The rest of us moved down to the tip of the South Island where my father had taken the parish of Riverton. She died a month after our arrival, and is buried in Auckland. I lost all interest in passing.Īnne wanted to die in the country where she was born, so we all returned to New Zealand.

I did not work very hard, and just before final exams I was told that my sister Anne was dying. In 1961 I began one inglorious year at the University of Manitoba’s Brandon College. It was the most dehumanizing, miserable experience of my life. After three months at the local high school, I was sent to a boarding school in Saskatchewan. Then in 1959 my father accepted a parish in Virden, Manitoba, and the family left for Canada. I studied the violin, an instrument I struggled over and gave up after two years, and the piano, which I enjoyed and continue to play, along with the recorders. I liked chemistry, because I was allowed to play with pretty crystals and chemicals that behaved as if they had magic in them. Any academic discipline that is expressed and interpreted through words I could conquer, but math was bewildering and foreign, a maze of numbers and ridiculous symbols with which I had nothing in common.

I was a very good student in everything but mathematics. My father had his first parish in Oxford, so in 1956, having passed the eleven-plus exam, a torture now fortunately defunct, I attended what was then the Oxford Central School for Girls. I grew up surrounded by countryside that I observed, played in, and grew to know and love passionately, and I wrote lyrically of its many moods. We lived in an ancient and very dilapidated cottage in the heart of the English Buckinghamshire woodland, and later in a small village in Oxfordshire called Great Haseley. Six years later my family emigrated to England where my father, an ex-policeman, wanted to study for the Anglican ministry. I was born in Auckland, New Zealand, on December 11, 1945, the first of three girls.

The eagle and the raven pauline gedge