Telling Tales

by William Taylor

  A few months into my term on council, the long-serving mayor of the town unexpectedly resigned. In for a penny, in for a pound, I allowed my name to go forward in the by-election for the mayoralty—on the proviso that should anyone else want the job and secure a nomination I would withdraw my name. No one else wanted the job. After less than two years in the place, I was the first citizen of the town—quite likely better than Tim Shadbolt could have done!

  Life did change somewhat. Any final vestige of social wallflower or shrinking violet was rapidly cast off. Ohakune may have been, indeed still is, a very small town, but as the self-proclaimed ‘Gateway to Ruapehu’ and of course ‘Where Adventures Begin’ it had more going for it than most small New Zealand towns of the 1980s. It was an era of rapid development in the place, a development boom that continues to the present day. Encouraging development, but at the same time doing what can be done to govern its worst excesses, is somewhat akin to walking a tight-rope. It is not usual for a town of fewer than 2,000 souls to be served by a couple of dozen licensed restaurants, and God knows how many tourist beds the place has today. Well, the fewer than 2,000 souls hardly needed the tourist beds, and there is a limit to how many times anyone can afford to dine out! The almost overnight development of the place into a ski resort town took some governing, and I quickly realized why very few people wanted to be mayor of the place.

  I would like to say that what little I was able to do over the seven or eight years I served the interests of Ohakune made the town a better place for its citizens. I have some doubts that it did. Tourism does provide jobs. Yes, there were beds to be made and dishes to be washed in restaurant kitchens. Such work is important, if not particularly well-paid. It seemed to me then, and even now, that the people who creamed it in Ohakune were, in the main, those attracted to the place and with sufficient wherewithal to establish the restaurants, lodges, motels and ski businesses. The majority of local people who found work seemed to end up towards the lower end of the pecking order. To make matters worse, many of these folk could not afford to go on living in the town as property values escalated. It’s a telling commentary that the school of which I was principal had a roll of some 550 pupils when I arrived there in 1979, and today it is slightly in excess of 200. There were times that I was truly thankful that my sole campaign promise had been those trees for the rubbish dump!

  Fortunately, the town and district had other strings to its economic bow. The timber-pulp mill at Karioi has had its ups and downs, but has generally provided good substantial work, and, of course, Ohakune was, and still is, the Carrot Capital of the nation.

  Over the years I have spoken to thousands of kids in hundreds of schools from northernmost Te Hapua, near Cape Reinga, to Invercargill and Bluff. I have never failed to pose each and every audience two questions: ‘Who knows where Ohakune is?’ (Ungrammatical, I know, but easily understood.) And: ‘Ohakune is well-known for two things. What are they?’ Oh yes indeed, there is a social divide in Aotearoa-New Zealand! All audiences within spitting distance of Remuera, the nicer bits of the North Shore, Karori, Fendalton, all private school groups and all State secondary schools where the pupils’ parking lot houses better cars than mine, will invariably answer ‘Skiing’ first. The rest? You’ve guessed it—‘Carrots’!

  It’s a little odd that I go on promoting the place even though I moved forty kilometres away to Raurimu twenty years ago, and it is here in these hills that I have written the majority of my books. For all that, I do know that I owe much to that very beautiful little town.

  I lived in Ohakune from 1979 until 1989. Forty years old when I arrived and fifty when I left. By far and away the busiest decade of my existence: I raised my two boys, and was mayor of the town for seven of those years. I served two deadly boring terms on the old Wanganui Regional Council, and one term on the board of the newly established Wanganui Community College. My first children’s book was published soon after I arrived in the town, and I wrote eight others whilst living there. For three years I had a part-share in a restaurant in the town, and, apart from making the apple strudel, I frequently washed the dishes—excellent and recommended therapy for a mayor!

  Additionally, I did the job that took me to the town in the first place: principal of the school. I loved the job.

  With the closure of St Joseph’s Convent School, Ohakune became the only primary school in the town. It’s not easy for a school to be the only one of its kind in a town; you end up being too much the focus of attention. But there are also advantages, in that you serve the needs of kids from a full range of backgrounds. And there was certainly a full range of backgrounds to be had in Ohakune! The roll was roughly 45 per cent Maori and 55 per cent Pakeha, including a fair number of well-integrated offspring of Chinese descent whose forebears had pioneered market gardening in the district. All social castes and classes were catered for. It had never been considered an ‘easy’ school to manage. I took over from a very nice guy who had coped unhappily in the job for only a year. It had been his misfortune to follow a long-serving principal who had ruled the place somewhat by force.

  The kids, en masse, were loud, highly physical, rather tough and somewhat rough. Somehow the meek and mild seemed to survive—provided they stayed around the edges well out of the way of any action. This was not an environment conducive to the feelings and needs of the overly sensitive. My office had a splendid view of the play area adjacent to the rooms of the four senior classes, the eleven- to thirteen-year-olds. I will never forget the sight of them erupting from those rooms for their morning and afternoon breaks. Erupt they most certainly did, in a gigantic free-for-all scrum, a scrambled confection of arms, legs and heads. Quite a sight—and the sound effects were equally scary. Rather a violent climate.

  Men taught the big kids. Women taught the wee kids. A mixture taught the ones in-between. The men used corporal punishment—liberally. The women didn’t. The men occupied the centre table in the staffroom at morning tea and lunchtime, playing cards. The women sat around the edges of the staffroom. The women deferred to the men and considered them to be the best teachers on the staff. The women were quite wrong in this assumption. Programmes of work were conventional, tending towards the sterile. The main focus in the school seemed more directed towards controlling the children than anything else.

  When the necessity for change seems obvious, it is sometimes best to jump in off that deep end—precipitously. I banned corporal punishment immediately. This did not endear me to those on the staff devoted to its use. Nor did it endear me to the community. The simple proposition of not using violent means to control violent behaviour did not appeal to all. However, in this one matter I was inflexible and uncompromising. It took a little time, but it worked. Matters were helped somewhat as, one by one, those who disagreed with my approaches took off for other places, probably in the hope that they would find atmospheres more conducive to their methods of doing things. Nothing was done unpleasantly on my part, but I was firm.

  While it is easy enough to be firm on such matters as the more overt forms of disciplining children, it was much harder indeed to institute programmes of work that better suited the needs of these children. To be honest, I didn’t spend too much energy worrying about programmes in Maths or Science (or nature tables!). My efforts to implement what I had found to be of advantage to all kids in reading, creative (I hate the word) writing, literacy in all its forms, were more gradually achieved. The seeds were certainly worth planting, they took root, were nourished—and the planting succeeded. I could not have done this by myself and I was blessed—well, the school was blessed—by the able encouragement and assistance of a core of like-thinking staff, led by Moreen Hancock who became my deputy principal. She and my good friend Ellen Gould had taught at this school since the early 1950s. These two, and a couple of others, had been the mainstay of the place for a very long time.

  It seemed obvious to me that, in order to demonstrate the efficacy of the methods I was espousing, that I had to be
seen to practise what I preached. Equally obvious, in order to achieve this I had to be seen to teach a class. For a year I did just that. I have no idea where I found the energy, but it was certainly worth the effort. I was paid what I consider to be the ultimate compliment by Authority—the inspector charged with the overview of our school: ‘You are setting a dangerous precedent for your colleagues’, meaning other principals of schools of similar size in our region. Many of my ‘colleagues’ might have benefited from getting back to the chalkface themselves! It would have been nice to have received just a little help in the exercise, in the form of a few hours’ extra clerical assistance with office work. It was not forthcoming. So, I taught my very last class, and once again we read, we wrote, we acted, we painted. We even created an embroidered wall-hanging which, thirty years on, still adorns a wall in my home. A little like my cooking, my embroidery skills are basic: chain stitch, blanket stitch and, if you want to get more creative than that, invent it for yourself!

  Whether I was teaching a class or not, I always managed to stage a major drama production annually. These days, whenever I come across someone I have taught in years gone by, they invariably remember one of two things: a school trip or being in a play. It may be the plays or pantomimes they remember most vividly. My own two sons are no exception, and, obliged as they were to follow me from school to school, they got to tread the boards more than most! Julian’s acting ambitions were the more modest of the two. He made an admirable dwarf, footman and tree—he was not too keen on learning lines! Robin made his stage debut in one of my productions when, aged four, he was the smallest rat in The Pied Piper back at Waiwhare. He ended his dramatic career in Ohakune when he made a stunning appearance as Pyramus in the play-within-a-play from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. However, he did transport his performance abilities to Dunedin both during and after his student days at the University of Otago, when he stunned audiences with his vocal and instrumental abilities as lead singer / guitarist in two or three (then) quite well-known groups, most notably Fast Food at Eight. While attending some conference in Dunedin, probably a municipal one, I managed to take in a gig of the latter. It was quite an experience. And definitely a loud one.

  I can’t say that Mrs Beryl Booth is my favourite character of the many I have created. She’s up there, though. Certainly she is one of those to whom I feel remarkably close. She sure has a harder job as a solo-parent than I ever did, if for no other reason than I give her one more boy to cope with than I ended up with. She does a great job on very limited means indeed. Her three little devils love her dearly, and she deserves every drop of their love.

  The Porter Brothers, Supermum and Spike the Dog, and S.W.A.T. The Southside War Against Terrorists were all published by HarperCollins in the early 1990s. If I were writing them again today, I may well change the title of the third in the series! They did very well at the time, although they have been out of print now for a long while. I can remember Paul Bradwell telling me that Supermum had sold in excess of 20,000 copies—a significant number then, or now, given that the books were only available in New Zealand and Australia. It is certainly the only series I have written where the sequel did better than the opening title. Possibly because it’s a better book.

  Very recently, I ploughed through the piles of correspondence I have received from readers of my work. I was surprised to discover that the books that generated the most letters were indeed my Porter Brothers titles. Hundreds of letters! Kids who read these books loved them. Readers appear to have related well—very well—to the characters, possibly in much the same way as I had done as a child reading Richmal Crompton’s JustWilliam stories. A helluva lot of reviews, too. Almost all reviewers seemed to recognize the nature of these largely light-hearted adventure stories. One or two well-known ‘purist’ reviewers/commentators took me to task over the language of the principal characters. Well, I ain’t makin’ no apologies there—indeed I don’t think I use any real ‘swear words’.

  I was overjoyed by the reception the books received from the Salvation Army, who covered the titles in a long piece in their periodical The War Cry. This meant a great deal to me on a personal level.

  Mrs Beryl Booth is a trombone-playing, uniform-wearing Salvationist. Her three boys, Augie and Dawgie Porter—whose father took one look at them before shooting through!—and the third, William Bramwell Booth, are more or less clones of the boys I remember from my Salvation Army Sunday School days in Petone. Beryl Booth’s close friend, mentor, and almost extra parent to the boys is Captain Gladys Knight, officer in charge of the Southside Corps of the church.

  I know where Captain Gladys comes from. Bible-in-Schools was, and probably still is, a feature in many of our primary and intermediate schools. The school gets technically closed for half an hour once a week, and the religious of many faiths come in to conduct a non-denominational session with the kids. Teachers generally get the half-hour off, unless rostered for ‘control’ reasons in some places. There were never enough volunteers at Feilding Intermediate—and I am not surprised!—so the whole school got lumped together in the hall and some woebegone poor religious soul was expected to hold their attention for thirty minutes. My God, they must have been souls of significant faith to submit themselves to this torture. Sackcloth and ashes would have been an alternative of light relief! However, there was one person who could, and did, hold those 700-odd kids in the palm of her hand: the Feilding Salvationist captain. William Booth himself would have been proud of her. My character of Captain Gladys comes from this woman, and one other.

  I heard my Great-Aunt Hilda, Mrs Major David Taylor, preach a couple of times. She could preach a spellbinding sermon. Hilda Taylor was a consummate entertainer. Storyteller may be a better word. She and Uncle Dave, younger brother of my grandfather, spent the whole of their working lives as officers in the Salvation Army. Uncle Dave didn’t preach as well as his wife, but apparently they made an excellent team and were also fine fundraisers for the church. Obviously my grandmother had not only converted Grandad from Presbyterianism to the Army, but had snapped up his younger brother as well. There is much of Hilda Taylor in my Captain Gladys.

  The Porter brothers! While the words were not, in themselves, particularly threatening or fearsome, the picture they conjured up in the minds of almost all the residents of Southside made spines tingle, hearts thump and heads ache.

  Augustus Porter, Augie, at thirteen years and five months, was the eldest. Douglas, Dawgie, at twelve years and seven months, was the second Porter. William Bramwell Booth, eight years and nine months, the youngest Porter brother, was not a Porter at all. William Bramwell was a Booth.

  Those of Southside with long memories agreed that Augie and Dawgie were the spittin’ image of their late father, a young man of charm and spirit and a holy terror in his own day who had swept off her feet and married the equally young Beryl. He had fathered his two sons and then lost his life in a boating accident, ‘I’m off with me mate, Fred, to chase the great white shark, honey,’ he had said to Beryl. She had never discovered if her husband had found the beast or the beast had found her husband first. While bits and pieces of the boat upon which the men had set sail in pursuit of their quarry had been found, no bits and pieces of her husband or his mate, Fred, ever surfaced or washed up. Beryl Porter was now a widow with two young sons.

  Mr Basil Booth, the late Mr Porter’s second best mate, consoled the young widow and even learnt to change Augie’s and Dawgie’s nappies. Very little time passed before Mrs Beryl Porter became Mrs Basil Booth.

  No luckier the second time around, poor Beryl was careless enough to be widowed again. Rather less romantically, Mr Booth, late on one wet and windy night and while motorcycling home from the pub, was flattened by a speeding sheep-truck on its way to the Southside meatworks and at a very nasty intersection of the roads leading to the suburbs of Southside and Eucalyptus Heights. Sadly he had not lived long enough to set eyes on Beryl’s third and his only son, William Bramwell, who had bee
n born some four months after his father was flattened.

  Even more sadly for poor Beryl, neither the late Mr Porter nor the late Mr Booth had been the best of providers. No insurances, no savings and not too much by the way of compensation for their loss. Beryl, widow of two and mother of three, was just about on her beam ends.

  The brave young widow faced life virtually alone and in a one-bedroom council flat where there was insufficient room to swing a cat—even if Beryl had one. Mrs Beryl Booth could not have afforded to feed a cat. From their very earliest days her fatherless mites showed a marked ability to eat the poor woman out of house and home and to the full extent of whatever benefits the state provided.

  They say God moves in mysterious ways. For Beryl and her little lambs, God moved into their lives in the person of Captain Gladys Knight, officer in charge of the Southside Corps of the Salvation Army. A woman of great character, enormous energy, abundant sense of humour and significant size, Gladys arrived at the foot of Beryl’s bed in the maternity annexe of the Southside General Hospital just forty-five minutes before the birth of her third son, William Bramwell Booth.

  ‘Heavens above, woman! You can’t fool me you’ve just given birth to these two cherubs and charmers.’ Captain Gladys pointed to the blond-curled, enormous violet-eyed and black-lashed, pocket-sized angels sitting on either side of their labouring mother. ‘Why’ve you got them chained to the bed, dearie?’

  ‘…twenty-seven…twenty-eight…twenty-nine…thirty…’ Beryl was counting her labour contractions.

  There was a loud snort from a passing nurse carrying a bedpan. ‘For one thing, Captain, we haven’t had the time to train them as midwives, what with the cutbacks and all,’ she snorted again. ‘Poor Mrs Bigelow down the hall got quite upset and this her first. They got a stethoscope from the office, plonked it on the poor soul’s tummy and told her her baby was dead.’ The nurse shook her head. ‘And that was only the beginning.’ She did not go on.