Judy’s fantasy

Press, 18 March 1989, Page 26

Judy’s fantasy

Worlds of cuckoos, gribbles, gorillas

By

MAVIS AIREY

“Once upon a time ...” the story begins, but it is soon clear that this is no traditional fairy tale. Judy Corbalis’ princess is six feet tall, likes to get her own way, challenges the palace guards to wrestling matches, and insists on driving one of her colour co-ordinated forklift trucks in the royal processions. Her father tries to persuade her to change her ways in order to attract a suitable princely husband, but to no avail. In the end, she chooses a, husband as unconventional as herself, who declares his love thus: “When I saw her pulling faces and shouting insults and throwing princes to the ground, I knew she was the one person I could fall in love with.” Corbalis’ other heroines are equally strong minded — going off to fight the dragon when all the princes have failed, taming the monstrous gribble that is terrorising the country, nursing ambitions to be an astronaut. No doubt this was one of the reasons this book, “The Wrestling Princess and other Stories,” was selected as the British Feminist Book Fortnight’s children’s choice in 1986. Corbalis was delighted but denies she is a deliberately feminist writer.

"I am a feminist, but it’s a very difficult label. I’m not the ball-breaking kind. I just don’t think women should do all the horrible jobs.” “I think when I was a kid I wanted to do things like drive a steamroller and be like my cousins, but I was often restricted as a lot of girls were then.

“I think it’s easier for girls to do these things now if they want. Women do have better role models, though there’s still a long way to go. We still have not achieved parity.” She thinks it is still hard for boys who want to develop their intuitive side.

However, she denies she deliberately writes books with a message. “I just write for entertainment,” she insists. “I didn’t intend to write ‘Oskar and the Ice Pick’ to show boys can cry, it just came out that way.” Similarly, publishers saw “The Cuckoo Bird” as a message to children not to let strange people into their home. “Reading it back, I see now that it is, but I didn’t see it at the time.” Her stories have a life of their own, she finds, and may well go in a different direction from the one she expected.

She often starts with a character: Oskar, she knew right from the start, was to have a mother who was a famous mountain climber, and a grandmother who was a cross-channel swimming champion. She says what she most enjoys about writing for children is the freedom to create fantasy. She also enjoys sharing that fantasy with her audience, face to face. Taking advantage of her acting training — she was a mature student at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and has worked in television, fringe and community theatre — she supplements her writing income by visiting schools and reading her stories to children. “It’s great to meet the consumer,” she says, pointing out that children are often not the ones with the buying power, at least when it comes to books, but tend to read what is bought for them.

"I can pick the boredom factor at once,” she says. She calls it “the glaze factor.” Thanks to that factor, “Oskar and the Ice Pick” is 7000 words shorter than it was. She has come to be interviewed straight from a visit to Elmwood Normal School, looking rather like the Pied Piper, wearing yellow tights with red shoes and a multi-coloured smock.

She often dresses as one of her characters, complete with zany props. As her latest character, Mrs Fooby-Lartil, she wears a dress hung with strange and interestingly shaped objects she has found, and a hat with a sparkler. She demonstrates her patent banana peeler, an ingenious device based on an umbrella. She loves to invent such “useless machines with a named function,” especially if children can build them, too, in the classroom. “I’ve found from experience that kids don’t respond in the same way if I dress in black or brown as they do if I dress in colourful clothes or a costume,” she says. Her interest in reading aloud was aroused when she was a school teacher in Rotorua. After graduating with a B.A. in English literature and history from Victoria University in 1962, she married a lawyer and found herself teaching in places with a heavy court list. A lot of the children had problems, particularly those caught between two cultures. Many of the less able ones could not read, but they could listen. “I think listening is the single most important art children can learn, ever,” she says. “And I don’t mean passive listening, absorbing things from television.” In the days before there were books for slow learners which were not demeaning to them, she remembers reading Steinbeck’s “The Pearl” to one class of older children with learning difficulties. The book was on the scholarship list that year. The children knew this, and it was a great boost to them. She stopped teaching when she went to Britain on an 18-month working holiday. She fell in love with living in London, and has stayed there ever since, although sometimes the greyness gets to her and she toys with the idea of spending a few months of each year back in the New Zealand sun.

She lied about her age (she was then 33) to get into L.A.M.D.A., survived the breakup of her marriage (“I think my

husband didn’t agree I needed to go to drama school”) and embarked on a new career. But the acting came to a traumatic end when she damaged her vocal chords drinking a carton of orange juice that turned out to be neat cleaning fluid. She is still fighting to get compensation from the company.

Thanks to ultrasound treatment and voice exercises, she can now speak again, although there are still some days when she has to clear her throat often to lubricate the vocal chords. Doing the schools visits, she has to ration the amount of time she projects her voice or it disappears altogether. She turned to writing almost by chance. She thought of illustrating children’s books and wrote a story to accompany some sketches she sent to a friend, Helen Craig, who was an illustrator. Corbalis’ account of what followed is laconic. "Helen’s advice was that the pictures weren’t that good, but the story was nice. She did some drawings and sent it to her publisher. The publisher asked for more.”

She still looks surprised. “There weren’t any more, but who could resist such a request? The result was "The Wrestling Princess and other Stories.” After its selection by the Feminist Book Fornight, the publishers were after her again. “I thought I’d better do it now, before everyone forgets — it’s such a

fickle world,” she says, modestly. Last year, three more Corbalis books were published: “Oskar and the Ice Pick,” “The Cuckoo Bird” and "Porcellus the Flying Pig.” Corbalis has adapted “The Enchanted Toad” from “The Wrestling Princess” for Thames Television, and is working on another story for them called “Your Dad’s a Monkey,” which she will turn into a book later. It is about a conventional family, in which the father has a mid-life crisis and decides to do all the unusual things he has missed out on before. This includes living in a tree, much to his son’s chagrin. The title comes from the taunts the boy gets from his school-mates. Corbalis finds television work fascinating. “Television is visual, so that gags don’t work the same way as they do aurally. It was fun to watch the story become three dimensional.” The insights of other people were interesting, too — instead of just the author and illustrator, there was input from the script editor, the director, the casting director, the costume department, the actors. Making “The Enchanted Toad” also involved a live toad, complete with toad handler, who she couldn’t help noticing was just about as warty as the toad. Despite her success, Corbalis still feels she has a lot to learn. In September, she is going back to university, to do an M.A. in creative writing. The course, at Norwich University in East Anglia, was set up by Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson, and is open only to bona fide writers;

As well as producing 2000 to 3000 words a week, she will have to do proofs, write a paper on the novel and accept group editing. “I’ve had three publishers,, and they’re all fine, but none has the time to do the stringent editing I feel is needed to improve my career,” she says. “I’ve only been writing for five years, and I haven’t developed that part of the craft.”

She is looking forward to the stimulation of meeting other authors. “I’m gregarious by temperament, and writing is a solitary occupation. That’s why I have to get out into the schools, and the television studio, to throw ideas around with a group.”

Twenty-one years ago, we were the night shift boys — Terry, Arthur, David, Graham and Peter. We were flour packers extraordinaire at D. H. Browns. We were temporary, with a quota to meet, a quota that got higher and higher, but we had a genius on our side, young Terry. Looking very James Dean, he was a mechanical wizard. As soon as our shift began, Terry would wind up the gearing. We were a motley crew, but did we ever pack some flour — 32 31b bags a minute filled, sealed and stored. And after Terry had fiddled with the cogs, nearer 40 a minute for 12 hours. Arthur was the oldest, and life had made him cynical.

We didn’t listen when he predicted that by increasing production, we were not going to get permanent positions. We were, in fact, working ourselves out of a job.

But we did listen to Graham. He was the quietest, and it was his job to change over the bins that we emptied with such enthusiasm.