Tina Grenville: A Life in Three Acts

By Tina Grenville

The extraordinary life of a former top model and television star.
tina Grenville always wanted to be an actress. Widowed at the age of 20, in mysterious and still unresolved circumstances, she was forced to find work as a housekeeper on a remote Hawke's Bay farm. Eventually able to move to Auckland with her young son, she became first a radio actress, then a leading photographic and catwalk model. One of Paddy's Girls, an elite stable of top models, in 1964 she won 'Model of the Year'. Encouraged to move to Australia, she was a resounding success, in demand with leading couturiers and top fashion magazines. Finally achieving her childhood ambition, she became a long-standing cast member on Logie award-winning series tHE GODFAtHERS. A regular guest on television game shows and Paramount telemovies, she stayed in Australia for 14 years before moving back to New Zealand in 1980, to host her own show, GOOD MORNING, for Northern television. A panellist on BEAUtY AND tHE BEASt, with the legendary Selwyn toogood, and a regular at Wellington's Downstage theatre, she has continued working as an actress, having recently completed a supporting role in the movie adaptation of Ronald Hugh Morrieson's work PREDICAMENt. this is her story - tragic, absorbing, funny, poignant and uplifting, and her insights into life, love and the lives of the lovely will have you laughing and crying in equal measure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jun 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781775490043

Tina Grenville

Tina Grenville is a lively, erudite sparkly-eyed woman in her seventies with a more than average take on a life less ordinary. Star of stage, catwalk television and motion picture screen, she now lives on Auckland's west coast.

Book preview

Act I

1890–1968

1

LORDS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

The dead and embalmed body of my step-grandmother Lady Mabel Olphert Beresford Rose lies in its elaborate coffin. She shares my grandfather Arthur Charles Frederick Rose’s state rooms onboard a P&O liner while he sails the seven seas seeking a suitable resting place for what remains of his beloved second wife.

This is found at last in Lerici, Cinque Terre, on the Italian Riviera, where they’d spent their honeymoon. An imposing black-marble mausoleum of solid severity with two archways is erected in her memory. There, beside her forever, his own ashes will ultimately lie.

Three somewhat breathless accounts were published in the social pages of Sydney newspapers, describing my grandfather’s first wedding to Ada Mary Copeland in 1890. Alas, his poor bride was to spend only 18 more months in the colony. She haemorrhaged to death giving birth to my father, and was buried in the cemetery at Ryde. Disgraced baby Arthur, named after his father, was sent back to his uncle in Kirby Muxloe near Leicester in England as soon as possible, accompanied by his maternal grandmother and a wet-nurse. My brokenhearted grandfather for evermore considered all children to be ‘spawns of the devil’, wanting nothing to do with his son, the innocent murderer of his young bride, and his second marriage was childless.

Another uncle lived in Winnipeg, Canada, and it was there that Daddy thought he was going 15 years later when he stowed away on board a ship sailing from Liverpool. He was mistaken. The ship berthed in New Zealand instead.

Before this, life with his uncle and young niece Dorothy was very pleasant. Money was sent from Australia for young Arthur’s education and expenses, and life was typically upper middle-class.

My great-uncle owned an extremely valuable stamp collection. To his eternal shame, Daddy, ignorant of its value, went to Liverpool to trade it for a fountain pen and enough cash to get to Canada. He spent the rest of his life in New Zealand trying to make amends by becoming an avid stamp-collector himself. Once he arrived out here he never left, and no letters ever came from his father in Australia or, perhaps unsurprisingly, from his uncle in England.

Arthur Rose met Lady Mabel, a sister of Lord Beresford, in India at the height of the British Raj, when England was endeavouring — with as little success as would-be conquerors before and since — to subdue Afghanistan.

She came from Ireland, and as soloist sang before a crowded private audience at the age of 19, in Milan Cathedral, and played the harp. The first white woman to ride side-saddle through the notorious Khyber Pass, she was hit by a bullet in the upper thigh and walked with a pronounced limp afterwards. When she was subsequently made an Honorary Lieutenant of the British Army for her services in the Afridi War, the men of her father’s regiment, the Irish Dragoon Guards, presented her with a fine ebony cane mounted with chased gold.

After her marriage she travelled the globe with her husband, living in Japan for at least four months each year and writing articles about their travels for the major Australian papers. They had a home in Rushcutters Bay, in Vaucluse, where for one term my grandfather was mayor, and also lived at ‘The Folly’ in Hunters Hill. Active in Sydney’s social scene, they were among those invited to a state concert in Sydney’s Town Hall to welcome their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York in 1901. I still have the hand-illuminated invitation.

When my grandfather retired, he returned to England with Mabel, and after her death the following year, 1928, she continued to share his travels until he built the mausoleum in Italy. On one side of the two archways is inscribed:

Mabel Olphert Beresford Rose

Tears like the raindrops

May fall without measure

But rapture and beauty

They cannot recall.

and in large letters beneath,

She went to her God, like a soldier.

After my grandfather’s death in 1934, the will was read. This was an extraordinary document in both length and complexity, from the cover which proclaimed it ‘The last Will and Testament of Arthur Rose — Gentleman’ to the bizarre attempts to locate my father, who was chief beneficiary. Everyone was looking for an Arthur Copeland Rose, who unbeknown to them was now residing in the Nelson district of New Zealand, rather mysteriously and for reasons never divulged under the name of Arthur Charles DeLacy.

A Mr Johnstone contacted the wireless company trying to locate Arthur Rose, and I met Mrs Johnstone, by then very old, by tracking her down through an old mortgage receipt with her husband’s name on it that Mummy had given me. She gave me the leather writing-case in which Grandfather had kept personal correspondence, photographs and newspaper cuttings. She also had the ebony gold-topped cane. ‘We’ll keep this, after all she was only your step-grandmother wasn’t she?’

As I was overjoyed to have found any memorabilia at all, I didn’t argue.

The wireless company was ultimately successful, and the police interviewed a Mr DeLacy — but more proof was required as to his true identity, for the estate was quite significant and Daddy’s name change suspicious.

He’d always been able to draw, and when he arrived in New Zealand by mistake was employed by a tattoo parlour. Not wishing to make an indelible error on the clients, he practised on himself. His arms and legs were quite beautifully illustrated, but he must have had help with the snake which wound in and out of his chest, dripping blood. A tattoo on his right arm not only said ‘Mother’, inside an elaborately decorated heart, but it also named her, with ‘Ada’ surrounded by tears. There was also a racehorse of a particular bloodline pictured on his left calf, and identified by name.

These proofs were duly photographed on my father in situ, and sent back to Leicester for identification. Although viewed with some astonishment, they proved beyond doubt that Mr A. Rose and Mr A.C. DeLacy were indeed ‘one and the same’, and Daddy truly was his father’s son and heir.

Apart from an unidentified picture of a composed child in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, seated in front of a potted palm and wearing steel-rimmed spectacles, which I gather is my father because the photograph was taken in Leicester, nothing advertising his existence was ever found among my grandfather’s papers. Spawn of the devil indeed — and later Daddy was to treat his own son Eric Beresford DeLacy in exactly the same manner.

The will revealed a substantial legacy. There were rental properties in Sydney, shares in the Australian Gypsum Co., a small island in the Pacific, land in Vaucluse, two residences in Sydney, furniture, paintings and jewellery, along with the P&O shares. But the registrar’s last paragraph reveals the existence of a

special letter to Mr DeLacy, giving full particulars of the estate, and explaining the position of the mortgages, the bulk of which had been arranged by W.E. Hawkins Solicitor, who had been imprisoned for embezzlement so some of them were not very satisfactory.

2

THE NICHOLSONS ARE COMING

Far too high above the stage in the Wellington Opera House, my maternal great-grandfather Papa Nicholson stood balanced on a swaying trestle in the paint frame, working on a backdrop for one of the touring shows for the Tait Co., who brought us theatrical productions from overseas. Nearly a century later, his place would be taken by the legendary Will Conroy personally instructing Papa Nicholson’s great-granddaughter, my sister Dorothy Faye DeLacy, in the art of backdrop painting and perspective.

Our great-grandfather’s paint was mixed in chamber pots and kept at the correct consistency during winter in the bitterly cold and draughty Opera House by small candle-burners. That, and his fingerless gloves knitted by my great-grandmother — GaGa to her grandchildren as my mother would be to hers — kept the vicious southerlies from disrupting his work.

The Nicholsons wore the McPherson tartan and came to New Zealand from Scotland to settle not in largely Protestant Dunedin, but in the North Island.

Grandma gave me an oval gold locket when I was 15, with a letter outlining its history. It was stolen in Sydney 25 years later along with other irreplaceably precious things. The future abbreviation of my name, Tina, was barely discernable on the front, as it had belonged to my great-grandmother Christina Priest Nicholson. It opened to reveal three generations of faded Nicholsons inside. Mummy, however, felt that it should have been given to her before me, and told me whenever I wore it to take it off immediately.

When I began photographic modelling I took it on location, and it mysteriously disappeared after I returned home. I was sure that it must have been lost on the shoot, and berated myself terribly. I’d let Grandma down, and she’d have no faith in me any more. I told Mummy, who promptly told Grandma that I’d lost it. Imagine my disbelief when, not long before I was married, I went to Mummy’s stocking drawer — where she kept them sorted according to colour, in cotton pillow-slips — to find inside one of them, right at the very bottom, my locket and chain, where they had lain for five years. I could have wept with relief and I took it back without saying a word, but I never wore it in front of her again.

When my grandparents moved to Whanganui from their big old house near the top of the Wellington cable car, it was a return to an area they’d both known when young. Grandma and her friends would stuff their ball gowns into saddlebags and gallop over the hills to Bulls for balls, picnics and parties.

Grandfather Albert was an extremely handsome man, judging by the photographs on the wall, but I could never equate the white-haired, pink-faced version with the dashing stranger hanging from the picture rail on long chains. The dashing stranger had a Maori nickname, ‘Riri Nikitini’ meaning Wild Nicholson, and staring up into his proud young face, I could well believe it.

Riri Nikitini’s brother George Dunbar Nicholson bought the loveliest little house down one of the side streets in Bulls for himself and his wife Ivy. It now serves morning teas, and there, in an open book on the table which lists all the former owners, is his name.

My two Nicholson uncles Lloyd and Bruce were in the Second World War, Lloyd in the Navy, and Bruce in the Air Force. Bruce was shot down in flames two weeks before the end of the war over the Solomon Islands, crashing into the sea. He was just 23, and is remembered in the New Zealand War Cemetery in New Caledonia.

Bruce was the baby of the family, and after the dreadful telegram arrived, as it did for so many other mothers, we were told never to mention his name in front of Grandma again. Afterwards, in the little room at Whanganui where I slept on holiday and where Bruce’s dress uniform still hung in the wardrobe, I had a recurring nightmare that I could see him standing at the foot of my bed wearing the blue-grey jacket, still on its wooden coathanger, lying across his shoulders like a gibbet. In the morning I couldn’t look inside the wardrobe just in case he hadn’t been able to return it, and Grandma would think that it had been stolen and be sad all over again.

After the war, my other uncle, Lloyd, sailed on the four-masted barque Pamir as radio operator. One evening after I’d grown up we were having dinner, and he told me of a curious incident that happened one night on board. He said it sounded so implausible that he was almost too embarrassed to tell me.

Returning to his cabin quite late after games of cards and drinks with the crew, he’d seen a man, a complete stranger both in height and in form, standing with his back to him, near one of the portholes. As he’d just left everyone down below, he felt uneasy at the silence, and the fact that the visitor appeared to be dressed in a long black cloak with what looked like a tricorn hat on his head. Transfixed at the cabin door he called out, but when the figure turned it appeared not to have a face.

Lloyd turned and bolted down to where he’d left his mates only minutes earlier. ‘OK, come on, which one of you buggers has successfully scared the living daylights out of me?’ He did a rapid head count. No one was missing. When he explained what he thought he’d just seen, there were predictable jeers about the results of too much Navy booze. Obviously ‘Nick’, as they called my uncle, was letting his imagination get the better of him, and they gave him another drink.

He was so shaken that he didn’t return to his cabin that night, and was more shaken still when he later realized the significance of the time and date when he’d seen the intruder. It was the exact time and date that his brother Bruce was shot down over the Pacific, as confirmed in the telegram sent to his mother.

3

ILLEGITIMATE AND LEGITIMATE

Arthur DeLacy’s three children, Eric Beresford, Kristine Litzi and Dorothy Faye, were illegitimate — in other words, just plain old-fashioned bastards. But we were spared the prejudice and resulting feelings of inferiority suffered by our half-brother Eric, particularly in that era, because we never knew the circumstances of our beginnings until much later.

Eric was born in 1916 when our father was 24, the result of a liaison with a woman whose name was always uttered in hushed tones — ‘Beulah’, which ironically means ‘to be married’ in Hebrew. Whatever made her agree to later put her son in a Catholic orphanage, and to virtually abandon him? Growing up, Faye and I didn’t know that Eric was related to us. Tall, with thick, wavy blond hair similar to my sister’s, he’d inherited our father’s artistic streak, and was only four years younger than Mummy.

Daddy couldn’t marry my mother because he had an older wife who refused to divorce him to wed a girl 20 years his junior. Years later, as a confused and elderly woman in a Nelson nursing home, she relented in order to give ‘the little girls’ a name. By then we were aged 14 and 16, respectively. Daddy legalized ‘DeLacy’ by deed poll before marrying Mummy.

Eric told me later that when he’d joined the Army there was a good chance of promotion if details of his family could be provided — his mother’s identity, at least. Daddy’s reaction was one of fury. ‘Christ, how the hell do you expect me to remember after all this time?’ The subject was never alluded to again and Eric didn’t get his promotion.

I always thought that my mother could have helped Eric become reconciled with his father, but she must have resented his presence because later any contact between us all was actively discouraged. Something of some magnitude must have happened between them, as he remained dreadfully bitter about her for the rest of his life, and ceased visiting without explanation. After I found out his true identity I asked him why, but he left it to my imagination.

Here we were with our ballet and music lessons, our lovely clothes, and access to education (although Daddy thought it a waste of time educating girls: ‘They just go off, get perms and marry.’). We were adored, and although Eric never appeared envious, he couldn’t have failed to notice the discrepancy between our childhood and his own. I tried to make it up to him by including him in things as much as possible.

4

IN THE BEGINNING

I was named Kristine after Phantom of the Opera’s heroine; Litzi after the German Jewish girl who helped look after me; and was wrapped in cotton wool from birth, eight weeks premature, in a private nursing home in Wellington, the month the Second World War was declared, weighing only as much as 2 pounds (900 grams) of heavily subsidized butter. Seventy years ago, this would have been a death sentence if tiny Sister Bosher hadn’t taken matters into her own capable hands.

She promptly sent my 27-year-old mother home and set about feeding me every few hours with Mummy’s expressed milk, laced with an eye-dropperful of brandy. I slept in a small shoebox that had once housed Sister Bosher’s sturdy size-2 black boots, in which she squeaked around the wards.

Our family lived in a rented house in Island Bay that had two large urns on brick columns either side of the entrance steps. There was also a top lawn belonging to the man next door who kept a fierce magpie as a pet, and I knew never to go near the path which led up to it. My earliest memory, before I could walk, was one of wilful disobedience — in spite of being told to stop by the first Litzi, I didn’t.

‘Kristine, she is crawling on the meadow up.’ I wasn’t for long.

Daddy had a chance to buy this house. The land was flat and near the sea, and Italian fishermen still mended their nets on the shore. But my mother said it was a mercy he couldn’t because his intention to spray-paint the kauri-panelled hallway (‘too damned dark’) in bright glossy white with a gold crackle finish would have been a tragedy. The fact that we were renting saved it from this fate worse than demolition. Thwarted, he bought 12 Northland Road instead, one of only two identical worker’s cottages built in the late 1800s, without telling anyone.

Clutching my mother’s hand on our first tour of inspection, I could sense her alarm and disapproval. Here he was in a collarless shirt and braces with a workforce of what Mummy called ‘his henchmen’ from the factory of DeLacy Signs and Advertising Craft, pulling down load-bearing walls, obliterating the hall (‘waste of bloody space’), covering the porch, filling the tiny backyard with leadlights, and ripping out heart-rimu boards with abandon. My father was deaf to all remonstrating, and any qualms Mummy may have voiced were well and truly drowned in the noise and energy of the renovations.

He turned the four-panelled doors, with their low, round brass handles, upside down and covered them with wallboard. The door knobs now stood high in the air and were replaced by ugly Bakelite versions with squared-off edges. The doors never stayed open properly and closed with difficulty. He blamed the earthquakes.

The house stood on two extremely steep sections, and my father’s boundless energy resulted in an orchard with one apple tree boasting six grafted varieties, raspberry canes and strawberries. We had vegetable and flower gardens, three lawns, and holding everything together were his famous brick walls. Many of these were built with no drainage holes, or reinforcements of any kind. Consequently, with a low and ominous rumble, one or another of them would tumble down from above, collapsing in a heap of red brick-dust to land outside the laundry windows.

Daddy had acquired No. 12 quite cheaply. It had formerly belonged to a man who liked his whisky. Early one evening, in the half-light, while he was unsteadily negotiating the dozens of steps down to his house he missed the corner and plunged headfirst into our next-door neighbours’ backyard. ‘Seeing a purple face hurtling upside down past our lounge room windows gave Mr Garrett and me quite a turn,’ said Mrs Garrett. ‘Broke his neck it did.’

I do know that he could never have used the old claw-footed bath. It was housed in a kind of corrugated iron lean-to afterthought, tacked onto the back of the laundry; grass grew in the bottom out of dirt that had filtered through a hole in the roof above, and was watered the same way.

Grandma loved and admired my father, but was still quite visibly shocked when visiting. ‘Lucy,’ she said to her eldest child, ‘you’ll never live here.’ She was wrong. It was our family home all our lives before my sister and I left, and Lucy did indeed live there for over 35 years — and cried when she sold it after Daddy died, to live in Plimmerton.

‘Oh look, you have your very own little school,’ said my mother in her too-bright voice.

I hadn’t been well early on in my life, and had weak eyes, and so was just starting school at nearly seven years old. Clutching my mother’s hand and dressed in a new brown-and-white gingham dress she’d made especially, we passed the big school, and followed the steep concrete path right down to the bottom, where our own infant school crouched.

Mummy explained to the Head my complete inability to utter one word in answer to her questions. ‘She’s very self-conscious, nervous and highly strung’ — said in a whisper which I wasn’t supposed to hear. Then I was ignored, which gave me a chance to look at the pictures on the wall. There were our King and Queen, with the two little Princesses. They refused to leave their palace even as London burned with fire all around them. They were a ‘symbol’, I was told, of England’s straight back and stiff upper lip in adversity. I tried to smile back at them with a stiff upper lip, to show that here in New Zealand, so far away, the three of us were all sitting in our own adversity too.

‘Kristine, do stop pulling those awful faces. Well,’ she said firmly, to discourage me from crying and therefore letting the side down, ‘I’ll be back later’, and was gone. Her hand was replaced by the Head Teacher’s, and with a ‘Come along’, I stumbled alongside her to the Assembly Hall, where I’d never seen so many children in one place, ever before.

‘Now,’ and she clapped her hands for quiet, then blew on a silver whistle she wore on a string around her neck, ‘who will look after Kristine, our little new girl?’

No one moved.

Suddenly, a small boy took my hand instead. He was Peter John Galbraith Button, to be precise, and from that moment my first love — not that he knew, poor little boy, and not that it had anything to do with me. It just was. The first in the line of Johns, as my sister called them.

We were going to the Botanical Gardens to learn about plants. John was my partner and pulled me off balance. I tripped, landing hard on my knees which bled, and my glasses fell off. A student teacher took me back to school and to a line of grubby china basins with black cracks inside. They had cold-water taps and soap with no bubbles.

‘Stop making such a fuss. I’ll call your mother and she can take you home.’ At that I cried louder. It had nothing to do with my bleeding knees. Mummy had made my gingham dress especially for school. I’d heard her sewing machine going at night when I was in bed, and now the blood had spoiled it. The other thing was that John wouldn’t have a partner now for the garden trip; or if he did, it wouldn’t be me.

John and I were friends all through primary school, enduring taunts and teasing. Once someone chalked a big heart on the blackboard with an arrow driven diagonally through it with ‘K.D. loves J.B.’ written inside; and another time, when we were walking home, a big boy rushed past us, banging our heads together, and yelled out, ‘When’s the wedding?’

On Wednesdays, the boys would go home at lunchtime to change into their cream cricketing longs and matching V-necked pullovers, sauntering back with their willow bats and shiny red cricket balls, to practise in the afternoons and to yell ‘Howzat!’ while throwing their arms in the air. John never knew that one lunchtime, a skinny girl with round spectacles hid in the bushes lining the path and waited just to see him striding down the zigzag swinging his bat and whistling, completely unaware that he was being spied on.

I guess he knows now.

John Button has been the music critic for Wellington’s Dominion, now the Dominion Post, for the past 19 years.

Our unofficial godfather was Hans von Adlerstein. People called him the Baron, which he was. The Baron had a wife Clara and a daughter Monica, and they lived in Karori. He used to call my six-foot-tall father ‘Little Arthur’ and seemed to greatly admire my mother.

We were invited to one of Monica’s birthday parties, and off we set clutching gaily-wrapped gifts and wearing our best dresses. Apart from Monica, we knew no one. Clara was very kind, and in order to try to integrate us, asked if we would perform one of our ballet dances. This well-meaning invitation failed to take into account that our set pieces were dances designed specifically to show how well we executed our syllabus steps and were usually accompanied by Chopin études, and I tried in panic to explain this to Clara.

‘Nonsense, my dear,’ she said, tightly, stressed with the whole party scenario. ‘Whatever you do I’m sure will be simply Wunderbar. We’re all looking forward to it, aren’t we?’

‘Yeeees,’ chorused the already bored children dutifully, secretly wondering when the promised juggler would appear.

It was terrible. With no music, and no idea of what to do, when to start and far more importantly when to stop, we just twirled with our arms in the air, pointed our toes, and tried to avoid bumping into each other, putting a complete generation off ballet for life.

Going miserably to the birthday table, which was resplendent with food and decorations, I was aware of all the jostling and pushing, but didn’t know why. I sat down on the only spare seat and an expectant hush settled over the entire table. Everyone was putting on their hats.

Mine was red, and as I put it on, the gawping faces, coming in and out of focus like painted clowns at cheap fairs, took on the shapes of nightmares, contorted but silent. Suddenly this was splintered by hoots and shrieks. Dozens of fingers were all pointing at my head.

‘Dirty Dick. Dirty Dick. Dick, Dick,’ they all yelled.

I didn’t know why they were pointing, or what they meant, until a boy opposite me reached across the table, knocking over a vase of flowers which ended up in the ice cream, to grab my hat, pulling my hair as he did so, to wave it in front of me. There it was — ‘Dirty Dick’. On the way home I asked my sister not to say anything. We were supposed to have had a lovely time.

Mummy met us at the door. ‘Well, tell me all about it. Was it wonderful?’

‘Kristine got the Dirty Dick hat.’

It was too much. I went to my room and burst into tears.

Eighteen years later, I was in the photographic studios of the Auckland Star with six other models shooting the Winter Fashion supplement. One of them was a new girl. She’d come from London, and her portfolio said that she was the face of ’68. Suzan Gornay.

After I’d introduced myself, she suddenly asked: ‘Tina, was your name Kristine DeLacy before? Did you live in a house at the bottom of lots of steps? My father called yours Little Arthur.’ I stared at her.

‘My second name is Suzan, and Gornay is my married name.’

‘Your father has to be the Baron then, and your mother is Clara,’ I said.

‘They’ve been divorced for ages, I’ve had a couple of stepmothers since.’

Then: ‘So, you are Monica von Adlerstein.’

‘Yes. Kristine — I’m sorry, I just can’t think of you as Tina.’ (Neither could I.) ‘Do you remember that party?’

Did I remember it? I still have the shot that shows us both laughing in recognition of one another, and also in recognition of what had happened in the interim, to ‘Dirty Dick’.

Among my small circle of friends at Kelburn School was Diane Holyoake, the daughter of the leader of the opposition. Daddy had known Keith Holyoake in Motueka, where he had a large farm, and didn’t agree with his politics at all; way too far to the right. However, I was allowed to go to Diane’s twelfth birthday party, and it was everything I’d imagined a birthday party to be. A huge polished table set with a white lace cloth, simply laden with the most extraordinary selection of party food imaginable. Norma, Mrs Holyoake, was wearing a floral printed apron over her dress; although in her position she had a cook to help in the house, she had overseen and done much of the baking herself.

There were even two shining chandeliers above the table, with matching smaller ones around the very pale-yellow walls. I was in heaven.

The pièce de résistance, of course, was THE CAKE, and it looked exactly like one in the shiny colour pictures I’d seen inside the pages of the American Ladies’ Home Journal.

Diane’s father, our future Prime Minister, far from escaping, was part of the whole wonderful afternoon, letting us see his office where all the ministerial papers were signed, and pushing us sky-high on a swing in the back garden.

In my last year at Kelburn, I played the witch in Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, my very first role on any stage (this stage was a raised platform at the end of the Teachers’ Training College hall). In a book put out to commemorate Kelburn School’s 75th Jubilee, the production was described as ‘a marvel, with the witch played by one girl who was to become a national beauty and a professional actress’. Two teeth were blacked out, my face was green as a tribute to the fearsome witch in The Wizard of Oz, and my hair was matted with Mummy’s Pond’s Cold Cream. To have been described as a future national beauty would have taken quite a stretch of the imagination.

Once a week we’d trek down to the old brick Mount Cook School for cooking lessons, carrying baskets of ingredients. There were secret paths then through common ground off Kelburn Parade: zigzags, precarious narrow wooden steps, even stiles to get us over the fences, carefully placing our precious baskets on the narrow wooden planks first. We walked through open grassland to get down to The Terrace,