Kiri: Her Unsung Story
Her sense of her own uniqueness only deepened as she began to learn more about her origins. According to Kiri, Tom and Nell told her the truth about her background when she was a little over three years old. They drew short of revealing the identity of her real mother and father but made no secret of the fact that she was adopted. As a young girl, Kiri’s emotions would have been no different from any other adopted child’s, a tearful confusion of anger, shame, insecurity and isolation. It was only years later that she began to understand the deep and divergent impact it had on her personality. Asked once about the legacy of her adoption, Kiri admitted it had added to her sense of isolation from the world. Kiri could be a naturally solitary child. ‘You grow up with this capacity to cut off,’ she said. ‘It’s a protective device. I become alone, totally alone when something goes wrong.’ At the same time the knowledge that she had been abandoned by her real parents instilled in her a tenacity and a determination she would never have known otherwise. ‘It turned me into a survivor. I felt I was special and had special responsibilities. I’m quite sure if I hadn’t known I was adopted I’d have stayed a nobody and would be in New Zealand breeding children now. But that turned me into a fighter.’
As her childhood progressed, she found a natural opponent in her mother. Kiri was, by her own admission, a classic example of a spoilt only child. It is easy to see how the distrust, antipathy towards competition and often naked jealousy Kiri has displayed throughout her life was born in her early years alone at Grey Street. ‘I was an only child. I didn’t make friends easily. I always wanted everything my way and I wasn’t very happy in a great bunch of children,’ she said once. While Tom doted on Kiri it was left to Nell to administer the discipline she undoubtedly required. If the young Kiri misbehaved she would be forced to sit silently in a chair. If she looked too unhappy she would be sent into the bathroom and told not to come back until she was smiling. Kiri described once how she learned to offer a sickly fixed smile even when her young heart seemed as if it was breaking. The ability to mask her mood would prove useful in later life.
If the crime was considered severe enough, her mother was not beyond dealing out physical punishment. Nell would take a large wooden spoon or a belt to the errant Kiri. Years later Kiri would recall how she had run mischievously through a patch of poppies Nell had planted in the Grey Street garden. ‘As I skipped through I hit the head off each flower.’ Nell’s reaction was instantaneous. The blow she dealt Kiri was ‘so hard it was unbelievable’.
At least once she threatened to run away. Packing a bag in a temper one afternoon she announced her departure to a disinterested Nell, who was entertaining visitors. Like so many other reluctant runaways, she made it no further than the garden gate where she sat sobbing quietly until the evening.
‘Thought you were going to run away?’ her mother asked as she limped back into the house.
‘I was going to but it got too dark,’ Kiri replied, still sulking.
It was Kiri’s greatest good fortune that she grew up in a house dominated by music. Nell liked to claim that her mother Emily was a niece of the great English composer Sir Arthur Sullivan. The story, repeated by Kiri throughout her life, was a blatant piece of fiction. In fact the roots of Nell’s mother Emily Sullivan’s family tree extended back to Lancashire and the town of Radcliffe. It had been there that Emily’s father, Jeremiah, had grown up with his father, a local schoolteacher also called Jeremiah Sullivan. Sir Arthur Sullivan’s only sibling, a brother, Frederic, lived in Fulham, London.
Nell’s talents as a musician seem to have been genuine, nevertheless. Visitors to Grey Street invaribly found its halls and corridors echoing to her fluent piano playing.
As the 1950s dawned, the television age was being born in America and, to a lesser extent, Europe. On the other side of the world, however, New Zealand would have to wait another decade before its first broadcasts, even then only one channel broadcasting three hours a day. In the meantime radio remained king, with racing and rugby forming the three Rs that were the bedrock of New Zealand life. At Grey Street the family would often sit around and listen to concerts and entertainment shows on the local Gisborne station. In the absence of decent music on the airwaves, Nell would provide the entertainment herself, conducting evening singalongs from the stool of her upright piano. ‘She was a very big personality, and a lot of people loved her,’ Kiri said later.
In this environment, Kiri’s raw musical gifts were soon apparent. At the age of two, according to her mother, she had danced to the sound of Uncle Dan’s harmonica. Nell would also sit her on her lap to show her the rudiments of the keyboard. To her mother’s delight, Kiri was soon accompanying her as well as playing solo. It was her tuneful singing voice that impressed Nell most, however. As a five-year-old, Kiri regaled Nell and Tom with her versions of songs like ‘Daisy, Daisy’ and ‘Cara Mia’. ‘By the time she was eight she had a nice little voice,’ her mother said.
At St Joseph’s, Nell encouraged Kiri to study the piano. To her mother’s frustration, however, Kiri was more interested in sport, in particular fishing and swimming, which she had learned at an early age with her father at Hatepe. ‘She used to be a real tomboy,’ Tom proudly proclaimed. She would not be deterred, however. Soon Nell was engineering Kiri a reputation as a new star in Gisborne’s musical firmament. Nell had begun to encourage Kiri to sing solo at Grey Street gatherings. Drawing on connections in town, she had won her a place on a popular local radio show. Kiri was seven when she made her public performing debut on Radio 2XG singing ‘Daisy, Daisy’. She proved such a success she was invited back at regular intervals. Victorian ballads and songs for more mature voices, like ‘When I Grow Too Old To Dream’, seemed to offer no difficulties. To Nell each of her daughter’s successes only served to fuel her belief that she had real talent. Her mother would reward Kiri with clothes and presents she would pick up on shopping expeditions to Auckland. To the young Kiri, however, the increasing attention became a source of resentment and confrontation.
Kiri got her first indication of the future being planned for her in her bedroom one morning as Nell came in and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘My mother had had a dream where she had seen me on the stage at Covent Garden,’ she recalled once. To Kiri it seemed meaningless. ‘I thought, “Oh, that sounds nice”, and thought no more about it.’ In time Kiri would come to share the same dream. ‘You have to believe in dreams. I don’t think I would have gone on if I hadn’t believed.’ In the meantime, however, she found herself becoming an often unwilling vehicle for her mother’s fantasies.
Kiri’s love of music was real enough. She had been fascinated by the new radiogram that had arrived in the house and had played the family’s first discs, ‘If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake’ and ‘Sweet Violets’ endlessly. When she broke one of them she had run out of the room screaming in fear of what Nell might do to her. Yet she had no real interest in devoting her young life to music. Her defiance was, in part, down to a laziness she confessed stayed with her for years. ‘I can see Mummy constantly kept the music going. I’d tend not to feel like it because I was a lazy child, but she’d insist that I sang,’ she recalled later.
Its roots lay also in her natural need to test the parameters of her relationship with her parents. Kiri knew that whatever her wishes she would find a supporter in Tom, in whose eyes she could do little wrong. In truth, Nell loved her just as much. She was a far less pliable personality, however. Kiri had yet to discover how far she could push her.
Ultimately, Kiri’s dislike of the ever-strengthening spotlight now being turned on her owed most to a simpler truth. For all her high spirits around those she knew and loved, she was painfully reserved among strangers. In the house on Grey Street there were times when she was literally ‘sick with shyness’, she confessed once. She was intensely sensitive, too. Kiri often cried when she was taken to the cinema, the sight of violence or sometimes even a phrase threatening it could reduce her to floods of tears.
When she came to take stock of her early years later in life, a prisoner of an operatic diary planned years in advance and a fame by then extended from Gisborne to Glyndebourne, Kiri’s memories of her childhood were not dominated by memories of dresses or dolls’ houses, living room recitals or early radio stardom. ‘If I had to name one aspect of my early life in New Zealand it would be the aloneness of life there,’ she explained. ‘I was able to be alone and I still seek that, I suppose.’
Nell seemed determined to knock her reticence out of her. Kiri’s earliest motivation for singing in public was the sheer terror with which she viewed her mother. ‘She frightened me into singing,’ she said once. When she threatened rebellion Nell’s words were as predictable as they were menacing. ‘I’ll speak to you when everyone goes,’ she would promise.
Few who watched the effervescent young prodigy singing would have believed it. ‘I was not an extroverted child. You have to learn to be extroverted,’ she lamented later.
Gradually, however, Nell’s bullying began to transform her. Soon Kiri was demonstrating the first, formative hints of self-confidence. She went on to one of her regular radio shows nursing a bad cold. When she hit a false note she heard a voice laughing. It might have been a moment of crushing importance, yet Kiri took it in her stride. ‘It was my first sobering experience of somebody being jealous,’ she said later.
The cold was a far from rare event. The harsh New Zealand winters brought a succession of colds and flus with them. For all the robustness of life at Gisborne and Hatepe, Kiri’s health was a constant worry to Nell. ‘I was very sickly,’ she once confessed. Her sports-loving father had encouraged her to take up some of his favourite pastimes to improve her health. Archery had been suggested as a good exercise to strengthen her lungs. Under Tom’s watchful eye, she would later learn to play golf, too.
It was around the time of her radio debut that Kiri was diagnosed as having ‘a touch of TB’. With the medical establishment conducting a love affair with the relatively new science of X-rays, Kiri’s young body was repeatedly ‘zapped’, without any real consideration of the long-term consequences.
Asked years later about her mother’s past, Kiri replied that Nell had been deserted by her first husband. ‘Or maybe she left him, I’m not too sure,’ she added hastily. In truth Kiri knew precious little about her mother’s turbulent background. As a seemingly strict Catholic there can be little doubt first that Nell’s shame would have been intense and lasting and secondly that her pain remained confined to the confession box. She certainly never shared its details with her adopted daughter. ‘My mother was rather secretive about that part of her life. It’s something I didn’t delve into,’ is all Kiri has confided in the years since.
Nell’s children from her first marriage provided the most positive link with the past. Stan, on whom Nell doted, had served in the army during World War II but had returned to run a poultry farm with his wife Pat in Gisborne. Nola had married Tom Webster, a local farmer, and lived at Patutahi on the outskirts of town. A one-year-old Kiri had been a flower girl at the Websters’ wedding in Gisborne in 1945. Nola had been unable to have children and had adopted a daughter, Judy. By 1954, however, Nola’s marital fortunes were mirroring those of her mother. Her marriage to Tom in ruins, she and Judy arrived on the guesthouse doorstep. Mother and daughter would become a permanent fixture at Grey Street.
Kiri quickly discovered she had much more in common with her five-year-old niece than she did with her grown-up half-sister. In the years that followed, Judy became the closest thing to a sister Kiri would know. Like Kiri, Judy knew she was adopted. Nola had told her she had found her in a shop window in Gisborne.
‘Every time we went into Gisborne to the shops I would have her going all round the streets looking for this bloody shop so that she could get all my brothers and sisters that she left behind in the window. I wanted them all with me. And of course she had to play along with it,’ recalled Judy. Inevitably the knowledge bound the two closer.
Judy recalls how at a ‘do’ once, Kiri had joked about the fact that they were sisters. ‘No we’re not,’ Judy had told her.
‘Yes we are, we are all adopted.’
Kiri’s loneliness as an only child seems to have been a source of concern to Tom and Nell. There was frequent talk of Kiri’s ‘brother’ joining the family, according to Judy.
‘Apparently there was meant to be a brother. I always remember it being talked about that Nana wanted to adopt him as well,’ she remembered. All Judy – and her ‘sister’ – knew of Kiri’s real mother was that she was ‘a blonde lady’ who lived somewhere on the coast of the East Cape.
To Judy, Grey Street seemed more like a hotel than a home. Uncle Dan still lived upstairs and appeared to act as an unpaid nanny for Kiri when Nell and Tom were not around. ‘Come up to my office,’ he used to joke with Kiri when she was alone in the house. Kiri recalled once how ‘Danny’ would fill his pockets with stolen bread rolls from a bakery across the road. ‘I used to have one for breakfast every morning. He used to pull out the middle and I’d eat the middle and he’d eat the outside,’ she said.
‘He used to give Kiri and I handfuls of peppermints,’ Judy recalled. ‘As long as we didn’t tell Nell.’
Judy quickly discovered that her ‘Nana’s’ authority was absolute and her temper truly volcanic. ‘When she lost it, we didn’t ask “How high?”, we asked “Excuse me, when can we come down?”,’ she smiled. Yet, as far as Judy was concerned, beneath her teak-hard exterior beat a generous and genuinely loving heart. ‘She was tough, but she had a soft side,’ she said.
Judy loved nothing more than to hear Nell play the piano. ‘Kiri and I would always be on at her after school to play. She would ask: “Have you finished what you were meant to do for school?” If we said yes, she would play.’ ‘Greensleeves’ was a favourite which Kiri too could play well.
A less musical child, Judy had shown a talent for poetry reading instead. A year or so after Judy’s arrival in Grey Street, Nell persuaded the radio station to showcase the two girls as a double act. Judy’s radio career was short-lived, however. ‘Kiri had to sing and I had to read a poem,’ recalled Judy. ‘Kiri did her piece fine, no problem, but I forgot the words and said “Oh shit”,’ she smiled. ‘Well, of course, it was a live show and it went out clear as a bell to all of Gisborne. I think Kiri started to laugh which didn’t help. That was the start and finish of my broadcasting career all in one night.’
Nell waited until Judy was back at Grey Street before unleashing her anger. ‘I remember getting a scolding for that,’ she said.
For all her ferocity, Nell was vulnerable to bouts of ill health. She had been overweight for years and suffered from related illnesses and general tiredness. She spent much of her time confined to her bedroom where she would listen to the radio, read music magazines and summon Tom and the children to talk to her. ‘She didn’t move around that much,’ Kiri explained once. ‘She liked to lie in bed and hold court.’ Kiri and Judy would lie on her bed with her listening to her read stories from the imported American Post magazine. ‘She was a big lady. She had these big arms we used to push up and use as pillows. I can remember her lying on the bed with me and Kiri either side, tucked up on her arms while she lay there reading the story of the Incredible Journey out of this magazine,’ Judy said. ‘She read the whole thing, from start to finish. We weren’t leaving until we found out what happened to these dogs and the cat.’
In the miniature fiefdom that was Nell’s home, the kitchen was the place where she wielded her ultimate power. ‘She was an absolutely brilliant cook, always cooking scones or something,’ recalled Judy. ‘She filled up jars and tins with all sorts of things, making her own jams and pickles.’ The sublime smells that wafted out on to Grey Street seem to have made it a magnet for friends, neighbours and passers-by. ‘When people bowled in, it was “Have a cup of tea.” If somebody wandered in off the street she would cook for them as well.’
In the kitchen, Kiri and Judy were Nell’s chief underlings. ‘She was like a chef. She made the mess and Kiri and me cleared up,’ recalled Judy. The two girls spent much of their time bickering over who would wash and who would dry. ‘Kiri and me fought constantly over that because if you washed you had to do the benches and the stove as well.’
The most intense arguments were reserved for the nights when Nell served mashed potato. ‘She used to make it in big old aluminium pots. They weren’t soaked of course, so the potato stuck to the sides like concrete.’ As far as the girls were concerned, the highlight of the year would be the family’s annual Christmas trip to the cabin at Hatepe on the shores of Lake Taupo. The cabin allowed Tom to indulge his twin passions – tranquillity and trout fishing. For Kiri, too, Hatepe provided some of the earliest and most magical moments of her early life. She recalled once the excitement of catching her first fish with Tom.
The fact that the house had no electricity only added to its enchantment somehow. ‘There was no power. We would drive up from Gisborne and my grandfather would get out the paraffin lamps from the shed,’ recalls Judy. ‘It was a huge big event down there. Stan and Pat stayed on the poultry farm because they had to work but there was my grandparents, mum, Kiri and all the locals would pile in too.
‘Christmas in those days was like a fairy tale for us and I always remember it as a happy time. Kiri and me used to go into the woods looking for big red toadstools. Sometimes we would sit in the trees very quietly, keeping very still, and wait for the fairies to come,’ she says. Kiri’s love of the open spaces of Lake Taupo had been inherited from her shy, self-contained father.
‘Daddy’ could not have presented a quieter, kinder contrast to the gregarious Nell. When she had the house filled with guests, Tom would blend into the background, a benign, watchful influence. ‘Tom was always there but he was always very quiet,’ recalled Judy. ‘If there was a big pile of people he would be stuck in the corner with his glass of ginger ale.’
Tom’s even temper was the stuff of legend within the family. Judy recalls only seeing him lose his composure once. ‘He was working on a car motor and said “bugger” when he hit his thumb with a spanner,’ she laughed. His love of speed seems to have been his only rebellious outlet. While Nell slept on the drive to Taupo the girls would encourage him to put his foot down on the treacherous, twisting inland roads west of Gisborne. ‘He used to drive like Stirling Moss. He was a brilliant driver, fast but not dangerous,’ recalled Judy. ‘My grandmother would doze off and his foot would go down and away we’d go. When she woke she’d bark: “Slow down, Tom, slow down!” It was hysterical. He’d slow right down and keep looking over at her until she nodded off again and then he’d roar off again. She’d wake up, shout at him, and on it went. Every trip was like that.’
The young Kiri lived for the mornings when Tom would wake her with a gentle kiss at 5 a.m. as he left for work. She would slip out into the dawn and spend the day sitting in the cab of his truck. At Taupo she would sit on the edge of the lake in silence as he fished for trout or simply took in the scene. Sometimes father and daughter would sleep out under the stars, ‘to be there when the fish rose in the morning’.
‘What was wonderful about him was you didn’t have to talk,’ she said later. ‘We used to look at the lake and we’d say nothing. For hours. That was the best part.’
For Kiri, such serenity was in increasingly short supply back at Grey Street. By the time Judy and Nola moved in, the evening get-togethers had taken on the air of a showcase for Nell’s prodigious discovery. If the gathering was confined to the immediate family, Nell would command the stage as usual. If there were visitors present, however, there was only one star. ‘Kiri was the big thing,’ said Judy. ‘Always, whenever anybody came around, I would have to sing,’ Kiri confessed later. ‘I felt at the time like a performing monkey.’
For large parts of her life, Nell had known little more than disappointment and disillusionment. With Tom she had, at last, found security. In Kiri, however, she glimpsed an opportunity for something more. She would not be the first mother to find her life revitalised and ultimately taken over by the vicarious thrill of her child’s success. Few stage mothers would drive their daughters from such unpromising beginnings to such unthinkable heights, however. By Kiri’s twelfth birthday, Nell’s ambition for her daughter had already far outgrown Grey Street and Gisborne.
Lying on her bed upstairs, Nell would listen avidly to the many musical competitions broadcast on the radio at the time. The contests had proliferated all over New Zealand and Australia. In 1956 the Mobil Petroleum Company had added to their credibility and popularity by sponsoring the most prestigious of New Zealand’s domestic contests, the biennial competition from then on known as the Mobil Song Quest.
The competition had produced its share of stars within New Zealand, none greater than the Auckland nun widely regarded as the finest teacher in the country. Sister Mary Leo had been born Kathleen Agnes Niccol, the eldest child of a respectable Auckland shipping clerk and his wife Agnes. In later life, she was mysterious about her exact birthdate in April 1895, as it fell only five months after her devoutly Catholic parents’ wedding. Kathleen Niccol became a schoolteacher and budding singer before, at the age of twenty-eight, she walked into the sanctuary of St Mary’s Convent in Auckland and the Order of the Sisters of Mercy. She never left.
A college had first been established at the convent in 1929. Two decades later, in 1949, Sister Mary Leo persuaded the Order to allow her to establish her own independent, non-denominational music school within the St Mary’s grounds. While she concentrated on voice coaching, four other nuns were enlisted to teach piano, violin, cello and organ. Each year as many as 200 aspiring musicians from all faiths and all corners of New Zealand received their education there. In the aftermath of the war, Sister Mary Leo’s pupils had begun to dominate the lucrative singing competitions. It had been her success with an emotionally frail but extraordinarily gifted singer, Mina Foley, that had transformed her into a national celebrity.
An orphan, Foley had begun singing as an alto in the St Mary’s Choir at the age of thirteen. At sixteen, encouraged by Sister Mary Leo, she had won the prestigious John Court Memorial Aria in Auckland. From there she went on to win almost every domestic singing competition. Her successes turned Foley and her teacher into stars. Crowds of well-wishers and pressmen followed them to their triumphs. When, in 1950, they travelled to Australia for the most lucrative of all the Antipodean prizes, the Melbourne Sun Aria competition, most of New Zealand tuned in on the radio.
Foley’s freakish range allowed her voice to reach across three and a half octaves. She had already been dubbed the ‘Voice of the Century’ by the New Zealand media. By 1951, thanks largely to a scholarship from the British Council, the singer had been accepted as a pupil of Toti Del Monte in Italy.
When Nell discovered that Foley was due to visit Gisborne before leaving for Europe, she wasted no time in booking two tickets for the concert at the Regent Theatre. If she had hoped the trip would inspire Kiri she was soon rewarded. Kiri still recalled the impact of the moment thirty years later. She remembered how Foley had taken to the stage in a wonderful gown, ‘all in green net, with off-the-shoulder puffed sleeves and sparkling jewellery everywhere. I remember it so vividly. She used to wear her hair pulled back with one ringlet trailing forward over her shoulder. It was the most awful style but at the time I thought it was marvellous.’