Telling Tales

By William Taylor

Memoirs of a leading children's author
In his warm, witty and erudite memoir, William taylor writes about life as an author and teacher in rural New Zealand, raising two young sons as a solo father. Always a character, from 1960 to 1986 he taught in Central and the Lower North Island, usually in single or two-teacher schools. After his first book Burnt carrots don't have legs, a comic look at rural teaching, he wrote six adult novels. Principal of Ohakune Intermediate School from 1979-1986, and Mayor of Ohakune 1981-1988, his hilarious account of the unveiling of the Ohakune carrot is counterbalanced by the experiences of a gay man in public life during the passing of the Homosexual Law Reform Bill, which saw him chair rowdy public meetings with farmers and Christian fundamentalists. In 1986 he retired to write fulltime and for 15 years produced one or two books a year. His works have been adapted for television and the theatre, and some have been continously in print in the US for over twenty years. He has won the Choysa Bursary, writing fellowships to Palmerston North College of Education and the University of Iowa, numerous writing awards and an OBE for services to children's literature. Following major heart surgery in 1994 William taylor has lived quietly at Raurimu, and his delightfully self-deprecating memoir is destined to become a classic for all lovers of children's literature and good writing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jun 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780730450931

William Taylor

William Taylor has written many children's books and has been published worldwide. He won the New Zealand Library Association's Esther Glen Medal for Agnes the Sheep. His titles have been honoured by both the New York Public Library and the American Library Association. William Taylor used to be a teacher, and he lives in Raurimu near Mt Ruapehu in the central North Island.

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Preface

In January 2009, Tessa Duder was staying here overnight on her way to the South Island. For the umpteenth time she got on to me about writing a ‘memoir’ of my life and times as a parent, teacher and writer for the young. Her argument for me taking such a drastic step had generally appeared, to me, to be based on my recounting of the story, yet again, of the unveiling of the Ohakune Carrot. While clearly a compelling and dramatic tale in itself, it still seemed to me a very slight base for a life story. ‘OK, Tessa,’ I said, calling the good lady’s bluff, ‘I’ll make a bargain with you: I’ll write my story if you can find a publisher for it.’ And, further hedging my bet: ‘Not after I’ve written it, either—before! I know you won’t find one.’

One would think that after three score years and ten I might have learnt never to call the bluff of anyone and hope to get away with it. Within a week I had received a phone call from Lorain Day, publishing manager at HarperCollins. ‘I have just been talking to Tessa…’ she began.

The story I tell in these pages is fully the result of my own gullibility. Further examples of that gullibility are liberally sprinkled throughout the pages of the tale.

Tessa was not my sole persuader. Fellow writer and equally good friend Janice Marriott must also bear some responsibility. Others were also on the sideline; my daughter-in-law, Carmen Gravatt, for one. Possibly hoping to keep me gainfully occupied in my declining years, Carmen also considered that it would be a good idea for me to leave some sort of written legacy, apart from my small mountain of fiction, for my grandchildren. An unlikely fourth individual who arrived in my life only a couple of years ago, Yura Zavgorodniy of St Petersburg and Pyatigorsk in Russia, virtually commanded me to go on writing when he heard what was afoot. You can read about him later on in these pages.

I acknowledge with deep appreciation the agreement of my two sons, Robin and Julian, my sisters, Margaret Debeger and Janette Jackson, and my former wife, Delia McRill, to allow my writing about them, and, indeed, to somewhat invade their privacy. In part, this is their story as well; I hope I have not let them down. Others—friends and wider family—also appear in these pages. All appear in a good light because, quite simply, all have been positive influences in my life and have helped, encouraged and supported me in so many ways.

I also acknowledge the generosity of my various publishers, notably Scholastic New Zealand, Longacre Press, and, of course, HarperCollins New Zealand, for allowing me to quote quite liberally from titles of mine over which they still hold publishing rights. I am grateful to Lorain Day, publishing manager of HarperCollins New Zealand, for her encouragement and enthusiasm for this work, and particularly to Kate Stone for her editing of the book.

It is up to any reader of this story to decide what this account is. I know what it is not, rather than what it is. It is not a ‘literary memoir’, for the very good reason that I am not remarkably ‘literary’. It is not a treatise on how to write fiction for the young. Nor is it a recipe for teaching practice or child-rearing as a solo-parent! Slivers of the work are autobiographical. Some bits are family history; in a sense a slice of social history of this country dating back to the mid-nineteenth-century wave of European migration to the shores of Aotearoa-New Zealand. I guess, in some sort of total, it is a recounting of how I came to do things in the course of my life and living. There have been laughter and tears, joy and sadness, a few regrets and a few wrong paths taken. It has been a full life and, looking back, I am somewhat surprised at how few things I would change.

It doesn’t really matter what my story is, however. I simply hope any readers enjoy and are entertained by the tale.

William Taylor

Raurimu, 2009

I

When I was seven years old I saw Jesus in our garden at Roslyn Road, Levin. It was something of a surprise because we didn’t get many visitors. The day was fine and warm; possibly late summer. I went inside to tell my mother we had an unexpected caller. She took the news in her stride. ‘That’s nice, dear,’ she said. ‘What did he have to say? What was he wearing?’

Stupid question! ‘A long white thing. You know—what he always wears.’

‘Is he still out there? Have a look, love. I don’t think we’re expecting anyone today.’ And she got on with whatever it was she was doing.

I checked…He had gone. Thinking back, so, too, had a golden opportunity. Not for me the instant acclaim and veneration that had been the lot of Bernadette of Lourdes or the little Portuguese trio at Fatima. If only my mother had been quicker off the mark the world may well have been my oyster: ‘The Blessed Bill of Roslyn Road, Levin’, a shrine, the full works. Instant fame. Maybe, in the fullness of time, even sainthood.

Mind you, mine had been a singular, possibly only a partial, revelation as opposed to the multiple appearances of the Virgin Mary to Bernadette and the Portuguese, and Jesus had not hung around long enough for a good heart-to-heart. For all that, though, I had at least spotted Him and not just his mum.

I have a feeling that my encounter coincided with one of my mother’s decidedly non-conformist stages. Mother was religiously eclectic. Generally Anglican—high church and low—occasionally Methodist, Salvationist, Jehovah Witness…all largely depending on her mood, on what was available where we happened to be living and, naturally, on the character of the pastor or preacher. We also observed elements of the teachings of Christian Scientist Mary Baker Eddy, most particularly in the form of the children’s prayer that hung on the wall of my bedroom:

Father-Mother God

Loving me

Guard me while I sleep

Guide my little feet

Up to Thee…

I haven’t come across the embodied Jesus again. Not a sighting to be had, and certainly no revelations unless you can count being saved at age seventeen by Billy Graham at Athletic Park, Wellington, in the 1950s as a kind of mini-revelation and a spiritual rebirthing that, for good or ill, didn’t stick.

My mother’s matter-of-fact, if not downright cavalier, response to my encounter was at some variance to her normal persona. She brought a certain flamboyance to motherhood that was frequently a distinct embarrassment to Margaret and me, her two older children. Rosa Dorothea wasn’t quite like the other mums of our acquaintance in immediate post-World War II Levin. Good-looking, elegant, tall, beautifully spoken, she dressed with a certain flair that made us shudder and want to hide when she descended on our school to take on the authorities yet again with regard to some slight—real or imagined—inflicted upon her offspring. It wasn’t as if she crept, mouse-like, into the place. Firstly, everyone could see her coming. Not many women in 1940s Levin visited our school in a full-length black, seal-skin fur coat…God knows how many baby seals had given their all for that one item. If she had to wear fur, why couldn’t it have been a good old-fashioned brown bunny? Maybe even worse than the black fur was when she chose to wear her brilliantly, extravagantly red jacket. On top of all that, she certainly didn’t speak quietly in her dialogue with our teachers. Dialogue may not be quite the right word, for Mother would have the first word, the last word, and most of those in between. It is probable that our teachers dreaded her visitations more than we did.

Now, such a creature might have been expected to have arrived in some state, chauffeured at least to the gates of our school. Not Mother. She came on her bike, cycling the three miles into town from our small farm. We didn’t have a car. Didn’t have a fridge, either. I have a clear memory of summer jelly being put to set in bowls, placed into a wire basket, then semi-immersed in a stream that ran, cold, through our property. The jellies generally set. While certainly not poverty-stricken, we were moderately but respectably poor. The small farm, farmlet really, of a few acres, market garden and orchard, was the rehab reward to my father for his four or five years of service during the war in North Africa, Egypt, the Middle East and Greece.

I had no idea at all of what a father was until I was six years old. Not uncommon back then, but, for all that, it came as quite a shock when I finally discovered I had one!

Any notion I might have harboured about fathers in general would undoubtedly have been romantic and coloured in full by Mother: ‘Oh yes, dear. The day you were born—I remember it as if it were yesterday. You were born at the moment of a beautiful dawn, fine and clear. Little birds, thrushes and blackbirds, were singing in the trees outside the window of my room.’

I must have been in my forties when one day I repainted this lovely image to my father as we sat reminiscing about this and that. ‘Utter bloody rot,’ he said. ‘It was the middle of the night and it was pissing down with rain. No chirping birds within sight or sound that night…’

Whatever, Lower Hutt was somewhat smaller then than now. The private nursing home where Margaret and I, and later, Hugh, were born, is long gone. For many years the actual spot where I first saw the light of either a crystal-clear bird-infested morning or a rain-soaked midnight sported a McDonald’s. However, the Big Macs have now gone the way of the nursing home and made way for the entrance to a shopping mall. Where no birds sing.

One year, two months and twenty-eight days after me, Margaret was born. She and I have always precisely known this age difference. In childhood we recited it as a sort of mantra…A few weeks after her advent, Father took off to war.

I suspect it was probably just after Father took off to do his bit for King and Country in 1940 that I had my first brush with notoriety—when I was voted Wellington’s Centennial Baby. I think it was a Plunket-inspired event based on a popular vote. No personal appearances were required. Those interested simply voted for the most photogenic wee mite. Although, in the beauty stakes, it has been a downhill slide ever since, my photo-portrait from the occasion shows that I was one stunningly soulful and wide-eyed little innocent. According to Mama—and who am I to doubt her?—I also made it to number five nationwide. Or maybe it was number seven. Fact or fiction? Who knows? Margaret, on the other hand, had to wait her turn, but did make it to the Plunket handbook of that era where her perfect milk-teeth were featured.

Possibly as a result of being famed for only her teeth rather than her full head, my sister decided to even the score by getting rid of me altogether. I was putty in her hands, even if those hands were one year, two months and twenty-eight days younger than mine. Mother’s much older sister, Agnes (Ga, as we called her), lived with us during the war years. She took care of us while Mother, after a two-week stint of packing biscuits for Griffins—a job not to her liking—worked, man-powered into wartime clerical service at the War Office in Wellington. I think I know which job I would have rather had…

One afternoon, poor old Ga decided to take what was likely a well-deserved forty winks, and Margaret seized the moment. Taking me by the hand, Margaret led me from our home in Waterloo, Lower Hutt, and escorted me to the nearby suburban rail station where we waited on the platform for the next train. It came. I clambered up the steps into the carriage, Margaret urging, pushing me from behind. I have never forgotten her words to me as she waved goodbye: ‘Go and find your mother,’ she called.

For obvious reasons, I cannot recall the glory days of my Centennial Baby success, but I certainly do remember ‘going to find my mother’. I have a reasonably clear memory of the event as it unfolded. I plonked myself down next to an elderly woman passenger—she may have been twenty or twenty-five—and simply sat there for the journey into the city. The guard came around and clipped tickets…He didn’t bother with me: obviously I was both younger than the age needed for paid passage, and also I was clearly in the care of my ‘elderly’ companion. That companion had no intention of being lumbered with a more permanent little partner, however, and I ended up, alone and forlorn and wandering around the cavernous Wellington Railway Station. I have a very clear memory of being apprehended and taken to the guards’ room at the station, where I was given an enormous bunch of keys to play with while I was interrogated, and maybe given refreshments. It all ended up satisfactorily, as I knew who I was and I knew where they could find my mother. The two of us were reunited and the whole escapade made quite a splash of light reading in the next day’s newspapers. Certainly much lighter reading than the usual wartime diet of news. I even have some memory of the train trip home again…Although maybe here it’s other trips I am dreaming of.

As if the black fur coat, the brilliant red jacket and the rest of her eclectic wardrobe were not enough, Mother was a singer. This might have been OK had she restricted herself to singing in a choir, her voice lost in some soaring, but at least joint, effort. Might have been even more OK had she stuck to the popular melodies of the day, sentimentally extolling the white cliffs of Dover or your more jitterbuggy Chattanooga choo-choos. No such luck. Mother had sung in opera, oratorio, as a soloist with choirs, patriotic concerts during the war years and, frequently, in recital on radio. She had trained in Wellington with a top teacher of those times, and possessed a beautiful mezzo-soprano voice. She was in much demand from the mid-1930s through until her last radio broadcast in about 1950. She had won herself a place at an Australian conservatorium of music, but didn’t take it up, opting for marriage instead. Whether she had regrets on this choice will never be known. If she did she never expressed them, and it may well be that the pathway in music had been the choice not of herself but of her sister-cum-guardian, Agnes.

Margaret and I were not of an age to appreciate her ability, and at ages ten or eleven would squirm in embarrassment whenever we were carted along to hear her sing somewhere. I can remember we were with her when she recorded her last radio recital. I still have her music case from what was probably her last appearance: Dvořák’s ‘Songs My Mother Taught Me’, Schubert, a couple of other ballads, something Gaelic, and ‘Hine e Hine’ from what looks to be one of the earliest published editions of the sheet music.

I do remember once or twice when she was singing at some public concert and she would dress for the occasion. The long gowns that I remember were both black—one in velvet, and the other a more elaborate taffeta creation. Pearls, and the black fur coat, of course. She certainly didn’t bike to these events, and someone would arrive to chauffeur her. Memory can be faulty, but I have a feeling the black velvet ended its days as cushion covers.

This woman was no dilettante. Schubert and Dvořák, surely, but during our years at Roslyn Road she also milked our house cows, cooked, baked and sewed, gardened avidly, and was largely responsible for harvesting the crop of what became quite a large cut-flower farm…Several tens of thousands of gladioli take some cutting and packing for market. Raising four kids can be added to this; one prewar, one beginning-of-the-war, one end-of-the-war, and one post-war. Rosa Dorothea was over forty when my youngest sibling, Janette, was born. Already her health, never very good, was in decline. She loved us all, her kids, deeply, passionately…but we were too much for her.

Quite likely my mother didn’t have much idea how to be a parent. She certainly had no role model for the job, not that ‘role models’ had even been thought of or invented back when she was born in the Edwardian England of 1907. She was the ninth of ten children. Her mother died giving birth to number ten, a little girl called Mildred, who died as a motherless infant. Until age twelve, Rosa Dorothea was simply parcelled up and handed around from family member to family member in and around Herefordshire and Wales. She always maintained that she had never been to school, and this may—or, more likely, may not—be the whole truth. Widely read and fully literate, there was every indication of a reasonable education somewhere along the line. Eventually, she was ‘saved’ by her much older sister, Agnes.

Agnes had come to New Zealand around the time of my mother’s birth as nursemaid and then nursery governess to the Levin family of mercantile fame and fortune. She was a good-looking young woman and clearly had her eye to the main chance. For fifty years I have worn a gold signet ring of hers, given to her at the outbreak of World War I by the scion of a notable expat family with a promise that there would be more when he returned from the conflict. He didn’t return. My half-century of wear has smoothed into oblivion what was once his family coat of arms. However, Agnes found someone else and married him—a Dane, a farmer of Takapau, Hawke’s Bay. After a few years of marriage he was killed in a logging accident on his farm. Obviously he had been of some substance, because his widow was able to afford several trips back to England over the years between the wars. I have a feeling that her family in England likely dreaded Agnes’s visits…Life in a far-flung colony had given her not only ideas but airs and graces well and truly in advance of what would have been her lot had she remained in rural Hereford. Less than happy with what she saw had become the lot of her youngest sister, she simply uplifted Dorothea and brought her back to New Zealand.

Barcroft, Tarrington, Herefordshire, England. A cottage on a vast estate. That’s where they were both born, along with eight others. We had little contact with our English family, but in the early 1960s my sister and I paid a visit. I don’t think either of us was quite prepared for just how humble our mother’s birthplace was. A small cottage of dry-stone construction, possibly Norman, certainly not much later than that. God alone knows how it had once accommodated a family of up to a dozen individuals. Grandfather William had been a minor farm manager, in charge of the horses, the stables.

By 1963 the landed gentry were no longer quite so well landed. The stately home had burnt down sometime during the war, and the last of the aristocratic family now made do with a rather lovely but very much smaller Elizabethan house that had in more prosperous times been the dower house or maybe vicarage on the estate. We stayed with our mother’s brother, John, in his home nearby, a delightful old half-timbered black and white house where you bumped your head going through most doorways, where going upstairs was perilous…and where the bath had pride of place in one of the bedrooms. His wife had once been lady’s maid to the lady of the manor. From time to time she still helped out the woman who had once been her mistress—for free. Noblesse oblige in reverse.

Possum Perkins was written in 1985. It is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Rosa Dorothea Taylor. While by no means my first published novel, it certainly serves to mark the beginning of my career as a full-time writer.

Between 1968 and 1973 I wrote half a dozen novels for adults. Why? Well, quite simply I seemed to have run out of anything else better to do, and it seemed like a reasonable idea at the time.

‘I’m going to write a book,’ I said to Delia, my former wife.

‘That’s nice, dear,’ she replied. ‘Don’t make a mess’, in tones similar to those of my mother on my announcing I had come across Jesus in our garden twenty-odd years earlier.

Delia maintains she said nothing of the sort. I know she did. Whatever…I was as good as my word. I sat down and wrote a book. I knew nothing about writing books, I had never met an author or a writer of any sort. I don’t remember the prospect daunting me too much. Ignorance is bliss.

I guess when someone starts to knit something they must start with a first stitch. So it is with writing a book. You start, not with a stitch but with a word, and then go on adding words until you have finished saying whatever it is you hope