Ngaio Marsh: Writer’s haven on display
Writers are often influenced by the homes they live in, especially if that domicile lasts for many years. A case in point was Christchurch’s Dame Ngaio Marsh, the doyenne of English-style detective fiction and an inspiring theatre director in New Zealand.
Although born in 1895 in Carlton Mill Rd, where she and her parents rented a villa and lived for her earliest years, their own home on the tussock-swept, eucalyptus-covered slopes of the Port Hills became the positive centre of their private world for decades thereafter.
This hursday, a key part of Marsh’s life – her 1957 Jaguar XK150 car – will be driven up the hill by its North Island owner for people to view on the site off Sherwood Lane behind Valley Road, with her home open as well for visitors.
Marsh owned a small number of cars – a Packard, then a Mark V Jaguar sedan and, finally, the XK150 which she imported in 1960 after using it to drive about in London.
It was a trademark sight for 20 years as she drove into the city and around Cashmere until cataracts prevented her from getting behind the wheel of the beautiful black snarler in the very last two years of her life.
Marsh lived a very intense life in her Christchurch family home, Marton Cottage, from the age of 10 (when it was built to a design by a cousin, Samuel Hurst Seager) until her death there on February 18, 1982.
Her parents had bought the property, on the lower slopes of Cashmere, in 1904, and by 1906 a “little house on the prairie” (a dark-stained timber cottage) had been built.
The Marshes inhabited it to enjoy the isolation of living amidst about 20 other scattered homes, the wide sweeping and often entrancing views of the emerging city, the dust-swept Canterbury Plains, the looming and often snow-clad Alps, and the gusts of fresh air and strongly rural aspect of the site above Valley Road.
In her 1965 autobiography, Black Beech and Honeydew, Marsh wrote that her father Henry “bought the nose of the … hill; some three-quarter acres of ground, already fenced, partly cultivated and set about with baby trees – pinus radiata and limes, not much higher than the surrounding tussock.”
In the summer of 1905 the Marsh trio loaded up a spring wagon and journeyed from Fendalton around Hagley Park, along the gorse-hedged Wilderness Rd (today’s Barrington St), across the Opawaho/Heathcote River, and finally up a winding lane and a rough track to camp on the building site at the sheltered end of the valley as their country cottage was being completed.
Marsh added that their new house “smelt of the linseed oil with which the panelled walls had been treated” and of the fresh timber scent of its bronze-toned wooden walls.
It was, in her words, a simple “fourroomed bungalow with a large semi-circular verandah”.
She noted: “From the beginning we loved our house. It was the fourth member of our family and for me, who still lives in it, has retained that character.”
She and her parents lived in Marton Cottage for the rest of their lives and it was the centre of many creative pursuits and much entertaining, having a very real rural-retreat aspect away from the routines of small city life. In many ways that fact explains Marsh’s own freedom from the tight, circumscribed notions of suburbia.
Her memoir warmly records her very free and happy childhood roaming and tobogganing on those open hills and sailing in flax rafts with other local children along the nearby Heathcote River.
It was the site of her own private golden age; and indeed her earliest published short story in book form was set on that property. Moonshine had been written for The Sun newspaper, and Warwick Lawrence later chose it for his 1936 anthology about the experiences of young people, Yours and Mine.
It records the experience at Christmas of an excitable young girl growing up (with a brother Ngaio never had) in the Valley Rd area, and explicitly refers to the sound of carol-singers drifting across the valley on a warm summer’s eve, from nearby Dyers Pass Rd.
Someone who intuited the vital importance of place on Marsh’s psychology was the historian and novelist Stevan EldredGrigg.
In his clever but somewhat stilted and rather heartless novel, Blue Blood (1997), Dr Eldred-Grigg set much of his plot (a spoof murder mystery with lesbian overtones) in the Marsh home and property and the upper hills area.
He altered material facts to depict the unmarried Marsh as emotionally crabbed, deeply frustrated and neurotically confined
in that Cashmere environs, trapped in a dull, conformist life with two eccentric and ageing parents.
Out of that negative influence of an imprisoning setting, Eldred-Grigg bent facts and invented the idea of the indolent and arrogant Marsh fashioning her Scotland Yard detective and her first crime novel as a fantasy escape from the tedium of an unfulfilled life chained, as an only child, to a life of stultification with her quirky parents in a small arts and craft bungalow up a lane in remote Cashmere.
What Dr Eldred-Grigg did discern was the fact that this property was Marsh’s mental workshop – the matrix – of much of her creativity in the arts – journalism, theatre production and her remarkably successful career as a “Queen of Crime”, writing stylish and clever “whodunnits” for discerning British and American readers of classic murder mysteries.
There is no doubt whatsoever that Marsh matured in, and with, that house, and that her literary and social personalities (and personae) evolved and matured over her 76 years of occupancy there.
Marton Cottage – named in honour of some Kentish forebears – was indeed the “quick forge and working-house of thought” for so much of Marsh’s phenomenal literary and dramatic output, so that visiting the house even today can offer authentic glimpses of its longest-dwelling occupant.
In that home she nursed both of her beloved parents (the only daughter) until their deaths. She fashioned a large number of her “tecs” there, inspired and energised as most of them were by her repeated refresher visits to Britain and Europe, held theatrical auditions, and meticulously planned many drama productions for Canterbury University and repertory societies.
It was where she designed sets, envisioned costumes and props, and carefully edited working play scripts of Shakespeare for student actors to bring to life on the apron stage.
It was also the graceful, tranquil haven where Marsh entertained a host of visiting arts figures – Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Sir Donald Wolfit, Sir Michael Redgrave, JB Priestley and Jacquetta Hawkes, Leo McKern, Derek Nimmo, Andre Tchaikovsky, Lili Kraus, and local arts luminaries and friends such as playwright Bruce Mason, poet Allen Curnow, Millicent Baxter and novelist Maurice Shadbolt.
And Marsh’s home was the fiction factory where she created her sophisticated detective plots and her often crazy – in her words “dotty” – characters who delighted her many fans here and overseas.
What the late Bruce Mason once called her “sturdy platoon” of detective novels that “will continue to occupy capacious shelves all over the world” all remain in print to this day.
Fellow crime writer Harry Keating noted that Marsh created people for our delight “who are at the same time seemingly real and splendidly larger than life” in books framed “in elegant prose and a fine sprinkling of apt literary quotation to give added pleasure”.
So it is neither too fanciful nor romantic to state that when Marsh died there (as she wished), in her own bedroom, on a grey nor’westerly summer afternoon in 1982, the circle of her intense imaginative and empathetic creativity was appropriately closed in what we now call the Ngaio Marsh House, with its expansive views of her terraced garden and the distant chain of the Southern Alps, which nourished her spirit and inspired much of her finest work as New Zealand’s former Grande Dame of the arts.
Bruce Harding was the first (now former) curator of the Ngaio Marsh House museum. You can see Dame Ngaio Marsh’s Jaguar XK150 on Thursday, March 28, between 1pm and 4.30pm at Ngaio Marsh House, 37 Valley Rd, Cashmere. Visitors can take one of three exclusive tours of the property at 1pm, 2.30pm and 3.30pm, alongside the chance to view the car and chat with a Jaguar expert. Visit ngaiomarsh.org to book a spot.