Weldon's tombstones, secrets and socks

By MARGIE THOMSON books editor

It's like Poltergeist, Fay Weldon told the 270 guests who attended yesterday's Literary Lunch event in her honour.

She said it in the sweetest way in what was a classic Weldon delivery, acid veiled with innocent wit. Coming back to New Zealand, where she spent her early childhood years, the past "rears up at her like tombstones out of the ground", she said. One minute she's walking along Coromandel beach, the next an old sailor is showing her his appendix scar, put there by her father more than half a century before.

The audience for the New Zealand Herald-Dymocks event at the Sheraton in Auckland was captivated, for Weldon is charming and her air of coy enjoyment highly contagious.

What she didn't directly mention was that the past had landed in front of her at her Auckland lunch setting in a most tangible way, placed there by her old classmate Colleen Williams from Christchurch Girls High, Form IV A: a browned school magazine from 1945 which contained a poem called Snow.

Faded blue-black ink tells us it was written by Fay Birkinshaw (as she was then) in December that year. "Feathery flakes fall like fluff to the ground/ From o'er the welkin there comes no sound," it reads, in part.

"She was always writing, even then," Williams remembered. Parental divorce and domestic conflict make up a significant proportion of Weldon's autobiography Auto Da Fay, which Weldon is in the country to promote. At the lunch, she spoke easily about her mother's dislike of the institution of marriage - she never married after divorcing Fay's father: "Too many socks", she surmises.

Weldon on the other hand, has been oft married, three times.

Auto Da Fay stops when Weldon is just 32. There's plenty of life to go, but as she says, "as you get nearer to yourself there are things you don't want to talk about ... friends you want to keep, events you would like to forget".