Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
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Mother Lockett is full of conceit:
She struts about on her pigeon-toed feet.
Old Mother Lockett by this time must know
If conceit were consumption
She’d be dead long ago. — Kass.”
Rose was so delighted with the verse that she never forgot it.
The American elocution teacher had a special distinction: she had a husband who was said to be an author. Kass loved her because she loved to recite poetry. There was some strain in her of The True Original Pa Man who had stood on an upturned box, quoting Byron for an hour and a half. When she was small, this was more an instinct and an emotion than a developed talent; but as she looked back at her own ardour and delight in it, it seemed to her that she must have been really moving:
“Jinny Moore was awfully good at elocution. Was she better than I? I could make the girls cry when I read Dickens in the sewing class, and she couldn’t. But then she never tried to.”
This was later in the Third Standard; but even those girls didn’t remember her reciting, though they always remembered her epigrammatic turn of phrase, and things that she wrote.
She had a beautifully pitched voice, as she grew older; and she spoke exquisitely. At home she had learned sweetness of tone from the mother and the grandmother; and “Gran Dear” had taught her a certain fastidiousness of phrase. Here she was learning precision of speech, and clearness of enunciation. The children were not to say “How-doyoudo,” all run into one; but “How do you do?” each word clear and distinct.
Lena Monaghan practised it on Mr. and Mrs. Beauchamp the next time she saw them riding in their phæton. Very distinctly and clearly:”How do you do?”
The following day at playtime, Kass told her the result:”Last night at tea, Mother said: ‘I saw Lena to-day, and she said,”How do you do?” to me.’ But Father said: ‘No, she said it to me.”’
It was only a sympathetic and understanding mistress who took Kathleen out of herself, in those days, but this one understood her:
“I saw Teacher’s face smiling at me, suddenly — the cold, shivering feeling came over me — and then I saw the little house and ‘the little window where the sun came peeping in at morn’.”
and
“To stand before all those girls and Teacher, knowing my piece, loving it so much that I went in the knees and shivered all over, was joy.”
“On poetry afternoons grandmother let Mary and me wear Mrs. Gardener’s white hemstitched pinafores because we had nothing to do with ink or pencil. Triumphant and feeling unspeakably beautiful, we would fly along the road, swinging our kits and half chanting, half singing our new piece. I always knew my poetry, but Mary, who was a year and a half older, never knew hers. In fact, lessons of any sort worried her soul and body. She never could distinguish between ‘m’ and ‘n.’ …
“I was a strong, fat little child who burst my buttons and shot out of my skirts to grandmother’s entire satisfaction, but Mary was a ‘weed.’ She had a continuous little cough.
“‘Poor old Mary’s bark,’ as father called it….
“‘I can’t bear lessons, she would say woefully. ‘I’m all tired in my elbows and my feet.’ And yet, when she was well she was elfishly gay and bright — danced like a fairy and sang alike a bird. And heroic! She would hold a rooster by the legs while Pat chopped his head off. She loved boys, and played with a fine sense of honour and purity. In fact, I think she loved everybody; and I, who did not, worshipped her. I suffered untold agonies when the girls laughed at her in class, and when she answered wrongly I put up my hand and cried ‘Please teacher she means something quite different.’ … But on poetry afternoons I could not help at all….”
Learning poetry by heart was to remain a passion with Katherine — a solace in some of her bitterest and loneliest hours. If this story is autobiographical — and doubtless it is — it must have cost her no small sacrifice to surrender to Chaddie the prize— “the green plush bracket with a yellow frog stuck on it” — which she had won by reciting Tom Hood’s “I remember, I remember” without a mistake. And, at least once again in her life, a frog was the precious thing surrendered: when she gave J. D. Fergusson her little brass “paddock” for a token that she acknowledged him (as she always did) as one of “her people.” For some reason such little figures were dear to her. At one time she possessed two charming little lizards of weathered bronze which lived (or appeared to live) in a shallow bowl of water on the floor before the fire. Probably, they also were given away as tokens.
Her most “secret” possession of the days at Karori School was never brought to the light of day in any of her stories. It was the memory of Tim Logan, her first sweetheart. They used to walk home together from school, in the ditch beside the road, hidden under the pine boughs holding hands.
CHAPTER V
75 TINAKORI ROAD
“Life never becomes a habit to me. It’s always a marvel.” — K. M. (Letters.)
1
WHEN Kathleen was nine and a half, Mr. Beauchamp moved the family back to town to No. 75 Tinakori Road, several squares further up the hill toward the Botanical Gardens. Again this was a home more quickly welcomed by the children than by the adults:
“Our house in Tinakori Road stood far back from the road. It was a big, white-painted square house with a slender pillared verandah and balcony running all the way round it. In the front from the verandah edge the garden sloped away in terraces and flights of concrete steps — down — until you reached the stone wall covered with nasturtium that had three gates let into it — the visitors’ gate, the tradesman’s gate, and a huge pair of old iron gates that were never used and clashed and clamoured when Bogey and I tried to swing on them.
“Tinakori Road was not fashionable; it was very mixed. Of course there were some good houses in it, old ones, like ours for instance, hidden away in wildish gardens, and there was no doubt that land there would become extremely valuable, as Father said, if one bought enough and hung on.
“It was high, it was healthy; the sun poured in all the windows all day long, and once we had a decent tramway service, as Father argued….
“But it was a little trying to have one’s own washerwoman living next door who would persist in attempting to talk to Mother over the fence, and then, just beyond her ‘hovel,’ as Mother called it, there lived an old man who burned leather in his back yard whenever the wind blew our way. And further along there lived an endless family of half-castes who appeared to have planted their garden with empty jam tins and old saucepans and black iron kettles without lids. And then just opposite our house there was a paling fence and below the paling fence in a hollow, squeezed in almost under the fold of a huge gorse-covered hill, was Saunders’ Lane.”
The children were strictly forbidden to venture into that narrow and mysterious lane where women with shawls over their heads slipped furtively. Its grubbiness as Little George Street, afterward, was nothing to what it had been as Saunders’ Lane.
The new house faced it … almost looked down upon it, in fact, but they could learn to pretend it was not there. They could look across, at the Tinakori Hills.
The girls had a room so high up it was like being on a ship; and they might see the Harbour again as they used to, at No. II, when they were very small. Kathleen loved hanging out of this window, like a bird from a branch, at those secret hours which open a new world: late at night, when the city enclosing the Harbour was a city of stars, and the Southern Cross dipped low in the sky. The coal hulks far beyond Pipeta Point were indistinct