Telling Tales

by William Taylor

  This is most certainly not the case with Agnes. The story is very tight. There is hardly an unnecessary word on any page. I don’t put this down to a suddenly developed sense of how to write the comedic. Quite simply I ascribe it to the way I was feeling when I wrote the thing. I was feeling far too wretched to write any word that didn’t have a job to do!

  Above all else, comic writing requires rhythm and pace. Things have to move along at speed—you don’t meander. Indeed, if you catch yourself dawdling, pull yourself up and cut to the next scene. Keep your scenes brief. Paint the picture in broad brush-strokes. All of my funny books for older children contain a goodly quota of conflict, competition, opposing views and values. I also do my best to people the tales with off-beat and often eccentric characters who believe absolutely in the courses they set for themselves as they work towards the goals they hope, often against hope, to achieve. This is certainly true in Agnes. But, believe me, zany romp though it may well be, there is certainly a moral to be had from this tale.

  Joe and Belinda are no better than they should be. They fully represent very many of the eleven- and twelve-year-old kids I have taught. I have a soft spot for the Joes and Belindas of this world, and they crop up, in different guises and with different names and motives, in many of the stories I have written. Joe is a bit of a bad boy. A wise guy, but with a heart of gold. A no-bullshit young guy: ‘If you want it bad enough, go out and get it!’ Belinda is rather more manipulative. Who can blame her, given the mother who stands right behind her?

  Mrs Robinson, the long-suffering teacher of Room 5 at St Joseph’s Convent School—a woman who believes she would feel far more at home and much more at peace if she took a job as a supermarket checkout operator—lets loose her class on an unsuspecting community. They are set the task of winkling out an ‘oldie’ in order to find out ‘What was life really like for them in those far-off, rugged pioneer days with no washing machines and no television, jet planes or videos.’ Joe and Belinda are paired, largely because no other kid in their right mind would want to work with either of them. Getting a head-start, they winkle out the town’s super-oldie, Mrs Carpenter, who certainly gives them a run for their money. Nowadays, of course, as an ‘oldie’ myself, I, too, would have most definitely given these two reprobates a ‘run for their money’. Mrs Carpenter’s memories of far-off and rugged pioneer days are somewhat at variance with those in the sights of the hapless Mrs Robinson. Rather than churning cream into butter by hand and trudging barefoot through seas of mud to school—shades of Great-Aunt Emma in more ways than one—Mrs Carpenter was off to the other side of the world, posing nude for an alcoholic artist in Left Bank Paris (and with the visual evidence to prove it!) and working as a human cannonball in a circus in the United States…among other things.

  In return for her memories, Mrs Carpenter exacts more hard labour from Joe and Belinda than either their parents, or Mrs Robinson for that matter, had ever managed to achieve. The last task she sets the pair is that of caring for her pet sheep, Agnes, should she, Mrs Carpenter, kick the bucket. The old lady dies and the hard work begins, because, in temperament, Agnes has grown to resemble her late owner…

  In all this, and indeed in everything comic I have written, the only way I have ever been able to exact humour is not to force it but, rather, to let the situation bring it out. In part this is probably no more than elements of the old ‘show, don’t tell’ dictum. Characters need to be clearly defined, one with another, and beyond confusion in aim and motive, appearance, style and voice. There is no confusing Mrs Carpenter, sharp as a needle, with warm, fuzzy and hand-flapping Mrs Robinson.

  There is no confusing either of them with Mrs Carmen Sylvester, who, in the course of time, has become one of my favourite characters out of all those I have ‘created’. As leading-light of the town amateur repertory, she regularly fossicks in the local dump for discarded gems that may find another life dressing up the scenery for her latest production. On one such foray she unearths the discarded contents of Mrs Carpenter’s home, dumped by the old lady’s heirs, great-nephew Derek, his wife Moira, and their repellent offspring, Shane. Anxious to demolish the old house in order to create a supermarket car-park, Derek, typical of most developers—knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing—has dumped a small fortune. Carmen Sylvester spots an assortment of rare oriental rugs, all well-encrusted with years’ worth of Agnes’s droppings. She hauls them home, painstakingly unpeels the shit, washes them in a mild detergent, and eventually scores big in a city antique auction house. Carmen makes enough to take off on a tour of the theatre capitals of the world, and to Wollongong, Australia, to visit her sister. Pace may be all-important in writing comedy, but it’s little touches like this last one that serve to add an extra pinch of seasoning and contribute more than their weight in building a character. Carmen Sylvester rides a bike. From time to time she can also be spotted wearing a jacket of a particularly brilliant shade of red!

  Belinda and Joe work valiantly to protect Agnes from Derek, Moira and Shane, who simply want to see the distinctly difficult creature stone dead. Derek employs the services of Kevin, apprentice butcher and pleasant young hoon, to do the killing. Kevin stuffs up the contract. Kevin and his mate, Bruce, who have ambitions to get into pig-hunting, join the campaign to track down Agnes. Kevin now has an added reason to knock off the sheep; he has spotted the magnificence of the ancient ewe’s fleece and he would like to turn her hide into a magnificent bedside rug for his mum, who has arthritis.

  Humour is in short supply in our nation’s literature. That short supply is invariably short-changed. If it ain’t serious, weighty and worthy, it receives scant and generally patronizing attention. It’s beneath the notice of the literary pundits. When it comes to literary awards, the ‘funny’ is almost always notable by its absence. Agnes the Sheep is one of the very few exceptions in this regard. However, while it certainly scored big in winning one of our major children’s literature awards, it is worth noting that it wasn’t even shortlisted for the other! It was gratifying for me to notice that the critical attention the book received beyond these shores was usually based equally on its humour and on what was perceived to be the work’s literary merit.

  I like to think that we are not a humourless nation, but I suspect we are not all that willing to laugh at ourselves or see the ridiculousness in aspects of our brand of the human condition. Maybe small societies tend to take themselves too seriously. Year after year, sometimes month after month, news broadcasts come up with that hoary old line that such-and-such or so-and-so is going to ‘put us on the map’. Of course, geographically we are so far down on any map I guess we could be considered in danger of slipping off it altogether—an event that would earn us some degree of significance should that extreme event occur. Some other frequently heard utterances denote either a marked inferiority complex or, at best, well-honed defensiveness. ‘So, what do you think of New Zealand?’ we ask visitors to these shores, often after they have been here for no more than a day or two, and almost as if we are daring them to answer in any way other than the glowingly, fulsomely positive. How on earth would we respond to anyone who came up with ‘It’s bloody awful. Dunno why we bothered coming’?

  While there is a shortage of humour in our literature, there is an almost total absence of it in home-grown television programmes…and, yes, the little that there is is rather ghastly. With one or two exceptions over the years, our comedians and stand-up comics are anything but funny. So far as telly is concerned the fault probably lies with budgetary restraint, but often the scripts are banal, hackneyed, or, even worse, attempting to replicate some overseas formula. We certainly have actors who are equal to the task of comedy, but the poor souls end up floundering in the material and situations they are required to bring to life. As for our stand-up comics? Well, generally they are no more than abysmal. It’s not that they take their art seriously—that’s fine—it’s more that they appear to think they are funny themselves, and that sel
dom works. There have been few bright sparks since the passing of Billy T James.

  Half of my output in writing for the young has been comedy. Fair enough—after all, the masks for comedy and tragedy are of equal size. Balancing it, as I have done, does have one minor peril: commentators in my field have always found it a little hard to tell when I am being serious, not with those books of mine that have primarily a comedic thrust, but with my more serious titles. They shouldn’t worry; there is an element of comedy in even my most lugubrious work.

  I am very happy to have been able to bring a smile to a few faces, the odd chuckle and, occasionally, a good belly-laugh. However, writer, actor or stand-up comic, you can’t hope to win ’em all! I have now been writing for forty years. Over those four decades I have received a lot of letters from readers. This one, my favourite and an absolute gem, is not about dear old Agnes, rather it is about the next funny book I wrote, Knitwits. It is from a more mature reader in Pennsylvania, USA.

  Dear Mr Taylor:

  Shame on you and shame on Scholastic, your publisher. Your book Knitwits (which unfortunately I bought) is not worth the paper it’s written on! What a waste of trees! What a waste of eyesight! What a waste of money! How dare you perpetrate such a FRAUD on children! There is not one single redeeming quality: it is ridiculous; it is pointless; it is contrived; it is ugly; it is stupid; utterly stupid. I buy lots of books. I am a former librarian. I am a mother, and a grandmother. Your book just went straight into the garbage, where it belongs. My only regret is the $13.95 I spent. I repeat: SHAME ON YOU! SHAME ON YOUR PUBLISHER!

  Very truly yours,

  Sylvia R Freedland (Mrs)

  IV

  I became a regular smoker at the age of eight, smoking around one cigarette annually for the next half-dozen years. I know that I didn’t enjoy the first experience. It was a solitary affair, just me, the cigarette, in the outside lavatory and very early in the morning when everyone else was asleep. Maybe it was curiosity that drove me in this sad and pathetic direction. Maybe it was compensation for my inability to ever conjure up a second appearance of Jesus in our garden. Maybe it was a reaction to my burgeoning, but relatively brief, career as a boy soprano. Angel and devil. Two sides of the same coin. I sang in choirs and I sang in concerts. (According to Dorothea, naturally, the singular purity of my voice reduced little old ladies to tears, and in cassock and surplice and bearing the cross in church choir procession, I was both a sight for their sore eyes and balm to their ears.) Wisely, we were Anglican during my vocal years.

  By age fourteen I had every reason to smoke. After all, back then in the early 1950s everyone knew that smoking surely served to calm the nerves, and indeed it was often medically advised, if not prescribed, for sufferers of asthma. I was not asthmatic, but I definitely had nerves that needed calming as our family entered a dreadfully unsettled period for five years, constantly on the move and only once having a place we could call home for more than a few months.

  I have lived in my present home up in the hills beyond Raurimu, now, for more than twenty years. That time has flown by so rapidly. Five of those years would seem to me these days to be next to no time at all. It wasn’t like that back in the far-off days of my adolescence. Pack Up, Pick Up and Off, my first novel for young readers: the title, alone, neatly sums up our existence as a family during what was said to be a time of great prosperity for our small nation. Not a time of prosperity at all for our family. Never rich, we got poorer!

  Everything was OK until Margaret and I, by this time in the same class, were enrolled at secondary school, both making it into the top academic Third Form at Horowhenua College, Levin. Our parents had sold the flower farm and had taken on a guesthouse-cum-private hotel in the town within spitting distance of our soon-to-be high school. We had six happy months there; this was our place. We knew the town, we both had our own sizeable sets of friends. Everything was too good to be true. We did six months of our secondary education before the guesthouse failed, whatever of our goods and chattels that hadn’t been sold off were put in storage, we piled into Charlotte, our old Chevrolet, circa 1936, and headed north.

  God knows why, but we ended up in Tirau in the Waikato, where Father found a job in a bakery. We lived on the outskirts of the village, more or less camping, in a rundown cottage that went with the job.

  Some years ago I was invited to speak at Matamata College. I made no mention that I had been a former pupil of the establishment. I remembered the place with distinct loathing, but it probably wasn’t all that bad, when I think back. It wasn’t their fault that I had been uprooted. It wasn’t their fault that I knew no one and made no friends. It probably wasn’t their fault that the curriculum they taught seemed to me to be completely different from that which I had known. In a couple of respects the place served me well: in the six or seven months of my time there, I was taught the rudiments of typing and, in significant advance of the times, took cookery as a subject. Both skills have stood me in good stead in the years since. Possibly, had we stayed longer, I might well have settled into the place, but I think I knew that we were not destined to be there long. We weren’t.

  All of a sudden we were off and away, and slightly more upwardly mobile this time. Ivan and Dorothea leased a business in Waihi: a plant nursery and florist. We all settled in, and Margaret and I were enrolled at the district high school. We were living in the town and we made a few friends. It was a nice place to live—any place would be after Tirau! Yet again, it proved too good to be true. The plants flourished, the florist shop was central and popular, but the overheads were far too high and the business went bust, bankrupt.

  I really only did a term at Waihi District High School, a result of miscalculation on my part and a possible over-reaction on the part of my mother. I have always been a relatively economic writer; I try not to waste words—they are, after all, hard to write in the first place. I simply recycled an English essay I had written for an assignment at one of my previous schools. I thought I had removed all identifying traces of its previous life, and it was, after all, my own work. However, I was caught out. I probably denied the crime, but the evidence was against me and I was corporally punished for the first and only time during my chequered secondary schooling.

  Well, Hell had no fury like Rosa Dorothea on the warpath in defence of her offspring. Quite simply, I left school at age fourteen and was put to work in the nursery and florist shop. Margaret was less fortunate—after all, she was only thirteen. She was yanked out of the district high and enrolled at St Joseph’s Convent School. She was there only briefly, but certainly long enough to be able to accumulate a nice stock of Roman Catholic works of art: pictures of bleeding hearts, Mary, Jesus, and an assortment of blessed saints decorated her bedrooms for at least the next two or three years.

  Waihi is notable as being the place where I did write two pieces of completely original work, both letters. I wrote to Her Majesty the Queen, congratulating her on her coronation and asking for her autograph. I also wrote to children’s writer, Ian Serraillier, author of The Silver Sword, one of my favourite stories. Sadly, the Queen could not find the time to reply personally—probably still recovering from the coronation—but I still have the letter sent to me by one of her ladies-in-waiting thanking me on Her Majesty’s behalf for my congratulations and good wishes. Even more sadly, I have lost the reply I got from Ian Serraillier. He replied in person, clearly not blessed with the services of a lady-in-waiting. He had taken the time and trouble to cut out and stick on a postcard a print of one of the line drawings from The Silver Sword, and he wrote a fairly long message about his writing of the book. Serraillier’s example was one that I have always done my best to follow. I have tried to reply to every letter that anyone has ever written to me about one of my books, complimentary or otherwise. (Yes, I did reply to Sylvia R Freedland (Mrs)!)

  My mother never smoked, seldom drank, and only very occasionally gambled. It was her gambling that saved our bacon after Waihi. She won roughly £40
0, a small fortune in 1953, on a TAB double, almost immediately on top of the bankruptcy of their business. It was a five-shilling ticket and the horses were clearly rank outsiders.

  We moved to Karangahake, then a deserted former goldmining village and nearer to Paeroa than Waihi. We lived, first, in a tiny little cottage lent to us by a Mrs Nell Donaldson, MBE. I never discovered what it was that earned her the honour. She was a lovely woman and had been, or possibly still was, a close friend of Poet Laureate John Masefield.

  The little cottage had been her childhood home. It had no electricity, but it did have an old wind-up gramophone and two or three records which we played over and over again: soprano Amelita Galli-Curci singing ‘Lo, Here the Gentle Lark’ and ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’—in the classic French version. When Father got a job on a local poultry farm we had to say goodbye to Galli-Curci, but at least the house provided with the poultry farm job did have electricity.

  I have no idea how they managed to do it—maybe another TAB double?—but Ivan and Dorothea scraped up enough money to buy an old house and a few acres overlooking the Ohinemuri River and Mount Karangahake. Obviously their bankruptcy had been at the lowest end of the scale and they had been let off the hook of insolvency very quickly indeed.