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A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters

The Four Quarters of the Cake: New Zealand

The Four Quarters of the Cake: New Zealand

The final tale in A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters is devoted to “Christmas Day in New Zealand” and is the most recent Christmas that Lady Barker experienced abroad prior to her return to England and the writing of this book. It seems likely then that this section would have been the clearest and most accurately remembered in her mind, given that not even three years had passed between her return to England and the writing of this book. Moreover New Zealand would have been fresh in her mind, having only recently written and published Station Life in New Zealand to great success the year before.65 Indeed, given the tale of the sheep farmers in this section of the book it is easy to imagine it fitting in either Station Life in New Zealand or the follow up to it Station Amusements in New Zealand. Though similar to the narrative liberties taken with events in the other sections of the book, it is likely that Lady Barker combined events from more than one Christmas and other times of the year in this section rather than describing with complete accuracy one particular New Zealand Christmas.66

This quarter of the book also is distinctly different from the other two stories of Christmas abroad in that it is undoubtedly the most light-hearted and does not include a tale within the tale that is dark and touched with sadness, loss, and death as do “Christmas Day in Jamaica” and “Christmas Day in India” – though this certainly could have gone the other way, had the story of the sheep farmers’ mishap with rat poison ended differently (301)! The reason for the overall more cheerful tone of this section may be due to the fact that with the exception of the loss of a newborn child at the beginning of her life in New Zealand67 (a sad and tragic event to be sure, but not one that was a new experience to Lady Barker) she did not have the extreme loss associated with it that she did with Jamaica (where her sister and father died) or India (where she lost George Barker). Additionally her time in New Zealand was melancholy for her because she was separated once again from her sons Jack and George, the memory of which would have been tempered at the time of writing A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters by her happiness at being reunited with them.

Whichever the cause for the tone in this section of the book, it was the favourite of critics, perhaps because of its less sombre content.68 Certainly New Zealand critical histories of the book such as the passage on Lady Barker in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English are focusing on this tale when they refer to A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters as tempering the difficulties of settlers with humour and excitement.69 In a sense, in the way that Lady Barker couches the darker tales inside “Christmas Day in Jamaica” and “Christmas Day in India” by following them with more light-hearted and silly stories, “Christmas Day in New Zealand” is a more cheerful tale to follow the darker two, and ends the book without the sense of loss provided by the other two tales. Unlike the other quarters of the book, “A Christmas Day in New Zealand” does not return to the English Christmas of the linking narrative at its end, but is the finish to the book as a whole, ending A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters with a melancholy description of the “lonely valley of the Malvern Hills” (304), an interesting choice in that it further gives a very different and less cheerful and more adult style to this section of the book. New Zealand of course was not the last place overseas that Lady Barker would spend a Christmas, and while there isn’t a direct sequel to A Christmas Cake in Four Quarters, readers can look to her later books for further details of other aspects of her life around the world.