Graeme Lay maps the North Shore's rich literary heritage

By MARGIE THOMSON books editor

Seven ageing pine trees hide

Their heads in air but, planted on bare knees,

Supplicate wind and tide. See if you can

See it (if this is it), half earth, half heaven,

Half land, half water, what you call a view

strung out between the windows and the tree trunks;

Below sills a world moist with new making where

The mangrove race number their cheated floods.

Thus wrote Allen Curnow in 1962 in A Small Room with Large Windows, as he gazed out through craggy, untidy pines over tidal Shoal Bay to the growing city of Auckland, so close and yet so alien to the North Shore quiet.

Today, you can visit that place, standing on the loosely sealed road at the end of the cul-de-sac that is Herbert St, making out a corner of Curnow's former residence, shadowed by those tall, dark, immortal pines. You can't go in the gate or into the house - someone else lives here now - but you can summon up the feeling that here, one piece of the mosaic history of a burgeoning New Zealand literature was chipped into being.

This old house of Curnow's is one of many included in a new publication of the North Shore City Council, a booklet dedicated to the literary heritage of Takapuna, Devonport, Milford-Castor Bay and Calliope Rd-Stanley Bay.

It provides maps and commentary to guide you around four literary walks, including the houses (or sites of former houses) of around 40 of the 81 writers who have lived or still do live on the North Shore.

Some of those names are forgotten now, lost in the passing of years and out-of-print books, but many are well known - Frank Sargeson, Janet Frame, Bruce Mason, Robin Hyde, Sam Hunt - and others are still writing there: Michele Leggott, Kevin Ireland, Noel Virtue.

Researched and written by Graeme Lay (himself a novelist and Devonport resident), the project grew out of the appointment last year by the council of a heritage officer, Greg Bowron, and the enthusiasm of the Takapuna Public Librarian Helen Woodhouse.

Writers have been attracted to the North Shore since the 19th century, and in the middle years of the 20th in particular it became the cauldron in which an independent, New Zealand literary identity simmered.

While roaring roads and encroaching suburbia have vastly changed the character of the Shore, especially since 1959 when the Harbour Bridge made a shortcut between city and the quiet northern bays, writers' reasons for choosing to live there have not greatly changed.

It's more informal than the city, they say. It retains a village atmosphere; it's near the attractions of the city yet removed from it. They can enjoy, as Noel Virtue succinctly puts it, "isolation without being isolated".

No matter what travesties of development may occur on the Shore, there still remain the beaches and sea, the gorgeous harbour vistas that have always inspired writers - "there's some affinity between writers and the sea," Lay declares - and which indeed have been written into many poems and novels.

If, during the Takapuna walk, we stroll as suggested down Ewen St, one of the little streets running off Lake Rd to Takapuna Beach, we come to number 26, where once stood the childhood home of playwright, critic and fiction writer Bruce Mason. Gone now is Mason's humble house; in its place is one of the large residences that have become typical of the Takapuna shoreline. But no developer can take away the setting that inspired Mason's most famous play, The End of the Golden Weather.

"Ahead," Mason wrote in his introduction to that play, "across a narrow channel, central to vision and imagination, Rangitoto, enormous, majestic, spread-eagled on the skyline like a sleeping whale, declining from a central cone to the water in two huge flanges, meeting the sea in a haze of blues and green. It guards Te Parenga [his fictional name for Takapuna] from wind and tempest: it has a brooding splendour."

A nation needs its stories about itself, its myths and legends, and a project such as this one helps to gather in the history that lies scattered around, unremarked, and turns it into something cohesive and interesting - a heritage to be valued.

As we walk these routes we bring geographic reality to the people whose work we love, or whose lives we have been briefly acquainted with thanks to, for instance, Michael King's biographies of Frank Sargeson and Janet Frame.

Here on Rewiti St, Kevin Ireland lived as a boy, and was paperboy to Sargeson, eventually graduating to literary protege, moving into the famous army hut after Janet Frame went overseas.

Here at Prospect Tce lived Robin Hyde before she left for China, then England, where she took her own life.

Here on the same street lived another tragic figure, the poet and novelist Margaret Escott, who drowned herself in the sea at Milford in 1977.

Sam Hunt lived here on Craig Rd at Milford where the Hauraki Gulf's north-easterly storms seemed to him "like anarchy come to town".

He would row his dinghy from Milford across the Wairau Creek mouth to Castor Bay and there catch the bus to school. Hunt wrote in one of his first published poems:

I have no memories as others do

Of family outings: we had it all here,

White sand, ocean, Wairau Creek and bridge,

The orchard where we laid our bodies bare

Frank Sargeson, of course, is the best-known literary lynchpin and, while so many of the cheap baches in which writers used to live have been pulled down, fortunately his battered little house on Esmonde Rd still stands - thanks, Lay notes, to the foresight of his literary executor Christine Cole Catley and the then Takapuna Borough Council - and is an important literary museum and landmark which can be visited by borrowing a key from the Takapuna Library.

Esmonde Rd, of course, is no longer the quiet little cul-de-sac it was when Sargeson first came to live there.

He was appalled when his street became a major feeder-road to the motorway, and since his death his original quarter-acre section has been whittled away, the land where the army hut stood sold to raise money for a writer's fellowship.

Last year the North Shore City Council revealed plans to widen Esmonde Rd, which would necessitate the carving of metres off the front of the famous property. There has been considerable public outcry about this, including a petition, and the latest on that proposal, Lay says, is a suggestion to leave the literary property intact and instead to make the road swerve around it: "the Sargeson swerve".

"If you can make the traffic change direction in Takapuna for a literary house, you've won a wonderful victory," Lay says enthusiastically. "I really hope it will happen."

So: get out your sunhats and sunscreen and some comfortable shoes, grab a booklet from the North Shore City Council or the Takapuna Library, and start strolling.

Lay's accompanying narrative is delightfully anecdotal and - who knows - could well send you back to the poems and novels first penned in these once-quiet streets. If the going gets too hot, you can always cool off in the sea at one of those beaches that drew the writers there in the first place.