by Tessa Duder
The desert scenes in Haggard’s book held a lasting lesson. ‘Back when I was a child and reading this part of the story, I had paused, wondering how it was that one could receive this account of suffering with any sort of pleasure. I stared blankly at the page, and it suddenly came to me that the thrilling adventures in stories (and probably in real life too) came about because something had gone wrong for someone. Heroes, though — true heroes — struggle on through discomfort and pain, and win through.’
In the meantime the adventures of family life at 26 Haig Street were enough to be going on with. Her parents’ marriage, says Margaret, was a wonderfully happy one, providing a very secure environment for the five growing children. Her predominant recollection of the house at 26 Haig Street was a happy jumble of laughter, jokes, games, music, stories, books, occasional fights, discussions on politics, religion, ideas; with so many children, and cousins next door, there was rarely very much stillness. She has often spoken publicly of her parents and family with undisguised warmth and enthusiasm, ‘though you understand I’m prejudiced in their favour!’
For a glimpse into the subtle, sophisticated and highly individual Mahy ‘feminism’ that developed early at home and has clearly underpinned her life and her fiction, it is worth reading Margaret’s contribution to editor Marilyn Duckworth’s Cherries on a Plate: New Zealand writers talk about their sisters, published in 1996.
Half of the essay is, it seems, fiction. The ‘sisters’ (in the feminist sense) come together in a slightly sinister waiting room and find themselves sharing their stories. The narrator is the unmarried writer who begins work at 4 a.m. and is astonished by TV news with more ‘edge and variety’ than anything she could possibly imagine. The others are an accountant turned solitary pig farmer, a still-married home and quilt maker, and a volunteer official carer. These portraits indicate how she has quietly made feminist theory her own: ‘I became myself with them, my present and historical self, in a profound and unspoken way quite impossible with other people more passionately loved. I felt true in this company.’
In this memoir Margaret is unequivocal about the true female strength of her family. ‘I come from a family dominated by women. Not only am I the oldest of four sisters, but I am the mother of two, and these days I watch my sibling granddaughters with fascination, noting how the younger of the two is entranced by the cleverness and skills of the one above her …’ The portrait of her Whakatane childhood is pure nostalgia — for her own roaming toddler adventurousness (which drove her busy and anxious mother ‘mad’); for the sisterly games, the giggling, the cooking, the tree climbing, the trapezes, the unsupervised swimming in the river, the Ohope Beach visits, the travel on the back of her father’s truck; a growing awareness of complicated squabbles, jealousies, manoeuvrings, and the growing up and apart, becoming ‘strongly differentiated,’ so that they ‘have all turned out to be heroines in their own stories’.
Not surprisingly, Margaret disagrees with the often-heard idea that an unhappy and problematic childhood is a useful (maybe even essential) prerequisite for a successful children’s writer. In many cases, she allows, such a background would add drama, but generally she believes it to be untrue. She now sympathises with her mother giving her one great wallop because she was late home from school, this being ‘a very worrying thing for her — and it never happened again, so did me good in a fashion’. But these strict parental boundaries were established and accepted. An escapade with her cousins of breaking and entering an abandoned bach at Ohope, only to be noticed and told off by a neighbour, had a revealing outcome. Margaret went home feeling very guilty about this misdemeanour, and confessed to her father with some consternation. He went to his brother’s house next door, and came back to announce that since her cousins were getting a hiding, to be fair Margaret should get one too. ‘So I got a hiding with a bit of stick — I was about nine — but half way through he broke off, saying he’d rather hit himself than hit me, and struck himself over his forearms, which filled me with grief — of course I was in grief because of the pain, but this was a different sort of grief.’
Housework — the assiduous 1940s–1950s model she grew up with and the job she later did at times to earn a living — is something she has often brooded about, very eloquently. Why, as an essential human service, is it regarded as lesser work, ‘partly because, being done by wives and mothers, it is largely unpaid, but also because energy is being poured out to achieve results that are not intended to survive’? Pictures get painted, houses and bridges built, but the housewife cleans a home whose ‘diligently achieved order tumbles towards chaos … I don’t think my mother (though she was a well educated woman) ever used the word “entropy”— the measure of the degree of disorder in any system, the study of which tells us that disorder cannot be finally overcome. Entropy is typified not only by the expanding universe but also by housework, which is done in order that it can be intentionally torn apart, sometimes only a matter of minutes later.’
The demands of housework affected relationships. Margaret remembers a mother ‘who just had no time for the sort of debate that often takes place between modern parent and child. She had to boil a copper, to wring out clothes by hands or by winding the handle of the washhouse wringer — clothes which included (for we often had a baby in the house during my childhood) whole lines full of napkins.’ (In later years, disposable napkins always seemed to her to suggest a sort of flippancy inappropriate to a good parent.) ‘My mother had to run a respectable, clean house — had to sweep and mop the floor rather than vacuum it. Even making beds was a very different job from what it is now. Mattresses had to be turned each day. There was nothing as light and warm and informal as a duvet. There wasn’t enough time to discuss things with little children. Right and wrong were, on the whole, simply defined, and were imposed rather than argued.’
Music was integral to her childhood. She learned the piano for a while, but was ‘never enormously capable’ and her mother despaired of the daughter (‘of two musical parents’) who could not learn to sing in tune. Once, overhearing this pronouncement, she was ‘filled with astonishment and dismay. Singing brought me so much pleasure (and indeed still does, I add in a crackling sinister voice) that it was hard to accept the fact that my singing might cause distress to those around me … (“Do you have to sing?” my daughter asks me, sometimes plaintively, sometimes irritably and I am seized by an old and furtive guilt, my eyes sliding sideways so that I do not have to look the world in the face and actually see it wincing with pain.)’
But there was singing and family music, nonetheless. Her mother played the piano, her aunt over at Ohope Beach the violin, her uncle the saxophone and her father could ‘knock out a tune’ on a great variety of instruments, mostly by ear: saxophone, banjo, piano (with a ‘rather uninspired left hand’ as his Parkinson’s developed from his early 40s). But, like many of that pre-television generation, he had an enormous repertoire of songs: nigger minstrel tunes, pop songs of the time, old vaudeville and often suggestive music hall numbers. He passed on to his children, too, the rollicking pleasure he derived from singing the songs of the great entertainers of the time: George Formby, Vesta Tilley of ‘Burlington Bertie’ fame and Arthur Askey, among many others. Margaret may lament her inability to sing in tune, but she too, given an appropriate occasion, can knock out a song — all the verses of The Lay of the Nancy Belle, or The Hippopotamus Song and other Flanders and Swann classics, many from Tom Lehrer’s witty repertoire and just about anything you care to name from Gilbert and Sullivan.
‘My connections with music were made in paradoxical ways through language — through sound of course, but through the sound of words … Music of a kind is regularly used and misused to announce, to emphasise and to sell … and when I was a child musical sound was not quite as ubiquitous. Yet I was, like most children, surrounded by music of a kind that I hesitate to define as music in the more mysterious and profound sense of the word. But having said that I go on to assert th
at there are strange and indirect connections.
‘There are many older people who talk nostalgically about the days when people made their own entertainment and I can certainly remember lying in bed at night and hearing through two closed doors music drifting in on me … [the adults in the family] played in their various ways, they sang and, wrapped in darkness, I would listen with pleasure, and more than pleasure. Response to music is part of a primitive and profound human response to the world and though I would never describe myself as musical in the deep sense of the word, yet, paradoxically enough, I have a passionate response to music in ways that sometimes seem to contradict one another.
‘My primary response has probably been to the beat of language — to the rhythm and tempo and timbre of it (snatching terms of musical reference from that World Book Dictionary definition) and to the joke of the rhyme. Certain lyrics still catch my attention in an inexorable way and the uneasy and rather scornful relationship I have with many current singers is that the words of their songs are so flat … and so often inaudible … Back then, there were the little printed booklets, readily for sale in bookshops, which contained the words of current songs, and songs, escaping from the radio and from the grooved surface of records into the outer world, were regularly sung and often parodied in the playground … my granddaughters currently sing pieces of songs by popular bands, but they don’t really know the words in the same way that children used to because the words aren’t knowable in the same way. Listeners cannot contain them to anything like the same degree for the words are pins that fix the actual music into us.’
The Mahys were occasional churchgoers, as were many respectable middle-class families of the time. Sometimes Margaret went to the closer Methodist church, against the inclinations of her Anglican mother, ‘but,’ she adds sympathetically, ‘as the mother of five, in the days when you used to handwash nappies, her ideas had crumbled a bit’. The young teenager at Bible class was ‘probably extremely irritating, since I used to ask awkward or defiant questions, partly out of teenage curiosity, partly out of personal conceit to show how smart I was. In terms of philosophical belief, I still feel strongly that Christianity isn’t necessarily the only system of belief; there’s the idea of the need to be kind and think of other people.’
Her intellectual curiosity took her to the local churches of different denominations, most notably to ask the Catholic priest about Catholicism; the idea of ‘instruction’ was mooted but May, while accepting her daughter going to services with neighbours, angrily vetoed any such suggestion. At one stage, Margaret says, she would have described herself as Christian, but fairly early on began to see herself as agnostic, though she would not have used that particular word. ‘If, at the time, I exercised any sort of religious faith it was out of romanticism, but after all, Christianity is a romantic story, one which has affected me deeply at times.’
She has written of childhood spiritual experiences. ‘Once, when I was ten or eleven, I found myself separated from my sisters and cousins, wandering along in a block of native bush my father owned. I was not frightened. Although there were no paths I knew this bush very well. At one point I stood still, listening for voices. I heard none. Instead I was engulfed first by silence, and then by a feeling of immanence. I felt something move towards me and contain me. Every leaf, every twig my eye fell on suddenly seemed to have infinite meaning. The world and every familiar thing in it became vast and incredible. I believed I was going to have a vision and looked around wildly into the air, expecting to see the Virgin Mary suspended before me. That was what a vision meant to me back then — the sudden appearance of Mary or of angels of some kind. However I think that I actually had a vision but could not recognise it, because I had no adequate language or image from reading to define it.
‘This was a remarkable event in my life, one I remember vividly … My own feeling is that somehow I tricked or unintentionally overrode the moment-to-moment insistence of my nervous system that there was nothing around me worth wasting alarm and wonder on. I saw the commonplace world as deserving of amazement, and that experience was welcomed at many levels as part of truth.’
Unusually for a late 1940s girl, she also owned a telescope. She had bought the lens and eyepiece at a camera shop and her father was interested and sympathetic enough to persuade an uncle who was a plumber to make a long metal tin tube of the required length, and assemble all the component parts. That first moment of suddenly focusing on the moons of Jupiter was something she has never forgotten; her delight in seeing the mountains and craters of the moon was an experience she would give Tycho in The Catalogue of the Universe.
During the time of making the telescope, he [Tycho] had been close to his father, had watched him adjust it, over and over again, becoming more and more intrigued and serious over the work. Mr Potter had borrowed tools from a friend to help him get it just right. Then they had taken it out into the garden and pointed it at the moon which had been quarter full. Easily caught, it had swung in the object lens, a white fish of night, but for the first second Tycho had been overwhelmed at the imprecision of the image, before remembering that he could focus his telescope and drag shape into what he was seeing. He turned the little screw slowly, the texture of the white fish altered, and suddenly, there was a surface made familiar by many photographs, seen in a flash and then gone again. He turned the screw minutely back — and at last caught it. The moment became the event. There was the Sea of Crises, with the Sea of Fertility below it and the crater Cleomedes above, just as pictures had shown him, but all laid on a surface curving to meet him. There it was — it really was — both outside and inside, a little world hanging in space, a silver apple sliced by a crescent blade of shadow. Tycho, beginning his nightly assignations with this landscape, watched it grow and change, the moon slowly revealing itself, pushing darkness ahead of it, then pulling darkness after it once more …
As an unconventional child and teenager, Margaret seems quite early to have decided that she fitted into the ‘tomboy’ category by which adventurous adolescent girls were then defined. The label was not necessarily a kind or admired one, and nor was the phrase ‘career girl’ pinned on twenty-somethings who appeared to be giving more thought to their work or study than to the important business of ‘settling down’.
Being a writer wasn’t the only career option officially and promptly discouraged. ‘In Standard Three I once suggested in class (having been told many times by then that being a writer was not a possible career) that I might be a vet, only to have the headmaster (on a fleeting visit to our classroom) declare that girls could not be vets. I distinctly remember his voice, filled with irritation at the stupidity of my suggestion. He made his despotic pronouncement, and yet another possible life dissolved around me.’
This headmaster, she generously allows, was, however, ‘probably being less sexist than he seems when I quote him now. Speaking generally, girls left school to become office workers, teachers, nurses or librarians until, with luck, they achieved primary success through marriage. Of course there were old maids, rebels and eccentrics but such lives were not regarded as desirable possibilities.’
Margaret never thought that this traditional path towards marriage, a home and children was for her. ‘Even as a child I decided I would like to live a life full of adventures and that I would never get married. There was a brief time as an adolescent when I would have loved to have had a romantic relationship with a boy, but I was incredibly naïve sexually and my mother had told me it was very beautiful when in reality it seemed so rude. When I was about eighteen I suddenly became interested in boys but I wasn’t very attractive because I didn’t know how to look after myself. I went around in a rather slatternly fashion with straggly hair which is partly why I didn’t have much of a social life at university, because then as now people do sell themselves through appearances. Instead of going out I concentrated on writing stories.’
Many years later Margaret wrote about the important transition from
a lonely primary school experience to the quite different environment of the local high school:
‘At some time during my standard three year, ten children were taken from a lower standard three group and put even further down among the standard twos. I was one of the ten. As, in all modesty, I was a particularly good reader and an effective (though not a neat) writer, I can only assume that my talkativeness (I was often strapped for talking in school) had filled some poor teacher with a desire for revenge. I was in a low ability class for the rest of my primary career.
‘It is worth mentioning these circumstances in order to emphasise the transformation brought about in my life by one particular teacher, a teacher of English at what was then Whakatane District High School. On the basis of my English assessment tests Ian McLean campaigned for my inclusion in a group of children designated as “professional”. He apparently did this against some strong opposition, partly because of the level of my mathematics assessment paper and partly because the members of my extended family who had preceded me at secondary school had been anything but scholarly. However, Ian McLean persisted. I was moved into 3P/C and he became my English teacher.
‘The first two assignments he gave the class seem improbable exercises these days. Firstly we were asked to parody the first poem in our third form text book and then to write a series of limericks using local place names.’
The 13-year-old Margaret came up with:
In the dark little town of Te Whaiti
A fellow put on the wrong nightie
Its owner came in
And made a great din
My Goodness, he did get a frightie!
‘These assignments certainly allowed me to display hitherto private skills. Buoyed up by success, I did reasonably well in other subjects, though sewing and mathematics remained enigmatic. (However, during my fifth form year I did put the notable theorem of Pythagoras concerning the right-angled triangles to the music of a song from The Yeoman of the Guard.)