If the divine soprano of Kiri Te Kanawa was instantly recognisable to the man at the centre of the most eagerly awaited Royal Wedding in living memory, it was less so to the vast majority of the 700 million or so people watching the spectacle on television around the world. At first the unannounced sight of her striking, statuesque form, dressed in a rainbow-hued outfit, a tiny, pillbox hat fixed loosely on her lustrous, russet red hair, had been something of a puzzle. Yet the moment her gorgeous operatic phrases began climbing towards the domed ceiling of St Paul’s her right to a place in the proceedings was unmistakable.
Charles had wanted the occasion to be a festival as well as a fairytale wedding, in his own words, ‘as much a musical event as an emotional one’. His bride had entered St Paul’s to a rousing version of Purcell’s Trumpet Voluntary. Sir David Willcocks, Director of the Royal College of Music, had conducted an inspired version of the National Anthem. A glorious version of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March no. 4 had been prepared to lead the newlyweds down the aisle. Yet it was the occasion’s lone soloist who was providing its unquestioned highlight.
Since she emerged, a decade earlier, as a musical star of the greatest magnitude with her performance as the Countess in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at Covent Garden’s Royal Opera House, Kiri Te Kanawa had grown accustomed to glamorous occasions on the world’s great stages, from the New York Met to La Scala. The faces she saw assembled before her today, however, made up the most glittering audience she or indeed any other singer had ever encountered. Seated on row after row of gilted, Queen Anne chairs were not just the vast majority of the British Royal Family but Presidents Reagan of America and Mitterrand of France, Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco, the monarchs of Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark, ex-King Constantine of Greece and the giant figure of the King of Tonga. Behind them sat crowned heads, presidents and prime ministers representing almost every nation on earth.
The soprano’s emotions were, as usual, a mixture of fire and ice. Inside, she confessed later, she was a maelstrom of nerves. Yet her voice, unfaltering and flawless, betrayed none of her true feelings. It was as if she had been born for this moment and this place – as, indeed, many were sure she had been.
In the decade or so since her early stage triumphs, Kiri Te Kanawa had frequently been described as a member of aristocracy. Her father, people said, was descended from a great chief of the Maniapoto tribe, a member of the Maori nation of New Zealand. In truth, she did not know her true identity. She had no real idea whether she was a Maori princess or not. Among the hundreds of millions of people who watched her sing that day, only a tiny handful knew the truth. They sat 13,000 miles away, on the east coast of her homeland, their television sets tuned to the wedding being broadcast live at midnight Pacific time.
As the strains of Handel faded inside St Paul’s Cathedral and the television commentators paid tribute to the singer who had so charmed the assembled kings and queens, they shook their heads quietly and a little mournfully. They knew Kiri Te Kanawa’s true story was rather different from that which the world imagined. They knew, much like the wedding of Charles and Diana, it too was far from a fairytale.
When people ask you
To recite your pedigree
You must say,
‘I am forgetful, a child,
But this is well-known,
Tainui, Te Arawa, Matatua,
Kura-haupo and Toko-maru,
Were the ancestral canoes
That crossed the great sea
Which lies here.’
Nga Moteatea, Peou’s Lament
In the early months of 1944 in the remote New Zealand community of Tokomaru Bay, an auburn-haired, twenty-six-year-old woman, Noeleen Rawstron, walked out of the shabby, corrugated iron bungalow that had been her home. She loaded a few belongings into a taxi and began the fifty-mile drive south to the nearest major town, Gisborne, on the eastern Pacific coast.
The two hour journey she was about to make was an uncomfortable one at the best of times. Despite recent improvements, the road to Gisborne remained little more than a rutted dirt track. Given the fact she was heavily pregnant, however, she would have had even more reason to dread every pit and pothole that lay ahead of her.
The child she was expecting was her second. She had left her first son, James Patrick, inside the ramshackle house with her own mother, Thelma, with whose help she had raised him. Like any mother, her anguish at leaving her son ran deep. Yet, in truth she had no choice. Noeleen Rawstron had reached a crisis in her life. The child she was about to give birth to was the result of an affair that had scandalised the tight-knit community in which she had spent her entire life. She had climbed into her taxi that morning to escape.
Noeleen Rawstron had kept her condition a secret from almost all her family, no mean feat given she was one of six children, three boys and three girls, each of whom lived in the small community. Her flight from Tokomaru Bay was almost certainly precipitated by the fact that she had failed to hide the truth from the most powerful figure in that family, her mother.
Noeleen had inherited much from Thelma Rawstron. She too was copper-haired and steely-willed, fiercely independent and at times too fiery for her own good. Now she would need to emulate another of her mother’s characteristics – an instinct for survival.
Thelma’s parents, Samuel and Gertrude Wittison, had fled Ireland at the turn of the century. After a spell farming land near Hobart in Australia, where Liza Thelma had been born in 1887, the Wittisons had sailed on to Napier in New Zealand. It was here, on 12 July 1909, that Thelma married Albert James Rawstron, the twenty-nine-year-old son of a police inspector who had emigrated to New Zealand from Bamber Bridge, Lancashire.
With his new bride, Albert, a carpenter, had soon moved to begin a new life along the coast in Tokomaru Bay. Thelma recalled to her children how she watched her possessions lowered on to the harbour in a wicker basket. To the eyes of later generations, Tokomaru Bay’s setting, on one of the most brutally beautiful stretches of coastline on New Zealand’s North Island, would conjure up images from New Zealand film director Jane Campion’s Oscar-winning movie The Piano. However, to Thelma there was little or no romance to this bleak, windswept outpost. The town amounted to little more than a threadbare collection of homes and farms. In the 1930s the town had little street lighting or indeed electricity of any kind. Fifty miles of often impenetrable dirt track separated it from the nearest large community, Gisborne.
In summer, the so-called East Cape was the hottest, driest region of New Zealand. Yet in winter the cold, Pacific winds would cut into the town with a vengeance. Thelma soon discovered life itself could be no less callous.
At first her marriage was happy enough. Albert, like many of the town’s population, had found work at the giant, meat freezing works that served the district’s sheep-farming industry. Thelma had six children in rapid succession and the demands of his rapidly expanding household became an increasingly difficult burden for Albert to bear. Work at the freezing factory was seasonal. At times money was so tight, all eight of the family were forced to live in a tent near the meat works. Eventually, as the pressures of providing piled up, Albert told Thelma he had decided to leave the coast in search of better paid work in Auckland. He was never seen in Tokomaru Bay again.
Even by the standards of Tokomaru Bay, Thelma’s life and that of her family became a grim and impoverished one. The community was spread out along the edge of the Pacific; the white, European immigrants concentrated in the more affluent part of the town, known as Toko, the indigenous, dark-skinned Maori in a shanty town called Waima. The Rawstrons were among the few white families forced to live in what most regarded