Margaret Mahy

by Tessa Duder

  Having begun to make books, she was persistent. Between eight and 11 she wrote a series of stories about beautiful wild horses; her notebooks were dominated by versions of My Friend Flicka and Thunderhead, even though she had not actually read Mary O’Hara’s books and was not allowed to see the film. ‘The sources of my inspirations were the quiver of discussion at school, the posters advertising the film, and an extensive display of Thunderhead in the window of our local bookshop. I will never forget that window made suddenly dynamic by the repeated image of a great white horse galloping towards me. So I continually acted out apprehended stories, trying out bits of conversation by speaking them aloud and rehearsing events that might be, later, transferred in a stilted form to the page. This is something I still do, though rather more knowingly now than then. I don’t think, however, I would have played these games with such complexity and conviction if I had not been a word child, encouraged to be susceptible to the stories and to venerate the books that held them.’

  The 11-year-old Margaret’s story of ‘Belle Gray’, based on a film she had never seen, filled three exercise books and was her longest completed book of her primary years. Rereading it a few years afterwards, she was ‘filled with agony at an incompetence which had betrayed, on paper, the original vision [of the girl in the film poster] with which I was still essentially involved’. Unable to bear its existence in the inadequate written form, she destroyed the book. But it was the first, she has said, that managed to ‘unite two systems that had operated, until then, in uneasy juxtaposition … story and book, anarchic desire and generalisations of written language, so some sort of beginning had been achieved’.

  She believes that quite early her parents recognised her singular writing talent, ‘for what that means’. To earn a living as a writer was beyond their imagining, as it would have been for any other New Zealand parents in the 1950s (and to many, even now), but her first appearances in the local paper, school magazine and later the School Journal were proudly applauded. ‘I can remember my father looking at my first books — by then he was quite stricken with Parkinson’s — and holding them in his hands, weeping with pleasure.’

  Like many New Zealanders of her generation, Margaret’s reading from her earliest days through to adulthood was almost exclusively of books imported from European or American cultures, with the single, notable exception of the localised stories provided in the School Journal. Many of today’s older New Zealand writers have lamented the lack of indigenous reading in their childhoods, citing instead a staple diet of English children’s classics, boarding school and horse stories, theatre and adventure tales, and, to a lesser degree, Americans like Mark Twain and Lousia May Alcott and an Australian or two. Few of the small number of New Zealand books then available are ever mentioned among their best remembered and loved.

  For those mid-20th-century children who later became novelists in the flowering of both adult and children’s fiction since around 1980, this serious deficiency worked in different ways. Some writers (like William Taylor, Jack Lasenby, Witi Ihimaera and myself) have been determined to provide their own children’s generation with a body of literature that clearly validated and reflected their own country and its culture; others have seen their early introduction to the great classics of the English-speaking world as a sufficient stepping stone to English, American and post-colonial literature, and their lack of indigenous childhood reading as sad, perhaps, but not deeply significant. (Even now, the School Journal notwithstanding, educational theory, powerful advocates and governments have not ensured — as they have in varying degrees in Canada and Australia — that New Zealand children read their own country’s fiction; yet it is unthinkable that English or American children would, through lack of political will or intellectual laziness or post-colonial cringe or snobbery, be denied deliberate and proud introduction to their own country’s literatures.)

  In Margaret’s case, her childhood reading led to a powerful sense of dislocation and an incentive to create, from the books she read, her own unique, extraordinary and fantastical other worlds deeply rooted in European cultures. As she moved through primary school, being read to and devouring books by the hundreds, she became more and more a ‘world citizen’.

  Both Margaret’s parents were habitual readers who read to her, constantly, from babyhood, even as her four siblings arrived on the scene. Her father, particularly, read widely, ‘coming to it in a sort of lower middle-class way, as part of upward mobility’. Margaret’s family owned books, bought books for birthdays and borrowed them from local libraries. ‘My exposure to these books must suggest the sort of family I came from, a family of school teachers on the one side, and a family of tradesmen on the other, people anxious to be educated, to rise in the world and seeing literacy as a way of rising. I don’t wish to suggest that they didn’t enjoy the books they read, because they did …’

  The books that Margaret remembers being read in her childhood are largely the English/European canon of classic works for children. Initially, via the usual nursery tales such as The Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood, she found herself getting involved ‘in the drama of who gets to eat who’. When she was a toddler, her mother read her Beatrix Potter and Alison Uttley ‘over and over again’; from five onwards she graduated to Alice in Wonderland, Winnie-the-Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, The Water-Babies and The Just-so Stories, later to Anne of Green Gables, and Seven Little Australians. Her father read the ‘boy’s books’ by Henry Rider Haggard, R.M. Ballantyne and Captain Marryat. In various speeches she has also mentioned the school stories of Angela Brazil and Bessie Marchant, and coming later to Louisa May Alcott, Arthur Ransome, Elizabeth Goudge and Richmal Crompton, often ‘reading them over and over again, for I was, and still am, a quick and greedy reader’. Goudge’s The Little White Horse was a particular favourite, read with an intensity that she recalls as nearly physical. She missed out on George Macdonald and Edith Nesbit and almost all American writers, whose books were virtually unobtainable. She loved anything that made her laugh, and drove her mother mad following her around the house, determined to share the funny bits. Now, she recognises ‘that the stories I enjoyed most showed people in some state of extremity, pitted against death and danger, but managing, in the process of escaping (through courage and good luck of course) to transcend themselves’.

  She remembers being ‘fairly resilient about fear’ in her early reading, though subject to odd particularities. ‘Some children like to be scared, like to test themselves, some hate it … it must have been about Standard One, around seven, we had a Whitcombe & Tombs reader called Connie of the Fourth Form. It was the first story in which I encountered a secret panel. I’d never heard of it before, and I can remember being very frightened by that — just the spooky idea that it was a part of a wall and could be displaced. I can remember trembling and clenching my teeth and my teacher suddenly realising I was terrified of this (no one else in the room was) and she was a bit taken aback … it was an odd thing to be scared by, but we don’t have panelled wooden walls in New Zealand.’ As Margaret told the Listener in 1987, ‘many of the first stories we tell to children are still basically concerned with “who gets to eat who in life … While we could certainly evolve a totally different literature it wouldn’t alter the fact that these predatory relationships do exist in nature and that children are sooner or later going to have to come to terms with the fact that their cat is going to eat a baby bird.” A lot of children’s stories, she says, meet a deep psychological need: like elements of play, there’s preparation for survival. Not that Mahy has ever objected to a bit of bloodthirstiness. “There’s the story of the little girl who said, ‘Sad, I hate sad. But cruel, I love cruel.’ I’ve always been a bit like that. Couldn’t take the tragic endings in The Babes in the Wood, or The Little Match Girl.” Many of the Grimm stories, she says, were never in fact intended for children. But Mahy has always loved being frightened. Probably, she says, because she always had a snug domestic security
herself. These days the scary stories she writes have that family security written into them.’

  As a child she was aware of two New Zealand writers, both from an earlier period. ‘There were only a few New Zealand books, some of which I still have, like Six Little New Zealanders by Esther Glen and the books by Isabel Maud Peacocke. But not all of these gave any real feeling about what it was like to be a New Zealand child living in a small town, going to school every day and playing or fighting with neighbouring children after school. Almost none of these books featured Maori children although there was one, The Book of Wiremu by Stella Morice, that I read when I was at High School. However, before I actually obtained the book I had read a piece from it in guess where? Yes, in the School Journal! The chapter I read there made me want to go on and read more. So, when I got a chance to read the book in full, of course I did. Nowadays The Book of Wiremu has an odd, rather out-of-date feeling about it, but it was a story set in New Zealand that tried to describe the way we live.’

  Very few children’s books were published in New Zealand during her crucial upper primary, pre-puberty years — nine in 1945, three in 1946, seven in 1949 — and Margaret recalls ‘they were often very modest, even clumsy productions which could not compete in appearance or style with the books from overseas — predominately from England — and they were often imitations of English books anyway, or written by people suffering from the same confusions that I suffered from when my time came. I don’t mean that they were all bad, but they were not all that good either. And illustration until recently lagged well behind writing, partly because our art schools looked, I think, beyond representational art and this affected attitudes to illustration which for a long time seem to have been seen as a minor craft, related to graphics and advertising. Anyhow our local booksellers probably did not stock the New Zealand books which were published, and my mother, if she saw them, probably scorned them. There was certainly a strong feeling at this time that things produced in New Zealand were innately inferior to anything produced overseas … available reading, and no doubt insidious social reinforcement too, led me to believe that wonder and astonishment were always in some other nameless country.’

  Neither did the great stories of Maori mythology appeal as they perhaps should have done, especially to a child living in a community with a large and visible Maori component and thrilled with the folk tales, myths and legends of other countries. In spite of what she once described to an Australian audience as the persistent attempts ‘to crush Maori folklore in the terribly strange bed of European culture’, Maori stories had nonetheless persisted and continued to stand alongside what else was offered to children by way of the 700 books published between 1833 and 1978, the ‘school readers’ and the good public library system.

  ‘Since the Maoris had no written language, these stories existed through being remembered, told, acted, carved into wood, and finally through translation into English. As a child I remember having Maori stories read to me. They were reasonably available, I think. What was not available was the conviction in telling. The voices of the people who read these stories were not Maori voices, and the translations, I now understand, leave a lot to be desired. However, in Whakatane with its large Maori population, I did hear Maori voices singing and chanting and because I heard them in childhood, these voices are part of my heritage even though I am a middle-aged Pakeha. If we had had the true storytellers I am sure the stories would have been part of my childhood too.’

  The metaphor of the fault line constantly recurs in Margaret’s writings to explain her childhood confusion between the world she lived in and the world of her developing imagination. ‘Culturally as well as geographically, we were all on a fault line, and I still feel it pass through me, for my parents did not know, did not feel, the stories of the Pacific as relevant to themselves, and it was many years before I came to feel that they had any real significance for me.’

  Even while young, Margaret began to ponder the nature of truth, and the division between the books she was told were true and the stories she knew were not. Reading in Arthur Mee’s Encyclopaedia that the earth ‘had once been a fiery ball that had dropped off the sun’, she knew it was true, ‘because of the sort of book the information was to be found in. The encyclopaedia was true and Peter Rabbit wasn’t. I was thrilled with the fiery ball, and knowing it was true was part of what thrilled me … [and] I excited as much resentment for speaking what I did believe to be a literal encyclopaedia truth as I did for acting out fiction … although, just to make the situation a little more complicated, nowadays no astronomer believes the earth was ever a fiery ball that fell off the sun. What I learned as truth back then was apparently not truth … not even a fact. It was not a story either, though it had some of the dramatic qualities of myth. It was a mistake. Still, it fixed my attention, and tied me to the astonishment of non-fiction and to a certain sort of truth as inexorably as if it had indeed been true.’

  One novel, perhaps even then an unusual parental choice, she has frequently credited with being the most influential book of her childhood. When the original copy got lost, she haunted second-hand bookshops for some years searching for a replacement: finding a battered copy was something akin to a religious experience.

  ‘When I was eight years old my father read to me from a small, rather unattractive book with a peeling spine, yellowed pages and small print — the very antithesis of all that a child’s book should be in appearance. He read to me of an elephant hunt and I was instantly encompassed by incident, drama, excitement and death all acted out against a golden African landscape.

  ‘The book was King Solomon’s Mines by Sir Henry Rider Haggard, the prototype of many African adventure stories, complete with wild animals, heroic travellers, undiscovered country, a mysterious tribe and fabulous treasure. My father obviously enjoyed the book himself (he was later to introduce me to Ballantyne and Marryat) but I doubt if he expected the story to exercise such a power over me as it did. I read on from where he stopped reading, greedy for the revelation of adventure and mystery it promised. I was sustained beyond my wildest dreams. I begged my mother to read it to me, which she did, though rather unwilling to read me a story I had read already. Then I read it again. And again. In a sense, I have never stopped reading it as I have read it to my own children, the last occasion being in May last year …’

  Margaret’s powerful and thrilled reaction to this book led her to tell other children that it was a true story, ‘for I could not bear to think its heady excitement rested on nothing more substantial than one man’s imagination, having no more reality than my own games and dramas.

  ‘Adventure is the name of Rider Haggard’s game. The story is simple. Brave men set out, a journey is made, a battle is won, a rightful king restored to his throne, a treasure is gained, a brother is found. It is calculable enough — though it wasn’t when I was eight. But Haggard invests this basic material with the prodigality of a great imagination and produces the first of a long series of African romances — a sort of African Gothic — at once real and magical.

  ‘Compared with Stevenson’s, Haggard’s style has its faults. King Solomon’s Mines was written in six weeks and has a casual, unpolished quality in its writing. It lacks the excellence and elegance of Treasure Island. Yet Haggard’s prodigious imagination sweeps the reader along. From the time they hit the desert, after a rather slow beginning, the course of events is breathtaking, the scenes become increasingly remarkable.

  ‘… There is much to cause a modern reader to frown in King Solomon’s Mines. What would a conservationist have to say to the slaughter of the elephants, or the feminist to Quatermain’s assertion that there are no petticoats in his story, or the racially sensitive to the patronising attitudes taken to the native servants? These are all points we cannot ignore in reading the story to children. They have to be commented on, put in some sort of historical perspective. But the adventure remains.

  ‘For me, adventure was and still is important, but
adventure is only partly an event. It is also a matter of interpretation. The most tremendous happenings, wrongly interpreted, can be uncomfortable, inconvenient or merely boring. A witness of one of Richard Pearce’s [sic] early flights was asked what he thought when he saw Pearce [sic] in his flying machine. “Silly Bugger” the man is quoted as saying and he turned his back on a certain sort of adventure, closed his mind to it. I no longer insist that the events in King Solomon’s Mines must be true but they have been of as much use to me as if they were. So many of life’s uncomfortable passages can be given a new relevance, seen under a new focus, if one is able to see them as part of the adventure encountered on a journey.

  ‘If asked about my own life, I would probably say it was adventurous even though I am involved with a daily job, two children, a garden, cats and chickens — none of which are generally seen as vehicles for adventure.’

  But it was Haggard’s book and one or two similar novels that truly turned her young imagination permanently towards the notion that all life, even the most mundane of domesticity, was An Adventure. ‘Once, as I was running away with my two children from a burning car, I heard myself shouting as much to myself as the terrified children, “Don’t be frightened! Look on this as an adventure!”, and as I shouted this an image from King Solomon’s Mines imposed itself on the bare spare Banks Peninsula around me. There they went, those heroes, tormented by thirst yet struggling on through the desert.’