It’s early afternoon on a gusty Wellington day and Jenny Pattrick has arrived back at her central Wellington home after spending the morning caring for her sister, who has early stage dementia. Caring has been a constant in Pattrick’s life. She has raised three children, was at her husband’s side when he died of motor neurone disease, and now, the 88-year-old is helping her sister, former actor Dinah Priestley, 84, and also spending time with her: sharing movie outings and meals together.
The weight of whānau responsibilities has not slowed Pattrick’s creative output. The author of the bestselling historical novel The Denniston Rose and its successful sequel, Heart of Coal, Pattrick is about to see her 11th novel, Sea Change, into the world. She expects it will be her final book, although she said the one before would be her last until she got another burst of inspiration.
She has lived in her home in the suburb of Northland for 50 years and there are memories everywhere – the framed photographs and the Bechstein grand piano her late husband, Laughton Pattrick, played. He was a renowned composer and singing teacher; the Pattricks enjoyed singing together – his tenor, her alto – until motor neurone stopped his hands playing and then took his voice.
“Music has been such a huge part of my life,” she reflects. “Laughton and I sang in a choir and when we stopped doing that, Dinah and her husband Tony and Laughton and I became a quartet. We’d sing everything, from early church music to sea shanties to rock’n’roll pieces Laughton would arrange for us. We had a repertoire of about 100 songs, and every Thursday night we’d get together at our house or theirs and sing.”
Afternoon sunlight streams into the living room, casting light on the paisley wallpaper. This is where Laughton spent his final weeks 41/2 years ago. She would sit in here with him, talking and reading.
Although many know Pattrick as an acclaimed novelist, she spent 30 years as a jeweller. She has had many incarnations: after training as a teacher, she taught herself jewellery making. She also created and taught the first craft design (jewellery) course at Whitireia Polytechnic, which in turn led to her role as the first practising artist chairing the board of the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council of New Zealand.
Writing came later. As a mature student, Pattrick studied creative writing at Victoria University of Wellington’s International Institute of Modern Letters, part of the same class as another celebrated author, Emily Perkins.
Two novels emerged after that course. But they weren’t worthy of being published, she scoffs. It was her third go, The Denniston Rose, written over six years, that whetted the appetite of Penguin Random House, which published it in 2003. “I think I was very lucky and I just hit the right moment because until then, nobody really published New Zealand historical fiction about overseas Europeans,” she says, adding modestly, “Maybe it was a good story, too.”
Acting up
Born Jenny Priestley in 1936, she was the eldest of three. Her parents were teachers and amateur actors in the Wellington repertory theatre scene. Theatre is strong in the Priestley genes. When she was 19 and training to be a teacher, she joined the left-wing Unity Theatre group, and ended up acting and directing. Dinah became an actor, as did her daughter (Pattrick’s niece) Tandi Wright.
Pattrick married fellow teacher Peter Barlow and taught for four years, stopping when she had the first of her three children. At home with her first, she began to teach herself jewellery making, selling her creations at Wellington’s Victoria Market from the late 60s. It was learn as you go. “Someone would come along and look at my stones and ask if I could turn it into a ring, so I’d go home and look it up in a book and think, ‘How could I do this?’ I also made a lot of what I’d call ‘lunchtime secretary rings’. Women would come in and pick up a cheap ring to wear over the weekend.”
Pattrick left Barlow in the early 70s, before benefit support existed for sole mothers. She ran her market stall for six years and then used her jewellery skills to support herself and the children.
A year after the marriage ended, she reunited with her teen sweetheart, Laughton, and they married in 1973. From a little bag near her chair she pulls out the wedding rings she made, chunky silver engraved pieces set with turquoise. “We wore them all the time – Laughton took his off to play the piano – but after a year or two we downsized to smaller ones and I made us two gold bands. I wear them both now.”
Her flourishing reputation as a jeweller – Te Papa holds some of her elaborate silver, shell and pāua pieces – led to a role on the Arts Council (the forerunner of Creative New Zealand) from 1981. She became deputy then chair of the council. In her time, the board was an outlier as it was largely female. Other institutions the council dealt with were more traditional, which led to bruising encounters.
“They were in these roles because they were powerful, rich men, and they often couldn’t deal with a woman telling them they’d got their budget wrong or something. They bullied me. I’m not that easy to bully but one day I had to go into the toilet and wipe my eyes.”
Everything is potential material to a novelist and years on, those men have provided Pattrick with a character in her new novel. Sea Change follows a group of residents in a small seaside town based on the Kāpiti Coast’s Paekākāriki, where Pattrick has a bach. After a tsunami devastates their town, it’s the tradespeople and those with useful skills who fare best. Meanwhile, a wealthy landowner pushes for a mandated evacuation, as he wants to use their land to build a resort, and he’s pitted against the hardworking, resourceful locals.
“I love working with my hands, and a lot of people in my family are the same,” says Pattrick. “During Covid, it was the people who were useful, who could bake bread and care for sick people, who were most valued.
“Laughton was sick through all that and two carers came every morning in full PPE gear. None of them are people who are financially valued in society. But I wanted to write about those people. There’s a tsunami and an earthquake and the town is completely isolated and there’s a mandated evacuation. They work out ways to survive.
“I love that. It’s the same problem-solving as making a piece of jewellery. What it’s saying is that these people might not be rich or famous, but you can find them in villages and towns all around New Zealand, and they’re ingenious and resourceful.”
A new publisher
The new book is the first of Pattrick’s to be published by Bateman Books. Pattrick quit Penguin Random House after 23 years when it dispensed with the services of its highly regarded fiction editor, Harriet Allan. Now freelance, Allan has remained Pattrick’s “first reader” and edited the first draft of Sea Change.
“In her writing,” Allan says via email, “Jenny homes in on a place and time crucial to shaping this country, and more importantly she depicts the people involved, those already here and those who have arrived from different parts of the world. While most authors find it a challenge to create more than a handful of convincing, three-dimensional characters, Jenny gives us an entire community.”
Typically, Pattrick’s novels are full of dialogue and are light on interior monologue, which the author puts down to being highly visual.
“When I’m writing about something happening, I see it as a scene and I’m describing it and I like to have lots of character. I like a dramatic landscape and I like a dramatic time in history, like the first settlers pouring into Wellington. That’s dramatic to me.”
Allan sees Pattrick’s broad interests – which include theatre, art, travelling, music and even engineering achievements – coalescing in the human stories in her work.
“With engineering, for instance, Jenny’s books will teach you about the cable-haulage system of getting coal off the top of Denniston, or about punting paddle steamers up the Whanganui River, or the building of the Makatote Viaduct on the Main Trunk Line.”
Life and death matters
Although the research for her novels typically takes her into the past, “after the last one, I thought, ‘There are so many problems today, one should write about those as well.’”
So the new book came into being. Once it was with the publisher, she added another first to her résumé: the debut of her first play. In February, Wellington’s Circa Theatre staged Hope. Like Sea Change, the play reveals the impact of political decisions.
Hope is the story of what happens when a government passes a bill that restricts treatment for the terminally ill in their last year of life. In the play notes, Pattrick references a Wellington Regional Hospital geriatrician who told her about the cost of keeping patients alive in their last year of life, questioning whether life should be saved at all costs.
Laughton would have been eligible for assisted dying, as his motor neurone disease was incurable, but Pattrick says he did not consider it. The play does not take a position on assisted dying, but one of its broader messages is Pattrick’s concern about mandates.
Even catching Covid was risky for someone her age and for her terminally ill husband before a vaccine became available. But she thought vaccine mandates went too far. In Sea Change, the residents also fight mandates.
Ironically, on the play’s opening night, she tested positive for Covid. Having been in close proximity to the cast, “I was so worried the actors had caught it off me and the play might have to be shut down.” (All was well and she recovered.)
It’s mid-afternoon and her 17-year-old grandson, Will, arrives back from university. One of six grandchildren, he’s living with her while he studies and Pattrick has set up a small kitchenette in another living room opposite his bedroom. She mentions in her typically practical way that it might be useful for a live-in carer if it ever comes to that.
She’s practical about health and longevity. Laughton accepted his impending death. A few years earlier, her younger brother, renowned earthquake engineer Nigel Priestley, had fought his cancer to the end, trying everything. The idea that we all face death differently interested her, and was part of the reason she wrote Hope.
“The worst thing for Laughton was when he couldn’t play the piano any more, but he could still sing until quite close to the end.
“In the end, the thing that went was his diaphragm. He couldn’t breathe. The breathing got quieter and quieter and quieter, and one day he was panicking, so I called an ambulance. Laughton said to me, ‘I want to go,’ and the two carers thought he meant he wanted to go to the toilet so they got the big hoist out. I said, ‘No it’s not that. He just wants to go, you know.’ And he did. It was a very easy, nice way to die.”
Pattrick says her own health is good, apart from “creaky knees”. She enjoys strolls around her neighbourhood – that’s when ideas for novels usually come to her, either on walks or in the garden or sitting on Laughton’s memorial seat in the small park on her street.
For now, she’s not actively chasing down any new ideas but preparing herself mentally and physically for the publicity for Sea Change.”I don’t know, maybe it would be better to stop now,” she says of continuing her fiction. Perhaps an autobiography could be next? She smiles at that but if it’s an idea to act on, she’s not saying.
“I quite enjoy just getting up slowly and doing a bit of gardening.’’
Sea Change, by Jenny Pattrick (Bateman Books, RRP $37.99), is on sale now.
