KEY POINTS:
What a funny book Lady Beverly Reeves has written about her time as the wife of the Governor-General. I wasn't sure, before meeting her, that this was entirely her intention but it certainly made me shriek with laughter in bits. In other bits it is - and I'm not being rude; it's done brilliantly - as dull as a very long, stuffy grand dinner. She has managed, in Playing The Part: My Life as Wife of the Governor-General or what she calls, "a wee, little memoir thing" to give a real sense of what it was like to live in the la-la land that is being vice-regal for five years and then to have to go back to the real world.
From the evening she and her husband, then Archbishop Paul Reeves, came home to find David Lange waiting in their lounge, being fed a soggy gingernut by their daughters, she has waited 23 years to write her book. And she is a little nervous about how it might be received by other former wives of GGs. A little; I don't think anything much makes her terribly nervous.
She is not at all imperious and says she never went grand because "I don't do grand at all well" but she is a former schoolteacher and she is a bit strict, in the way that people who know their own minds are. I am not to make her sound "too strident or I'll shoot you. Metaphorically". And she does, in advance and just in case, by lining me up in her sights with a metaphorical gun made out of her fingers. I think she has always known her own mind and has never been afraid to express it.
She certainly knew it enough to marry Paul Reeves even though when she took him home in 1954 to meet her parents they weren't, well, let her tell it.
"My parents did not find it easy to accept my relationship with this dark, handsome young man."
That is a delicate way of saying he was Maori. She puts it that way in the book and much less delicately (and in a very un-PC way) in person. But she says, "you'll get popped" if I dare put it in so of course I don't.
"You think back to 1954, no, you can't think back because you're not old enough, but the whole structure of society and how they thought about Maori was so different." But she obviously thought differently? "Well, he was a nice looking young man, with a bit of mystery." You thought he was gorgeous. "I thought he was gorgeous. There you are. There's your answer."
She is enormously good fun and I have no idea how she managed to restrain herself through those five-odd years where she had no real job, but a role which came with no allowance at all.
She was supposed to have to ask her husband for money, a state of ridiculous affairs that left her flabbergasted then and still does.
She put up with people talking to her husband and completely ignoring her. She used to get a bit miffed but she couldn't stomp her foot and say, 'excuse me. I am here, you know'.
"You had to be a laydee."
The rudest of all, according to my reading of it , was the Pope. "I might have been a fly on the wall," she writes. "Oh, gosh," she says when I exclaim about this. "Oh, I wondered if I should put that bit in. But he was so tired and thinking in a third language. Italian, Latin, Polish, whatever, fourth language maybe. Yes, well, I shouldn't have gone. Did I say that? I shouldn't really have gone to that meeting and I when I think back, why I went was because I really was nosy."
All that and after it was over: "He carries his status with him; mine disappeared."
Going back to teaching was not an option, "because, you know, Lady Reeves! Fancy. Kids could have been rude to me and that does very odd things when you've been kowtowed to for five years."
She is Beverly Reeves on the cover which I think is a real shame because by Beverly, Lady Reeves would have made a very grand author's name. "It is, after all, a title you get courtesy of what your husband's got so that's why I didn't really want Lady Reeves all over the book. I think the bulk of New Zealanders think twiddledeeda. I mean, who cares?"
I do, because what is the point of being a Lady if you can't have a bit of fun with it?
"Well, here's a bit of fun. When somebody meets me for the first time, an older person normally, and calls me Lady Reeves, I say, 'just call me Beverly' and you can see them relax." A bit of fun? Well, she was an archbishop's wife.
I thought the subtitle of the book should have been Revenge of the Wife of a Governor-General but she says, "No! I don't think so. There is no revenge at all.
"You don't believe me, do you?"
No, I don't. But I think it is very good natured revenge-taking. When I ask her whether she thinks it's a funny book she says: "Well, it is sort of funny." The bit she thinks is the funniest is the chapter where Paul Reeves decides they are both to take up tramping so that "Paul could have a relationship with the environment".
She doesn't recall him asking her. After they do the Greenstone Valley Walk she asks how the tramp had "enhanced his relationship with the environment" and his answer was that he had much enjoyed some puddings they'd had one night. "All he could say was: 'I love those spongy puds!' Ha, ha, ha. The sad man!"
She doesn't want me to think she had a miserable time being the wife of the GG, although she was certainly lonely and bored at times.
Some of it was fantastically boring and she shares this with her readers, vividly. "Oh, gosh. You're going to write that. I hope that didn't come out too much. Oh, dear."
It does come out rather a lot, I'm afraid, but so too do the mad times. God knows what the staff assigned to the vice-regal couple thought of their charges.
He threatened (as a joke) to dig up the front lawn of Government House for a hangi pit. I want to know whether, if he'd really wanted to, he could have done just that.
"I think," she says, sounding almost vice-regal for what will turn out to be the first of only two occasions during the interview, "that's a dotty question, excuse me. I just don't think he would ever, as a sensible man, have really done it."
Oh, well, excuse me. Who's she calling dotty?
This is the woman who moved into the Government Houses with a corgi called Barney with a bladder problem who had to be followed by a housemaid with a soda water bottle. She might write another book about "the almost royal corgi and his very long puddles".
There is a funny story about Barney who, when the Queen and the Duke came to stay, was shampooed and powdered and presented to the royal couple. The duke took one look at poor old Barney and muttered something like: "I thought I was spared corgis for a while."
"I don't think," she says, "I was meant to hear that. Oh dear. And, what's more, we had him years before Paul became GG. People looked at us if to say: 'Oh, you've got a corgi as well' as part of the accessories of the office."
After Barney had to be put down and another corgi was run over by a gardener, the Reeves got a third.
This was the corgi who was running down one of the halls after the Queen of Spain. So Lady Reeves called: "Sophie!" And the Queen turned round and Lady Reeves said: "I'm sorry, but that's the dog's name." She can't remember what Queen Sofia's response was. "I think my memory's blotted it out, it's too embarrassing!"
I think, actually, she has a high threshold for embarrassment. Why else would you include a photograph of yourself looking at your husband giving his speech from the throne on a state occasion with a face which, as she says, "looks as though I've just eaten a lemon".
She attempts to wriggle out of this by saying it was just an unfortunate and probably fleeting facial gesture and that there aren't many photos of the two of them available and she collapses in giggles and says, "no, I can't defend it and you're going to make a big thing out of this".
She makes an even bigger thing of it by mentioning it to "Himself" when he comes home.
"Do you know she thinks the funniest photograph is the one of the opening of Parliament and she asked me a stiff question on: what was my face telling?"
He looks at the picture and says: "What a boring old fart." That, I say, is what I thought she was thinking but she won't own to it. "No," she says, "I won't own to it."
No, and she didn't, with unseemly alacrity, try to move the caricature of her husband - "big skite" - entirely from our picture when the photographer asked if she could move it just slightly. The photographer says, "no, no, I want it in", and she says: "Really? Do you? It isn't his interview."
She invited me to her book launch at Government House though she says she might take it back after she reads this.
Then she does her second impersonation of a very grand vice-regal lady, "I have faith, you have your invitation. Of course, I might not recognise you."
I hope I'm still invited. She's an utter delight and hardly dotty at all.
