In her latest novel, Fay Weldon has channelled her childhood experiences in New Zealand and some mischievous Maori ghosts. She spoke to Stephen Jewell.
Whether it is the desire to raise their children in an idyllic environment or a love of the great outdoors, there are many reasons New Zealanders based overseas eventually return to familiar shores. But according to Fay Weldon, it is the kehua - the mischievous Maori ghosts that lend their name to her latest novel - who surreptitiously draw us back.
"If you think about the conflict that most New Zealanders living abroad have, they all have this sense of somehow being herded home," she says.
"If you resist you feel like a dirty stop-out. It's almost your duty to go back. If you think about it - and I only started thinking about it much later on - we need the kehua, which is how I've ended up with them in my own garden, telling me that I should go home."
Having spent most of her childhood in New Zealand before shifting back to England on her 15th birthday, Weldon knows that better than most. Although she was born in Worcestershire in 1931, she was actually conceived in New Zealand.
"I should have New Zealand citizenship, as babies have rights so shouldn't fetuses have them as well?" she laughs. "My parents were both immigrants from England and my father was a doctor at Napier Hospital. My mother was pregnant with me during the Napier earthquake but the medical facilities weren't very good back then, so she came back to England to have me before going back to New Zealand when I was 6 weeks old."
Weldon lives in the scenic Dorset village of Shaftesbury, in a 19th century cottage that she shares with her third husband, Nick Fox.
Still sprightly and with an ever- present twinkle in her eye, you wouldn't believe she turned 79 last month. "When I left the first time, it never occurred to me that I would be away for so long," she says. "But I was a child, and people in those days would often never go back. It wasn't possible, because New Zealand was too far away. The whole thing was very traumatic."
Weldon published her first novel, The Fat Woman's Joke in 1967, but Kehua! marks the first time she has explored her New Zealand roots.
"It just seemed like the perfect time," she says, stressing the significance of the title's exclamation mark. "You should never forget it, because it's a note of alarm. It's not just a description like 'oh my God!' It's very important to me."
Weldon has incorporated much of her own past into free-spirited grandmother Beverley's back-story, a multigenerational saga that begins in the present day before harking back to the 1940s.
She also lived in Amberley in North Canterbury before moving to the Coromandel but unlike her fictional counterpart she wasn't orphaned after her father shot and killed her mother before killing himself.
"My parents divorced, which was unusual in those days," Weldon recalls. "The places in the book are the places that I knew and have remembered. All of that was very much there. You think about the macrocarpa hedges in New Zealand and you realise how much landscape affects us. I'm particularly aware of that in this house, where you look right out over Dorset.
"Certain landscapes can also be very different to other landscapes, which is something I'm very conscious of whenever I go back to New Zealand and Australia, which I do from time to time. The sky just seems right down there and I do like the Southern Cross. That's what makes me feel at home."
Weldon is unsure when she first became aware of the existence of kehua. "I have a Maori daughter-in-law and she has never mentioned them," she says. "I must have read about them somewhere and then they came to mind when I was thinking about the story of this New Zealand family who have come over here but have this impulse to run.
I was wondering what caused that and perhaps it was the spirits of the country, the kehua. I then became interested in this sense of family and belonging, which is very important and strong in Maori culture. At the beginning, this family have lost that feeling but they come to realise that there is a family that you belong to whether you like it or not, which is quite a compelling and comforting idea."
She compares the kehua to similar phenomena in other mythologies, such as the Scottish kelpies, the Greek Furies and the Hungry Ghosts of Chinese folklore. "In the novel, they're the grateful dead, the dybbuks," says Weldon, who suggests that they may be psychological manifestations of past traumas. "You can give them a name, call them spirits or ghosts, but they really are compulsions, which follow families through generations. All cultures have that. In England they tend to be domestic ghosts in old houses, this house being the house in the book."
Weldon plays a role in the narrative herself, contrasting her battles to finish the novel with the hilarious and adulterous exploits of struggling journalist Scarlet and her sister Cynara, who has embarked upon a passionate but disastrous lesbian affair.
"Once your picture has been on the back of a book and the reader knows enough about you, it seems a very artificial conceit not to be in your own book," she says. "To pretend to be anonymous is a bit false, so you might as well be in your own book. And if you do that, then you might as well put in some of the things that are going on in your own life, so the writing of the book became part of the story."
In one of the book's funniest moments, Weldon recalls how Scarlet's glamorous actor boyfriend, Jackson Wright, is poised to star as gruff butler Hudson in a big budget version of the popular 1970s period drama Upstairs Downstairs, until a drunken altercation with the director spoils his chances. Weldon herself wrote the very first episode of the classic television show in 1971 and was working on the script for a big-screen remake until it was cancelled in favour of a BBC spin-off series set several years after the original. This is scheduled to debut in Britain this year.
"The film nearly got made but then the rights reverted," she says. "The owners of the rights then decided to go with the telly, which made a lot of people angry."
Weldon is instead concentrating on a musical version of her best-known book, The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil, which was turned into a BBC television series in 1986 and Hollywood movie She-Devil in 1989, starring Meryl Streep.
"I'm writing the lyrics for it," she says. "I've done opera before and it's always nice to hear your words sung."
Although veteran British director Nicolas Roeg turned her 1980 seventh novel, Puffball, into a movie in 2007, no films based on Weldon's considerable oeuvre are currently in the works.
"My work is seen as difficult to adapt," she says. "I don't think it is but other people do. To me, they all seem to have a story with a plot and characters but maybe they're a bit too clever-clever."
Perhaps that will change with Kehua!, which Weldon believes would be a perfect project for Peter Jackson, as it is is reminiscent not only of Jackson's 1994 mainstream movie breakthrough Heavenly Creatures, but also his recent adaptation of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones.
Like Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker, Weldon attended Christchurch Girls High School, leaving around a decade before the arrival of the two teenage friends whose infamous murder of the latter's mother inspired Heavenly Creatures.
"[Jackson] didn't get the sinister nature of the place quite right," she says. "It was a very gloomy place when I was there, or so I felt, as my high school friends from New Zealand will probably get very cross with me if I suggest that. But there was a strange kind of enclosed, no-escape feeling, which you didn't get in other towns in New Zealand."
Like Heavenly Creatures, Weldon believes that Kehua! fits into the burgeoning New Zealand literary sub-genre of Kiwi gothic.
"It's an academic term that female academics are vigorously trying to promote," she says.
"My book should be an absolute gift to them, so I got my publicist to send them a copy. But The Listener will probably attack them and go 'don't be absurd'. It's an ongoing thing and I'm rather pleased to be a part of it."
* Fay Weldon's Kehua! (Corvus, $29.99) is out now.
