Free Black Beech and Honeydew by Ngaio Marsh Page B

large dining-room table in a conveniently curtained bay window of my cousins’ house. I remember the opening scene: Cinderella, discovered in rags before the fire, soliloquized.
O dear, O dear, what shall I do,
    Of balls I’ve been to such a few
    Just once I’ve seen that handsome Prince
    And I have never seen him since.
    Her predicament having been thus established, the Ugly Sisters made a brief and brutal appearance and I came on as The Fairy Godmother, croaking offstage:
Knock at the door and lift the latch
    And cross the threshold over.
    The rest of the dialogue escapes me.
    I am conscious that I am vague about dates and the order of events during these early years and have dodged backwards and forwards between my tenth and thirteenth birthdays. The passage of time had not the same significance in those days. The terrors of childhood receded. Other people became more complicated and the firm blacks and whites of human relationships mingled and developed passages of grey. One grew taller. Frisky went into retirement and was replaced by a large rawboned horse called Monte. And then, one day in 1910, Miss Ffitch said goodbye and bicycled down the lane for the last time. I was to go to school.

CHAPTER 3
School
    St Margaret’s College was only six months old when I became a pupil there. It was one of a group of schools established in the Dominions by the Kelburn Sisters of the Church, an Anglo-Catholic order of nuns. These ladies already conducted St Hilda’s College in Dunedin. With funds raised by their Colonial exertions they supported their work amongst the poor in the East End of London.
    On the face of it, the choice of St Margaret’s would seem to have been an odd one on the part of my parents. My mother certainly respected and subscribed to the Anglican faith but she was not an ardent churchwoman. Occasionally she would let fall a remark that suggested not doubt so much as a sort of ironical detachment. ‘Apparently,’ she once said, ‘the Almighty can see everything except a joke.’
    This was not the sort of quip that would have gone down well at St Margaret’s.
    As for my father, he seldom missed an opportunity of pointing out the devastation wrought by ‘religion’ (usually undefined) upon the progress of mankind. He would invite my mother and me to look at the Crusades. ‘Bloodiest damn’ business in history. Look at Evolution! You want to read. Read Haeckel!’ he would shout. ‘Or Darwin. Or Winwood Reade. They’ll show you.’
    My mother had hidden Haeckel’s Evolution of Man in the lockers under the living-room windows, mainly, I suppose, because of its rather surprising illustrations. There it lay, cheek-by-jowl with Three Weeks. These were the only books that were ever withdrawn frommy attention, and I found them both in due course. I was but mildly engaged by the first, thought the second pretty silly and didn’t get farther than the first chapter of either. She needn’t have bothered.
    It does seem strange that, holding such rationalistic views, my father should have sent me to a school where every possible emphasis was placed upon high-church dogma and orthodox observances. Moreover his attitude to the Sisters, although he occasionally referred to them as Holy-Bolies, was one of amused respect. He did their banking for them and knew their real names. Once, in an absent-minded moment, he let fall to my mother that one of them was a lady of title in her own right. He caught sight of me and was disconcerted.
    ‘Pay no attention,’ he said, ‘that sort of thing doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have said anything.’
    He made less of class distinctions than anybody I have ever known, not self-consciously, I think, but because they were of no interest to him and he had a talent for forgetting anything that bored him. My mother, nowadays, would probably have been thought of as an ‘inverted snob’, a term which, if it means anything at all, indicates, I imagine, somebody who is inclined to