The Age for Love

By Julia du Fresne

Sheela Tree is the “strange name, a name for keeping strangers company”, chosen for her career in theatre by Marie Cassegrain. Marie is the only daughter of Neils, a New Zealander whose parents are Danish-born Lutheran, and Leila, born in Taranaki and steeped in the traditions of Irish Catholicism.
It’s a mix described by a prominent psychologist, consulted by her parents on behalf of her brother Laurence, as a recipe for disaster - an opinion echoed by Sheela’s analyst Max Hatfield, “who thinks she’s just a lush”.
Her childhood with herfive brothers, inside what amounts almost to a pale - their Catholic parish in a Hawke’s Bay town in the ’50s - is revealed during Sheela’s treatment in her 20s for addiction to drugs and alcohol.
The “strangers” she comes across include aspiring thespian Barrie Gore, with whom she becomes only too familiar, whose father Cosmo is “chairman of the vestry at St Cuthbert’s and a pervert”, and whose mother Violet is “a collector, a bully and a snob”.
There’s the mystic Graham Mikes, who reads Juvenal and experiences “divine dazes”; Patrick Blackmoor, director of the NZ Theatre Company and “a pimp of the sophisticated kind”; Father Edmund, a monk given to giggling; Xavier, a French set designer and “man of passions” and Dr Grayson Lamb, who finds the women and girls he refers for illegal abortions in Christchurch “passive, even submissive” - and takes advantage.
Even the Cassegrain family are strangers, or so they seem to “the broom brigade”, the shopkeepers and accountants of the local Chamber of Commerce and the farmers on the Power Board, Neils’ employer in Potangotango, “a quintessential Nazareth”.

Her mother Leila’s forte is fainting, sometimes rehearsed, sometimes not; her engineer father Neils might be described as charming, if charming were “a word with currency in Potangotango”; her difficult, disruptive brother Laurence is bipolar and bisexual.

The Catholic Church is examined at a time when, like bulimia and hate speech (not yet invented), there was no whiff of sex abuse. A priest can be ‘fab’ or “choleric”, wear a roman collar and get away with it. Sex outside marriage is sinful – and indulged. “You knew people did it, and incredible though it seemed – imagine Mrs Redmond-Hogg, so thin and mild, or Mr Rozbicki with his gumboots, his accent and harelip – even Catholics did it.”

We glimpse New Zealand’s academia in the days of Roger Hall’s Middle-Age Spread and its runaway success; Germany during WWII, and the hidden life of a little monastery which looks anything but.

Seen through the eyes of a family like the Cassegrains, the social mores of small-town New Zealand in the ‘50s are anything but boring.

Incidents of a troubled childhood – one, her mother forbids her to mention - prefigure a teenage pregnancy and illegal abortion. Years later, at the Mas de l’Ange, a commune in France frequented by theatrical types and governed in the spirit of Eros by her lover Xavier, Sheela is confronted by the same dilemma, this time resolved in that same spirit by Xavier, in the US.

But Sheela, who in New Zealand had barely registered the existence of a tangata whenua, is eventually surprised by a “yearning for something unique to Maori” which brings her home again, to the hill where her father had said the sun always came out, in “the most beautiful place in the world”.

Making a vineyard here, guided by the mystic Graham Mikes and an unlikely newcomer, Sheela finds the lives she had lost and new life for herself - but one which those earlier losses mean she may still lose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Julia du Fresne
• Release date: Mar 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463019801

Book preview

Part One

one

…when the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea?

- William Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgement

A pram burning, a boy on a kindled bonfire, a Maori scorched to death on a cross: in hindsight, my years of growing are lit like a flarepath, by events which may have lent a fevered cast to my imagination.

My father walks the dim rooms of my childhood, carrying fire. He treads deliberately, bearing outstretched on a shovel the bright coals of winter’s day, taking them at nightfall from the kitchen hearth to make a fresh blaze in the sitting room for my mother, my five brothers and me, his Marie. Or Marie-Céleste, as I call myself in the stories that run on in my head. Later in life I’ll choose another name, a strange name, a name for keeping strangers company: Sheela Tree.

You children! Go and help your mother. My mother washes the dishes in the dark so the Power Board won’t have the satisfaction of sending us big bills. The Power Board sacked my father, and him with six children to support!. My mother says they wouldn’t if he were a club man, but my father isn’t a club man, he’s a Catholic. Worse still, he ‘turned’ as a club man would say.

My father was born and brought up Lutheran. My mother tells us how when she was introduced to his mother, who’s dead and buried now and we gather a good thing too, the old lady seated on a high-backed chair had spoken to her in the manner of her ancestors demanding tribute of Danegeld: What is this I hear? Neils is going over to Rome? But my mother wouldn’t have married him otherwise.

My father has a mandate over fire and water; he manages the sun. He learned their laws by the mothy sheen of kerosene lanterns in state hydro tents in the bush.

Although he had to leave school, my mother tells us, when he was only twelve! to pick up stones on the family farm at Hopetoun, he was the first man in Australasia to qualify extramurally as an electrical engineer. But the document in its flimsy frame on the wall at Pareora, Neils Cassegrain AMIEE, somehow fails to convince me.

‘Snow’, the men called him on the hydro gangs, because of his hair, the colour of a poker baked white in hot embers; in the gloaming it reflects the firelight, as I imagine Danish moors glimmer in winter beneath the aurora borealis. I’ve never seen that unearthly glow, but the night he took us young ones outside to see the southern lights, it was as if he’d personally turned them on.

Like torch lilies these incidents glow in my secret garden of recollection, where I rarely venture. Nearer and brighter than any - except for the flames of that Redemptorist hell, always only a heartbeat away - there burns another blaze. Lit with my virginal sacrifices of blood it smoulders underground, breaking the surface at my every waking. So I meet fire with fire. Only sometimes. When I need it. I use heated cocaine. Crack.

*

Hmmm.

Here Sheela Tree paused and lifted her eyes from the keyboard. Does that, she thought, make me sound like a drama queen? Well of course. She was a drama queen, literally. But the drab little prof who ran her writing course might enjoy a change from the gothic goings-on in Wellington flats served up by the rest of the group.

"I’m uneasy about your language."

Jack Avenue’s eyes protruded slightly; they had something of the quality of boiled lollies. She could see them start and swivel when he read this.

Even I, Jack had said, "even I don’t understand some of these words. You don’t actually talk like this, do you?"

Not as often as I’d like, she’d said. Only to people who can foot it. But you get the gist.

Would Jack Avenue pass her manuscript on to his chum Max Hatfield, her therapist, who thought she was a lush? Were Hatfield and Avenue in cahoots, and would it be what Max called ‘ethical’ if they were? Would they recognise an ethic if it got up and bit them on the nose?

Having advised her to take Jack’s course, would Max Hatfield have the staying power to read this to the end? Jack Avenue was paid to read it, but would anyone pay to publish it? Sheela was dying to find out what happened next, but for her the subject had a natural fascination. She should stick to her day job perhaps.

1980

two

Had man no memory:

a city without walls

no toll to pay

no promise to keep.

- Janet Frame, Had Man no Memory

What was your father - Neils, what an unusual name - what was your father like?

I could quote my mother, said Sheela. She used to say, Your father is a good man.  She stopped. She’d thought this would be a stroll, an easy part. She had her lines down and now she’d fucked up, she couldn’t go on. She turned her attention inwards.

Yes, said Judith Mikes encouragingly, You quote your mother, and that’s very natural. You were the only girl, with … five?… brothers. I suppose everyone thought you were spoiled. Did your father spoil you? How did you relate to your father?

Judith’s small mouth wore a permanent upward curve, insurance perhaps against age lines; she was aware of a tendency to purse her lips. Her hair lay close to her temples, her clothes were an economic reproach to Sheela whose handbag though battered was Hermès, whose jeans fitted like skin and whose singlet was Ann Demeulemeester.

Judith’s blouse and skirt were modestly efficient, with an air of not being really hers. She’d know the people at St Vincent’s by name, Sheela thought, and they probably phoned when anything her style (school-marmish, synthetic), and size (small and shrinking) came in.

Judith had seated herself in front of her desk in a Swedish armchair of a type which by then had mostly migrated to beach baches, and tactfully implying equal status had given Sheela another beside her. On the woodgrain desktop however, a stack of books lent Judith a gravitas for which Sheela felt her handbag failed to compensate.

The phone rang; Judith spoke to someone called ‘my dear’. She seemed to be sorting out some contretemps involving the parish priest. I’m afraid, my dear, said Judith into the phone, I’m very naughty but I’ve decided sometimes it’s best to back off. Or go ahead and do it. Don’t ask for permission, just ask for forgiveness afterwards. As Judith talked Sheela went through the books on the desk, all by the same author, before replacing them in different order.

Judith put the phone down. She said, I’d offer to lend you one of those. But my friend Kevan Costello - he’s a priest - says the Vatican’s having second thoughts about the theology.

Sheela was plumbing the depths of her handbag for her lighter, wanting it as a password to get her out of there smartly if needed; the place was plastered with signs saying thank you for not smoking. She thought of Patrick, seated arse-on to the company at rehearsal, speaking in that ripe baritone which cut the air like a two-edged sword.

If you’re going to pick your bum, darlings, pick it with conviction, - and he’d demonstrated.

Breathing from the vagina, Sheela took up her cue. How I related to my father, she said, was irrelevant. It was what my mother said that mattered and to her, girls were an inferior species.

Beyond opinion now, her mother seemed. Bestowing a gracious smile on a favoured aide, ignoring the other old women circulating slowly around Mount Vernon House like flies at a windowpane in winter, Leila would sometimes condescend to greet visitors (not usually hers) at the front door: "Now, where am I going to put you?"

Gaga. Mt Vernon’s manager suggested Alzheimer’s but Sheela wasn’t convinced; she knew her mother to be a class act.

My mother’s name was O’Connell, she told Judith. "And her mother’s name was O’Donnell. Oirish as Paddy’s pig."

Every Saturday night Leila and her sisters had sat on the stairs at South Road, Kopaki, cleaning their brothers’ shoes for Mass next morning. Leila had never made her daughter clean her brothers’ shoes and she liked to point this out, as proof of her enlightened approach to gender issues.

"All my friends had comics like Girls’ Own, said Sheela. We had Radio Fun and Superman. Once when the inspector came to school and asked did we know what blocked x-rays, I was the only one to put a hand up. She paused. Judith cleared her throat. Lead," said Sheela.

I wore my brothers’ cast-off shoes. The only chickens we ate died of old age. One chook boiled and roasted for the eight of us.

From time to time wails from the kitchen would advise, as her mother plucked and gutted a bird, that she’d found eggs - once again, Neils had wrung the wrong neck. "Wahonowin, wahonowin!"’ Leila had a quotation for every occasion and a preference for Longfellow.

I was lucky to get one wing, said Sheela. She mimed the playing of a plaintive violin. ‘We lived in t’ cardboard box in t’middle of t’rord.’ Just don’t tell me I was spoiled.

But you say that when you were small, the family was under doctor’s orders not to upset you?

They bloody well made up for it later on, she said. She stood up suddenly and went to the window to look through net curtains at rain falling on sun-scorched rhododendrons and marigolds, their incongruity emphasised by rocks painted white and fringed with dead grass. At the end of the drive was a sign advertising Judith’s services and counselling rooms: GETHSEMANE.

"My God, said Sheela in an undertone pitched precisely to reach Judith’s ear, let this chalice pass from me. " It was ten years now since Summervale, but she’d rather be back there with the tats and black jerseys and joints than here with this god-awful dame.

Judith’s eye followed Sheela’s. Wonderful rain, she said, a blessing.

She spoke in tones enhanced by her years in professional theatre. At Mass recently with her mother, listening to Judith proclaiming the word, Sheela had thought that possibly she saw her ministry as gifting her voice back to Godde.

Judith had shared with a few ‘special people’ - one of whom had shared with Sheela - how she’d left the theatre and brought her husband to Potangotango to save their marriage. Graham Mikes was a silent man with no visible means of support. Sheela had met him at Mount Vernon and wondered why Judith bothered.

She turned from the window. Bloody rain, she said. "A blessing for the farmers and a blessing for the burghers of Potangotango, the broom brigade. And fucking bad luck darling, for moi. You know I was doing Titania for the Shakespeare at the Peak this year. Cancelled. The promoters are in receivership and here I am, a major creditor. Cost me a bleeding bundle."

Judith gave her a winning smile. I’m fine with bad language, she said. Only yesterday Father Edmund at the abbey was telling me he was buggered. I should introduce you to Father Edmund.

Uh-huh. A monk next. I need a monk like I need a hole in the head and I’ve already got one of those. I had a lot of money riding on Titania.

Oh, I know. Bad luck indeed. Although there’s not really any such thing as luck, you know. Good luck’s a blessing, bad luck’s a grace.

Huh?

An opportunity for conversion, Judith said smugly, and for this one we should thank Hilary. I was hoping you might meet Hil today. She glanced at a diary on her desk. Popped out for a meeting I see, for the Harvest Festival. Hilary’s the leader of our little A A group here. An Anglican, so that’s rather special.

Sheela fondled her lighter.

Hil has a prayer partner. Sometimes they sit in the car and pray for people walking past in the street. Last week they prayed for rain.

Sheela wondered when the harvest fucking festival meeting would end. She sat down, stood up, walked to the door and back and sat down again. Judith suggested a cup of tea. Or coffee or milo or hot water. Whatever she liked.

What I’d like darling, is a joint. Stone - or grass, a reefer, pot as Barrie called it when he introduced me to it. Back then. Before I married the stupid bastard. I don’t know what you’d call it. A fix.

Fine, said Judith brightly. I’ll fix you some coffee. She left the room.

Sheela looked at her watch. She pictured the special Anglican. Denim skirt, Liberty print blouse, Peter Pan collar. Little pearls.

Leila’s preference had been for vivid colours and assertive patterns. Sheela remembered, on the floor in the south light of her parents’ bedroom, a pool of scarlet scrawled with black. Cutting out a dress on the kitchen table, distracted by the young ones making a racket, Laurence winding them up, Leila had made a mistake.

"Wouldn’t it make you walk up the wall. Such dear material. Snapping scissors severed the scarlet. Measure twice, cut once!" She’d had to lay it out again on the bedroom floor and piece it.

Except for Mrs Merryweather who had gypsy blood, Leila said, she was the only woman Sheela ever saw in her childhood in a full-length frock, a ‘gown’ Leila called it, for BMS concerts where she sang duets with Neils, he got up in a black tie and a jacket with tails. Oft in the Stilly Night. Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young Charms. Dark-haired Marie.

Are you waiting for your love ship

Dark-haired Marie?

Her father always sang that song for her, he said. For his Tootsie.

Preceded by the odour of instant coffee, Judith re-entered carrying a tray with a sugar bowl draped in muslin with glass beads dangling, just like the nuns’ at afternoon teas for parents in the parlour. There were biscuits with fork marks.

Made by Graham, said Judith. Now where were we? Your father.

Sheela had found the Dunhills. If it weren’t for Hilary and her prayer partner for God’s sake, she’d have been working, she wouldn’t have gone on a bender. Only a few vodkas, not enough surely for the DTs that happened next. How had that woman in the kaftan and hoop earrings, that social worker, managed to bully her into seeing this God-botherer? Probably it was the priest who’d sorted it. The Catholic mafia. Merde.

What the hell. Make an entrance, give a performance. She swallowed a mouthful of coffee. Let’s get my husband out of the way first, she said. It won’t take long.

I thought he’d got himself out of the way, said Judith.

Touché, Judith! Very neat. She might be up against more here, she thought, than she’d bargained for. But Barrie’s fairly relevant, she went on. "Unfortunately. What can I say? …

Ah … his grandfather was knighted for making a fortune in linen in Ireland. Shirts for the Prince of Wales, frocks for the little princesses sort of thing. Barrie’s father was a younger son and chairman of the vestry and a pervert. His mother had a thing for Nancy Mitford and blue and white china. And silver - they had these enormous silver domes on the sideboard, at Hurtwood they called their place in Canterbury, to keep flies off the mutton.Violet loved cleaning silver. She was a collector and a bully and a snob. Then there was Edward, the soldier boy. ‘My brother the black shirt’, Barrie called him. They were charming.

How interesting. And your father?

"I despised my father. For years. From when I went away to school. Such a poseur, or so I thought then. Always quoting Malcolm Muggeridge, and what an old lecher he turned out to be. And the retinue of women he took to his BMS evenings, and his Bach and his sherry. He’d fill a ‘demi-john’ - a flagon - at the wine shop from three different casks and serve it in striped sherry glasses with slices of lemon and ‘mini’ ice cubes. He’d talk about people’s ‘iddy-ay-fixes’."

Judith looked questioning.

"Idées fixes, said Sheela. He seemed to think they were something other people had."

Oh yes, said Judith.

I remember walking with him one day down to the orchard when I was about twelve. There were all these different varieties of apples growing on one tree. We weren’t allowed to pick those apples. He took a look at them and had a drink at the tap and we started back up to the house. She paused. I took hold of his hand. It was so smooth. Like polished.

Judith perked up.

I said to him, Daddy …

Yes?

We called him Dad but I wanted to call him Daddy, like a girl in a book, an English girl. He let go of my hand. He said I was too old to call him Daddy.

Mmmm, said Judith.

Uh-huh, thought Sheela, that turned her on. He made an awning for his chair on the verandah and marked it with the months of the year so he could set it to keep the sun out of his eyes.

The next time they’d held hands it was she who’d dropped his, freighted with the gravity of death. Had he prayed as he sat in that Heath Robinsonish chair, waiting for her to come home? With those big hands like tooled mahogany, fretted with white hairs, spread on his bare knees, his feet in Roman sandals planted on the worn floorboards, gazing over what had been a paddock with a cow, a few sheep and chooks straggling in the grass under the weeping willow where Louis dressed in rags with a stocking over his head had waited on a heap of tree prunings to scare the life out of the convent kids.

He’d sit there admiring his subdivision, she said. "Ten acres of paddock we had. He built two houses and got them into the Weekly News but they didn’t make any money. He had the Midas touch in reverse. His gold turned to dross."

Did you judge him for that?

Why should I? He didn’t judge himself. She paused. Money and religion were the great divide between the Cassegrains and the Gores. The Gores had titles and a castle in Ireland and a linen mill, and Lady Gore rode around the estate in a dogcart pulled by great danes. She preferred her dogs to her children. Barrie’s father went to a public school, Inst. He bought a farm out of Christchurch and sent Barrie to Maudlam.

Your father?

This woman, Sheela thought, has a one-track mind.

I don’t want to bore you, she said, "but if you insist … Money didn’t matter to my father. Or to his father, Jacques Baltasar, the bygmester. So much for Huguenots and banker blood. Jacques came down in the world, he was owed a lot of money. It’s a family tradition. My mother never worried about getting money, she worried about keeping it. She managed the money, because she said my father was just like hers."

Judith smiled. You don’t mean to say, she said.

Her father came out to New Zealand with a faithful retainer and lots of money. He kept the retainer but not the money; he lost one farm after another. In the end he worked for a stock firm in Kopaki and wrote letters to the paper on matters of historical interest.

If, Judith put in, you judge anyone in a primary relation to you, you will reap that judgment.

Sheela started a yawn. Really, she said, then went on, My grandmother ran the show. My grandfather sat in a chair in the corner with the newspaper over his face.

If you judge a mother or a father or a sibling, Judith said, you will either repeat their behaviour or someone in a primary relation will do the same to you.

Judith, Sheela thought, looked quite pleased.

The first sections had sold well enough for the trip of a lifetime and at the age of sixty-five her father had taken his wife overseas.

I’ve proved it.

Sheela had been touring South Africa at the time. In his only letter to catch up with her, his beautiful handwriting coursed over paper which seemed too flimsy to support it.

Now we’re nearly home again, I can say New Zealand is the most beautiful country in the world. And Hawke’s Bay is the most beautiful province in New Zealand, and Potangotango’s the most beautiful town in Hawke’s Bay.

And then, crashing into bathos: And Pareora’s the nicest house in Potangotango. Ergo, I live in the most beautiful place in the world.

He’d enlarged on this theme in conversation, tilting his sherry glass as he explained the failure of a succession of schemes - sugarbeet, grape-growing, moving the railway line - that he’d tried to persuade the Potangotango Chamber of Commerce to promote. To Sheela his election as president of a bunch of shopkeepers and accountants was ridiculous, but the irony was lost on her father, hell-bent as he was on ‘progress’ - delayed, he said, "by our Mediterranean climate. We procrastinate. Mañana, mañana!"

Such sophistication, such drollery. The BMS ladies were charmed. (When her singing voice went, Leila stopped going to the concerts. They were wasted on her, she said.) Also wasted on her apparently, but not on the ladies of the BMS, was Neils’ air of empiricism, his mild and unfamiliar gallantries.

Sheela slid the Dunhills out of her handbag and started chewing her nails.

I saw your mother with you last Sunday, said Judith, at Mass.

‘Mother’, repeated Sheela. Dad always wanted us to call her ‘mother’, because that’s what he called his mother. We just laughed at him. We never laughed at her.

She was looking so pretty.Very frail, but then she’s always been frail.

Frail?

My mother … interpolated Sheela, and after a pause continued, Do you remember the United Women’s Convention? In the ‘70s? My mother went there on her own. She got up on a chair and told the feminists, all teachers and academics she said, what she thought of them. She said if they legalised abortion there’d be more premature and handicapped babies and schools would close and next thing they’d want euthanasia. They laughed at her. They tried to shout her down. She got up on a chair because she said, they were all such big women. My mother was only five foot two. She stopped. The rain had let up; she heard a car on the drive.

She was the Colossus, Sheela said, who bestrode my childhood.

It sounded like an exit line. End of Scene I. She stood up, cigarettes and lighter in her bag.

Yes, by all means have a break, said Judith. You can smoke out on the porch.

Sheela smiled. She’d thought of a coda. I went back that day, she said, down to the orchard. I picked every single apple on that tree.

In the hallway she saw, framed by the front doorway, a beautiful man with deep-set eyes, part Maori she thought, crossing the gravel. There was a smell of lavender on the wet air.

The Mas de l’Ange. Xavier.

She shivered. She heard Judith call, Hilary?

She slipped through another door and found herself in the kitchen. Graham Mikes was at the sink washing his hands. He looked up.

" Ashes, he said, to ashes. It’s a messy business. He indicated dead leaves smouldering in the fireplace. Lawson. Burns like buggery. Last year’s blessed palms for this year’s Ash Wednesday. What are you giving up for Lent?"

Let me out of here, said Sheela. She dodged past, out the back door. Rain was falling; a cat was asleep on the driver’s seat of her rental - she’d left the window down. Tipping the cat out she accelerated rather loudly down the drive into the street, past the college grounds where Damien had been drilled for war, past the Chinese takeaway which once had been the Arcadia Coffee Lounge, and took the road out of town.

She thought about her mother, the Colossus. The Colossa, surely? Lovely line, darling, but it didn’t ring true.

She’d been named for Saint Lelia, a sixth-century virgin of Limerick, but except to her relations and the handful of friends she invited to call her Leila, she was Mrs Cassegrain, and like her namesake she was chaste. When Marie turned fourteen she presented her with a book wrapped in brown paper. Your Growing Body would explain, she said, why Marie would soon begin to bleed.

Down there. So you won’t be frightened like I was. I thought I was going to bleed to death. But really it’s the same as the boys starting to shave, only that’s much worse. Imagine having to shave every day for the rest of your life.

Leila had been married at twenty-eight, not to the Catholic solicitor, the most handsome young man in Kopaki whom her sisters fancied on her behalf, but to the bespectacled state hydro worker, thin and gangling and with a strange name, not a Catholic but prepared to embrace the Faith, who’d joined the Municipal Choir to sing under the baton of Mrs W. A. O’Connell, and who as her protégé was the only one of her sons-in-law to win her approval.

Leila entered the marriage bed for the sake of children, but managed to ignore her husband’s body as she did her own. So reluctant was she to admit evidence of carnal knowledge that one year after the Nuptial Mass her first born fought for three days to break free, escaping her narrow flanks at last with a squeezed skull and a lop-sided, quizzical look.

To her sisters - tactfully, only the two who’d already given birth - she said, If a man had come into that ward with a gun, I’d have begged him to shoot me. Two years later she returned serenely to the same nursing home to give birth to Laurence, who was followed by three more sons and one daughter.

Sheela has had two children. Her mother doesn’t know that. Neither does Judith Mikes. And neither do they know that they too are dead.

But not buried.

three

He said true things, but called them by wrong names.

- Robert Browning, Bishop Blougram’s Apology

"Pokker, says my father, is Danish for poker."

When it’s hot enough to turn white my brothers pull the poker out of the fire and bend it and burn holes in the mantelpiece. Our mother sits beside them on the hearth rug oblivious, the evening paper spread in front of her on the floor.

"Pokker, says my father, is also a polite middle-class Danish swear word."

It means the devil, or hobgoblin or troll, words which translate also as nisse. In Standard Five at the fancy dress ball at the Potangotango Municipal Theatre, wearing a skirt of orange satin flames and black velvet horns, camouflaged as one of a troupe of hobgoblins who’d performed at a recital earlier that week, I pass unnoticed.

But in the car on the way home my mother says, Your horns were the best. She ran my outfit up herself, even the horns, on the sewing machine my father converted so it could be plugged into the kitchen table, similarly electrified.

Backstage forming up for the Grand March, I meekly take Trevor Glyn’s hand which he’s just spat on before sticking it out at me, with a smirk. There aren’t enough convent boys to go round so one of us