LITMIR.BIZ

       Fay Franklin

      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

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