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Te Ao Hou, March 1959, Page 58

That just about sums up Miss Vorontosov's picture of her own race. She is not content with this idea of hers develop through all its stages: her own civilization, she sees in the Maori children a life force of which she wants to be part. She says: ‘…. I am as clay in the hands of this force, this something that told my delphiniums when to bud; this will that is frighteningly present in my infant room, deeply at large beneath the lid of orthodoxy and discipline …’ What does she give in return? A wild sort of motherly love; how much she would have liked to be the mother of all these children. ‘By the time the six lovely simple weeks of the summer holiday have drawn to their conclusion, my arms have become itchy on the inside to hold children. From the wrists on the inner side along the skin right up to the shoulders and across the breast I know a physical discomfort. If ever flesh spoke mine does; for the communion of hands, the arms stretching round my waist, and black heads bumping my breasts.’ But she has, in addition, a special gift of her own to offer them: the gift of reading. An astonishingly large part of this novel is simply about Miss Vorontosov teaching the children to read, and that is not a dull part: It is the most exciting adventure in the book. Teaching becomes, in her hands what it was in the beginning of the world, when the old men showed the young the sacred mysteries of the tribe; it becomes revelation. This is how she teaches: ‘What is Rangi's background?’ I ask the Head. ‘His father is a pugilist who runs a gambling den at the pub.’ ‘What are you frightened of, Rangi? I ask as he sits in a knot of others. (No artificial discipline in this class, only companionship) ‘P'lice’ ‘Why?’ ‘P'lice they takes me to goal and cuts me up with a butcher-knife.’ I print these words on separate cards and give them to him. And Rangi, who lives on love and kisses and thrashings and fights and fear of the police and who took four months to learn ‘come’, ‘look’, ‘and’ takes four minutes to learn: butcher-knife Daddy gaol Mummy police Rangi sing haka cry fight kiss So I make a reading card for him: out of these words, which he reads at first sight, his first reading, and his face lights up with understanding.’ She calls this the ‘key vocabulary’, and we see how she gets the idea, how she explains it to the Senior Inspector, to all the curious prominent visitors, and so forth; how she makes a vividly

illustrated reader out of the children's own stories and vocabulary; how the children themselves are allowed to create everything they are learning. Her teaching scheme becomes her life—‘my precious work guards me everywhere’, she says, and ‘I have built my tower of song’. Being a woman, of course, she does not do the scheme only for the children. Her other inspiration is the Senior Inspector, the tall grey-trousered immaculate father-figure who turns out to be such an unworthy recipient of the scheme. When he disillusions her, she is very sad for a while; does not even go near the children—‘I have to wait until my grand rules of loving flow back into me once more’. Finally she leaves the school, back to her old love of many years ago. And she in turn can be the child whose sore leg has been trodden ‘for nutteen’. What are we to make of this unusual book? It has been very well received in England; in New Zealand, it is undoubtedly one of the best novels so far written. It is explosive, passionate, exciting all the way. There is a grand informality, a total absence of nonsense. There is nothing ponderous, heavy or abstract. Only love and ghosts are taken seriously. The language is simple, precise, sharp and evocative. Unlike most New Zealand novels, it comments not only on private life, but also on work for a community. The Maori influence can take much of the credit for that. The idea of the ‘key vocabulary’ should be some challenge to educationists, even though the author's soft irony may sometimes tease their self-esteem. Her image of the teacher could certainly be an inspiration. (Still, what would happen indeed, as one of the Inspectors says, if all teachers suddenly turned ‘irreducible’). In addition this book is the best study I have seen of the mediator—the person who has moved away from his own civilization to find comfort in another culture. The author describes such a woman in all her isolation. Do I have any reservations about the book? Only this: that the field of vision of the novel is rather narrow. The main figure stands out clearly, but where is her background? European society becomes a caricature, shrewd and amusing but not fully acceptable. The beautiful descriptions of the Maori children, of Whareparita and her dead-born twins, of old Rauhuia who so loves his grandson,—they are all brief episodes and one feels that even this very sensitive pakeha could penetrate no deeper—the task of portraying Maori people as full major characters (in the way the Spinster herself is so excellently portrayed) must remain for a Maori author. Miss Ashton Warner is on dangerous ground standing between two cultures; no wonder that at the end of the novel Miss Vorontosov rejoins her own people. ERIK SCHWIMMER