Margaret Mahy

by Tessa Duder

  The Procession

  Who came tapping at the door? A wild wandering man, green as Spring! Who came running to open the door? A little girl, eight years old dressed in a filmy, floating, cloudy nightgown!

  ‘Will you dance around the world with me?’ said the wandering fellow.

  ‘Yes, of course I’ll come,’ said the little girl. Off they went together, into a primrose yellow morning. The wanderer played his violin and they danced along the road.

  Who was it knocked at the door? A wild wandering man and a little girl wearing a filmy, floating, cloudy gown.

  Who came running to open the door? A man with great grey bird wings growing from his shoulders.

  ‘Will you come dancing with us?’ they asked him.

  ‘I have been waiting for you,’ he told them. ‘Why were you so long?’

  Off they went together into a blue crystal morning. They danced along the road. The wanderer played his violin, and the little girl sang:

  ‘Honey, honey, dripping from the flower,

  Petals, petals, falling from the rose,

  Where can I find yesterday’s happy hour?

  No one knows! Nobody knows!’

  Who came tapping at the door? A wild wandering fellow, a little girl in a filmy, flowing gown, and a man with bird wings!

  Who came running to open the door? A Fiery Man and his friend the Dragon.

  ‘Will you come with us?’ they asked.

  ‘Can my dragon come too?’

  ‘Yes, we need a dragon.’

  ‘Well then, I will come as far as you are going!’

  Off they went, and then, suddenly, it was lunchtime.

  ‘Will you have salt in your stew?’ the wandering fellow asked politely.

  ‘Will you have honey on your bread, or cheese?’ asked the bird-winged man. They toasted muffins on the Dragon, and drank lemonade.

  ‘Do you know what we are?’ asked the little girl happily. ‘We are a procession.’

  ‘There are no trumpets,’ the Dragon pointed out doubtfully.

  ‘The happy feelings inside us are the trumpets for our procession,’ the Fiery Man replied peacefully.

  The procession went on … through a wood, over a bridge, across the sea in little boats (coloured sails like gay wings over the water), over a desert on silent proud camels, up a sharp mountain that was like a tooth biting at the sky.

  Who was it clanged on the bell at the gate? The procession! Who came running to peer through the bars? The young King, wild in his crimson velvet robes, shining like a rose red star.

  ‘Take me with you, take me with you!’ he cried. ‘I want to see, and hear, and smell, and feel the wide world.’

  Who came running to pull him away from the bars? Five guards in armour, five wise men in black cloaks, like learned umbrellas, frayed at the edges.

  ‘Come back to your books on law and government,’ they cried, ‘or you will never learn enough to be king.’

  ‘Law is a fine thing, and government is a fine long word,’ said the wandering fellow, ‘but what of the song at night by the fire? A King should hear this, once in his life.’

  ‘A King should dance in the moon, and feel the black and silver night around him,’ said the little girl.

  ‘Oh,’ cried the bird-winged man. ‘A King should know poetry that sings, like the soaring of great feathered wings.’

  ‘A King should feel in his heart that life is strong as the music of trumpets, and warm as the flame of a dragon,’ added the Fiery Man.

  And the Dragon ended: ‘But not only a King should know these things. A guard in his armour should know them, and a wise man in a black cloak should know about them, too.’

  So the guards opened the gate and the young King ran out. The wise men followed him, flinging off their black cloaks. Underneath they wore patchwork like five pied pipers — all the colours of the rainbow, all the colours of the world. The guards left their armour to rust. They went out dressed in brown and green, like five sturdy trees.

  ‘Now we are a real procession,’ said the little girl.

  ‘But no trumpets!’ complained the bird-winged man.

  ‘The happiness that we feel is like trumpets,’ the five wise men said.

  ‘Or like kettle drums!’ said the five guards.

  ‘It is all sorts of music,’ said the young King.

  The procession went on and on with singing and dancing and being happy.

  Perhaps tomorrow, they will knock at your door.

  And a poem, also published in the School Journal that year, again signalled the Mahy preoccupations with the images from a thousand folk tales, though sharpened up.

  The Witch, my sister

  The witch, my sister from over the sea,

  Wonderful presents has sent to me.

  A whistle to blow, and a bell to ring,

  Silken ropes for a shining swing.

  A golden lion that will play and purr,

  Dancing slippers of silver fur,

  And, sharp as a needle, bright as a pin,

  A mouse that plays on a violin.

  Many primary school teachers around the country used these charming, quirky pieces in their classrooms and must have wondered about their author. One reader who did more than wonder was somehow connected with the New Zealand pop group Blerta, which turned The Procession into a song, ‘Come Dance All Around the World’. Characteristically, Margaret’s quoted comment expressed pleasure while rightly making a point about the business of copyright. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you expect to happen to a children’s story, to have it turned into a song. It’s interesting to see how an idea leaves you and goes on to someone else who uses it in a different way. I didn’t give my permission to have the story used. I didn’t even get a copy of the record. Strictly speaking, someone should have approached the publishers about it, but I felt very pleased to see it used in a different medium.’

  Along with the joy of being published 1961 brought the arrival of her daughter Penny. Margaret has described her decision to have a child at 25, as part of a ‘romantic and compelling love affair’ begun when she was 21, as linking ‘very naturally with these ideas I had about adventure’. In those days, adoption was the usual and expected course of action, but despite pressure she never really considered this, confident that she would find a way to support herself and her child. She saw the whole thing very much ‘as my own particular adventure and responsibility’. In 1990 she was to reflect that ‘at the time I don’t think I contemplated the possibility of not succeeding at what I’d done; I never doubted that I was capable of replicating for my own children the sort of marvellous upbringing I had myself as a child’. But in some ways, too, she had a ‘rather falsely romantic view of my own role — I saw myself as a woman alone setting out on her adventures. I always assumed that I would be the one to look after them. I think on some unconscious level I had sought to live out the woman-alone-against-the jungle-of-the-world fantasy, otherwise I would have opted for something safer.’

  With her baby and very little money, Margaret went to live with a young couple, Belinda and John Rotman, in the Ohariu Valley, north of Wellington. In return for board she would do light housework and help in the garden, tending and picking the tomatoes they grew. Margaret speaks with warmth and gratitude of her three years there, and her long-standing friendship with Belinda Rotman. She was able to fit in caring for her baby and her habitual nocturnal reading and writing around the jobs expected of her. The rural environment was appealing, and the immediate landscape she looked out on really was a ‘meadow’ with wild flowers, not a paddock. For her part, Belinda Rotman, quoted in a 1984 newspaper feature, looked back ‘on the three years of Margaret’s stay as the most extraordinary time of her life’. The two women would spend some days ‘speaking entirely in rhyming couplets. “It was the most carefree, lovely time. There was never a dull moment. Although she is quite introverted, when you get to know her she has a tremendous wit and sparkle.”’ In response to a commen
t about Margaret’s vulnerability, Belinda replied, ‘“Why, she has the strength of forty men. She’s one of the strongest characters you are ever likely to meet.”’

  From the Ohariu Valley, the stories to the School Journal started to flow, some with names that would later, as picture books, become world famous: The Birthday Party, Guy and the Bears and The Little Man Who Went to Sea in 1962; The Old Bus in 1964; and in 1965 The Adventures of Little Mouse, Alone in the House, The Clowns, Once upon an evening (poem), A Lion in the Meadow, The Little Wild Woman, The Merry-go-round, Mouse Music (poem), Mr Rumfit, Right-Hand Men, Sailor Jack, The Playground, A Witch in the House.

  In 1965, Margaret moved south to Christchurch, which would remain her home. With a modest bequest from her paternal grandfather she was able to buy a small section of land at Governors Bay, on the western shore of Lyttelton Harbour, reached by a spectacular road over the Port Hills from the city. She rented a cottage for a few months, while having the beginnings of a house erected: the most basic two rooms, with, for a good few years, no running water, no inside toilets and no electricity. There was nothing much on the overgrown section except a few fruit trees from an earlier orchard.

  There was, however, the spectacular Canterbury landscape, later to become the background to several of her novels: Lyttelton Harbour in The Tricksters and Underrunners, the Port Hills in The Catalogue of the Universe, the city itself in The Changeover, Aliens in the Family, Memory, The Other Side of Silence, 24 Hours and Alchemy. Descriptive passages in The Catalogue of the Universe and, especially, Underrunners portray a landscape that provided pleasure or challenge almost every day: the Port Hills road rising from the city plain, swooping and curving ‘writhing like a desperate serpent pinned down and anxious to be free’, until, above a dry creek capable of ‘roaring like a beast on a continual, angry note as if the hill side itself had found a throat and was issuing a warning’, it ‘grew leaner and more treacherous, held at bay on one side by a bank alive with moss and ferns and broom and foxgloves, while on the other it surrendered to the void, a great airy fall on to stony slopes far below. Not only this, the road claimed victims just as if it were a serpent god.’

  To the north, from this road, stretch the city plains, the long sweep of misted coastline; to the west the jagged foothills of the Southern Alps, snow-clad for much of the year. When the narrow, winding hillside road to Governors Bay surmounts the saddle and descends, it suddenly offers a framed view of the inner reaches of Lyttelton Harbour, its rim of tawny, barren hills encircling islands and jutting fingers of land lying in water that can be deep turquoise, or green, or a sullen grey, mirror calm or white-capped. Margaret has spoken of the solace of driving down that scenic road to her little home and shutting the door at the end of each daily adventure in the city or beyond, each wearying trip overseas. Governors Bay in 1965 was quite primitive, a place for holiday baches and what would later be called ‘alternative lifestylers’, but it was her chosen place, her haven.

  Like 1961, 1966 brought Margaret two somewhat similar events of equal joy and significance.

  First, the School Journal editors decided to pay an unprecedented compliment to a single writer and, despite their lack of ‘New Zealand’ content, devote a whole issue — The Wind Between the Stars, Part 3, Number 3 — to stories by Margaret Mahy. They were superbly illustrated by Jill McDonald, a Wellington illustrator, trained as an architect, who was art director of the School Journal from 1957 to 1965, then left New Zealand to go on to an outstanding illustrating career in England. Introduced by a strong cover image of animals surrounding a melancholy Harlequin, the seven stories and two poems made up what was, in effect, Margaret’s first collection and her first soft-cover book. Five of the stories would later be published in Britain and the United States as hardback picture books: The Boy who Went Looking for a Friend, Pillycock’s Shop, Mrs Discobobulous (renamed Mrs Discombobulous), The Wind Between the Stars and The Princess and the Clown. Betty Gilderdale has singled out the story ‘Small Porks’ as the one tale ‘above all others [that] sums up her work by making a wry comment on society within a humorous framework’. Small Porks is the youngest in a litter of 10, and a sensitive chap who responds to teasing and outside criticism of pigs simply by determining to think beautiful thoughts, his own and, after a while, even somebody else’s. After three days of intense thinking, Small Porks, singing in a golden voice, wakes his siblings.

  He was still a pig, but he was a new pig — a pig metamorphosed — a pig transmogrified, transformed and utterly resolved — and all that means, simply, he was changed.

  He was still pink, but now he shone pink as a rose dipped in the fire of glow worms. His tail was a twist of clematis, white with flowery stars. His spots had changed to the shape of petals and leaves and from his back blossomed two wings, pink and white as shells fresh from the sea.

  In what would become a typical Mahy transformation scene and an ironic ending, Small Porks, now ‘more myself than I have ever been before’, flies off on his adventures (‘I always knew that boy would rise in the world,’ said his mother) while his family watch amazed and the old pig in the next door pen

  stared at the bright vanishing figure of Small Porks harder than any of the others.

  ‘Perhaps we’re all like that if we want to be,’ he said. ‘Perhaps Small Porks is the first really truly true pig the world has seen since we were turned out of the Garden of Eden.’

  But the other pigs had heard the clank of the mash and scrap bucket and weren’t listening, and after a moment the oldest pig heard the clanking too, and quite forgot his strange thoughts.

  The 1966 School Journal stories are already remarkable for their range and their command of genre. Even without the editorial support a major commercial publishing house would offer, the confident Margaret Mahy voice rings through work that is poetic, comic, disturbing and lyrical. Take the last W.S. Gilbert-inspired verse of When the King Rides By:

  Oh what a fuss when the king rides by —

  Rockets dance in the starry sky,

  Mice in their mouse-holes wonder why,

  The people throw their hats up high,

  The soldiers stamp and the ladies sigh,

  The dogs all bark and the babies cry,

  The puss-cat runs and the pigeons fly,

  And the drum goes rat-a-plan-plan.

  Or the opening of the story about an old woman who falls into a washing machine, Mrs Discobobulous, which plays with alliteration and words — vixen and virago, tyrant and tartar — very unusual in children’s stories of the time:

  There was once a very cross woman called Mrs Discobobulous. Oh she was a scold, a shrew, a vixen and a virago, and a proper tyrant and tartar to her poor husband (whose name was Mr Discobobulous). She niggled and naggled him day and night, from first yawn to last. He was ragged, poor-spirited, uncivil, unkempt and unkind, if you listened to what his wife said about him. Her tongue, people said, was as sharp as a barber’s razor, and three times as long. Mr Discobobulous used to sit in silence, listening to her and staring out hard from under his hat-brim while she scolded him, and then he would stamp out and go and meet his friends, who were all sorry for him, because of Mrs Discobobulous and her scalding, scolding ways.

  The second momentous event of 1966 was the arrival of a second daughter, Bridget, when Margaret was just on 30. If being a solo mother was very unconventional in the 1960s, being a solo mother of two was rather more so. Because her daughters had the same father, Margaret was, as she has said, ‘very monogamous in those terms’; she was certainly not an early feminist resolving to bear a child with no intention of partnership or marriage. ‘As a child I assumed I would never get married, and sometimes I feel that as a child I spoke more truly about what I wanted to do with my life then when I was in my twenties. At university, too, I remember talking in a tutorial about having children without being married, so in a way I suppose I was imaginatively speculating on the possibilities of being an unmarried mother long before I became o
ne.’ After the relationship ended, she was ‘very conscious of how powerful romantic love can be and how it can take hold of people’s lives and make them behave in ways that are irrational and destructive’. Many years later, she said that though there were times when she would love to have been married, recognising that ‘a good marriage with shared responsibilities is a wonderful way to bring up children’, she doesn’t regret not having married. ‘I like where I am pretty well and I think for someone like me who has writing as a central passion in life, it’s a solitary passion and it tends to exclude other people. You need solitude to be a writer, and although a lot of male writers are married to women who look after the kids and it’s taken for granted they’re entitled to their solitude, that’s not the case with women, who are still on the whole expected to behave like traditional wives. So I suspect I’m better off single.’

  She had also long known, well before the feminist 1970s, that the women she admired were those ‘who imitated men and lived adventurous lives like men … I was always fascinated by women who dressed like men. I have no idea why … They had guns and swords which gave them power over life and death and meant they were not natural victims, which women tended to be.

  ‘Perhaps for the same reason my role models in real life were men. I looked to my father and my grandfather as examples, not to my mother. My mother was an excellent and very devoted mother who encouraged me to believe there were no limitations, but deep down what she really wanted for all of her daughters was for them to have a happy marriage and a family since that was what she had had herself. I think that if she had been confronted with somebody who had chosen to have a career rather than a family she would have been a little resentful. That may be why I chose male role models rather than female ones. I didn’t see reason why I shouldn’t be the sort of man that my father and my uncles were — in a way I am, because I have become a hard-working tradesman just like them, someone who earns a living by working hard and never turning down an opportunity to make money.’