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The True Original Pa Man coined a phrase which became part of the Beauchamp heritage:

“The umbrageous hills kissed the waters of the South Pacific.” This was “very Pa,” Katherine Mansfield thought, and she laughed at it as one laughs at things because one likes them. She herself had a “special” feeling for certain places that she knew in New Zealand: Day's Bay, and “the ferny paths” through the manukas and tree ferns; Anikiwa on Marlborough Sounds; Karori. As she looked back, they became “a kind of possession.” She belonged to that Island. Her navel string had been fastened to it, and from it she was nourished.

The grandmother had so often told her of the storm on the day of her birth, that she more than half believed she remembered it, herself:

“She had come forth squealing out of a reluctant mother in the teeth of a ‘Southerly Buster.’ The Grandmother, shaking her before the window, had seen the sea rise in green mountains and sweep the esplanade. The little house was like a shell to its loud booming. Down in the gully the wild trees page 63 lashed together and big gulls wheeling and crying skimmed past the misty window.”

She was born at eight o'clock on Sunday morning, October 14th, 1888. It was early spring in Wellington, and azaleas were out in the Botanical Gardens.

She might have been born of the wind and the sea on that wild morning.“The voice of her lawless mother the sea” called to her all of her life; she was “the sea child” of her early poem.

“Into the world you sent her, mother,
Fashioned her body of coral and foam
Combed a wave in her hair's warm smother
And drove her away from home.”

She never was happy far from it, not happy for long with it. When Cornwall, Ospedaletti, the South of France, reminded her of New Zealand, she was at home while the illusion lasted. But wind always frightened her. It brought back the night terrors of childhood and made it impossible for her ever to live long alone.

From the time she was fifteen and first seriously trying to “write,” her notebooks were filled with such beginnings as:

“The storm on the day of her birth. Now to plan it—She is born in New Zealand on the day of the storm.”

The storm at her birth seemed to have some mysterious significance for her which was part of her being and must be expressed.

In The Birthday, as it was first published with a New Zealand setting, she developed that storm into page 64 part of her story; but when she rewrote it for The German Pension, she transferred the setting to Germany. It was not what she meant: it was not “that Island.” It merely reflected her ironic state. In The Aloe she tried once more to describe it; but when she revised the tale as Prelude, she omitted the description. She felt, it seemed, that the storm at her birth had a meaning which lay beyond words. It belonged, in its elusiveness, with The Voices of the Air.