‘She won’t go to school,’ Nona said.
‘Do you not want to go to school?’ Edgar asked his daughter.
‘No,’ she replied.
‘Then don’t send her,’ he said and turned and went up the stairs again. And that was the end of my mother’s formal education, apart from a couple of terms at the Slade School of Art when she was fifteen. She told me she knew at the time it was a major life decision and she had chosen wrongly. Her failure to go to school made her over-respectful of authority, I think, and she never felt permitted to lie when she filled in a form, though brave enough in other respects, and she never learned to deal with what she didn’t like: all the important things one learns at school. They tried her again at the age of nine, but after a week of lessons she refused to go any more. She already knew everything they were trying to teach her.
Edgar’s account of it runs thus: ‘My daughter Margaret at the age of nine refused to go to school because it bored her, and it proved to be the wise course. Neither Susan or I [alas, for the poor forgotten Frieda, now subsumed into wife and mother ‘Susan’] could conceive of any reason why she should go to school, and we raised no objection to her staying away from it. I do not know whether she regrets it…but she writes better if gloomier novels than Selwyn or I, both of whom suffered seven years’ schooling apiece, and if you doubt my judgement, read her Via Panama.’
In the three weeks after my birth, after Margaret had succumbed and gone to stay at Adelaide Road with her father and her new stepmother, and before she took the ship back to my father, Edgar and she managed to write a book between them, Miss Amagee in Africa. ‘I shouldn’t have gone to stay with them,’ my mother said later. ‘It hurt Nona very much.’ But her own attitude to her mother was ambiguous. Her sister Faith had been betrayed by Nona, she sometimes hinted that Nona had been too fond of Frank: the clamour for emotional justice and the need to love battled it out.
Miss Amagee in Africa, of course, shows no sign of emotional stress: it is a stirring adventure tale about a brave American woman outfacing lions in Africa, written on the hoof, as it were, with wonderful descriptions of a landscape which neither writer had ever seen. I can only imagine that Lois was left to look after Jane and myself, and Jennifer too, while Edgar and Margaret worked. If so much was to get written in so short a time, someone had to look after the children.
And then it was time for Margaret to go home, though no one wanted her to go – except, I daresay, Lois. Frank was waiting impatiently for his wife and children to return. He had found a practice in the South Island, inland from Christchurch, at a township called Amberley, in the heart of the flat wheatlands of the Canterbury Plain. It was going to be all right, he assured her in his letter. He was starting a radio station. And he was standing for parliament as the socialist candidate.
Of Amberley, I remember the hot wind blowing off the mountains, day after day, and a bare flat landscape, and a lot of sheep there was no escaping. I remember being dressed up as Little Miss Bo Peep for a fancy-dress party. I remember the creaking of the windmill which pumped our water, and the hot dust beneath the macrocarpa hedge which you had to wriggle through to get to play with the children next door. I remember the milk being warm when it came from the cow, and wishing it wasn’t. I remember the day I learned to read – I was three – and the way the letters suddenly made sense, and the excitement of that. I remember thinking now I could catch up with Jane but of course I never could. I remember my father coming home with a big new gold car, and how proud he was of it. It was a Voisin, imported from France; it had a starting handle and running boards on which we were allowed to stand. It was a magic car: I was sure it could fly, one day it would take off into the sky. But my father had a trick which I hated: he would stop the car in the middle of a dry river bed and tell us how we had to beware them, how people would camp the night in them, and be swept away in the darkness as the flood swept down from the melting mountain snows.
I was frightened, he knew I was frightened, why did he want to make it worse? Even today I still get panicky when driven through even the shallowest ford in the soft English countryside. ‘Can’t we go the long way round?’ I plead, but we never can. My experience of men in cars has always been that if you don’t want them to do something, they will. It is when they are behind a wheel that they most fear the control of women and children.
I remember my mother turning cartwheels on the lawn, white legs flashing, short skirt whirling, and being overwhelmed with admiration. None of my friends’ mothers turned cartwheels. They wore pinnies and made apple pies. We were different. I became aware that we were homies. We came from a far-off place called England, and didn’t really belong here. This made you both better and worse, before you even began. Sometimes people didn’t even understand what you said. Then you felt stupid. You wanted to speak like your friends, but your mother wanted you to speak as she did and was quite cross when you didn’t. You wanted to say ‘yiss’ but she wanted you to say ‘yes’. So you learned to speak two different languages, one for home, and the other for your friends. The picture books came from England, though, and showed children and their parents who were more like you than the other families around. You could read the stories to your friends and they liked that. People were like the pages of books. There were more and more of them, a page behind every page, and everyone with something new to say, and you never wanted it to stop.
In retrospect it is clear that my father took to life in the outback with enthusiasm, my mother decidedly less so. She had escaped the emotional stress of her family circumstances but at some cost, though at least there weren’t any earthquakes down here in the South. The earth stayed steady beneath her feet and my father and she did indeed have a radio station to play with, or at least several hours’ a week broadcasting time. My mother wrote radio plays, and even in these benighted parts found people enough to perform them, and an appreciative audience, and made friends: my father lectured on socialism and lost quite a few. New Zealand was an advanced country in social terms – first in the world with votes for women, first with an embryo national health service – and always, like my father, hungry for improvement, but actual socialism was viewed askance, particularly in rural areas.
My father was tireless and energetic: he wrote a detective serial for the local newspaper which went on for more than a hundred episodes. He wanted to stop but he couldn’t because he didn’t know who had done the murder. He was like a hotel guest who wants to leave but can’t because he has no money to pay the bill. The longer he stays the worse things get. In the end my father offered a five-pound prize for anyone who could solve the puzzle, and someone turned up who did. There is always a reader out there who knows better than the writer, and just as well.
In my father’s footsteps, I wrote a serial for a woman’s magazine in the Eighties: The Hearts and Lives of Men. It was meant to go on for twelve episodes but ran for forty-nine before the editor called enough, other writers wanted their space on the page back. I was happy to finish: I had already had to divorce and remarry my hero and heroine once so that the eventual ending would stay feasible. To do it again would be absurd. The serial was about a lost child, little Nell, who must in the end be reunited with her parents and bring them to their senses.
This endeavour went on for nearly a year. A courier would call at the door at one o’clock every Thursday to collect the latest instalment, which I had most likely written on the train that morning. In those days I lived in Somerset but had an office in London. I marvelled at how trusting the editor was: had there been a train strike, had I been ill, he would not have been able to collect his instalment. I think he had a vague idea that the story was already written and all I was doing was cutting it up into bits and handing it to him section