Few who watched the effervescent young prodigy singing would have believed it. ‘I was not an extroverted child. You have to learn to be extroverted,’ she lamented later.
Gradually, however, Nell’s bullying began to transform her. Soon Kiri was demonstrating the first, formative hints of self-confidence. She went on to one of her regular radio shows nursing a bad cold. When she hit a false note she heard a voice laughing. It might have been a moment of crushing importance, yet Kiri took it in her stride. ‘It was my first sobering experience of somebody being jealous,’ she said later.
The cold was a far from rare event. The harsh New Zealand winters brought a succession of colds and flus with them. For all the robustness of life at Gisborne and Hatepe, Kiri’s health was a constant worry to Nell. ‘I was very sickly,’ she once confessed. Her sports-loving father had encouraged her to take up some of his favourite pastimes to improve her health. Archery had been suggested as a good exercise to strengthen her lungs. Under Tom’s watchful eye, she would later learn to play golf, too.
It was around the time of her radio debut that Kiri was diagnosed as having ‘a touch of TB’. With the medical establishment conducting a love affair with the relatively new science of X-rays, Kiri’s young body was repeatedly ‘zapped’, without any real consideration of the long-term consequences.
Asked years later about her mother’s past, Kiri replied that Nell had been deserted by her first husband. ‘Or maybe she left him, I’m not too sure,’ she added hastily. In truth Kiri knew precious little about her mother’s turbulent background. As a seemingly strict Catholic there can be little doubt first that Nell’s shame would have been intense and lasting and secondly that her pain remained confined to the confession box. She certainly never shared its details with her adopted daughter. ‘My mother was rather secretive about that part of her life. It’s something I didn’t delve into,’ is all Kiri has confided in the years since.
Nell’s children from her first marriage provided the most positive link with the past. Stan, on whom Nell doted, had served in the army during World War II but had returned to run a poultry farm with his wife Pat in Gisborne. Nola had married Tom Webster, a local farmer, and lived at Patutahi on the outskirts of town. A one-year-old Kiri had been a flower girl at the Websters’ wedding in Gisborne in 1945. Nola had been unable to have children and had adopted a daughter, Judy. By 1954, however, Nola’s marital fortunes were mirroring those of her mother. Her marriage to Tom in ruins, she and Judy arrived on the guesthouse doorstep. Mother and daughter would become a permanent fixture at Grey Street.
Kiri quickly discovered she had much more in common with her five-year-old niece than she did with her grown-up half-sister. In the years that followed, Judy became the closest thing to a sister Kiri would know. Like Kiri, Judy knew she was adopted. Nola had told her she had found her in a shop window in Gisborne.
‘Every time we went into Gisborne to the shops I would have her going all round the streets looking for this bloody shop so that she could get all my brothers and sisters that she left behind in the window. I wanted them all with me. And of course she had to play along with it,’ recalled Judy. Inevitably the knowledge bound the two closer.
Judy recalls how at a ‘do’ once, Kiri had joked about the fact that they were sisters. ‘No we’re not,’ Judy had told her.
‘Yes we are, we are all adopted.’
Kiri’s loneliness as an only child seems to have been a source of concern to Tom and Nell. There was frequent talk of Kiri’s ‘brother’ joining the family, according to Judy.
‘Apparently there was meant to be a brother. I always remember it being talked about that Nana wanted to adopt him as well,’ she remembered. All Judy – and her ‘sister’ – knew of Kiri’s real mother was that she was ‘a blonde lady’ who lived somewhere on the coast of the East Cape.
To Judy, Grey Street seemed more like a hotel than a home. Uncle Dan still lived upstairs and appeared to act as an unpaid nanny for Kiri when Nell and Tom were not around. ‘Come up to my office,’ he used to joke with Kiri when she was alone in the house. Kiri recalled once how ‘Danny’ would fill his pockets with stolen bread rolls from a bakery across the road. ‘I used to have one for breakfast every morning. He used to pull out the middle and I’d eat the middle and he’d eat the outside,’ she said.
‘He used to give Kiri and I handfuls of peppermints,’ Judy recalled. ‘As long as we didn’t tell Nell.’
Judy quickly discovered that her ‘Nana’s’ authority was absolute and her temper truly volcanic. ‘When she lost it, we didn’t ask “How high?”, we asked “Excuse me, when can we come down?”,’ she smiled. Yet, as far as Judy was concerned, beneath her teak-hard exterior beat a generous and genuinely loving heart. ‘She was tough, but she had a soft side,’ she said.
Judy loved nothing more than to hear Nell play the piano. ‘Kiri and I would always be on at her after school to play. She would ask: “Have you finished what you were meant to do for school?” If we said yes, she would play.’ ‘Greensleeves’ was a favourite which Kiri too could play well.
A less musical child, Judy had shown a talent for poetry reading instead. A year or so after Judy’s arrival in Grey Street, Nell persuaded the radio station to showcase the two girls as a double act. Judy’s radio career was short-lived, however. ‘Kiri had to sing and I had to read a poem,’ recalled Judy. ‘Kiri did her piece fine, no problem, but I forgot the words and said “Oh shit”,’ she smiled. ‘Well, of course, it was a live show and it went out clear as a bell to all of Gisborne. I think Kiri started to laugh which didn’t help. That was the start and finish of my broadcasting career all in one night.’
Nell waited until Judy was back at Grey Street before unleashing her anger. ‘I remember getting a scolding for that,’ she said.
For all her ferocity, Nell was vulnerable to bouts of ill health. She had been overweight for years and suffered from related illnesses and general tiredness. She spent much of her time confined to her bedroom where she would listen to the radio, read music magazines and summon Tom and the children to talk to her. ‘She didn’t move around that much,’ Kiri explained once. ‘She liked to lie in bed and hold court.’ Kiri and Judy would lie on her bed with her listening to her read stories from the imported American Post magazine. ‘She was a big lady. She had these big arms we used to push up and use as pillows. I can remember her lying on the bed with me and Kiri either side, tucked up on her arms while she lay there reading the story of the Incredible Journey out of this magazine,’ Judy said. ‘She read the whole thing, from start to finish. We weren’t leaving until we found out what happened to these dogs and the cat.’
In the miniature fiefdom that was Nell’s home, the kitchen was the place where she wielded her ultimate power. ‘She was an absolutely brilliant cook, always cooking scones or something,’ recalled Judy. ‘She filled up jars and tins with all sorts of things, making her own jams and pickles.’ The sublime smells that wafted out on to Grey Street seem to have made it a magnet for friends, neighbours and passers-by. ‘When people bowled in, it was “Have a cup of tea.” If somebody wandered in off the street she would cook for them as well.’
In the kitchen, Kiri and Judy were Nell’s chief underlings. ‘She was like a chef. She made the mess and Kiri and me cleared up,’ recalled Judy. The two girls spent much of their time bickering over who would wash and who would dry. ‘Kiri and me fought constantly over that because if you washed you had to do the benches and the stove as well.’
The most intense arguments were reserved for the nights when Nell served mashed potato. ‘She used to make it in big old aluminium pots. They weren’t soaked of course, so the potato stuck to the sides like concrete.’ As far as the girls were concerned, the highlight of the year would be the family’s annual