, for instance, she told interviewer Melvyn Bragg, ‘I think my formal education suffered because I would be trying to sort of study … and more often than not I was pulled out in the middle of the class to have another singing lesson or rehearse with the choir and while I was doing half these subjects I never ever got a full lesson done.’
Later she added, ‘Sister Mary Leo enabled me to miss classes so that I could study music. I can now see that I might have been good at many subjects – languages, arts and crafts – which I never got the chance to study. I never received the formal education my parents sent me to school for.’
Nuns who remember Kiri are confused by these accounts, however. ‘There’s some misunderstanding there, maybe,’ said Sister Mercienne, the college archivist. She explained that throughout Kiri’s time at the school, she was not seen as exceptional and was not treated any differently from any other pupil. That meant that her English and arithmetic lessons, and of course Christian Doctrine, were sacrosanct, and that if Sister Leo had chosen to give Kiri any extra tuition it would only have been with the agreement of her class teacher. The truth seems to be that Kiri’s academic ambitions were ultimately frustrated not by Sister Mary Leo’s demands but by her own mother’s grasp of the situation.
As decision time arrived, without much deliberation Nell told the school principal to stream her daughter in the commercial class. To Nell’s frustration, Kiri had arrived at St Mary’s to be told that Sister Mary Leo still refused to teach her personally. With 200 mature pupils attached to her music college and only a limited number of places available to girls from the school itself, Sister Mary Leo insisted that all fourteen- to sixteen-year-old singing pupils were also proficient at the piano. Despite Nell’s early efforts to teach her, Kiri had failed to make the grade required. It took Sister Mary Leo’s accompanist to spot the latent talent in the Order’s midsts.
‘Kiri was pestering Mary Leo for singing lessons but Sister wouldn’t teach anyone who couldn’t play the piano so she kept fobbing her off,’ recalled one of the members of the present day Order, Sister Dora, at the time one of the youngest teachers within the music school. Kiri was forced to take lessons with the college’s keyboard specialist, Sister Francis Xavier. While Sister Mary Leo revelled in the spotlight, her colleague Sister Xavier was so painfully shy she rarely revealed more than the tip of her nose from behind her wimple in photographs. She was every bit as canny a judge of musical talent as her colleague, however. ‘Kiri went to Sister Francis Xavier for piano lessons but still kept on and on about singing, so she gave her some singing exercises just to keep her quiet,’ recalled Sister Dora.
The college pianist was immediately struck by the beautiful clarity of Kiri’s voice and raised the subject of her joining the stable of singers with Sister Mary Leo. Sister Francis’s influence was considerable. Away from the music room she and Sister Mary Leo would share feasts of sweets and ice cream and it was perhaps during one of these that the college pianist pleaded Kiri’s cause. ‘She noticed there was something terrific in the voice and talked to Mary Leo about her,’ recalled Sister Dora.
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