📍Katherine Mansfield House & Garden, 25 Tinakori Road, Thorndon, Wellington 6011, New Zealand
1888 – 1893“I was born upstairs in this narrow Italianate house in Thorndon in 1888, into a crowd of women — my mother, my grandmother, two aunts, my sisters and a maid — while my father climbed the ranks of the Bank of New Zealand. I wasn't fond of it: I called it a dark little cubby hole of a house. But a child notices everything, and I stored it all away — the gully behind the house, deep with tree ferns; the Wellington wind rattling the windows and banging the gate; my grandmother's lap, and my mother's coolness. We left for a bigger house at Karori when I was four, yet Tinakori Road never left me. Years later, far from home in Europe and often unwell, I rebuilt this world on the page in Prelude, The Aloe and A Birthday, and found that the house I had once dismissed was the truest material I had. It was New Zealand, in the end, that gave me my own voice.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
🛰️ Satellite view · © Google