Telling Tales

by William Taylor

  By 1963 the landed gentry were no longer quite so well landed. The stately home had burnt down sometime during the war, and the last of the aristocratic family now made do with a rather lovely but very much smaller Elizabethan house that had in more prosperous times been the dower house or maybe vicarage on the estate. We stayed with our mother’s brother, John, in his home nearby, a delightful old half-timbered black and white house where you bumped your head going through most doorways, where going upstairs was perilous…and where the bath had pride of place in one of the bedrooms. His wife had once been lady’s maid to the lady of the manor. From time to time she still helped out the woman who had once been her mistress—for free. Noblesse oblige in reverse.

  Possum Perkins was written in 1985. It is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Rosa Dorothea Taylor. While by no means my first published novel, it certainly serves to mark the beginning of my career as a full-time writer.

  Between 1968 and 1973 I wrote half a dozen novels for adults. Why? Well, quite simply I seemed to have run out of anything else better to do, and it seemed like a reasonable idea at the time.

  ‘I’m going to write a book,’ I said to Delia, my former wife.

  ‘That’s nice, dear,’ she replied. ‘Don’t make a mess’, in tones similar to those of my mother on my announcing I had come across Jesus in our garden twenty-odd years earlier.

  Delia maintains she said nothing of the sort. I know she did. Whatever…I was as good as my word. I sat down and wrote a book. I knew nothing about writing books, I had never met an author or a writer of any sort. I don’t remember the prospect daunting me too much. Ignorance is bliss.

  I guess when someone starts to knit something they must start with a first stitch. So it is with writing a book. You start, not with a stitch but with a word, and then go on adding words until you have finished saying whatever it is you hope to say. In my case I ended up with a book rather than a garment.

  We were living at Waiwhare, a farming district some fifty kilometres from Hastings on the Napier–Taihape road, just short of the Gentle Annie. I was the head teacher of the two-teacher school that served the district. We weren’t called the more pretentious ‘principal’ back then in the olden days, not in the primary service. It was a good little school. In truth, it could have run itself! The school was up and running, the grounds of the school and schoolhouse next door were beautifully kept (by the head teacher), and really there was not much to do, professionally or domestically. We had two very small sons, ages one and two years, a car that was not too reliable on what was then a very rough trip into town, and very little money to throw around even if we did manage to get down into the bright-ish lights of Hastings or Napier.

  Nearer to Hastings than Waiwhare, on the trip into town, you pass Omahu School, previously called Fernhill School. It was here that, slightly earlier than my years in the district, Sylvia Ashton-Warner had lived and taught, along with her husband. It was here, quite likely, that she had put the finishing touches to one or more of her earlier novels, maybe Spinster. This was my initial inspiration. If Ashton-Warner could do it in surroundings not unlike my own, then why couldn’t I write a book?

  In the next handful of years I certainly outdid her in quantity, if definitely not in quality. Five of my six early adult novels came out of Waiwhare.

  It’s all well and good to write a book, but, having written the thing, you then have to find a publisher. Persistence may well reap its own reward, but I was sensible enough to know that my persistence would have its limitations. If that first, or maybe stretching as far as second, novel had not been picked up by a publisher, I would have thrown in the towel and moved on to trying my hand at…God knows what.

  It is hard to know from such a remove how to judge my early efforts objectively. These days, if I ever talk about my first six novels I tend to disparage slightly. I know they aren’t bad. I know they aren’t very good. It’s wrong to say they are mediocre, so maybe they rest somewhere on the continuum between mediocre and goodish. They certainly found a publisher. By fossicking around bookshops and libraries I found that a likely outlet for my work would be the old New Zealand firm Whitcombe and Tombs, still a publishing house back then and with their offices in Christchurch. The late Max Rogers, publisher, accepted my first book. Not only that, he managed to score an English co-publisher, Robert Hale of London. I know he had hoped for WH Allen, also of London. All six of my novels, from Episode in 1970 to The Chrysalis in 1974, were published jointly by the two firms. They each sold out their one edition, and were generously reviewed and moderately well received. However, they didn’t make much of a ripple and, thirty-five years on, are virtually forgotten. Nevertheless, odd copies may still be stocked in some libraries. Well, I know that for a fact…The Authors’ Fund (Public Lending Right) compensates writers for their titles held in public libraries, partly based on the assumption that borrowers of books would otherwise be buying them. A minimum of fifty copies of a title need be held in libraries up and down the nation in order to qualify for a payment. Inexplicably, my very first published title, Episode, came back onto my list two or three years ago after an absence of about two decades! Sadly, it has now disappeared back into oblivion…

  Logically, it was only a matter of time before I began to write for a younger audience. It was a faltering start. I was teaching at Feilding Intermediate School when my last adult offering, The Chrysalis, was published. The Manawatu Standard did a profile along with a large photo of me with wife and sons.

  ‘So what? You can write books, eh? If you can write them for old people, why can’t you write one for us?’ I remember the comment well. A challenge? A throwing down of the gauntlet? I had never really given much thought to writing for kids. After all, I worked with and for them all day, and then went home at night to another couple of the little blighters. For all that, I accepted the challenge, picked up the gauntlet and began writing what was to become Pack Up, Pick Up and Off, sharing each completed chapter with my class. They seemed quite approving of my efforts. However, the exercise came to an abrupt halt when I was appointed principal—or it may still have been ‘head teacher’—at National Park School, Mount Ruapehu.

  The new job was challenge enough, and those three or four chapters were consigned to a bottom drawer and almost forgotten for a number of years. There were other challenges, too. In 1975, Delia took off for a trip home to England and to her mother who lived in Spain. This was her first visit back to where she had come from as an eighteen-year-old migrant on the old Captain Hobson in 1959. I think we both knew that what had proved to be a rocky marriage had staggered to its end. We divorced, amicably enough, our union finally ending a couple of years later in the Crown Court in Hitchin, Herts. Unhitched in Hitchin! We’ve both always wryly appreciated that little drop of irony. We remain close friends.

  So, running a school of 120 pupils, teaching a class back in those days before ‘principal release time’ for head teachers had been invented, plus raising two small boys singlehanded didn’t allow much time for writing!

  Writer, bookseller, and children’s literature guru Dorothy Butler of Auckland visited the school in her book bus. Really, she came to visit her daughter, Christine Sidwell, married to David, then a ranger in the Tongariro National Park. Christine taught with me at the school, part-time. Naturally the school patronized Dorothy’s wonderful mobile bookshop. I spent some time with Dorothy, who knew I was writer—or, as I thought then, had been a writer. I mentioned that I had written the first few chapters of a novel for older children. I can’t remember whether I asked if she would like to read it or whether she asked if she could read it. Whatever, she took the fragment away with her and read it overnight. Her response the next day may well have finished for good my writing career for younger readers. There are some comments we always remember, and I sure remember this one: ‘Bill, I think you should stick to writing for adults.’ I am sure she would have smiled as she said it.

  I know that Christine smiled the
next day when I told her. ‘Mother doesn’t know everything about children’s literature,’ she said. I didn’t believe her.

  Inadvertently and tragically it was my brother, Hugh, who really got me into writing for kids. In 1978, Hugh and his wife, Alyson, took leave from their teaching jobs at the old Hutt Valley Memorial Technical College in Petone. Recently married, they were taking a year or so off to travel overseas. They didn’t get far. They made it to Burma and boarded a flight from Rangoon to Mandalay to have a look at the temples. Just after take-off, the plane exploded. All on board were killed: a posse of high-ranking Burmese Army officers and half a dozen overseas tourists.

  Among the hundreds of letters of condolence we received at the time is one from a young Indian man. The next stop on their trip had been India and a stay with the family of an Indian woman with whom they had taught in Petone. He had waited for five days and five nights on some train station in an out-of-the-way place, meeting every train, waiting for them.

  It was a truly dreadful time for both families. Thirty years on, I still tune out from the news of any air disaster.

  Hugh had been the nearest thing to a golden child in our family. Six years my junior (he was the end-of-the-war child), I loved him dearly. The only irate words he ever addressed to me were when he was twelve and I was eighteen. ‘I’ll knock you bloody flat if you ever make me clean your shoes again.’ Given he was already taller and bigger than me, I took the hint. We had shared a bedroom for years. (To be honest, the two of us shared our room with a large accumulation of car parts and enough tools to stock a good-sized garage.) He was your all-round individual. Captain of this and that at school, head boy and dux at good old Petone Tech, he had taken off, done a reasonable science degree, and then returned to Petone Tech to teach there for what was to be the whole of his career. He had played and then coached basketball. He also played the clarinet—dreadfully; and the guitar—‘diligent’ is a kindly way of describing his efforts. He sang, too, but gave no evidence of having inherited very much of Rosa Dorothea’s abilities. Still, one can’t excel at everything.

  An ugly ending to two good lives, and a snuffing-out of promise of anything that might have been. The situation at the actual time could hardly have been uglier. Little news made it out of Burma, even then, and both families were told that they would not be permitted entry to the country. Their remains were cremated following a funeral service at the Anglican cathedral in Rangoon, and a couple of months later their ashes were repatriated. An enormous memorial service had been held in Petone in the week following their deaths, and their families finally farewelled them, privately, when what was left of them eventually came home.

  My father was devastated and distraught. He probably never got over this loss in the ten or so years left to him. I did all the grubby work for him, and did what I could to hold our family together. Dear old Hugh had written his own will, so enough to say that it took some figuring out and legal manoeuvring.

  Six months or so of all of this was not too good for me or my boys, and I realized I had to do something about it. I didn’t take Dorothy Butler’s advice. Instead, I dragged out those early chapters of my first novel for kids, sat down and finished it off. Pack Up, Pick Up and Off is dedicated to the memories of Hugh and Alyson Taylor. The character of George, the small brother of Charlie, the narrator, is very much my brother Hugh when he was little. The book tells a simple, straightforward story of a nice family in a not-very-nice place. There are elements in the tale that come from my years at rural Waiwhare. Lowest of the low in the rural social pecking order is the rabbiter. It’s a job that doesn’t exist these days. Charlie Thomson’s father is the new rabbiter in the district. It is the first day at their new school for Charlie and his younger brother and sister:

  We waited for the school bus that first day. Out at the gate and in plenty of time. In fact Mum had sent us off with a good ten minutes in hand. ‘Make sure you stand by the mail-box,’ she said. ‘That’s where they said for you to wait.’

  We waited. And the bus went right past. Like anyone waiting for a bus, anywhere, we sort of pricked ourselves up at its approach and stood, expectant, bags in hand, on the grass and gravel edge of the road. It came; a cloud of dust mushrooming, fanning out behind. It didn’t slow and it didn’t stop and we were eaten into the dust. We trudged back to the house.

  ‘It didn’t stop, Mum.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ she said, and then realised our being there proved we weren’t liars. ‘Well then, you couldn’t have been standing by the box.’

  ‘We were, Mum,’ said Carey.

  ‘We were,’ echoed George.

  She brushed a wisp of hair from her forehead and looked, for just a moment, lost. ‘Well, your father’s got the car so there’s no joy there. Wait out on the road. Someone might pass by.’

  ‘On the road, Mum!’ said Carey. ‘We’d wait all day. No cars go past here. Not often, anyway.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said George.

  ‘Your father’ll be back for his lunch about twelve. I’ll phone the school and tell Mr Hughes you’ll start this afternoon. I don’t think he’d mind once I tell him what’s happened. Anyway, by the looks of you it’ll take me ’til then to hose the dust off.’

  I looked at the other two and then said, ‘It’s okay. Mum, we’ll walk.’

  ‘Walk!’ said Carey. ‘Not me.’ She looked out along the road. ‘It must be five miles.’

  ‘Three, if you must know. Dad and me measured it on the speedo in the car,’ I said.

  ‘George can’t walk,’ said Mum, brushing away that wisp again.

  ‘Yes I can,’ said George.

  ‘Well, I can’t, and that’s that,’ said Carey.

  ‘You damn well can,’ I said. Something in me told me that, just this once, it was the only way. It wasn’t a walk I was looking forward to. Not in the February heat along the up-hill, down-hill road. But it was the only way.

  In spite of the dust as the bus had passed us at the gate and in spite of the speed of the vehicle as it rocked along, I could swear I had seen two, maybe three, faces pressed to the back window. And they had been laughing. Yes, we had to walk.

  The book was finished at Pukerua Bay. I was principal of the school there for a couple of years before tackling my final teaching job at Ohakune.

  ‘Where do your ideas come from?’

  The most frequently asked, the most annoying, the most perplexing and the most impossible question posed to any writer. Every time a coconut! It lands with a thud. Over and over again, a hundred, a thousand, many thousands of times in the past quarter -century.

  I don’t know. So I invent answers—often to keep myself awake…

  ‘From the world around me. From the place I live, the people I know. The people I love—and don’t love! From every nook and cranny of my long life.’ And generally answered with a smile.

  I guess Possum Perkins comes from the kids I have taught. It may come from the premise of opposites attracting. May even come, in tiny part, from the possums I’ve killed. The setting likely comes from an amalgam of places where I’ve lived.

  My long-time friend, colleague and fellow writer Tessa Duder says that she always starts off with a character in mind—and she reckons I do, too. She may be right—she often is!

  In 1984, I was awarded the Choysa Bursary for Children’s Writers, back then the only grant available to writers for the young. Most of our current crop of major writers for children and young adults have scored this award. In its day it was a major initial building block for many outstanding careers. The sum of money was not great. My grant was $7,000…and when added to my reasonable school principal’s salary in that particular tax year, well, most of it ended up in the government’s coffers. Probably more important than the actual sum was the boost it gave to a writer’s confidence, an indication that you were on the right track.

  My money got doled out at a function in Wellington. Turnbull House, Bowen Street, just across from the Beehive, once a private ho
spital where my tonsils had been whipped out as a three-year-old. The then Minister for the Arts, Peter Tapsell, did the honours. My two boys, my father and my stepmother were with me. Two things happened when the time came for the presentation. Tapsell seemed convinced that it was my father, and not me, who was the rightful recipient, and Ivan was quite happy to go along with this travesty. However, a flunky got Peter back on the right track just in time, and then hissed in my ear, ‘For God’s sake, don’t open the envelope—it’s empty. We’ve lost the cheque. We’ll find it and pop it in the mail.’ The cheque’s in the mail? Yeah. It didn’t arrive for weeks.

  I got to work. Took a two-term leave of absence from my job and settled to write. A full-time writer! Well, for eight or nine months, anyway. I didn’t waste any time. In the time that I had, I wrote three novels for eleven- to thirteen-year-olds: Possum Perkins, My Summer of the Lions and Shooting Through. A quarter-century later and two of the three are still in print. I am happy with that.

  I was really given no option other than to write. Once, twice, occasionally more often than that, after school had closed for the day, two small boys would materialize at my front gate or would venture into the garden. Six or seven years old, pupils from my school whom I knew well, indeed had enrolled them as five-year-olds. If I was unwise enough to be sitting out on the verandah enjoying an afternoon cuppa, they would call out, ‘How many words have you writ today?’ Always rather accusingly and certainly seriously. Without a shadow of doubt I knew that I would have writ far more in half a day than either of them would have read in a week!