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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.’
Kiri was transfixed by Foley’s voice. ‘She sang and sang and I never for one moment stopped gazing at her. I think it was then that my mother realised I was going to concentrate on music and nothing else.’ In the wake of the Foley concert, Nell’s dreams began to solidify. By the beginning of 1956 she was ready to swing into action.
For all its historic importance, the East Cape was far from the hub of New Zealand life. In the 1950s and sixties it was regarded as one of the least dynamic and most isolated regions of New Zealand. Nell knew that a move north to Auckland was vital if Kiri was to make any progress. Nell began by telephoning St Mary’s in Auckland and asking to be put directly through to its most celebrated teacher. It was to be the first of many memorable confrontations between the irresistible force that was Nell Te Kanawa and the immovable object that was Sister Mary Leo.
‘I have a daughter who sings very well,’ Nell announced, matter of factly. ‘Will you take her on?’
Sotto voce, Sister Mary Leo explained that, as a pupil of a school other than St Mary’s, Kiri was ineligible for her classes until she was eighteen. In other words, no, she could not.
Nell was in no mind to be deterred by such a rejection, however. She began her efforts to persuade Tom that the family, including Kiri, Nola and Judy, should move to Auckland and that Kiri should be installed at St Mary’s. She had clearly missed her true vocation as a saleswoman. Soon Tom had not only agreed to put the Grey Street house up for auction, but to sell his business as well.
Kiri, however, could not share her mother’s enthusiasm for the move. Grey Street had provided a happy home. From Uncle Dan to the students with whom she had forged lasting friendships in the town, its cast of characters represented a loving and rather extraordinary extended family. Now she was being forced to leave them. Her protests were pointless, however. The move to Auckland was made shortly after Kiri celebrated what she later remembered as a sad and solemn twelfth birthday in March, 1956. ‘It was pretty horrendous,’ she came to say. ‘All the books tell you that you should never change a child at that age. I had left my beautiful home, a dear old man who was my nanny, and missed my “family”.’
Given the events that had led her to Grey Street a dozen years earlier, there was an added cruelty to the enforced farewells. It would only be later in life that she came to understand the significance of what had happened to her. ‘I basically lost my family when I lost that house,’ she would say.
‘The Nun’s Chorus’ (#ulink_26a48bba-73b2-5b24-aa67-e99056404fb0)
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.’
The Caruso exercise was preferable to another recalled by Gillian Redstone. ‘One method she used to teach us to control breathing involved Sister’s big old reel to reel tape recorder, a very heavy machine in a case,’ she said. ‘We had to lie on the floor with the tape recorder stuck on top of the diaphragm and then lift it with our breathing for a few minutes. It wasn’t on long enough for us to go purple, but it was certainly quite a lesson.’
Such was her pupils’ faith in their teacher’s near divinity, no one ever protested at the tortures they were put through. ‘We didn’t dare question it at the time. And we believed in her, that she was doing the right thing,’ said Redstone. Like every other pupil, Redstone knew the potential cost of dissent. There was too much to lose.
Sister Mary Leo controlled her singers with an almost absolutist power. Her word, and her word alone, dictated the speed with which they progressed up the St Mary’s ladder. If a girl had talent, Sister Mary would invite her first to join the St Mary’s Choir. If she shone there she would be encouraged to sing the occasional solo at the choir’s frequent public and charity appearances. The ultimate accolade was to be invited to represent St Mary’s – and therefore Sister Mary Leo herself – in one of the highly competitive singing contests. A girl only had to look at the portraits of Mary O’Brien and Mina Foley to imagine what might lie ahead from there. Talent and success were not necessarily related. It was no different in the rarefied world of St Mary’s. Sister Mary Leo alone ordained the chosen ones. It paid to stay on her side.
Kiri’s late start did little to inhibit her rapid progress through the ranks. She was quickly installed as a member of the St Mary’s Choir. In keeping with the traditions on which their Order was founded, the nuns visited Auckland’s less privileged, performing at hospitals, mental institutions and prisons.
Kiri sang at church and charity events all over Auckland. Sister Mary Leo also added her to the list of girls recommended for engagements in and around Auckland society. The christening, wedding and funeral – ‘hatches, matches and dispatches’ – circuit could provide a girl with a tidy supplementary income. Booking agents invariably had to go through Sister Mary Leo, who insisted any flowers a girl was given be donated to the St Mary’s altar. She was motivated less by money than control, and although she did charge her private students the going market rate of a guinea an hour, brown envelopes stuffed full of the cash fees collected from her singers would gather in small piles round her music room. Kiri’s years as a ‘performing monkey’ at home stood her in good stead. Soon she was one of the most assured performers at the school. Tom bought her a secondhand Standard Ten as a fifteenth birthday present. The car was soon clocking up the miles as Kiri spent more and more time shuttling to and from her various engagements.
If the compliments were in short supply in Kiri’s presence, Sister Mary Leo was soon leaving few in any doubt that she sensed St Mary’s had an important new discovery. Elsa Grubisa recalls that she outshone Kiri in a singing exam carried out by an English examiner, a Mr Spinks. ‘He actually gave me a better score than Kiri. But Sister Mary Leo made no bones about telling me that she didn’t know what the examiner was thinking about and I had no business scoring better than Kiri,’ she remembered. The moment confirmed two suspicions that had been forming in Grubisa’s mind. Personally she no longer had any interest in subjecting herself to Sister Mary Leo’s authoritarian regime. ‘That was it for me. I gave up after that,’ she said. She also sensed St Mary’s once more had a star on its hands. ‘I think Sister Mary Leo realised from the beginning that she had someone a bit special in Kiri,’ she added.
Sister Mary Leo saw her role as more than a mere voice coach. She was a Mother Confessor and best friend, musical guardian and Svengali all rolled into one. ‘I suppose I mother the girls to a certain extent. I don’t just teach them singing, I am interested in their own lives,’ she said once. ‘To be able to get the best out of them one has to be a bit of a psychologist too. I don’t treat them all as peas in a pod. I try to understand them and realise that, like everyone else, they too have their problems.’
One day during her second year at St Mary’s, Kiri visited Sister Mary Leo’s room with a gift of handkerchiefs she had bought with a group of other girls. Sister Mary had invited her new discovery to sit down for a lengthy, intimate talk. Unlike most of the St Mary’s girls, Kiri had quickly overcome her fear of her mentor. ‘Kiri was confident and could communicate with her,’ recalled Elsa Grubisa. As she grew to understand her precocious new pupil, Sister Mary Leo had, in return, been ‘completely frank’ with Kiri. By now Sister Mary Leo recognised a gift as natural as anything she had encountered in her long career. She also understood how easily that talent could be squandered through indiscipline and over-confidence. ‘You have got a lot of ability, dear, and you’re going to have a lot of people giving you all the encouragement and praise in the world,’ she explained. She went on to explain why Kiri could not expect her to be anything other than her toughest taskmistress. ‘I’m going to be harder on you than anyone else, because it is better for you.’
Moments later, as she walked Kiri to the door, Leo revealed the real reason for her wanting their little tête-à-tête. ‘Now tell me, Kiri,’ she smiled. ‘Next term, would you like to go for competitions?’
At the dawn of the 1960s, with the exception of live commentaries on the All Blacks rugby test matches and the races of the Olympic middle-distance star Peter Snell, few radio programmes drew such avid audiences as the transmissions of the singing competitions that had by now proliferated all over New Zealand. Since the Mobil Petroleum Company had begun pouring sponsorship cash into the hugely popular Song Quest, so the smaller competitions held all over New Zealand became more popular and highly publicised. During the autumn and winter months provincial outposts like Tauranga and Te Awamutu, Te Aroha and Rotorua became the focus of intense interest among New Zealand’s music-loving public.
The aria contests helped many young singers develop into stars. Long player recordings of the winning competitors sold well. Recording contracts and overseas scholarships were commonplace for the feted few who made it on to the winner’s podium. Financially the rewards were considerable. The Mobil Song Quest first prize was £300. The purse at the most high profile of all Australasian contests, the Melbourne and Sydney Sun Arias, was £1,500, about double the average annual wage at the time. In short, the contests offered a stairway to stardom, a tantalising route to fame and fortune, in New Zealand terms at least. Perhaps most importantly, they offered New Zealanders an opportunity to overcome the inferiority complex they felt in comparison to the mother country, the ‘cultural cringe’ as Kiwis called it.
‘With rugby and horseracing, singing was the big thing in New Zealand at the time,’ recalled Diana Stuart. As a gifted soloist and cellist, Stuart was given a deeper than average insight into this competitive world. She often played in the orchestras accompanying the singing finalists. To the New Zealand public, the competitions seemed like genteel, elegant affairs contested between neatly groomed young ladies and gentlemen. The backstage reality was rather different. ‘The rivalry really was ferocious.’
Nowhere was the competition more intense than among the teachers themselves. Publicly Sister Mary Leo tut-tutted such petty jealousies. ‘I hate that competitive spirit,’ she told the New Zealand Weekly News once. ‘I tell all the girls: “Do your best. Don’t merely concentrate on winning, music is too beautiful, the voice is a gift they have been given, to give joy to other people.”’ The truth was no one hated losing more.
Sister Mary Leo’s main opposition invariably came from singers attached to a small group of rival teachers, the Drake family and Mary Pratt in Dunedin and a Madame Narev in Auckland. Her representatives were left in no doubt what was expected of them. ‘She would say things like: “I’m going to be very disappointed if you don’t do so and so,”’ recalled Diana Stuart. ‘She loathed losing.’
As Sister Mary Leo began preparing Kiri for her entry into this new world she quickly realised she had unearthed a natural born winner. Like every other Sister Leo girl Kiri found herself taught how to dress, pose and behave on stage.
‘She endeavoured to train them even in things like how to walk, how to look gracious, how to bow, how to accept applause,’ recalled Sister Mary Leo’s contemporary, Sister Mercienne, now the school’s archivist. ‘She would do her best to bring them to the point where they could make the most of themselves and stand up there like young queens and sing their hearts out.’
Perhaps Sister Mary Leo’s greatest gift, however, lay in her ability to teach girls to express their personalities in their singing. ‘She was not a flamboyant person herself, but she encouraged that in her singers because it is what you need on the stage. She was very good at drawing people out and getting them to express themselves,’ recalled Hannah Tatana.
Tatana had been educated at Queen Victoria’s, Auckland’s all Maori girls’ school, where she had come to the attention of Sister Mary Leo. By 1960, she was already being talked of as the first female classical star to emerge from the Maori population.
Tatana had first heard Kiri sing at a talent competition held at Taupo in the Christmas of 1960, where, with her brother, she had been asked to act as a judge. ‘Kiri sang “Ave Maria” and I was bowled over by her voice,’ she remembered.
Back at St Mary’s, she had taken a keen interest in her progress under Sister Mary Leo. ‘There was this wonderful sound that was new and so gorgeous and luscious that it gave the impression that with judicious choice of repertoire – which was something that Sister Mary Leo was good at – there was no limit to what she might achieve,’ she said.
As Kiri took her first tentative steps on to the competition circuit, her towering talent made an immediate impact. Kiri’s first important competition appearance came in her home city’s premier event, the Auckland Competitions, in 1960. She sang two songs, ‘When the Children Say Their Prayers’ and ‘Road to the Isles’, in the sixteen-year-old age group. She won with ease.
In March 1960, as Kiri celebrated her sixteenth birthday, her days within St Mary’s College itself were drawing to a close. By now she had been accepted for a year-long ATCL course at Auckland Business College. As far as Nell was concerned, her schooling there was subsidiary to her continuing education as a member of Sister Mary Leo’s 200-strong group of private, fee-paying students. Her Sisters at St Mary’s regarded Sister Mary Leo in much the same way Kiri’s family saw Nell Te Kanawa. ‘The other nuns quivered in her shadow,’ Kiri laughed later in life. To Kiri, her teacher was ‘a very grand lady – a “grande dame”. However, my mother was also a “grande dame”, who liked to command and demand everything so the two characters didn’t get on very well.’
Yet the two women had formed an alliance that was as formidable as it was unlikely. Nell had made no secret of her ambitions for Kiri. ‘It was mainly her mother’s wish and ambition on Kiri’s behalf which led her to devote herself chiefly to more serious music,’ Sister Mary Leo conceded later.
As Kiri continued her studies, however, she realised the financial cost of maintaining her embryonic career was considerable. The differing demands of the competitions and choir performances and her less formal wedding engagements required a well-stocked wardrobe. Resourceful as ever, Nell made a collection of full-length evening costumes, cocktail dresses and ballgowns. Her eyes were also eternally open to opportunities to acquire or borrow outfits that enhanced Kiri’s image. As Kiri reached the end of her studies at business college, emerging with an honours pass, Nell made it clear that she too would have to contribute to maintaining her lavish professional lifestyle. A succession of menial jobs followed, the first at the main telephone exchange in Auckland where Kiri began working from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. every day.
By May 1961 the Te Kanawa household was forced to find the money for the most glamorous addition yet to Kiri’s wardrobe. With a handful of other girls from St Mary’s, Kiri was invited to attend the highlight of the Catholic community’s social calendar, New Zealand’s equivalent to London’s debutantes’ ball.
For the girls of St Mary’s the event represented the romantic zenith of their adolescent social lives. ‘It was a big thing for us,’ recalled Gillian Redstone, who joined Kiri in walking the length of the Town Hall to meet the Archbishop of Auckland, James Liston, that night. ‘We all looked forward to reaching the age of seventeen when we could actually be presented.’
Kiri was one of the undoubted belles of the ball afterwards. The tomboy was rapidly metamorphosing into a striking young woman. Her emerging beauty shone through in the carefully posed studio portraits taken to mark the event. Kiri’s dazzling white lace dress was set off by a pair of long silk gloves, an elaborate pearl necklace and floral earrings. The pictures offer a jarring contrast to the story of the girl who, in Kiri’s own words, ‘came from nothing’. They stand as evidence too of the skill with which Nell was now moulding her daughter’s image.
Nell had become friendly with the leading Auckland couturier Colin Cole. Cole’s salon on Queen Street was the domain of New Zealand’s high society. The designer’s exquisite garments were all one-offs. A Cole blouse cost around £250, four months’ wages for the average New Zealander, while evening gowns retailed at a stratospheric £1,200 – the cost of a modest home.
