KATHERINE MANSFIELD’S AT THE BAY SOME COMMENTS

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 2, Issue 1, 1 April 1969, Page 15

KATHERINE MANSFIELD’S AT THE BAY SOME COMMENTS

Barry Newlove (Dunedin)

Though I read Mrs Maude E. Morris’s paper with interest, it has not persuaded me that The Glen, Muritai is the house of the story At the Bay. Most (perhaps all) of the characters in At the Bay are drawn from life and Mrs Morris assumes that the ‘story’ house has its prototype in one of the eastern bays of Wellington Harbour, where the Beauchamp family used certainly to stay. I accept the assumption provisionally and shall return to it. Mrs Morris marshals her evidence and concludes: 1) that the house at Day’s Bay (conveniently called the Downes Point house) is not the ‘story’ house and

2) that The Glen, at the corner of the main Muritai Road and Puriri Street Extension, Muritai, Eastbourne, is the ‘story’ house. With the first conclusion I agree. Indeed Mrs Morris’s case against Downes Point may be strengthened in at least four respects. First of all the Downes Point house, before it was extended, was much smaller than the ‘story’ house, which had the kitchen whence the three little girls bore their plates of porridge, the living-room where they breakfasted, the bedroom which the grandma shared with Kezia when they took their siesta, the parents’ bedroom into which Burnell dashed when they ‘made away with’ his stick, Beryl’s room where she kneeled on a window-seat (‘Everybody’s asleep’.) and bedrooms probably for the children and for Alice the maid. A porch on the landward side of Downes Point might just qualify as a veranda.

Secondly, the Downes Point house is right on that Point at the northern end of Day’s Bay. But after they had rounded the corner into ‘Crescent Bay’ the shepherd and his flock walked the ‘sandy road with shallow puddles’ for some distance before passing the gatepost where the Burnells’ cat watched for the milk-girl. And after the gatepost they had still to pass the fisherman’s hut, the whare where Leila lived, the yellow swamp where the sheep strayed before they were headed for ‘the steeper, narrower rocky pass that led out of Crescent Bay .

Whether the shepherd travelled north or south and whether ‘Crescent Bay’ represents Day’s or Rona Bay or any other, the story house was at neither end but somewhere about the middle of its bay. Thirdly, there were the stars!. Beryl’s room was at the front and from her window-seat at night she saw the road but she also saw stars. Elbows on the sill and veranda ahead, would she have seen them from the Downes Point house? Across the road the hillside is close and steep. But looking inland from the middle of one of the bays one would expect a more open aspect and Beryl might see both the sorrowful bush’ and stars.

Fourthly, a study of known dates is revealing. Certainly Beauchamp once owned and Kathleen stayed at Downes Point. Having visited that house I have no doubt that it is the one described in Katherine Mansfield’s journal entry of 1 June 1907 and though the sea has encroached it must have ‘stretched right up to the yard’ before the present retaining wall was built. During the big storm in 1968 when the Wahine was wrecked, water lashed the windows nearest to that sea-wall.

But Beauchamp had not bought the land until about March 1906, when he ‘apparently immediately erected a cottage’. That the ‘cabinlike bedroom fitted with bunks’ of the Journal had become in the letter of 4 March 1908 to Sylvia Payne, ‘two bedrooms fitted with bunks’ suggests that the carpenters had been back. On 6 December 1906, Katherine Mansfield returned to Wellington after attending school in England, so she had turned eighteen before she first visited the Downes Point house. It seems to me incredible that she would have transferred the Kezia of the story and her correspondingly younger sisters and cousins to this later house. And her Aunt Belle (Beryl in the story) who remained in England at the end of 1906, never saw it.

Katherine left for England again in July 1908. She had known the Downes Point house only during the previous eighteen months, a period pitted by much sadness and unrest. The tender memories of the story could not, even by deliberate transference, have been associated with that house. h«n ('< r . iIELj

Although for these and other reasons I think Mrs Morris is right to look beyond Downes Point for the house at the bay, she has not persuaded me that The Glen is that house, even if The Glen be the furnished cottage which Beauchamp, in his 1937 letter to Mr Morris, recalled having taken for his family at Muritai. Her case leaves me with too many doubts. b Supporting the proposition that many of the characters in the story are drawn very closely from life is the authority of Katherine Mansfield herself. In a 1921 letter which discusses At the Bay she wrote: ‘lt is so strange to bring the dead to life again. There’s my grandmother, back in her chair with her pink knitting, there stalks my uncle over the grass; I feel as I write, “You are not dead, my darlings. All is remembered. I bow down to you. I efface myself so that you may live again through me in your richness and beauty.” ’ : J; , SiirH Vera (Isabel); was born in 1885, ‘Chaddie’ in 1887, Katherine in October 1888, Jeanne in 1892, Belle Dyer about 1875. How old are the children in At the Bay ? Kezia digs a river down the middle of her porridge (so would I, but no matter). Lottie finds it fearfully hard to get over a stile and playing at cards she cannot remember whether she

is donkey or dog. Pip finds a ‘nemeral’ and there are lots of other pointers. I should have thought Kezia to be between seven and ten (the very most). Could she have been only six? The boy can turn over; he has dark-blue, baby eyes and a toothless smile. Leslie Beauchamp was born in 1894. It is probable that memories of several years’ holidays were telescoped, so that small age discrepancies will not matter. But I would not expect to find large discrepancies and it is my belief that the Burnell family was already staying ‘at the bay’ when Kezia-Katherine and her little sisters were still very much in the bucket-and-spade phase. This means the nineties.

It is worth remarking that in another ‘family’ story, ‘Prelude’, there is much accurate attention to detail. Kezia is younger. When the Burnells moved house Lottie and Kezia, ‘in their coats with brass anchor buttons and little round caps with battleship ribbons . . . hand in hand . . . stared with round solemn eyes . . .’ It is known that when the Beauchamp and Waters families moved to Karori Katherine was four and a half years old. The cousins had the same dog, Snooker. Perhaps he was given to them when they moved to the country. I do not believe that Katherine Mansfield would have placed these characters on a stage with scenery acquired years later and for that reason alone would reject the Downes Point house known only to the eighteen-year-old Katherine. Does the same difficulty arise with regard to The Glen?

According to a footnote to Mrs Morris’s paper a Deeds search has disclosed that from March 1903 until February 1913, The Glen was owned by Mrs Ann Barraud, wife of a Bank of New Zealand officer. The note suggests that Barraud ‘would have been a close business associate of Beauchamp’s and hence could have rented the house to him’. It may have been so but that would not make The Glen the house ‘at the bay’ for two reasons. Firstly Katherine was in her fifteenth year in March 1903. Secondly, she was not in New Zealand. She had sailed for England in January 1903 to attend Queen’s College, London. By the time she returned Beauchamp had acquired and probably already built on the Downes Point land. One would have expected her to stay at the new house and that, of course, is what she did. And her father remained the owner until long after Katherine had left New Zealand again. For The Glen to be the house of the story there would have to be an earlier letting, and if it were not built by the late nineties I would reject it on that account alone. A further Deeds search might, if considerations are expressed in earlier conveyances, reveal the approximate date of erection. orb ttferjeo ad doiflw moil fins mivn ptmnom yhco ns iooj

There is further evidence that the house of the story belongs to the nineties. The family moved from Chesney Wold, Karori, back to

Tinakori Road about the end of 1898 when Katherine was just ten. According to Alpers ‘to compensate for the return to town, Beauchamp had now taken a seaside bungalow for the children’s holidays at Day’s Bay’. Alpers follows Ruth Mantz, though she employs the word ‘bought’, not ‘taken’.

In 1962 Owen Leeming interviewed ‘Chaddie’, Vera and Jeanne. From the edited text it appears that Leeming referred specifically to Day’s Bay and the story At the Bay was obviously in his mind, though at this stage a portion of the conversation has been summarised. None of the sisters, all of whom had lived overseas for years, seem to have queried the name ‘Day’s Bay’ but this is of little significance as formerly that name often embraced a wider area, including Muritai. Vera described an unspoilt, clean beach and breakers and referred to the simplicity of the house. ‘Chaddie’ remembered the girls making sandcastles. Questioned as to whether her father used to go to work occasionally from the seaside, Vera said ‘I don’t think he was very often with us. We went out with Aunt Belle and our grandmother. I don’t think father and mother came out there very much.’ (Old Mrs Dyer died on the last day of 1906 and had not been living with the Beauchamps for some time.)

Beauchamp, in his letter of 8 February 1937 quoted by Mrs Morris, referred to the taking of a furnished cottage at Muritai ‘before I purchased the property’ in Day’s Bay. My impression is that he meant ‘not long before’ but even if that impression is unwarranted the quotation does not exclude the possibility (or likelihood) that occasionally, since the summer of 1898/9 and perhaps earlier, Beauchamp rented a house or houses at one of the eastern bays. I do not know that he was ever asked and in 1937 he was in his seventy-ninth year. Rona Bay and Muritai at least, were well settled before the turn of the century and I doubt whether the prospering family spent all its holidays at home in Chesney Wold between 1893 and 1898. The Leeming interview suggests that bay holidays were frequent and started early and ‘Chaddie’ does not deny that her father stayed sometimes at the seaside. If the ‘story’ house dates back to the nineties, that in itself does not rule out The Glen, provided it was built, and Mrs Morris associates not only Muritai but The Glen with information contained in the story. I have examined some of these associations.

Beauchamp, during the 1937 interview, said that he had never stayed a night at the furnished cottage identified, probably correctly, as The Glen. Yet Burnell has an important part in the story and must have been living in the house where his wife was sleeping, from which he took an early morning swim and from which he caught the coach after breakfast (repeat performances too! ‘He’d beaten them all again.’ ‘Gone?’ they asked.). It is difficult to believe that the departure scene is

not drawn from life. It may be argued that it is an imaginative trimming or that the coach-catching is transferred from elsewhere, but to what extent may one accept detail lifted from the story if it fits a theory but reject it if it does not? Of course Beauchamp may have caught the coach outside The Glen though he had never spent a night there. He may also have caught it anywhere between southern Muritai and Day’s Bay after spending the night in some other cottage, though the nearer he was to the Day’s Bay wharf (built in 1897) the likelier it is that he would have walked. He was a good walker but, according to the story anyway, he sometimes cut things a little fine and even from close at hand might at times have had to rely on the coach to catch the ferry steamer to Wellington. From Karori he used to walk to town in the morning and was fetched home in the buggy in the evening. Were there regular stopping places for the Muritai ‘bus’, and if so, was there one by the store? In the story Beryl was sent to the gate to stop the coach.

In his 1937 letter to Mr Morris, Beauchamp said that Katherine, when the furnished cottage had been taken, made the acquaintance of a Mrs Jones, wife of another bank officer. Later he said that Mrs Jones kept the store but ‘on being pressed’ said he was not sure. In the story Mrs Stubbs kept the store. She was a widow and does not sound very much like a bank official’s widow. Besides, is there not a faint suspicion that Mr Stubbs drank? The maid Alice visited Mrs Stubbs, but she has no encounter with the Burnells and if any characters were introduced from another time or place she is one of the likeliest. Incidentally, the Katherine who ‘made the acquaintance 0f...’ seems an older Katherine.

Discussing the first section of the story, the bay under sea-mist, Mrs Morris says: ‘We are told that the house was in front of the hills; that the paddocks and bungalows were on the other side of the road’. I do not think we are told that the paddocks and bungalows were on the other side of the road from the house. We are merely told that they were on the other side of the road from the hills. The first lines of the story are as follows:

‘Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. You could not see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. The sandy road was gone and the paddocks and bungalows the other side of it.” The narrator is not manacled to the house. She is an aerial all-seeing sylph flitting about, able to see the bowed pinks and marigolds in the bungalow gardens, to see the tiny drops on the shepherd’s coat, to see the sandy road as he saw it and to smell the eucalyptus. ‘Hills at the back’ means the hills at the back of the bay, not house; and the little streams were flowing in the heart of the bush.

I contend that the house at the bay (unlike The Glen) is on the seaward side of the road. This house does not appear at all in the first section of the story, only its reticent gatepost. The bungalows are mentioned several times and plainly they are on the seaward side, along with the paddocks. The house is mentioned for the first time at the beginning of section two, in words of significance.

Of I‘A 'few moments later the back door of one of the bungalows opened . ot’j Stanley Burnell is off for his early-morning swim and the ‘story' house is one of the bungalows. It could not be plainer, .ycwyns In the story no-one crosses a road to get to the paddock. When the little girls had finished their breakfast and their father was gone l they ‘ran into the paddock like chickens let out of a coop*. And it is unlikely that a paddock was ever attached to The Glen on its seaward side. When the back door opened, the figure in the bathing-suit ‘flung down the paddock, cleared the stile, rushed through the tussock grass into the hollow, staggered up the sandy hillock, and raced for dear life over the big porous stones . . .’ That is the same route to the sea as was followed later by the little girls. Antons k> c Beryl watched Kember ‘leave the road, step "along the paddock beside their (the Burnells’) palings as if he were coming straight towards her.’ irniii s Jon aiorb a .wobiw irted £ sdi! xbum

These passages all indicate that the house is on the seaward side of the road. The sea is behind the house and surely not half so far away as it is from The Glen. It is also close enough for one to ‘just hear the soft swish of the sea at full tide sweeping the pebbles’. The house is close to the other bungalows and when Linda and Jonathan talked in the front garden ‘the voices of children cried from the other gardens’. As I have shown, the house is in the middle section of the bay and from the front windows one can see the manuka tree, the road and the sorrowful bush. ‘We are dumb trees, reaching up in the night’ it said, for the bush was up-valley. Under the manuka tree in the middle of the front grass patch Linda Burnell sat. So the sun was there in the morning. And Jonathan, when he called to take his boys home, met Linda walking in the front garden. Later he went to the washhouse, which stands on the seaward side of the house. The house paddock is at the back and beyond it are the sandhills and the sea. ‘And now the quick dark came racing over the sea, over the sand-hills, up the paddock. You were frightened to look in the corners of the washhouse.’

That washhouse is ‘a small tin shed standing apart from the bungalow’ and it has a little window. And, consistently, ‘somewhere, far away, grandma was lighting a lamp.’ I wonder whether the little tin shed has survived and whether it could be described as prominent, like the washhouse at The Glen.

I wonder, too, where in the 1902 photograph of Muiilai which illustrates Mrs Morris’s paper, are the telegraph poles mentioned in the story. There is a post visible. Mrs Morris attaches importance to the fact that The Glen is on a hill, but the only evidence that the ‘story’ house is on a hill consists of the references to Alice walking down the path on her way out, Stanley being half-way up the path on his way home and Stanley asking Beryl to ‘cut down to the gate and stop the coach’. I think this is inconclusive. ‘Down the path’ means ‘to the gate’, ‘up the path’ means ‘to the house’ ... or did when I was a child living on the flattest of plains. According to the Beauchamp interview the store was on the opposite side of the road and about opposite the cottage. But the ‘story’ house was not opposite the store. It was some distance down the road. After the shepherd passed the shop he saw spots of light gleaming in the mist. He stopped whistling. He rubbed his nose and beard and looked at the sea. He took out his pipe, fumbled for his tobacco, cut some, filled the pipe, lit it, and later on he passed the Burnells’ gatepost.

When Alice the maid left the house to visit Mrs Stubbs at the shop she certainly walked some distance. She ‘did wish there’d been a bit of life on the road though. Made her feel so queer, having nobody behind her . . . She . . . said to the distant gum tree, “Shan’t be long now”.’ ‘. . . out of Crescent Bay and toward Daylight Cove.’ Mrs Morris’s identification of Muritai as Crescent Bay and Day’s Bay as Daylight Cove is convincing and the shepherd’s early start suggests that he was making north (toward Wellington). I agree that the Downes Point house is not the ‘story’ house. With Mrs Morris’s exclusion of Day’s Bay I also agree on the grounds of the absence of sandhills and the fact that the road skirts the beach. There is the further and perhaps decisive ground that Day’s Bay was not subdivided until 1906, and until Day’s Bay House was built about 1903 there was nowhere the Beauchamps

could have stayed except perhaps in some building belonging to the Wellington Steam Ferry Company or in its caretaker’s house. I agree that the furnished cottage mentioned by Beauchamp was almost certainly The Glen. But I cannot accept Mrs Morris’s statement that ‘with this cottage in Muritai, all the details of At the Bay agree’. On the contrary I think that those details nearly all disagree and prove that The Glen is not the house at the bay. If the ‘story’ house does have a prototype it has not yet been found. Perhaps it is an agglomerate after all, owing something to The Glen, something to Downes Point with its rocks like crouching shaggy beasts, something to an unknown cottage, something even to Chesney Wold.