Telling Tales

by William Taylor

  The cadenza slips perfectly into the opening given by the orchestra. This is your solo and it catches, amplifies, fits. No hesitation and your orchestra is perfectly cued into a quiet rejoining with you before swelling into the close of the Allegro. The slightest of pauses and you move directly to open the Largo…almost a meditation, and then rest briefly while the orchestra takes up on your opening, expands. You rub your hands very firmly up and down your trousers. It is hot work. For the only moment in your whole performance you come from the reality of the music to the reality of the other world. You look up with a faint smile to where you know your mother is sitting, indeed you can see her. Eyes wide open you look up to her, and mouth, ‘For you,’ and nod. Just a moment. No more, and then back down into the beauty of what you are about to play. You have no idea at all that your mother is now howling her eyes out.

  And so you move on, exploring, weaving into the complex beauty that you know and love like life itself, drawing together the components into a seamless stream of sound…

  A friend told me that a music expert acquaintance of hers had read the book, enjoyed it, but said that no pianist would ever select Beethoven’s ‘Third Piano Concerto’ as their main offering in a top piano-playing competition. This nagged away at me very slightly for two or three years until I read an account of the latest Leeds piano competition, one of the world’s most prestigious. ‘My’ concerto had been played by the winner. Vindication!

  Longacre Press did a fine job in the production of the book. The cover is great—a young male pianist sprawled across the top of a grand piano. Young and gifted New Zealand pianist Justin Bird allowed his image to be used free of charge. However, the newspaper where the photo had first appeared was not so generous!

  I have accumulated probably more than my fair share of awards, honours, medals, residencies and grants, and so forth. Spider earned a White Raven listing by the International Youth Library of Munich as one of the best books of 2002. The New Zealand Children’s Book Foundation, Storylines, listed it as a ‘Notable Book’. However, for all that, the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards of that year ignored it completely. Petulantly, and because of this, I decided against writing the sequel to Spider. Childish, really—but just occasionally a writer can feel a wee bit bitter about this sort of thing.

  A writer never forgets the characters they have created—no matter how many. They live in your mind, I guess forever. Spider Trent lives on in my mind along with all the others. I know what happened to him.

  Afterword

  I never thought of growing old or of being old. If the thought did cross my mind, it was peremptorily dismissed. Aging was not for me. How on earth I hoped to avoid it, I have no idea. As an eight- or nine-year-old, dreamily and slowly cycling the three miles home from school to Roslyn Road, Levin, I do remember saying to myself, frequently: ‘I wonder how long it will be until I am grown-up?’ There was never an answer. ‘Grown-up’ of course meant ‘old’, and getting there seemed as unlikely then as a man ever landing on the moon!

  And now it’s happened. By today’s standards I have reached at least modest old age; that biblical span of three score years and ten. I am a bit uncertain as to ‘ripe old age’—what it is, and if I will reach it. I think I would like to give it a whirl, most particularly when that dearest of little creatures, my granddaughter, Isla, is staying here and she puts her tiny hand in mine and we toddle off over the road together to feed the chickens for my nearest, largely absentee, neighbour. These days we toddle at about the same speed, but I know the day is only around the corner when waiting for Grandpa Bill to keep up will spell the end to our expeditions. However, since first writing this paragraph just a few short weeks ago, Isla has been joined by an even tinier little fellow: her brother and my new grandson, Leon William—the youngest Taylor in this tale. Clearly I must hang around a bit longer.

  Back in my naïve, gauche and gawky teenage years in Karangahake, I would often visit a very old lady, Mrs O’Neill, who lived around a couple of corners from us. She must have been an old lady of significant character or appeal because I never minded visiting her. Clearly I had got to know her quite well, because, with the brashness of youth, I asked her one day what it felt like being old. ‘I still look out on the world with the same eyes I had when I was your age,’ she smiled. I have never forgotten her words. There was every truth in what she said.

  I, too, look out on the world around me with the same eyes I have always used, albeit these days aided by a couple of pairs of specs to focus the looking! Successes, failures, the ups and downs of life, the experience of life itself, must surely have tempered how I view things and have modified my interpreting of what I see. But I still look out, more in wonder than anything else. I may have proved my ability to provide ‘a springboard for the study of irony’, but I have not yet descended to any level of cynicism. I am certainly not pretending I like everything I see, but I don’t know that I ever did. I have been around since before Hitler and his minions set out to systematically murder 7 million Jews. I was old enough and able enough to read the newspaper accounts of the trials when the worst perpetrators were brought to account. It is not as if this is the world’s sole atrocity during my life’s span. It probably won’t be the last, because as a species we are slow to learn and frequently condemn ourselves to a repetition of the same follies. The bewildered eyes of that child being herded towards annihilation in Hitler’s Germany are no different in their apprehension, fear and bewilderment from those of children in Pol Pot’s Cambodian killing-fields, Rwanda, Kosovo and other bits of the bloodied Balkans, of Palestine and of Dafur today.

  My eyes have seen them all. It would be trite, indeed bordering on the obscene, to say that I share their agony. But, as a human being, I am certainly one with them.

  Thank God that eyes may see more than evidence of the evil of which man is capable. A good pair of eyes sights more than simply the negative. Our souls are nourished at the sight of children and grandchildren growing, at the smiles of friends—and, let’s face it, it is not only our souls getting nourishment at the sight of a well-cooked meal! My own eyes never tire of the wonders of growth, not only of grandchildren, but of the annual transformation of my garden from the dormancy of winter to the blossom and flowering and leafing of spring. My score of years in this spot may have meant some degeneration in my body, but the regeneration of garden is some compensation for that! Maybe a slight pity, not entirely consolation, that regeneration for me will largely be through the growth of my family rather than some seasonal re-growth of myself.

  On the other hand, writing these 60- or 70,000 words has put me in the mind to write again. Maybe I will. Wasn’t it Grandma Moses who didn’t start her rather remarkable painting career until she was around ninety? However, if I never write another word, no one could ever say I have short-changed my customers on quantity.

  I am grateful for the life that opportunity and the society in which I have been nurtured has afforded me. I’m certainly not rich in material terms, but I live here, up in these hills with my wondrous view, surrounded by reminders of all that I have described in these words. If my family are not physically with me, with all their abundant enthusiasms and affection, they are forever in my mind’s eye—and in the dozens of framed photos of them that litter my home. Similarly with friends. Similarly with family and friends long gone. Looking around my place I am linked back to all of them. I am an inveterate hoarder and collector of stuff, and not all of it of great intrinsic value.

  Out of the corner of my eye as I sit here writing, I can spot the amphora busts—Joseph and Mary, the family has always called them—left to my father by Great-Aunt Emma, she of the wild tales of little girls pursued by emus. Late nineteenth-century, Austro-Hungarian Empire pieces, signed, they may be quite valuable. Family history has it they were gifted to Aunt Emma by a pawnbroker who owed her money. Only Aunt Emma would be owed money by a pawnbroker! And what for? God knows.

  On a bookshelf nearby is a weig
hty, leather-bound copy of the complete works of Burns and Scott; Mrs James Taylor is written firmly, in a childish hand and in black ink, on the flyleaf—possibly by one of the many offspring of either my great-grandmother or great-great-grandmother. Clearly it accompanied one or the other on that long sea voyage that would forever separate them from their Scottish homeland. It is in such remarkably pristine condition for a 150-year-old volume that I have some doubts that it was ever read very often. Well, with two dozen kids between them, there would have been little time for recreational reading! Also in the bookshelves are a couple of much slimmer volumes, children’s books from Edwardian times: Heedless Harry and Bunny and Furry. One belonged to my mother as a child, the other to my father. Who owned Bunny and who owned Harry, I have never known—but it was good to know that they started out as the readers they were for the rest of their lives.

  In my office, and I am looking at him now, is an object of absolutely no intrinsic value whatsoever other than in my heart: a plaster-of-Paris lion. He has lost part of his tail, his mane is chipped, as are his paws, and the paint is peeling away from every bit of him. ‘What on earth have you got there?’ I asked my elder son, then aged five or six, as he staggered in from an expedition to a jumble sale. ‘He’s beautiful, isn’t he, and he only cost me five cents. It’s a wondrous work of art!’ And, yes, I know I have used those last few words elsewhere in this tale!

  Reminders, too, of times not long gone, such as the magnolia tree that Gaelyn Gordon planted to ‘celebrate’—as she put it—my heart surgery. It was small when she planted it. Today it reaches up a good seven or eight metres. Even present-day garden reminders. It’s only a few months since Swiss Michael marked his last visit by planting two rimu trees. ‘Make sure you give them water when it’s summer and while they are little,’ he lectured me. He will be back again next year to check on his trees, on me and the place, possibly along with Johannes and Mathis and one or two of the others.

  It is and it isn’t maudlin sentimentality. It certainly isn’t when you are looking back over a life and thinking of the bibs and bobs of your own existence and that of others who have made you what you are.

  It is my immediate family, of course, who mean most to me. My extended family, too, of course; not only those connected to me by blood, but also that sizeable tribe I have deliberately added to my own lot. My parents and my siblings are frequently in my thoughts, and all have played a significant part in making me who I am today. Friends, too, who have stood by me, shared the good times with me, and, because they are friends, have helped me through the not-so-good times that all of us experience. It’s hard to express, here, the debt of gratitude I know I owe to the like of Anthea and Bill Tidswell in Turangi, close friends for over half my life. Important to me, as well—as I get older and, naturally enough, find more difficult the everyday demands of life in an isolated spot—is the ready help and assistance of my nearest neighbours, Charles Earle and his family. Generous farming folk indeed!

  Of enormous importance in making me ‘who I am’ are the children I have taught and the children for whom I have written a respectable pile of books. I have done what I can to do my best for them.

  I am luckiest of all in having kept the love and affection, respect and regard of my two sons, Robin and Julian. They have had a lot to tolerate. I know, even today, I can exasperate them and try their patience. I am proud of them both. They are not perfect—but nor am I.

  Julian lives the quieter and less adventurous life of the two. He has had a fair number of demons to face, and has done his best to conquer them. His green fingers find evidence in my garden: my three English beech trees, growing sturdily, will one day be far too big for the place—Julian grew them from seed. Not an easy thing to do. Jack and the Beanstalk got him into gardening. At age five he bought himself a packet of broad-bean seeds and planted them in gardens up and down our street in suburban Palmerston North—then eagerly awaited the results. I don’t know where he thought he might climb. Frequently he would return home from his rambles with a twig or a leaf, insist on planting them, and generally they would grow. At age fourteen, however, he was totally unable to convince me that the plant he was trying to grow under artificial light in his foil-lined wardrobe was actually a tomato plant. You can’t win ’em all!

  I guess his main gift to me has to be my grandson, James. James has inherited his father’s sensitivity towards all feathered and furred creatures. James has shot a rabbit—just one! He decided he would like to go feral-goat hunting here with me one day. James tracked down a couple of the beasts in expert fashion—and then jumped up and down, yelling at them to run away before it was too late! As a six- or seven-year-old he stayed with me here for a week, bringing his pet magpie for added company. A free-range magpie, Maggie was only caged at night. Maggie enjoyed flying through the house, liberally fertilizing the carpets on the way. Generally, the bird was not to be seen during daylight hours, and daily I would pray that it would forget to return home. As night fell, all it took was James out on the doorstep calling, ‘Mag mag mag mag mag mag…’ and seemingly from nowhere there would be a whirr of wings in flight, it would alight on the boy’s shoulder, and then hop down into its cage. Maggie enjoyed cat food. The cat did not enjoy Maggie’s company.

  I am proud of my son Robin. In 2008, he received the New Zealand Special Service Medal for his work in Indonesia’s Aceh province in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, when he led a joint Greenpeace and Médicins Sans Frontières rescue team to the more out-of-the-way corners of that badly stricken region. His reports on this expedition make harrowing reading. As I write these words, he is in Haiti on a similar mission in the wake of the disastrous earthquake. He has worked for Greenpeace for many years, these days more or less as a consultant when the organization requires a strong pair of hands for an action or programme in any part of the world. He has worked in the tropics, in the Arctic, in Bhopal, India, and even in Washington DC! His wife, my daughter-in-law, Carmen Gravatt, is Campaign Director for Greenpeace NZ. No one could ever hope to get a better daughter-in-law.

  Their three-year-old daughter, Isla, is an equally strong character. She would need to be to keep up with her parents! She went through a stage of calling me Uncle Bill, as a result of her memorizing most of Margaret Mahy’s immortal poem ‘Down the Back of the Chair’. A bright button, she also knows by heart much of Lynley Dodd’s work. It is good to see little Kiwis growing up on a sound diet of New Zealand fiction. Her parents, even more than me, see to this nourishing. I know that the works of Joy Cowley, Robyn Belton, David Hill and Jack Lasenby, Gaelyn, Tessa and Janice—indeed all of those who ‘came of age’ on the New Zealand children’s writing scene at around the same time as I did—will soon be added to her reading list.

  If nothing else, at least this tale, now just about complete, will prove that I have not quite departed the writing scene. Certainly slightly less in evidence than once was the case, but not yet entirely moribund. It has been rewarding to me to have been able, more lately, to mentor a growing list of (generally younger) writers hoping to work within the same discipline as myself. That some have now been published and others are about to be published gives me great satisfaction. Equal satisfaction has come from my involvement with local King Country writers, an admirably able and active group, many of whom have been published and who aim to further improve their work.

  It is probably slightly precious to say that I have been fortunate enough to have drawn liberally from that well of writing and books, literature, that it’s only proper to pour a bit back into it—but it is the truth!

  One good thing about writing less of my own stuff means that I now have more time to read the work of others. It always seemed to me that my writing peers managed to find more time to sit down with a good book than I ever did. I think that one valid reason for this was that, when writing flat-out, I always considered it important to get away from the written word and involve myself in something more physically active than curling up with
a good book written by someone else. Today, however, I am once again a voracious reader, devouring anything that takes my fancy, high-brow or low-, fiction or non-fiction. For years, when actually working on the writing of a book, I would consciously never read the work of another writer, often articulating the excuse that in so doing I would be running the risk of subconsciously emulating the style of the writer of whatever it was I might be reading. Possibly a load of nonsense. However, while writing this particular tale I have broken that habit of my writing lifetime, munching my way through most of the output of a remarkably adept Swedish writer of detective fiction. I can discern no trace, here in these words, of his individual style…

  More time, too, for listening to music and enjoying my sizeable collection of the instrumental works of Beethoven (forever my favourite), Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and the operas of Mozart, Bellini, Donizetti, and of course Verdi and Puccini…Maybe nothing too far into the twentieth century. Operas, of course, tell stories; unlikely in many instances, but great stories for all that. So, too, does country music, which I love. Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris and a host of others in between all tell damn good stories. If nothing else, I am a storyteller!

  I have not the slightest intention of detailing my tastes in television viewing. Family and friends shake their heads in bewilderment at what they consider my execrable tastes in the product of this medium. I can’t pretend that I restrict my viewing to the occasional stagings of Shakespeare, the great operas or ballets, adaptations of the classics or of ‘quality’ modern drama. I don’t. While I don’t view every ‘reality’ TV programme or quiz show, or every episode of Judge Judy, I have no objection to a quota of any of them!