Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles)
Englishmen, armed to the teeth, were seen stealing round the Jungle. They seemed to be rather inconvenienced by numerous oceans, which they swam with great exertion and puffing….
“‘One man wounded,’ said Beggles, with great satisfaction, viewing Jinks’ knee….
“She sat in the bottom of the boat and Beggles doctored her. First he laid on the cool leaf, which they believed was used by the ancient Britons for medical purposes, and then tightly bound round the handkerchief. The rest of the morning they cruised around Fiji, had a look at Queen Victoria, an unimportant fight off the coast of China, and arrived home in time for lunch.”
Or they played “ladies and gentlemen,” which involved being “married in a daisy chain with the wedding service read from a seed catalogue.” Or they made mud-pies. Katherine’s recollection of this heavenly occupation — its peculiar terrors and unique delights — was vivid.
“In the days of our childhood we lived in a great old rambling house planted lonesomely in the midst of huge gardens, orchards and paddocks. We had few toys, but — far better — plenty of good strong mud and a flight of concrete steps that grew hot in the heat of the sun and became dreams of ovens.
“The feeling of making a mud pie with all due seriousness, is one of the most delicious feelings that we experience; you sit with your mixture in the doll’s saucepan, or if it is soup, in the doll’s wash-hand basin, and stir and stir, and thicken and ‘whip,’ and become more deliciously grimy each minute; whilst the sense of utter wickedness you have if it happens to be on clean pinafore days thrills me to this hour.
“Well I remember one occasion when we made pies with real flour, stole some water from the dish by the dog’s kennel, baked them and ate them.
“Very soon after three crushed, subdued little girls wended their way quietly up to bed, and the blind was pulled down.”
Or they played ladies and gentlemen and mud-pies all at once, as in the great game in Prelude where Kezia, as the servant, beat up a beautiful chocolate custard with half a broken clothes-peg.
Selected children from the Primary School — selected neighbour children — were allowed over to play with them; and then they had great parties in the garden, while the tall pines in front of “Chesney Wold” threw a cool shadow across the road. In the afternoon the children stayed to a “proper tea” in the nursery, with the Grandmother presiding. Afterward, they went to the drawing-room “all cleaned up,” and sang. Chaddie was close to the piano. Kass hung back. The mother played for them when they were quite small. Later, Vera accompanied.
But the best times, those which afterward became part of her “possession,” were the hours spent in the garden with Pat.
“Sometimes to make it more real, we had lunch together, sitting on the wheel-barrow turned down, and sharing the slice of German sausage and a bath bun with sugar loaf on it.”
Long afterward, when life had become for her something quite other, how she turned back to the companionship of those warm, sun-filled days in the back garden of “Chesney Wold” ! Pat was associated in her mind with all that was glowing and warm and paradisal. Of her garden of Eden, he was the gardener.
“Sparrows outside are cheeping like chickens. Oh heavens! What a different scene the sound recalls! The warm sun, the tiny yellow balls, so dainty, treading down the grass blades, and Sheehan giving me the smallest chick, wrapped in a flannel to carry to the kitchen fire.”
and
“I am all for feathery-topped carrots — don’t you love pulling up carrots, shaking them clean and tossing them on a heap! And feeling the cauliflowers to see which one is ready to cut. Then Out comes your knife. When I was about the height of a garden spade I spent weeks — months — watching a man do all these things and wandering through canes of yellow butter beans and smelling the spotted broad bean flowers and helping to plant Giant Edwards and White Elephants.”
By then she had forgotten the flaw, if flaw there was at the time:
“Pat was never very fond of me. I am afraid he did not think my character at all desirable. I pro- fessed no joy in having a bird in a cage; and one day committed the unpardonable offence of picking a pumpkin flower. He never recovered from the shock occasioned by that last act of barbarism. I can see him now, whenever I came near, nodding his head and saying, ‘Well, now to think. It might have become the finest vegetable of the season, and given us food for weeks’.”
She remembered only what Pat really “meant” : understanding of the child’s world, with the power to enter it himself.
He vanished from their world as unexpectedly as he had come:
“When we left that house in the country and went to live in town, Pat left us to try his luck in the gold-fields. We parted with bitter tears. He presented each of my sisters with a goldfinch, and me with a pair of white china vases cheerfully embroidered with forget-me-nots and pink roses. His parting advice to us was to look after ourselves in this world and never to pick the flowers out of the vegetable garden because we liked the colour.”
4
The five MacKelvies were well-known “characters” in Karori in the ‘nineties. Mrs. MacKelvie, a stout neat little Cockney with “an Australian voice,” was the village washerwoman. She was amusing, and a great talker. Everyone hired her; she knew everything and everyone, and talked to all alike. One of the reasons she was given such free range was that she was either too witty or too wise to gossip indiscriminately. She told a good story and people were always repeating her philosophic comments on life.
On the day that Mrs. MacKelvie came to wash, the mistress of the house was likely to drift down to the wash-house to listen, while the fat red arms splashed in and out of the foaming tubs, and the Australian voice rose and fell.
She told Mrs. Waters that Zoe, the second eldest, should have been her child. No one knew why. Zoe was apparently rather feeble — not quite bad enough to be exactly “mental.” But Mrs. MacKelvie thought her wonderful. She looked like her mother, with her great wad of crinkled black hair; yet she was untidy and had a silly smile. Lil, the eldest, was the only normal one; she married, later, and had seven children; but she apparently was too normal to interest her mother.”Our Else,” the artistic one, was the mother’s favourite. She called her “The Heavenly Child.” They all looked after her. Else used to paint on glass, and Mrs. MacKelvie gave the results about to the people she worked for. This pathetic “little wishbone of a child” cared for only the one thing: she loved to paint. Later, someone taught her to do chromos, and she made huge, unearthly castles, tottering on the brink of dark precipices. Could the child have made up these strange things? Yet they were well drawn. She had undoubted talent of some kind. Framed in ornate gold, they hung on the MacKelvie’s parlour walls; and Mrs. MacKelvie said:”What I ‘aven’t room for on the wall, I ‘ang under the bed.”
The grown-ups even used to call at the neat little shack, as they came back from the South Karori Road, after visiting the “Bird Man” with the children, or from a picnic. Some one of them surprised the MacKelvies one day when the extras were “hung” not only under the bed, but all over the parlour. The mantelpiece had fallen in the night, and the chairs were loaded with gilded willow twigs; with wax sprays; with velvet stuffed hearts; with china knick-knacks. A tortoise-shell cat leaped madly through the willows and showered painted glass, and water, and last year’s catkins. But Mrs. MacKelvie dusted the cleared chair with her apron. Her Australian voice rolled on, unperturbed and hospitable:
“Mum, Our Lord lived in a stable; didn’t He? I met Dad on the wharf on Saturday, and married him on Monday, and we lived in a tent. Lil, clear the combustable off that table. Let ‘er ‘ave ‘er tea.”
“Dad” MacKelvie was a little dried man, a “proper” gardener. He trailed in the wake of his wife to work in the gardens while she washed; and if she intrigued the grown-ups, Mr. MacKelvie filled the children with astonishment and admiration.
He