Margaret Mahy

by Tessa Duder

  In raising language to an ‘exciting art-form’, warns Keestra, Margaret Mahy does not allow readers to take it for granted: fullest pleasure and enjoyment depends on careful reading, lest any delights be missed. She cites the invented adjectives and especially, expletives, worthy of Edward Lear; the jokey transfer of meanings recalling Lewis Carroll, such as a meal of shenanigans, peccadilloes and paragon soup (in Raging Robots and Unruly Uncles). Then there are the names, always as inventive, sly, ironic, fanciful, funny or classically allusive as necessary for the characters and the story. Others have had similar fun in picture books — Jill Murphy, Babette Cole, Joy Cowley — or gone for similar allusive seriousness in novels — J.K. Rowling, Jan Mark, Roald Dahl, Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman or Sonya Hartnett — but not both at the same time.

  Consider pirates called Peregrine (The Horrendous Hullabaloo), Orpheus Clinker, Terrible Crabmeat, Roving Tom, Wild Jack Clegg (The Great Piratical Rumbustification), Lionel Wafer (The Pirates’ Mixed-up Voyage) and Grudge-Gallows (Tingleberries, Tuckertubs and Telephones); teachers called Ms Marigold, Mr Sogbucket (The Horribly Haunted School) and Mrs Desiree Thoroughgood (The Blood-and-Thunder Adventure on Hurricane Peak); a beautiful librarian named Serena Laburnum (The Librarian and the Robbers).

  There are the families — the Terrapins (The Great Piratical Rumbustification) and the Scholars (The Haunting); Wicked Uncle Jasper and his seven sons, Caligula, Nero, Genghis, Tarquin, Belshazzar, Adolph and Julian (Raging Robots and Unruly Uncles); sisters Alpha, Cathabelle, Elodie, Icasia, Zamira (The Five Sisters); the Likely family, brothers Hardly and Scarcely, mother Pretty and clown Uncle Flipping (The Great Millionaire Kidnap).

  Then there are the villains and magicians — Rancid Swarthy, Whizzy Tambo and Crambo Tambo (The Riddle of the Frozen Phantom); Carmody Braque (The Haunting), Sir Quincey Judd-Sprockett, Amadeus Shoddy and Voltaire Shoddy (The Blood-and-Thunder Adventure on Hurricane Peak); Squidgy Moot (A Villain’s Night Out); the robbers Salvation Loveday (The Librarian and the Robbers) and Buckbounder (Beaten by a Balloon); the magicians Quando (Alchemy) and Heathcliff Warlock (The Blood-and-Thunder Adventure on Hurricane Peak); sinister brothers Felix, Ovid and Hadfield (The Tricksters), wacky sisters Ursa, Leona and Fox Hammond (24 Hours), difficult, demanding older sisters Ginevra (The Other Side of Silence) and Christobel (The Tricksters), difficult stepsister Jake (Aliens in the Family), feckless young male Jackie Cattle and the damaged bully Christo (24 Hours).

  From the novels come heroines Laura Chant (The Changeover), the besieged Troy and talkative Tabitha (The Haunting), beautiful Angela and her betrayed mother Dido (The Catalogue of the Universe), secretive Ariadne (The Tricksters), Bonny Benedicta (Memory), Winola (Underrunners) and mute Hero (The Other Side of Silence); the heroes and interesting young men Tycho (The Catalogue of the Universe), Sorenson Carlisle (The Changeover), Jonny Dart (Memory), Ellis (24 Hours), Roland (Alchemy) and Norvin (The Great White Man-Eating Shark).

  Witches, grandmothers and assorted crones? The Carlisle witches, mother Miriam and grandmother Winter (The Changeover); bustling granny Mrs Oberon (Busy Day for a Good Grandmother), poor senile Sophie (Memory), creepy Miss Credence (The Other Side of Silence) and cold, pale Miss Gibb (The Wind Between the Stars).

  For explorers and scientists she comes up with Tycho Potter (The Catalogue of the Universe), Jess Ferrett (Alchemy), Boniface Sapwood and Corona Wottley (The Riddle of the Frozen Phantom), Belladonna Doppler (The Blood-and-Thunder Adventure on Hurricane Peak); for babysitters, Daffodil (The Riddle of the Frozen Phantom) and the unforgettable Mrs Fangboner (The Catalogue of the Universe). Mr Prospero is a dutiful but vulnerable father (Down the Dragon’s Tongue); Mr and Mrs Flip are ballroom dancers (The Queen’s Goat). Then there is Mrs Discombobulous, and Pillycock’s Shop and Small Porks and dogs named Nightshade, Oberon and Titania, a sculptor named Uncle Pygmalion, a home decorator called Jacques Spratt and a boss called Mr Fat and an alien spy from outer space called Bond and a ghost named Lulu … As she explained in a 1975 speech, Margaret is fully aware of the symbolic, philosophical, visual and aural possibilities of language.

  ‘Language seems at times to have a separate existence from the people who use it. We talk about respecting it, about the damage that can be done through misuse of it. At times it seems as if language is man’s creator as much as a thing created by him. Without language we remain potential rather than actual.

  ‘After all, what is language? A way of symbolising! Some words stand for ideas with very well-defined boundaries. We can use the word “four”, meaning the idea of “fourness”, understanding precisely what is meant. No flexibility is possible here. Other words stand for ideas with which we are less apt at dealing. “Ultra-violet catastrophe”, for example, is a phrase with a highly technical meaning which only a physicist can fully appreciate. And yet we feel a response to the words, to their richness, their unexpectedness, to the explosion in their heart. Our response gives us pleasure and moves us on into other areas of verbal speculation. Sound alone has an impact beyond the necessities of sense.’

  Then there is the word that has a boundary, but the boundary is constantly changing. The poor abused word ‘love’ is an example.

  ‘I once had an aunt who had very definite ideas about love. It had to be “unselfish” or it was not “true love”. Love between the sexes had to lead to marriage. Not to intend marriage was to exhibit “selfishness” and therefore the feeling involved was not “true love”.

  ‘I remember arguing against these views, saying that she was making the criteria too narrow — that there were many cases outside the boundaries she had laid down that deserved to be described as cases of “love”. We could not agree. We obviously understood different things by the word and yet we continued to use it meaningfully to one another, stretching this way to cover point A, and back again to cover point B. You cannot stretch the “four” to cover “fiveness” or “threeness” but sometimes the definition of “love” can be stretched until it meets itself coming around the other way. We speak of love-hate, a term which is meaningful to us, though it encompasses two ideas that we understand as opposites.

  ‘Being aware of the definition of a word capable of such treatment is to understand it. Being open to the nuances possible within the boundaries of that meaning, nuances which at times extend the boundaries like frontiers in strange territory, is to be open to the intuitive field that such words build up around them … some of the more obvious ones are emphasis and expression (in conversation), irony and understatement.’

  Intuitive listening, she believes, is a matter of practice. ‘The ability to use words so that they simultaneously satisfy the need for rational discourse between two people, and at the same time extend into a variety of private satisfactions to the individual, is one which is often initiated in childhood and develops the very thing it relies on — the tuned ear listening to associations, to meanings underlying the pattern of words.

  ‘The person listening in to the field spread out around each word becomes an explorer of language, a taster of words, whose every encounter with reading or conversation has a potential, both in terms of momentary beguilement and more permanently, in that it may be one of the experiences by which future encounters are interpreted and defined. For such a person the world is full of messages flashed urgently, exhibited briefly and gone. Who is the sender? Sometimes it seems the universe is constantly revealing itself in a curious shorthand inscribed everywhere. Sometimes the inscriptions are moving and expected. Sunshine, storm and seasonal change write themselves across the city and we make guesses at what we are being told …

  ‘In writing for children I often find, on looking back, that a story written purely for entertainment at a particular time is nevertheless full of clues suggesting to child, adult, author, and reader alike that words are capable of many uses which are purely individual, even though they relate to the needs of social communication. The mother says there is a dragon in the matchbox and behold — there is a
dragon in the matchbox. Her word has taken a green and purple body to itself, breathes smoke and fire and terrifies the lion. Her words, working through her son, achieved a validity she would never have imagined. She must never tell a story again unless she dignifies it with belief, even if it is a belief in the symbol that underlies her story.

  ‘In another story, recently written, an old man uses the phrase “ultra-violet catastrophe” as a magical phrase, a spell which will recall him always to a realisation of himself, of his own identity. He shares the phrase with a small girl and it becomes, not just a magic formula, but a password between them. “Ultra-violet catastrophe” she says instead of “Goodbye”, and it means “Goodbye” and “We will meet again” and “We are good friends” and “We had a wonderful, adventurous time together”. The listening mother and aunt cannot hear any of this. The message is given but the secret is kept.

  ‘I hope there is enough in this to amuse and satisfy a reader without it being necessary to understand the phrase. It actually means, and my understanding of it is very imperfect, a catastrophe that would occur if energy were not contained in little parcels, in quanta. If energy were not restricted in this fashion, it would escape away through the ultra-violet end of the radiation spectrum — ultra-violet catastrophe, with apologies to any physicist. So there is a literal meaning hidden in the story, a funny surprise for any child who reads the story and then encounters the phrase in its literal form later in life. On the occasions that I have had such encounters I have certainly been amused and have felt, moreover, the literal situation enriched by the fantastic, and vice versa. I suppose one of the author’s satisfactions lies in establishing circumstances for this to happen for a like-minded person, in thinking of a child grown up and involved in physics suddenly encountering the phrase and saying “My God! Ultra-violet catastrophe” and feeling the spaces between thought and feeling, childhood and adulthood, symbol and reality, close up and everything become one, for the space of a second. In the present is the password for the future and part of the pleasure for the author is that it is speculative. It might never happen. It is a message sent out blindly like the broken plaque in the Mariner space probe that carries the image of our humanity outward to the stars.

  ‘Just as, for me, and at least some other people, too, all journeys are basically symbolic and just an outer manifestation of an inner exploration, so I think all statements are statements of self and one’s place in the universe. As we plan and commit ourselves to certain ideas and actions we watch ourselves carefully, see ourselves using words to give ourselves form, like ghosts using ectoplasm to materialise.’

  Margaret spent three years as the Christchurch children’s librarian, adding to her by now encyclopaedic professional knowledge of children’s books. Some older writers can remember her from this period, a jolly and welcoming presence clad in the unflattering smock that librarians of the time wore. Other librarians, such as her long-time friend Cathy Thompson, saw her as their ‘scribe’, composing poems for people leaving, organising book days, quoting Chaucer. ‘But the abiding memory everyone has is of an exhausted Mahy falling asleep at her desk.’

  Some fascinating scraps survive, in the library’s Margaret Mahy Archives, of the scribe’s contributions to in-house newsletters, such as the ‘Library Advisor’s Song’, accompanied by an Edward Lear-style cartoon of a giant cat, with bearded librarian astride as driver, and behind him, back-to-back, a woman with a machine gun trained on a fierce pursuing dog:

  We always know just where we’re at

  Travelling by trusty cat

  Petrol troubles are all gone

  Milk is what we travel on.

  On we speed, though once or twice

  We have to stop to take on mice.

  Goodbye to every mileage sorrow,

  Cats! The transport of tomorrow.

  ‘A Library Christmas Carol or The Consolations of Literature’ is also written and illustrated (lizard on trumpet, mouse on violin, hedgehog on drums) by Margaret Mahy. The librarians are discussing what to do with their library on the 24th of December.

  ‘We should close the library down,’ said one. ‘No one ever comes in on the 24th of December. Everyone is busy buying balloons or posting a last minute Christmas card to Aunt Minnie or trying to get a card of Christmas string. No one comes into the library.’

  ‘But somebody did come in once,’ said a high minded librarian. ‘Once some people from a lighthouse came in looking for books. Suppose we had been closed! Those people would have been denied the consolation of literature over Christmas.’ All the librarians were silent. None of them wanted to deny members of the public the consolations of literature over Christmas.

  No members of the public come, of course, but a man in a red coat and white whiskers does, and borrows

  … a book on woodwork, three detective stories and a thick book called ‘An analysis of the work pressure systems revealed by the dream of reindeer’. This book had only been issued once before.

  ‘That was me,’ said Mr S. Claus pointing to the date. ‘I had this book out in 1947 and I’ve never forgotten the whole new field in reindeer-employer relationships it opened up for me. I don’t know how to thank you for staying open on the 24th of December and letting me get this fine book out once more.’

  ‘Yes I do!’ he suddenly cried. ‘You may keep that Christmas tree. It is loaded with rich gifts and seasonable viands and was intended for the Town Hall, but I’ll give it to you instead …’

  Virtue was rewarded. Librarians enjoyed the rich gifts, and when ‘5 past 5 came and they were legally allowed to go out and buy their last minute Christmas string, theirs were the most cheerful Government faces to be seen on the city streets …’

  Librarians crop up in many of her stories as figures of fun. ‘What has she got against the poor librarian?’ asked one commentator. ‘Apart from having been one for many years herself and therefore understanding what it is like to be a librarian, she sees in the image a dichotomy between form and disorder.’ In Cuckooland, the television series that she was to write around 1985, Margaret hugely enjoyed the ‘inappropriateness’ of pairing up a librarian who heads a group called the Library Task Force who go out to reclaim books that have been kept overdue. ‘They simultaneously have the persona of the librarian and also of the SAS. They arrive in a balloon and speak through a loud-speaker saying, “Mr Branchee, come out with the book above your head and you will not be harmed.”’ In other speeches she has noted that ‘Jorge Luis Borges was national librarian of Argentina though he was blind, and the fact that he had 800,000 books in his library was apparently one of the few facts he ever bothered to remember. The post was a sinecure, and one he felt ironic about. Casanova was not only a writer but a librarian too, a fact not commonly noted. Still such illuminaries [sic] do not really define the profession, except to suggest how wide the abilities of librarians need to be.’

  But she could also be deadly serious about libraries’ roles in communities.

  ‘Human beings are driven, within their cloud of limitation, to struggle towards some sort of understanding of what is going on around them. There isn’t any escape. They live lives in which they observe, record, theorise, detect significant patterns, invent fairy tales that elucidate the human situation, and over and over again they need to record. Babies are given puzzles that challenge them to fit flat painted wooden horses into the empty horse-shaped spaces, and in a way we never outgrow such confrontations, though the shapes and the spaces grow stranger and the correspondences more tenuous. The library exists to maintain human records, but over and above that it also exists to impose form on the chaos of human perception and, through giving it form, to make it universally available. The library struggles with ambiguity, puts books on the shelves in an order that theoretically makes knowledge readily obtainable to all rate payers, and trains people to help other people when it comes to solving the increasingly complicated electronic maze which is also the respository of human information.�
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  Occasionally, for the local press, she would write encouraging, wise — and very funny — columns aimed at parents:

  ‘Do you have anything on disasters?’ asks an anxious mother. ‘He needs something on disasters for a school project.’

  The librarian answers her question by asking another.

  ‘How long has he got to do the project?’ and the parent looks both deprecating and anxious as she replies, ‘He’s got to have it in by tomorrow. He only mentioned it this morning at breakfast. You know what kids are.’

  The librarian, quite possibly a parent as well as a librarian, knows what kids are and slides an apprehensive glance at the section of the non-fiction shelving that houses books on the world’s great disasters. A suitable book may actually be there. What relief, what vindication of the library service if it is. And contrariwise, what feelings of inadequacy all round if the various books on disasters are all issued to other children for similar projects and the parent has to depart with a mere token earthquake or worse still, totally disasterless …

  Many children, with or without their parents, never make it over the library threshold. The aura of intellectual privilege is too alarming, though the librarian tries to conceal this by cheerful displays and by cultivating an easy informality, but many children and parents see through this and refuse to lower their defences. I recently encountered one mother, brought to the library by her daughter, who seemed about as comfortable there as a criminal in an electric chair. She apologised for being there at all, said she did not want to cause any trouble, mildly scolded the child for bothering the librarian (by asking for books on erosion) and then finally and rather wistfully admired a book with a pink and particularly pretty ballet dancer on the cover.

  ‘Take it out!’ I suggested. ‘Take it home and look at it. You can have it on your daughter’s card.’ But she began retreating in little short scuttles, dismayed by this confrontation, saying as she left the library …‘No, no, I won’t take it. I’ll leave it for some other kind of people.’