Black Beech and Honeydew by Ngaio Marsh Read Free Book Online Page B

unproductive explorations of its less accessible mysteries decided my mother against this vehicle. She felt that the important thing was to arrive.
    So, on what seems to me to have been an interminable journey, we plodded through the borders of Fendalton, round the parks, past a region of drafting-yards and sheep pens where, once a week, livestock was sold, down a long highway and into Wilderness Road, an endless stretch between gorse hedges. It is now a main suburban street. This brought us at last to the hills; to a winding lane, a rough track and our destination. I remember that a hot nor’ wester raged across the plains and when we tried to pitch our bell tents, got inside them and threatened to blow them away like umbrellas. We settledat last upon the sheltered end of a valley, below our section and within sight of the scaffolding that had already been set up.
    There we lived throughout the summer. It was the beginning of a new life for all of us.
    I continued at Tib’s. Every morning, with my father, I left our tents, climbed up and over a steep hill, or as an alternative, walked a mile round the foot of it to the terminus of a steam-tramway and was carried into Christchurch. In winter I was dressed in a blue serge sailor suit with braid on the collar and skirt and an anchor on the dicky. I also wore a sailor’s cap with HMS Something on it. In summer this nautical motif was carried out in cotton or piqué and the hat was of straw. We had friends living near us in a large house with plantations and a rambling garden – the Walkers: mother, sister and four enormously tall brothers of Dundas, who was now on the stage in Australia. Three of the brothers were bearded, which in those days was unusual, and they were all extremely handsome: Graham, Colin, Alexander, Cecil. I transferred much of my devotion to them, particularly to Colin. Although they were cousins of Miss Ross, they held her so little in awe that on one occasion, finding me alone on the top of the double-decker steam-tram, they rifled my satchel and extracted an exercise book. Alexander gripped my arms while Colin wrote on a virgin page:
Kids may come and kids may go
    But Tib goes on forever.
    We were not permitted to tear leaves out of our books.
    ‘You can say we did it,’ they told me. ‘It won’t be splitting. We’d like you to.’
    We had to lay our exercises on Miss Ross’s desk. I watched her work her way down the pile until she came to mine. For the first time in my life I saw a woman turn red with anger.
    ‘Who,’ she asked with classic economy, ‘has done this? Ngaio?’
    ‘The Boys,’ I faltered, for so I called these bearded giants, and she knew who I meant. With a magnificent gesture she ripped out the page. She then strode to the fire, committed the couplet to the flames and returned to her desk.
    ‘The hymn,’ she said in a controlled but unnatural voice, ‘We are but little children weak. Open your books.’
    Soon after this incident I became ten and had grown out of Tib’s.
    By that time our house was almost built. We struck camp, climbed our hill and moved into it.
    ‘This,’ said my father, referring to the workmen, ‘will hurry them up,’ and indeed I think it must have done so, for they disappeared quite soon.
    The new house smelt of the linseed oil with which the panelled walls had been treated and of the timber itself. It was a four-roomed bungalow with a large semi-circular verandah. The living room was biggish. There were recesses in its bronze wooden walls and there was a pleasant balance between them and the windows. My mother had a talent for making, out of undistinguished elements, a kind of harmony in a room. At once it became an expression of herself and the warmth she always lent to human relationships: newcomers used to exclaim on this and often said that they felt as if they had been there before.
    At a little distance below the house was a big bicycle shed which, by a heroic concerted effort made by my