Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
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appears in Prelude, The Aloe, and At the Bay. The first six years of her married life had drained her energy; she was surrounded by her family. Her husband, with his continual need of her support, took what time and life she had to spare. The children flitted about her in the little box-like house. She would go out among the flowers, for which she had a passion: arum lilies and pincushions around the little square mat of lawn in the front garden; and to the wild gully, at the back — filled with green and tree ferns; beyond that, the world appeared unreal.
But the Grandmother was still in close touch with domestic life. There is work to be done in the New Zealand homes, where maids are few and inadequate. A succession of Alices,”Alice-the-hired-girl,” came and went, but the Grandmother, like all really good cooks, loved cooking, and by the time Kathleen was big enough to peel passion fruit for the little purple seeds to put in fruit salad, Vera was old enough to be a real help in the house.
Vera Margaret was everybody’s favourite, and well she might be. She was one of those fortunate and contented children born to be “a comfort to her parents.” She had her mother’s rather effusive manner without her mother’s natural hauteur. They all had this manner, except the small Kathleen. The atmosphere was more that of an English than a Colonial home. The children were well-behaved — taught to say “Gran, Dear”;”Mother, Dear”; Father, Dear”; and they all addressed one another indiscriminately as “darling.” If, at times, Vera seemed to the younger children to belong rather to the world of grown-ups, it was doubtless because — being the oldest, and having her father’s sense of responsibility — she felt accountable to the grown-ups for the younger ones.”To see Vera was to love her,” the Anikiwa cousins said:”to see Kathleen was to remember her.” Vera at eight was a tall, straight-backed girl (though she was threatened with curvature of the spine for a while); she had the high colour in her cheeks and lips that the Wellington wind whips into the faces of so many children. Her hair — brown like the mother’s — was in long, neat plaits. All the girls looked like the mother; but Kathleen had her mother’s colourless skin; the others had a touch of the father’s ruddy colouring.
Charlotte Mary (“Chaddie” familiarly,”Marie” more respectfully) was a year and a half older than Kathleen, and apparently followed the course of the other two. She wore her hair in ringlets, at six, and walked with her feet turned out. She was a charming and affectionate child, easy and soft of speech.
All three of the little girls were dressed alike. They wore jumper dresses on week-days, and freshly starched pinafores on Sundays. If company came for tea, the Grandmother slipped a fresh pinafore over the play frock. They had small black sandals with short socks, and bare knees that needed frequent scrubbing.
Kathleen’s wavy dark hair was about her shoulders like Edna’s in Something Childish, when she was very small. She was rather lumpish, and often called to the others:”Wait for me! I can’t hurry. I’m too fat—” One of the little Walter Nathans, of whom there were five, used to shout over the fence at her from No. 13:”Fatty! Fatty! Fatty!” To which she scorned to make reply.
Yet even when she was small, she cast a small black shadow of her father’s temper. It was, she afterward thought, a little demon which possessed her — a “black monkey” :
“My Babbles has a nasty knack
Of keeping monkeys on her back….
“She comes and stands beside my chair
With almost an offended air
And says: ‘Oh, Father, why can’t I?’
And stamps her foot and starts to cry —
“She throws about her nicest toys
And makes a truly dreadful noise
Till Mother rises from her place
With quite a Sunday churchy face….
“Never a kiss or one goodnight
Never a glimpse of candle light
Oh, how the monkey simply flies!” …
In many other respects she was her father’s daughter. They were alike in the wrong ways, and different in the right ones. But there was a twinkle between them and the bond of the “jolly voice” in which children “expect to be talked to” and in which he so often did talk to her. Kass shared her father’s humour as fairly as she shared his temper. The real bond between the Pa Man and the child was the True Original Pa Man, who had given them both their patrimony of wit. The children were brought up on his auctioneer’s jingles as other children are raised on their father’s old college songs. The small Beauchamps were veritably rocked to sleep on:”Ohau can I cross the river Ohau?” and
“On the banks of the Wamangaroa
They discovered the bones of a moa,
The largest I ween that e’er was seen
On the banks of the Wamangaroa.
Its back measured two feet by the tape, Sir,
And it was a most elegant shape, Sir —
And he dug his own grave by the bright rippling wave
On the banks of the Wamangaroa.”
When he was feeling “jolly” and had exhausted his father’s repertory, the Pa Man occasionally tried extempore of his own:
“Orua away gently in a small boat
For you must beware of the Horowhenua afloat.”
Or he rolled off the pleasant greeting phrases that he and his father learned from the Maoris: Kanui taku aroka atu kia oke (Great is my love to you) … Kia whiti tonu te ra kirunga kiaoke (May the sunshine of happiness ever rest upon you).
These celebrations were usually over the dinnertable when the children were allowed to dine with the grown-ups.
Even when they were far too small to understand, the “jolly” voice rolled about them:
“‘Bread?’ Plain or coloured, Miss? Half a yard cut on the cross, I take it, with as little selvedge as possible.”
The whimsical spirit of The True Original Pa Man presided over some feasts:
“‘My father would say,’ said Burnell (as he carved), ‘this must have been one of those birds whose mother played to it in infancy upon the German flute. And the sweet strains of the dulcet instrument acted with such effect upon the infant mind …’.”
When, in after years, anything was “very Pa,” it meant (in Katherine Mansfield’s private language), something with a style of its own, something which could withstand the current mode — something having individuality, vigour, flamboyancy.
There were the flashes when the father stopped for a twinkle with the children at home, and would draw for them strange and exciting dragons— “dragons with seven bellies”; and there were the brief and intoxicating visits to the strange place where he lived during the day:
“My father’s office. I smell it…. I see the cage of the clumsy wooden goods lift and the tarred ropes hanging.”
On his desk was a little brass pig, with a bristly mat of hair for wiping pens. It always stood on a pile of torn letters. When she had to stretch on tiptoe to look over the edge of the desk, it had been the first thing she reached for: the darling little gold pig! With her delight in small quaint things, it seemed to her too, too lovely! What was its significance, of what was it a symbol?
When she went “home” to England for the last time it went with her. It stood on a pile of torn letters on her own desk all the rest of her life; and when she first knew she was to die, she said (among a very few other things):”Don’t let anything happen to my brass pig. I’d like Vera to have it.” In her will, afterward, she bequeathed it back to her father. This was strangely significant because very few possessions — in the material sense — were precious to her. She had