Margaret Mahy

by Tessa Duder

  The Five Sisters was one of two books published in 1996. Margaret described it as a mysterious book for younger readers and was uncertain as to whether it would actually get published. ‘Do you know the game where you fold up a piece of paper, then you draw the shape of a child on it and cut it out? When you unfold the paper you have several figures all holding hands. The story is about five sisters who are cut out of a piece of paper, all of them holding hands. However, only the first one has a face. They get blown away by the wind, but they didn’t fall to pieces; they persist in holding hands, and every now and then someone finds them, and slowly different faces are drawn on the blank figures. Eventually they all have different faces; so, in a way, the story is actually about how each sister gets a face as an identity. What I intended to was to suggest that everybody who gives a sister a face is not only giving a face but receiving something in return. In the end, the sisters look a little bit frail but are still together. The child who finally finds them is the daughter of the woman who drew them in the first place. In the final chapter you’re told what happened to the other people who had drawn the faces. The sisters are all differently drawn or painted — one is scribbled, another is very carefully drawn, one has eyes drawn and a face which is completed by somebody else. Later an artist turns a mark into a tear, so that this sister is drawn to cry, while the final one is drawn to laugh. It seems to me you can use a story like this to say some interesting things about the world without having to write a young adults story. I have no idea of just what set of readers I’m writing for with a story like this. When you write a story, as you probably know, you write with the idea that the people out there are the sort of readers that you are yourself, and that they will live with the story in the same way you do. You pass the story you’ve received on to them. Five Sisters is an introspective kind of story, but at the same time there’s a lot of adventure in it.’ The story, dedicated to her old friend Belinda Rotman, was handsomely published in hardback, with jacket cover artwork and charming, subtle illustrations by the English artist Patricia MacCarthy. Three years later, Margaret would read extracts from this story to an audience of about 400 at the first Auckland Writers’ Festival. She had been rather reluctantly included on a panel of ‘Scary Marys’ alongside more familiar feminist writers — novelist Rosie Scott, health activist Sandra Coney and Australian poet Dorothy Porter — but it was Margaret’s reading which quietly stole the show, causing one young woman to rise to her feet and thank the festival organisers for the opportunity of hearing a ‘feminist’ writer previously unknown to her. To most in that audience except the children’s writers, Margaret’s contribution was a revelation.

  At 62, Margaret set off on a journey that rivalled even Rider Haggard’s African adventures — 10 days in the Antarctic. She was the first writer sent under the new Creative New Zealand Artists in Antarctica scheme; a friend had encouraged her to apply. ‘It was the most mysterious place I’ve ever been in … You land at Scott Base and there’s all this human activity in the foreground but behind that is the silence of the continent … it’s not a natural place for humans to be … you’re there because of the technology.’

  Typically, her novel take on the experience, The Riddle of the Frozen Phantom, was to combine two highly improbable elements: the Antarctic as a place of mysterious history, and scientific research with children. When explorer Boniface Sapwood is abandoned by his housekeeper Daffodil, who leaves to pursue her career as a dancer, he decides to take his three children, Sophie, Edward and little Hotspur, south with him. Add Corona Wottley, an ambitious female penguin expert, the ghost of a murdered captain awakening like the Sleeping Beauty from a long nap, a colony of albino penguins, and various villains with names like Rancid Swarthy seeking cheap thrills with explosives and the good ship Riddle’s clues to a stash of diamonds, and you have mainstream comic Mahy. Closer reading, however, reveals a good knowledge of 20th-century Antarctic exploration, Scott, Shackleton et al., and her own direct experience, in such details as the webbing seats in the Hercules aircraft, the necessary polar clothing and the timeless landscape:

  [Boniface Sapwood considers] there is something wonderful about spinning out across Antarctic snow and seeing mountains ahead of you, beautiful as dreams yet somehow truer than dreams. Once you have seen those dreams there is no waking up from them. They are in your head for always.

  As for Edward and Sophie, they were both now staring across a stretch of dark beach. Summer winds had beaten the snow back, revealing black sand and stones, curving away towards a distant headland. Embraced by this beach was yet another long curve (of broken ice this time) and beyond the ice, the sea spread like a great blue plain. Old! Old! Old! that Antarctic sea whispered to Sophie while, in the distance, on the other side of the sea, far, far beyond the black stones and the broken ice, Sophie could make out another distant blue-and-white shoreline marked with valleys, peaks and glaciers.

  ‘It’s like being on another planet,’ said Edward again.

  ‘It’s cold enough to freeze your nose off!’ said Sophie. Indeed the cold was so fierce it seemed as if you should be able to fling your arms around it and wrestle with it, as you might with a bear.

  The Riddle of the Frozen Phantom, she has said, ‘is a book in the tall story tradition, full of impossibilities but set in a possible, indeed an accurately described setting. Possibility and impossibility emphasise one another. [It’s] essentially a tall story but family life intrudes. I imagined some explorer like Scott or Shackleton setting out to do some classical Great Exploration and being suddenly deserted by his baby-sitter. What if someone like Scott or Shackleton had had to take his kids to the Antarctic along with his polypropylene waistcoat and his [polar boot] mukluks?

  ‘Of course there is more to the story than jokes about family life. I was in Antarctica as a part of a writer’s fellowship. It is an astonishing place. There is a feeling of purity about it and you don’t want that purity diluted in any way. You can feel that people should not be there but the paradox is that you are there yourself. The Riddle is set in that landscape and needs to be truthful to that landscape: a vast whiteness and black rock.

  ‘On one of the trips outside Scott Base I stayed for a few days at Cape Bird adjacent to a colony of 30,000 Adelie penguins and one day, looking out over all these penguins and penguin nests I saw a single white penguin weaving its way through all the others like a great penguin ghost. In my story I have stretched that single bird out into a whole colony of albino penguins. Once again real life and imagination twist around each other.’

  The one book published in 1998 gave Margaret particular pleasure, and not only because it won her the Picture Book Award and her first Supreme Award in the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards the following year. This was A Summery Saturday Morning, beautifully illustrated by a young English-trained artist, Selina Young, who also lived in the volcanic crater of Lyttelton Harbour. Her representation of the area’s distinctive headlands, inlets and bare and golden hillsides, matched by superb design and production, turned some of Margaret’s slighter verses into a small gem of a book. She told an Australasian conference held in Christchurch: ‘There is no way I can adequately tell you how delighted I have been by these pictures. It has almost been like being forgiven and taken back into a family, even though my strange sort of alienation was not my fault, and of course there have been times when it has been an advantage that I am not denying or regretting, since I have been only too happy to exploit it. Nevertheless, looking at A Summery Saturday Morning, I do feel I have come home at last, and am truly one of the New Zealand writers and illustrators who have discovered their own country both for themselves and for children too.’

  The story was based on an incident ‘in which two dogs are taken for a walk, chase a flock of geese, only to have the geese turn around, flap and hiss and begin to chase the dogs. The reversal seems fictional but was a real event. I did see my two dogs chase retreating geese, only to see the geese suddenly irritated beyo
nd all measure turn around and begin chasing my dogs. Of course the story reads like invention. It is told in rhyme with repetition and a one-line chorus. The dogs begin their rascally adventures by chasing a boy on a rattling bike and then a cat before they chase the geese thereby meeting their comeuppance. The story has taken on a classical structure where a certain kind of event is repeated three times, changing dramatically on the third.’

  Although delighted with that feeling of homecoming to what was now a well-established and lively children’s literature scene, Margaret has always been prepared to sound notes of caution about disturbing trends in publishing and achieving a balance for New Zealand children between their enjoyment of overtly indigenous stories and those from other countries.

  ‘In choosing to develop our new local literature, which of course we should do, it may be we sacrifice our connection with the marvellous books from other places. And perhaps there isn’t the time — the reading space in the life of modern children — to be both a local and a universal reader, alone with taking swimming lessons, playing with others kids, and keeping up homework (as well as carefully chosen TV programmes and videos). My granddaughters both read extensively, but they have many other things that take up their time, and my impression is that at a time when the number of books is increasing, the time available for extensive reading is less than it used to be. My impression is also that children’s editors have a difference pressure on them from editors of 30 years ago. I certainly know of cases when the dominating pressure to accept or reject a book has come from the sales department, rather than the editorial one and certainly in two cases that I know of, a literary editor, on retirement, has been replaced by someone from the Sales Department — the book being interpreted more purely as saleable project, rather than literary art.’

  As the millennium approached, Margaret was asked to contribute to two special publications to mark the event. One was a special supplement of the Sunday Star-Times, published on 2 January 2000, which included commissioned essays from a range of established and newer New Zealand writers; the other was a thoughtful and surprising piece on her chosen key literary moment of the 20th century for the literary journal Landfall, along with novelist Witi Ihimaera and essayist Denis McEldowney.

  Her irreverent Sunday Star-Times piece, a fantastical, quirky and welcome breath of fresh air among some more portentous offerings, shared the Margaret Mahy — writer, of Governors Bay — with her alter ego, ‘the old witch who lives somewhere in the back of my head … I hear that voice every day.’

  ‘“Millennium-Millooonium!” exclaims the old woman, but I can’t tell if she is making fun of the coming occasion, or of me, trying to sound significant about a senseless subject. “It’s talked about everywhere these days,” she adds, cackling and throwing up her heels … she’s right, of course. It is everywhere … Millennial moments on television — Millennium promises, prophecies, prognostications and possible profits …“Two thousand years … but since what?” she cries …

  ‘What we are really going to celebrate, she tells me, is not so much the changed date, but the changed look of the date … that “2”… almost a question mark … (but a question mark ruled off before the question had been properly asked, perhaps) is going to crowd out the “1”— that straight number which stood sternly to attention in front of all the years any of us can remember. And that “2”— that half-question — will be followed by a line of “0”s … three round windows through which we may try squinting into the future.

  ‘Or are those “0”s three eyes staring back at us? The thought of it seems to make some people uneasy. Disasters are being predicted. We may be about to enter on a time of revelation and disaster. Or, according to other theories we may be on the edge of new hope … new optimism. Either way we like the idea of a party of some kind, but what we are celebrating is the different look that next year’s calendars will be taking on.’

  As for the momentous day itself,

  ‘… though I like the idea of a party, my own wishes for the Millennium are small scale, intimate and ironical. And there is a sort of pleasure in the thought of missing out on it altogether — of going to bed (just as usual) in one Millennium and waking up (just as usual) in another. Missing the actual Millennium moment might actually help me to feel the occasion all the more closely. I imagine myself getting up, feeding the dog and cats, and making myself a cup of tea (if the power is off due to computer failure I am quite capable of boiling a billy on the woodstove) and thinking with a sort of quiet pleasure that the new Millennium would be a subtext to the day — something both significant and irrelevant … a huge joke that is only partly a human joke. After all, why shouldn’t the universe have a sense of humour?

  ‘Anyhow of this imaginary first morning I would glance at the calendar … and I would see the new year looking back at me … that curling “2” hanging on its forehead like an unruly forelock, and then those three eyes staring back at me. If I ever look into them directly I know they will be round, innocent and empty enough, but the woman tells me that, once I have turned my back on the date, the year will begin winking ironically, pulling secret faces. Its “0” eyes will narrow … will stretch sideways, will reduce themselves to dots, to hyphens and dashes, hastily rounding themselves out again to meet the suspicious gaze I will no doubt be shooting uneasily backwards across my shoulder from time to time. “Oh sure —,” the year will be saying. “I’ve started! Here I am. But am I what people say I am? Am I the Golden Age? Fata Morgana? Or am I a different sort of farter — the year of the Great Raspberry?”

  ‘“It could be the year of the Apocalypse!” the old woman reminds me slyly. ‘Doom could fall … or even DOOOM! Capital letters with three eyes looking out of the middle of the year. There they are again — the eyes of the year using a different peephole this time. “Did you notice”, interjects the old woman, “that when I called it ‘the Milloooney-um’ back then, I stretched out the middle of the word?”

  ‘“Three eyes?” I suggest.

  ‘“Three ‘0’s,” she answers. “Oh! Oh! OH! Get it right.”’

  Her choice of key event for Landfall would have surprised many readers, not so much for her consideration of a children’s book but for the very compelling reasons she gave for suggesting that, with his fine 1994 novel The Fat Man, Maurice Gee had produced a important work of ‘literature’, not a children’s novel valued more for its entertainment or educational worth. The Fat Man, she thought, was a ‘quite different sort of book, on dangerous ground because of people’s expectation of what a book for children or even young adults should be like’.

  In the controversy about The Fat Man’s placement, for the purposes of the 1995 New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards, in the junior rather than senior fiction category, and again with the outcry over Paula Boock’s Dare Truth or Promise, a novel about a lesbian relationship which won the 1998 Supreme Award, it was noticeable that few who involved themselves publicly in the debate spoke about the books as, simply, successful works of literature.

  ‘Every so-called key event in New Zealand writing seems to me to be not so much a single event as an intensification — a tangle — of other winding circumstances. Anyhow I am choosing … the publication of The Fat Man, a young adult book by Maurice Gee which is both a single event and the exemplification of a 20th-century process which allows children’s books to be taken seriously as literature.

  ‘When Maurice Gee wrote his first book for children, Under the Mountain, he had recently become a full-time writer and was exploring the possibilities of making a living. Books for children often generate more income than books for adults for reasons irrelevant in this context. Having said this, Gee was not exploitative of the genre. He took writing for children seriously, and wrote with imagination and concern. Yet one does not feel in Under the Mountain the same central necessary that one feels in his adult books. It is, however, a considerable leap from Under the Mountain and The Half-Men of O to The Fat Man which won the New
Zealand Post Book of the Year award, and, in doing so, alarmed some truly knowledgeable and caring children’s book people. It was declared by some to be “a book without hope”, and children, it was maintained, should not have hopeless stories imposed on them.

  ‘As it happens I think all human beings, including children, need the reassurances of hope, and, though the word ‘realism’ often suggests misery, happy endings are not necessarily unrealistic. True reporting on life, however, demands that certain implacable stories be made available to a range of readers, including young adults (and I must add here that, personally, I do not think that The Fat Man is a story without hope). However, when submitted for the award, The Fat Man was classified as a junior book. I subsequently puzzled over this remarkable classification, and was told that it was based on the hero’s age — he was aged 11 — which does not seem to me an adequate reason.

  ‘Anyhow, Gee is telling a story which, like many of his adult books, draws on complex and sometimes dark themes, but he writes with truth, including truths that children’s writers are generally expected to avoid or symbolise, since appreciation of these truths calls for a perception that most children have not had a chance to develop. And I think that, with The Fat Man, Maurice Gee’s writing for young readers becomes one with his most central adult writing. One feels the author is engaged in a primary way.

  ‘Books for young adults have moved beyond being children’s books, yet they are often classified with them, sometimes shelved beside them and are readily available to good child readers. As far as awards are concerned, books for young adults are essentially linked with children’s books rather than with books for adults. I think the publication of The Fat Man was a challenging literary event because the book was written without imaginative reduction, and, though simpler than, say, Loving Ways, it seems to me to be as much a part of Maurice Gee’s primary writing as Loving Ways or Crime Story, and I think it takes writing for young adults seriously as literature, rather than as peripheral entertainment or as a source of moral example.’