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a tiny cabin with bunks and portholes – why do ships have round windows? – the smell of oil, the great brass-edged pumping machinery of the engine, pounding through the night, breakfast in company, the kind of food other people ate, not us. Bacon and eggs, and a fried slice. Then we’d spend the day in Wellington, the capital city, bigger and busier than Christchurch, whipped by wind and with ground that trembled, go to the zoo to see the lion and the kiwi, to the Botanical Gardens to look at rare ferns. Disloyal to be too happy and excited, too ready to leave my mother for the eternity of two months, to be the doctor’s daughters.
In the evening she put us on the overnight train to Auckland and went back home on the ferry. Jane and I had a sleeper, a delight: seats which turned into bunks, hidden lights, little tables which pulled out, miniature shelves for fob-watches, a tiny basin and tap and cut-glass tooth mugs. I was in Jane’s care. In those days children travelled alone: Jane was nine and I was seven, sixteen years between us, old enough added together to meet all eventualities.
The train hooted and whistled out of Wellington: the sky was red and orange against hills, night fell, the whole future spread out in front of us, secret black, shot by moonlight. The train took its time, edging its way up through the centre of the North Island, the crevices between hills opening out into farmland and closing back in again: at five in the morning it began to get light, mist wreathed the landscape as it declared itself, a rising sun replaced the moon and the bush turned slowly from black to green. Farmhouses built before the railway had their WCs at the end of the garden. They had been built without doors and so they stayed, though now they looked out on to passing trains. If you looked, you could see people sitting there, unabashed. We were hungry: we’d eaten our breakfast sandwiches the night before, of course we had, thinking hunger could get no worse. The guard bought us grown-up tea and biscuits.
But would our father be there to meet us? He hadn’t managed Cranmer Square, would he manage Auckland Station? What would we do if he didn’t? But he was there, large and dark among pale, streaming passengers and friends, cigarette sticking to his bottom lip: we were too stiff and self-conscious to hug – people touched so much less, once upon a time, even in families – though he sniffed a bit and I thought he was crying. He took the suitcase and admired the way we travelled light. He was taller than I remembered. I was instantly in love with him. He strode off through milling crowds and we ran after. He assumed, in his lordly way, that we would and so we did.
The journey was not finished yet: now there was a six-hour drive to Coromandel, out of the quiet limbo of Christchurch, through the eventful purgatory of places in between, to arrive at the unknown. My father owned a Ford V8 imported from America, solid and black, and the newest thing in engines. People stared after it as we passed. Cars till then had been square and upright: this one was curved; ‘streamlined’, my father described it. This made it go faster, apparently: the shape offered no resistance to the air, which would stream away on either side as we went. I loved the importance of it. With my father, going north, we were on the top of everything, looking down. Not, as with my mother, peering cautiously upwards, fearing the descent of the untoward.
The road was flat and straight at the base of the thumb of land and we travelled fast: too fast for my liking – I am easily frightened in cars – but after the mangrove swamps outside the little town of Thames the hills began and progress was slow. As we went further north the landscape changed: now we were in sub-tropical bush, and soon the only way forward was along the winding, unmade-up road which skirted the coast. Red pohutukawa trees leaned down from the cliffs to meet the rocky sea-line, where cormorants shrieked and dived, past rough shacks where Maoris, brown, beautiful, glistening, lived and fished, and on to Coromandel bay, and the ghost town of Coromandel itself. And even then as a child I knew how privileged I was, to be in that place, at that time, in the Golden Age.
The real gold had gone, the seams exhausted, but the memory of it remained. The Coromandel Peninsula saw a gold rush at the beginning of the century – there were rumours that you could pick up nuggets on the hill tracks, or just sitting there on the stream beds – but the seams were soon exhausted and a population which had suddenly swelled to hundreds of thousands, as suddenly dwindled again to be reckoned in thousands. The goldminers were long gone – other than a few reddish hairy old men who stumbled out of the hills from time to time to consult my father, like survivors of some forgotten war. But they had left behind not anger, disappointment and despair, which you might have expected, but a benign ambience of hopeful exhilaration. The High Street was like something out of the Wild West: wide enough for a gunfight or so and the Wells Fargo coach to rattle through, lined by wooden shops: the general store, the outfitter, the bank, the lawyer, the chandler, drinking-houses by the dozen and a couple of wooden churches, and a little further on, on the dirt road out of town, was the wooden hospital and opposite it the doctor’s house. All are still there, largely unchanged. The hippies have moved in, and marihuana floats through the air, the tourists come and go, but the coast road is much as it was and keeps the bus parties away.
My father was medical superintendent to the whole sparsely populated peninsula. He was not just a GP, but his own specialist surgeon, physician, obstetrician and consultant. He had to be, since there was no one else to do it. He held his morning surgery in the cottage hospital across the road. The hospital was grand and pillared, with a wide sweep of lawn and drive in front, and had been originally built by a mineowner for his own use: the doctor’s house had housed his chief of staff. There were seldom more than a handful of patients and a ward sister and some four or five live-in nurses to help. There was an operating theatre, and I pleased my father by being able to spell the word without trouble.
Every summer for the next five years Jane and I were to go to Coromandel. One year when my mother was ill we stayed on and went to the village school. I loved it: it was such a casual affair. You could go barefoot, and sit in a class with others younger and older than you. They gave the cane – the thwack of a stick on the hand for misdemeanours – but it was seldom used: the only time I can remember is when one of the big boys held the headmaster’s head under the school cold-water tap and kept it there. And after the caning he got expelled as well. It would not happen to us: we were children of status now, we were the doctor’s daughters, no longer Margaret, Jane’nFay, on the wrong side of things. I made friends, Dulcie Strongman in particular: she was the shipwright’s daughter. We ran wild. We’d go up into the bush where we weren’t meant to go, because it was pocked with mine shafts, and slid down the hills on the great green bucket leaves of palm trees. We looked in the streams for little frogs which were said to date back to dinosaur times, and for gold nuggets which might still be lurking there. Deep in the bush everything was quiet and you didn’t like to shriek or make a noise. It was dark, dark green, except for a scatter of white clematis hanging from the kauri trees, which stood like the masts of ships, piercing up through the forest roof to get to the light of the sky. These secret parts of the forest were the temples of unknown Maori Gods; we went quietly through them, following streams, not wanting to stir up things we didn’t understand.
It was unusual for a man to be in charge of children, and not a mother in sight. The nurses took us under their wing. For food we relied mostly upon morning and afternoon tea served up at the hospital. Morning tea was meat or fish-paste sandwiches and scones and strawberry jam. Afternoon tea was the same but with potato scones, Afghans, brandy snaps, sponge cake filled with jam and cream, and lamingtons – pink or yellow sponge squares rolled in desiccated coconut – added. Those were the great days of New Zealand bakery, a cold-climate, carbohydrate-rich habit of cooking brought to the antipodes by Scottish pioneers, refined and developed in days of warmth and plenty into something inspiring, if fattening.
But mostly we were out of sight and out of mind. We played in the orchard behind the house; it had an orange tree and lemon tree and a banana grove: cherries, apples, plums, figs and apricots. We carved out rooms in the bamboo grove and lived in those for a time; we moved our beds out into the veranda and slept there. On Wednesdays we’d