Chapter Five: Write What you Know

From Letters to my Mother. Mrs Mooney looked at me and said “Write what you know”. I was 13 and this shaped my work for a lifetime. Her casual words hit me with a fierce logic.

I guess I started writing when I was around 6 or 7 years old. I wrote fairy stories with princesses, knights, and warriors with helmets and swords. I distinctly remember making a book and then asking my mum about binding. I sewed that first book together as though it were a skirt, badly, but it kind of worked. Later, we inspected books in the library in the front room for binding ideas, and I attempted to transcribe a story onto pages that would fold together later, but that was way too convoluted for my little brain, even for my big brain to be fair. I folded multiple pages together, sewed them down the middle, then bound them in card, THEN wrote in them, but this was never satisfactory either. I would write on sheets of paper and glue them into my homemade books, but the glue made the paper buckle, so I gave up on that too.

How did you make your books when you were little?

I have always made books. It was not only the simple act of taking words used by other people and rearranging them into a sequence of my own, but also the actual act of putting the words on paper in a certain way that was pleasing to the eye and creating a cohesive, solid piece of work I could hold in my hands. This was long before computers and laptops. Typewriters needed expensive ribbons, so we wrote with fountain pens on paper. For some reason, I did not like using a pencil.

For the longest time, I thought I would be a poet, and when I was very young I was content to write poems with vanishing words. My poems got so minimalist that only one or two words would be a whole poem, until I realized that they were meaningless to other people because the words those other people were reading were not the words I was holding in my head. They just did not make sense. And words were made to be read or heard. So I gave that up and jumped to short stories and essays.

For as long as I could remember, I was given a diary every year. A "Dear Diary" kind of diary, some pink some with locks on them, some long or small and fat. These diaries led to bigger diaries with lines one year and without lines the following eventually landing on large pads of heavy watercolor paper. No matter how often they gave me a diary I was always ripping blank pages out of my mothers sketch books to write words on. So they eventually brought me sketch books. In a similar way, Dad bought my mother a sewing machine every Christmas. He began by building the treadle into a sewing bench in the wash house, then moved on to an electric sewing machine, then a small portable sewing machine, then a mini sewing machine as a joke, and in the end, because Mum never sewed with these machines, she much preferred hand sewing, he gave up with supreme good grace and bought her two silver thimbles. In the same vein, they bought me diaries every year, then switched to art paper, Totally misunderstanding my love of large blank artists paper they thought I was an artist and brought me art books and paints and thankfully a new fountain pen each year. One year it was a roll of butcher paper.

One of my mother's friends was a published writer of children's stories and in the year that I was 13 I had the courage to show her a story I had written about two children surviving an eruption where their house was filled to the chimney with hot, stinking larvae, until the house fell apart but somehow they all got away. It was all very dramatic and of course I was the hero.

She sat me at her writing table and treated me like a proper reader. She helped me pitch my story to her, (I was 13 remember) then we had an interview and she critiqued my work, pronounced it good but lacking in fire. "Have you ever been in an eruption?" she asked. Mrs. Mooney lived along the waterfront and had known me since I was born, so she knew perfectly well that I had never been in an eruption. However, New Zealand is littered with volcanoes, so I might have been near one at some point.

"Well?" she said.

"No, Mrs. Mooney," I said. "I have never been in an eruption."

"Well," she said. "Write what you know."Then she winced. "What is wrong, Mrs. Mooney?" I asked.

"I tripped on the church steps, you know, that big green mat," she said. "Well, I tripped on it, and I may have broken my typing finger.”

I cannot tell you how impressed I was that this magnificent woman, with green eyes and a hefty heartiness that never faltered, who always wore one of those folding cross over aprons with the tiny flowers strapped over her vast shelf of a bosom. This woman who got paid to write and who had a dining room table covered in research papers and empty cups of tea and a big black immobile typewriter and who made the BEST fruit cake ever; typed with ONE finger. (Of course later I learned about irony).

But these four words “write what you know”, shaped my work for a lifetime. This hit me with a fierce logic and profoundly influenced my writing. I always bring myself back to this.

That morning I thought for a long time about what I knew. I was 12 - what could I know? I knew nothing, and on the other hand, as I began to watch, I realized I knew everything. No one saw me. I was skinny and quiet. I never said boo to a goose. I always hid in the kitchen cooking when visitors came. I would escape with a mug of tea and marmite on toast to a window seat behind a curtain and read. I would sit in patches of sun behind the couch in the front room library and write. I was invisible. So, grown ups talked in front of me. They seldom noticed I was there except to send me for a cup of tea. I would follow clues and dig about for facts. I became a detective. A spy. But hopefully not in a creepy way.

Like I said: they gave me a diary at Christmas every year until they thought I was an artist then they gave me drawing books and fountain pens and books. Then they gave me a camera. I was tiny, skinny and deeply quiet, wisping about the long, dark corridors of the house. No one even knew whether I was in the house or on the beach or at the workshop with my camera and my artists pad and pens. I don’t think they cared too much as long as my family jobs were finished on time and I was home in time to make the tea (we called dinner Tea in those days).

The camera and paper and a pen defined me for the next sixty years (yes I am that old).

I began documenting the family and the beach and everyone around it. Watching and absorbing their words. Noting where their eyes landed as they spoke. How their hands fell. Which side which lady folded her legs to. How short her skirts had become or how long her eyelashes were.

I took photos of them and never used a flash. I learnt that the flash startled people and bleached out important details. Dad taught me how to process my own pictures in his darkroom. I laid these photos out to dry on my bed and studied them.

I practiced interviewing people - everyone. I must have been so annoying but everyone was always kind. I interviewed an old priest when I was 12 who was a chaplain in the war and was on that awful 100 mile death march of prisoners of war in the Philippines. Right at the end of the war I think. He walked it all as his men died along the way. The sounds of the march never left him. He saw thousands of men die. Was it the Philippines? - I need to find that diary book and check that. His name was Father Smith, he was a small bent man who was never without his black beret, he rode a bike very fast everywhere, and was renowned for having the shortest sermons ever.

Those pictures, those words, so many of them, I wrote what I saw and pasted pictures in beside my words and created a formidable collection of books on ordinary life in the ‘60’s and 70’s.

I wrote about the price of butter and the vegetable man and my mothers illnesses (she was always sick with something), my brothers friends, the tides, the seaweed, how to build a fishing boat and even designed and built a solar water heater from my diaries. I described how the curtains moved and our blue flowery wall paper, how my sister painted a line down the middle of our bedroom because I was so untidy it drove her mad. How she kept making me late for school. I wrote about my visits to Mrs Van and how Miss Jack down the road only had one leg and how Mrs. Northey, who lived at the end of the spit, was unable to have children, but she wished she could. Every year, her husband would ask the lady at the chemist to make her a gift box of perfume, talc, and "woman things" for Christmas, and wrap it up. He never knew what he gave her. This all happened in the year that I turned 13. People talked to kids about everything in those years. And they knew about my books.

By the time I turned 14 I was writing articles for the newspaper about happenings on our beach and stories of the old people and even took photos to accompany them.

I would show these to Mrs. Mooney, and for a period, I had a small desk in her writing room, as long as I did not make too much noise, only had one slice of fruit cake at a time and was home in time to make tea. She helped me get my articles published in the Daily Telegraph. Though I cannot remember ever being paid. My objective was to write for the National Geographic, to write about saving the trees and my personal mission to stop anyone fishing in my sea ever again, and Mrs. Mooney was all set to support me in this too, but then Mum got sick with the cancer, and I had to take over the little ones as well as the cooking. Mrs. Mooney helped as long as she could, but then she got sick with the cancer too.

I kept writing though. Only notes. And I always had my pad and camera in my bag.

Later that year, Mum was still sick (it was ten more years before they let her die) and the nuns took me back to the convent for a few days because I was so overworked that I was fainting at school, and I really needed to study for end-of-year exams. I was given a bed in the dormitory and a desk in the hall where we did homework. I wrote and wrote, describing the convent with pure delight at the quiet. I crammed for exams and kept on writing, I might have been there two or three days, I even interview the old nun who ran the enormous kitchen with its coal-ranges, until my little sister asked for me at the convent doors, telling me to come home because Mum wanted me home and where was her red skirt that matched her red socks. "The convent is right at the top of the hill," I said. "How did she get up here?" "I brought your bike," she said. "It's at the bottom of the steep bit. You can double me home."

When did you begin writing?

Letters to My Mother, The Collection, is a series of stories from my childhood growing up on a beach on New Zealand many many years ago. They are interesting to untangle because they are written by an adult (me) using the memories of a child (me). Which makes them as interesting to write, for me as I hope they are to read, for you.

I would also like to gently offer that I am presenting these stories to you from my solitary desk in the midwest and I would be ever so grateful if you were able to throw a few dollars into my hat via the subscription. They take a long time to write.

$5 a month will help keep me off the streets and in tea and cranberry shortbreads. Check ABOUT to read more about that.

I will post at the beginning of every week. I don’t think I will ever run out of stories.

If you want to catch up with what happened on the farm TODAY. Go here to thekitchensgarden.com. I write at the kitchens garden every day all about my sustainable life on a homestead in the midwest. (and sometimes travel)!! c