It took a village my writing lifetime to raise. I left my childhood village of Matata for Auckland at age 12 and started confiding in a diary. That year I composed my first handwritten and hand-illustrated book between the hard black covers of an exercise book, a quotidian account of our Waiheke family holiday co-authored with my father. It remains my only writing collaboration, but my father took centre stage in steering me towards recording my Matata childhood and then becoming the fictional centre of the fictional Matata I called Kotuku.
He wanted his boys to read derring-do yarns as he had in the densely written Chums annuals and adventure writers like Robert Louis Stevenson, Captain Marryat, R M Ballantyne, J. Fenimore Cooper, Jules Verne and Conan Doyle. Mike and I devoured all of these, but Mike concentrated on science fiction while I loved the whimsy of Compton Mackenzie’s Whisky Galore, which I first read aged 12. I particularly loved the cartoon cover of the Penguin edition so much I cut it out and pasted it into my story-telling exercise book. I judge my own books by the covers.
Records of Matata life were spasmodic entries in the diaries I continued through my student and journalist years. I travelled as a feature writer for five years around Britain, enjoying village life in places like quaint Cornwall, antiquated Norfolk and the rugged Isle of Skye. Nowhere was more villagy than Doncaster, where I stayed with a retired miner confined to a wheelchair after the mineshaft collapsed on him, who kept budgies on his roof. He told us a lot about budgies but forgot to tell us of the invisible feud line in the local pub. When I inadvertently crossed the line to get a round of pints, the confrontation was pretty hairy until the miner used his wheelchair to separate the aggressors. That night I opened the upstairs window on to a group of carol singers singing Silent Night as the snow slowly and comprehensively submerged them in a Yuletide Christmas card scene.
Not only did I enjoy village life, but I also consumed accounts of folk growing up in villages, whether the shimmering nostalgia of Cider with Rosie or the brutal lives of Akenfield. I began to spend lunch breaks in the High Holborn library recording my childhood. Back in New Zealand I sent the story of my father surf casting and snoozing to The Listener and editor Ian Cross published it. I shaped the notes into chapters, and this became my first book The Kid from Matata.
My father said the book was fiction, which rang a different bell from his dismissive one. There was necessarily restraint about a non-fiction account of your childhood, but fiction was free to write whatever you liked. The first fictional effort of the imaginary Matata I named Kotuku after the white heron that arrived there each duck-shooting season. It was called Gold in the Creek and was prompted by the delirious and scarcely believable incident where my brother and our best mate and I dug up gold in the shape of a cascade of coins out of the golden sand bank. Choking with excitement, we raced down to the Duck In dairy and spent the lot, a ten shillings fortune, on pies, ice creams and lollies such as chocolate toffee straps, sherbets and liquorice allsorts.
I wanted a cover to match Whisky Galore and Listener cartoonist Trace Hodgson delivered a cracker. He also drew the other two covers of the geyser and the stamp. Now published in e-book and print as The Kotuku Chronicles, it has the subtitle Comic Kiwi Rural Crime to highlight in mostly farcical fashion the destructive ambitions of Big Brother and criminal intruders.
The reality was market forces Roger Douglas unleashed in the 1980s destroyed Matata’s post office and the petrol pumps and the railway station. It caused my father heartache and indignation that the institution he had served his public servant 40 years from mail boy to postmaster should be hocked off by his beloved champion of the public service the Labour Party. His indignation fuelled my story. My first Kotuku yarn has criminals swooping in on the cheap real estate, the villagers resisting.
In the second yarn the geyser excites corrupting plans to cash in on tourist potential by private and public enterprise, with locals counterattacking. This story was kick-started by the sadness of the kuia at Whakarewarewa as she explained that the Crown took the prime site for viewing the Pohutu Geyser and Maori were left with no more than a back door. I had grown up visiting Rotorua and in awe of Guide Rangi in the great tradition of Guide Sophia and Guide Maggie. The stamp story harks back to the 1949 origins of the postmaster and the drug dealer waging war over a valuable stamp and its threat to the integrity of the village, fuelled by my father’s business and love of stamps and his respect for Maori stories of Whakaari volcano. In all three stories there are waves of pillaging outsiders.
The village prevails. Long live the village. But in my mind only when I rewrote and re-edited the three stories that had been published in 1996, 2011 and 2014 into a much-trimmed The Kotuku Creek Chronicles. The first was identified by the Listener review as ‘A veritable Milkwoodful of characters’, but I always planned to edit comprehensively my first venture into fiction. With 20 per cent cut and all three stories much altered, it can be defined as a new publication. It comes in at 664 pages after my last-minute intervention to remove two pages and avoid the Devil’s number. This is the biggest book I have published, and it has consumed my lifetime professionally and personally.