Telling Tales

by William Taylor

  When not engaged in blood- or motor-sports, there was no lack of other perilous choices of activity. The rocky crags and hills of Karangahake had plenty of deserted mine tunnels, not many of which had been blocked up, and none ever appeared to be fenced off. One of our favourite tunnels was that of a cinnabar mine, not too far from our home. I have no idea how much residual mercury may still lurk within me. There were gorges, gullies and gaps strung over with three-strand-wire access ‘bridges’. In some of these, one or two of the strands had already rusted away. I became so adept at teetering across ravines on a couple of wires that I was well on my way to qualifying as a tight-rope walker.

  Life cannot be all fun and games. The ANZ Bank encouraged me to increase my qualifications: they would give me a little time off work, and pay all necessary fees, if I would work to gain my University Entrance. If I got it, they would increase my remuneration. So, I enrolled in my fifth secondary school—the Correspondence School of New Zealand. I was, in small part at least, already one of theirs because of my doing History with them the year before.

  I set to work on the pile of assignments that began to arrive, all in little canvas bags—reputedly sewn by prison inmates. My enthusiasm at solo study waned, and then petered out completely within a very few weeks. I may have completed one assignment in each of the four subjects I chose before giving up and forgetting about the whole thing and getting on with my burgeoning sporting and social life.

  In some respects the education system must have been more forgivingly liberal back then. I may have forgotten them, but the Correspondence School had not forgotten me! Around August or September I had a letter from them. I was more than welcome to sit my University Entrance in History, Geography and English, regardless of not having done much (!) of the course. Biology was slightly more of a problem. In order to sit that paper I had to have completed a one-week practical course in the subject at my local high school. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Back to PDHS for a week of dissecting luckless frogs and watching plants absorb dyed water. The school even gave me a little room all to myself behind the science lab. It seemed that I was one of their most popular former pupils. Oh, how times change. I feel sure that if I had joined in with the cadets I would have been made, at very least, a sergeant on the spot.

  I extended my preparation for the exams to the extent of reading through my School Cert papers—after all, could it really be that much different? By a stroke of absolute luck, the week before sitting all four papers, I read an old copy of Life magazine, the main article in which was a fascinating illustrated piece on a community of honey bees. Not only did I have the ANZ Bank on my side, clearly God was helping me out as well. I may well have been totally ignorant of ‘birds and bees’, but on bees themselves I was fully informed. One of the main questions in the Biology paper required a detailed description of an insect community and how it functioned.

  I got my University Entrance by little more than a whisker. Down from the dizzy heights of 229 to, this time, 206. No matter. Whisker or not, it meant a pay rise.

  Quite frequently the pundits of the children’s writing world have taken me to task and hauled me over the coals for my depiction of the adolescent male. While they have every right to do so, equally I have the right to maintain that I do better than most in depicting him both truthfully and accurately. Adolescent males are frequently iconoclastic, profane, foul-mouthed, egocentric, and much more. Even in this enlightened day and age, many of them smoke, and most of them imbibe far too much alcohol—probably far more of the latter than those of my own generation ever had the opportunity to guzzle.

  When my novel Jerome was published, Whitcoulls required the publisher to ticket the jacket with a sticker saying Contains explicit language. I think I may be the only New Zealand writer for young adults whose work has required such a warning. The book certainly did contain explicit language. It also contained excessive smoking and consumption of alcohol, and I would have had greater sympathy with the bookseller had they required the work to be labelled with a ‘health warning’ in this regard!

  I have always felt that I had an obligation to ‘tell it how it is’. I may be a weaver of stories and tales, and a re-teller of old fables, but, for all that, I am honest. If in my honesty I offend some people, well so be it.

  When my last young adult novel, Land of Milk and Honey, came out, the publishers, HarperCollins, labelled the book jacket themselves: Some themes and content may disturb. Well, in all truth, they do! They were meant to. A rose is a rose is a rose…and may well ‘smell as sweet’. But not everything smells as sweet as a rose.

  Early on in my writing career, either in a speech or something I wrote, I addressed the topic of the young people about whom I write. I said then, and repeat now, that not all of our children live happily and well-loved with a mum and a dad, maybe one or two siblings, and with a pony called Dobbin cheerfully munching away on windfall apples over in the orchard at the bottom of the garden. That a small number of our kids in this fortunate nation do manage to live this ‘fiction’ is, in global terms, an aberration. Even in our blessed society they represent a tiny minority. It sure ain’t true in many of the suburbs of South Auckland. Nor is it true in the small town near to me where you can see unhappy-looking young women of sixteen or seventeen years—and sometimes younger!—pushing prams and pushchairs, endlessly it seems, up and down the main street. I imagine it is no different in many small-town main streets, not only in this country but in Australia, the United States, Canada and so on…

  It is even less true if you do think globally. My heart breaks when we are shown on television the countless young twelve- to fifteen-year-old kids in South Africa who have been orphaned by the epidemic of HIV/Aids, and who gaze uncomprehendingly with wide-eyed anxiety at how they may survive themselves, and generally care for younger siblings as well. The hoopla and hype surrounding the brilliant recent movie Slumdog Millionaire highlights, in part, the plight of Mumbai’s slum-dwellers—some 9 million of them! What price childhood there? Very low price, actually. It is easy to go on and on and on: the children of Africa, the children of Iraq, the children of many places…If I ever do get around to writing about that faithful Dobbin in the apple orchard, well then, that’s when I should really be taken to task!

  Generally speaking, my female characters earn approval. They are often voices of reason, possessors of intelligence…and, in all truth, somewhat controlling! Quite frankly, sometimes they are quite detestable. Alice Pepper, the counter-protagonist in my Knitwits series of three, is certainly a case in point. She never quite manages to completely twist poor young Charlie around her little finger, but she certainly has a damn good try. He never quite catches her napping; any pratfalls she does experience are more the result of an overweening self-confidence in her own infallibility. With only one or two exceptions, the mothers in any of my stories, while certainly not saintly, are frequently better grounded than their spouses—if they have one. Ditto with grannies, and certainly with teachers. Quite a few of my novels have a mother as sole provider; I can think of only one of my books that has a solo-dad—and he flounders somewhat!

  I tend to make my female characters strong. In this day and age, woe betide any male writer who doesn’t. However, I don’t think I do this in any calculated or deliberate way. It may be nothing more than writing from my own experience. The only people close to me in my own infancy and early childhood were female. At the age of six my father came back into my life, but until I was an adult he filled really little more than a supporting role, seeming perfectly happy to abrogate the responsibilities of parenthood to my mother. Had I ever got around to asking him, I am sure my six-years-younger brother would have seen this quite differently. After all, in addition to a father he had an older brother whom he adored, and was adored by in return.

  The gestation of my stories in my mind—a very lengthy process—begins with an imagined situation, often arising from a factual base or premise. I do know that the ‘peopling’ of th
is situation invariably starts with a ‘what if…’. The subject of that ‘what if’ has almost always been male. Very occasionally it has been a coupling of two characters, male and female, as in Possum Perkins. On a couple of occasions, of course, it has been male and male. I don’t think I have started the process by asking ‘what if’ of someone of the gender opposite to my own.

  In the end, none of this probably matters a great deal. The gestation period is always the lengthiest component of my writing process. It has never varied. The three months, six months, nine months, year—or occasionally even longer—is the most crucial period to me in the process of producing a book. It extends in time far beyond the period I have ever spent in doing the actual writing, redrafting, polishing or reshaping of the end product. My stories live in my mind, are part of me and part of my life for however long is necessary. In all truth, all of them continue to linger, twenty or thirty years after having been written and published…and probably long-forgotten by anyone who has read them. The characters in my books are as real to me as any of the actual living people who have been, or still are, part of my ‘real’ living.

  By the time I sit down to do the physical writing, I know more about my characters and the situations in which they find themselves than I will ever need to use in a book. I know what they look like and the clothes they wear. I know how they sound and the language they use. I know who lives next door and across the road. I know the colour of their curtains, the name of their cat or dog—and probably the name of the cat or dog who preceded the present ones. I know the music they listen to. Given the music that most of my younger characters listen to is decidedly not the music I listen to, this has involved a significant degree of sacrifice on my part!

  Obviously, all of my stories have a beginning and an end. It is essential, therefore, that I know in my mind what came before that beginning, and what is likely to happen after the end.

  Unless as a writer I know all this, and even more, I cannot possibly hope to create characters that are believable or that are any more than cardboard cut-outs. I have always said that, in order to make my characters work, there has to be a little bit of me in each and every one of them. It doesn’t matter if they are good or bad, male or female, young or old—there must be a tiny drop of me in there somewhere. Similarly with the situations in which I place these people. Now there is an element of absurdity here, but at least a grain of truth. I simply cannot do everything that I have described my characters, by now in their hundreds, as having done. Matthew Trent in Spider plays a Beethoven piano concerto. While I couldn’t achieve such dizzy heights myself, I can attest to the fact that I can play the first few bars of Beethoven’s Für Elise—excruciatingly badly. Charlie, in Knitwits, knits. Charlie knits just as well as I ever did. And when I wrote the book, determined to get the knitting bits right, I had yet another go at the fine craft—and I was as bad, if not worse, as I had ever been. Mind you, in the same book, Charlie’s mum does give birth to a baby, and I know I can’t do that!

  V

  We left Karangahake. I can’t remember the move from there being a great disaster in my life. We were now quite used to being moved on and, happy as this last stop had been, another shift was probably overdue! Ostensibly we left because of Mother’s health, which, never good, was starting to fail. She was to have only three more years of relatively normal well-being.

  Grandma Taylor had died. Grandad was living alone now, down in Petone. We moved in with him, briefly, and then into a house directly across the road in Victoria Street. Mother ended her brief flirtation with the Jehovah Witnesses, and from time to time we accompanied Grandad to the Army.

  The head office of the ANZ Bank was on the corner of Lambton Quay and Featherston Street. In no way at all did it resemble the Paeroa branch of the firm. I started work right up on the top floor in the mail-room, which shared the floor with the offices of the General Manager and a tribe of assistant general managers. Apart from sorting and distributing the incoming mail and dispatching the outgoing stuff each day, it was my duty, along with a team of similarly junior bank clerks—a cheerful bunch—to serve the morning and afternoon teas to the big bosses. We didn’t actually serve the biggest of the bosses, indeed I don’t think I ever saw him, but we did serve his refreshments into the manicured hands of his exceptionally elegant and quite forbidding private secretary, who would then transport the goodies to God in his inner sanctum.

  Gone were the carefree days of jacketless high jinks with Rosalind and Shirley down in our back room. This was the big time. No matter how junior, we were fully suited—all the time. The new position did have its compensations. Us mailroom guys—no girls!—were pretty slick at wangling the dispatching of the daily mailings to the bank branches in order that we were required to work overtime (often of only a few minutes’ duration), and thereby earn not only an hour of extra pay but a meal allowance as well. For all that, it was beginning to dawn on me that banking was possibly not going to be my lifetime career and that there could conceivably be more to life than this world of high-ish finance. It dawned like a ton of bricks on the day when, in charge of the franking machine that was used to stamp the daily outpourings to the branches, I noticed, too late, that I had inadvertently set the stupid thing incorrectly. Instead of the postage on each piece clicking through at three-pence, sixpence or a shilling, I sent out 200 or 300 items at ninety shillings plus the three-pence, sixpence etc. Ninety shillings roughly approximated my weekly take-home pay! Had I owned up—and I didn’t—it could have taken me several years to pay back what I had overspent. However, banks being banks, I imagine they never found out.

  It was not an exciting job. Possibly the pinnacle of excitement in my few months there was being trapped for an hour or two in the lift, alone with Lady Holland, wife of then Prime Minister, Sid. Possibly, being the spouse of the PM, she had been up on the top floor doing her personal banking with God himself. I did most of the talking during our involuntary imprisonment; Lady Holland was not a noted conversationalist and I did my best to make up for this, until eventually I managed to attract the attention of someone and got us released from the cage. While suitably grateful for my efforts, Lady Holland’s gratitude fell short of expressing any desire to continue our relationship.

  I was looking for a change of direction, a change of career, something new. I decided to join the navy, and applied to become an officer cadet. I feel sure my sole reason for such a drastic career change was that I rather fancied my chances, one way or another, dolled up in those naval dress whites. Or maybe my brief experience as an other-ranks lance corporal had awakened some latent military desire? How fortunate, indeed, that I had had the foresight to acquire my University Entrance. The navy was perfectly willing to accept me. I fulfilled their, then, educational requirements and, after filling out all the forms I was sent off for a full medical examination…I failed. Oh, I was fit enough, certainly. I did wear glasses, but it was another eye reason entirely that thwarted my ambition: I was colour-blind. Apparently colour-blindness is, or was, a naval no-no. Bummer. And no, I didn’t want to join the army as a consolation prize.

  Years later in life, I was consulting an optician, clearly with too much time on his hands, who decided to give me yet another colour-blindness test. Obviously the condition had not changed and my responses to those weird little patterns of dots caused him great hilarity. ‘What do you see when you meet someone dressed up in camouflage gear?’ he enquired.

  ‘It’s always puzzled me why they bother,’ I replied. ‘They stand out like a sore thumb.’

  ‘You’ve certainly missed your vocation,’ he said. ‘The army would have snapped you up on the spot.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You would have made an ideal sniper.’

  How sad. I had missed out on a fulfilling career in the services after all. Given I was a reasonable shot, obviously I would have enjoyed great success, and been a patriotic killer to boot.

  Colour-blind people, almost always male,
get used to entertaining family, friends and colleagues. One Fourth Form school report puzzled me for years—Outstanding experimental use of colour in his work— on the basis of which I had quite undeservedly topped the class in art!

  I have several rather lovely red rhododendrons in my garden. Each year I eagerly anticipate the beauty of their flowering. Each year one of the damn things beats me. I simply cannot discern its particular shade of red, and it is often in full flower before I spot the infinitesimal difference between the red of its blossom and the green of its leaves.

  It was in Cuba Street in Wellington that I spotted the poster. Would you like to be a teacher? it said, or maybe something similar. It must have posed a question, because I do remember responding to it: ‘No!’ And then I stopped. Maybe not such a bad idea after all. Why not? So I trudged on up to Abel Smith Street and into the offices of the old Wellington Education Board. I was told that I should have read the poster more carefully; it was an old one. It should have been removed, as applications had closed a couple of months earlier. After all, it was now early December and they had been advertising for the following February’s intake. Suitably admonished and chastened, clearly by an ex-teacher, I turned to leave. ‘But,’ she continued, ‘you may be in luck…’

  The mid-fifties were rather desperate times for our schools. The Baby Boom kids were now flooding in, clogging up the system, and the powers-that-be were in dire need of cannon fodder for the little ones. Virtually anyone who walked through the door, particularly the few wearing trousers, and who were morally, medically and moderately educationally fit would fill the bill. Colour-blindness was no bar. The Wellington Education Board had set up a selection panel for any late entrapments. I passed on every score. Flying colours! How fortuitous that I had recently allowed myself to be blackmailed into helping out with the Petone Salvation Army Red Shield Cub Pack for a few weeks. And already, at just age eighteen, I had had two years’ experience in the workforce and might be considered fully mature!