Black Beech and Honeydew by Ngaio Marsh

write and illustrate stories for their entertainment. Then I wrote a play and rehearsed it with them. This was a popular move and our effort, having been passed by Sister Winifred, was introduced into the prize-giving ceremonies at the end of the year. The play was called Bundles and the title is all I can remember about it. A New Zealand authoress of those days – Miss Colburn-Veale – saw it and wrote to my mother, offering to show it to her English publisher for an opinion. He wrote backvery kindly and sent me a book: Tristie’s Quest by Dr Greville Macdonald, the son of George Macdonald whose stories my father, having delighted in them as a child, had tried in vain to get for me. Tristie’s Quest was a wonderful children’s novel and I wish very much that I had not lent it to the little girl who never returned it.
    Encouraged by these events, I now wrote a full-length piece based on one of George Macdonald’s fairy tales as related by my father. It was called The Moon Princess. There were long chunks of very torrid blank verse and a good deal of theeing and thouing. For songs, I wrote new verses to old music and got very worked up over the whole affair. When it was finished I showed it to my friends, the Burtons, and they bravely decided to produce it on quite an imposing scale at St Michael’s.
    ‘I hear, Ngaio,’ said Miss Hughes, shouting down the length of the luncheon table, ‘you have written a play.’ Her manner was friendly but I was seized with embarrassment and muttered churlishly at my plate: ‘Yes, Miss Hughes.’
    I would have done much better to show it to her and take what no doubt would have been a devastating opinion.
    In the event, it went quite well and drew good audiences. Perhaps, after all, it was not too bad since my mother agreed to play the witch. She made a splendidly frightening thing of the curse:
    ‘In the dark nights that follow the old moon – ‘
    Her big scene was with Helen Burton, the director and star of the production, and they both let fly with everything they had, lifting my dialogue into a distinction that it certainly did not possess. This feat, it occurs to me, illustrates in miniature one of the strange paradoxes of the Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian theatres. It can be seen at all levels from our remote New Zealand amateurism up to the great actor-managers. Irving’s most successful roles were in pieces that today reveal themselves as unbelievable fustian. These strange monsters of the theatre poured the charged stream of their personality and technique into dialogue which, by its very mediocrity, gave them the freedom which they needed. Irving was an intelligent man with a strong vein of irony but he seems to have been quite uncritical of his material except in so far as it provided him with a vehicle. Ellen Terry was different. ‘A twopenny-ha’penny play,’ she said of their enormously successful travesty on Faust. Ifthere were adequate recordings or a film of Irving I wonder what we would think of them. Grotesque helpings of ham and corn? Or would some tingle of the electricity he generated in a theatre still make itself felt? Ellen Terry lived to a great age and people who remember her performance as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet tell us that it was timeless in its perfection. But Irving?
    ‘I went to the Lyceum for Ellen Terry,’ my father said. ‘Irving’s mannerisms – ’ He thought for a moment. ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘there was something – ’ He gave a little chuckle. ‘Yes. There was something.’
    And he went on to relate how Irving as Mephistopheles, in a scene with Martha, the character-woman played as a tiresome old village body, had an aside to the audience.
    ‘I don’t know where she’ll go when she dies. I won’t have her,’ which always brought the house down. It is hardly enough to set us falling about in the aisles nowadays but my father insisted that Irving gave out the line in such a droll, unexpected manner that