MAORI CHILDREN COME TO LIFE IN REMARKABLE NOVEL

Te Ao Hou, March 1959, Page 57

MAORI CHILDREN COME TO LIFE IN REMARKABLE NOVEL REVIEW OF ‘SPINSTER’ BY SYLVIA ASHTON WARNER This book is about Maori children. There has not been such a book before, in which Maori children really come to life in the way they are. ‘What is it, what is it, Little One?’ starts the novel. And the answer comes ‘That's why somebodies they tread my sore leg for notheen. Somebodies. ‘Miss Voffa,’ inquires Twinnie, ‘how do you spell ‘boko’? ‘What are you writing?’ ‘My twin she dong me on the boko.’ * * I'll shoot that ghost,’ Matawhero assures us, ‘It jumps on my back.’ * * ‘What's the matter with her face?’ asks Mohi when teacher has had a great disappointment. ‘Her nose it's got long’, observes Seven. ‘Her hair it is curly like a circus,’ noted Bleeding Heart. ‘Tinga-aling.’ ‘Her eyes they's like a morepork.’ ‘Her mouf is too big.’ ‘She got fox teef.’ ‘Her ears they flap.’ ‘Course. She got ghost flesh. Miss Vontopop. The children make up the core of this wonderful book—Whareparita, Matawhero, Hinewaka, Seven, Waiwini all stand out as full-blooded characters with their love, their fears, their violence, and all the storms of their family background. There has not been such a novel before. No Maori has yet published a novel and no pakeha, until this book, has really understood the Maori child. One moment they are embracing, the next they are kicking each other ‘in the stomat for nutteen’. There is no sentimentality, no caricature, but the humour and understanding that comes with love. The whole book plays in a school and the main character is a school teacher, Miss Vorontosov. Surrounded by death, love and violence, she lives her quiet life, absorbed in her flowers, her children, her lover of many years ago—a spinster. Painting and music are her great comforts. Out of this remote world she steps every morning to face the children in the school ground (Miss Pop-off. Seven he's trying to kill us all with the axe for nutteen)—‘the jagged-edged world of rough reality’. And she loses herself in the personalities of these children; they sit on her knee; even the bully Seven is loved: ‘How I respect all this force in him and how I understand his violence.’ This unusual school teacher is a remarkable character of fiction: a naive and innocent spinster with a very shrewd eye: does she realise the intrigue between the teacher Paul and the beautiful schoolgirl Whareparita? Yes and no. And these inspectors she worships and fears so much: does she really take them as seriously as she makes out? Who can tell; the reader is certainly left with the impression that these inspectors live on pretence and make-believe; they may fool her with false flattery, hurt her deeply by their contempt of her unconventional teaching methods, but the joke