Ian Gordon - Katherine Mansfield scholar

MARGIE THOMSON explores a quirky byway in our literary history with long-time Katherine Mansfield scholar Ian Gordon

Professor Ian Gordon arrived in New Zealand from Edinburgh in 1937 to take up a chair in linguistics and literature at Victoria University in Wellington.

Interested in local literature, he became fascinated by Katherine Mansfield. Karori, where the Gordons made their home, took on the added attraction of having also been the home of the Beauchamp family (Mansfield was born Kathleen Beauchamp) before they moved to Tinakori Rd in 1898 when Kathleen was 9.

Filled with enthusiasm, Gordon would take his students on tours to landmarks from Mansfield's stories, the brick schoolhouse at Karori primary school, for instance, which appears in The Dolls' House.

Many years later, when he had become a respected Mansfield scholar and his biography, Katherine Mansfield, had been translated and reprinted repeatedly, he came into possession, as a result of his subsequent friendship with Mansfield's younger sister, Jeanne, of a diary written by Mansfield's mother, Annie Beauchamp, during a sea voyage "home" in 1898.

He eventually transcribed it and researched the many names casually alluded to in the handwritten pages, adding explanatory information as footnotes. This has just been published as Victorian Voyage: The shipboard diary of Katherine Mansfield's mother (Wilson and Horton, $19.95).

But there was one name about which he was unable to discover any additional information: Annie Platt, the Beauchamps' maid. Frustrated, he had to let the matter go, until one day, only a few years ago, Gordon and his wife were having afternoon tea with one of their Karori neighbours, a woman whom they had known well for more than 30 years. This woman finally admitted to Gordon that her mother had been Annie Platt.

"God," Gordon says, still clearly upset at this travesty of omission, "why couldn't she have told us 20 years ago? You wouldn't believe it! But she didn't like to admit her mother had been a maid. If I'd known in time I'd have pumped her dry."

Annie Platt's daughter, now 95, was unable to tell Gordon much, apart from a couple of revealing anecdotes.

One concerned Annie's courtship with a man who used to visit the Beauchamps' Tinakori Rd house. She would hug him in the hallway and they were one day caught out by a group of sniggering Beauchamp daughters, Kathleen included, who were spying on the couple from the top of the stairs. Annie received a letter the next day from the girls, no doubt at their mother's behest, apologising for their behaviour.

"The relationship of the maid and the Beauchamp family was very friendly," Gordon notes.

"When she married they gave her a sewing machine, complete with an inscribed brass plate, a considerable gift. But by the time I found out about it, the sewing machine and all that lovely first-hand information was lost for ever."

Gordon, now 92, transcribed Annie Beauchamp's diary several years ago, thankfully before his eyesight became so bad that he can no longer read, and has seen the result published twice: first by the University of Auckland's Holloway Press, in a limited, handcrafted edition, and now in the commercially available Wilson and Horton edition.

The diary in its original form is a neat little package, about 22cm square, written in what was probably an order book from Harold Beauchamp's warehouse. Its 102 pages are filled mostly with Annie's smart but difficult hand and sometimes idiosyncratic spelling, with the occasional entry from Harold when Annie was laid low with seasickness.

An odd document, it is on one level simply a fairly mundane record of a slow-paced six weeks aboard the steamship RMS Ruahine in which the main preoccupations were the vicissitudes of physical comfort and health, wardrobe matters and moderately diverting social relationships. Annie filled the last page two days after they arrived in London and posted it back to her family in Wellington.

But it is the clues it gives us about the Beauchamps' later-to-be-famous daughter that are more interesting.

First, there is the point that Gordon makes in his introduction, that genes will out. "Genes leave an imprint. Katherine Mansfield inherited from both [parents]. Harold's preoccupation with figures is echoed in the columns of accounts that form a feature of her notebooks. Harold's other side, the life and soul of the party, singing a minstrel song at the ship's concert, foreshadows a time when his daughter will astonish Lytton Strachey and the Garsington crowd with her mimic impromptus. She was her father's daughter.

"She was also her mother's. Annie combines real narrative skill with a novelist's eye for character: the elderly clergyman afflicted by 'St Vitus,' the young parson 'playing cards for money' every day including Sundays, the haughty bejewelled woman with dyed hair ('a thorough Sydney second-rater'). Annie was the mother of the later observer of Miss Brill and the Man Without a Temperament."

But in the social commentary, the endless descriptions of clothes and obsessive concern for personal comfort, there lies a self-absorption that seems chilling. In vain might the young Kathleen have searched the diary for a personal message or sign from her mother: there was none.

Passing mention is made of her older sisters, Chad and Vera, her younger sister, Jeanne, and brother, "Boy," but none of Kathleen, although this would have been the first word any of the children had from their parents for more than three months. The trip in total kept the Beauchamps away for about nine months.

"I think she was a chilling person," Gordon says.

"She was a social person, her husband was roaring up the social scale. There is not any fondness or endearment to the children in the diary."

He feels the nature of the relationship was demonstrated some years later when Annie found out that Katherine, by now living a rather bohemian existence in London, was pregnant and unmarried. Annie furiously "rushed" (as much as one could by steamship) to London, collected her daughter, took her to Germany for an abortion and left her there. She returned to New Zealand, where she immediately rewrote her will, cutting Katherine out of it.

"There was no loving relationship," Gordon says. "She was coming to cover up for herself, to get rid of the little bastard."

But that is all behind the scenes, or in the future. In its least complicated manifestation, Annie Beauchamp's diary is simply a contemporary account of a vanished piece of New Zealand's social history. In the days before planes, thousands of New Zealanders made the leisurely journey to England by passenger liner. For those such as the Beauchamps, in one of the most expensive cabins, everything was laid on.

"For some tranquil weeks," Gordon writes, "Annie could recuperate, display the variety of her wardrobe, idly contemplate washing her hair. They were on a Voyage."