by Tessa Duder
In 1976 a Woman’s Weekly journalist was one of the first to comment, rather breathlessly, on Margaret’s celebrated wig. ‘Her tousled, bright green wig swept spikily in all directions, green and purple patterned kaftan-like gown giving her a billowy, fluid shape, she drops her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. The children at her feet are entranced; here is fantasy come to life, a real person with just the right aura of magic and mystery to sweep young minds off on Technicolor flights of imagination. Margaret Mahy is in town. Doing the things she loves and is so good at: telling stories … all based on simple, everyday processes, magically coloured and soaring on the wings of imaginative anarchy.’
The wig helped in the early days of these school visits and library readings when she was unsure of her ability to hold an audience. ‘Dressing up for me is partly a disguise. It’s also an attempt to keep myself under some wraps. But it’s also more than that — it’s an attempt to be as entertaining as I can for the children. They are a captive audience, they don’t necessarily ask for me to come and talk to them … I want them to be interested.’ It originated as a bit of fun for the reading sessions, of her own and other authors’ work, she arranged as part of her new job at the Public Library in Christchurch. But the hired wig was such a hit with children that she soon bought it for more frequent outings and indulged her growing taste for colourful (and now more affordable) offbeat outfits. From the moment she arrived in the school office, she was irresistibly fascinating and funny to children of all ages and soon became a skilled and mesmerising performer to audiences of any size —‘a bit of an exhibitionist, with nothing to exhibit’, as she has more than once described herself.
By 1980 the wig and Margaret were thought so inseparable that the Christchurch children’s book community was alarmed when hearing that she had unaccountably offered her unique headgear to a forthcoming telethon to be sold to the highest bidder. ‘Margaret Mahy minus Wig … that repository full of ideas from which she plucks imaginative tales when needed?’ Christchurch librarian Veda Pickles reported from the front line on this catastrophic prospect in the Children’s Literature Association 1981 Yearbook. ‘As well imagine Arthur without Excalibur, Morecombe without Wise, Buckingham Palace without corgis. My immediate reaction was one of horror. What would I, as a teacher, do next Book Week, without the Green Wig to talk to us? What would my pupils do without the Green Wig to encourage them to write and keep on writing?’ The call went out, and ‘within minutes members of the New Zealand Librarians’ Association, the Children’s Book Group and Children’s Literature Association had swung into action, pooled their resources and saved the day.’ On telethon night Margaret’s supporters bid vigorously for the wig and returned it triumphantly to its rightful owner.
Margaret was always sensitive to the wig’s powers and its impact on her audiences. ‘Kids were very entertained. There comes a point though where kids will suddenly get embarrassed. You never quite know where that point is.’ She describes with wry amusement the appalled embarrassment of ‘big boys at country schools who are probably leading reasonably adult lives, doing useful things on farms, being addressed by somebody in a green wig. It must seem very denigrating.’ When the green wig was lost, Margaret realised she’d ‘got a bit sick of it’ and thought she wouldn’t be bothered wearing it again. But by then the wig had taken on a persona of its own. ‘When I went to schools, almost the first question was, have you got the wig?— even at secondary schools. After a while I had to get another. It’s rainbow coloured and I don’t like it quite as much as the green one.’
In later years she would sometimes don a full penguin suit, given to her by the Gibson Group film company, confiding in a chuckling aside to the children (and sometimes adult audiences) that it was hot inside and that penguin flippers were not made for turning pages. Resulting from one of her many trips to Australia from the mid-1970s on, a possum suit became another addition to her wardrobe, though its bushy tail presented certain difficulties in sitting down and in getting through customs.
A story was later told of a Christchurch chief reporter’s response to a breathless new reporter announcing to the newsroom that he had just seen a giant possum carrying an umbrella and riding a bicycle. ‘Mahy,’ said the underwhelmed chief. ‘Surprised it wasn’t the penguin.’ The multicoloured wig arrived sometime in the early 1980s, a radiant confection of pastel pinks, yellows and lime greens, dramatic purple and electric blue, sometimes decorated with twigs and leaves for a ‘forest sprite’ effect. Later again, any ethnic or more classic outfit would be regularly transformed by a jaunty hat (sometimes decorated with a feather of alarming reach), and/or a hand-knitted scarf of impressive length, made weighty and clanking by several hundreds of badges collected from a huge variety of sources — schools, associations, booksellers, publishers, probably hotels, airlines and so on — all over the world.
The year’s leave of absence presented Margaret with the appealing picture of what it might be like to be a full-time writer rather than a full-time librarian. ‘Working does cut time a lot, and it also cuts leisure time in which you think and turn over ideas almost unconsciously … letting different things come in, turning them over, turning them into images, metaphors, into jokes, and I do think I suffer from this now, where work is concerned.
‘Once on a television programme they commented on the fact that some of my stories had been described as stories of genius, and asked if I thought this was true. And I think it’s very true to say that I’m not single-minded enough for this. I certainly love the writing, but I’m just as interested in a different way, a more public way, in the library, in reading, and in what other people write. And I’m interested in pursuing private studies of things, and in doing things with my children. I wouldn’t wish to give any of it up.’
In early 1977, about to turn 41, Margaret was not quite ready for the uncertainties of full-time writing. After her year’s leave, she accepted the position of children’s librarian at the Canterbury Public Library. This would be a significantly more ‘public’ position than the School Library Service, involving greater interaction with many more adults other than teachers, and with children of all ages from toddlers through to high school students.
Looking through comments on Margaret’s development as a writer in the 1970s, one is struck by certain preoccupations and perceptions. First, why does she write for children, and second, why does she not write New Zealand stories for New Zealand children like other well-known New Zealand children’s writers of this period, Jack Lasenby, Anne de Roo, Elsie Locke, Ruth Dallas, Ron Bacon and Eve Sutton?
‘She has often been criticised because her books lack any distinctive New Zealand flavour,’ noted a 1976 newspaper profile. ‘Even the word “meadow” in her best-known story is seldom if ever heard in the mouth of a New Zealand child. (Paddock is the vernacular New Zealand word here.)’ Baffled interviewers wanted her to explain why she should want to focus so obsessively on ‘little stories’ for children. Although ‘little’ was not always articulated, it was often implied by adults who, though possibly parents themselves, may never have actually considered that, in all the best picture books, a highly sophisticated, adult layer of meaning lies behind the simple words and folk tale manner of telling. This is certainly the case in all Margaret’s short fiction, especially the miniature masterpieces like A Lion in the Meadow, Pillycock’s Shop, ‘Small Porks’, The Girl with Two Shadows or The Wind Between the Stars.
One of her earliest written opinions on these issues was a long interview entitled ‘One Great Frolic with Words’, which appeared in Education in 1973. Her polite, slightly tentative answers (almost as if she were still searching for convincing intellectual justification for the literary activity she had now been compulsively engaged in for nearly 20 years), foreshadowed major speeches she would make in several countries. The unnamed interviewer asked, circumspectly, whether the places she had lived in affected her work.
‘Not a great deal, because the things I have written are
basically from the inner landscape of a personality. They are concerned with things that I have found funny or amusing — eccentricities on the whole — but sometimes I will use a story in a single image that I have observed in the outside landscape. The other day when I was at a school the teacher asked me where I got my ideas from. I tried to explain to the children how ideas can come from anywhere at all. You just are, you know, open to them. I said, “Suppose a witch was to get on a bus.” A bus, you see, is a very self-contained (if temporary) community. (I wrote it as a story later on.) The witch starts to make trouble and it ends with a bus load of people fighting and throwing eggs and hitting one another. The witch is laughing to herself and then she slides out, leaving the bus in this chaotic condition; but on the way out she catches her foot and she falls in a puddle. Everyone looks at her and some of them remember that she had started the trouble and others are ashamed because she found it so easy to cause trouble and then they all start to laugh and with the laughter the chaos is cleared up. They clean up the eggs and the oranges and everything. The bus goes on its way, filled once again with a happy warm self-contained community. When people give up stamping and start laughing, there is no way to tell where it will all end. This is a story that obviously comes from ideas rather than environment but it is still affected by environment.
‘I do believe quite strongly in the therapeutic value of the happy ending. I think that not only is it very pleasant for children to read a happy ending, but I think it can make you go out and want to make a similar happy ending, make you want to be brave, strong and true. People nowadays are very suspicious of happy endings and think they have to be contrived … I think that the prince and princess in the fairy tale take on a symbolic quality, and that the happy ending is a much more dynamic thing than people nowadays tend to give it credit for.’
Was her kitchen sink fantasy deliberate?
‘Well, yes, I don’t wish to sound at all precious about this but I believed that any commonplace object has a capacity to become a thing of wonder. I don’t think this is a coy fantasy. I have been reading a lot over the last few years — on a very popular and simple level, admittedly — about the structure of matter, and the quantum theory and things like this and it gives me the feeling that any object has a capacity for being wonderful, that at any moment any part of the landscape, a tree, say, can turn into a burning bush with the voice of God speaking out of it. A table can be all sorts of things to me, depending on which way you look at it. A box of matches on the kitchen sink is as intricate as the Bach partitas. I couldn’t write about atomic theory for children, though I find this sort of thing extremely moving, but I try to suggest the ordinary/miraculous double nature of things.
‘I think that a lot of writers are like this, each of them is a receiver and a transmitter; one receives signals from outside and transmits them in one’s own particular way. This is why I think that perhaps any object in a story that I write could become a vehicle for a miracle or a remarkable happening.’
So who did she write for, children or herself?
‘I write for myself entirely, but nevertheless it would be unrealistic to say that I don’t have children in mind. I write about the things that entertain me — that entertained me when I was a child and haven’t stopped entertaining me. I suppose I have a certain faith in my judgement where this is concerned but I feel that I was ordinary enough as a child for there to be a lot of other people whose children would be entertained by the same things. It is really a way of sharing a joke.’ And on responses from children: ‘It is very hard to distinguish my own stories from other people’s stories in that I take just as much delight in other people’s stories too, and looking backwards I find that reading and writing tend to merge into one great frolic with words.’
Did she consider that childhood was the best time in one’s life? ‘Oh no. The most exciting and interesting times I have had really have been as an adult. I don’t wish to go back even two or three years. I don’t wish to go back to being 21 again for that matter. So far, to me at any rate, it has been more interesting to go forward. I don’t exactly know why it is that I write for children and not for grownups, perhaps there is an element of nostalgia too.
‘My adult life is very full and I am reading a lot of other things that people have written and I find it good, by writing for childhood, to maintain a sort of feeling of time past and time future being here all at the same time. Childhood is not a separate part of a person’s life, it is just part of the way in which we become a particular person. I think that this is why I have a lot of old people in the stories I write — people do tend to treat children and old people as if they were much more separate. They put them here, and they put them there and make plans for what to do with them. Old people seem to be deprived of their autonomy to a certain extent, and actually they are just different points in the growth of individuals.’
Did she consider herself a religious person?
‘Oh yes, I think that I am probably very religious in a way. If I am asked to write down my religion I usually put “agnostic” because it seems easier, but it depends, I suppose, on what you mean by religious. I have trouble where basic acts of faith about a personal God and creation and questions like this are concerned. It is very difficult to me to line up with a particular form of dogma, but sometimes when I am talking to people who are Christians I think that our views are probably very similar.
‘I believe that I have a reverence for life, for stars and cells, for structures. I said before that I find it extremely moving to read about the structure of matter; it ties up with a lot of other things as well. I have very little education in these areas, so I have to be very careful what I read because it is important to me to know what is true about these things.
‘I remember once many years ago — it must be about six, I was expecting Bridget at the time — I was levelling a piece on the section, pushing a wheelbarrow of clay. I was doing this for about three weeks and I remember this as a remarkable experience — rather like what people describe when they have been taking some sort of drug — every object burning with a deeper significance. Everything that happened was significant; the way the sun and the moon arranged themselves across the sky. As I walked along, one was on one hand, and one on the other, so that I was balanced in the middle of them like a sort of Blake personage. The way the birds sat on the bare branches of the trees looked like some isolated thing from Haiku poetry. It was late in the year and next door a liquidambar tree burned like a flame. I saw it simultaneously as a tree and as a fire burning against the sky and the sea and, without necessarily at the end of this time understanding more what a tree was, I felt that I had moved deeper into its meaning. This is a religious experience. I can’t remember anything as sustained since that, but, even once in six years, it’s something to look back on with a feeling of gratitude.’
The formal speeches from this period, which grew in confidence and never underestimated her audience’s intelligence, considered why she wrote as she did:
‘[After 1969 I] was soon called on to make some statement of why I wrote for children, and more particularly why I wrote for children rather than adults.
‘To digress for a moment there are some assumptions about writing for children which crop up continuously either directly or implicitly in the questions people ask. These assumptions are not irrelevant but they are surprising to me because they suggest that the motives for writing children’s stories are very circumscribed in people’s minds. One such assumption is that you write children’s stories because you love children although no one assumes you write adult stories because you love adults. In fact I do like children — babies and all — because I like people and the degree of liking or disliking depends on the individuals concerned. There is nothing very esoteric about it. Another belief is that one begins writing stories because one has children of one’s own to tell stories to. This was not so in my case. I chose to write stories for children well before I had children … B
ut it is certainly true of many outstanding writers for children, including Carroll, Milne, Grahame and Kipling. Even so I would like to suggest that in many cases the presence of children in the author’s life has been a starting point only and the story has become, consciously or unconsciously, a vehicle for the author’s own self-expression. It certainly seems to be hard for people to accept that, in writing children’s stories, one writes, as William Mayne says somewhere, for oneself in childhood, that there is some area of one’s childhood unappeased to which one must return and give sustenance, or that the symbols and images of childhood reading have laid so strong a hold on the writer’s imagination that he must come back to them again and again for strength and refreshment. And when one takes such a familiar journey over again, one often finds it is not, after all, familiar. The old signposts and landmarks may still be there, but they signify new directions on this second journey. The waves still scribble their message on the sea, but they tell you something different from what they did when you were a child. Meaning is always an interaction between word and reader and even though words may remain constant the adult has different experiences to bring to bear in his part of the negotiation, than those he had when he was a child.
‘In 1969 when I was asked why I wrote for children I said it was simply to entertain them. I now think that the fear of appearing pompous caused me to over simplify. The old explanation no longer satisfies me for its very openness is a distortion and delusion. “Simply to entertain” is an odd statement in itself, for the sources of entertainment, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde’s comment on truth, are rarely pure and never simple.