Telling Tales

by William Taylor

  All I knew of this had come from my parents. Emma Reeves had come from a London family of merchants. She had been born Emma, the second daughter of George Henry and Emma Matilda Blake. She married in 1869. Clearly a family of substance, both the Blake daughters married at St Margaret’s, Westminster. Not quite a synagogue. Mind you, Jewish families often apostatized—often for very good reasons, frequently for physical survival! Similarly, surnames were frequently anglicized.

  Emma had not married a Mr Hamilton at all. God knows how he entered the story. She married a Mr Collins—whether from the publishing firm or not is not known—and had a relatively long marriage when compared with that of the family legend. Mr Collins lasted for six weeks before losing his life. Emma Collins endured widowhood in London for a few months before her sea voyage to Australia in 1871 on the ship La Hague. It was quite likely she was chaperoned. Lady Collins? Who knows? May have been an aunt by marriage or other family connection. She married Francis Reeves in Sydney, 1872. This is where the plot meanders well off-course.

  Among my father’s papers, quite accidentally and quite recently, I came across the marriage certificate of Emma and Francis. The bride is detailed as ‘Emma Norris. Spinster’. Now, does this represent some error on the part of the registrar? Does it imply that Mrs Collins was lying? Is it the truth? Was it easier to simply tell a lie because you hadn’t thought to bring your previous marriage lines out to the colonies with you in order to prove your status? After all, you had only intended a lengthy holiday in order to get over a tragedy, and colonial officialdom could be relatively easily hoodwinked. How do you turn Emma Blake into Emma Collins and then into Emma Norris…and then into Emma Reeves? Was this woman ever a Blake from a rich London family whose family home was just off Grosvenor Square?

  Fact and fiction occasionally meet. Emma Georgina Blake was indeed the daughter of George, a cabinet-maker, and his wife, Emma Matilda. In 1868, at the age of sixteen she married James Norris, also sixteen, a chimney-sweep and son of a chimney-sweep, not at St Margaret’s, Westminster, but rather at St John the Evangelist, Waterloo. Poor Emma was widowed at age seventeen. Two years later, the young widow, with not the strictest regard for truth, lied about her age, described herself as being twenty-one and with both parents deceased—this second detail at least half untrue! She did take passage on the ship La Hague to Sydney as an assisted immigrant, with her occupation listed as ‘General Servant’ along with a shipload of other young women similarly described. It is quite likely they needed to be chaperoned. In 1872, she married Francis Reeves. A year or two later her older sister, Ann, married William Treloar at St Margaret’s, Westminster, and eventually ended up as lady mayoress of London, wife of a baronet.

  I am clearly an arbitrary genealogist, and until very recently had not spared much thought or time to poor old Francis, my great-grandad, knowing little of him other than that he had minimal literary skills! Francis Reeves, son of Francis Reeves, had followed his dad to the land down under. He had not seen dad for quite a while, because Francis senior had departed for southern shores when Francis junior was still a little boy. Francis senior had also taken an assisted passage to Australia, although it seems more than likely that he didn’t want to make the trip—a rather less than voluntary jaunt! In 1843, having been found guilty of larceny at the Old Bailey in London, my great-great grandfather, Francis Reeves of Kentish Town, was sentenced to seven years’ transportation. Lost in the mists of time are any details of his actual crime, but the Old Bailey records show Francis receiving the most draconian sentence handed down at that particular court sitting. Francis senior obviously did his time, stayed on in Australia for at least a while, and maybe it was he who had taken up the land that my great-grandfather eventually farmed at Kempsey in New South Wales. At some stage the senior Francis returned to London, where he died in 1883 at age seventy-eight and was buried in the East London Cemetery.

  In the early 1900s, Great-Aunt Emma, having won the war against the Boers, dumped her only child, Eleanor, my Aunty Nell, into the care of her sister, my grandmother. My father always regarded his cousin Nell as more of a sister on account of her spending most of her childhood being brought up by his parents. Great-Aunt Emma was off to London to do her bit to retrieve the family fortune. Clearly remittances to the Sydney bank account had come to an end or were in danger of drying up. The family had been awarded the leases on some of the properties in Ludgate Hill in the City in return for services to the Crown during the Napoleonic Wars. Precisely what services the forebears of an albeit prosperous London cabinet-maker might have provided to the Crown can only be a matter of conjecture. The leases were not in perpetuity, but for a term of 100 years. The 100 years were up and the family was looking for an extension.

  Great-Aunt Emma stayed with her aunt and uncle, Sir William and Lady Treloar. Sir William was the Lord Mayor of London, and his own great fortune had been made from carpets. Lady Treloar was the sister of Mrs Hamilton-Norris-Reeves. However, regardless of all that pedigree, position or fortune, they had no luck whatsoever in restoring their lost incomes and the leases reverted to the Crown.

  In 1977 I took my two boys to London to spend Christmas with their mother. On a cold London January day I made them walk up and down Ludgate Hill. ‘This was once all ours,’ I proclaimed loudly, startling the few passers-by who were out in the freezing weather. And later: ‘Your great-great-great-uncle and -aunt once lived there,’ as I pointed to Mansion House. They were about as impressed as when I insisted on taking them, at great expense, to the Royal Ballet to enjoy The Nutcracker…having had to bribe them with a double visit to the first of the Star Wars movies.

  Sir William and his wife were childless. They offered to adopt the two eldest of Mr and Mrs Reeves’s four little Aussie girls: Great-Aunt Emma and my grandmother, Annie. Stupidly, Mr and Mrs Reeves declined this generous offer, reputedly with the words ‘You can’t pick and choose. If you won’t take all four, you can’t have any.’! Sir William’s relations were not quite so stingy, and they eventually adopted a couple of kids from his side of the family, digging out another Antipodean, a nephew, in Hokitika, and transporting him back to England. William’s own fortune was largely given away. He and his wife founded a hospital in Northampton for crippled children. Its purpose and function changed over the years, but it continues to this present day still bearing his name. An American branch of the Treloar family have an internet website. William features prominently as possibly their best-known connection. They provide a link to a UK archive of historic audio recordings from the early twentieth-century. William can be heard as he talks about his charitable ambitions. He was also a bit of a writer. His account of his thoughts and feelings while being knighted by Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle makes good reading. Edward VII later made him a baronet, possibly at the insistence of Queen Alexandra who lent significant support to William’s charities.

  I have a small photo of Lady Treloar. She bears a remarkable resemblance to Mrs Minnie Dean, the notorious and luckless Winton baby-farmer. I don’t think they were related.

  None of all this meant very much at all to my grandmother. I will never know the impulses that sent her off to Melbourne in the 1890s to train as a Salvation Army officer. Was there a Salvationist corps in Kempsey, New South Wales? Had she attended services there? Did she know someone who did and had persuaded her to come along and worship? There must have been some influences in order to winkle out a presumably good Anglican from a remote corner of New South Wales and send her off to Melbourne—which, then, was in not so much a different state as a different colony. There must certainly have been some zeal to do good on her part. I have a beautiful studio photograph of her, taken around 1896, in Army uniform, bonnet and all. She looks serene and quite lovely…and not at all prepared for service to the Lord in Kalgoorlie and then in Kumara, serving the needs, or saving the souls, of the miners down on the West Coast of New Zealand. I guess if there had been zeal, there must also have been strong will.

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bsp; She must have saved Alexander Taylor, my grandfather, a nice young Scots Presbyterian some four years her junior. Clearly competing with his thirteen almost-all-older siblings down in Winton had proved a bit much, and he was likely doing a bit of digging in the mines in order to earn his living. It was definitely a falling in love on his side—enough, at least, to have him follow her to her next posting, back in Kalgoorlie. Persistence must have worn her down, because they married in 1903, in Fremantle, Western Australia. Marrying someone who was not an officer in the Salvation Army meant that Annie gave up her vocation, but she remained a very loyal Salvationist. In the course of time, two of her granddaughters—Frances and Laurel Cresswell—would become Salvation Army officers. Alex was devoted to her for the rest of their lives together, and then to her memory during his last handful of years without her. A lovely and loving couple in every respect.

  They lived modestly and simply in the house they built in Victoria Street, Petone, next door to the kindergarten and diagonally across from the Workingmen’s Club. Grandad was a foreman in the Post and Telegraph Service until his retirement.

  Whenever we stayed with Grandma and Grandad we were loyally Salvationist as well, and trekked off to the old Citadel in Petone to sing the choruses, enjoy the music of the very good band and, of course, go to Sunday School.

  Grandma was a quiet woman. I never heard her raise her voice. For all that, I always sensed a strength within her. After some fit of fur-and-feathers-flying temperament on my part, I remember her taking me aside, quietly calming me down and telling me how that when she had been younger she had possessed a dreadful temper but had learnt to control it. I did not believe a word of it. Not then, and not now!

  When I spent my year with them, I would go into Grandma’s bedroom and watch her while she did her hair. It was long, straight, and by then steel-grey hair which she rolled into a bun. It was quite mesmerizing watching her brush it, sitting at her dressing-table surrounded by the photos of her four children and eleven grandchildren.

  Every birthday, Grandma would write us a letter. Indeed I still have the last birthday letter she wrote to me before she died. I was fifteen. In the letter there was always a ten-shilling note—a goodly amount back then. It was with one of Grandma’s birthday ten shillings that I bought my first New Zealand novel; one of Edith Howe’s last books for children, Riverside Family. I still have that, too.

  I wrote Agnes the Sheep in 1988. I wrote it as therapy for failure and in order to show that I could still do something. I had failed, to my mind, quite badly. I wasn’t used to failure. After all, I had run large schools, raised a family, won elections, and had written over a dozen novels all of which had been published. Pride comes before a fall, and I am sure the experience of falling did me good. Served me right, too.

  I had given up the mayoralty of Ohakune at the beginning of 1988 when the borough was amalgamated into a larger district council. I had played a full role in the amalgamation process, but decided that enough was enough and my almost accidental career in local politics was over. I thought it was time to volunteer for something totally different, and Volunteer Service Abroad (VSA) agreed and I was dispatched to Bhutan, the small Himalayan kingdom, to teach for a year or two. So far, so good. At almost fifty years of age there was no reason why I shouldn’t do something like this for a while.

  It would be good to say I succeeded, but I didn’t. Almost literally I fell flat on my face. Most of Bhutan is at a fair altitude. Parts of the little kingdom are well above 10,000 feet. VSA prepares its volunteers very well, but there was never a mention that some people can have great difficulty living at a high altitude. I proved to be one of them, and I lasted no more than a few weeks before I had to be shipped back home. It didn’t help, either, that I seemed to contract a variety of amoebic dysentery and, it transpired later, an unspecified form of hepatitis.

  The altitude sickness disappeared almost immediately after I was flown down to Calcutta in India, where I rested up for a week or two before flying back home. Indeed it went so quickly that I wondered whether I had imagined it. I know I didn’t. I can remember walking around Thimpu, the Taupo-sized capital of the country. The streets were not remarkably steep, but with every step I took it was like walking into a brick wall. It was all a big pity. Bhutan is a unique little country, largely and deliberately locked off from the rest of the world. A year or two up there was a great opportunity that I had to forego.

  I managed a few short walks out into Calcutta from the small hotel where I stayed. Abject poverty and significant wealth cheek by jowl. On one occasion I was approached by a personable young Indian man. ‘Please give me some money for Mother Teresa. She’s got no money for breakfast.’ Who could resist such entreaty?

  Miserable, sick, and feeling very stupid I returned to Ohakune, some 10 kilograms lighter than when I had left not too long before.

  The flight home was penance in itself. Calcutta to Bangkok. Bangkok to Perth. Perth to Adelaide. Adelaide to Melbourne. Melbourne to Sydney, and so on home after several hours’ stopover in each. I spent each leg of the flight and associated stopovers doing two things: making frequent trips to toilets and restrooms, and coming to grips with what was to be the story of Agnes the Sheep.

  Old Mrs Carpenter was eighty-nine years of age when she died. She left behind for her nearest and not-too-dearest relatives her large house on Gladstone Road, everything inside the house and the land the house stood on. Mrs Carpenter died peacefully in her sleep at the end of a full life and with few regrets about leaving this world.

  Mrs Carpenter also left behind Agnes, her pet sheep. ‘I want you to promise me something,’ she had said to Belinda and Joe not too long before she died. ‘I’ll be going soon.’

  ‘Where to?’ asked Belinda.

  ‘Heaven,’ said Mrs Carpenter firmly. ‘I am charging you two with looking after Agnes for the rest of her natural life.’

  ‘Hey! That doesn’t seem too fair to me,’ said Joe.

  ‘Why not, pray?’ said Mrs Carpenter. ‘You’ve had your money’s worth out of me since first we met. If I remember rightly, it was you who wanted something from me back then. If poor, dear Agnes suffers the misfortune of falling into the hands of my great-nephew, Derek, I would doubt that her life would be extended one little bit.’

  ‘But why charge us to do it?’ asked Joe. ‘I don’t mind looking after the old sheep but I don’t think it’s very fair we’ve got to pay you to do it.’

  Old Mrs Carpenter looked at him over the top of her rimless glasses. ‘Keep your mouth shut, boy! That way you sound more intelligent.’

  I have since considered those last two lines as probably the best bit of writing I have ever done. I certainly didn’t think so at the time of writing. Full of self-pity and feeling very sick—I remember one day when I had to crawl around the house because I felt so bad. In all honesty, I was leaking from every orifice! Little feeling was left over for any empathy with my story or its characters. Also, it was highly uncomfortable to sit down and actually write: I had lost so much condition off my bum that I was virtually perching on skin-covered bones. Of course things started to improve, but even when I sent the completed manuscript off I considered it highly likely that rejection would be its fate.

  I sent Agnes off to Scholastic feeling dissatisfied with the product and with little hope that it would be accepted. I was wrong, and the very prompt acceptance most decidedly helped me out of my overdose of self-pity and, I feel sure, also helped my physical recovery, although I would be in hospital a few months later with the ‘unspecified hepatitis’. But that was a little time away and much was to happen in the interim.

  Agnes did very well for me—and for Scholastic. It won awards. It was published in America where one review lavishly praised the work of ‘Australian humorist Taylor’. An American academic journal identified the piece as ‘a fine springboard for the study of irony and satire’. It journeyed on to the United Kingom. It had two different editions in England with different cov
ers: one depicts a wild, white, yellow-eyed sheep; the other, a rather demure blackfaced beast! The up-market American dust jacket, on the other hand, shows the old animal with a splendidly full head of teeth despite the story describing her as toothless! Mind you, nothing can compare with the Italian jacket design—the Italian Agnes is completely lunatic and almost unrecognizable as a sheep. It must have done the trick, though, because Agnes won one of their main children’s book awards in 1998: the Premio Andersen.

  Graham Beattie, then publisher at Scholastic New Zealand, secured a splendid deal from some affiliate of Disney for a three-year option on the film rights to the book. It was around the time of the success of the movie Babe, so there was a rush to buy up the rights to any current title that, when filmed, could conceivably be seen as a successor. It was certainly a pre-emptive action that was to my benefit. They took an option for three years and were required to significantly increase what they had to pay in both the second and third years…I held absolutely no hope whatsoever that it would be filmed. It wasn’t. Sadly, the studio did not renew the option for a further three years! Eight of my books have had film, television or stage options taken out, but only in three instances have they been taken up.

  Agnes the Sheep was not my first funny novel. Three of the four Worst Soccer Team series and I Hate My Brother Maxwell Potter came earlier. With regard to the series, I have sometimes said that I wish they had come later in my writing career. That is not to diminish them as comedies. They were successful here and overseas, and I received hundreds of letters from kids who loved the antics of Tom, Lavender and the rest. But, had they arrived on the scene later, I would have spotted their major flaw: they are too wordy. I would have kept the stories as they are, but would have worked rather more diligently to fine down my glorious prose! Quite simply, far too many words.