Pauline Parker - Relationship With Juliet Hulme

Relationship With Juliet Hulme

The girls met in their early teens, when Hulme's family moved to Christchurch from England. They both attended Christchurch Girls' High School, then located in what became the Cranmer Centre. Both girls had suffered from debilitating illnesses as children — Parker from osteomyelitis, Hulme from tuberculosis — and they initially bonded over it. According to Parker's accounts, she and Hulme both romanticized the idea of being sick. During their friendship, the girls invented their own personal religion, with its own ideas on morality. They rejected Christianity and worshipped their own saints, envisioning a parallel dimension called The Fourth World, essentially their version of Heaven. The Fourth World was a place that they felt they were already able to enter occasionally, during moments of spiritual enlightenment. By Parker's account, they had achieved this spiritual enlightenment due to their friendship. Eventually, the girls formulated a plan to flee to Hollywood.

Shortly prior to this, Hulme had discovered her mother was having an affair and her parents were separating. This devastated Hulme as well as Parker, who, due to having spent so much time with the Hulmes, thought of Hulme's parents as her own. Both girls were unaware of the fact that both sets of parents were collaborating at the time in an effort to separate the girls, viewing their friendship as potentially unhealthy or homosexual (which, at the time, was thought of as a mental illness). The Parkers and the Hulmes' efforts culminated in a plan for Juliet to accompany her father to South Africa, where he planned to move after the divorce, so Juliet would leave Pauline behind in New Zealand. Parker's mother was particularly concerned about the nature of the girls' friendship and was adamant that Pauline could not accompany her best friend.