ever be tall enough to hide the mountains and, strangely enough, the little river Heathcote, where we used to sail on rafts that we built ourselves, has scarcely changed. Children still paddle about on it in home-made craft.
A few miles away from us, round the hills, there lived a horse-coper called Mr McGuinnes. For him my father conceived an admiration (’Decent fellow, McGuinnes’) and with him, soon after we arrived, a bargain was struck. Mr McGuinnes would keep me supplied with a pony which would be grazed in the Top Paddock to which we had access. The pony would be changed from time to time and the outgoing mount sold, I now realize, as having been used by a child. I, who had never bestridden anything but my rocking horse, was madly excited.
In due course the first pony arrived. Dolly, she was called: a pretty, mettlesome little creature who sidled up the lane showing the whites of her eyes. When my father put the new slithery pad on her back she kicked him. This unsettled his temper. Mr McGuinnes, who held her firmly with both hands near the bit, made the classic observation that it was only her fun. I was put up. Before my feet could be set in the stirrups, Dolly went into a series of humpbacked bucks. Like Mr Winkle before me, I clung to her neck while Mr McGuinnes and my father shouted at each other. I would have liked to show the intrepid spirit of Little Lord Fauntleroy who, it may be remembered, gallantly trotted and cantered at his first venture. But the Earl of Dorincourt’s stables did not produce half-broken buckjumpers for the little heir to learn upon, nor did the Earl and his groom scream instructions at each other not to let her bolt.
‘I’m getting off,’ I said.
‘No, you’re not,’ shouted my father.
But somehow or another I did, and we had a row.
‘It doesn’t matter if you do fall off,’ roared my father. ‘It’d only be like falling off the kitchen table. You wouldn’t think anything of that. Get up again.’
Dolly snorted, reared and backed, and Mr McGuinnes fought with her head.
‘I don’t want to,’ I said. ‘It’s not a bit like the kitchen table.’
‘Good Lord!’ said my father in disgust. ‘Here. I’ll show you, you ass.’
He leapt into the saddle. ‘Let her go,’ he said sternly.
Dolly made a complicated bound and broke into a gallop. Halfway down the lane she threw him and the rest of the afternoon was spent in recapturing her.
My nerve, if not completely shattered, was far from secure. However, there were further equestrian attempts. Dolly was again ridden by my father and, after bolting with him for a considerable distance, came lathering back in what was held to be a chastened mood. I was led up and down the lane, whitely attempting to ride in my stirrups and hating it.
I doubt if I would ever have become a horsey child if we had not, at this juncture, paid one of our visits to Dunedin. Here, under the guidance of a very old and almost stone-deaf gardener-groom, I became acquainted with two elderly ponies, Tasman and Tommy. I fed them over the paddock rails, learnt to bridle them, climbed on them of my own accord and when nothing untoward occurred, began to bump bareback around the paddock. It seems to me, now, that there was no interval between this tentative experiment and early morning rides when I cantered along the sea front, a hardened but far from technically accomplished equestrienne. The Pacific thundered and crashed along the beach, seagulls screamed over the island they had whitened, and sometimes I rode up a steep and winding road to Cargill’s Castle. Up this same road my father, when he first came to New Zealand, had been driven with Uncle William and his wife to balls the Cargills gave in their antipodean highland castle. He told me how the lights of the carriages had glowed and turned in the night, how gay life was in the Eighties and Nineties. Sometimes on my early morning rides I remembered his stories.
On our return to Christchurch came Frisky, from whom I should have learned the facts of life.
She was a little chestnut mare, part Arab, and she stayed with me until my feet were a few inches from the ground. Other ponies and horses came and went (’Ridden by a child. Very quiet.’) but Frisky remained. I adored and bossed her, sometimes flinging my arms round her neck and burying my face in her celery-smelling hide, sometimes cramming her into prolonged gallops. After a time she was removed for a short period by Mr McGuinnes. When she returned, I was told that she was in a delicate state of health and must be taken quietly until further orders. I obeyed these injunctions tenderly and without question. My mother afterwards told me that, encouraged by this ready-made exemplar, she attempted to use it as a basis for biological instruction but that I paid no attention whatever to her carefully chosen phrases. I rode Frisky quietly, my legs spreading wider and wider apart, and concluded that as she was getting fatter she must be getting better. My father suggested, one morning, that I should accompany him to the Top Paddock. Nothing could have exceeded my astonishment when I found that Frisky was attended by a foal that wobbled round her like a sort of animated diagram. Delighted, I was: enlightened as to the facts of life, not at all.
To this day I cannot understand my idiocy in this respect; I behaved like a Goon. When one of my little girl friends from Miss Ross’s who was called Merta, told me that her mummy was fat because she was going to have a baby I thought she was spinning an extremely unconvincing yarn and didn’t believe a word of it. An intelligent and amiable child, Merta took no offence but merely said: ‘Well, anyway, that’s why she’s fat. You’ll see,’ and did not reopen the discussion. When another little girl confided specific, if not altogether accurate, information imparted by her brother, I was interested but never for one moment did I apply it to anybody I knew. When my mother asked me if I’d like a brother or sister because Dr Dick had said she might have one now, I merely said I wouldn’t and continued to think that our family physician concocted babies in his surgery. What is the psychiatrist’s explanation of such booby-like obstinacy? I have noticed it in other children whose mothers, spurred on by contemporary attitudes, have lost no opportunity to point the moral, if not adorn the procreative tale. In each case the reaction was unrewarding.
‘You see, darling, Mummy is keeping the new baby warm under her heart until it is ready – ‘
‘Yes, Mummy. Mummy, if I kept a penny for every day for a million years could it buy a bicycle?’
‘I expect it could, don’t you? And you see, darling, Daddy is really like a gardener – ‘
‘Can I have a garden of my own to grow mustard and cress?’
‘We’ll see. And it was just the same when you were born – ‘
‘When’s my birthday? Can I have a gun for my birthday?’
Heavy going.
III
After I left Tib’s, my mother struggled for a short time with my lessons and then I had a governess: Miss Ffitch. The capital F was used, I imagine, as a concession to colonial prejudice. Nowhere in the English-speaking world are proper names more arrogantly misused than in New Zealand. In retrospect, my heart bleeds for Miss Ffitch who, I am sure, would have been much happier with a conventional and nicely comported little girl. Invigorated by the fresh air of the hills, toughened by the companionship of neighbouring children and reacting, perhaps, from the complicated terrors that had beset my first decade, I had become a formidable, in some ways an abominable, child. My dear friend Ned, who in all other respects never led me into mischief, had taught me to smoke. We bought a tin of ten ‘Three Castles Yellow (strong)’, divided them equally, retired into a wigwam we had built among some gorse-bushes, and chain-smoked the lot without evil results. Encouraged by this success, we carved ourselves pipes from willow wood into which we introduced bamboo stems and in which we smoked tea. We also smoked red-hot cigars made of pine needles and newspaper.
Lessons ended at noon. On one occasion I retired into the trees outside my bedroom and lit my pipe. I had forgotten that Miss Ffitch adjusted her hat at a glass in the window. Wreathed in smoke and glancing hardily about me, I encountered her gaze: transfixed, blank, appalled, incredulous. For a second or two we stared at each other and then her face withdrew into the shadows.