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To kill rabbits was an honourable procedure. And then, on an autumn morning, I wounded a hare. The landscape blackened and cried out against me and that was the end of my active part in field sports.
    These expeditions alternated with boating on the quiet river where one glided through unknown people’s gardens, under willows and between the spring-flowering banks of our curiously English antipodean suburbs. The oars clunked rhythmically in their rowlocks, weeping willows dipped and brushed across our faces. If you nibbled the pale young leaves they were surprisingly bitter.Sometimes our keel grated on shingle or sent up a drift of cloudy mud. One trailed one’s fingers and felt grand and opulent. It seems to me that it was always late afternoon on the river.
    Until my schooldays came and, with them, camping holidays in the mountains, the great adventure, undertaken on several occasions by my mother and me, was a journey to Dunedin. It lasted all day. Up before dawn, we dressed by lamplight while cocks crew in the darkness beyond the window-pane. We seemed to have taken our house by surprise while it was still leading a night life of its own. In the hall stood our corded boxes and the coats we would wear. Breakfast was a strange hurried business eaten by the light of an oil lamp with a clock on the table. Presently the front door had banged behind us.
    My father took us to the station and put us into our carriage (second-class after the financial setbacks). It had wooden benches running lengthways and spittoons along the floor. Now began a period of frightful anxieties. Suppose we stayed too long on the platform and the train suddenly went away without us? Suppose, as I was getting in, my mother should be left behind, mouthing after me on the platform while I was carried rapidly south? Suppose we were in the wrong train and would be swept up through the mountains to Westland or that my father, having established us in our seats, foolishly dallied and was borne away in the train with us and financially ruined.
    When we were on our way these apprehensions faded, most of them recurring when my mother decided that we should stretch our legs at the longer stops. The journey became fascinating. We racketed across the Canterbury Plains while in the world outside the Southern Alps advanced, retired and slowly looked over each other’s snowy shoulders, and mad loops of telephone wires dipped and leapt in front of them. ‘Dun-e-DIN. Dun-e-DIN’ said the hurrying train and ‘No-you-DON’T. No-you-DON’T,’ sometimes breaking out into a violent excitable clatter as we roared through a cutting: ‘Rackety-plan. Rackety-plan.’ We crossed great rivers and saw men and vast mobs of sheep on lonely roads. A long day.
    There were three little parcels to be opened at appropriately spaced stations. They were always books. There were the lurching hazards of an endless stagger through other carriages andover-shifting footplates in a roaring wind, to the dining car. There were Other People to speculate upon and at evening when one was very tired indeed there was a final treat: my mother’s dressing case to be explored. It was lined with deliciously-smelling leather and fitted with crystal, silver-topped bottles. Soap, eau-de-Cologne with which one’s face was cleaned and freshened. A tiny phial of real attar-of-roses sent out by my grandmother from England. Papier-poudré, which was a little book of leaflets that my mother rubbed over her eau-de-Cologned nose and chin. An ivory-backed brush and comb. A looking glass from which one’s face stared back like a ghost in the murky lamplight. Now we were hurtling round the high cliffs of the Otago coast. If there was a moon outside it shone on the Pacific, far below. Lonely patches of bushland and ranges of hills moved against the sky behind cadaverous nodding reflections of Other People’s faces.
    At last, at the end of a lifetime and late at night: Dunedin, the smell of Mivvy’s fur coat