by Tessa Duder
With Bridget around a year old and Penny at school, Margaret decided that, after a break of more than five years, she must return to full-time library work. Accepting a job with the School Library Service in Christchurch, she began 13 years of juggling her maternal role with writing and full-time working, and wrote only short stories and poems because that was all she could do.
She does not look back on this time with any great feeling of complacency. On the whole, she saw it ‘as an adventure, and I still see it that way’. There were times when she was ‘wonderfully happy,’ and times of terrible anxiety and even of suicidal depression; most of the time she looked on depression as something she would get through, hanging onto the thought that, as for Allan Quatermain in King Solomon’s Mines, real life was bound to have its discomforts too: ‘that realisation enabled me to cope with the uncomfortable bits and not get overwhelmed by them’.
Now attitudes to mothers with jobs are considerably more liberal and compassionate, and childcare more readily available. Then, as a Listener journalist wrote in 1987, ‘there were the times when she had to leave a 10-month-old baby suffering from pneumonia and go to work “because the idea then of asking for time off to look after a child was just so terrible”. Mahy never enjoyed leaving the children: “I’d get off the bus at night and immediately start weeping as I walked toward home.” Even when she had begun her career as a librarian — she loved the job — there was still the awful tiredness; of coping with the children and the housework on her own and finally, late at night, sitting down to write. At least one car accident was caused by falling asleep at the wheel.’
Or by small, wayward cars, whose unpredictable tantrums would summon Allan Quatermain to her aid.
‘One evening, when my two daughters were small, it became necessary to find some nice stones for a school project, and we drove to a place called Birdlings Flat, which is noted for a strange and rather desolate beach consisting entirely of stones smoothed by the constant churning of short violent waves. As we drove home the sun went down and we were driving into that time of day when one seems to be exactly balanced between day and night without being in either. The sky was colourless, clear as water, and we were suspended between realities. With the going down of the sun it suddenly got colder, and one of the children turned the heater on. There was a spluttering sound and suddenly flames shot out from the dashboard. Combustion was taking place. Material elements were being rejoined into new combinations and as I and my children were material elements in satisfactory combinations already this was a terrifying possibility … I decided that the thing to do was to get out of the car and run like mad down the road, and this we proceeded to do. We ran hard, but the distance between us and the smouldering car seemed to diminish very slowly. At the same time I experienced one of those detached moments common to us all … feeling that I was really somewhere up around the rocky summits that mark the rim of an old volcano cone watching three people run away from a smoking car. The children were upset, one whingeing with apprehension, the other crying loudly, and in an effort to comfort them I cried aloud in a hoarse voice, running all the time, “Look on this as an adventure.” I repeated it two or three times. I know just what I was trying to do. I was trying to change the frame of reference of this uncomfortable incident, to make a different, and no less appropriate sense, of what was going on. I was trying to find a way to make a place for what was happening in my personal framework.
‘When I shouted “Look on this as an adventure!” another landscape flowed out of my mind overlying the real one. I could see them both at once … the crater walls seen through a desert filled with sand stone and karoo bushes. Crouching under those bushes were five brave men … it was while reading about their crossing of the desert in King Solomon’s Mines when I was quite young, about 8 or 9, that it suddenly came to me that the adventure which I was enjoying so avidly was being achieved at the expense of severe discomfort myself. I am sure there are many other times when I have been in difficulties and have invoked the heroes of childhood reading by shouting “Look on this as an adventure!” But on this occasion I was conscious of calling on that particular story to give me strength and flexibility, and the power even to enjoy what was happening as if I were both a character in a book and the reader of the book at one and the same time. Invocation and the image I chose was from my favourite story of childhood. Through reading, I had access to the imaginative energy the author had stored in his story and linked it up with energy of my own. Allan Quatermain was the code name by which I located that energy and was able to use it … Rider Haggard’s cautious and resourceful hero has become an emblem of part of my own imagination. It is myself that I am addressing. In Ways of Telling, an essay in his book, Book Talk: occasional writing on literature and children, Aidan Chambers mentions his personal conviction that we are not changed by our experiences, as common wisdom has it. “What changes us are the stories we tell about our experiences. Until we have formed our lives into story-structured words we cannot find and contemplate the meaning of our lived experiences. Till then they remain in the realm of beastly knowledge. Only by turning the raw material of life into story, but putting it into a pattern of words we call narrative — can beastly knowledge be creatively transformed and given meaning. It is the storying that changes us not the events.” I believe this is true, true at least for me and many other people …’
As adults, Penny and Bridget have paid public tribute to their mother’s dedication to their childhood and teenage years. Penny, whose very earliest memories include her mother house cleaning, tomato picking and (on occasion, because of their poverty) serving porridge three times a day, finds it hard to comprehend just what Margaret was able to achieve in the course of a single day. ‘Things became more frantic after Bridget arrived and Margaret went back to work. Mum was in that superwoman era. I actually have a memory of that book sitting on her desk.’ A punishing routine of taking children to school, work, early evening home life, bedtime stories — and then about midnight, often until 4 o’clock in the morning, her own writing. This was her life for years, but Penny says ‘the important things were never compromised. She was always there for us and we could always talk to her …’, even when she was almost, or completely, worn out. Because, Penny adds, Margaret ‘finds it impossible to say no to people’, she would often drive off at night to talk to schools and PTAs, even to the West Coast or South Canterbury. Bridget, too, has spoken of the stability of the gradually developing house and garden in Governors Bay and the closely bonded Mahy family of uncles, aunts and cousins (though none on her father’s side). Despite the inevitability of day-time babysitters from the age of about 18 months, Bridget remembers that her mother always made time for early-evening reading and weekend activities with her daughters. She is ‘a workaholic, and probably has been for some years out of a strong desire to support’.
With two daughters, several animals and a mortgage to support, single-handed, Margaret in her mid-30s was creating and experiencing a very different sort of family life from her own. But though such an affectionate, close family life ‘is of course a wonderful thing … sometimes I think it puts a distortion on the lives of children who grow up thinking that’s what their lives will be like. And none of us, for a variety of reasons, including of course social expectations, have had the sort of lives that my parents did.’
With large extended families in both her parents’ and her own generation, it is not surprising that Margaret’s books contain such a diverse range of possible family combinations. Indeed, as her reputation grew, she began to be recognised internationally, along with writers like Robert Westall, Jan Mark and Anne Fine, for her understanding of and insights into the modern family. The basic nuclear family (sometimes), the extended family (often), the divided family (often), the solo-parent family, either as widow or divorced or never married (frequently)— all can be found in both her novels and short fiction, always drawn with compassion and a recognition that both the very young and ve
ry old, even old Sophie in Memory, are capable of change and growth.
Margaret’s handling of the mother-daughter relationship, as between Laura and her mother Kate in The Changeover, is noteworthy, given what she has written over the years about her relationships with her own mother and daughters. A real companionship between mother and daughter can, according to Joan Gibbons’s reading of Mahy, ‘be damaged but is not easily destroyed. It is not that mother and daughter treat each other as equals, because the parent/child difference, the sense of being responsible which Kate feels, is always present, but they do treat each other as women. Such a closeness is rare in children’s literature, and indeed, [American academic Marianne] Hirsch suggests, rare in all literature … Mahy has, in many of her early stories and in all of her highly acclaimed novels, advanced family themes with sophistication and sincerity, especially as regards casual, friendly relationships between children and parents, whatever their marital status … [she] has also developed the relationship between mother and child, showing not only the process of the child growing towards adulthood, but also the continued development of the adult.’
Once accused that her families ‘were a bit like psychic battle grounds’, Margaret replied that ‘Family life is where you get your greatest blessings, but it’s also the area where a lot of people sustain their greatest damage. People who speak about the survival of the family often overlook the terrible damage people receive from families. Things can often depend on something as random as a person’s place in the family. I was the oldest. My experience of my father sounds quite different to my sister, who’s third in the family.’
Margaret’s deeply felt but subtle feminism (as subversive and influential as any from those who have claimed to be ‘feminist’ writers in the past two decades) has also given her international standing as ‘a leader amongst writers who have broken from tradition in their treatment of females and children’. But traditionalists should take heart from Margaret’s overall treat-ment of her ‘ambitious, courageous and determined’ female heroes, whose ‘focus for their activities is their family … Many books with strong, adventurous girls have been accused of backing off as these girls become young women, allowing domestic responsibilities and need to care for others to replace their sense of adventure and of fun. In children’s literature, growing up as a girl has largely meant being diminished as a person so as to allow, altruistically, for the growth of others. This does not happen to Mahy’s young women … they learn that the family is the true centre of what goes on in the world, the place where truly important things happen … Being associated with their families does not rob them of holding other important positions in the world. Fulfilling oneself is as important as helping others; it may even be a prerequisite. Neither need mothers be self-denying.’
There were fewer Mahy appearances in the School Journal after the dedicated 1966 issue, only one story a year between 1967 and 1969. Returning to full-time work, juggling children and babysitters and neighbours, gardening, food shopping with no car and living in a quite primitive little house with a view and hundreds of books but no running water and no time for housework or ironing uniforms took their toll, even on Margaret’s legendary stamina. The final years of the tumultuous 1960s were among the hardest of her life. Later novels such as Underrunners and The Catalogue of the Universe would deal powerfully with the scrimping realities of solo motherhood.
Margaret had been writing stories seriously now for around 15 years; apart from the School Journal, no publisher had responded with any positive enthusiasm to the collections she had begun to submit. ‘They wrote me notes back saying, we don’t think they’re sufficiently New Zealand in their content to enable us to publish them.’ She had no agent to push her work, because in the New Zealand of the 1960s, with local publishing in its infancy, there were no such people; and unworldly New Zealand children’s authors did not go looking for overseas literary agents or consider the glittering possibilities of overseas markets.
Neither could she find any satisfaction in self-consciously attempting to give her work more New Zealand content, as she once had at high school. ‘I was enthusiastic about the idea, and I certainly tried but I never enjoyed writing them; I would go out and look at the landscape and try to write about it, but the stories didn’t seem to work.’ Friends confirmed her fears. ‘I’m still puzzled as to why that should be, except that I know writing isn’t just sitting down and looking at something and describing it. It involves a whole lot of subtle and mysterious things like the ability to give landscape a mythical quality and for some reason I wasn’t able to give the New Zealand landscape that quality … I was made the inhabitant of a country that didn’t exist.’
Sometime in 1968, a letter from New York was to ‘transmogrify, transform and utterly resolve’ her own life, in a fairy-tale fashion gifted to few writers with long-held ambitions to get published. But around this time, there was also another mentor poised to play a similarly crucial, if less dramatic, supporting role in Margaret’s career. In 1969 Jack Lasenby, her former fellow student at university in Auckland, joined the editorial staff at School Publications, taking over editorship of the School Journal from Wellington poet Louis Johnson. (Margaret’s very first editor of her earliest stories was probably John Kelly, who had preceded Johnson.)
A noted children’s writer now in his early seventies and the only one of her early editors still alive, Lasenby knew of Margaret’s work from his seven preceding years as a primary classroom teacher. ‘I knew her stories pretty well: A Lion in the Meadow, Pillycock’s Shop, that extraordinary issue in 1966 … They were just so extraordinarily fresh and profligate of language. My God, nobody had written like that, certainly no one in New Zealand. Elsie Locke’s lovely Runaway Settlers had come out — and that was a huge milestone — but here was someone flinging words around like Kipling. There’s a sort of genius to her. That abundant generosity, the extraordinary stamina. She learnt early the secret of unlocking energy from tiredness itself — and that funny old Kiwi voice of hers, it’s all part of the wonderful whole.’
Until he left in 1975 to teach at the Wellington Teachers’ College, Lasenby was regularly selecting and editing ‘as many as we could get out of her. Her stories were sometimes handwritten, and needed very little editing. She wrote some beautiful poems at that time, too. Her particular genius was that lovely ability with language and the released imagination. Occasionally, she’d miss a beat, descend into lushness … but the best of them were simply wonderful. In her writing I see little bits all through, of things that I know about her personal life, that she used as all writers do. Some children’s writers go out with their little notebooks and consciously record young people, their speech and behaviour, but they don’t come within a bull’s roar of what Margaret does imaginatively.
‘She once said to me, with a searching look, “You know, before you went to School Pubs they weren’t very reliable.” On arrival as editor, I’d got a big hard-backed exercise book to begin a register in which all arriving material, voluntary contributions and commissioned, had to be entered. Until then they just relied on memory. Margaret told me she actually had a story lost by School Pubs. I’ve never dared ask her about that again. I don’t know if it turned up later, but the thought of having one of her stories just disappear like that — I said to her, you’ve got a copy of course, knowing she possibly hadn’t — just gave me the cold shakes.’
Lasenby was dismayed to find that some Mahy stories had been accepted but never used. ‘One thing I was delighted to do for her: I found, set in print in galleys, somewhere over there at the Government Printer, her series of stories about Tai Taylor, a Maori-Pakeha kid. I was just swept off my feet by them. Although too difficult for the junior Journal, they had been bought for Alistair Campbell’s Part 3 and 4 some years before and unused for some reason. I could never get the reason out of Alistair, nor anybody else.’
Encouraged by his boss, Lasenby proposed that the Tai Taylor stories should be dusted off a
nd used. All School Publications material was then vetted by a senior inspector. ‘I was knocked back on Tai Taylor, because there were things in the story such as Tai Taylor portrayed as being “the sort of hero who could pick up a headmaster and press him in a book like a wild flower”. I was rapturous about it. I remember saying to this rather dry inspector, “Can’t you see the enjoyment this will give kids in all those happy classes where the teachers do get on with the kids, and they’ll grin at each other knowingly?” And he said, “But it’s the others I’m worried about.” The world has shifted since then.’
Undaunted, Lasenby circumvented the senior inspector and went to see Brian Pinder, ‘the driest Director of Education ever appointed in New Zealand, one of those with lights on up in his office with his senior inspectors until nine or ten o’clock every night, Monday to Friday. I told him, “I think this is a brilliant story and deserves publication.”’ Pinder, though displeased by the breach of protocol, agreed to read the manuscript after Lasenby pleaded that it should be published — for the sake of the kids. ‘He rang me first thing the next morning and said of course it must be published, as is. I was delighted, for Margaret and for the story, but it also gave me a certain strength after that with any of her other work. She would have had a widespread reputation among New Zealand teachers and inspectors by the early 70s; her sudden publication abroad came as no surprise.’
Lasenby says that the School Publications editors had many long talks about Margaret Mahy, wondering about her, how far she would go. Towards the end of his editorship, he got her to write a story that would teach children how to use a library. Instead of an instructional pamphlet, who better than this ‘writer, mother, librarian’ to come up with something more interesting to children? To his delight, it was supported, and was published in 1977 as Look Under V. One day, he says, it should be reprinted.
