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– where Captain Cook first observed the transit of Mercury, as everyone kept telling us – and if there was an emergency there and he had to stay over we’d go to the village school there, and show off our mental arithmetic and our pronouns, but subtly – noblesse oblige. We were the doctor’s daughters, and wherever we went we were welcomed. Out of term it was the beach, the surf and paradise.
We looked after animals on first principles. They had to eat, to drink, to sleep like you did, and you combed out the fleas to do them a favour. We had a pen for the livestock the grateful patients who couldn’t pay would leave in lieu. Usually hens or ducks but sometimes a sheep and once a pig. Sometimes the old men from the hills would pay with gold nuggets. They sat in a row along the mantelpiece, greyish, disappointing lumps of stone. They needed polishing, my father said.
On wet days we learned poetry. My father paid sixpence for every Shakespeare sonnet. Jane learned all the Ancient Mariner but that was at a lower rate and I gave up after the first two pages. Soon I could recite all The Lady of Shalott, and poetry extending into prose, could deliver the first page of John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty. That was my party-piece.
We were the cow in the Christmas pantomime which my father put on. Jane was the front legs, I was the back. We sold programmes for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, which he directed and the whole town out of loyalty turned up to see in the tiny Town Hall. They were baffled – what had Norway’s mountain trolls to do with them? – but they were receptive. He loved them as they loved him. He is still remembered. They wear his appendix scars to this day, some with pride and some with alarm. I think he was quite innovative when it came to operations. His clock is in the tiny town museum along with what I’ll swear is the laundry wringer we never used. These Coromandelians were not people turned out by the button-maker, they were sharply individualistic.
If my father were called out in the night he’d take us with him. We’d take our pillows and blankets to the car and settle in and go back to sleep. I woke once in the early dawn and found my father gone and the car parked on a hillside. Along the ridge of the hill above us was a row of horsemen, looking down at us. They were very haughty, Maoris in ceremonial dress. We were intruders. I woke Jane. She was as frightened as I was. They galloped down the hill towards us: horses milled around the car in a flurry of cloaks and feathers. An angry tattooed face hung upside-down to stare in at us. Then the mouth broke into a smile the wrong way up, and someone whooped something, and they galloped off to where, as the sun rose, I could see the carved roof of a Maori meeting-house. Presently my father came back. ‘It was a boy,’ he said. ‘It was difficult but it’s okay now,’ and we drove back home.
The second year we left to go back south to Christchurch on the morning of 4 September 1939. We were up at five to be at the Thames airstrip by eight. We went up to the hospital for breakfast and found everyone in a state of alarm. War with Germany had been declared.
Germany was a long way away and it was hard to understand what the quarrel was about. But Hitler had ‘walked into Poland’ with tanks and guns and couldn’t be allowed to get away with it. We were shown maps. All the young men were to leave New Zealand to fight for ‘home’. This they would do with bayonets, guns and in hand-to-hand combat. They were to be put in the way of the Germans and meant to kill any they came across, unless the German said ‘I surrender’, in which case the German was put in a prison camp to stop him cheating and continuing to fight, until the end of the war. The end came when one side said ‘pax’. In the meantime it was permitted to kill German women and children by dropping bombs on them otherwise the German men would drop bombs on you. The rules of engagement seemed strange, and rather like a lot of playground games except people got killed.
We children were set to knitting balaclavas in khaki wool. We sang as we knitted.
Knitting, knitting, knitting, with a prayer in every row, That the ones we love, By God above, Shall be guarded as they go.
It was exciting to wonder about the young man who would actually wear this strange garment, and stare out of the holes we had left for the eyes. He would never know us, but we would know him. It was quite an erotic feeling, though we didn’t know the word or what it meant. I think we rather wondered, as we looked at the knubbly, crooked, khaki piles we had created, whether anyone would actually ever wear them, or what good it would do them if they did. Jane knitted perfect balaclavas, and was even allowed loose on the socks, but the rest of us weren’t.
We were sent out into the wheat fields at harvest time to look for ergot, a black fungus which would cause madness if you ate it, but which also made a blood-clotting substance useful on the battlefront. We were told not to lick our fingers if we found any. I found some, forgot and licked my fingers, but I stayed sane.
We marched about a lot in parades, waving little Union Jacks on sticks. I wished I was a boy, and not doomed to knit and wave flags: I longed to march off with the men. I was proud to be English: it was as if everyone was coming to my defence. It turned out to be true that if you didn’t bomb them they would bomb you – there were photographs in the newspapers of London burning. I felt with my mother then that it was my true home, and I wanted to be there if only for the excitement.
But death was real, not a playground game. I went into a corner shop to buy colour balls and the woman who ran it came out of her door crying. She had a telegram to say her son had been killed in action. I cried as well and held her hand and went home without the sweets. I felt the earth shake beneath my feet and knew that this time it was in my head: I could see that earthquakes and volcanoes were just an outer and visible sign of an inner state, what happened to you as you lived your life. Omens and presages, geological convulsions and emotional shiftings, sudden eruptions; everything inside and outside made the same patterns.
There was a shortage of tender young Canterbury lamb; New Zealanders were left with tough old mutton scrag. All the best cuts were shipped off to Britain. There was not a banana to be seen for five years. Oranges were a rarity. My mother’s copies of the New Statesman and Nation, which used to come in clusters of six, every six weeks, now came in clusters of thirty-six. Ships still braved the torpedoes and got through, but cargo space was booked for essentials.
In 1941 the Japanese entered the war and things took a turn for the worse. Singapore fell. Darwin was bombed. Japanese submarines were seen in Sydney Harbour. There seemed no stopping them. It was believed that they would swoop down and take New Zealand and use it as a base to capture Australia. New Zealand was defenceless: a nation of women, children and old men. The warrior caste was away fighting other people’s wars. The Japanese looted, raped, tortured, killed, everyone knew. Friends told my mother she must be prepared to kill her daughters to save us from a fate worse than death at the hands of the enemy. Instead she taught us to smile courteously and if spoken to by a Japanese man to reply – what was it, ‘konichiwa’? – I think so. What those troops could possibly want of us girls remained a mystery. There were air-raid shelters in the school playground.
Then suddenly US troops were everywhere. Their ships were in the harbour, handsome men in swanky green uniforms strolled up and down the streets. They had got to New Zealand with a week to spare. The Japanese called the invasion off. We were saved. But now we had to stay indoors after dark, for fear of marauding GIs, of whom everyone seemed to be unreasonably frightened. If you spoke to them they gave you chewing gum, which you were not allowed to have at home. It was one of the vulgar things from which good girls were protected: chewing gum, comics, jazz music on the radio, the company of rough soldiery. We might be poor, the enemy might be at the door, but we were cultured and would not give in to populism.
Elmwood acquired two new men teachers, Mr Stuart and Mr Reid. They were communists, conscientious objectors, and