How many words have you writ today?
All of my books, everything I have ever written, begins life as a tiny speck, a grain of thought in my mind. A glimmer of something, no more than that. Then it gathers substance. Something like a snowball starting off small and rolling down a snowy slope gathering other flakes of snow to it as it travels. Or—another woolly analogy—maybe the gradual rolling of a ball of wool from a skein of the stuff.
Again, like all of my stories, Possum Perkins was fully worked out, held in my mind—the beginning, the middle and through to the end—before I ever committed one word to paper. I know my story fully, the back story, the lot. All the characters. What they look like and, more importantly, how they sound. Relationships, one with another, relationships with time and place. The only notes I ever make are mental. I have never kept a notebook for jotting down bits and pieces or ‘bright’ ideas.
Back then, of course, in the mid-1980s, before the common use of computers, all of my manuscripts were handwritten. These days, at least, I don’t have the struggle of having to decipher my almost indecipherable handwriting! The scratchings out, the scribbled inserts, the arrows indicating other bits up the top, down the bottom, in the margins, sometimes even back to the page before…Oh yes, a computer screen has much to recommend it.
The writing process itself is always done at speed, building from, at first, a meagre thousand words a day, and then gathering momentum to three, four, five thousand words a day…No five-day working week. When I work on a book it has to be every day, seven days a week. Miss a day and it seems to take at least three more to get back into the thing. To think back into the thing. Flat out for two or three weeks until that first rough draft sits there, complete. Well, not complete. That’s just the first stage. Then, a far more leisurely working-over of the whole until you get it to say what you want it to say to the best of your ability. There’s a trap there, of course. It is possible to work on something too much, and all you end up doing is flattening, deadening the product—rather like over-kneading bread dough. It is equally possible to get carried away, adding bits and pieces here, there and everywhere, often just to show how clever you are. Experience has certainly taught this writer that, more often than not, it is better to take stuff out than put stuff in. Less means more. Well, sometimes…Maybe not always.
Possum Perkins is the story of Rosie and Michael: Rosa Dorothy Perkins—how fortuitous that her rose-loving mother had ended up with the appropriate surname—and Michael Geraghty. Sometimes I have thought that in Rosie and Michael I am exploring the two sides of my own character. I am both of them. The one an introspective loner; the other, gregarious, outgoing and sometimes thoughtless. One certainly brighter than the other.
I have learnt, through reading what others have written about my work, that I have an intuitive feel for the ‘shape’ of a story. I don’t know whether it is intuition or not. Probably it is more instinct. It is certainly something I have never thought much about. I do know that I have the ability to build a tale to a satisfactory climax. I know, also, that I generally aim towards a double climax, certainly in my novels of, say, 30,000-plus words.
In Possum Perkins, poor Rosie’s tale resolves in at least a part-resolution of matters with her sick, alcoholic mother, through to the assault upon her by her insanely jealous father. And then, to add to the poor girl’s load, the possibly inevitable death of Plum, the possum she has raised. When I think about it now, maybe I gave the poor soul too much to contend with.
Much has been written about Possum Perkins, most particularly in regard to the father–daughter relationship. Reg Perkins assuredly has a suffocating love for his daughter, his only child. She is, to this poor sad loner, the only ray of sunshine in his life. His wife has deserted him—if not physically, at least in almost every other sense as she lies in her drunken and drug-induced miasma. Indeed, this little family is full of loners, two of them very sad indeed. So devastation is somewhat inevitable when one of this tightknit trio reaches outside its confines, and an outsider reaches in!
There are those who have chosen to read incest into the work. So be it. Let’s face it, the old adage that to the pure all things are indecent holds more than a grain of truth! Suffocating, cloying and indeed unhealthy may sum up Reg Perkins’s relationship with his daughter. That he would die for his child is, I think, equally true, although not explored in the piece. Incest in its strict sense? I think not. For all that, it is this element that has bedevilled this work’s long life, almost to the present day.
I finished the work and sent it off to Paul Bradwell at Reed Methuen. I know that he and his consultant editor at the time, Dorothy Butler, gave the story great consideration, but ‘aspects’ of it worried them. While they pondered, I beavered away on my next book, My Summer of the Lions. I completed that piece, sent it to Paul and had it accepted by Reed Methuen almost immediately. And then, with some regret, he rejected the story of Rosie and Michael. I didn’t feel particularly daunted.
I then submitted Possum Perkins to Ashton Scholastic (now Scholastic New Zealand). Scholastic accepted the book at about the same time that book number three, Shooting Through, was also taken up by Reed Methuen.
I have never bothered to do the sums, but I think Possum Perkins is my clear winner in world-wide sales. I was lucky. Ashton’s then publisher, the late Duncan Nicol, sold the American rights to the book to Scholastic US, where it was published under the title Paradise Lane—the Americans thought it sounded nicer and, besides, they didn’t want easily confused young Americans having to grapple too much with the difference between Australian opossums and their own indigenous possums. They published a lavish hardback edition, followed by a mass-market paperback. It sold very well indeed. It was taken up by Hutchinson in the United Kingdom, again with a hardback followed by paperback. In France, as Princesse, it came out in a very lovely edition by L’École des Loisirs; Denmark, Sweden and others all followed. Most recently, and to my enormous satisfaction, it was published in Albania for sale in that country and in Kosovo (just about the only other place where Albanian is spoken). In all truth, not a large edition there. The Swedes must have loved it. They did the obligatory hardback and then a printing of 20,000 in paperback. Rosie, Michael and Plum the possum have travelled far and wide.
The work received significant acclaim, most particularly in the United States. Publishers Weekly gave it a boxed review, School Library Journal a starred review, and Kirkus a pointed review and called it ‘riveting and unforgettable’. I seldom keep reviews; I nabbed these wee quotes from the back of the jacket on the US edition of Agnes the Sheep.
There were certain ‘ironies’ in the history of Possum Perkins. The education authorities in sunny Queensland, Australia, would allow only single copies to be held in school libraries; no class sets of the book were permitted. Apparently, they would have relaxed this edict had I been willing to sign an affidavit, or disclaimer, to the effect that the relationship between Rosie and her father was not incestuous. I declined. Really, if you think about it, no matter what I signed would make any difference to the story being told between the covers of the book.
The rights to Possum Perkins finally reverted to me a year or two back. A major New Zealand publishing house wanted to republish the work for sale in this country and the United States. I was delighted. Negotiations proceeded amicably and with enthusiasm on both sides. Fresh artwork was done for the book and it was re-designed. Every little thing moved along swimmingly—right up to the signing of the contract, when I received a phone call from the editor working on the book. They had decided to withdraw. ‘For what reason?’ I asked. ‘I thought you were more than ready to go with it.’
What reasons indeed! I could have tolerated economic ones; however, on the advice of their ‘advisory panel’ they had decided that certain aspects of the story were unsuitable and more than a little worrying. On hearing this, I jumped to quite the wrong conclusion. ‘You mean a panel of teachers or librarians in some Bible-be
lt area of America?’ A chill ran down my spine when I was informed that, no, it wasn’t an American panel…it was a fully New Zealand panel.
To add insult to injury, I was then asked if I would like them to send me, as a memento, the completed artwork for the aborted new edition. At this juncture I was a tad rude, and I do have regrets here because common sense tells me it had not been the poor young editor’s fault. Her enthusiasm for the whole project had been admirable.
But where in this green, pleasant and relatively liberal land of ours had they managed to come across this coven of bigots? And poor old Possum Perkins now almost a quarter-century old!
I think Rosa Dorothea would have enjoyed the tale of Rosa Dorothy Perkins. Indeed I know she would have. ‘Hmmm,’ murmured my father when I gave him his copy. ‘Not as big as a Wilbur Smith, is it?’
Ivan enjoyed the book. I’m pretty sure he enjoyed everything I wrote; and if he didn’t, he certainly didn’t say so. I do know that he was fully supportive of my soon-to-be-made decision to give up teaching in order to write full-time. Now, as I creep further into old age, I realize increasingly just what an enormous debt I owe my parents, Ivan and Dorothy Taylor.
II
In midsummer of the year 1860, James and Elizabeth Taylor and their seven children—an eighth had died in infancy—boarded the clipper Robert Henderson in Glasgow, Scotland, for the long voyage to Dunedin, New Zealand. Quite clearly this was a search for a better life. Each of their eight offspring had been born in a different town or village around Highland and Lowland Scotland. James is described as being a ‘farm steward’, and satisfactory employment had obviously been hard to find for this father of a growing brood who needed to be clothed, fed and educated. Like thousands of other families at that time in England, Scotland and Ireland, they looked further afield. In James and Elizabeth’s instance they decided upon following the trail to the other side of the world already taken by a fair few other Scots over the previous decade.
The voyage was long; three months at sea, even though the clipper was, according to records, one of the best, one of the speediest. One hundred and fifty years later and many of their descendants make the same trip, if they’re in a hurry, in little more than twenty-four hours!
It was an uneventful voyage, other than for an outbreak of scarlet fever which knocked off four of the passengers. Seven others perished from a variety of conditions. The monotony of the long voyage would have been slightly relieved by what was likely obligatory attendance at the subsequent burials at sea.
The Taylors settled in Dunedin’s North East Valley. James seems to have been a man of some small substance, because he and his older sons managed to rake up enough capital to establish a small carrying business; probably a bullock-drawn dray. Luck was on their side. The Central Otago gold rush began a few months later. Canny Scots, they decided against chasing the elusive metal, but were certainly not averse to carrying others who needed transport to the goldfields along with their equipment and provisions. James and his boys made enough money to buy a modest acreage in Winton, Southland, among the first handful of settlers in that community. In 1864, most of the family moved there. They farmed, and continued carrying and contracting.
By the time they died—James in 1898, and his wife in 1901—they had become patriarch and matriarch of a very large brood indeed. It was to get much larger.
By 1986 when a family gathering was held in Invercargill and Winton, James and Elizabeth had 5,000 living descendants. Not all of them could make it to the big weekend, but some 1,500 did. It was just as well that Invercargill’s Centennial Hall was big enough to take the number. When the 1,500 moved over to Winton, it was the racecourse that had to do the honours. Organization was simple: seven groups, each lot descended from one of the children of James and Elizabeth.
Some had done better than others in the reproduction stakes. The only one really letting the side down was the Jane Taylor branch, of which there were only twelve living descendants. The clear winner? The James (after his old man, and my great-grandfather) Taylor branch, of which there were 1,500 living descendants. James number two and his wife, Mary McGregor, married both aged eighteen, had certainly given their all to populate Aotearoa-New Zealand. They had fourteen children. Indeed, of the elder James and Elizabeth’s relatively modest family of seven, three had produced fourteen offspring each, another one thirteen, and the most fertile of all, their youngest son, David, and his wife had produced fifteen. No wonder that in 1986 there were 5,000 living descendants (with a further 2,000 married into the family). Twenty-plus years further on, I guess the tally would have increased exponentially! My two sisters and I have a tally of twelve grandchildren…none of whom were born when the family reunion took place. As is often remarked, the Taylors have bred like rabbits.
A perusal of the family tree (a 300-page book) shows that James and Elizabeth have a very wide variety of descendants. ‘Taylor’, for a start, is no longer the predominant surname. Of the 1,500 at the reunion only about fifty males still carried the Taylor name. There are Maori, Polynesian, Dutch, Greek, Indian, German, Russian, French and Scandinavian surnames, along with, obviously, the Scottish, Irish and English. An even wider variety of occupations: teachers, nurses, dentists, doctors, lawyers, a judge or two, a diplomat, farmers and farm workers, accountants and business people, freezing workers, factory workers, shop assistants, police, fire service, prison officers, maybe a few prison inmates, although not listed as such, the armed services…and even two or three writers! There have been those who have made their mark in sport, including at least one obligatory All Black. Seven of the descendants of James and Elizabeth were killed in World War I, three at Flanders alone. In an historic link to this latter sacrifice, it is likely that the Taylor family were among those who migrated from Flanders to Scotland in the twelfth century to work in the wool trade. Many others served in and survived both wars. In 1986, one in every sixteen Southlanders was a descendant of this couple.
It was good that my father, then approaching his mid-eighties, was able to attend; one of the dozen or so oldest at the gathering. It was great that he could catch up with at least one or two of his surviving first cousins; originally they had numbered eighty-eight. He had often recounted, with some pride, his early memory of attending the funeral of ‘Granny’: Mary McGregor Taylor, the granny of the eighty-eight. Ivan had been allowed to ride in the horse-drawn hearse.
Family? You can’t avoid them when it’s a family of this size. I’ve taught them, without knowing I’ve taught them. They’ve been living down the road, in the next street, without my realizing for months or years. They’ve popped up at places where I’ve been speaking up and down the country.
‘I think you can ask him now,’ the man said to the woman, at the end of whatever I had to say at the Nelson Library about my last young-adult novel, Land of Milk and Honey, just a couple of years back. The couple, about my own age, were a little hesitant and had hovered nearby while I answered the questions of those who had waited behind for a personal word.
I saw the woman reach into her bag and bring out the book, our family tree and history: The Taylor Millions. I smiled and said, ‘Yes, you’re right. We must be cousins—somewhere along the line.’ I was delighted that they had waited so long and so patiently. We had a good chat.
In 1987, the descendants of James and Elizabeth Taylor unveiled a stone to mark their graves in the Otautau Cemetery. I have sometimes wondered why their resting place was left unmarked at the time of their deaths. It was certainly not as if the family had not prospered sufficiently and had been unable to afford headstones at the time. That prospering had certainly resulted from the actions of the old couple in uprooting themselves and their children, leaving their homeland to find a new life on the other side of the world. A degree of gratitude might have been expected! Maybe Scots parsimony is more than just a myth.
And of James and Betsy themselves in old age? Did they ever just stand and look around them in this southern land
so far from their own roots, in wonder at what their actions had wrought? Did they ever hanker for the Highlands, the glens, the Lowlands of their native land, thinking of kith and kin left behind? Probably not. I guess the old boy and his wife were far too pragmatic for such sentimental indulgence. After all, the land of their fathers could hardly be said to have nurtured them in any way as satisfactorily as had their new, adopted land. They may well have self-referenced themselves as ‘Scots’; their descendants, however, would only be New Zealanders, Kiwis.
Nothing that I have written can avoid being about ‘family’. Family, in all its permutations. Of course this is a self-evident truth in most fiction. I have written about warm and loving conventional families. I’ve written about families in crisis. I’ve written about dysfunctional families. I have written about love and the absence of love in families.
In Circles (Penguin, 1997), I write of the generations of a family and the myths that often grow up within a family and cloud the truth, often not intentionally, so that the end product is not quite what it seems. It’s not that lies are told; more often it is that the truth is not fully revealed and the future ends up being built on supposition. I believe I said some important things in Circles, and I continue to think it a pity that it was allowed to go out of print so quickly and just when it was beginning to be picked up and read by those for whom I had written the piece.
Now that I am getting older I have significant regrets that I didn’t ask enough questions of my mother and father or of my Taylor grandparents. There are things I would like to know, questions I would like answered. There is now no one around to answer them. It’s great that Ivan rode in the hearse to Granny’s funeral. But I have no idea what Granny was like. The one photo I have of Great-granny Mary McGregor, circa 1905, shows a very grim and dour old Scot indeed. She sits, uncompromising, dressed in black, flanked by three of her four score and more grandkids, girls aged between twelve and fourteen. What did she think about being a granny to so many? Did she ever tally up a total of them all? I would bet she didn’t remember birthdays! It doesn’t look as if she is too happy with the three in the picture. I look at the photo from time to time, not because it tells me very much in itself, but simply because the grim visage of the old girl uncannily resembles my younger sister, Janette, and I find this as amusing as Jan finds it disturbing!
Telling Tales Page 3