Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Joanne Drayton

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СКАЧАТЬ stop on the long sea voyage, which would take nearly eight weeks, was Sydney, where she witnessed a half-span of the harbour bridge going up. She saw a production of Henry VIII put on in Newton by her old actor-manager friend Allan Wilkie, and went to the city’s ‘grandiloquent’ state gallery which stands on a hill flanked by giant statues of snorting steeds bearing symbolic figures of ‘war and peace’. In the English section of the gallery, she was taken by the work of Impressionist Laura Knight, and in the Australian, by the Post-Impressionist Margaret Preston. ‘They are brilliantly painted,’ she wrote of Preston’s stilllifes, ‘they seem to reveal the very spirit of flowers without a touch of over-representation or sentimentality. Her sense of pattern is…inspiring.’ In the colonies Ngaio’s taste in art was modern, and her discussion of Preston perceptive, but in European centres that had wrestled with Cubist deconstruction, Dada nihilism and the psychosis of Surrealism, it was traditional. Her final visit was to the new Cabaret-Romanos, where she found heterogeneous humanity dancing cheek-to-cheek to the ‘muted “Blues” of the best Jazz in Sydney’.

      In Hobart, she shuddered at photographs of the ‘dreadful instruments’ of penal correction used in the former convict prison and noted the sad demise of Aboriginal culture in the face of English settlement. She found Melbourne cooler and more decorous than hot-blooded, sun-baked Sydney. Here she again visited the state gallery, noting the work of late 19th-century ‘moderns’ like idiosyncratic Symbolist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and the painting of French and English Impressionists such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Frank Brangwyn, John Singer Sargent and Sir William Orpen. Again, her taste was conservative. The highlight of her stay was a lavish production, by the Melba-Williamson Grand Opera Company, of Puccini’s unfinished Turandot. ‘The audience at the opera in Melbourne is a very festive one and the gorgeous theatre coats made a brave show against the florid brilliance of the gilt walls. Many of the men wore tails and white ties.’ Ngaio relished the rituals of class and culture and felt it gave the event dignity. She was naturally attracted to the theatrical, even camp accessories of upper-crust society, and this fascination lasted. Her observation of aristocratic manners was acute, and her belief in them shifted from born-again conviction to good-humoured scepticism.

      The liver-coloured, coal-burning Balranald was making a last long sea voyage to the wreckers’ yard, and Ngaio’s berth was cramped, yet shipboard life appealed to her. She eagerly participated in deck games and dressing up for performances and parties, and delighted in the company of the other passengers. Already Ngaio was fascinated by the pursuit of people-watching, especially in a confined space. ‘I have always had a vague and ill-informed interest in crowd-psychology, and never was there a better opportunity of studying it.’ She could watch people with impunity—‘Australians who wanted to see the world, Americans who have seen it and insisted on telling you about it, Swedish, Greek, Armenians and Italian wanderers…South Africans’—and share her amusing observations with her Christchurch readers. It took three weeks to reach the coast of Africa, and by then much of the food on board was stale or bad. The water made people sick and, opening a folded slice of cold meat, she ‘found it encrusted with small shells’. Ngaio decided ‘to cut loose’ and eat in Durban.

      She was enchanted by the city’s strangeness. ‘The first excitement we [Ngaio and a fellow passenger] encountered was a row of Zulu rickshaw men with their amazing headdresses of quills, feathers, and horns, their fur tippets and painted legs.’ The rickshaw ride to the hotel through sunny streets that thronged with ‘Hindoos, Kaffirs, Zulus…white people…[and] beautiful Indian women in ample robes of vivid blue and scarlet and cerise’ was as colourful as it was exhilarating. On a hill, the driver drew himself onto the shafts of the rickshaw and ‘we free-wheeled at an alarming speed while he rang his cow bell at the crossings’. They recovered from their ordeal by drinking coffee on the loggia of the hotel ‘and looking on at the pageant of the streets’. Ngaio saw Sybil Thorndike, her husband Lewis Casson, and their small daughter in a revival of The Liars by Henry Arthur Jones, and in a packed Indian market she bought the food she had promised herself. For sixpence she filled a colossal basket with pineapples, oranges, pawpaws, succulent tangerines and gigantic grapefruit. Ngaio ached to paint the scene, with its bustle of humanity and kaleidoscope of costumes, produce, deeply shaded little shops and brilliant lengths of silk, but she had time only to take a photograph and make a quick sketch on the back of an envelope. She wrote about the market in her ‘Pilgrim’ article before she painted it. Increasingly she was capturing the world around her in words rather than paint, but she pictured it vividly with an artist’s eye.

      Durban’s racism troubled her. She had qualms about taking a rickshaw ride, and described with contempt the treatment of a black man who ‘ran in front of three sullen-looking Dutch youths, who turned on him savagely’. She concluded: ‘I remember Mr J H Curle’s contention that it is the under-bred white who, at bedrock, is responsible for the “colour question”‘, and this is what she believed. Ngaio was sensitive about race and culture. As a Pakeha in New Zealand, she had seen the plight of Maori in the face of colonization, and she felt for their loss of culture, language and land. She saw pathos in the position of the ‘aboriginals who have seen the coming of the English and the changing of their ways’. Ngaio was born a Victorian, her liberalism was flawed and limited, and her thinking sometimes straitjacketed by convention and class, but she despised racial prejudice. The final picture she painted of Durban was one that disturbed her. It was the fading image of ‘a grinning kaffir boy’ dancing on the wharf. He had made friends with children on the boat. ‘“He’s a nice nigger boy,” said a little girl. “He does what I tell him, ‘Dance boy’.” He danced and waved his arms obediently…till we slid away and the children lost interest in him.’

      From Durban, the Balranald sailed in heavy seas down the coast of Africa to Cape Town, where Ngaio met Uncle Freddie, one of Henry Marsh’s six brothers. Their father, a tea broker in the days of clipper ships, had died suddenly leaving his widow in a small Georgian house near Epping with a family of 10 children to bring up. The sons, desperate for financial independence and opportunity, left England for Canada, South Africa and New Zealand, adventurers out to make their fortunes. ‘There seems to have been no thought of university or profession for any of them,’ Ngaio later wrote. ‘The Colonies, it was felt, were the thing.’

      Henry learned Chinese at London University for a position in the Hong Kong-Shanghai Bank, but this plan was cut short by a bout of pleurisy and an invigorating year on the veldt of South Africa. A solution to his employment problem came from his father’s eldest brother, who was Governor of Hong Kong. While this uncle was staying in New Zealand, he secured the offer of a good position for his nephew with the Colonial Bank. When Henry arrived, however, the unthinkable happened: the bank crashed and he was forced to take a humble clerk’s job with the Bank of New Zealand. He remained in the same position for the rest of his life. Ngaio’s Uncle Freddie, now permanent secretary to the Governor-General’s Fund in Cape Town, was luckier. He and his family proudly escorted Ngaio around the sights of the city, which included the museum, the ancient colonial house of Koopmans-de Wet, the ‘old Curfew bell that…call[ed] the slaves in from their work’, and the ‘ill-tailored statue’ of former prime minister and colonizing magnate, Cecil Rhodes.

      A sultry yellow sun beat unrelentingly down as they steamed along the Gold Coast. ‘When the land breeze gets up it fans us with the accumulated heat of all Africa,’ Ngaio wrote, ‘but tomorrow we turn away towards Las Palmas, and sail out of the tropics.’

      When she finally reached the silver-grey misty seas of England she could hardly believe it. ‘Just before dawn the cabin steward made an isolated gesture. For the first time on the voyage he brought me a cup of tea. He said…the water had been filtered…I thanked him warmly and had drunk half the tea when I found the rest of the cup was full of a thick, viscid, grey silt.’

      It was with a huge sense of relief and excitement that she met the Rhodes family on the wharf. They drove her through streets that were noisy monuments to history after the colonial outposts and cicada-serenaded towns she knew. She was infatuated. Her first excursions from Alderbourne Manor into London СКАЧАТЬ