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In 1977, a 9-year-old girl and her mum spent 36 hours on a series of aeroplanes flying “back home” to New Zealand for the holiday of a lifetime: two months with extended family; halcyon days on sun-kissed beaches eating pipi straight from the sandbars; fishing on her uncle’s boat; and nights under clear skies picking out the Southern Cross.
When Catherine Taylor returned to England, home since she was two-and-a-half, it seemed “old and grey and tired”.
Nevertheless, within days, after an announcement from her parents, she vowed never to return to New Zealand; she thought if she did, “some yet unforeseen catastrophe” would result.
Now, Taylor is back - and wondering why she ever stayed away so long. Her first evening was spent at Wellington’s Mt Victoria Lookout, where she looked up and saw the Southern Cross for the first time in 47 years.
“That was the most emotional moment,” she says. “There’s a strange familiarity. My mother, Pearl, ran a bookshop in Sheffield and there were regular visits from New Zealand authors and friends; one of her best friends was Alan Preston, who started Unity Books, and he used to stay with us often.
“We had books from New Zealand; we grew up on New Zealand stories and books. The things she cooked and the foods she talked about were all from New Zealand.”
An award-winning writer, journalist and critic, Taylor is one of the headline authors at Word Christchurch and Verb Wellington where she’ll talk about her 2023 memoir The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time and take part in other events, including one tomorrow evening (Wednesday, 28 August) marking the centenary of Janet Frame’s birth. (To read the Listener review of The Stirrings, go here.)
Frame looms large in Taylor’s life. Encouraged by her mother, she grew up reading Frame’s books and has recently written about her life and work for the UK’s Guardian newspaper. She’s clearly a fan, describing Frame as “internationally renowned, strikingly original and unclassifiable, a dazzling interpreter of and innovator in language, a shrewd investigator of the postcolonial world and New Zealand’s projected image of itself”.
Like a number of other prominent writers – some of whom she quotes, including Eleanor Catton, Emily Perkins, Catherine Chidgey and Kirsty Gunn – Taylor would like it if Frame’s personal demons were put aside in favour of more focus on her literary legacy.
As she points out, Frame is the only New Zealand writer to have won individual national awards for poetry, short stories, novels and autobiography. “Eleanor Catton has said that any one of Janet Frame’s books could be published today, and it would be groundbreaking.”
The lives of women
A desire to write about her own maternal grandmother’s experiences is part of the reason Taylor has come back to New Zealand now, and there is a tangential connection to Frame.
Taylor’s grandmother, Amy Annie Weaver (neé Petherick), spent 20 years in the New Zealand psychiatric system, some of it at Avondale Lunatic Asylum [later Carrington Hospital] when Frame was there. Taylor thinks their respective stays overlapped by about a year and while their experiences were different, there is the common thread of being creative, of bucking against societal expectations of and for women, and ending up institutionalised.
“My grandmother was about 50,” Taylor explains. “She was bipolar, or she might have had postnatal depression, which was untreated and quite common for many women. She was admitted, subject to ECT [electroconvulsive therapy] and she never came out. She was institutionalised for 20 years, until she died in 1975.
“When I was a small child, we used to get letters from ‘Grandma-in-New-Zealand’, and she would send baby shawls and cardigans because she was an extraordinary knitter. I don’t ever recall seeing a photograph of her, but my mother would tell me about her, that she had beautiful handwriting and was a great reader. She was an absence in our lives, and I feel that absence.”
Taylor says Amy Annie’s life followed a trajectory that wasn’t unusual. Thrust into a violent marriage, mothering multiple children, and floundering because of it.
“In all communities, there’s hidden violence - it’s unspoken - but women and children are often the victims of it. So, I want to write about a history that’s hidden. I’m trying to work out how to do it.”
Part of her research and writing process might involve delving into the experience of feeling like an outsider, something Taylor relates to. Born in Waikato but raised in Yorkshire, she says there was always an undercurrent of feeling that she didn’t belong.
“I think, particularly growing up in Yorkshire, where there’s also a feeling that if you don’t come from generations back then you are an outsider. I’m not saying, by the way, that Sheffield isn’t welcoming - it’s officially a city of sanctuary for refugees – but I did feel like an outsider.
“My mother had a ‘funny’ accent; my father was from southern England. We moved there because he got a job there.”
In The Stirrings, an evocative and visceral coming-of-age memoir, Taylor dissects the fallout from her parents’ divorce, announced to her just days after she returned from that trip-of-a-lifetime to New Zealand.
The ensuing anxiety that something terrible would happen while she was “on the other side of the world” saw her decide not to return to her NZ home again. The divorce was the “beginning of the upending of life.”
But there were other upendings and insidious threats around her. Taylor’s childhood and adolescent years, in the 1970s and 80s, were when Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe was killing girls and women. Sutcliffe was eventually arrested behind Taylor’s high school.
“My relationship with my father was fractured from the point that my parents announced their separation, and I felt the loss of the protection of my father,” she explains. “I don’t conflate the two figures – of course, my dad wasn’t the Yorkshire Ripper – but it added to the shadows behind being a young girl at this time. It was a very scary time in which to grow up.”
Throughout The Stirrings, Taylor recounts childhood memories only to juxtapose them with sentences like this: “The day after this episode, on the morning of Sunday 26 June, the body of a sixteen-year-old shop assistant, Jayne McDonald, was found by children in a playground.”
She never delves into Sutcliffe’s life or psyche, preferring to focus on the oft-forgotten victims of his crimes. In a memoir full of poignant remembrances, one of the most affecting is when Taylor points out that Sutcliffe left 26 children motherless.
“I really didn’t want to give him any more airtime,” she says. “One of the shocking things about one of the reviews [of The Stirrings] in the UK is that they used a photograph of him to accompany the review. I was outraged by that, but I also suppose it’s a bit inevitable. Sometimes, people don’t have much nuance or imagination…”
It’s even more outrageous because the experience of being a young woman in the not-so-distant past is so integral to The Stirrings. Reading it feels like Else Kelvey, from Katherine Mansfield’s short story The Doll’s House, has been allowed into the parlour and encouraged to speak her truth, to leave nothing out.
It is history become herstory, intimate and raw, and clearly Taylor isn’t done writing from the real-life female past just yet. However she approaches her next book, Taylor says returning to New Zealand is pivotal.
“There are lots of reasons that I haven’t come back before now. It’s so far away from the UK - or the UK is so far away from it – and I had either no money but lots of time or more money but less time, but when my mother died [in late 2016], I knew that I would come back at some point. It was just compelling.
“So, I am here as someone who has strong ties to New Zealand, but also as a journalist with a possibly more objective lens.”
For Catherine Taylor’s WORD Christchurch appearances, go here https://wordchristchurch.co.nz/authors/catherine-taylor/ and for Verb Wellington, here https://www.verbwellington.nz/events/catherine-taylor
