Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
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holidays the children followed the little scalloped bays along the shore to Island Bay. Island Bay was just a suburb of Wellington around the point toward Happy Valley. It was all inlets and rocky caves; a wild man lived in one of them (so they said). He made the expedition uncertain and daring; but unlike Old Underwood, he hid himself well away and so was rarely cornered. Long afterward, Kathleen wrote to Mr. Ruddick:
“Does Marion remember Island Bay, I wonder, and bathing her doll in the rock pools with me? … I wonder if she has forgotten our games at Miss Partridge’s, or old Miss Partridge’s way of saying: ‘Oh, I’m so tired!’ Or the cream buns we were given for tea. I must say I think the cream buns should have been withheld from me, though.”
The girls learned to swim and dive, in those days, at the Thorndon Sea Baths, below the Quay, where they were taken three times a week. For years they remembered the seaweedy odour, the gritty marmalade sandwiches which they devoured afterward, and the lemonade they drank while the elders drank tea.
There were games: tennis on the hard court at No. 75; and, while they lived there — billiards.
“… Billiards…. It’s a fascinating game. I remember learning to hold a cue at Sir Joseph Ward’s, and I can see now R.’s super refinement as if she expected each ball to be stamped with a coronet before she would deign to hit it.”
There were a few parties, usually for tea, but an occasional one in the evening when they were “invited out,” and brought “slippers in a satin bag.” Sometimes there were dances of the kind authorised then:
“Somewhere quite near someone is playing very old-fashioned dance tunes on a cheap piano, things like the Lancers, you know. Some minute part of me not only dances to them but goes faithfully through Ladies in the Centre, Visiting, Set to Corners, and I can even feel the sensation of clasping warm young hands in white silk gloves, and shrinking from Maggie Owen’s hand in Ladies’ Chain because she wore no gloves at all.”
After they had moved back to town, Mr. Beauchamp bought the country place at Day’s Bay, near Mirimar, for the children’s long holidays.
There was no road around the edge of the Harbour then; the only way to reach the Bay was by The Duke or The Duchess, sailing across Lambton Harbour. Often the girls held each other’s heads for that rough half hour. Day’s Bay was a quiet place, a paradise for children. Zoe was at a cottage near the Beauchamps’ and the Walter Nathans were not far away; but except for a pavilion occasionally open for entertainment, these few families had the Bay to themselves. Kass and Marion spent their December summer holidays there. To the Canadian child, this semi-tropical life was filled with surprise :
“When we weren’t paddling in the sea, we were digging sand castles with marvellous moats and draw- bridges. Zoe initiated us into the joys of shrimping in the rock pools; and we loved seeing shrimps back, in their silly way, into the nets. We thought it cruel to have them plunged into boiling water alive, but the assurance that they were killed instantly, and the lovely salmony pink colour they turned to from a dull greenish grey, compensated us for the boiling process. From delving in the rock pools, we evolved the idea of rock pool gardens; each selecting a pool, we collected seaweed, pearly shells, coloured stones, sea anemones and star fish. I vaguely remember Christmas at the Bay. I gave Kass a thimble in a green plush case, and felt at the time that she would have much preferred a book. To Jeanne I gave a pink and white dolls’ teapot, which she still talks about. ‘Chummie’ had a toy dancing bear, and that is all I remember except a present that I received of a large mauve box of chocolate almonds with a pair of gilt tongs on top. It was my first real box of sweets — from a friend of my father — and Kass and I were both quite overcome by such magnificence.”
The quietness of Day’s Bay became, for Katherine Mansfield, a standard of stillness. It was only of the heightened sense of absolute stillness produced by isolation and illness and “a sky like lead” that she could say it was “much quieter than Day’s Bay.” That meant a superhuman, or even an inhuman stillness — the quietness that descends upon one who has drifted out of life itself. The quietness of Day’s Bay represented a perfection of human stillness, friendly and benign. It was of Day’s Bay and her summers there that she was thinking when, in a mood of happiness in a Paris spring, — when, as she walked,”the air just lifts enough to blow on your cheeks. Ah, how delicious that is!” — she tried to make a present of her happiness to a friend.
“There is a wharf not far from here where the sand barges unload. Do you know the smell of wet sand? Does it make you think of going down to the beach in the evening light after a rainy day and gathering the damp driftwood (it will dry on the top of the stove) and picking up for a moment the long branches of seaweed that the waves have tossed and listening to gulls who stand reflected in the gleaming sand, and just fly a little way off as you come and then — settle again?”
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At Karori, her own country had lain “beyond the Blue Mountains.” When she returned to Tinakori Road, it lay beyond the Green Gate. She was always — all her life long — to have this escape — this country of her mind. For years it was the Heron, that perfect house beneath the flowery trees where I she would create her own world, live in the company of those radiant beings,”her people.” Nearer the end of her life when her disease had made her even more of an exile, it became “the silent world”; then “no one knew where she was” :
“… I have felt very often lately as though the silence had some meaning beyond these signs, these intimations. Isn’t it possible that if one yielded there is a whole world into which one is received? It is so near and yet I am conscious that I hold back from giving myself up to it. What is this something mysterious that waits — that beckons?”
The Green Gate was far on this side of those borders; yet it was beyond the known land. Behind it were flowers, and enchantment. It was guarded (both she and Marion liked to believe) by a fiery dragon. Many times the two girls passed it as they flew up Hill Street to the Golder Hill house, where Kathleen was allowed to visit Marion Ruddick. Many times they crept to the Green Gate, longing yet fearing to open it; always something drew them back in time.
In the Golder Hill garden they sat in the acacia tree eating little fluted cakes of Canadian maple sugar brought by Marion from Canada. From their high leafy perch, they could look into the Convent square; they could even see the ripple across the grass, across the beds of freezias. Was it the wind shaking them, or were they heavy with bees? Kathleen was never in that garden more than once or twice; yet from the acacia tree she was at home in that square. They could see the Harbour from their high seat. On some rare days the water turned the colour of New Zealand jade — jade that the Maoris mined in the South Island. In 1915 her brother gave her a tiki made of it, which she wore round her neck till she died.
Marion told stories of her own country:”sliding down snow-covered hills on sleds and driving in red sleighs with jingling bells through forests of living Christmas trees”; and she remembered, afterward, that:”Every tree in the Golder Hill garden contained a wood nymph and every flower a fairy. The big rata tree with its shaggy red blossoms we called ‘the fire tree’ and its flowers were burning tongues of flame.” They tried poetry, as they sat in the tree looking out over the Convent garden and the Harbour. Marion remembers their struggle with an Ode to a Snowdrop. They kept that kingdom to themselves.
There were other “moments, glimpses, even, before which all else pales.” Up through the wild bush at the back of Day’s Bay were the “ferny paths” winding lazily through tree fern: umbrella fern with dark green leaves spreading out from the centre like a star fish; lace fern, aromatic in the hot sunshine; the real climbing fern, Mange-Mange, twisting over bushes and trees with its stem so uniform that the Maoris wove baskets from it, and used it as rope to fasten the thatch to their roofs. There was King Fern with little boat-shaped seeds; and Crown Fern with a perfect little crown in each section of stem.
Over the second range beyond the Bay was a beech grove — nothing but beeches over the whole hill top. The leaves were like lace — like dark brown lace. Light coming through them made another world, like the light beneath