Discovering a two-country heritage

Press, 3 July 1985, Page 23

Discovering a two-country heritage

Joan Rosier-Jones heard planes and trucks arriving with police reinforcements as she sat in her home near Whenuapai in 1978, during the Bastion Point Maori land protest. “I was angry about it, but not enough to go and join the protesters,” she said. The memories stuck, partly because of a friend’s experience, and they form a core for Ms Rosier-Jones first published novel, “Cast Two Shadows” (Hodder and Stoughton). Her friend, a Maori-Yu-goslav woman, is fictionalised as the novel’s protagonist. In real life, “she didn’t join in,” says Ms Rosier-Jones of the Bastion Point protest, “she just went up there on e day and felt this was her argument, her land.” In some places, the book follows her friend’s life closely, showing her coming to terms with her heritage. “Parts of the finished book she still can’t read because it is a bit painful,” said Ms Rosier-Jones. “She gave up a child when the child was four.” Ms Rosier-Jones had written an earlier novel, and the publisher’s representative said he liked it, “with reservations. He suggested I get on with the next one.” She was managing a travel agency in Takapuna when she worked on “Cast Two Shadows.” Now she is using a $2500 Literary Fund grant to help her continue writing without outside employment. She has been writing short stories, off and on, for 20 years. Ms Rosier-Jones, who was born in Christchurch in 1940, is already working on her next project, “a sort of family history.” People kept coming up to her and saying they had an interesting life she could write about. “I could see the rest of my days being someone else’s biographer,” she said. So she decided to write a fictional account loosely based on her own family. She had a Finnish granfather who was shipwrecked off the coast of New Zealand and could not get back home. He settled here “very reluctantly,” she said. He will figure in a story that will not lack for characters or material. A celebration When a Penguin Books editor opened his flat door in London one day during World War 11, he found Denis Glover standing there. As John Lehmann describes him in his introduction to a volume of New Zealand stories, Glover was “a sturdy, stocky sailer of sanguine complexion wearing a broad grin, looking rather like Mr Punch in naval uniform.” Lehmann developed an instant liking for the printer and publisher of the Caxton Press, one of the contributors to his “Penguin New Writing” series. Penguin New Zealand is celebrating the parent company’s fiftieth year partly by bringing together “New Writing” stories, prose pieces and poems that were written either by New Zealands, or by people using the country in their stories. Stories in the “Celebration” volume include experiences of New Zealanders in Crete and Italy. Two pieces by Glover are about the Royal Navy, which he served as both a seaman and officer. They are “Convoy Conversation” and “It Was D-Day.” Glover commanded a landing craft during the invasion. Five of the “Celebration” pieces are short stories by Frank Sargeson, including “The Making of a New Zealander,” and the 64-page “That Summer.” All pieces

BOOKS

in the book are published in the order they appeared in “Penguin New Writing,” and the volume begins with Sargeson’s “A Great Day.” When the “New Writing” periodicals were starting in the mid-1980s, a friend of Lehmann lent him a booklet of short sketches and stories by Sargeson, and the editor’s correspondence with the New Zealand writer lasted many years. “Celebration” contains poems by Charles Brasch and Allen Curnow. Story master A paperback volume of Sylvia Townsend Warner stories ranging over 40 years has been issued by The Women’s Press. “One Thing Leads to Another” is the second first-time collection of stories by the late Miss Warner. They appeared in both American and British magazines. Miss Warner was once described by an English critic as a latter-day Jane Austen. Her story output may not have matched that of countryman V. S. Pritchett, but her story quality matched his work. The writer had no formal education. After World War I, she spent 10 years as one of four editors of the 10volume “Tudor Church Music” project. Real terrain A corner dairy in the Lower Hutt street where he grew up was the model for the centrepiece shop in Lloyd Jones’s first novel, “Gilmore’s Dairy” (Hodder and Stoughton). Jones, the 30-year-old editor of the new “Wellington City Magazine,” has written short stories for “Landfall,” the “Listener,” “Metro” and other publications. He had tried to write a novel while managing an apartment block in San Francisco a few years ago. “The plot and settings weren’t terribly good,” he said of the earlier manuscript, but he learned his craft by giving it a try. Once he had the character of Gilmore, the extravagant shopkeeper, he knew he had someone he could build a solid story round. The “Gilmore’s Dairy” cover drawing looks as if the shop could be set down in the middle of Taranaki. Jones said the dairy is meant to be in a more suburban setting about 240 km from Wellington. Incidents in the story are strongly drawn from his own childhood: “I think you have to be anchored to some real terrain to make the story credible,” he said. Some of the story has the flavour of New Zealand’s Ronald Hugh Morrieson. Jones said one of the manuscript’s readers had mentioned elements of Morrieson in the book. That made him angry, since he had never read a word of Morrieson. His influences had been more along the line of San Francisco’s Charles Bukowski and other American writers, he said. Jones, a former sports reporter for the “Evening Post” in Wellington, is working on a new novel, this time specifically about Lower Hutt, including the fact that the city lacks statues, and who should decide who would qualify if they ever started building them. STAN DARLING