Kiri: Her Unsung Story

‘The Nun’s Chorus’

With the proceeds from the sales of Grey Street and Tom’s truck company, Nell was able to put a sizeable deposit down on a new home in the Auckland suburb of Blockhouse Bay, about nine miles south of the city centre. The nine-year-old house at 22 Mitchell Street stood at the bottom of a steep drive overlooking the picturesque Manukau Harbour. Only a set of nearby electricity pylons marred the splendour of the view.

At £5,500 the house was double the average house price in the area. Fortunately Nell had made a healthy profit on the Grey Street house which she had sold to a Wellington hotelier for £6,000, at a profit of £4,600 in twelve years. Tom soon averted any future financial crises when he landed a contract installing underground petrol tanks for the giant Caltex company. Judy was at first put into a boarding school by Nola. It was only after smuggling out a letter expressing her unhappiness to her father in Gisborne that she was able to join Kiri at Avondale Convent Primary school, a short bus ride away from Blockhouse Bay.

To ease her admission there, and at St Mary’s where Nell intended enrolling her at the age of fourteen, Kiri had by now been confirmed. Immaculate and angelic in her white lace gown and veil, Kiri smiled sweetly for the family photographs in the spring of 1956. Yet, inside, she remained deeply unhappy at the upheaval she had been forced to undergo.

Kiri had been a poor student at St Joseph’s in Gisborne and showed even less interest in her studies at Avondale, where she steadfastly refused to fit in. ‘It was a child’s reaction to something new,’ she admitted later. ‘I hated every minute of it – and they hated me.’

Kiri’s unhappiness was understandable given the physical abuse she received at the hands of her new teachers. She recounted, years later, how her music teacher at Avondale repeatedly pulled at the flowing tresses she had been so proud of as a young girl in Gisborne. ‘I had lovely long black hair and she used to grab it by the roots and rock me from side to side,’ she said. ‘I used to work really hard for her because I was so frightened, but it didn’t change her behaviour.’

Eventually Kiri was driven to drastic measures. ‘I got so desperate that I persuaded my mother to let me have all my hair cut off, and I mean right off, real punk rock style,’ she said. ‘It looked awful, but even then the teacher managed to get hold of it.’

Kiri would constantly ask her mother to ‘lop off’ her hair in her time at Avondale. Her peculiar look only deepened the self-consciousness that was already taking root. Even before her decision to crop her hair short, Kiri’s sturdy, strong-boned features had always made her look gawky and boyish. She would never rid herself of the pubescent unhappiness she began to feel over her shape and size. ‘There is nothing that I like about myself. When I look at myself I see thousands of flaws from top to bottom,’ she said later in life. She particularly hated the heavy frame and legs bequeathed to her by her Maori father. ‘I have a very solid body – when you look at me you’d hardly get the impression that I couldn’t handle life,’ she complained once. ‘I hardly look delicate, do I?’ As she entered her adolescence, she seemed content living up to her tomboy reputation.

Away from the tortures of Avondale, Kiri remained happiest water-skiing, swimming or sailing on the waters of Blockhouse Bay, playing golf at the nearby Titirangi Club or practising archery up on One Tree Hill with her father.

In the company of the equally boisterous Judy, she frequently ran riot. Kiri and Judy’s earliest neighbourhood friends were the five Hanson boys, brothers who also lived on Mitchell Street. Their friendship blossomed from the most unpromising of beginnings.

According to Judy, she and Kiri would sometimes get involved in fights on their way home from Avondale. ‘We used to scrap on the bus,’ Judy recalled. As a convoy of buses dropped off their passengers on Mitchell Street one day, Judy had begun fighting with one of the younger Hansons, Mark. As the fight had spilled out on to the street, Kiri and Mark’s brother Andrew had jumped off their respective buses to join in. ‘It was all on. The four of us were having a full-on blue [fight],’ recalled Judy. By the time the four-way contest had progressed to its climax, onlookers were left in little doubt who had emerged victorious. One of the Hansons had been carrying an umbrella. ‘He ended up with the thing wrapped around his neck,’ smiled Judy.

Kiri and Judy inflicted sufficient damage for the boys’ mother Betty to berate Nell over the telephone. ‘It was then we found out there were another three of them. From then they became life long friends,’ recalled Judy.

Publicly Nell defended her headstrong daughter to the hilt. In private, however, such disappointments were only widening the distance between mother and daughter. Years later, a student of the greater psychological insight of another age, Kiri sympathised with the problems Nell must have had to contend with. ‘It was tough for my mother, because at that time people were never told that kids become terrorists at twelve and stay that way until they’re eighteen,’ she said. ‘And if you try to cover up and pretend everything’s OK, the trouble you’ve swept away under the carpet will come back at you – twice as hard.’

On another occasion she put it even more simply. ‘She didn’t understand me and I didn’t understand her.’

There were times when Nell’s frustration at Kiri boiled over into rage. On one occasion it fell to Judy to save her from being flailed by Nell with Tom’s leather belt. ‘Nana didn’t hit her much, and only for specific things,’ she recollected. ‘It wasn’t unfair, but I remember defending her when she was accused of doing something wrong and she was going to get a belt on the backside.

‘I grabbed uncle Tom’s belt and ran off with it. Then I got his other belts from the bedroom and hid them behind the wardrobe – where they stayed for years. In fact Tom ended up with a piece of garden twine holding up his trousers.’

Such moments only served to tighten the conspiratorial bond between the two ‘sisters’. Judy and Kiri spent much of their adolescent lives in defiance of Nell’s tyranny. They would spend evenings running up their own rough and ready clothes on Nell’s sewing machine. It was hardly haute couture. The cut and colour co-ordination left much to be desired. ‘If you had yellow material and green cotton then too bad,’ said Judy. Nell loathed seeing her girls, Kiri in particular, looking scruffy and frequently flew off the handle at the sight of their latest piece of crude needlecraft. ‘She would go crazy, screaming, “What are you doing? You do that properly or not at all!” She used to pull the things apart so the job could be done properly.’

Nell’s musical ambitions for her daughter provided the most frequent source of friction. Like Grey Street before it, the house at Mitchell Street quickly become a magnet for all manner of visitors. Nell had continued to coach Kiri at home and wheeled her out at every opportunity when entertaining guests. Whether or not Kiri complied or complained depended on her mood. ‘There were times when she would resent it, when she would feel like a prize pig,’ recalled Judy. ‘But there were others when she was happy as a sandboy. Kiri herself liked to sing.’

At times Kiri and Judy seemed to be fighting a constant war on Nell’s nerves. The menagerie of pets that had begun to accumulate at Mitchell Street provided another battleground. The by now aged black cat William had made the journey from Gisborne. Kettle had been replaced by another black cat called Two-Ten. ‘From the cost of having it neutered by the vet,’ said Judy. Tom had also bought a cocker spaniel called Whisky. Soon they were joined by a rabbit that Tom had found at work, and which Judy and Kiri named Peter.

‘My grandfather absolutely adored Peter,’ recalled Judy. ‘Peter followed Tom everywhere.’ Tom, Kiri and Judy spent much of their time protecting Peter from the predatory instincts of Two-Ten. ‘Two-Ten used to want to kill this rabbit and the rabbit used to fly up and sit by my grandfather’s leg.’

Nell posed almost as great a danger. ‘We had this green carpet in the lounge and Peter started to eat holes in it,’ said Judy. ‘Kiri and I kept moving the furniture over the holes but eventually Nana found out and the rabbit was in big trouble.’

Almost half a century later, a mother of five herself, Judy cannot condemn Nell’s overbearing behaviour towards Kiri. ‘My grandmother was just very proud of her,’ she said. The more she heard of Kiri’s confident, commanding voice, the more Nell was convinced her decision to move the family to Auckland had been justified. Her conviction only deepened in the summer of 1958 as Kiri finally began making the daily bus trip across Auckland to the most celebrated music school, and the most feted singing teacher, in New Zealand.

Shortly after her fourteenth birthday, dressed in her new, navy-blue uniform, Kiri became one of the 500 or so girls entrusted to the care of the Order of the Sisters of Mercy at the Convent of St Mary. The Order’s nuns liked to claim that one in every four of their pupils remained with them for life. Kiri would never be a candidate for holy orders. Yet in her own way she would keep faith with St Mary’s and its principles as devotedly as any nun. ‘The poetry of earth is never dead. And the music of St Mary’s never really sleeps,’ read a two-line verse in the 1958 St Mary’s Annual, summing up the alternative gospel for which the Order were rightfully famous. Kiri would embrace it like no other pupil in the hundred-year history of the college.

The Order of the Sisters of Mercy had arrived in Auckland from Ireland around 1850. They had erected an elegant, wooden church on a hilltop overlooking the middle-class suburb of Ponsonby soon afterwards. By now the striking, Spanish-style buildings erected on the site dominated the skyline. However, it had been the achievements of Sister Mary Leo that had lifted its profile not just in Auckland but all over New Zealand.

As Kiri arrived at St Mary’s the achievements of the teacher’s latest crop of prodigies filled the pages of St Mary’s Annual. Lengthy reports described the successes of Mary O’Brien, the soprano who had won that year’s John Court Memorial Aria in Auckland, and the former pupil Betty Hellawell who had sung that year in Boris Godunov opposite Boris Christoff at Covent Garden. Artistic portraits of St Mary’s prize-winning choirs and orchestras, star instrumentalists and singers seemed to feature on every page.

The main musical event of March 1958 had been a gala concert held inside the college chapel in aid of the Hard of Hearing League. The event would have offered the young Kiri her first glimpse of the legendary Sister Mary Leo and her stable of stars. Afterwards the Archbishop of Auckland, James Liston, addressed the audience. His words were directed particularly at St Mary’s prized performers. ‘Music is a wonderful gift which God has bestowed on you to give pleasure to others,’ he said. As she settled into college life, however, Kiri found her own gifts overlooked.

The Sisters of Mercy lived a less rigid existence than other orders within the Catholic Church. Its nuns were among the first in New Zealand permitted to wear the looser, less stifling ‘modern’ habit. Yet, as she settled into the rhythms and rituals of college life, her days dictated by the muffled toll of the church’s bells and their seemingly endless calls to prayer, Kiri could not help but absorb the powerful influence of her surroundings. The faith she discovered there would never desert her. Somehow her belief in God filled the void she still felt when she thought about her uncertain past. ‘I was brought up a Catholic and I know there is a God,’ she said once. ‘You need to believe it when you’ve been given a pretty sticky start, being adopted – as I was – by a couple who didn’t have very much. Sometimes I feel strongly that there is somebody looking after me personally. It gives me an extra strength.’

Kiri joined a third-form class led by an Irish nun, Sister Mary Leila. For the first year her timetable was dominated by English, Arithmetic, Social Studies, Art, Sport, School Singing and, naturally, Christian Doctrine.

Under St Mary’s ‘parental preference’ system, however, Nell and Tom were soon required to chose the direction Kiri would take for the remainder of her two years there. The choice was a simple one – Kiri could take the academic path, learning languages and preparing for New Zealand’s equivalent to the British O level, ‘school certificate’, or else opt for the ‘commercial’ curriculum in which girls were prepared for business college or secretarial jobs with classes in typing, shorthand and book-keeping.

Kiri, a self-confessed non-academic, remained an underwhelming performer in the classroom. If Kiri shone anywhere during her early months at St Mary’s it was as a sportswoman. In 1958 Kiri made her first noteworthy appearance in the school annual not as a singer but dressed in a gymslip and plimsolls as a member of the ‘Post Primary C’ basketball team. The accompanying report described her as ‘the mainstay of the team’.

In later life she blamed her lack of academic progress on the demands of her musical education. In a 1990 television profile, for instance, she told interviewer Melvyn Bragg, ‘I think my formal education suffered because I would be trying to sort of study … and more often than not I was pulled out in the middle of the class to have another singing lesson or rehearse with the choir and while I was doing half these subjects I never ever got a full lesson done.’

Later she added, ‘Sister Mary Leo enabled me to miss classes so that I could study music. I can now see that I might have been good at many subjects – languages, arts and crafts – which I never got the chance to study. I never received the formal education my parents sent me to school for.’

Nuns who remember Kiri are confused by these accounts, however. ‘There’s some misunderstanding there, maybe,’ said Sister Mercienne, the college archivist. She explained that throughout Kiri’s time at the school, she was not seen as exceptional and was not treated any differently from any other pupil. That meant that her English and arithmetic lessons, and of course Christian Doctrine, were sacrosanct, and that if Sister Leo had chosen to give Kiri any extra tuition it would only have been with the agreement of her class teacher. The truth seems to be that Kiri’s academic ambitions were ultimately frustrated not by Sister Mary Leo’s demands but by her own mother’s grasp of the situation.

As decision time arrived, without much deliberation Nell told the school principal to stream her daughter in the commercial class. To Nell’s frustration, Kiri had arrived at St Mary’s to be told that Sister Mary Leo still refused to teach her personally. With 200 mature pupils attached to her music college and only a limited number of places available to girls from the school itself, Sister Mary Leo insisted that all fourteen- to sixteen-year-old singing pupils were also proficient at the piano. Despite Nell’s early efforts to teach her, Kiri had failed to make the grade required. It took Sister Mary Leo’s accompanist to spot the latent talent in the Order’s midsts.

‘Kiri was pestering Mary Leo for singing lessons but Sister wouldn’t teach anyone who couldn’t play the piano so she kept fobbing her off,’ recalled one of the members of the present day Order, Sister Dora, at the time one of the youngest teachers within the music school. Kiri was forced to take lessons with the college’s keyboard specialist, Sister Francis Xavier. While Sister Mary Leo revelled in the spotlight, her colleague Sister Xavier was so painfully shy she rarely revealed more than the tip of her nose from behind her wimple in photographs. She was every bit as canny a judge of musical talent as her colleague, however. ‘Kiri went to Sister Francis Xavier for piano lessons but still kept on and on about singing, so she gave her some singing exercises just to keep her quiet,’ recalled Sister Dora.

The college pianist was immediately struck by the beautiful clarity of Kiri’s voice and raised the subject of her joining the stable of singers with Sister Mary Leo. Sister Francis’s influence was considerable. Away from the music room she and Sister Mary Leo would share feasts of sweets and ice cream and it was perhaps during one of these that the college pianist pleaded Kiri’s cause. ‘She noticed there was something terrific in the voice and talked to Mary Leo about her,’ recalled Sister Dora.

At first Sister Mary Leo remained stubbornly disinterested. ‘She kept urging her to have a listen and eventually she did. From then on Kiri never looked back.’

In the years that followed, even the most reserved member of the Order could not resist the odd gentle boast. ‘Sister Francis Xavier always used to joke with us saying, “I was the one who discovered Kiri”,’ said Sister Dora.

To her contemporaries, Kiri seemed one of the more carefree spirits at St Mary’s. ‘I have fond memories of Kiri sliding down the banisters,’ recalled one classmate from Commercial IV, Elsa Grubisa, now Vujnovich. Yet, for all her outward exuberance, Kiri was, with good cause, intimidated and a little awestruck as she finally underwent her first encounters with her formidable new teacher.

Sister Mary Leo taught in a light, airy, L-shaped room on the first floor of her music school, a two-storey building in the St Mary’s grounds a short walk from the Convent and the main college. With its miniature brass busts of Schubert and Wagner and framed photographs of former pupils, the room was a shrine to her second religion. Sheet music was piled neatly in almost every alcove. The room was equipped with a modern, reel-to-reel tape recorder and a radiogram. The floor was dominated by a highly polished grand piano. To a fourteen-year-old, it seemed an utterly intimidating place. Sister Mary Leo’s reputation for toughness only added to it. She often began work after early morning prayers at 8 a.m., hardly pausing for breakfast, and continued teaching long into the evenings. She expected the same dedication from her pupils and was intolerant of any signs of immaturity. Nervousness, for instance, had no place in her music room. ‘She hadn’t much time for nerves. She’d just tell us to pull ourselves together and stop that nonsense,’ recalled Sister Patricia, another of Sister Mary Leo’s former pupils. The greatest sin a pupil could commit was to turn up underprepared. Sister Mary Leo would expect an apology before the lesson could continue.

‘With Sister Mary Leo you had to be totally committed to your singing. She would not tolerate anything but total commitment,’ said another pupil of the time, Diana Stuart.

For those who did not match up to her exacting standards, the punishments were severe. For all her air of saintliness, Sister Mary Leo possessed a withering tongue. ‘There wouldn’t be a pupil of Sister Mary Leo’s that she hasn’t had in tears,’ said Gillian Redstone, another contemporary of Kiri’s at St Mary’s. ‘I always remember her telling me I had expressionless eyes, like a cow’s,’ recalls Elsa Grubisa. ‘That was her style. You had to accept what was being said to you and either shape up or ship out.’

Having been accepted as one of her personal students, Kiri was called to sing with Sister Mary Leo twice a week. Her first impressions, she said later, were that Sister Mary Leo ‘seemed enormously old to me, even then’. As she overcame her fear, the knowledge that she had relinquished all to devote herself to God only deepened the respect she demanded. ‘She was first of all a nun and a very devout Catholic. When I was singing, wherever I would go I would always have to go into the church,’ Kiri recalled later in life. Her knowledge and undoubted love for her music was quietly inspiring. ‘I think she was sometimes torn between the two because the music sometimes took over and God had to take a small backseat. But she was a very dedicated person and that’s, I think, why I liked being taught by her because she had no other interests, it was just music and God.’

As a tutor, she could not have presented a starker contrast to Kiri’s mother. At home she had been showered with praise by her family and their house guests. She soon discovered Sister Mary Leo operated according to different principles. In her classes conversation was kept to a minimum. Sister Mary Leo often spent an entire lesson scribbling notes to herself. ‘She never stopped writing in her notebook,’ said Diana Stuart. ‘She would make copious notes but she never told you what she was writing.’ If a passage was sung to her liking she would say ‘good’ or ‘fine’.

‘She was not a great one for compliments,’ Kiri said once. Yet as she began working with Kiri, Sister Mary Leo quickly understood why Sister Francis Xavier had recommended she take on her discovery. Her only disappointment was that Kiri’s raw yet powerful voice had been trained to sing undemanding material from musicals; what Sister Leo later rather loftily referred to as ‘music of an essentially trivial kind’. During her first weeks with Sister Mary Leo, Kiri sang nothing more taxing than folk songs.

In the meantime she set about preparing Kiri for more serious music. Sister Mary Leo’s teaching methods bordered on the bizarre. Kiri found herself joining other girls in curious physical exercises designed to improve her physical ability to project her voice. ‘She got these bees in her bonnet. She’d have this new idea or she’d hear or read something and we’d be on that for a week,’ recalled another student, Hannah Tatana. ‘There was singing with a pencil in your mouth which was supposed to loosen your throat but tightened your jaw. Then another time she’d read somewhere about Caruso pushing a grand piano two inches with the expansion of his diaphragm and we had to do that.’