KEY POINTS:
Stella Duffy's new novel, The Room of Lost Things, long-listed for this year's Orange Prize, may be a paean to her native south London but her heart still belongs to her adoptive homeland, New Zealand.
The 45-year-old - who describes her roots as "London via Tokoroa" - first moved Downunder with her New Zealand father and English mother in 1968.
Like many young New Zealanders she embarked on her OE in her 20s, returning to her birthplace in 1986 with the intention of staying just a few years.
More than two decades later she finds herself still in London, which she attributes to her long-term relationship with writer Shelley Silas. "I have lived in London longer than I lived in New Zealand," she says. "I lived in New Zealand from when I was 4 and I left when I was 23.
But they are both home." Duffy's family history is surely worthy of a novel in itself. Her father, a wireless operator and air gunner in the RNZAF, first met her mother when he was stationed in London during World War II.
"He was billeted with my mum's parents," she recalls.
"They went out for a bit but he was shot down quite early on. He became a prisoner of war in Germany for almost four years, during which time Mum, who was in the British Army, met and married someone else. After the war, Dad married another woman. But both of their marriages ended quite painfully and my parents soon got back together, bringing five children from their previous marriages to this new marriage. It was rather like the Brady Bunch and then they had two more of us, including me -
I'm the youngest - between them as well." Duffy's 11 novels to date can be divided between mainstream fictions like The Room of Lost Things, and the five unconventional crime thrillers she has penned about lesbian private investigator Saz Martin.
However, none have so far been set in New Zealand, although the third Martin tale - 1997's Beneath the Blonde, which featured a touring rock star - visits Aotearoa's shores. "I have written short stories about New Zealand but to write a novel about New Zealand, I would have to be there," says Duffy.
"I do have a big New Zealand novel that I want to write. My Nana inherited the Martinborough Hotel in 1921, before it was finished. My Aunt Pat, not long before she died, said to me, 'See what they've done to your Nan's hotel!
' She didn't approve at all of the poshness of Martinborough now. So there is an interesting story there, based around being a post-colonial woman, Catholic and Irish second generation.
But I'd also have to find an angle that wasn't The Thorn Birds because that's been done to death." The Room of Lost Things couldn't be further removed from New Zealand.
It centres around Loughborough Junction, the Lambeth suburb nestled between Brixton and Camberwell that Duffy calls home, and concerns the heartfelt relationship that develops between 67-year-old dry-cleaner Robert Sutton and his young British Muslim protege Akeel, However, the story boasts several Kiwi references, including that most ubiquitous of exports: Anchor butter.
"That's not just because it's from New Zealand," says Duffy. "That's because my mother, the south Londoner, would only eat Anchor butter. There's a certain generation of white, working-class British for whom New Zealand is these things.
They are still pure and good and the people who emigrated did the right thing. I think a character like Robert would think like that. My mother would have been 20 years older than him but it's still a very similar generation."
Duffy also reflects on the lives of various members of the neighbourhood, whose paths cross with the drycleaner's, including Australian nanny Helen, whose plans to explore Europe are postponed indefinitely after she embarks upon an ill-advised affair with the father of her young charge.
"I couldn't make the nanny a New Zealander because people would say it was me, so I made her Australian," says Duffy. "It really is that annoyingly basic although I feel that a lot of how she feels about being new to London is kind of how I first felt but I was also coming home when I came here.
"I don't think the fact that she is from Sydney makes it that different. I do think that coming from a city like Auckland is different from my experience, coming from Tokoroa.
I probably have more in common with other friends who came to London from a small village in Yorkshire than someone coming from New Zealand's largest city." While she has no plans to return on a permanent basis, Duffy would like to spend more time in New Zealand.
"I wouldn't say I would never go back," she declares. "I don't rule out the possibility of getting some marvellous money from somewhere and being able to live half there and half here. That would be fantastic."
- NZ HERALD
