Her sense of her own uniqueness only deepened as she began to learn more about her origins. According to Kiri, Tom and Nell told her the truth about her background when she was a little over three years old. They drew short of revealing the identity of her real mother and father but made no secret of the fact that she was adopted. As a young girl, Kiri’s emotions would have been no different from any other adopted child’s, a tearful confusion of anger, shame, insecurity and isolation. It was only years later that she began to understand the deep and divergent impact it had on her personality. Asked once about the legacy of her adoption, Kiri admitted it had added to her sense of isolation from the world. Kiri could be a naturally solitary child. ‘You grow up with this capacity to cut off,’ she said. ‘It’s a protective device. I become alone, totally alone when something goes wrong.’ At the same time the knowledge that she had been abandoned by her real parents instilled in her a tenacity and a determination she would never have known otherwise. ‘It turned me into a survivor. I felt I was special and had special responsibilities. I’m quite sure if I hadn’t known I was adopted I’d have stayed a nobody and would be in New Zealand breeding children now. But that turned me into a fighter.’
As her childhood progressed, she found a natural opponent in her mother. Kiri was, by her own admission, a classic example of a spoilt only child. It is easy to see how the distrust, antipathy towards competition and often naked jealousy Kiri has displayed throughout her life was born in her early years alone at Grey Street. ‘I was an only child. I didn’t make friends easily. I always wanted everything my way and I wasn’t very happy in a great bunch of children,’ she said once. While Tom doted on Kiri it was left to Nell to administer the discipline she undoubtedly required. If the young Kiri misbehaved she would be forced to sit silently in a chair. If she looked too unhappy she would be sent into the bathroom and told not to come back until she was smiling. Kiri described once how she learned to offer a sickly fixed smile even when her young heart seemed as if it was breaking. The ability to mask her mood would prove useful in later life.
If the crime was considered severe enough, her mother was not beyond dealing out physical punishment. Nell would take a large wooden spoon or a belt to the errant Kiri. Years later Kiri would recall how she had run mischievously through a patch of poppies Nell had planted in the Grey Street garden. ‘As I skipped through I hit the head off each flower.’ Nell’s reaction was instantaneous. The blow she dealt Kiri was ‘so hard it was unbelievable’.
At least once she threatened to run away. Packing a bag in a temper one afternoon she announced her departure to a disinterested Nell, who was entertaining visitors. Like so many other reluctant runaways, she made it no further than the garden gate where she sat sobbing quietly until the evening.
‘Thought you were going to run away?’ her mother asked as she limped back into the house.
‘I was going to but it got too dark,’ Kiri replied, still sulking.
It was Kiri’s greatest good fortune that she grew up in a house dominated by music. Nell liked to claim that her mother Emily was a niece of the great English composer Sir Arthur Sullivan. The story, repeated by Kiri throughout her life, was a blatant piece of fiction. In fact the roots of Nell’s mother Emily Sullivan’s family tree extended back to Lancashire and the town of Radcliffe. It had been there that Emily’s father, Jeremiah, had grown up with his father, a local schoolteacher also called Jeremiah Sullivan. Sir Arthur Sullivan’s only sibling, a brother, Frederic, lived in Fulham, London.
Nell’s talents as a musician seem to have been genuine, nevertheless. Visitors to Grey Street invaribly found its halls and corridors echoing to her fluent piano playing.
As the 1950s dawned, the television age was being born in America and, to a lesser extent, Europe. On the other side of the world, however, New Zealand would have to wait another decade before its first broadcasts, even then only one channel broadcasting three hours a day. In the meantime radio remained king, with racing and rugby forming the three Rs that were the bedrock of New Zealand life. At Grey Street the family would often sit around and listen to concerts and entertainment shows on the local Gisborne station. In the absence of decent music on the airwaves, Nell would provide the entertainment herself, conducting evening singalongs from the stool of her upright piano. ‘She was a very big personality, and a lot of people loved her,’ Kiri said later.
In this environment, Kiri’s raw musical gifts were soon apparent. At the age of two, according to her mother, she had danced to the sound of Uncle Dan’s harmonica. Nell would also sit her on her lap to show her the rudiments of the keyboard. To her mother’s delight, Kiri was soon accompanying her as well as playing solo. It was her tuneful singing voice that impressed Nell most, however. As a five-year-old, Kiri regaled Nell and Tom with her versions of songs like ‘Daisy, Daisy’ and ‘Cara Mia’. ‘By the time she was eight she had a nice little voice,’ her mother said.
At St Joseph’s, Nell encouraged Kiri to study the piano. To her mother’s frustration, however, Kiri was more interested in sport, in particular fishing and swimming, which she had learned at an early age with her father at Hatepe. ‘She used to be a real tomboy,’ Tom proudly proclaimed. She would not be deterred, however. Soon Nell was engineering Kiri a reputation as a new star in Gisborne’s musical firmament. Nell had begun to encourage Kiri to sing solo at Grey Street gatherings. Drawing on connections in town, she had won her a place on a popular local radio show. Kiri was seven when she made her public performing debut on Radio 2XG singing ‘Daisy, Daisy’. She proved such a success she was invited back at regular intervals. Victorian ballads and songs for more mature voices, like ‘When I Grow Too Old To Dream’, seemed to offer no difficulties. To Nell each of her daughter’s successes only served to fuel her belief that she had real talent. Her mother would reward Kiri with clothes and presents she would pick up on shopping expeditions to Auckland. To the young Kiri, however, the increasing attention became a source of resentment and confrontation.
Kiri got her first indication of the future being planned for her in her bedroom one morning as Nell came in and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘My mother had had a dream where she had seen me on the stage at Covent Garden,’ she recalled once. To Kiri it seemed meaningless. ‘I thought, “Oh, that sounds nice”, and thought no more about it.’ In time Kiri would come to share the same dream. ‘You have to believe in dreams. I don’t think I would have gone on if I hadn’t believed.’ In the meantime, however, she found herself becoming an often unwilling vehicle for her mother’s fantasies.
Kiri’s love of music was real enough. She had been fascinated by the new radiogram that had arrived in the house and had played the family’s first discs, ‘If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake’ and ‘Sweet Violets’ endlessly. When she broke one of them she had run out of the room screaming in fear of what Nell might do to her. Yet she had no real interest in devoting her young life to music. Her defiance was, in part, down to a laziness she confessed stayed with her for years. ‘I can see Mummy constantly kept the music going. I’d tend not to feel like it because I was a lazy child, but she’d insist that I sang,’ she recalled later.
Its roots lay also in her natural need to test the parameters of her relationship with her parents. Kiri knew that whatever her wishes she would find a supporter in Tom, in whose eyes she could do little wrong. In truth, Nell loved her just as much. She was a far less pliable personality, however. Kiri had yet to discover how far she could push her.
Ultimately, Kiri’s dislike of the ever-strengthening spotlight now being turned on her owed most to a simpler truth. For all her high spirits around those she knew and loved, she was painfully reserved among strangers. In the house on Grey Street there were times when she was literally ‘sick with shyness’, she confessed once. She was intensely sensitive, too. Kiri often cried when she was taken to the cinema, the sight of violence or sometimes even a phrase threatening it could reduce her to floods of tears.
When she came to take stock of her early years later in life, a prisoner of an operatic diary planned years in advance and a fame by then extended from Gisborne to Glyndebourne, Kiri’s memories of her childhood were not dominated by memories of dresses or dolls’ houses, living room recitals or early radio stardom. ‘If