Now Voyager: The Proud and the Profane

Today was the first day of the Rugby competition, and I was told it is an event not to miss, seeing the crowds dress-up that is, so I went into town to have a look. But I was too early it seemed, no-one was around, so I happened across the birth home of NZ's most famous writer, a short story teller who revolutionised the art, Katherine Mansfield. Her birth home is in Thorndon, 75 Tinakori Road, and I had often seen it and was waiting for the best time to enter. Today was obviously it, everyone was at the Rugby Sevens! I parked my scooter nearby in the now very affluent suburb, and was welcomed in by the attending lady who took my backpack.

The house had been beautifully restored and there was a real feeling of the 1800s when Katherine's father, a quite wealthy merchant, was just starting his career. They were a very upwardly mobile family and her mother was a beautiful woman who had five children, but as was often in those days she was left in not good health, and died quite young. However she died not as young as her brilliant second daughter, Katherine.

Wild and adventurous Katherine contracted tuberculosis while living in London, possibly through undetected gonnorhoerra, and died at the tender age of 34 in the south of France, where she had lived with her adored friend Ida Baker for the months preceding her death. Her husband, John Middleton Murray, whom she also loved, was an editor and publisher who stayed in London for his career, and a very handsome man he was too, but unable to give her the love she was looking for.

Katherine was before her time, and her best friends in London were DH Lawrence and his German wife Frieda, with whom she eventually fell out, as they wanted more in the free-love stakes than her more simple husband was willing to give. The Lawrences and the Wolfs, Virginia and her husband, were the elite literary set with whom she mixed in London after she had precociously published her first novel and short stories which had been very well reviewed. She was a phenomenon. She was a witty person, original and at ease with everyone including the Irish philosopher Bertrand Russell, who said her conversation was even better than her writing. Here was a young New Zealand lass who had been sent half way around the world to school in London as great things were expected of her, but she was bowing to no man. Her biggest love was platonic, and Ida joined her in France to care for her in the later stages of her life. Katherine left a literary legacy, even at the tender age of 34, of hundreds of short stories which live on today and are said to have greatly influenced the style of short stories in English literature. She was as good as the great French short story writer Honore de Balzac, in my opinion.

Houses on Tinakori Street opposite Katherine Mansfield's birth place.

So on to the rest of my day witnessing the emergence of Wellington in Drag, as that is what it seemed. There were so many men in frocks, with big falsies, and loving the spectacle they created. It was a football carnival after all. Along the foreshore in the many bars and pubs the music was loud and the beer was flowing to prepare everyone for three days of festive Rugby Football.

Unfortunately I just heard that New Zealand lost its first game, Wellington will doubtless be in a black depression!

See the photos below.