Margaret Mahy

by Tessa Duder

  Given that ‘the told story or word-game precedes the read or printed one’, Margaret had stories both told and read to her from infancy, not only at bedtime but during, for example, her mother’s frequent stints at the ironing board, when the three-year-old would coerce her into playing a game based on the story of the little red hen. ‘I was always the little red hen and my mother was always the fox. “I think I will try to catch the little red hen today,” she would have to say, while, in my proto-office under the table, I crawled in and out of a labyrinth of chair legs shouting out to her, telling her what to say. “This is such a nice little hen I don’t think I’ll eat it. I think I will take it home and we will be friends.”’

  There was another, similar story based on real life. ‘“You be Stan Kerr, Mummy, and I’ll be the deer,” I would cry. My father actually had a friend called Stan Kerr who, dramatically from my point of view, killed deer … but in my story Stan Kerr, confronted with the little deer, was always touched by its beauty and its endearing ways, and, instead of shooting it, would take it home to be a friend. So, shouting from under the table, I called on both folk tale and everyday life, and used a story to remake reality along more agreeable lines. Invariably I cast my mother as aggressor and myself as potential victim … a victim, however, whose beauty and charming ways always averted disaster … I now think I was trying to remake the world along better lines. It must have been fun, because I did it over and over again.’

  Her first film, at three or four, provided another moment of understanding. ‘At the Regent Theatre in Whakatane — in about 1939 — we celebrated Mickey Mouse’s birthday party. Children attending the film session were entertained with Disney cartoons and given a slice of birthday cake. I remember the cake, and my astonishment on coming out of the theatre to find it was still daylight. And I also remember my distress at one sequence in which Pegleg Pete seized Pluto. “Yes, he is a nice dog,” he cried and stretched Pluto out in a way which would have been terribly painful to any of the dogs I knew. All round me people were roaring with laughter, but, believing that Pluto must be suffering, I began to cry. “It is only a joke,” my mother whispered, comforting me in the dark. “He can’t feel it.” It turned out to be a seminal moment for me. Put straight on this point, having been given as it were permission to laugh, laugh I did, making a huge leap towards that future occasion on which I would joke about someone running towards a swimming pool, plunging through a plate glass window and cutting himself severely in the process. I had been authorised to laugh at the contemplation of someone else’s discomfort.’ Besides, ‘I was a child strongly affected by my own theories of animism, to such an extent that many years later, when I was given a new quilt for my bed I rolled the old one up and slept with it in my arms so that it would not feel discarded, though of course it was. I was distressed when our old caravan had to be pulled to pieces but dreamed in the night that its spirit would somehow travel with us, in the pieces of it we salvaged. I am not totally free of such primitive responses to this day, though I think I recognise them for what they are.’

  Turning five in Houhora, with a birthday cake thoughtfully posted by her Aunt Frances from Whakatane, and little sister Helen now welcomed to the family, Margaret was expected to go to the nearest state primary school, Kohukohu. There she vividly remembers seeing books of a kind quite different from her well-used Whitcombe & Tombs classroom readers; these books, new and desirable, were subtly but significantly different, in their print, their margins, the style of illustration. Originating in the United States, they suggested otherness. They came, not from bookshops, the eager children were told, but from the Country Library Service. But this ‘rare treat’ of school was to be of short duration. The farm milk truck that had provided transport to Kohukohu was taken over by the army, so the six-year-old stayed in the caravan to be taught to read and write by her mother. When the family moved back to their home in Whakatane and enrolled Margaret at the local school, she was an advanced reader for her age, and a competent, if untidy, writer.

  She does not, however, remember her primary schooling with much enthusiasm. She was overly talkative and lacked concentration. Her maths was poor, her handwriting worse still. She was often simply bewildered and sometimes found herself being defensive about her reading ability. ‘People didn’t believe I could read so fast, teachers would say you couldn’t read that and they’d question me and I had! Yes, I had a retentive memory, but I also came early to recognise that with certain sorts of reading, where the relationship of one word to another is important, I had to deliberately slow myself down, or I’d miss out.’ She was generally considered a slow learner, and ‘different’. ‘I once got the strap FIVE times, one after the other, for shrugging my shoulders. The funny thing was that I didn’t really mean to be rude to the teacher. My shrugging was like a sort of nervous twitch. I will never forget going back to my desk after the fourth strapping and feeling, with horror, my shoulders twitch again and hearing (also with horror) the teacher call me back out in front of the class to be strapped for the fifth time.’

  As a solitary child, she lived very much in her own world. ‘I used to play by myself, and wander round talking aloud to myself, acting out adventure stories, which I was very keen on. I would try to get other children to join in and act out my fantasies. I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t, and why I had problems with other children, because my parents had given me such a strong feeling that I was a worthwhile person and I thought everyone else should see this as plainly as they did. My parents tried to reassure me that I was rather an unusual person, and that it wasn’t necessarily a good thing to be like other children when other children laughed at me and refused to play with me. That’s probably why I went through primary school in the lowest possible class, even though I read and wrote well. I don’t blame those other children now. The misjudgement was mine.’

  Her abiding memories of primary school are the conflicts resulting from the ‘odd battles with truth’ between her seventh and tenth year, and the equal longing for a best friend. ‘I didn’t have friends for many years; why I’m not sure. I think at times I did seem very different from other children but I don’t want to suggest I was unduly sensitive and misunderstood. It might even have been I was understood too well.’

  She has frequently written of her yearning to ‘become astonishing, not only to myself but to other people as well’, and has no doubt that these ambitions sprang ‘from the impact of story, for part of the functions of stories is to acknowledge our craving … But I wanted stories to be more than entertaining. I wanted them to be true … I continually tried to take over the lives of singular fictional identities in such a way that my central wonder would be obvious to everyone in the everyday world.

  ‘In the 1940s when posters outside our local picture theatres tended to be dominated by images from B-grade westerns, boys in particular … lived the lives of cowboys in the school playgrounds, shooting with their fingers and arguing incessantly about who had killed whom. Of course I was not included in these adventures. Indeed girls were forbidden, back then, to cross over into the boys’ playground, and vice versa, though a sort of flirtation certainly went on along the boundaries. Both boys and girls, but particularly boys, thrilled by possibility, eagerly took on the role that stories alive in the air suggested to them, though they were sensibly aware that real life would never dissolve and make way for the fictions they were assuming.

  ‘However, I tried to tear fictional possibility off the page and fan it to exotic life on the footpaths of Whakatane not as a mere invented flourish, but as something just as real, just as believed in, as the lives of the shopkeeper or the taxi driver. For the day came when Whakatane Primary School was to hold a fancy-dress ball. I wanted to go as a fairy, thinking this would give me the chance to be seen as both pretty and magical. My mother, however, said that a great many girls would dress as fairies and that I should try something different. “You could go as a witch,” she said, and then added, speaking t
o my father over my head, almost as if I would not be able to hear her, “She has the right sort of face for it.” I remember very clearly my moment of astonishment at this revelation. My mother — my mother — thought I had the right face for a witch. I was disconcerted rather than hurt, but I accepted her judgement. And this, in due course, probably helped me to take on witch life with spontaneity and conviction.’ Subsequently, she refused to abandon it, and laid claim to strange and supernatural functions, including a poisonous bite, chanted spells and physical fights. When unduly goaded, she did bite a child, who for reasons of her own, chose ‘to become part of the fantasy, [and] actually confirmed that my bite was poisonous … in the end children always knew that I was just another kid from down the road’.

  A year or so later the kid from Haig Street moved into ‘rather more dangerous territory’ after being taken to see Alexander Korda’s film of The Jungle Book. She became ‘instantly and profoundly envious’ of Mowgli, and determined to recreate his life in the Whakatane playground. ‘I began telling other children that I was an evacuee from Britain … but the plane had crashed in the Indian jungle and I was the only survivor. I claimed to have lived there among the animals and learned their language … I look back on these allegations with puzzlement. How could I ever have expected any of my contemporaries to believe for a moment in the alternative life I was claiming for myself?’

  The story of how she tried in various eccentric ways — eating grass, drinking from puddles, talking gibberish — to live out Mowgli’s life is one Margaret has told often in speeches, in comic but rather poignant detail. Her bemused playmates brought her leaves and berries and these offerings she devoured without question, despite how unpleasant they tasted or how risky they might have been. On one occasion, offered a leaf ‘with scrupulous care’, she was told ‘amid screams of pleasure and disgust, that there had been a caterpillar on it’.

  Later there were other dramatic lives that she adopted ‘obsessively’—‘initially in my head but later by writing them down … the life of an 11-year-old girl, Belle Gray (inspired by a film poster featuring the maverick female outlaw Belle Starr), who led an outlaw band in the American Wild West; [later] the life of Edric the Anglo-Saxon boy — a boy so clever and attractive that he won the respect of Norman invaders. Living Edric’s limited life, I talked aloud in my own voice for the Normans but in falsetto for Edric, alternately grunting and squeaking, and, as I did so, chopping kindling wood or hitting a tennis ball against a concrete wall to emphasise the obsessive rhythm of my tale … for as long as I can remember, being in charge of the story has been a function I proposed for myself, and part of the story was to live the adventurous life.’ Edric, the Anglo-Saxon boy with the long golden flowing hair, was with her for over a year. Another favourite, acted out with great intensity, using different voices for the two main characters, was based on the only comic she remembers being allowed to own, The Adventures of Middy Malone. Her variations on this story about Middy and the pirate captain with the heart of gold ‘placed heavy emphasis on Captain Vice yielding to goodness’.

  Now children are encouraged to write or tell their own stories as a valued part of the general acquisition of literacy skills, but then Margaret’s unusual talents counted for little. Her concerned mother’s success, when Margaret was about eight, in persuading the headmaster to relocate her in the ‘top’ stream was short-lived: one baffling maths lesson ended with a female teacher angrily telling her to pack her bags and leave the class. ‘You’re dumb. You’re in with the babies,’ the children taunted. In Introducing Margaret Mahy Betty Gilderdale suggests it is hardly surprising that women teachers, notably headmistresses, often fare badly in Margaret’s fiction, portrayed as formidable, if clever, bullies. Her parents reassured her that she was unusual, and special. ‘“But really, the only thing unusual about me was that I was given such a good opinion of myself that I chose to abide by it when there was a lot of suggestion that I should modify my behaviour … Imagination is a wonderful asset, but I do think most people, without doing too much damage to themselves, can learn to adapt and fit in. That immediately sounds as if I’m urging conformity, and I’m not — but I really don’t know how useful it was for me to be so unhappy.” To have had a bad time at school is, someone once told her, no excuse whatsoever for writing a novel.’

  Even before the humiliation of demotion, Margaret had written her first book. As soon as her small hand could control the shapes and the words on the paper to express the ideas in her head, ‘when pencil was the only safe thing for a seven-year-old to use’, she wrote a story she called ‘Harry Is Bad’.

  ‘My mother saved that first book, a series of pages sewed together, so that tells you something of the sort of family I came from. Years later she gave it back to me, and I have it still. I am able to show children that it does not take very much to begin being a writer — it is an activity accessible to anyone who happens to be interested.

  ‘What I remember most about this first book is the way I tried hard to make it look as much like a book as possible. I wrote my name in small print at the top of the pages and then the title of the book … underneath the author’s name and at the conclusion of the story I wrote THE END in big letters, just in case there was any doubt about it. In those days many books and films finished with the words THE END. To me it was part of the form — part of what made the story authentic. Still compelled by form, I went on to write in notebooks. I thought my stories had to fit exactly into the notebook covers, for stories I had read fitted so neatly in between covers supplied by the publishers. You would never find 20 empty pages at the end or a note saying that in order to read the last chapter of the story you should look in another book. So when I got halfway through my notebook I knew I was halfway through my story and I would celebrate by drawing pictures.’

  Reading that first book now, Margaret feels ‘on the whole, pleased with my past self because, though there is no great sign of imaginative or significant style, the story does at least have form. It has a beginning, a middle and an end — and a good moral too. The lazy hero, Harry, is whipped by a witch until he learns to love work. Well, who wouldn’t! Having achieved this desirable apotheosis, he wakes to find he has been dreaming, but I am sure I intended his moral advance to be a permanent one.’

  She now finds it interesting that she wrote this story, not at school, but in her spare time. ‘Writing was something that I was choosing to do …what interests me is that there is a curious little bit of biography in the story. The Hero (a lazy boy, you will be sorry to hear) is lured away from home to the house of a witch … The lure that he follows is a pheasant … and I remember that, back when I was seven, I thought that pheasants were the most beautiful birds in the world. A short time before my parents had been given a dead cock pheasant which was hung by its legs in our washhouse. I remember how the house seemed glorified by the presence of this beautiful heraldic bird, and I remember my horror and distress when in due course my mother took the dead bird down and began to pluck it. The dismantling of this object of beauty caused me to burst into tears. “Don’t worry! It can’t feel it!” my mother cried, but my grief was partly at least to do with seeing the beautiful bird reduced, though none of this prevented me from eating part of it with enormous pleasure later in the evening. I don’t want to suggest that I was one of those sensitive children. What I want to explain is that real life intruded into my stories even at a time when I felt my real life had nothing to do with anything I read.’

  Neither her storytelling nor writing abilities were greatly valued by either teachers or other children. ‘I did have one friend called Margaret who wrote stories too, and together we used to make excursions into fantasy, but she really liked other people better than me. We’d go through a day or two when I’d feel she was my friend and I’d be very happy, but then she’d show she really liked someone else better and I’d be miserable and suffer a great deal. I know a lot of people look back on their childhoods as not being partic
ularly happy, but I seemed to experience a lot of that particular angst.’

  An ambition to see her work in print was soon evident. ‘I published early — when I was seven or eight, sending poems and stories to a children’s page in the Bay of Plenty Beacon — a paper capable, incidentally, of calling Mary O’Hara Hairy O’Hara, or of advising its readers that Women’s World of Prayer will be held in the Whakatane Gospel Hell. I occasionally won writing competitions — thirty shillings for writing the last line of a limerick for example …’

  The Beacon featured a children’s column every Friday. ‘The Friday after I had posted my story — or perhaps the Friday after that — I ran to our gate to retrieve the paper, opened it, and behold — there it was — a short epic about two kittens successfully catching a mouse — with my name at the end of it. Once again I don’t think the printed story had anything like the passion of the stories I was telling myself; it was a trite tale — story reduced to something within my capacity for production. However, standing there, bewitched by seeing myself in print for the first time, I experienced, also for the first time, the strangeness of seeing work that one knows one has written oneself looking as if it had been produced by some other more competent force. Print glorifies but simultaneously displaces the author, moving the story on from writer to reader. Yet there it was — my story and my name given a new authorisation. Screaming with pleasure I ran to show my parents, successfully surprising and gratifying them. I was left in no doubt of their excitement and pleasure.’

  There were further enticements available. ‘Anyone who had a poem or story or joke published in this column would receive a certain number of points, and when the writer had gained ten points, he or she received a free ticket to the pictures. So in a way, I have always looked for the chance to write for profit. I still have photocopies of a few of those pages. The date on the one at the top of the pile is Friday, September 7th, 1945.’ As well as contributing to this newspaper column whenever possible, she used to go in for competitions like those in a small monthly magazine called the Junior Digest, and every now and then won a prize. ‘I remember opening the issue in which I was first featured in a competition, (one in which I came second) and thinking, “This proves it! I really am going to be a writer.”’