To her contemporaries, Kiri seemed one of the more carefree spirits at St Mary’s. ‘I have fond memories of Kiri sliding down the banisters,’ recalled one classmate from Commercial IV, Elsa Grubisa, now Vujnovich. Yet, for all her outward exuberance, Kiri was, with good cause, intimidated and a little awestruck as she finally underwent her first encounters with her formidable new teacher.
Sister Mary Leo taught in a light, airy, L-shaped room on the first floor of her music school, a two-storey building in the St Mary’s grounds a short walk from the Convent and the main college. With its miniature brass busts of Schubert and Wagner and framed photographs of former pupils, the room was a shrine to her second religion. Sheet music was piled neatly in almost every alcove. The room was equipped with a modern, reel-to-reel tape recorder and a radiogram. The floor was dominated by a highly polished grand piano. To a fourteen-year-old, it seemed an utterly intimidating place. Sister Mary Leo’s reputation for toughness only added to it. She often began work after early morning prayers at 8 a.m., hardly pausing for breakfast, and continued teaching long into the evenings. She expected the same dedication from her pupils and was intolerant of any signs of immaturity. Nervousness, for instance, had no place in her music room. ‘She hadn’t much time for nerves. She’d just tell us to pull ourselves together and stop that nonsense,’ recalled Sister Patricia, another of Sister Mary Leo’s former pupils. The greatest sin a pupil could commit was to turn up underprepared. Sister Mary Leo would expect an apology before the lesson could continue.
‘With Sister Mary Leo you had to be totally committed to your singing. She would not tolerate anything but total commitment,’ said another pupil of the time, Diana Stuart.
For those who did not match up to her exacting standards, the punishments were severe. For all her air of saintliness, Sister Mary Leo possessed a withering tongue. ‘There wouldn’t be a pupil of Sister Mary Leo’s that she hasn’t had in tears,’ said Gillian Redstone, another contemporary of Kiri’s at St Mary’s. ‘I always remember her telling me I had expressionless eyes, like a cow’s,’ recalls Elsa Grubisa. ‘That was her style. You had to accept what was being said to you and either shape up or ship out.’
Having been accepted as one of her personal students, Kiri was called to sing with Sister Mary Leo twice a week. Her first impressions, she said later, were that Sister Mary Leo ‘seemed enormously old to me, even then’. As she overcame her fear, the knowledge that she had relinquished all to devote herself to God only deepened the respect she demanded. ‘She was first of all a nun and a very devout Catholic. When I was singing, wherever I would go I would always have to go into the church,’ Kiri recalled later in life. Her knowledge and undoubted love for her music was quietly inspiring. ‘I think she was sometimes torn between the two because the music sometimes took over and God had to take a small backseat. But she was a very dedicated person and that’s, I think, why I liked being taught by her because she had no other interests, it was just music and God.’
As a tutor, she could not have presented a starker contrast to Kiri’s mother. At home she had been showered with praise by her family and their house guests. She soon discovered Sister Mary Leo operated according to different principles. In her classes conversation was kept to a minimum. Sister Mary Leo often spent an entire lesson scribbling notes to herself. ‘She never stopped writing in her notebook,’ said Diana Stuart. ‘She would make copious notes but she never told you what she was writing.’ If a passage was sung to her liking she would say ‘good’ or ‘fine’.
‘She was not a great one for compliments,’ Kiri said once. Yet as she began working with Kiri, Sister Mary Leo quickly understood why Sister Francis Xavier had recommended she take on her discovery. Her only disappointment was that Kiri’s raw yet powerful voice had been trained to sing undemanding material from musicals; what Sister Leo later rather loftily referred to as ‘music of an essentially trivial kind’. During her first weeks with Sister Mary Leo, Kiri sang nothing more taxing than folk songs.
In the meantime she set about preparing Kiri for more serious music. Sister Mary Leo’s teaching methods bordered on the bizarre. Kiri found herself joining other girls in curious physical exercises designed to improve her physical ability to project her voice. ‘She got these bees in her bonnet. She’d have this new idea or she’d hear or read something and we’d be on that for a week,’ recalled another student, Hannah Tatana. ‘There was singing with a pencil in your mouth which was supposed to loosen your throat but tightened your jaw. Then another time she’d read somewhere about Caruso pushing a grand piano two inches with the expansion of his diaphragm and we had to do that.’
The Caruso exercise was preferable to another recalled by Gillian Redstone. ‘One method she used to teach us to control breathing involved Sister’s big old reel to reel tape recorder, a very heavy machine in a case,’ she said. ‘We had to lie on the floor with the tape recorder stuck on top of the diaphragm and then lift it with our breathing for a few minutes. It wasn’t on long enough for us to go purple, but it was certainly quite a lesson.’
Such was her pupils’ faith in their teacher’s near divinity, no one ever protested at the tortures they were put through. ‘We didn’t dare question it at the time. And we believed in her, that she was doing the right thing,’ said Redstone. Like every other pupil, Redstone knew the potential cost of dissent. There was too much to lose.
Sister Mary Leo controlled her singers with an almost absolutist power. Her word, and her word alone, dictated the speed with which they progressed up the St Mary’s ladder. If a girl had talent, Sister Mary would invite her first to join the St Mary’s Choir. If she shone there she would be encouraged to sing the occasional solo at the choir’s frequent public and charity appearances. The ultimate accolade was to be invited to represent St Mary’s – and therefore Sister Mary Leo herself – in one of the highly competitive singing contests. A girl only had to look at the portraits of Mary O’Brien and Mina Foley to imagine what might lie ahead from there. Talent and success were not necessarily related. It was no different in the rarefied world of St Mary’s. Sister Mary Leo alone ordained the chosen ones. It paid to stay on her side.
Kiri’s late start did little to inhibit her rapid progress through the ranks. She was quickly installed as a member of the St Mary’s Choir. In keeping with the traditions on which their Order was founded, the nuns visited Auckland’s less privileged, performing at hospitals, mental institutions and prisons.
Kiri sang at church and charity events all over Auckland. Sister Mary Leo also added her to the list of girls recommended for engagements in and around Auckland society. The christening, wedding and funeral – ‘hatches, matches and dispatches’ – circuit could provide a girl with a tidy supplementary income. Booking agents invariably had to go through Sister Mary Leo, who insisted any flowers a girl was given be donated to the St Mary’s altar. She was motivated less by money than control, and although she did charge her private students the going market rate of a guinea an hour, brown envelopes stuffed full of the cash fees collected from her singers would gather in small piles round her music room. Kiri’s years as a ‘performing monkey’ at home stood her in good stead. Soon she was one of the most assured performers at the school. Tom bought her a secondhand Standard Ten as a fifteenth birthday present. The car was soon clocking up the miles as Kiri spent more and more time shuttling to and from her various engagements.
If the compliments were in short supply in Kiri’s presence, Sister Mary Leo was soon leaving few in any doubt that she sensed St Mary’s had an important new discovery. Elsa Grubisa recalls that she outshone Kiri in a singing exam carried out by an English examiner, a Mr Spinks. ‘He actually gave me a better score than Kiri. But Sister Mary Leo made no bones about telling me that she didn’t know what the examiner was thinking about and I had no business scoring better than Kiri,’ she remembered. The moment confirmed two suspicions that had been forming in Grubisa’s mind. Personally she no longer had any interest in subjecting herself to Sister Mary Leo’s authoritarian regime. ‘That was it for me. I gave up after that,’ she said. She also sensed