KEY POINTS:
Shonagh Koea has written a new book, called The Kindness of Strangers (Kitchen Memoirs), which I like very much. It is a sort of memoir through food, with quaint, friendly recipes for quite frugal things like Drip Stew and Marmalade Loaf.
So the idea, a quaint and friendly one, perhaps, was to go to see her and talk about her book, and about her, which should have been easy enough because of the book being a memoir.
It is a nice thing to talk to somebody when they have written a book you like and ask them questions about it. And it is interesting to see Koea at home on the North Shore, because she has a pretty little house full of nice old things to look at. She collects these things from various places, including the side of the road, which is where she found the curtains in her writing room and, just the other day, two wonderful chandeliers which she has re-strung.
She likes to show people around and to point out this and that. She likes to make a house a pleasant, calm place to be. "I'm a house-y person."
This is probably because she grew up in houses that were not pleasant or calm. There are many houses in her book, other people's houses she saw as a girl, with nice things and, later, her own houses.
"Yes, I like everywhere I live to be a nice place. It might not be a nice place by other people's standards, but it's a nice place by mine."
She is having a hole in her dining room wall repaired and says people would come around and have dinner or a cup of tea and they'd point out this hole in the wall. She would just say, "'Oh, really. Thank you'. But I think inwardly, 'I don't think I'll have you to dinner again'."
People seem to say extraordinary things to her. They say "I bought your book for Aunty Hilda for Christmas and she thought it needed more action". Or, "My father didn't like your book because he thought it should have a dog in it".
She thinks people say these sorts of awful things to everyone. They don't.
I think she just doesn't mind, or doesn't mind in the way other people might, because for one thing she stores them up, as writers do.
And also, she grew up with the people who were supposed to care for her saying dreadful things. This is according to me, not to her.
Her mother once told her that, "The trouble with you, apart from writing those terrible books, is that you've always used far too much soap". Her mother, still alive but very old and in a home in Australia, was a bit grubby. She was always, says Koea, "a shocking housekeeper".
Once when Koea went to visit her in Sydney and started cleaning, her mother said, "You always were a naughty little girl, using all the Ajax".
Another time her mother said "Shame you haven't got that lovely curly hair like Geraldine", who was a distant cousin. This is not in her memoir, but in a short story called Small in an anthology called The Cat's Whiskers edited by her great friend, Peter Wells. I remind her of these awful things her mother would say because in her memoir she writes that her mother was nice but hopeless, while I think she sounds ghastly.
"Geraldine!" says Koea, "she had terrible hair, like steel wool. She was the one who jumped under a train." Was it the hair? "No, no, no, no, they were all very disturbed."
That's one way of describing her family.
Her father, who casts a long, ogreish shadow over her early life, was surely mad. He was violent and mean with money and liked to flick small children on the nose and laugh when they ran away crying. He would go into the bathroom and wipe mud all over the towels and the walls. His idea of a really funny joke was to wait until Koea was in the bath, then he'd push a hose though the window and turn it on.
He used to tell her she was so ugly that when she went out on the streets people would laugh at her because of it.
She hopes he wasn't mad, because she wouldn't like to think it could be hereditary. She thinks now, although she hadn't thought of him for years until she wrote the memoir, that he was sadistic. He seems to have really hated her, and her mother, but she says it wasn't specific to them. "He was horrible to everybody. Lots of people were frightened of him. His violence and rudeness and his verbal abuse of people was across the board. Do ask me something more positive."
She doesn't want anyone to think she had an awful childhood. "No. I think for a writer it was very suitable. I wish it had been worse so I'd write better. When I look at my work, you know, I bust a gut writing novels and things, and when I look at them, they're like a little silk scarf, waving in the wind and I wish they were like a little dry bone, a very eloquent little ancient bone lying on the page."
Well, I like her little wafty scarves but there's no use trying to tell her this. After I arrive, and after about 10 minutes of us wafting about like silk scarves looking at things, she says, "What do you want to ask me?"
She asks in a way that suggests she is horrified at the thought of being asked anything, and incredulous that anyone might have turned up with such an aim in mind. Well, I loved her book, and found it interesting so I might ask her about that.
"I can't understand that really, Michele. Because to me I can't see that it's frightfully interesting." She wrote it, "oh, well, because Random House wanted me to".
What she really likes to talk about is cats: hers, mine, former cats we have both been servants to. I ask her about her lovely husband George, who was quite a bit older than her and proposed marriage on the grounds that she needed looking after.
He was the editor of the Daily News in New Plymouth and he died of a heart attack in 1987, after which her life was saved by the arrival of a white manx cat called Small. When I asked her about George she said, "Yes, he was nice, he was nice but I'll get you a picture of my cat Small ... Small was lovely but she loved only me". At one stage she was telling me about her tabby Maisky (named after Lady Molly's naughty monkey who was named after a Soviet ambassador in Anthony Powell's 12-novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time - whew) which she rescued from the SPCA.
"She got prettier here. And I think people might be a bit like that. If you got somebody a bit unprepossessing and petted them and dressed them up they might come on quite pretty, don't you think?"
What I think is that sounds like what happened to her after she married George, who was kind and bought her nice dresses and lovely books. "Possibly. Ha, ha, ha."
We had some more cat talk and I'm not going to put in any more of it because it was very interesting to us, but probably not to anyone else.
But I did make the mistake of telling her I'd once had a man around to read my cat's paw (it was for a silly story, if you must know) and she seized on this with alacrity and crowed, "and you call me dotty!"
I hadn't actually, or not yet. But I remind her that once she was swimming in the sea and a little girl said to her, "Are you a funny lady?"
"Yes, well, hasn't a little girl in the sea ever said that to you when you were bobbing about?" "No."
"Oh. Do you think people say funny things to me?" Well, yes I do. After George died people said very funny things to her and advised her to cut her hair and sell her furniture and some pinched her bum.
"Oh, yes, people were really strange then and I found it odd and I would look at people I'd known and think 'Oh. I don't think I like you'."
Is she a funny lady? She calls her car a dinghy, but why not? When the phone rings she sometimes goes and stares at it without answering, which seems perfectly reasonable to me. But why does she?
"I imagine it's like a person and it might jump at me, or like a frog. I don't know."
She easily, and possibly deliberately, distracts herself from my attempts at interviewing her.
She says at one point, "did Jennifer [the publicist] tell me to give you a cup of tea? Or was that someone else?" I have no possible way of knowing the answer to these questions.
She says, when we're talking about her book, "I think people would think this is a very odd sort of a story".
Well, you wrote it, I say.
"I know I did but, you see, I really had forgotten all about my father."
Despite having written about her father, she hates talking about him and she doesn't really like talking about herself much, either. She thinks she has led a dull life.
So we have some ginger crunch out of the baking tin and talk about that instead.
And I suppose some people might find this all a bit funny but I thought it was a very nice thing to do.
