Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Joanne Drayton

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СКАЧАТЬ and Henry Marsh rented a small house in Fendalton—the best area they could afford—and kept a maid, which was almost beyond their means. Gramp Seager was a dreamer and a spendthrift, but still an ambitious man; Henry Marsh lived in a world of his own. From early days, Rose realized he would make a better father than provider. Their daughter, Edith Ngaio Marsh, was born on 23 April 1895. Henry’s belated attempt four years later to register her birth created an official error, that Ngaio later used to claim she was born in 1899. (And this mistake was perpetuated in print many times.)

      It was a perfect marriage of opposites. Henry’s soft-centred fantasy combined with Rose’s galvanized theatricality to create an imaginative wonderland for Ngaio that she never completely escaped. She was the centre of their world, and their world was a stage where life and drama mixed so seamlessly that the anxious, sometimes highly strung young Ngaio could not distinguish the difference. She was disconcerted when she saw her parents rehearsing a new script: suddenly they became strangers. In The Fool’s Paradise, her mother was transformed into a wicked femme fatale who slowly poisoned her husband. The tension of the scenes was overpowering for the terrified child. Her horror of poison lingered, and was reignited when Rose Marsh took her to a production of Romeo and Juliet. The fighting scenes were incomprehensible. She buried her head in her mother’s lap. ‘They aren’t really fighting, are they?’ she asked desperately. ‘Yes, yes!’ cried Rose, consumed by the action on stage. And to add to the awfulness, ‘there was Poison and a young girl Taking It!’ This confirmed Ngaio’s lifelong phobia about poisons.

      But Rose’s judgement was usually sound. She took Ngaio and her young friend Ned Bristed to children’s plays like Sweet Nell of Old Drury and Bluebell in Fairyland, and when the vast International Exhibition opened in Christchurch in 1906, Rose took her daughter numerous times to see displays of paintings, go to concerts, watch the dazzling nightly fireworks, and take wild sideshow rides. She introduced Ngaio to literature that braced her mind and imagination. Between the ages of 11 and 14 Ngaio read David Copperfield, Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend. She was read to, and read herself, a kaleidoscope of different titles that included anything from Peter Pan to Roderick Random and Tom Jones, which her father recommended she read to find out about ‘fast’ girls.

      Sexual looseness was tolerated by neither of her parents; nor did they accept breaches of etiquette or sloppy diction. Their uncompromising Victorian standards were rigorously policed, especially by her mother. It was a hothouse childhood Rose wanted for her daughter, and she was prepared to sacrifice having another baby to provide it.

      Ngaio’s first taste of the real world was a tiny, 20-student dame school run by Miss Sibella E. Ross for children between the ages of six and 10. Fitting in was an ordeal for Ngaio, who was the tallest in her class and had an astonishingly deep voice. Rose Marsh was anxious, but she realized that her only child must integrate. Ngaio made firm friends with two bristling boys in the class, and the bullying ceased.

      Rose and Henry Marsh were in their early 40s by the time they had finally saved enough money to build their own home. They bought a steep section on the Cashmere Hills close to Christchurch, and employed Rose’s architect cousin, Samuel Hurst Seager, to design a four-roomed bungalow with a large verandah, which they called Marton Cottage. A horse-drawn wagon was loaded with their belongings, and they journeyed from Fendalton to the Cashmere Hills, camping in bell-tents near the site for three months. They were so eager, they moved in before it was completed. ‘From the beginning we loved our house,’ wrote Ngaio. ‘It was the fourth member of our family.’ At last they were homeowners in a town that made property a criterion of status.

      Marton Cottage was a brilliant piece of Marsh family foresight. At the time they bought the section, the Cashmere Hills were a blank canvas of heathery tussock, low bush, and the occasional stand of trees with an isolated homestead. As Christchurch grew, Cashmere became one of its most desirable suburbs. On a clear day, the view from the cottage across the city to the distant Southern Alps was breathtaking. But in the opening decade of the 20th century the city had not yet begun lapping at the edges of the honey-coloured hills, and the trip into town to Miss Ross’s school involved a long walk and then a protracted tram ride. Rose took Ngaio each day. On the way home, they always got off a stop early and walked to save paying for another section.

      When Ngaio became too old for the dame school, her mother struggled with lessons at home for a while before deciding to employ a governess, Miss Ffitch. Ngaio was more of a challenge now. The outdoor life of the Cashmere Hills had instigated a Huckleberry Finn phase. Her constant companions were boys: Vernon, who lived locally, and her cousin Harvey, and later there was Ned Bristed. They made rafts and sailed them up the Heathcote River, they lit campfires, played primal games of hunt and chase across the tussock, and ran wild.

      Henry Marsh did not exactly stem the tide. He secured Ngaio a succession of ponies, which were being broken in, so she could ride bareback along the beach. When she was still a young girl, he gave her a Frankfurt single-bore rifle. ‘How superb were those sunny mornings when I was allowed to walk behind my father and Tip [the family dog] through the plantation where he and his friends went quail-shooting. On these occasions he was completely and explicitly himself.’ It was Henry in his mellow easy moments with whom Ngaio identified; but it was Ned who taught her how to smoke:

      We bought a tin of ten ‘Three Castles Yellow (strong)’ divided them equally, retired into a wigwam we had built among some gorse-bushes, and chain-smoked the lot without evil results. Encouraged by this success, we carved ourselves pipes from willow wood into which we introduced bamboo stems and in which we smoked tea. We also smoked red-hot cigars made of pine needles and newspaper.

      For a time Ngaio was out of control. ‘I had become a formidable,’ she later admitted, ‘in some ways an abominable, child.’ It was little wonder that Miss Ffitch chose to ignore the sight, from a bedroom window, of Ngaio under the trees with her head wreathed in pipe smoke. ‘I encountered her gaze: transfixed, blank, appalled, incredulous. For a second or two we stared at each other and then her face withdrew into the shadows.’ In addition to formal lessons, Miss Ffitch had the unfortunate job of dragging her reluctant charge twice a week to piano lessons with ‘Miss Jennie Black, Mus. Bac.’, a title Ngaio delighted in chanting ‘because of its snappy rhythm’. According to Ngaio herself, she ‘had a poor ear, little application and fluctuating interest’, but at other marriage-worthy accomplishments she was even worse: ‘I had and have, rather less aptitude than a bricklayer for sewing’. She was beginning to show real promise at art, but it was the shining light of Miss Ffitch’s Shakespeare that first penetrated the smoky haze of Ngaio’s adolescence. She began with King Lear. Despite the fact that it was a censored version with every possible sexual reference or innuendo removed (’just torture, murder and madness left’), and even though Miss Ffitch delivered it primly without ‘a word of exposition’ other than the notes (which she overused), Ngaio ‘lapped it up’. She could understand it. She loved the poetry of its language.

      It was probably with a sense of relief that Rose Marsh watched as ‘Miss Ffitch said goodbye and bicycled down the lane for the last time’: Ngaio was going to school. It would cost them a fortune for fees and the expensive uniform, but Rose felt certain that it would be worthwhile. Ngaio needed taming.

      It was 1910, and St Margaret’s College had just opened and was run by a strict order of Anglo-Catholic nuns. Only the best families could afford to send their daughters there. Rose would have to scrimp and save even more, but the school had the values and status she wanted. It was not that she was an avid Christian, or even a great snob; what impressed her most was the school’s serious attitude towards young women’s education. The curriculum was heavy in literature, history and the arts, but what they taught promised to be equal to that of any good boys’ school. She knew Ngaio had potential and believed that Ngaio could realize it there. She was right. ‘From the first day, I loved St. Margaret’s.’

      Ngaio swapped Huck Finn СКАЧАТЬ