Black Beech and Honeydew

Vivien Leigh tried it on. She was small, slight and delicately shaped and it fitted her enchantingly.

As for the book, I shall relate what happened to it at the appropriate time.

One other of Gramp’s theatre stories sticks in my memory. When he was a very small boy he was taken with his father to call upon William Charles Macready in his dressing room. The production included a big crowd scene. Macready took the little boy by the hand and led him up to one of the bit-part actors who carried him onstage. All he could remember of this experience was being told by his father not to forget it. Stories about Macready abound, many of them authenticated by his own hectic diaries. Actors, perhaps obeying some kind of occupational chemistry, are frequently obstreperous but Macready takes, as we used to say, the buttered bun, for throwing ungovernable tantrums. I like best the stories that collected round his frightful rows in America. These culminated in a pitched battle with his audience during a performance of Macbeth. Articles of furniture were thrown about, armed troops were called in. People were shot. At the centre of this gigantic rumpus, Macready continued in his role but selected suitable lines (and there were many) to hurl in the teeth of one or another of his tormentors. One can see him advance to the footlights, squinting hideously at the audience and beside himself with rage, point a trembling finger at a jeering face and yell ‘The devil damn thee black thou cream-faced loon’. Speaking of buns, it is worth noting that his unfortunate manager in London was called Mr Bunn, a sort of Happy Family name that accorded ill with the insults Macready tended to throw at him.

In his old age Gramp was both energetic and cantankerous. After Gram died he stayed with each of his daughters in rotation. He still took long walks over the hills and on his return would sit on the verandah apostrophizing the city on the plains with as much energy as if it had been Gomorrah itself. His hat was tilted over his astonishingly blue eyes, his pince-nez was perched halfway down his formidable nose, his head was thrown back and his very moustache sneered.

‘Generation of vipers!’ he would groan. ‘Sycophantic dolts! Perfidious beasts! Bah!’

Nobody knew why he had taken up this attitude towards the city of his adoption. My mother said he merely enjoyed the sound of the phrases. Perhaps his elevated position reminded him of Mount Horeb and the mantle of the prophets fell across his shoulders or perhaps he was merely giving a final airing to his undoubtedly strong histrionic inclinations. At last he became very old and silent and it was not possible to guess at his thoughts or know if he listened to anything that was said to him. He died when he was over ninety years old and left behind him the trunk full of documents that I have already described and a great deal of material for the performance of conjuring tricks.

IV

‘Lord Dismiss Us With Thy Blessing – ’ I had expected to be torn with emotion when, for the last time and well off-pitch, I joined in this valedictory hymn. It was annoying to find oneself relatively unmoved. Perhaps if it had been a rather more inspiring composition – ‘Jerusalem’, for instance, or ‘Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones’ – I might have risen to the occasion with a poignant throb or two but as it was, the final break-up passed off quite calmly and we faced the world with equanimity.

It was a world on the brink of war and that seemed very odd to my schoolfellows and me. We had been taught by Miss Fleming, who took us in history, to look upon war between civilized peoples as an anachronism. It could never happen again, Miss Fleming had crisply decided. The appalling potential of modern weapons of destruction was a safeguard: no nation, she assured us, not even Germany, would dare to invoke it. In that cosy belief we went forward with our plans for growing up. One of my best friends was to have a coming-out ball. There were endless consultations.

In the meantime we went into the mountains for our fourth summer camp. I find I have caught up with the beginning of this book.

CHAPTER 4 Mountains

Glentui is a bush-clad valley running up into the foothills of the Southern Alps between Burnt Hill and Mount Thomas. The little Glentui river churns down this valley, icy-cold and swift among its boulders. The summit of Mount Richardson from which it springs is called Blowhard and from here one looks across a wide hinterland, laced by the great Ashley river, to the main range. The Alps are the backbone of the South Island. When, in comparatively recent geological times, New Zealand was thrust up from the bed of the Pacific, this central spine must have monstrously emerged while the ocean divided and its waters streamed down the flanks of the heaving mountains and across the plains until they found their own level and the coastline was defined in a pother of foam. Ours is a young country. Everything you see in the South Island leads up to the mountains. They are the leitmotif of a landscape for full orchestra.

Glentui is about thirty miles crow’s-flight from our hills. On winter mornings when the intervening plains are often blanketed in mist, it seems much closer and on a nor’ west evening in summer when a strange clarity, an intensity of colour, follows the sudden lapse of the wind, one can see in detail patches of bush and even isolated trees. So that we were, in a sense, familiar with Glentui long before we camped there in the first summer of my schooldays at St Margaret’s. We were a large party: two of the middle-aged Walker Boys – Colin and Cecil – Mivvy, the four Burtons, Aileen’s and Helen’s fiancés, who were called John and Kennedy, and Sylvia, another schoolfriend. To reach Glentui was an all-day business. We had to go roundabout: by train to Rangiora, a mid-plains town, and then by a meandering branch line to Oxford, where we lunched at a country pub. Here, in sweltering midsummer heat, we picked up two farm carts loaded with stores, tents, shooting equipment, and hay for our sleeping-sacks. Then came an eight-mile plod round the foothills and across the great bridge over the Ashley. The air, as clean as mountain water, smelt of sun-baked tussock and our load of hay. On hilly stretches we climbed down and walked to ease the horses. Tuis sang in the hills. Is the song of our native birds really as beautiful as we think? The tui, black-coated with a white jabot, has a deep voice and changes his tune with the seasons, often interrupting himself with a consequential clearing of his throat. Sometimes he sings the opening phrase of ‘Home to our Mountains’ and sometimes two liquid notes, a most melodious shake and a final question. I tried to suit words to his song: ‘Remote. Remote. Alone and fordone. Gone,’ but they didn’t really fit and I was left with that aftertaste of an acute pleasure that always resembles pain.

In the late afternoon we reached Glentui and turned up the valley to find a camping ground. The carts jolted down a rough track and we ran ahead of them into the bush.

On our side of the ranges the bush is hardy: not gigantic and lush like the Westland forests but tenacious and resistant to sun and wind. Most of the trees are native ‘beech’ with an undergrowth of flowering-creepers, mosses and fern. The smell is glorious. As we entered, we heard the little Glentui river. It flowed through the silence like some cool and preoccupied conversation. We found a clearing and below it, at the base of a steep bank, the stream itself, emergent from a small gorge.

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