The Book that Made Me

by Various

  Much as I loved the books, I never imagined myself as one of those kids. They were English, they went to some posh boarding school during term time, and their sailing adventures mostly took place on an English lake that was very different from the ragged sea coast I knew so well.

  It was Barbara Leonie Picard’s retelling of The Odyssey that really captured my imagination. Odysseus’s wanderings – all those encounters with one-eyed giants, six-headed monsters, ghosts and sorceresses – took place on, or near the sea. The small beaches, reef-bound harbours, rocky shores and scrubby headlands around Sandy Bay were easy for me to transform into the scenes of Odysseus’s various adventures.

  One summer some friends announced they were going to sail their yacht down to Waiheke and visit us. So every day my brother Denis and I would climb up a narrow gorse-lined track to the top of the headland between Sandy Bay and Hekerua. There was an open grassy spot right on the snout of the headland and we’d sit there watching out for our friends’ keeler to come sailing in.

  Or rather, Denis would be looking out for the yacht and I’d be Odysseus marooned on Ogygia and waiting to be rescued, or Penelope gazing out to sea praying for Odysseus’s ships to appear over the horizon.

  When I was old enough to take a sailing dinghy out on my own, my daydreams became even more vivid. The little P class became Odysseus’s raft and I’d crouch in the cockpit, one hand on the tiller and one on the sheet, feeling the pull and heave of the wind and water as I stared across the bay at the local village of Oneroa and my imaginary homecoming.

  I didn’t restrict myself to the stories Homer told. There’s a large element of fantasy, of fairytale, about Odysseus’s Wanderings that, right from age six or seven, led me into inventing my own variations on this old Greek story. One early invention of mine – which I don’t feel any need to turn into a book now – had Odysseus go back to the Cyclops’s cave after all his wanderings were over.

  Why you’d want to make friends with a one-eyed monster who’d torn the heads off six of your mates and eaten their bodies in front of you is beyond me. I guess, as a young kid, I wanted to put the world to rights. Friendship is important, and healing little misunderstandings like this seemed a good idea at the time.

  Back home in Auckland I’d drive the family mad by shutting myself in the bathroom. Safely inside with the bolt across, I’d drape myself in a couple of towels knotted at the shoulder or fastened with safety pins to make an improvised tunic. There I would fight imaginary battles against Trojans and monsters while the family pounded on the bathroom door.

  And at night I’d lie awake in bed in the dark and continue telling myself my stories about Odysseus. I even took to hiding bits of bread and cheese under my pillow – the closest I could get to an ancient Greek hero’s diet – so Odysseus could enjoy a meagre meal after days of starvation at sea.

  What was it that hooked me on Odysseus?

  Well, he was often outnumbered by enemies with brute force and magic on their side – an ancient Greek David to their Goliath. Maybe I saw him as a kindred spirit, as I battled to hold my own against two older brothers. Was that why I drove my eldest brother crazy (Laurie was definitely a monster in disguise) with my smart-arse remarks?

  Or maybe it was just the power of Odysseus’s personality – cunning and brave, resourceful and adaptable, quick on his feet, imaginative, a bit lippy, good at keeping secrets (too good sometimes), loving and very loyal.

  Did Odysseus instil in me my sense of adventure, my urge to give things a go, my competitiveness, determination, thoroughness, plain stubbornness and initiative? Or did seeing those qualities in him feed what was already there in me?

  What about those fabulous illustrations by Joan Kiddell-Monroe? I’m a sucker for pictures, and even by the time I was reading Dickens, I still adored the old-fashioned drawings, pausing to absorb as much of the detail as I could before reluctantly continuing with the text. In Picard’s Odyssey, Kiddell-Monroe has a glorious picture of Odysseus greeting the ghosts in the Underworld. My hero’s calf muscles are so impressively drawn, I spent the rest of my childhood, all my teens and much of my twenties trying to grow muscles to match.

  Or was it Picard – and Homer’s – talent for storytelling, the seduction of entering another world so vividly drawn, that inspired me?

  Most young kids have strong imaginations and spend hours inventing stories and acting them out. But as we get older and busier, with homework and sport and remedial maths and music after school, with mates and projects and study and partners and jobs and rent and mortgages and our own kids later on, the everyday world crowds into our heads and stifles our imaginations.

  The key, for a writer, is to keep that imaginative world alive, and in that way I was lucky. Somehow my “Odysseus” stories kept enticing me into their grip and eventually I decided I had to write them down and share them.

  Beyond the Influence

  Ted Dawe

  The story was paid out like fishing line by my grandmother as she drove us about on prodigious car journeys. How young Dick Herron the Mountie and the wily old trapper Sam Bolton caught the renegade Ojibway Indian Jingoss and brought him back to face the consequences. It was a long story with many sidetracks about the frozen north of Canada, caribou herds, the Hudson’s Bay Company, moccasins and snow blindness. It pitted youth and vigour against age and experience. The trapper against the native. Loyalty to one’s companions was balanced against loyalty to one’s mission.

  Growing up in the 1950s, car journeys around New Zealand were slow and taxing. It was particularly tortuous for children, sitting in hot cars while we wound over endless dusty roads in elderly De Sotos or Ford Populars. My grandmother was an enthusiastic driver who had a tool bag full of tricks to pacify fidgety kids. She would let the favoured front seat passenger steer while we rolled down long hills with the engine switched off. She would sing “Lazybones” or “Down by the Canebreak”. She would tell us funny stories about our mothers or fathers; the things they did when they were small. Most of all though she had the ability to retell a long novel in intricate detail.

  The Silent Places, as I have discovered, was written by Stewart Edward White in 1904. The author was a prolific writer who specialised in stories set in the wilderness and in accounts of “channelling” or spiritualism. I only know this because modern technology (Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg) has put me in touch with the source material. Prior to this the book lived only in the form of car-borne narratives.

  Sitting in my study today, with a fresh reprint of the novel in front of me, I see on the first page a couple of sentences that maybe sum up the book’s early magic.

  It was strange speech, richly embroidered with the musical names of places, with unfamiliar names of beasts, and with unintelligible names of things. Kenógami, Mamátawan, Wenebógan, Kapúskasíng, the silver-fox, the sea-otter, the sable, the wolverine, the musk-ox, parka, babiche, tump-line, giddés, – these and others sang like arrows cleaving the atmosphere of commoner words.

  Many years after these journeys I discovered I had an affinity for books set in wildernesses of one sort or another, the novels of Jack London in particular. I imagine that these sorts of books had the same sort of appeal in the early 1900s (when my grandmother was a girl) as science fiction or fantasy does for today’s young reader: the vicarious pleasure derived from journeys into uncharted lands and the challenges confronted there.

  Looking at the book now, from a “fifty years later” vantage point, it seems incurably colonialist, racist, sexist and any number of other “ists”. The characters, and in particular the heroes, are caricatures of stalwart virtue while the supporting cast are not so much people but part of the environment. The Indians (“Injuns”), the trappers, the wolverines and the caribou; all obstacles to be overcome rather than carrying an individual truth or vitality. So given this, why does the story live on so sharply in my memory?

  For the last ten years or so I have been busily engaged in the art of novel writing.
My books deal with teenage males in situations where they have passed well beyond the influence of their parents and have to cope in a challenging environment. Some of the decisions they make are life or death ones. Most are life-changing. The language these characters speak will one day soon seem as antiquated as that spoken by Dick Herron and his trusty companion. The world they live in is largely urban, rigorously New Zealand in its character.

  For all that, I struggle with the same artistic challenges that confronted White in the early 1900s. Authenticity, vitality and relevance. My books are journeys of exploration into a world not often written about by other authors and, as a result they attract controversy. I am pushing my way beyond the civilised world into a place that is largely uncharted; a place where I am constantly discovering things which frighten and amaze. Like young Dick Herron, my first duty is to my mission and my resolve is only strengthened by rebuke or criticism.

  My grandmother grew up in a world only one generation removed from colonisation. Her parents traded axe heads and blankets for farmland. England was her home, although she had never been there. Her education ceased at primary school level. Despite that, she grew up to travel the world and become the revered matriarch to twenty-six grandchildren. She was fiercely opposed to swearing, sexuality and bad manners. (My books are drenched with these things.) Yet, this woman narrating this book is the single most important factor in my becoming a writer. Now, from the perspective of late adulthood, I have a few ideas about why this might be the case.

  Oral stories rely on structure and memory devices in order to hold the reader. The structure of The Silent Places is fairly conventional; the hero, the quest, the outcome. This seems to fit with some instinctual template that our minds find satisfying. What makes the story memorable is the sharp specific detail (snow blindness, scalping, spoor); tension (the battle for survival of the warm-blooded in extreme cold); poignant themes (Dick Herron’s love for a girl of an “inferior” race). My grandmother’s voice glided over the ornate writing, accelerating or digressing as she sensed her audience’s responses. All these things help the listener lose himself in the story and shuck off the tedium of daily existence.

  In my writing I strive, like my grandmother, to hold my audience, to ring true, to captivate. Once that happens then the narrative can roam far and near and the reader will float along in its wake. There is magic in this. I have never been able to resist its call. I believe I am not alone; that people like me are drawn to the altar of the keyboards, the tyranny of the blank page; to practise what the poet Dylan Thomas called our craft or sullen art.

  A Sense of Resolution

  Simon French

  A few short years ago, I found and purchased a second-hand copy of The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier.

  It was almost four decades since I had first discovered and read it, yet my recall of the characters and events remained as vivid as familial memory. Before affording The Silver Sword a deserving place on my bookshelves, I sat down to read it again, curious about my adult’s reaction to the text and keen also to place Serraillier’s work in the context of my life as an educator and author.

  The Silver Sword, first published in 1956, tells of a Polish family, the Balickis, in the final stages of World War II. The opening chapter begins in the style of old-fashioned storytelling and character introductions, but with events, place and characters introduced, the narrative quickly assumes greater speed and immediacy. The Balicki family are separated – father from family, and then the mother as well, leaving the three children to fend for themselves in the hostile environment of a turbulent, wartime Europe.

  My own copy of The Silver Sword is a hardback reprint from 1965, ironically the very edition I borrowed from Blacktown Library as an eleven year old in 1968. The edges of the pages are a little fragile; they are beginning to fox with yellow specks, and are slightly grimed by dozens and dozens of page-turning fingers, including my own from long ago – and again, more recently. When the municipal library moved to a brand-new building some years ago, much old and surplus stock was put out on sale tables in the foyer of the original building. And there I found several actual copies of books from my childhood, including Mr Serraillier’s landmark novel.

  I think it may have been a review and extract in The School Magazine that first alerted me to The Silver Sword, but there was then another motivation behind wanting to find and read this story: my father had been in Bomber Command during World War II, and like many men of his generation, it was not something he talked about. Along with sex and any politics to the left of Sir Robert Menzies, “The War” was off limits as a conversation topic in the household of my childhood.

  Prior to The Silver Sword, the only fleeting encounter I’d had with The War was the arrival of the Nazis towards the end of the movie The Sound of Music. Aged eight, I’d asked some innocent question about “those soldiers”. My father furnished a brief reply, and something in the tone of his voice and answer piqued my curiosity. A couple of years later, when I brought The Silver Sword home from the library, the book earned itself a quiet nod of approval from him. I didn’t realise at the time that I was embarking on a conscious voyage of discovery about my father as a young man, but I knew at the very least I was about to begin broadening my knowledge of The War.

  And once I started reading, I could barely put the story down. I was there. Like so much great writing for children, the young protagonists have to strike out on their own, solve many of their own problems, be ever watchful for dangerous adults – and survive. Ruth, Edek and Bronia face constant danger in their trek across war-torn Europe as they search for their father. The chance encounter with orphaned Jan reveals the fact that their father is alive and also searching for them. For Jan is in possession of a letter-opener, a small silver sword given to him by an escaped prisoner of war – the Balicki children’s father.

  Serraillier’s knowledge and detail of life, indeed childhood, during wartime remains an astonishing achievement. First published just eleven years after the conclusion of World War II, The Silver Sword must have been about the first piece of quality writing for children that depicted both the exciting and mundane experiences of boys and girls in the stressful, atypical circumstances of a comparatively recent conflict. Of course, many other fine works set in World War Two have been published since – Robert Westall’s The Machine Gunners, Penelope Lively’s Going Back, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr, and Morris Gleitzman’s series of novels beginning with Once – that are quite closely related to Serraillier’s work, all with child protagonists negotiating a landscape that can be utterly dangerous at every step.

  The Silver Sword, however, spares us the graphic aspects of war. In fact, it steers a path through a war zone largely uncluttered by blood and gore; awful certainties hover at the edges of each page, but we do not encounter them. We worry constantly about the safety of these children, feeling that their journey is ours as well. The reader desperately wills the Balickis to survive through sheer dint of their own humanity. Their determination, measured optimism and kindness shines through all fraught interactions.

  In the bedroom of my childhood, I hung on to every paragraph of the Balicki family’s journey, and felt great relief when sanctuary was found. Yet I felt a little disappointed as well: I really liked the character of Jan – the clever criminality that had helped him survive a war zone, his status as an orphan. There was a lot I liked about his enigma, and a lot more I wanted to know about him. I loved this mystery – that we never found out anything more about his background and the obvious trauma and loss that Serraillier hints at but skilfully sidesteps. The story’s postscript is the very last page inhabited only by a portrait of Jan – well dressed, smiling and serene. The portrait summed up the courage and inner reserves of strength that Jan and the Balicki children had mustered to reunite a family and to find peace for themselves. This happy conclusion to The Silver Sword is the best and only way that Ian Serraillier could have set out for his characters. For me,
however, it is Jan’s untold story as an orphan and child refugee that is the enticing and unfinished narrative.

  Aspects of Jan have probably found their way into many of the narratives I’ve fashioned as an adult author. The Silver Sword was one of the childhood books that helped me include in my character casts not only kids who resembled my friends or students, but also the outsiders, delinquents and enigmas. I taught myself to afford these latter personalities the same depth and empathy as I did my lead character or narrator – in fact, the outsiders often have been my narrators. I learned how to fashion a narrative that would leave the reader with a sense of resolution; with an understanding that the trajectory of a narrator’s life would be strengthened and resolved by whatever experience had carried them through the course of a novel. As an adult writer, I came to understand how much the unfolding skills as an author had been indelibly fashioned by encountering so much in the way of quality reading; that reading and writing are so eloquently knotted together and dependent on one another.

  For every one book I could have cited as the “book that made me”, I could have listed a multitude of others: the works of EL Konigsburg, Patricia Wrightson, Penelope Lively and Ivan Southall are but one quartet of favourite authors among many, many more that I read and loved as a child.

  But it was the personal, family aspect that has shaped this appreciation of the one special book: my father. In his final years, he opened up a little more about his war experiences. He consented to answer the school assignment questions of a friend’s teenage son, who in turn had the good sense to record his voiced answers. To me, my father in his last years made an uncharacteristic confession: that in England during the war he had enjoyed the company of a number of girlfriends; in particular a Danish girl whose family had fled to England. Several small black-and-white photos were produced, accompanied by an unfamiliar and warm commentary from my father. He then began to mention the bombing runs over Germany and in particular, over Dresden. There was a certain intonation that crept into his voice at this point: grief and guilt, most likely for the devastation caused on the ground and for the many innocent lives lost. He did not live to read of the rebuilt Dresden Cathedral; I think such news would have meant a great deal to him.