Pounamu Pounamu (Anniversary Ed) by Ihimaera Witi

Author:Ihimaera, Witi [Ihimaera, Witi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742532554
Publisher: Penguin New Zealand
Published: 2012-02-17T05:00:00+00:00

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FENCE

By the time I came to the end of my year of writing, 1970, I had amassed quite a few Maori and (this might come as a surprise) Pakeha short stories. I put them into a collection – which I titled Exercises for the Left Hand because I’m a cack-hander – and schlepped them along to a number of publishers, without success. One of those publishers asked me, ‘Who will read your book?’ I said that Maori would. He answered, ‘Maori don’t read books.’ I think I had earlier suspected that this perception of me personally and my work commercially might be a problem, so that’s probably why the book was both Maori and Pakeha stories combined: have an Ace up your sleeve, just in case you have to play it and prove that actually you are a good writer, Maori or not.

Noel Hilliard came to my rescue. Jane and I were preparing to go overseas on a working holiday to the UK and Europe when Noel sent the stories to David Heap, then managing director of Heinemann Educational Publishers. Just before we left, in March 1971, David told me they would be interested in publishing a collection (I had told him I was also writing a novel, Tangi, and that interested him too), but he felt that I should concentrate on Maori stories. If I could assemble such a collection, particularly longer stories to go with the shorter ones, Heinemann would look at it; they would market it mainly to schools.

Well, at least I had half of a book, eh.

‘The Other Side of the Fence’ was one of the longer stories I wrote at David’s suggestion. From my recollection, it was the first I wrote while Jane and I were living in our one-room bedsit just off Earls Court at 67 Harcourt Terrace, South Kensington. Jane would go off to work as a teacher at Hounslow East and, while I was able to score some jobs as an office temp, most of the time I sat at home writing more Maori stories … and that novel. It was difficult to live in one reality and write in another. In this case, I was recalling the relationship between our family and the Waughs, a migrant English family who came to live next door at Haig Street. The relationship was quite tense to begin with, as two cultures with a fence between tried to come to grips with each other, and that was the symbolism that appealed to me: the story was about 1950s Maori and Pakeha relationships in a microcosm. I don’t believe I was technically sufficiently equipped to write this story at the time I did; this story and ‘The Whale’ are the only ones in the book where I write from within someone else’s head, and I didn’t have the hang of it then. I had a second go with the revised Pounamu Pounamu, the 2003 edition, and it works better there.

In the end, Gordon and Jean Waugh became second parents to my sisters and me.

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