Robert Louis Stevenson, at home in Samoa

Vailima, the name of a house as well as the village, and the home for five years of Robert Louis Stevenson and his family in Samoa.



The house is airy and elegant, with high ceilings and wide verandahs. Upstairs, one room leads into another and the sash windows, overlooking the lawn, are wide open to catch the breeze. It must have been a beautiful place to live (although his mother, who apparently dressed like Queen Victoria, never stopped complaining about the climate.)

Robert Louis Stevenson arrived in Samoa in 1889 and died there of a stroke in 1894, but that was long enough to endear him to the Samoans. They held him in high regard, partly because he was on their side in their struggle for independence. I wonder if their affection for him was also connected to the fact that they saw him surrounded by family - his mother, wife, stepchildren and others, all of whom he supported by his writing, despite his ill health. Family is so central to the Samoan way of life. They must have sensed that here was a man who held fast to the same values that were so dear to them.



Robert Louis Stevenson with his family and household on the verandah at Vailima, 11 May 1892.
In the back row are Joe Strong (husband of Belle, Robert's stepdaughter) with a parrot on his shoulder, Margaret Stevenson (Robert's mother), Lloyd Osbourne (Robert's stepson), Robert Louis Stevenson, Fanny Stevenson and Simi the butler.
In front of them sit Elena the laundress, Taloja the cook, Belle (Isobel, Robert's stepdaughter) and Austin Strong (Belle's son), Lafaele the cattleman and Tomasi the assistant cook.
At the front are Savea the plantation boy, Arrick the pantryman and another boy.[/caption]

It is over 100 years since RLS lived and died in Samoa, but the drawings and photographs on display make him seem much closer. You can stand on the lawn, looking at the steps leading up to the house, half close your eyes and imagine the family sitting there.



RLS and family at Vailima. Left to right: Mary Carter, maid to Stevenson's mother, Lloyd Osbourne, Stevenson's stepson, Margaret Balfour, Stevenson's mother, Isobel Strong, Steveson's stepdaughter, Robert Louis Stevenson, Austin Strong, the Strong's son, Stevenson's wife Fanny Stevenson, and Joseph Dwight Strong, Isobel's husband[/caption]

RLS was a man of letters, of many and varied accomplishments, impossible to pigeonhole or categorise. He wrote poetry (A child's garden of verses), classic adventure stories like Kidnapped and Treasure Island, novellas like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and travel stories like Travels with a donkey. He was often in poor health (constantly searching for a better climate because of his tuberculosis), but he worked so hard, wrote so many books, travelled so widely and supported such a big family so uncomplainingly. He was brave, resourceful, funny, enthusiastic and likeable. You can tell that because he once donated his birthday to a 12-year-old girl who was upset that her own birthday fell on Christmas Day. He wrote a letter transferring his birthday to her, saying that he  no longer had need of a birthday and that she would make a much better day of it.

When he died, the local Samoan men cut a path through the bush and carried his coffin to the summit of nearby Mt Vaea. We had been warned to set off early, but the track itself proved to be almost as much of a problem as the sticky heat. A cyclone or two had roared through recently, and tree trunks had fallen and blocked the path. The view from the top, over Apia, was impressive -



but by the time we had scrambled over or under the fallen tree trunks, we were so hot and exhausted that everyone had to lie down for ten minutes before we could raise the energy to look around.



The inscription on one side, in Samoan, uses the special name they had for him: Tusitala, teller of tales. According to the website of the RLS Museum, it says "O Le Oli'olisaga o Tusitala "( "the happy resting place of the Writer of Tales") and contains two verses in Samoan from the book of Ruth ("thy people shall be my people.")



The other side carries his famous poem, Requiem, which he had had written years before but requested to have on his grave:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea.
And the hunter home from the hill.

At one end is his inscription for his wife Fanny, who died in California in 1914. Her ashes were returned to Samoa so she could be buried beside her husband. "Teacher, tender comrade wife," it begins, "fellow-farer true through life."

Both inscriptions are strangely moving. It's true that RLS was here at Home, surrounded by the family he loved, in a land he had grown to love. But he was also such a very long way from Scotland, his other and first Home - almost as far as he could have been, right on the other side of the world.

 We had the site to ourselves for about twenty minutes before anyone else (hot, panting and red-faced) arrived. One of them climbed over the grave while his friend took a photo, and for a moment I felt affronted on RLS's behalf. But later, when we saw children in a village playing on the family graves beside their house, I wondered if it just reflected the Samoan attitude to death and burial, and I was glad I hadn't said anything at the time.





Mt Vaea, looming over Vailima. Both well worth the trip. Robert Louis Stevenson, friend of Samoa and a fine writer.

Once upon a time...

"Once upon a time..." - the start of every good fairy tale.

Last year to mark the 200th anniversary of Brothers Grimm’s book of fairy tales, the Goethe-Institut New Zealand ran a competition to write a Grimm fairytale for modern Aotearoa New Zealand. It's a lot harder than you might think to get the right mix of magic, mystery and a touch of nastiness.

Over 300 entries were submitted and they're now being published on the Once upon a time blog where you can vote for your favourites.

And if you want to have a look at mine (The four brothers and the ungrateful princess)... it's just gone up.

Treasures in the letterbox

There was a lovely story in Saturday's paper about a woman who lived in Japan for a while and was given a letter by a Japanese friend when she left - the sort of letter that you would want to treasure forever.

It made me think of all the letters I used to write, and so seldom do nowadays. When we were travelling, there was no email or Internet of course - let alone cellphones or GPS - so we wrote letters, or postcards (and often used to get lost), and most of the time nobody knew where we were until a week or so later when the letter arrived.

And years before that, when I was young, we had penpals - what a quaint idea that seems now! I was probably quite an annoying penpal because I would reply much quicker than the other person did, so they would always be owing me a letter.

I do still have one faithful corespondent, who writes from the other side of the world, usually on the same sort of blue envelopes and paper (whereas mine in return are scribbled on scraps, because I no longer buy writing paper) and it's always a treat to find a real letter in the letterbox.

We talk a lot about how the publishing world is changing, less (unless you're a biographer) about how letters are vanishing from our lives. One of the things I love about them is that they are such a straightforward and uncomplicated way of writing. You're not worrying about how much or whether you'll get paid. Unless you're already rich and famous, you don't have an eye on possible publication. Your attention is on the person you're writing to, or perhaps on the scene in front of you, and you're writing out of (often) affection, or maybe another emotion like awe or wonder at some new sight you're encountering for the first time.



Sigh. No use fighting the tide, though. Letters, posties, even letterboxes probably won't be around for much longer.

Katherine Mansfield and the Wellington storm

The storm that just swept through Wellington brought down power lines and trees - a lovely one just opposite our house, ripped off roofs, scoured out railway lines, sent waves crashing across roads, demolished sea walls and generally caused a heap of damage. A week before, we'd been watching the film on the sinking of the Wahine at the Museum of Wellington City and Sea. Thankfully there was no such tragedy this time, although one of the ferries spent what must have been an uncomfortable day out in the harbour, monitored by a small watchful tugboat, until it could be safely moored again.

Sadly, it seems that one of the houses that has suffered the greatest damage is a small seaside cottage in Day's Bay, once owned by the Beauchamp family, where Katherine Mansfield (then Kathleen Beauchamp) used to spend holidays as a child.

A few years ago, I went on a Day's Bay literary walk, led by Don Long, who took us round to see a number of houses in the area owned by past or present writers. One of them was this wee cottage, and the owners kindly let us have a look inside. You can read more about the house on the New Zealand Historic Places Trust website.

Today's paper reports that it has been so badly pummelled by the waves, it may be a write-off.

Don commented presciently that "the waves still sometimes break against – virtually over – the house on Downes’ Point during storms." He explained that Sir Harold Beauchamp bought the land in 1906, and it was Kathleen’s "bolt-hole" from then until she left for London in July 1908, aged 19. Memories of it stayed with her forever and infused her writing of one of her most famous stories, "At the Bay". You can read it online here, thanks to the Katherine Mansfield Society.

On 4 March 1908, Kathleen wrote, “The sea has never seemed so high – so fierce.  It dashes against the rocks with a sound like thunder.”

 

 

The wonderful Kate Atkinson

Bliss = being snug and warm inside (hoping the power doesn't go off) while a wild southerly rages outside, up to pg 375 of Life after life and still another 154 pages to go. The sort of book you can't wait to finish but want to last forever. The only thing that could make it any better is for Jackson Brodie to make a cameo appearance, but I doubt that's going to happen.



Kate Atkinson appeared recently at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival - the best possible reason for going - and I didn't. But never mind, because her interview session is now online - over an hour of wonderfulness. Her conversation is as delicious as her prose. How many people can casually drop a word like "bifurcating" into the middle of a sentence?

She had firm opinions about the process of becoming a writer, and the place in that process of creative writing classes - "creative" delivered with imaginary speech marks, because she doesn't like the word. "Learning to be a writer is really, really hard and you have to do it on your own... it's a very isolated, individual thing." She said that what a writer needs is "an enormous cushion of knowing what good writing is", and that you have to "read everything that's ever been written - it doesn't matter if you forget it", because that's how you learn to find your "inner critic", which is the most important part of learning to write.

When the interviewer, Ramona Koval, opened the session up for questions, Kate Atkinson warned the audience that they probably wouldn't be able to match the best question she'd ever been asked. It came from a 13-year-old boy who wanted to know, "if you were stranded on a desert island, which member of your family would you eat first?" She had answered that with tact, ingenuity and humour, which was how she also responded to some other tricky questions in this session. Like predestination vs free will - "that's an extraordinarily large question to be asking me!"

Another good one was "how do you know when it's time to start a new book?" "When I start worrying about money." But the biggest cheer came when someone asked: "can we look forward to more Jackson Brodie?" (He even has his own page on her website.) "He's on a cruise," Kate said. "A long cruise." But she didn't say no.



Jason Isaacs as Jackson Brodie

Kate also said how much she liked the Canadian cover of the book, with a fox on the front.

Power still on, phew. Unlike 30,000 other homes around Wellington. Back to the book. Wonderful.

Writers in Schools: Ngaio School

Thanks to Ngaio School for a great visit last week with the NZ Book Council Writers in Schools scheme. We lived in Ngaio when we came back to New Zealand after several years away, and our first child was there so I have many fond memories of pushing her pushchair up and down its hilly roads.

Year Threes and Fours - I loved how you were such good listeners - and I loved all your questions! - especially these ones:

• Have you ever travelled anywhere that has inspired you to write? (I'm still pondering that one. I travelled a lot when I was younger and I think it has influenced my writing, but it's hard to say exactly how.)


• What text type do you prefer?


• Did you like writing when you were little?


• Do you know any other New Zealand authors?


• Closely followed by - Have you met Roald Dahl? (Sadly, no. But I have been to the Roald Dahl Museum in England, where you can see things like his artificial hip bone, re-used as a handle for a filing cabinet.)


• Have you ever written a book with anyone else? (Not since I was about eight or nine. But it would be an interesting experience!)

Thanks again, Ngaio School, and good luck with your reading and writing for the rest of the year.

Golden Yarns

Big thanks to all the organisers of the Golden Yarns children's writers and illustrators hui held over Queen's Birthday weekend in Christchurch. They included Te Tai Tamariki, The Children's Bookshop, Storylines, Kiwi Write4Kidz and the Wellington Children's Book Association who sponsored the illustration workshop on the Monday, and a number of wonderful volunteers as well. .

Lots of highlights. Here are a few:

• Getting to spend a weekend with about 50 other writers and illustrators, talking about writery (and illustrationish!) stuff.


• Meeting someone who was in my antenatal class when we were both having our first child!


• A great workshop on Revision Techniques with Joanna Orwin. We all ended the session wanting to go home and try them out straightaway, but it was only Saturday afternoon and there was still lots of good stuff to come.


• The panel discussion on graphic novels with Ant Sang and Dylan Horrocks. I didn't expect to find this so interesting, but I know very little about graphic novels, and Ant and Dylan are both passionate about them - so it was fascinating. And listening to anyone talk about how they tell a story, in whatever medium, makes you think about how you do it too.


• A heartbreaking talk and slide show by Mary Sangster about how the earthquakes affected The Children's Bookshop and the offices of Te Tai Tamariki upstairs


• A delicious breakfast at Cafe SisMo. If you're in Christchurch, they're worth a special trip to Riccarton (find them on Facebook!)

All though the weekend, people who had gone out to look at the central and eastern parts of the city came back sobered and reflective. Seeing it on TV just isn't the same as walking or driving around and seeing it for yourself - the razed sections, the boarded-up houses, the wonky bridges and potholed roads, the sadness of the ruined cathedral.

But there were good parts too. The shipping container mall - much fancier than I expected:



Poems painted on walls by Poetica, the Christchurch urban poetry project.



The Quake City exhibition, so well done (even with a screen of quake-related cartoons at the end in case you needed cheering up):



And the new cardboard cathedral, nearly finished:


Christchurch was a very special place to hold our writers and illustrators get-together. In fact I think every organisation should think about holding a meeting there if possible. I certainly have renewed respect and more understanding of what Christchurch people have been and are going through.