Maria Dronke and I

When I was at Teachers' Training College in the early 1950s I had trouble with my vowels (I still have). There is no Hungarian equivalent of the New Zealand 'e', 'a' or 'o'. New Zealand 'e' is unlike the Hungarian 'é', 'a' or 'ó'. The New Zealand vowels ar really diphthongs and their middle is flatter. So Sunny Aimie, in charge of speech and drama, sent me to the great local teacher of elocution, Maria Dronke. Sunny Aimie later became Lawrence Olivier's assistant at Old Vic, and when she returned to New Zealand, the Director of the Downstage Theatre in its great halcyon days. Maria Dronke, a German actress, whose career was cut short by the advent of Nazism, was a startling beautiful, widely educated woman and I was quite overawed by her. She was the outstanding local theater producer and eloquent performer of recitations of poetry by the most celebrated poets around. She did her best to teach me how to open my mouth, hold my tongue, utter the sounds that vaguely corresponded to New Zealand vowels. She overlaid my Hungarian accent with her German accent, and perhaps made my words more intelligible. I knew of Maria Dronke before I had met her. Her son, Peter, my contemporary, but an awful lot brighter, was my tutor in my first year English 1 at university, when I came down to Wellington from Palmerston North. He went off to Oxford and then to Cambridge where he became the foremost authority on Medieval Latin poetry. When I worked for the Oxford University Press I had the privilege of selling his book, though I don't think that I sold vast numbers in New Zealand. I also vaguely knew Maria's daughter, Marie, we moved in the same broadly left wing, socialist circles, and knew her husband Conrad Bollinger, who was one of the elder statesmen of the socialists, and a scintillating, witty companion. So my world and Maria Dronke's ever so more sophisticated world, which I greatly admired, intersected time and time again. In 1970 I opened my bookshop in Lower Hutt. I had a vision of a bookshop that would be a haven for thinking, enlightened people, a place where the people who dropped in would be surrounded by the best in contemporary literature, a magnet for like-minded people. My models were Gordon Tait in Christchurch, Bob Goodman in Auckland, to a large extent Roy Parsons in Wellington, all refined, educated men with an air of scholarship about them. Little did I realize that Bob Goodman and Gordon Tait would go broke a few years later, and that Roy Parsons would survive by becoming the foremost purveyor of classical CDs. Nor did I take into account that what migh work in Christchurch, Auckland and Wellington might be harder to make a go of in Lower Hutt, that viewed itself as a dormitory suburb of Wellington with little to offer except for jobs in the freezing works, the railway workshop, the biscuit and car factories. When I opened my bookshop there were already two bookshops in Lower Hutt: Ackroyds, once a fine bookshop that fell on hard times (for reasons I don't need to go into here) and was taken over by Whitcoulls, and a Whitcoulls shop, more interested in getting the local school stationery business than in stocking a good selection of books. I was confident that there was scope for a real bookshop that treated books with respect, not just as yet another line of assorted merchandise. And indeed, in a very short time, my shop became a haven for scientists from the Wild Life Division and the Geological Survey of the old DSIR, who foregathered in my shop at lunch time to meet each other and occasionally engage me in stimulating conversation. The shop also attracted distinguished retired academics, some of whom taught me at university. Colin Bailey, retired professor of Education came. He addressed students on their first day at university, and I remember him telling us not to hesitate writing in our books, not think that we deface them, think of how exciting it would be to find a Bible, no longer pristine, with scribbles by one Martin Luther in it. Unfortunately, the last time I saw Colin Bailey he was a pathetic shrunken little man suffering from advanced Alzheimer disease. Stuart Johnson, retired senior lecturer, or perhaps by then, associate professor of English was a regular, and so was James Bertram, urbane, gentle, a fine scholar, but better remembered as a journalist who attained fame in revolutionary China as a friend of Chou En Lai. And Maria Dronke kept dropping in. She came with a companion. By then John Dronke had passed away, her wonderful husband, a judge in pre-Nazi Germany, who abandoned his native land and his career to save his Jewish born wife by moving to New Zealand, where he eked out a living playing the double-bass in the National Orchestra, and later doing menial legal work in the Ministry of Justice. Maria Dronke that walked into my shop was not the Maria Dronkle I once knew. She looked a little unkempt, somewhat bewildered. Her once brilliant mind and forceful personality were gone. But she came often, perhaps because I remembered her and gave her the welcome that such a distinguished star deserved. I don;t remember whether she ever bought any books, but she came because she felt at home surrounded by books, a reminder of her former life, a reminder of the world that she had lost.