Telling Tales

by William Taylor

  Of course, it is only as we ourselves age that we really have the time or the inclination to ponder such things. I was in my mid-forties when Ivan died. I was busy. Very busy. My own two boys were teenagers. Being the single-parent of two teenage sons is work enough in itself, but there was also a home to run, books to write—not to mention my illustrious career in local government and one or two other things besides. I had scant time to worry about myself, much less Mary McGregor.

  My knowledge of my father, Alexander Ivan Taylor, is somewhat spotty. Not sketchy, but spotty. A lot that I do know was filtered through my mother, and, bless her heart, accepting everything that she said as gospel was always a bit risky. I have always known—because she told me—that Ivan once had a girlfriend called Violet, who was on the scene well before Dorothea. That’s all we ever knew on this score: Father once had a girlfriend called Violet.

  Born in Winton in 1904, the eldest of four—my grandparents were not good breeders by family standards—Ivan’s minuscule division of the family was one of those which escaped the grip of Southland. Not long after Ivan rode in Granny’s hearse, my grandparents moved their little lot to the North Island. First to Norsewood, then to Palmerston North and, finally, around 1920, to Petone where my grandparents would live for their rest of their hardworking and highly respectable lives. I guess it was a common enough trek in those times.

  Ivan was a diligent scholar. I have the ornate ‘Good Attendance Certificate of the First Class’ from Winton School, one dated 1911, certifying that Ivan Taylor ‘has been present every time the school was open, both in the morning and afternoon’. It is a beautifully designed document, demonstrating a surprising degree of bicultural sensitivity for that day and age. An intricate koru design set off with a branch of pohutukawa in full flower, and two small depictions—one of Mitre Peak and one of a kiwi—the whole thing the work of an Invercargill lithographer.

  Ivan’s certificate of two years later is less auspicious. It is of ‘the Second Class’, indicating fewer than five half-days of absence in the year. Possibly the time of Granny’s demise and funeral.

  By age fourteen or fifteen, he had left school and started work as a cadet in New Zealand Railways. This was clearly not of great appeal, because he moved on from there and did several years with the Wellington firm of EW Mills where, again according to my mother, he could have had a stellar career. By the time Ivan and Dorothea met, during the Depression, he was a driver, delivering small goods, bacon and sausages for Hutton’s. He was to be a driver for about twenty years, one way or another. He was a driver for the whole of his World War II service. He drove a bread-delivery van, at least part-time, in order to supplement our family income during our years in Levin.

  I will never know what ambitions, if any, he had for himself. He never said. He seemed content with his lot. He provided for us. He was a dutiful husband. He was to care for my mother, in every respect, during the last agonizing twelve years of her life after a series of crippling strokes left her almost completely incapacitated. She needed him. He didn’t complain. I wish I had told him how much I admired him, how much I loved him. Maybe he knew. I am sure that Ivan lived another life in his mind that he never felt compelled to share and that largely excluded those around him—not in any deliberate, uncaring way, but simply, at times, as unnecessary distractions.

  I remember phoning him once just to see how things were going. ‘Hello, Father, it’s Bill here.’

  ‘Bill? Bill who?’

  This was late in his life, but I never let him forget it. On another occasion, before my mother died, he arrived home one day and said to us, ‘This strange woman stopped me in town. Asked all these questions—seemed to know you all. No idea who it was. Very nosy, she was.’

  Later the same day, I answered the phone. ‘Had a good long chat to Ivan in town today. Do you know, I don’t think he had the slightest idea who I was!’ It was his sister, Aunty Florrie Cresswell.

  Such was the surface of his life. But there was more that he seldom ever mentioned. He had been a surf lifesaver, an excellent swimmer. I have the medals he won. He had been an athlete. I think he held the New Zealand record at some time during the 1920s for either the five or ten miles. He came near selection for an Olympic team—possibly for the games in Antwerp. He played tennis. Maybe Violet had been his mixed-doubles partner? Apparently he was very good at tennis. On all of these grounds I must have been a great disappointment to him as a son, but he never showed it. Thank God, my younger brother and sister excelled in areas where I certainly failed.

  My poor father. He gave up on teaching me to drive. It was just too perilous. Good God, I only drove the car into a river once! Oh, the shame, the ignominy of it all. Margaret, Hugh and Jan, all driving, fully licensed, on just about their fifteenth birthdays…I was to be in my twenties when Hugh, a teenager, told me he was sick to death of being my chauffeur and I could afford a car of my own and he would come and buy it with me and teach me to drive the bloody thing. He did.

  Ivan had also been a musician. A good one, too. It’s hard not to be when you grow up in a Salvation Army family and you are trained on the cornet and trombone. In the 1930s he played the saxophone, at least semi-professionally, in a top Wellington dance band. The band’s vocalist was Daisy Basham, whose voice would be even more fully utilized in her later career as radio’s Aunt Daisy. Semi-professional was probably just about as far as you could go in those days of grey Depression. His music career lasted for a number of years, possibly until he married.

  Probably, according to Mother, Ivan’s Salvationist days had ended with him being kicked out of the band at age fourteen when he had shoved his swimming togs down into his cornet or trombone or whatever in order to go for a quick swim after morning service. He had forgotten they were there and, as he tootled into the opening bars of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, out they shot. Now it is certainly easy to pick holes in this one. Firstly, your 1920s togs, even for boys, were not as skimpy as latter-day Speedos. You would probably need a bassoon to accommodate them rather than a cornet, and on top of all that you would need lungs as big as an elephant’s in order to expel the obstruction.

  No. I think he simply parted company with the Army. He was certainly not anti-religious, nor irreligious; that would have been difficult given both his own background, and then my mother’s wide-ranging forays into faith. But it wasn’t for him. He told me, well before he died, that he wanted no religious service for his funeral. His wishes were respected.

  Around the time of my father’s death in 1987, I wrote two novels. Both succeeded, and exceeded my expectations for them. By this stage in my writing career I didn’t feel too self-conscious placing the word ‘writer’ in any little box where I needed to list my occupation.

  I had worked out very early on, before I gave up teaching, that in order to survive financially from my writing, I needed two things: a mortgage-free house and to be prolific in my output of books. I cannot remember ever being too worried about whether the stuff I wrote would be accepted for publication. More, it was a matter of writing enough so that if one or two pieces along the way suffered rejection it wouldn’t be too crucial. A working writer who wants to go on writing needs to be practical.

  The two novels I wrote in the late 1980s have both more than served to keep the wolf from the door. Agnes the Sheep was the second of the two. Just before the blessed sheep came The Blue Lawn. For a number of years it appeared to me to be a wasted effort and destined to be one of those pieces that would be snuffed out through rejection.

  I wrote the story of David and Theo against the backdrop of homosexual law reform in New Zealand, when it was a fairly tumultuous time, politically. The bigots were out in force, and the religiously fundamental and rightfully righteous were in their element. Hellfire, damnation, Sodom and Gomorrah…The whole works—including the downfall of Western civilization and the decay of family values, accompanied by an incipient plague of AIDS and an outbreak of paedophilia—were on the menu. S
tupidly, I allowed myself into the thick of it.

  As then-mayor of carrot-and-ski town Ohakune, I was not unused to chairing the occasional public meeting. Goes with the territory. I thought little of it when I was invited to chair a public meeting on the contentious subject of this particular law change. It was held in the town’s old courthouse. I got to sit up on the bench where the visiting judge would normally sit. It was as well that I was afforded some elevation. It was as well that a couple of the town’s constabulary were also in attendance. The place was packed. The holier than thou, armed with their Bibles, clustered in the front seats. Moderation did not prevail. Whenever a reasonable question was asked or a point raised, whenever a pro-reform view was expressed, one or more of the Bibled folk would begin to recite, quite loudly, from the Good Book. For all that, I did manage to exert a certain control over the proceedings. A good loud voice, coupled with the fact that I was lucky enough to be looking down on the assembled throng, certainly helped. It was indeed an experience.

  It was also an experience that I was doomed to repeat at least twice more. The far more sensible local government leaders of nearby communities declined the honour of chairing similar meetings in their towns and, stupidly, maybe arrogantly, I agreed to step into the breach. The only condition I laid down was that there had to be a cop in attendance!

  On the one hand it was a crucial issue. On the other hand, in the wider scheme of things pertaining to human existence, it can only be seen as exceptionally trivial. The repeal of manmade laws that had only been in existence in the Western world for little more than one century of man’s history. Particularly unfair and arbitrary laws, too, in that they had only ever applied to the male of the species. Women had never suffered their draconian effects—simply, it is said, because Queen Victoria could not believe that consenting females could ever get up to such fun and games with each other!

  The Blue Lawn treats the subject of same-sex attraction in a muted fashion. There is no overt sex. No sexual acts are described, quite simply because they don’t happen, are not part of the story. David, the slightly younger and far less worldly-wise of this pair of fifteen- to sixteen-year-olds, is confused at the feelings that the more sophisticated Theo inspires in him. Theo is far more sanguine, and quite likely knows what’s happening. I make it quite obvious that, for both characters, the feelings that grow within them, each for the other, are both confusing and disturbing. Of course it is a love story. Near the end of the tale, David asks of his much older sister:

  ‘Can you tell me, does it always hurt? Does it always hurt so really, really bad?

  ‘What…?’ she began.

  ‘Like there’s nothing else but that feeling and it goes on and on and it’s in your mind and things go wrong and don’t work out and there’s nothing, nothing you can do to make it feel better.’ He looked at his sister and he breathed hard. ‘Does it always have to hurt?’

  As he looked at her, so she looked at him…

  The setting of the novel is small-town New Zealand, my favoured terrain in many, if not most, of my books. I have lived in all four main New Zealand cities, spent a year in London, but it is small-town and rural New Zealand that is closest to my heart and where I have spent most of my life. I know it well. I appreciate the advantages, and occasionally rail at the disadvantages of such living.

  Against this backdrop of factors, I wrote the book. I wrote it because there was nothing else around that told such a story. I wrote it, quite consciously, reflecting my own feelings of bewilderment at a similar age and stage to that of my two protagonists. I wrote it fully in the knowledge that, had such a tale been available to me at age sixteen, my life just may have been somewhat different. I know that I did not write the thing in order to shock or titillate. It is a story of young love.

  David is small-town ‘ordinary’. He is happy with his life and with his achievements, most particularly those on the rugby field. His home life is equally satisfactory, and his relationship with his parents is warm and sound. He has no desire to move beyond his immediate horizons. Theo, on the other hand, the ‘outsider’, new to the town, has enjoyed a more cosmopolitan existence. He may be worldly-wise beyond his years, but a veneer of sophistication at age sixteen is generally no more than a veneer. He comes to the town to live with his grandmother, Gretel, whose own story provides a counterpoint to the main tale. A refugee, a Polish Jew, she has experienced the ultimate horrors of rabid prejudice. In early old age, wealthy enough to indulge herself, she retires to the town, builds a house and plants a garden, and cherishes the enjoyment of watching it grow. David, rather than her grandson, helps with her garden.

  So I write their story. As always, it does not take long. Then, completely gutless, I put it away. Why? Well, for no better reason than I lacked the courage to do anything with it. I was concerned at what I might be saying, how what I was saying might reflect on me in ways that I chose to avoid. That what I was writing might be construed as autobiographical. Some things were better left unsaid. It was consigned to the proverbial bottom drawer and forgotten for a number of years. I have a little understanding of my actions. At this stage in my writing career, I was very busy writing my humorous fiction for older kids; the Worst Soccer Team Ever series of four novels—a very successful series at the time, published here by Reed Methuen, and in Australia and the United Kingdom by Penguin—and the Porter Brothers series published by HarperCollins. And others.

  Maybe a little tired of writing funny stuff, one day, about 1993, I remembered The Blue Lawn, dragged out the handwritten manuscript and read it through. ‘This is quite good,’ I must have muttered to myself. ‘Nothing wrong with it.’ I typed it up, changing very little. I sent it to Penguin New Zealand who had already published some of my work, and would publish more in the future. It didn’t take very long for them to make up their mind. It was rejected on the grounds of suitability and taste, and—this one stung me—that if published it would irreparably harm my reputation. Suitably chastened, and feeling rather grubby, I put the story of poor David and Theo away again.

  My good friends and fellow writers Tessa Duder and the late Gaelyn Gordon came to stay. We often stayed with each other and had strong friendships that had been built, initially, on our shared occupation. Gaelyn in particular was always quite demanding when it came to my work; she would always expect something new of mine to read, either in published or unpublished form. This time I had nothing to offer them, until I remembered The Blue Lawn, told them a little of the story and my recent mortification over the grounds of its recent rejection. Tessa read and appreciated the story. Gaelyn read it one night when she went to bed. ‘This has got to be published,’ she pronounced the next morning. ‘Let me have it. I’ll take it up to Paul Bradwell. I’m seeing him this week and I’ll tell him he’s got to publish it.’

  I didn’t quite roll around on the floor laughing, but I did say, ‘You must be joking. Paul wouldn’t touch this one with a ten-foot bargepole.’ I remembered Possum Perkins!

  ‘Oh yes, he will,’ Gaelyn continued to pronounce.

  Paul phoned me two or three days later. ‘I’m halfway through the book. It’s great. I want to publish it as soon as possible.’

  I do remember saying, ‘Before you make a decision, Paul, it may be a good idea to finish reading the whole thing.’

  ‘I’d like to,’ he said. ‘The only problem is that there seems to be quite a few pages missing…’

  He was right. The missing pages were all to be found under Gaelyn’s bed—bless her memory, one of the untidiest people I have ever known!

  HarperCollins published the book in 1994 and reprinted it a year later. They published a new edition in 2004.

  The publishing of the book coincided with a rather unpleasant blip in my health. I endured open-heart surgery in Wellington Hospital; a triple bypass operation. Physically, I recovered remarkably quickly. Mentally, things took rather longer. I had not counted on a massive black cloud of depression seeping into me. The better I got
on the physical side, the worse I felt in my head. Family and friends did everything they could to help, but in the end I had to help myself. I got over it. It would be ridiculous to say that The Blue Lawn played a part in my recovery, but its reception did serve to take my mind off how I was feeling.

  The reception for the book was both positive and negative. Extremes really, with not much in the middle. The book was reviewed by Jack Shallcrass on Kim Hill’s ‘Nine to Noon’ programme on National Radio. I was told when the review would be broadcast, and I toyed with going out for the day or at least mowing the lawns and not listening to it. However, I faced the ‘music’ and compromised a little. I turned up the volume on the radio and busied myself by climbing a ladder to clean some windows—possibly not a wise move given my recently stapled ribcage! I needn’t have worried: it was a great review. Indeed, I climbed down off the ladder after the opening couple of sentences.

  I didn’t worry about its reception when it became a topic on talkback radio; I didn’t bother listening. Paul Bradwell phoned and told me that the thrust of what was being said fell only slightly short of requiring that I be hanged, drawn and quartered for the crime of inflicting such dirty tripe on young New Zealanders. Parliamentarian, Graeme Lee, quoted in the press, considered the work scurrilous (I think he even mentioned it in some parliamentary debate). An association of secondary school principals in the lower South Island blacklisted the book and pronounced that it would never, ever be stocked in their schools’ libraries. Times change, of course. Some years later I visited several from this group of schools and was enthusiastically received. I didn’t say a word when I discovered The Blue Lawn well and truly in evidence in the libraries of all. My later novel Jerome, a far more graphic exploration of the same theme, was also in evidence in one particular library. I could see that the copies in stock had been well used. ‘I haven’t actually promoted the book,’ the librarian told me. ‘But solely by word of mouth it’s done the rounds of every senior pupil in the school.’ I was very pleased.