he allowed me to go twice a week for instruction in the Antique Room where I struggled with charcoal and Michelet paper, confronted by blankly explicit plaster casts. I also was permitted to slosh about with watercolours and rather depressing still-life arrangements. My drawing began to improve a little.
It seems to me that in our early years on the hills I was never at a loose end, that there was always something to do, and that these were halcyon days. Sometimes I would wake at dawn, steal from the sleeping house and climb up through the mist, chilling my bare legs in tussock that bent earthwards under its veil of dew. Frisky, hearing me call, would whinny, look over the hilltop and come to meet me. She shared the Top Paddock with Beauty and Blazer, two cows belonging to our nearest neighbour, Mr Evans. Jack Evans, a quiet self-contained boy who did three hours’ hard work before going to school, would plod up the hill, softly chanting.
‘C’mon, Beauty. C’mon, Blazer.
C’mo-on, c’mo-on.’
And we would all go down the track together, I to my dawn-ride and Jack to his milking.
Sometimes one or the other of my two particular friends from Tib’s would come to stay: Mina and Merta. Mina was an extremely witty and articulate little girl who wore grey dresses and immaculately starched pinafores. ‘O Ngaio, fool that I am, I have forgotten my book!’ she dramatically exclaimed when we were still at Tib’s and she about seven years old. Mina shared my passion for reading, but was cleverer and much more discriminating than I. When we were a little older, she confirmed my suspicions of Kipling in his extroverted manner. ‘I understand it,’ Mina said, ‘and I don’t care for poetry that I understand.’ She had a grand manner and for that reason, I suppose, we called her Dutchy.
On wet days we wrote stories and illustrated them. My mother would set a competition to last through the holidays and give us each a fat little book with delectable blank pages. Two days before Mina was to leave, we handed over our completed works and my mother retired to deliberate. The following day she gave a very detailed judgement with marks for every story and illustration and stringent comments. The result was a tie. My mother presented each of us with a book, explaining that if the contest had not been drawn the winner would have received both of them. We were, I suppose, rather precocious little girls but we were completely taken in by this transparent device. Our mutual admiration was extreme.
Merta lived near us and we met frequently. I think it must have been on the occasion of her mother’s confinement, which Merta generously refrained from throwing in my teeth, that she came to stay with us. I have a vivid recollection of the day her father arrived to fetch her. By some mischance Merta and I got ourselves locked in the lavatory and in a state of rising panic, hammered and roared until we made ourselves heard by my mother, who was entertaining Mr Fisher, a shy man, to tea. She was unable to effect our release and was obliged, in the end, to ask for help. Through the keyhole, Mr Fisher begged us to keep our heads and follow his instructions, which we did at last, and emerged to find him scarlet in the face and walking rapidly away.
On my tenth birthday I had a party.
For many years my father had boasted about the excellence of the ginger beer brewed by their gardener and his assistant at Woodside, Essex.
‘Jolly good stuff, Old Jo’s and The Boy’s ginger beer. Totally different from the rotgut they sell out here.’
He wrote to my grandmother about it and she sent out the recipe. My father bought half a used brandy cask and a great many ingredients and set himself up in the cellar under our verandah. It was a long and elaborate process and for many days the house was suffused with pungent fumes. Occasionally, muffled oaths could be heard beneath the floorboards and my mother made remarks like: ‘Well said, Old Mole, cans’t work i’ the earth so fast’ and ‘You hear this fellow in the cellarage.’ She also asked him if Old Jo and The Boy had sent any incantations or runes to be muttered in the Essex dialect over his seething cauldron.
‘Don’t be an ass, Betsy,’ said my father, grinning happily. He had reached the bottling phase. On my birthday the proper time had elapsed for the brew to be mature.
The party was in full swing. Gramp played ‘Sir Roger de Coverley’ on the piano and gaily shouted instructions. My mother and aunts and uncles sedately chasséd and swanned down the dance while we children hopped, linked arms and became hot and excited. Some of the little boys went mad and made exhibitionist faces. The moment had arrived for refreshment.
My father had retired to the kitchen from whence presently there came a formidable explosion. He appeared briefly, looking rather like a mythical sea-god, being wreathed, bearded and crowned with foam.
‘Is it Old Father Christmas?’ an awestruck child asked. ‘Is it Christmas-time?’
My father went into the garden. A feu de joie of reports rang out and we eyed each other in wild surmise. He returned triumphant with a great trayload of buzzing drinks.
The response was immediate and uproarious. In next to no time my aunts and uncles and acquaintances were screaming with laughter in each other’s faces while their children, unreproved, tacked about the room, cannoned into each other, fell, threw cream cakes or subsided on the floor in a trance. I remember particularly a nicely mannered boy called Lewis who zig-zagged to and fro and offered a tilted plate of sandwiches to wild little girls. The sandwiches, one by one, slid to the floor but Lewis continued to present the empty plate. I must have been quite overcome because I have no recollection whatever of how the party ended.
‘Can’t make it out,’ my father said the next day. ‘It’s no good you thinking it was my ginger beer, Betsy. Absolute rot! Jolly wholesome stuff.’
Some weeks later we were visited by a hot nor’ wester, a very trying and enervating wind in our part of New Zealand.
‘Shall we,’ my mother limply suggested, ‘have some of Daddy’s ginger beer?’
She poured out two small glasses. We spent the rest of the morning lying quietly side-by-side on the carpet, looking at the ceiling. In the afternoon I had a bilious attack.
My father, concerned, said: ‘It might be the brandy I suppose.’
And so, of course, it was. The fermenting ginger beer had drawn into itself the overproof spirits with which the cask was saturated. In future, this heavily fortified beverage was offered only to grown-ups and, at that, it was dynamite.
‘Damn’ good stuff,’ my father would say. ‘Ginger beer. Old Essex recipe you know. M’mother’s gardener – ‘
To this day I cannot bear the smell, much less the taste of ginger beer.
IV
I think the greatest difference in convention between the children of my time and those of today may be seen in the amount of money spent on their entertainment and this, I believe, was a consideration not only of necessity but of principle. Books and toys were a fraction of their present cost but they were not casually bestowed. Gifts were largely restricted to special occasions and to open a parcel was a matter of burning excitement.
I am glad my friends and I were less indulged than children are nowadays. Even if my parents could have afforded to give me lots of expensive presents I am sure they would not have done so. If birthdays and Christmas had brought a succession of grand parties with everybody getting a great many impersonal gifts at each of them, I really do not believe these occasions would have held the same enchantment. There were very few formal parties. In the early affluent days in Fendalton, there had been journeys in hansom-cabs to fancy-dress balls in large houses. At one of these, I, dressed as a tiny Marion de Lorne, walked in procession with a fairy whose face fascinated me by growing more and more scarlet with each promenade. A day or two later I developed measles.
On the hills there were, for the most part, only impromptu festivities. My mother and her sisters and my father were superb in charades. One of my uncles (Unk), a distinguished geologist, also liked to take part. He always insisted, regardless of subject matter, on being dressed up and on carrying their