Black Beech and Honeydew

CHAPTER 3 School

St Margaret’s College was only six months old when I became a pupil there. It was one of a group of schools established in the Dominions by the Kelburn Sisters of the Church, an Anglo-Catholic order of nuns. These ladies already conducted St Hilda’s College in Dunedin. With funds raised by their Colonial exertions they supported their work amongst the poor in the East End of London.

On the face of it, the choice of St Margaret’s would seem to have been an odd one on the part of my parents. My mother certainly respected and subscribed to the Anglican faith but she was not an ardent churchwoman. Occasionally she would let fall a remark that suggested not doubt so much as a sort of ironical detachment. ‘Apparently,’ she once said, ‘the Almighty can see everything except a joke.’

This was not the sort of quip that would have gone down well at St Margaret’s.

As for my father, he seldom missed an opportunity of pointing out the devastation wrought by ‘religion’ (usually undefined) upon the progress of mankind. He would invite my mother and me to look at the Crusades. ‘Bloodiest damn’ business in history. Look at Evolution! You want to read. Read Haeckel!’ he would shout. ‘Or Darwin. Or Winwood Reade. They’ll show you.’

My mother had hidden Haeckel’s Evolution of Man in the lockers under the living-room windows, mainly, I suppose, because of its rather surprising illustrations. There it lay, cheek-by-jowl with Three Weeks. These were the only books that were ever withdrawn from my attention, and I found them both in due course. I was but mildly engaged by the first, thought the second pretty silly and didn’t get farther than the first chapter of either. She needn’t have bothered.

It does seem strange that, holding such rationalistic views, my father should have sent me to a school where every possible emphasis was placed upon high-church dogma and orthodox observances. Moreover his attitude to the Sisters, although he occasionally referred to them as Holy-Bolies, was one of amused respect. He did their banking for them and knew their real names. Once, in an absent-minded moment, he let fall to my mother that one of them was a lady of title in her own right. He caught sight of me and was disconcerted.

‘Pay no attention,’ he said, ‘that sort of thing doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have said anything.’

He made less of class distinctions than anybody I have ever known, not self-consciously, I think, but because they were of no interest to him and he had a talent for forgetting anything that bored him. My mother, nowadays, would probably have been thought of as an ‘inverted snob’, a term which, if it means anything at all, indicates, I imagine, somebody who is inclined to suspect and give battle to snobbish attitudes where none exist. It is true, however, that they both intensely disliked what they considered vulgar turns of speech, oafish manners or slipshod utterance. They came down remarkably crisply if I showed any signs of backsliding in these respects. ‘Rude,’ said my mother, ‘is Never Funny.’ The aphorism was shortened into ‘R is Never F’ and constantly employed.

‘Jump up,’ she would mutter when grown-ups approached, and when they left: ‘Up. Run and open the door.’

‘I was going to!’ I would furiously mutter back, but I jumped to it.

Such was her authority that it involved a trigger-reaction. It was not enough to rise. One leapt.

Perhaps it was because of their views on civilized behaviour that they made what must have been a great sacrifice to send me to St Margaret’s. I took it all as a matter of course but remember now, with something like heartache, how long my mother’s coats and skirts lasted her.

I now realize that she refused many invitations because she had no appropriate dress for the occasion. My father thought she looked beautiful, as indeed she did, but he was vague to a degree about clothes and it never entered his head that she was hypersensitive in matters of economy.

‘Good Lord!’ he would ejaculate on being told the probable cost of some painfully rare necessity. ‘Thirty bob! It can’t be as much as that, can it? Are you sure, Betsy?’

He would grin incredulously at her and she would shrink inside herself and do without. He was far from being ungenerous, but he was singularly blind to certain forms of vulnerability and so, alas, at that time, was his daughter.

Economies that would have seemed irksome to other children were unnoticed by me. I remember how we used to leave the tram (now on an extended route) a half-mile stop before our own because it was the end of a section. My mother was not very robust. She must have often longed for the extra lift. We were, because we had to be so, a thrifty family, and if my parents had been content, as many parents in their circumstances were, to send me to a high school, there would have been a much wider margin for those small luxuries which their friends enjoyed without thinking about the cost.

Having made their decision, they might have settled on one of the other private schools less extreme in their religious attitudes than St Margaret’s and, one would have thought, more acceptable to my father if not to both my parents. Perhaps they considered that the, as it were, personified focus given by a Church school to pure ethics, would be salutary. If so, I think they were right. The fervour, the extremes and the uncertainties of adolescence must find some sort of channel. I took mine out in Anglo-Catholic observance.

II

‘Good morning, girls.’

‘Good morning, Sister. Good morning, Miss Fleming.’

Every morning after prayers we performed this ritual, bobbing first to Sister Winifred, our headmistress, and then, on a half-turn, to our form mistress who, with a sort of huffy grandeur, returned our greeting.

From the first day, I loved St Margaret’s. All the observances that had terrified and haunted me at Tib’s were now enthusiastically embraced. It was superb to be one of a crowd. Appeals to Honour produced a reaction as instantly responsive as a knee jerk under a smart tap.

Several of my schoolfellows at Tib’s were now at St Margaret’s and turned out to be so unalarming that one wondered why they had ever seemed formidable. And here, after a long interval, was the friend of that magic house in Fendalton. She asked me to stay with her and the old enchantment was revived; the delight, quite untouched by envy, of a visit to another world.

Among my closest friends was Friede Burton. She was one of four daughters of a newly arrived English vicar at the Highest of Anglican churches in Christchurch. The eldest of these girls, Aileen, who had been at the Slade school, made sensitive drawings of birds and painted miniatures. The second, Helen, had been a student at Tree’s School, afterwards The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Friede came third and Joanie fourth. There were two older sisters in England.

All the Burtons were knowledgeably interested in the theatre and as soon as they were established in their father’s parish began to organize plays. He was himself an extremely good actor both in and out of the pulpit. His sermons were tours-de-force. In a darkened church he would thunder doctrinal anathemas and blinded by the very knowledgeably placed light that shone upwards into his face, would point accusingly at some unseen trembling old lady or startled vestryman. ‘You know what I mean. Yes, You!’

‘Even a little child –’ he would say and single out some gratified infant. ‘Even a little child – Friede, Helen, Ngaio, I have left my spectacles on my desk. Go and fetch them.’

Whichever of us was nearest to the aisle would then rise, hurriedly bob to the east and bolt over to the vicarage. On our return we would hand the spectacles up to him. Though I would not have put it like that, he was a great loss to the stage.

For the first time I found myself among contemporaries who shared my own enthusiasms and from whom I could learn. I stayed with them often, tumbling out of bed when the huge bell of St Michael’s in its separate belfry shook the vicarage windows with a summons to seven o’clock Mass. My memory of those mornings is so vivid that I can almost smell the drift of incense mingled with coir matting and the undelicious aftermath of Sunday School children. Candles shone like gold sequins above the altar, dawn mounted behind the east window, the celebrant’s level but immensely significant monotone was punctuated with imperative interjections from – the analogy though instantly rejected was inescapable – something rather like a giant bicycle bell. We were rapt. From this it will be seen that I had become an ardent Anglo-Catholic.

To say that I took to Divinity as a duck to water is a gross understatement. I took to it with a sort of spiritual whoop and went in, as my student-players would say, boots and all.

I was still at school when the first volume of Sir Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street appeared. The other day, after almost half a century, I took down my copy of this novel and re-read it. The book, tattered and stained, is encased in a dust jacket that I made for it. Michael Fane is seated on the top of a library stepladder with Lily and the appalling Meates peering over his shoulders. It is not a very good drawing but it does express something of the extraordinary attraction this romance of adolescence held for adolescents. It never occurred to me to draw a parallel between Michael’s Anglo-Catholic raptures and my own but, in point of fact, there was an extremely close one. To revisit the book was to look again at a faded photograph of myself, at the wraiths of impressions that had once been most strongly defined, to catch at the memory of evaporated emotions and remain gently, regretfully, unmoved by them.

In retrospect it is impossible not to smile at many of the excesses and solemnities of one’s behaviour during those intensely awkward years. How illogical, how dogmatic, how comically arrogant, one mutters, and how vulnerable! Perhaps the Roman Catholic Church is wise to offer its members for confirmation while they are still children and so avoid the complications of later transitional years. This church believes, no doubt, that calm, thorough and early saturation is better than a delayed-action plunge and the illogical anticlimax of experiencing nothing in particular except the firm pressure of the bishop’s hands on one’s head.

‘I didn’t feel anything,’ the honest girl next to me whispered. ‘Not anything.’

I, less honest, would not allow myself to say, ‘Nor did I’.

All the same, at the very moment when the intemperances and egoism of those years are most vividly recollected there follows an acknowledgement: the failures and blind spots were often one’s own, the exalted teaching, even if one no longer can accept it, remains exalted.

I felt other things: longueurs, unheralded gusts of joy that arose out of nothing and drove one to run the length of the room and launch oneself, exultant, face downwards, on one’s bed. Onsets of love that were for some undefined object – the world, a flower: a storm of tears, unexpected and agonizing, when my mother asked me what I would like for my fifteenth birthday.

‘I don’t know, I don’t want anything, I don’t know.’

‘What’s the matter? Just crying? For nothing in particular?’

‘For nothing at all.’

‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter. It won’t last,’ said my mother.

Here are three persons to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. The first is Canon Jones. He was precentor at Christchurch Cathedral and a man of learning. Once a week he lectured on Church History to the fifth and sixth forms at St Margaret’s. He was a white-faced Welshman with rich curls, burning, pitch-ball eyes and an excitable manner. He wore decent black canonicals and a shovel hat, tilted forward as he himself was tilted, being usually burdened with an armful of books. He was reputed to have the most distinguished private library in New Zealand. Canon Jones walked with a feverish pace and would enter our formroom abruptly, almost at a run.

‘Morning, Sister,’ (we were, of course, chaperoned), ‘Morning, girls,’ he would pant, and dump his books on the desk. On one occasion, he then screamed: ‘Sister! Spiders!’ and Sister Winifred composedly removed a suspended creature while Canon Jones, grinning desperately, backed into a corner.

He lectured to us as if we were adults and we learned more secular history from him than from any of our history mistresses. We followed him avidly, took frenzied notes, since he was very fast in his delivery, and were always chagrined when his period came to an end. He led us down many rococo byways of history.