Wandered Restlessly, Wrote Furiously

Te Ao Hou, June 1964, Page 15

Wandered Restlessly, Wrote Furiously He left Ardmore, worked for a year in a bookshop in Auckland, then spent three years wandering around the North and South Islands—working in freezing works, timber-mills, woolstores, hydro works, on the wharfs, digging ditches and ‘a dozen and one’ other jobs for short spells. All this time he was writing furiously. He sees this period as being a kind of apprenticeship as a writer—‘My only regret now is that I didn't take more notice of what went on around me and the people I met. I didn't start out drifting entirely because I was after experience—although it has worked out that way. In much of my writing now I am drawing on those restless years—at the time it was a hand-to-mouth way of living, as far as I was concerned.’ At this time his writing ‘just poured out. It was pretty shapeless at first—I had practically no control over it. All I knew was I had to get it down on paper.’ Like so many other writers, he is concerned chiefly with the people and places which he knew as a child: with his own experience and with the experience of all the people, especially working people, whom he has known. ‘By “working people”, I mean manual workers. They have more vitality and warmth than white-collar workers, and this seems to rub off on to me and into my writing.’