HarperCollins did their second printing of The Blue Lawn. In 1995 it won the Senior Fiction Award in the children’s book awards of that year. It did well in Australia, and I spoke about the book there and watched a scene from the novel ably dramatized at the youth section of the Melbourne festival. Later, the work was dramatized by a Wellington actor, and staged for short seasons in Upper Hutt and Wellington. It was a good production and kept faith with my story.
I have a lot of letters from readers about this book. Many, if not most, open with ‘You have told my story.’ Others, ‘You have told my son’s story.’ Some have said that I have told a friend’s story, a brother’s story. One or two, the saddest of all, let me know that I have told their story…but leave the letters unsigned. The book has been quietly around ever since, selling the odd few copies here and there. Paul Bradwell left HarperCollins, and I did try to interest his successor in finding a wider market. I don’t know whether he tried very hard.
Following my 1997 Writer-in-Residence stint at the Palmerston North College of Education, English lecturer Mona Williams, a storyteller and writer herself, sent me a collection of short stories with a gay theme and asked for my comments on the work. It was an American collection published by Alyson Books of Boston, a small firm publishing exclusively gay titles. There was a note from the publisher in the back of the collection. I wrote to them, and told them about The Blue Lawn. They asked to read it. They liked it very much and published it. While certainly not selling in enormous numbers, it earned significant critical acclaim. It was honoured by the New York Public Library, was a finalist for the Michael L Printz medal—the prime US award for young adult fiction—and was also a finalist in the Lambda book awards for gay writing. It travelled on to the United Kingdom where it was also well-received.
Alyson did a great job of packaging the book. The jacket shows a misted sort of blue lawn of grape hyacinth and depicts the jeaned legs and sneakered feet of the two characters, David and Theo, against a blue background, and quotes the New Zealand Listener review: ‘A powerful, sensitive work of fiction that pushes the boundaries’. Several years later I stayed with Alyson’s senior editor in Los Angeles—the firm had moved from Boston—and told him I thought the cover was terrific and asked who the legs belonged to. ‘Just a couple of people from the office,’ he said, and smiled. ‘We couldn’t find two guys whose legs matched very well. One of them is a woman.’ Fair enough, too!
Alyson Books co-published Jerome with Longacre Press of Dunedin. The jacket is also stunningly good, depicting a soulful-looking young man. Definitely male, this one—a photo of a young Czech porn star who happened to be visiting the Alyson offices to be interviewed for one of their magazines. I did a third novel for Alyson: Pebble in a Pool. I chose not to have this work published in New Zealand.
I have a feeling that there is a price to pay if you choose to run counter to the general flow. In some quarters of the children’s literature establishment, I am considered not too kosher. There is something ‘not nice’ about my work. Naturally, this would be vehemently denied! After all, literary folk, even in the arena of books for the young, generally like to see themselves as open-minded and liberal of thought. Fellow writers, as the producers of the product, have always fully supported and encouraged me. With one exception, I recall: ‘Should never have been written, much less published,’ said one of my fellow writers, male, when asked to comment on the success of The Blue Lawn.
The ‘establishment’ I am thinking of is most certainly not the writers. More, it is the clutch of ‘guardians’ and ‘gatekeepers’. These are folk who consider they know what is right and proper. They most certainly believe they know what is right for the young of our nation. They are generally, but not exclusively, women. They work with books in libraries and schools, they may be teachers. They often seem to be very nice people. I spoke to a conference of school librarians a few years back, and my speech did include quite a bit about what are considered to be my more contentious novels. ‘I do have a copy of your book Jerome in my school library,’ a very nice librarian said to me afterwards, ‘but I keep it locked away in a cupboard in my office.’ I can’t waste too much time being paranoid.
Jerome, the central and dead character in the book of the same name, has committed suicide, unable to face his feelings for his very macho best mate, Marco. Marco is devastated at the loss. He comes to terms with what may be his own feelings towards Jerome, helped towards self-realization by the third character in the novel, Katie. Katie is overseas for most of the novel on a one-year student exchange in Minnesota.
As if being a solo-father to my own two sons had not been enough, in 1997 I parented for a year the first of my eight American Field Service (AFS) ‘sons’, Michael from Switzerland. Half of the story in Jerome was given to me by Michael: simultaneous with his stay here with me, there was the ongoing story of a friend of his, a Swiss girl doing an exchange year in rural Minnesota. She badly misjudged the social climate of the Midwest, announcing she was lesbian.
Agnes the Sheep was published well before The Blue Lawn. It is still around and has stayed in print for many years. While not too many copies sell these days, it was a success in its heyday. It was certainly still in the mind and memory of many when The Blue Lawn came out. I was interviewed many times in respect of the latter. There was always one inevitable question, sometimes asked tentatively and frequently more bluntly: ‘Are you gay?’ I had a stock response, ‘No one ever bothered to ask about my relationship with sheep when Agnes was published. I think my sexuality is equally immaterial this time around.’ Is it? Was it? I don’t really know.
I am very happy and content that I did write The Blue Lawn, Jerome and Pebble in a Pool. I know that they have meant something to some people. I wrote them not only for young people who might have been having a struggle with their own sexual identity and would be happy to see themselves reflected at least a wee bit in a few of the pages they read. I wrote them also for kids who are happily and heartily heterosexual in order to show them that things are not always quite so clear-cut for some of their peers. That society has moved, some would say light years, in regard to acceptance of difference, there are some things that will always remain the same. Gay men and women will always be in a minority. Although we are much better these days at respecting the rights of minorities, a minority is always a minority, and, as such, possesses an innate fragility. Constant vigilance will always be necessary in the preservation of all rights—those of minorities, most definitely so. Circa 1930, not too long before I was born, there would have been few Jewish folk in Germany and most of mainland Europe, most certainly a minority, who would have dreamt of what would be their dreadful lot a handful of years ahead. Gay people of Germany at the same time? Ditto!
III
I would not be standing here today if Mr Hamilton had not been knocked over by a hansom cab, killed stone-dead in Piccadilly Circus on the first day of his honeymoon sometime in the late 1860s, leaving a very young widow.
In 1998, I was awarded the Margaret Mahy Medal and Lecture Award by the New Zealand Children’s Book Foundation. This is what I had to say on that occasion:
That widow was my great-grandmother, and Mr Hamilton had not been given the time, or maybe the opportunity, to become my great-grandfather. Family history records nothing but the bare facts of the young man’s tragic death.
I like to think that, maybe, fully euphoric, he burst through the front doors of their hotel, calling at the top of his young lungs, ‘Eureka! I found it!’ or words to that effect, startled the horses and paid the ultimate penalty. I hope that the first night of their honeymoon had been a night of unbridled mid-Victorian passion.
Family histories are plants of strange growth. Word-of-mouth recounting tends to twist the branches of the plant more than a little.
Were Mr and Mrs Hamilton actually on their honeymoon? What were they doing in Piccadilly Circus? The offspring of solid merchant families, their homes were just around the corner. Y
oung persons of substance might surely have been expected to have ventured further afield for their first night of connubial bliss. Who knows? Maybe they decided upon a sort of local first-night and were, on the day of the tragedy, about to board a train to Dover, then across to Calais and on to more exotic and erotic climes. This was not to be. After one of the shorter marriages on record, the young widow had to face life alone.
Victorian widowhood was no laughing matter, but there were consolations. In order to put the tragedy behind her, the young widow was packed off on a long sea voyage to, of all places, Australia! A few months at sea, a few more months frisking among the aboriginals and former convicts was just what the doctor ordered and life might be better faced afterwards. There never has been any accounting for taste! The young Mrs Hamilton was little more than a slip of a girl, and simply could not go by herself on such a weird trip. Victorian minds would have boggled. A chaperone was found.
You may now breathe a sigh of relief: at last I make it to the literary. Yes, a chaperone, in the person of none other than Lady Collins, wife of the then current Sir William who ruled the family firm, cementing the family fortune by publishing the classic, improving tracts and various editions of the Holy Bible. Family history does not record whether Lady Collins was simply doing a good deed or if she felt like a trip herself. I like to think that in part it was a business trip and that Lady Collins was going to Sydney to check out the Aussie branch of the firm—or even perhaps set it up—and to ensure that the local bookshops were giving suitable prominence, promotion and position to the William Collins product. It also suits me to think of Lady Collins as a formidable Victorian of ample stature, well corseted and dressed in bombazines of subdued tone, with perhaps a riotous purple or mauve for dinners at the captain’s table. I know the voyage would have been first class. You don’t put a Lady Collins in steerage!
I hope the sea voyage helped the young widow. Can’t have been all fun and games dressed, as she would have been, in widow’s weeds. Those nights in the tropics must have been hell. Still, all good things must come to an end and Sydney loomed.
Just what happened to Mrs Hamilton in Sydney is veiled in the mists of time. I imagine the two women took up residence at a respectable George Street hotel. I imagine there was dinner, and maybe a weekend, with the Governor.
Undoubtedly, as was the custom, the first-class manifest of the ship would have been published in the social pages of the Sydney dailies. Can’t you just imagine the daily commotion in the foyer and public rooms of that respectable hotel? Every would-be, could-be Sydney-side novelist, poet and writer of improving tracts would have been paying court to the good lady, waving dog-eared manuscripts under her nose and generally importuning the poor woman. Good God, it wasn’t as if she had come to Sydney with the express purpose of unearthing the great Australian novel!
Escaping the ravening literary hordes by touring the bookshops was little better. There is a limit to how many bibles you want to inscribe To Bazza, Kylie and the kids, best wishes, God, pp Lady Collins! My sympathies, naturally enough, lie with my great-grandmother. There are only just so many times you want to go and gawk at the sites where the Harbour Bridge and Opera House will eventually stand. And when the cat’s away, sadly the mouse will play! And this is just what happened. I have a feeling that Mrs Hamilton would have faced anything other than a return sea voyage to the old country with the redoubtable Lady C.
Mrs Hamilton found husband number two: my great-grandfather, Francis Reeves.
Little is known of Francis. Understandable; he was a nineteenth-century Australian. I like to think that he may have been a convict, or at least the offspring of convicts…I imagine that he was inordinately handsome and sexy, because he did not have a great deal else to recommend him. For a long time among our family treasures was a small document signed by Mr Reeves: X, it says with admirable simplicity. And in parentheses: (Francis Reeves, his mark). Less than charitable souls may now be muttering under their breaths, ‘Aha! Must be from his great-grandfather he inherited his literary ability!’
Mrs Hamilton must have presented as heaven-sent to Francis, widowed himself and left with four young sons. Love at first sight and someone to rear the boys. They married—history does not record whether Lady Collins was matron-of-honour—and the new Mrs Reeves was whisked off up to the New South Wales and Queensland border to get on with married life on Mr Reeves’s property. I think it must have been a station and it must have been big. I have my Great-Aunt Emma’s word for it. It was a tough life for the young Mrs Reeves, but she had time to produce four daughters to complement her husband’s four sons. They were poor—according to Great-Aunt Emma—so poor that the kids went without shoes, trudging miles and miles barefoot to school through the snow. Barefoot in the snow was bad enough, but there were other perils—wild emus! The wild emus used to chase the little girls, chase them to and from school every day—I think the boys must have graduated by this time. They must have. After all, boys being boys they would have shot the bloody things! The only chance you had of escape from a wild emu as you trudged barefoot and dressed in flour-bag clothing was to hide behind a cactus bush. Great-Aunt Emma, my authority on this matter, informed me that wild emus find it difficult to see around corners and, having only very little brain, tend to just give up and go away. They also dislike cactus bushes because they catch their feathers on the prickles. A hard life indeed. A strange climate, too.
I must tie up a few ends in the story. Great-grandmother never went home to England, and I bet Lady Collins had a bit of fast talking to do when she got home.
‘What have you done with our girl, Lady William?’ Mum and Dad would have asked.
‘Oh, goodness. I knew I’d left something behind. How silly of me,’ Lady C.
‘Silly, be damned,’ the furious father. ‘It was downright careless! Australia! A fate worse than death!’
However, Great-grandmama was in no way deserted by her family. She became a remittance woman. Year in and year out for the rest of her life money from the Old Country was deposited in an account in her name at a Sydney bank. She touched not a penny of it. I like to think that she and Francis were happily married. The four boys took off over the Queensland border and, God help us, helped run the Queensland police force for a generation. Of the four girls, Emma, the eldest, became a nurse and fought in the Boer War. Fought? Yes, I use the word advisedly. Great-Aunt Emma was a tough lady! Annie, my grandmother, trained as a Salvation Army officer and was a missionary in other emu-infested bits of Australia and then in New Zealand. Mrs Hamilton Reeves lived to a ripe old age. I have one photo of her taken in her mid-eighties; slightly stooped, gaunt of face, hair pulled back and with a very prominent nose. (I feel a peculiar affinity to this woman!) In the fullness of time the fortune that had piled up in the Sydney bank got shared among her daughters…I think I know where most of our share went. Ah, yes, those Salvationists have much to answer for.
Family histories, stories, recounted orally, word-of-mouth, one generation to the next, are very edgy things. Fragile. There is metamorphosis as they get handed down, embroidered, told against present background where the social mores of the day may require a certain tempering or change of emphasis. The lecture I offered on this occasion was actually on the power of story and how it is a dominant factor in my life and work. The tale of Mrs Hamilton-Reeves is certainly a powerful story.
‘You mustn’t believe everything that Auntie tells you,’ my grandmother, Annie Georgina Taylor, would say to me gently, after yet another visit from her sister, my Great-Aunt Emma. An admonition I was none-too-keen to heed! Aunty Emma’s stories were so good they just had to be true.
When I was eleven I lived for about a year in Petone with my grandparents, Annie and Alex Taylor. It was a good time. Things had been a bit difficult at home. My battles with my sister, Margaret, were none too easy for both our parents to manage. The two of us were close in most ways, and I probably depended on her more than she ever did on me. Frequent
ly, she was my guide and mentor. Frequently, she led me up the garden path! In some matters I turned more to my younger sister for advice than I did to my mother, and much more, indeed, than I ever turned to my father…It was around this time that, once again bewildered, I turned to Margaret. I had noticed several little hairs sprouting in my armpits. I don’t think I had bothered, or even thought of, checking lower down. ‘Don’t worry too much,’ she said…‘Well, not just yet. But if you see any growing on your hands, you’ll know you are turning into a monkey. Make sure you let me know when that happens so I can have a look.’ As always, I believed her. It’s all grist to a writer’s mill. I use this fragment in my novel I Hate My Brother Maxwell Potter! This fragment, along with a few other gems of the wisdom she imparted to me in my pre-pubescent years. There are distinct similarities between my sister and Great-Aunt Emma.
Back to the story of Mrs Hamilton-Reeves.
In recent years I have done a little digging on this part of my family, along with my cousin, Gay Buchanan. Gay has made frequent trips to Israel, where she for a time managed an Anglican guesthouse in Jerusalem for Christian pilgrims to the country eager to visit biblical sites. I asked her if she realized we had some Jewish ancestry of our own. This interested her both from the aspect of knowing more about our background and, equally important to her, if we did have Jewish blood it just might make her access to Israel significantly easier, regardless of whether we had all ended up Christian or not. We did some research.
Telling Tales Page 5