Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
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would have been disgusted…. But they certainly couldn’t help having plenty of crumbs…. There was Jenny Wren at her wedding, with Cock Robin…. Why a hanky over her face? Oh, it was a veil that ladies always wear then…. How did she keep it on when she flew? She must have kept her head tucked under Cock Robin’s wing…. And that was the old woman flying up to the moon in a basket…. Yes, our clothes basket.’
“This was a very old book. It belonged to her mother when she was a little girl.
“What is the fascination and charm of all these old old rhymes?
“‘Comb hair, comb,
Daddy’s gone to plough
If you want your hair combed
Have it combed now.’
“‘Oh, such a beautiful hymn.’ … the little child, standing on a chair by the window, looking out over the garden to the fields, and Daddy, ploughing even at that early hour, would see a light at the windows and say, ‘Oh, that’s my little daughter having her hair combed.’
“Even the delicious adventures of Little Black Sambo and the irresponsible, intoxicated holiday glamour of Sam and Selina could not surpass these old verses:
“‘Little girl, little girl, where have you been?
Gathering roses to give to the Queen.
Little girl, little girl, what gave she you?
She gave me a diamond as big as my shoe.’
“‘But what does she do with the diamond — and it has no smell…. I would rather have the roses.’
“But here was another picture … the little girl courtseying low, half hidden behind the great bunch of roses, and the Queen, on her golden throne stretching out her hands for the flowers — her white hands — but she is used to thorns — and beside her, the diamond in a neat parcel tied with a ribbon….
“The Child fell asleep … and took her way along the little white road hedged with blossoming briar roses — past the green meadows where children played with white lambs and led them by a blue ribbon beside the buttercup fringed pools — past the wayside cottage where Mrs. Punch was pinning Toby’s clean neck frill on to the clothes line and Mr. Punch was reading ‘Ernie at the Seaside’ to the baby in long clothes.
“Far away up in the air an old woman in a basket. She was descending rapidly. ‘Frightful lot of extra work these balloons are making,’ said she frowning and muttering. ‘They send the currents all wrong.’
“‘The currents,’ said the Child. ‘Is that where currants come from?’
“‘Oh,’ the old woman muttered, ‘there are currents and currants, which of course tells you I have a sister in the currant business— “Hot Cross buns the old woman runs.” …
“From a minute house came the sound of a great many babies laughing and crooning. Inside, a row of the prettiest babies imaginable. And at the end of the room the teacher, a demure little person with great horn spectacles and a birch rod in her hand.
“‘I just wanted to say How do you do,’ said the Child, ‘and ask if the babies might sing the school song.’
“‘They’re all too young,’ said the Schoolmistress, ‘but perhaps you would sing it for them?’
“The Child put her hands together, shook her back hair, and sang in a clear high voice:
“‘Little Nellie Nipkin, brisk and clean and neat
Keeps a little baby school in the village street
Teaches little pupils all that she can find
And keeps a little birch that teaches them to mind.’
“‘Thank you,’ said Miss Nipkin, ‘but the birch is only a matter of form.’
“From the street came the sound of music … and there was the lady cat playing the violin, and the three little kittens with trousers. The Child clapped her hands.
“‘Hallo, hallo,’ she said. ‘I knew I would find you here.’ The lady cat nodded brightly.
“‘What sweet little knickers your children have.’
“‘They are quite blithesome,’ said the lady cat, and as we walk down the street into the market place we hear her violin, now faint, now clear….”
3
Even when Kathleen was still of importance as “the baby” of the family — even then she often turned to her own duality for companionship — as Katherine turned, later, to Kezia. Her company in those days was with “the shadow children, thin and small”; or the cabbage tree with its hair out of curl:
“Never mind, cabbage tree, when I am taller
And if you grow, please, a little bit smaller,
I shall be able by that time, may be,
To make you the loveliest curls, cabbage tree.”
Later her sense of solidariness drew her very much deeper into a fantastic world. And then (as now, when she was small) her aloneness was closely connected with a certain fear: fear of wind, fear of night. From that earliest childhood she was haunted by fearful dreams that made her sleep poorly. In fact she preferred to go without sleep, at times — and trembled for the comfort of a candle in the hands of her mother or grandmother, when she was a child.
There were occasions when:
“The wind keeps going creepy-creep
And waiting to be fed.”
and
“Like an awful dog we had
Who used to creep around …”
The fear of the wind, when she was small, was joined in her mind with fear of the doctor’s little dog,”Jackie,” who snapped at her bare legs when she was two. It was connected with her earliest memory, and it was a fearful one which lasted all her life. The horrors were perhaps the worst when they strayed from the companionable world of fantasy and betrayed her by precipitating her back, terrified, into the world of grown-ups for protection.
One of these strayed companions from her fanciful world watched her grimly as she said her solitary good-bye to the darkening house in Tinakori Road. This was later when she was five. But it was a characteristic episode of her early days:
“Her old bogey, the dark, had overtaken her, and now there was no lighted room to make a despairing dash for. Useless to call ‘Grandma.’ … If she flew down the stairs and out of the house she might escape from It in time. It was round like the sun, It had a face. It smiled, but It had no eyes. It was yellow. When she was put to bed with two drops of aconite in a medicine glass It breathed very loudly and firmly and It had been known on certain particularly fearful occasions to turn round and round. It hung in the air. That was all she knew and even that much had been very difficult to explain to the grandmother. Nearer came the terror and more plain to feel the ‘silly’ smile. She snatched her hands from the window pane, opened her mouth to call Lottie, and fancied she did call loudly, though she made no sound — It was at the bottom of the stairs, waiting in the little dark passage, guarding the back door — but Lottie was at the back door, too! ‘Oh, there you are,’ she said cheerfully.”
Even “the same old nightmare” that often came from the grown-up world: “… the butcher with a knife and rope who grew nearer and nearer, smiling that dreadful smile, while she could not move, could only stand still crying out, ‘Grandma, Grandma’ …” could not have been as terrifying to The Little Girl as those disembodied Ones that escaped to pursue her in the dark, and sped through her dreams at night.
The