Henry Hulme

The truth is, the girls' background could not have been more different. Among the proud provincials of Christchurch, Juliet Hulme was practically an aristocrat. Her father, Henry Hulme, was a noted British physicist, a prominent mind in the British War office during the fight against Hitler, who later went on to play a key role in Great Britain's nuclear weapons program. His wife, Hilda Hulme, was, in many respects, the model for the upper middle classes of the time. She was poised and dignified, with a kind of easy grace, and was at the same time, progressive in her thinking. She spent much of her free time — and most of her time was free — working with the local Marriage Guidance Council. She did prototypical relationship counseling at a time when discussions of such intimate topics was considered scandalous.

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In 1947, when Dr. Hulme was just 40, he accepted the post as rector of Canterbury University College, and made plans to transport his family from their native Britain to the Christchurch, a tidy little city that, like so many former outposts of the empire, held all things and all people from the Motherland in the highest imaginable esteem. Juliet arrived in 1948.

Canterbury College

The truth is, it was never clear that Professor Hulme was fond of the city of Christchurch, which must have seemed to him like a cloyingly quaint gingerbread village laid out beneath a Christmas tree. But he had taken the post so that Juliet, his elder child, could recover from a variety of respiratory aliments (ailments which later culminated in a bout with tuberculosis) that she had suffered since early childhood.

On at least one occasion, when she was about six, a serious case of bronchitis nearly killed her. When she was eight, she survived a bout with pneumonia so severe that her family arranged to have her shipped to the Bahamas where, according to Porter's research, she lived for more than a year. It has long been suspected that the psychological scars of that long separation, together with the trauma Juliet suffered as a child living through the almost nightly German bombing attacks on her neighborhood in London during the war, may have been one of the key factors that drove her deeper into her fantasy world as an adolescent.

There was, according to published reports, at least one more separation for Juliet and her family. Not long after arriving in Christchurch, Juliet's parents became concerned about her health, as Porter puts it, and decided to place her in a boarding school on the more tropical northern Island of New Zealand. She remained there for a few months, and was, according to Porter, so severely depressed that her parents brought her home to Christchurch where she was privately tutored for the rest of that school year.

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