Long-dormant drawers and box-files are being opened, yielding up photos that bear actual, if blurry, evidence of Nell’s presence in my life. Here’s our family, we the first two kids of five, down from Christchurch, visiting our grandparents’ new-to-them Dunedin house.

The aunt I’ve called Flick in the novel was an artist, with an artist’s eye. She would sketch us …

… and make photo portraits. I feel almost shy, meeting this girl again. I’d like to know her better.

Nell and ‘Floss’ had identical, pale brown VWs: And here is fresh evidence of a visit by one of them to our home in Christchurch. Fruitcake was baked and brought north, but presumably stowed too close to the rear engine. I recall the whiff of petrol in it. Here is confirmation, too, that we really did grow up under, and more often in, the biggest cherry tree you ever saw.

Before they moved to the villa alluded to above, Nell and ‘Herb’ bought a house in Ravensbourne big enough to house their five children, and visitors. The house still exists but, as it’s surrounded now by a huge, impenetrable holly hedge and forest, this photo from the 1950s gives the best view I’ve had of it.

In the following novel excerpt, Nell and Herb are moving to Dunedin after a life in the high and highish country. Nell is weary from three years of minding her mother. I made the turret room octagonal, with horizontal window panels, in keeping with a dream I had long ago. Evidently, that was ambitious. Nevertheless:

1951

‘Mrs Hamilton, please don’t go up there. It’s unsafe.’

            Nell has stepped over the chair tipped as a barrier across the first steps of the winding stairwell. She has climbed over the three rotten treads (inferior wood used here and there; easily remedied). ‘I do so at my own risk’ she tells the property agent. ‘You needn’t follow.’

            He hadn’t wanted her to see this house. He has been fixed on the idea that she wants modern, light and stylish. Which she would like, if there weren’t so much barren ugliness mixed in with the newer homes he’s shown her. Expanses of concrete paving. Banks of conifers. Tiny city kitchens.

            Herb told her about the For Sale sign he’d noticed in passing, here at Ravensbourne, off the beaten track, and she insisted on being brought to see the house once the agent had dragged her through three or four hopeless properties: variously too soul-less, too public, too confining.

            At the top she steps into the octagonal tower room with its eight horizontal window panels looking south into pines, west onto young beeches and elms and north to the swathe of lawn. The whole huge garden is hedged in holly. Nell is magnetised to the eastern windows, with their view of the harbour, shaken by wind, a deep, striated blue between the green hills. She kneels and spreads her elbows along the sill, with sun on her neck and shoulders.       

            Downstairs is a thunderously large, dark and ugly kitchen (she’ll paint all the woodwork white), a sprawling living room, chilly green drawing room and six bedrooms, with two cavernous bathrooms. The house is set in its own forest. It’s wildly impractical, but here… This turret is hers. Her bedroom, her dayroom. Here she will be at ease.

            Her mind is made up and Herb will have little choice in the matter.

            ‘Yes,’ she tells the agent. ‘Will you draw up the papers and bring them to us today?’

* * *

Nell was said not to be much of a reader, but the old house is packed with books, and we keep finding copies with her name on the fly leaf. Plus, there’s this: