Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (19 page)

During blazing hot days of dazzling sunlight, they revived in the chill mountain waters of a swimming-hole they made by damming the river. In the seclusion of their private beech-fringed glade, ‘
the girls could rid
themselves of their neck-to-knee bathing clothes’ and swim and exult in the soft ‘springing pleasure of young grass’ as they sunbathed. ‘One day we climbed the mountain to Blowhard and looked across a great valley into the backcountry: range after naked range with a glittering of snow on the big tops. “My country,” I thought.’

In this landscape Ngaio felt a connection and a sense of belonging that was never extinguished. England was the home of her ancestors, but New Zealand was her turangawaewae. The land of her birth always drew her back. Like many Pakeha—or ‘newcomers’, as she called them—she felt the dilemma of protest against and disillusionment with the Old World, of a truncated history, of the anomalies of colonization and land ownership. ‘
I do not know
if other New Zealanders are visited by this contradictory feeling of belonging and not-belonging, ’ she wrote in
Black Beech,
‘but it came upon me very vividly when I first looked into the high-country from the top of Blowhard and it has returned many times since then. It is a feeling that deepens rather than modifies one’s attachment to New Zealand.’

The Burton girls’ fianc
é
s were both Anglican curates, and on Christmas Day at Glentui they celebrated Holy Communion at dawn. Henry Marsh, the ardent atheist, spent Christmas Eve fashioning an altar made out of manuka poles in a clearing by the river. Ngaio was at her religious zenith and probably still smarting from the loss of a confirmation cross and chain which had been spirited away from her tent by a thieving weka who crept across sleeping bodies to steal it. Henry, who allowed each individual their belief, built the altar for his daughter. He carefully positioned the structure between two trees so that the sun would rise behind it, but was not present at the service the next day. He was magnanimous again later, when one of the Burton fianc
é
s, a union supporter, was involved in the Waterfront Strike of 1913 and Henry was a government-
appointed special constable. He was conservative in his political principles, yet he let others have theirs. The Marsh family enjoyed several more Christmas camping holidays at Glentui before Ngaio left school and her friends drifted off like dandelion seeds on a gust of autumn wind. It was natural that they would go their own ways, but Dundas Walker and Sylvia Fox would remain constant throughout Ngaio’s life.

Glentui formed part of the backdrop to Ngaio’s writing in
New Zealand,
but other outdoor experiences were equally charged. The book included 12 colour plates of landscape paintings documenting New Zealand’s settlement and scenery, from
Captain Cook Arriving at Queen Charlotte’s Sound, February 10th, 1777
(by J. Clevely) to Elizabeth Wallwork’s more recent
Wind in the Larches.
Ngaio included two of her own mountain landscapes, and one by her friend Olivia Spencer Bower. It was the borrowing of the Wallwork painting that would have brought back a host of memories. Elizabeth and Richard Wallwork had been Ngaio’s teachers at Canterbury College. Richard was the life-room lecturer, but he and his wife were also devotees of landscape painting, and part of a wider Canterbury School who selected raw, often South Canterbury vistas of rivers, rolling plains and mountains as their subject matter. The more progressive painters sought to convey the arid bones of the landscape in simple dramatic forms. They shunned the picturesque and the iconic in favour of the simple and the ordinary: the quiet railway siding, the isolated mountain hut, the meandering shingle road crossed by a ramshackle bridge. The human scale was insignificant. Ngaio expressed it perfectly: ‘
our presence here
was no more than a cobweb across the hide of a monster’. These were subjects that visualized how it felt to be overpowered by Nature. The artists of the Canterbury School painted outdoors in front of the subjects that inspired them. The itinerant camping life, the sand in the oils, the mosquitoes in the watercolour water were all part of the ritual. Their landscapes were a groping, instinctive statement of nationalism.

After she had been at art school for a year, Richard and Elizabeth Wallwork invited Ngaio, her mother and a young cousin on a painting trip to the West Coast. This was the rich, dark, brooding, primordial balance to the dry, open plains of the east. Their train left at 8am, and by noon foothills loomed on either side and they were climbing, hurtling through scree and tussock until they reached the mountain tunnels. Ngaio and her cousin stood outside in the blackness as the platform surged and bucked beneath their feet. Sooty cinders burned their lungs and the noise of the train in the tunnel was deafening, but
they were exhilarated. The railway line stopped at Arthur’s Pass, so the final stage was taken by road. Their party was among the last to take a Cobb and Co. Royal Mail Coach, before the Otira Tunnel was opened in 1923. Women sat inside the coach and men on the top, but Ngaio slipped past convention and climbed up into the box seat.

We were plunged
into a region of wet forest and dark mountains. We looked into a chasm where treetops were no bigger than green fungi…It opens with a series of hairpin bends. I am badly affected with height vertigo…On the outside seat one seemed, literally, to overhang the edge. I gripped a ridiculously small curved rail…Nobody spoke. From time to time the brakes screamed and stank.

Passengers were paralysed with fear until the going finally became calmer and the coach pulled up in the sleepy West Coast settlement of Otira.

There they found ‘
a straggle of huts
, a large pub and a little station’ that was the West Coast railroad terminus. At the pub, which was coming alive after the day’s hibernation, they ate cold mutton, yellow pickles and a loaf with butter and black tea. The smell of beer mixed with the smell of pungent bush. That night they slept on blanket-covered bracken in tiny two-bunk logging huts standing in a row overlooking a railway bridge at Te Kinga. Richard Wallwork had to commandeer a railway jigger to carry their gear. The rent was 5 shillings a week. At dawn they were woken by the sound of logging teams leaving for their camp deep in the bush. They were invited by the timber men to visit the camp, and watch gigantic tree trunks being winched out. At the mill at Te Kinga, they saw the logs thundering down the skids. ‘
I did a painting
of this and would have liked to call it “Too Bloody Big,” for that was what the mill-hands said repeatedly of the giant we had seen felled.’ In the mornings and evenings they painted with great concentration. ‘
We learned about the behaviour
of trees, about the anatomy of mountains, how to lay out the ghost of a subject and then, at the fleeting hour of sunset, seize upon it.’ The afternoons were free to take expeditions into the bush.

During her art school days, Ngaio returned three times to Westland. Each visit gave them a reminder of the region’s cruelty. There was the timber man’s snigger horse, blind in one eye from the whiplash of a bush; the farmer’s three young sons drowned in the cruel waters of Lake Brunner; and the thin, refined
hermit woman who lived in a shack near Lake Kaniere. They stumbled across her hut one day in a clearing. She was dressed in rags and ruined workingman’s boots, but still she invited them in. As she poured the tea, they noticed the faded photographs on the wall behind her. One of them was of a ‘
very pretty woman
in full Victorian evening dress’; another of a group of three children with a boy in an Eton suit. As they were leaving, Rose Marsh said, ‘Did you recognise the photograph on the wall?…She must have been lovely as a girl.’

This was remittance country, and when remittance men and women ran out of money Nature was unforgiving. It was on the West Coast that Ngaio and her fellow student Phyllis Bethune encountered the drunken revellers who became the subject of ‘The Night Train From Grey’, her first piece of professional writing for the
Sun,
under its progressive editor Edward Huie, who was also president of the Canterbury Society of Arts. The rugged, New Zealand landscape and its solid, self-contained, sometimes bush-crazed people were an inspiration for Ngaio.

Her own paintings in
New Zealand
were dry east coast scenes typical of the Canterbury School. In
Mount Goldie,
three singlet-clad athletic stockmen stand looking across a rural landscape dotted with sheep to the etched forms of distant foothills. It is a cleverly composed but conventional picture, ideally suited to its illustrative purpose. Ngaio began her
New Zealand
story like one of her novels, introducing the various groups of people attending an agricultural fair. ‘
To find such a slice
of local colour a stranger would do well to visit one of the cities during a carnival week. These festivals take place in the spring, and, in most towns at this time, a race-meeting coincides with an agricultural…show.’ The first people mentioned were the runholders, described as the ‘squattocracy’ of New Zealand.

New Zealand
also contained reproductions of 19th-century engravings and a selection of contemporary black-and-white photographs. The initial batch of the latter, sent to London to be included in the book, were lost at sea, and the colour film that was to be used instead could not be processed, but this did not mar the experience for English critics, who were enthusiastic in their praise. Reflecting on all the Commonwealth titles produced to that point, the reviewer for
Time and Tide,
writing in April 1942, stated: ‘
I confess it was
Miss Ngaio Marsh’s
New Zealand
which caught my attention most of all. And here perhaps it was partly by means of the pictures.’ Ngaio’s slice of New Zealand was an affirming rather than provocative view of the empire and colonization. ‘Most
English people…have the feeling that New Zealand is a kind of business-like fairyland, and Miss Marsh left me with the conviction that most English people are right,’ wrote
The Observer.

It may have been the
New Zealand
book that shifted Ngaio’s focus to Rotorua and
Colour Scheme,
but how could she explain Alleyn’s presence Down Under? Then it occurred to her.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought war to the Pacific. On 19 February 1942, Japanese aircraft bombed Darwin, in the first of about 100 air raids against Australia carried out between 1942 and 1943. In that first attack, the Japanese dropped more bombs on Darwin than they did on Pearl Harbor. It was a huge psychological blow, not only to Australia but also to New Zealand. These were countries stripped of able men—over 140,000 New Zealanders were fighting in Europe and North Africa—and now there was the possibility of a homeland invasion. New Zealand’s isolation did not automatically make it impregnable.

A spy theme could justify Alleyn’s being in New Zealand and give the novel a contemporary flavour. Ngaio gathered her characters around a health spa owned and run by the Claires at fictional Wai-ata-tapu Springs near Rotorua. The vague and incompetent Colonel Claire, his wife, and two children, Simon and Barbara, are English emigrants who have lived here for 12 years, just long enough for the Antipodean dream to fade and curl at the edges. The money has gone, and their energy is as dilapidated as the flyblown posters that hang by a single drawing pin on the notice board.

As he approaches the spa by road, renowned Shakespearian actor Geoffry Gaunt thinks it is a dosshouse. Gaunt and his secretary Dikon Bell are guests, along with Mrs Claire’s brother, retired London doctor James Ackrington. Gaunt hopes he will find a cure for the ravages of the stage in the murky thermal waters of the spa. In his spare moments he is dictating his autobiography to his secretary. Thermal activity seethes around the Claires’ jaded bathhouse, producing pyrotechnic displays of geysers, gas and steam, and pools of scalding mud. Close by is the Maori village of Te Rarawas, and behind it, looking across the fictional Harpoon Harbour, the extinct volcanic cone of Rangi’s Peak. Two miles (5 kilometres) off the coast from Harpoon Inlet, a fully laden warship has been torpedoed. A seemingly coded series of flashing lights from Rangi’s Peak seemed to have precipitated the attack, and espionage is suspected. Who
in the Wai-ata-tapu Hot-Springs Spa is a spy?

Dr Ackrington decides to report these strange events to Roderick Alleyn, who is in New Zealand looking for leaks of classified information. Alleyn disguises himself as the elusive Septimus Falls: bent, but still good-looking and lean, seeking treatment for a bogus case of lumbago. The leading spy suspect is the gauche Maurice Questing, who holds the Claires’ hot pools to ransom over an unpaid debt. His disappearance, and subsequent reappearance as a boiled skull bubbling in the briny waters of a mud pool, lays the case wide open. Who is the murderer? Who is the spy?

This thin plot is brilliantly thickened by Ngaio’s investigation of two cultures undergoing dislocation and change. The most ravaged and therefore sympathetically presented is the Maori facing the consequences of colonization. It is not a flaky liberal, but cantankerous old Dr Ackrington who explains the ‘criminal imbecility’ of the Pakeha to Geoffry Gaunt:

We sent missionaries to stop them eating each other and bribed them with bad whisky to give us their land. We cured them of their own perfectly good communistic system…We took away their chiefs and gave them trade-union secretaries. And for mating-customs…we substituted…disease and holy matrimony.

Through the character of Eru Saul, Ngaio explores the dilemma of the young Maori ‘half-breed’ caught between cultures—a ‘bad Pakeha and a bad Maori’—trouble for both peoples. She saw the loss of Maori language, beliefs and values as destabilizing and tragic, and despised the exploitation of Maori culture through merchandising and appropriation.

Maurice Questing is a speculator whose programme of enhancing the tourist value of his property includes organizing groups of ‘poi girls’ and young Maori children who dive for pennies, and the sale of curios. He is the least likeable character in the book. It is Questing who violates the laws of tapu when he climbs Rangi’s Peak and desecrates a Maori burial ground by removing the magnificent adze of great chief Rewi, grandfather of aging rangatira Rua. And Questing who comes to one of Ngaio’s stickiest ends. His scream across the blackness of the night as he boils echoes the sad end, years before, of a young Maori woman who inadvertently ate food near her grandfather’s grave and broke tapu. She crept back to her village at night, fell into the boiling mud of
Taupo-tapu, and her blood-curdling scream was heard across the village. The next morning, all that the pool would relinquish was her dress.