by Tessa Duder
Storytellers are not always romantic, even about their place of birth. ‘I spent thirty-seven years in New Zealand doing the usual things,’ she once told an audience in Australia, ‘being educated, working, falling in love, having children, pushing cars when they stopped working at traffic lights — before I went overseas for the first time. By then I was certainly what New Zealand had made me.
‘Of course in the case of New Zealand the seas are notoriously wide. We’re stuck on the outer rim of the great circles of art, science, culture and political and industrial power … New Zealand, by contrast [to Australia] is little and twitching, a country of forest and ferns. “Green, green, green,” said an early colonist, and he said it in despair. Birds cry out in curious voices full of twangs and gong notes. New Zealand is uneasy because it is volcanic and even when you live far from the active volcanoes, you might find yourself (as I do) living in the ruin of an extinct one, or perhaps on a fault line. [My home town of] Whakatane was built on a fault line, and I think continuation of that fault line runs through me — but then I think it runs through us all. It is just that New Zealand offers its citizens tangible fault lines to observe. Below us the tectonic plates grate against each other, tearing the country in two.’ But it was, she added a little later, ‘a country of readers’.
More recently, she has described New Zealand as a ‘beautiful, damaged country which I love’ and has learned over the years to write about it with lack of self-consciousness, ‘naturally and passionately’, and, more bluntly, as not the ‘idyllic country the travel brochures try to suggest. It is part of the world and the damage of the world. Along with its wonderful patches of forest and South Island mountains and its North Island beaches and its programmes for saving endangered birds, it has its share of racial problems — sometimes bitter ones — of crime, broken families, youth suicide. It has its bullies, its abused and ruined people. Its writers describe the beauty, but they want to acknowledge its contentious areas, too … These days, we may be concerned with what it is to be New Zealanders, but we are part of the world, the Western world and the Polynesian world, too. We are all world citizens because of books, pictures, films and popular music. We have something to give and receive and something to offer.’
In 2004 it is a country ‘looking energetically inwards, defining and redefining its own identity, yet simultaneously longing to be recognised by the wider world. So the recent success of the film Whale Rider leads to a curious mood of local self-congratulation. See! We too, just by being who we are, can be up there with the best — a mood that is currently encouraged by curiosity from the outside world. Whale Rider! Amazing! What else is going on in New Zealand?’
Although she is not known internationally as a writer of distinctively ‘New Zealand’ stories in the same way as, say, the earlier great Australians Ivan Southall or Patricia Wrightson, and although detailed description of landscape and environment is infrequent in her work, New Zealanders know from subtle but clear evidence where her heart lies. When, as a mature writer, she began setting her novels in and around Christchurch, the descriptive passages in books like The Tricksters contained, in the opinion of academic Tom Fitzgibbon, ‘the warmest and most vivid evocation of New Zealand seascape, shore and encircling hills since [Katherine] Mansfield’s novella At the Bay some seventy years ago’. Here, in the first chapter, is an English visitor discovering Lyttelton Harbour at the start of an antipodean Christmas:
Then, beyond the orchard and the native bush, they came face to face at last with the harbour, held in a circle of craggy hills in the cone of an old volcano. Its grey spaces and reflecting films of water at low tide made it look more like a prehistoric estuary than a commercial port, even though docks and cranes, small as children’s toys, could be seen directly opposite. Thin soil lay draped over the bones of the land, in long, curving folds, falling, always falling, down to the sea and ending in a ragged coastline of tiny bays and indentations. Native bush grew darkly in the gullies; the gaunt ridges were freckled with the gold of gorse and broom. The two landscapes ran into each other and made a new countryside altogether (not pretty, but desolate, beautiful and timeless). Towards the eastern end of the beach was the boat house with Charlie’s Sunburst drawn up on the ramp, and beyond that, just as if the sand and seagrass had worked themselves into a useful shape, was a little cabin propped up by flax bushes and wild yellow lupin.
The landscape of her childhood was also an eastern coast, but North Island rather than South, oceanic, wild and expansive rather than encircled and enclosed. Margaret May, a desired first child, was born on 21 March 1936, in the small coastal township of Whakatane, on the long fertile sweep of the North Island’s Bay of Plenty. In pre-European times it had been a stronghold of Ngati Awa, Tuhoe and Te Whakatohea iwi. European whalers, sealers and traders began arriving in the 1830s and a small settlement gradually developed into a centre for shipbuilding and a small port for local produce destined for rapidly growing northern settlements. By the mid-1930s some 1800 people lived beside the Rangitaiki rivermouth, servicing a hinterland of productive farmland and looking out seaward to a Pacific horizon dominated by the occasional smoke puffing forth from volcanic White Island. A few kilometres to the south was the glorious long sweep of sand and surf, Ohope Beach. And, sitting right on a major fault line, the people of Whakatane knew about earthquakes. It was not uncommon for families like the Mahys to sit down to a meal and, feeling the floor beneath them tremble and seeing the cutlery and dishes on the table begin to shake, cry ‘Earthquake!’ and dive under the table or a nearby door lintel. Margaret often had the unsettling experience of seeing ‘the ground twist with earthquakes’.
Margaret May was born in the town’s small hospital and taken as a baby to the still-existing concrete family home built by her father Frank at 26 Haig Street, across the road from the town cemetery. Six decades later she would remember, for a ghost story she was writing, that ‘sometimes you can swim in the river and sometimes you are given the chance to swim in the sea … as I wrote I remembered how, when the tide was coming in, it always looked as if the river-ripples were running backwards … Twice a day (twice in 24 hours) in that cemetery, the tide would turn and then the light would change and, if you were in that cemetery walking around the old tombstones, those stones would start looking like pages from a book … anyone who was walking there at the time when the tide turned looked as if they had been transformed into an angel …’
She describes herself as coming from ‘good English stock’. Her ‘overwhelming memories’ of her father’s mother are of ‘a woman without teeth, leading an almost exclusively gardening life’. Her father was overjoyed to be a parent, and her mother, who had been a teacher, was ‘terribly keen to have a clever child’. Margaret was surrounded from the beginning by a large extended family of grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. Her paternal grandfather Frank Mahy (with the ‘rather peculiar and romantic’ history of being unaccountably abandoned at a Bristol orphanage) was a tailor in England who had emigrated to New Zealand in search of a better life for his seven children and settled in Whakatane. He was an unusually domestic man, bottling jam and teaching all his children to sew, the role model for his own children and the model perhaps for the father in Jam, the story of a family coping with an overabundant plum tree and one of Margaret’s most ‘New Zealand’ picture books. These paternal grandparents, Margaret was to write, remained enigmatic, feeling ‘perhaps with some justice, that bringing up their own seven children had exhausted any interest in childcare’.
The arrival of their son’s first child must nevertheless have brought great joy to the Mahy grandparents, and equally to 25-year-old May’s parents, teacher Frank Penlington and his wife down in Christchurch. The first Penlingtons had emigrated some generations earlier from Cornwall; it is tempting, reading the poetic, graceful letter to Margaret May written by her grandfather Frank on the night of her birth, to speculate on some powerful genetic Celtic disposition towards language and imaginative st
orytelling. ‘He wrote letters to his other grandchildren too, and none of them became writers. Nevertheless his letter seems to me more than a good wish — it was like a secret instruction.’ Though he died when she was about three, Margaret has written that when she reads that letter, ‘his voice speaks in my head, and I feel some directive coming to me not only from the actual words on old pages but, it seems, also from in between them’.
Fendalton,
21 March 1936
Dear Little Margaret May
I am informed that you happily arrived this afternoon, quite punctually after a rather long journey. I am sure your mother must have been delighted to meet you for I know she had been looking forward to your coming with much anxious hope. It is probably much too soon to ask how you like your new surroundings and what you think of all the strangers you have met, but what a lucky girl you are to have landed safely on a new planet and to have before you all the new joy and pleasure of the flowers in the field, the sound on the shore, the stream over the stones and the sunshine on the hills. If only I were a fairy Godmother instead of a very common sort of grandfather I might wave a wand and so give to you all rich blessings, and all good graces, but probably your mother and father have arranged these things for you for I am sure that, so far at least they think you just about perfect.
Now, Margaret May, I am going to look forward to seeing you, and tell them, and of course, ever after, you have my best wishes for a very happy life in your new home.
Yours affectionately, Grandfather
So Margaret May arrived today
Not unannounced they seem to say.
She brought no luggage but came to stay.
A doctor went along to greet her,
A kind nurse too was there to treat her,
Of course her mother went to meet her,
Important Margaret May
Perhaps, Margaret has fancifully suggested, this letter is the reason she is now a writer; ‘it now seems as receiving a written greeting might imprint one, in curious subliminal ways, with the idea of writing back. Certainly my mother’s side of the family, when I began inventing poems and stories of my own, did not credit me with my success. “She gets it from Dad,” they would say to one another over my head, and perhaps they were right …’
Margaret’s mother, a third-generation New Zealander, was the youngest of six daughters, with an upbringing that was ‘literary in an academic way, and proud of her intellectual background’. Her father and three of her sisters were teachers; her mother was frail and ‘rather patronised by her children (“Poor mother!” her daughters would say, before going on to indulge in a little innocent boasting about their father and his academic abilities.)’ May Penlington had met her future husband when she took a job as a teacher at a school 12 kilometres out of Whakatane. For a young woman, marriage in the 1930s ‘automatically meant that she gave up teaching in order to realise her true female destiny by becoming an utter wife’. But she was nevertheless ‘a homemaker in an interesting way’ because she also had the considerable responsibility of keeping the books for her husband’s business and later became a shareholder in the company, as well as collecting rent from houses built on land bought by Frank and signed over to her. So she did have an independent income, a career of sorts; in Margaret’s recollection, her mother considered she had a very fulfilled and happy life.
By the birth of his first child, Frank Mahy was nearly forty, the owner of a ‘reasonably successful’ contracting business in Whakatane. It was not a huge company, but ‘a respectable one,’ which steadily increased in staff and scope of building work as the family grew up. ‘My father’s family were all tradesmen, plumbers, building, cartage contractors … men who worked long hours every day at their chosen trades.’ And Frank Mahy’s particular professional speciality was to provide rich metaphors and images for his observant, thinking eldest child.
‘My father actually was a bridge builder. My childhood was spent picnicing [sic] by a variety of bridges, at various stages of construction. I have written a short story about bridge building.’ This was The Bridge Builder, in The Door in the Air and other stories, a reflection on the nature of transformation and death which is possibly the finest short story she ever wrote; it has been anthologised in ‘adult’ collections more than once.
[The bridge] is ‘a very lively symbol in my own life. Bridges, leaping from one place to another, cover a great variety of abysses, including those between countries, between communities and those between the inside and the outside world. Probably the adjustment that the imagining individual makes to the complicated real world, is my own obsession. Though I take pleasure, and support the efforts and advances of my country, in developing its own literary identity, this is not why I write and it is only one and possibly not the basic reason, for the existence of literature at all. As well as giving people overseas some insight into what it means to live as a New Zealander, a writer may wish to communicate ideas about the human condition that have nothing whatever to do with geographical situations. The ideas I draw on come from things as random as cracks in the pavement that may appear to presage the break up of material nature, or the reflections of stars whose light may have been travelling many years to reach my telescope, or a daughter exclaiming, “From now on I’m only going to fall in love with really handsome men. It’s just not worth it [otherwise].” In the latter case one may find oneself overwhelmed by all sorts of reactions, including the “otherness” of one’s children and the vibrations startle all sorts of hidden associations out of the brain. This is an experience that belongs in New Zealand, Australia, Japan — belongs to anywhere in the world. The bridges we build show not only our differences but our sameness, or link us up through the republic of ideas.’
Although the lyrical opening paragraphs of The Bridge Builder suggest a greater variety of bridges than was true in real life, Margaret says that the shingle and sand, the steel and cement were an intimate part of her childhood memories. ‘I did watch bridges appear and people cross over. If I return to my home town by car I cross at least one of my father’s bridges including one I remember from the time of its original construction. We’re over it in a second, but of course without that bridge the journey would be more complicated.’
And it was often quite dangerous work. ‘We used to travel round the bridges my father was building, and some days he would be away working very long hours, because they were pouring the deck of the bridge, which had to done as a continuous process. It was dangerous, in a way, because my father could drive a pile down into the bed of the river and find rocks and then, with the next pile he drove, he might find mud. You never quite knew, in small country areas of New Zealand, just what you were going to find under the surface; there was always an element of risk. So, on the one hand, it was nerve-racking; but, on the other hand, he enjoyed the risk.’
As a family man, the bridge builder seems to have been the ideal father for an unusually imaginative first child growing up hungry for stories, the rhythm and sounds of words, music, ideas being expressed and debated, opportunities for laughter, jokes and silly games. He was also a domesticated husband, like his father before him: when he came home in the evening he looked after the family, fixed broken dolls, made jam and read stories. He was, Margaret says, a ‘natural philosopher, with imaginative views about right and wrong that weren’t typical … more of a humanist, essentially, than my mother was’.
As the 1930s drew to their end, the increasing possibility of war in Europe cast its shadow over the young family. In wartime, fewer roads and bridges might be built, and work for a contractor become scarce. Some of Margaret’s first few years were spent with her parents in a caravan at the tiny eastern coast settlement of Houhora, in the Far North of New Zealand, where her father had won a contract to rebuild the wharf destroyed by fire. The living near the beach was simple and frugal, with cooking on an oil-burning Primus, and shops distant. The pre-school child started to become aware of talk of war, of a general feeli
ng of alarm, of rationing and even greater frugality, of male relatives going away; her father had had rheumatic fever when young men were being called up for the First World War and by 1939 was too old for active service, though two of his brothers went. Wartime introduced the young Margaret to notions of goodies and baddies, that there were people called enemies to be defeated. She asked, ‘Santa won’t bring any presents to the German boys and girls, will he?’ The war wasn’t their fault, mother quickly reassured daughter. It was, Margaret recalls, one of significant little moments of enlightenment in her very early childhood, a moment of alteration when she stopped believing that the Germans or anyone else were baddies, and knew this to be the truth.
For the first few years, it was ‘a fairly plain childhood, because war broke out when I was three, but it was a good upbringing from the point of view of being encouraged to do what I wanted and not being defined in any particular way. Whenever I did anything that was in the least bit smart they praised me for it and gave me a lot of positive reinforcement, so I grew up with a good feeling of my own self-worth. When I was about four, for example, I used to make up poems in my head and then recite them to my mother, and she would always praise me and get me to repeat them to my father. I can still remember some of those poems. I couldn’t write at that stage, so I learnt them off by heart.’
