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Mr Fisher begged us to keep our heads and follow his instructions, which we did at last, and emerged to find him scarlet in the face and walking rapidly away.
    On my tenth birthday I had a party.
    For many years my father had boasted about the excellence of the ginger beer brewed by their gardener and his assistant at Woodside, Essex.
    ‘Jolly good stuff, Old Jo’s and The Boy’s ginger beer. Totally different from the rotgut they sell out here.’
    He wrote to my grandmother about it and she sent out the recipe. My father bought half a used brandy cask and a great many ingredients and set himself up in the cellar under our verandah. It was a long and elaborate process and for many days the house was suffused with pungent fumes. Occasionally, muffled oaths could be heard beneath the floorboards and my mother made remarks like: ‘Well said, Old Mole, cans’t work i’ the earth so fast’ and ‘You hear this fellow in the cellarage.’ She also asked him if Old Jo and The Boy had sent any incantations or runes to be muttered in the Essex dialect over his seething cauldron.
    ‘Don’t be an ass, Betsy,’ said my father, grinning happily. He had reached the bottling phase. On my birthday the proper time had elapsed for the brew to be mature.
    The party was in full swing. Gramp played ‘Sir Roger de Coverley’ on the piano and gaily shouted instructions. My mother and aunts and uncles sedately chasséd and swanned down the dance while we children hopped, linked arms and became hot and excited. Some of the little boys went mad and made exhibitionist faces. The moment had arrived for refreshment.
    My father had retired to the kitchen from whence presently there came a formidable explosion. He appeared briefly, looking rather like a mythical sea-god, being wreathed, bearded and crowned with foam.
    ‘Is it Old Father Christmas?’ an awestruck child asked. ‘Is it Christmas-time?’
    My father went into the garden. A feu de joie of reports rang out and we eyed each other in wild surmise. He returned triumphant with a great trayload of buzzing drinks.
    The response was immediate and uproarious. In next to no time my aunts and uncles and acquaintances were screaming with laughter in each other’s faces while their children, unreproved, tacked about the room, cannoned into each other, fell, threw cream cakes or subsided on the floor in a trance. I remember particularly a nicely mannered boy called Lewis who zig-zagged to and fro and offered a tilted plate of sandwiches to wild little girls. The sandwiches, one by one, slid to the floor but Lewis continued to present the empty plate. I must have been quite overcome because I have no recollection whatever of how the party ended.
    ‘Can’t make it out,’ my father said the next day. ‘It’s no good you thinking it was my ginger beer, Betsy. Absolute rot! Jolly wholesome stuff.’
    Some weeks later we were visited by a hot nor’ wester, a very trying and enervating wind in our part of New Zealand.
    ‘Shall we,’ my mother limply suggested, ‘have some of Daddy’s ginger beer?’
    She poured out two small glasses. We spent the rest of the morning lying quietly side-by-side on the carpet, looking at the ceiling. In the afternoon I had a bilious attack.
    My father, concerned, said: ‘It might be the brandy I suppose.’
    And so, of course, it was. The fermenting ginger beer had drawn into itself the overproof spirits with which the cask was saturated. In future, this heavily fortified beverage was offered only to grown-ups and, at that, it was dynamite.
    ‘Damn’ good stuff,’ my father would say. ‘Ginger beer. Old Essex recipe you know. M’mother’s gardener – ‘
    To this day I cannot bear the smell, much less the taste of ginger beer.
IV
    I think the greatest difference in convention between the children of my time and those of today may be seen in the amount of money spent on their entertainment and this, I believe, was a consideration not only of necessity