Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles)
extraordinary sounds. When he sneezed, when he cleared his throat, the children stood petrified into dolls by delicious horror and surprise. How such a loud sound could come from such a small man! And his thunderish voice was made to carry against the Wellington wind.
“I tried to marry once before,” he roared at the children.
“Why didn’t you, Mr. MacKelvie?”
“She said ‘no,’ not ‘yes.’”
Finally he went blind, and Mrs. MacKelvie had him put into the “Home for In-curables,” as she called it. There she spent all her time when she wasn’t washing. Once, one of the Karori children, who by then was a grown-up herself, was walking through the Home, when she heard the familiar “Australian voice” :
“Isn’t that Miss Edy? Come see ‘im, Miss Edy. Mr. MacKelvie’ll be wantin’ to see you. Our Else is married, but ‘e seemed a bit soft in the ‘ead. I didn’t think as she could get on alone, so I sent Zoe, too; an’ you might sy as ‘e married the both of ‘em. But ‘e got so bad we sent ‘im to Porirua [the asylum]. Now you’ve got something to go ‘ome an’ tell the family!”
5
In 1893 Kathleen Beauchamp entered the first standard of the Karori Primary School. It was then a rough frame building of three rooms, surrounded by pines, about a mile up the road from “Chesney Wold” — an easy walk for the children in the fine weather; in the bad, Pat drove them to school in the cart. The school building stood back from the road on a slight rise above a gully where the children played, and in the dinner hour ate “their thick mutton sandwiches and big slabs of johnny cake spread with butter.” All the Karori children — boys and girls — went to the Karori School except a few who lived near the South Karori Road. The playground for the little boys was marked off by “tarred palings” from the playground for the little girls; and this was the only evident division among them.
Kathleen shared a seat with Lena Monaghan. The rows were tiered, built up on flat, wide steps; and the seats were made for two. Kass was plump and liked to sit in her own special way: with her knees tight together, both feet on the floor, and her elbows hugging her sides. Lena was a thin little thing with sharp, protruding bones. She was perky, like a bird, quick and sudden in movement and in speech — a nervous trigger type with an air assuming that all she might say was right. Her sudden movements sometimes brought her sharp little bones into Kass’s soft thighs. Lena felt that Kass was “too fat and took more than half the seat.” This may have been the basis of a memory which became somewhat symbolic:
“To me it’s just as though I’d been going home from school and the Monaghans had called after me, and you — about the size of a sixpence — had defended me and p’raps helped me to pick up my pencils and put them back in the pencil box. (I’d have given you the red one.)”
And one day around the memory of it all Katherine Mansfield’s experience was to crystallise. The moment came when she wrote in 1916:
“I begin to think of an unfinished memory which has been with me for years. It is a very good story if only I can tell it right, and it is called ‘Lena’.”
But what subtle changes the memory had still to undergo before it was created into The Doll’s House are beyond discovery, and probably even beyond Katherine’s own knowledge.
The little MacKelvies did not enter the Karori Primary School until a year after Kathleen. At the end of 1895 the South Karori School, which they had previously attended, was closed, and they began the daily trail to school and back past the gates of “Chesney Wold,” of which The Doll’s House is the enduring record.
With the Beauchamps and the Monaghans and the MacKelvies were the Waters boys: Eric, timid and sensitive, who had inherited his father’s love of music, Barry, the dashing and original, who after an adventurous career in Australia and Africa, returned to New Zealand to die of tuberculosis. He was Pip of Prelude. He it was at the Karori School who burned holes in the frames of the slates for the sponge-string.
“Did you ever burn a hole in the frame? It was Barry Waters’ speciality, with his initials burnt, too — and a trimming.”
“And a trimming.” It was what Shakespeare meant by “the flourish set on youth,” which Time transfixes. There was a touch of the flamboyant in Barry which endeared him in especial to Kathleen’s memory.
She now learned to read and to write on a slate and entered her second enchanted world. She took books to bed with her at night and read until the Grandmother had to carry away the candle left to keep off her “old bogey the dark” and the animals that she dreamed rushed at her “while their heads swelled e-normous.” She put the book under her pillow and waited for the light to come again. Finally, she read herself into headaches and had to wear little steel-rimmed spectacles which made her dark, searching gaze even more disconcerting than before. The grown-ups felt she was reading their minds when they used Maori words or ambiguous phrases and parts of quotations over the children’s heads. The other children were fascinated by the rather owlish appearance of the plump, dark little girl with her serious, intent look, and her penetrating brown eyes framed in little silver frames. She herself was proud of the distinction.
She was eight years old when she won the school composition prize for a composition on “A Sea Voyage.” Was it, one wonders, a sea voyage of her own — the first form of her enchanted description of a voyage across the Strait to Picton? Or was it an imaginative report of the traveller’s tale of her father and mother. They had but lately returned from one of their journeys home, and the mother had brought back for Kass a magic glass to spy upon the wonders of the world.
“When mother came back from Switzerland in 1894, she brought me a tie-pin made like a violet, and one shut one’s eye and looked through it at the Lion of Lucerne!”
Kathleen liked the Karori School; but there was one mistress, a young and extremely pretty woman, who had a disconcerting way of hurling her commands:”Slates — one, two, three!” Kass was likely to be dreaming, and she jumped as the slates clattered from the backs of desks. But she turned hers quickly too. The penalty for missing three sums out of five, or for misspelling many words (and spelling was Kathleen’s secret weakness) was the Dunce’s Cap. She managed to avoid it. She was quick in arithmetic; to the end of her life she could do “marvellous accounts — you know, pages and pages where everything is reduced and then turned back again.” While for the spelling, she devised a method.
A new girl had come into the form — a girl named Turner. The teacher said coldly:”Sit by Kass Beauchamp, please!” After one quick look at her, Kathleen moved to the extreme end of the seat and was silent. But she observed that the new girl could spell — also that she couldn’t add. Though she had the whole seat to herself while Turner stood on the floor wearing a yellow paper cap with red letters: Dunce, she easily visualised their positions reversed after a spelling class.
The next time that Turner glared helplessly at her slate, Kathleen nudged her. The teacher was looking.”What are you staring at, child?” she said sharply.
“I can’t do all the sums.”
“Are you getting on all right, Kass-y?”
Kathleen stood up:”Yes, thank you, but this new girl doesn’t know all the rules. If you don’t mind, I shall show her.”
The teacher only turned away to explain the class problem; so under cover of the instruction, Kass pushed her slate across the desk. On it she had written:”What sums can’t you do?”
Speaking in school meant staying in, so Turner wrote the numbers. Kass did them and passed over the slate. Then when spelling hour came, Turner wrote out the spelling words for her.
One of the little boys was in danger of the Cap on a charge that seemed unfair. Kass raised her hand:”Please, he didn’t hear the question!” Then she sat and stared at the Mistress who was sounding her a’s and r’s in a manner so affected for Karori.