‘Not me.’ She looked out along the road. ‘It must be five miles.’

‘Three, if you must know. Dad and me measured it on the speedo in the car,’ I said.

‘George can’t walk,’ said Mum, brushing away that wisp again.

‘Yes I can,’ said George.

‘Well, I can’t, and that’s that,’ said Carey.

‘You damn well can,’ I said. Something in me told me that, just this once, it was the only way. It wasn’t a walk I was looking forward to. Not in the February heat along the up-hill, down-hill road. But it was the only way.

In spite of the dust as the bus had passed us at the gate and in spite of the speed of the vehicle as it rocked along, I could swear I had seen two, maybe three, faces pressed to the back window. And they had been laughing. Yes, we had to walk.

The book was finished at Pukerua Bay. I was principal of the school there for a couple of years before tackling my final teaching job at Ohakune.

‘Where do your ideas come from?’

The most frequently asked, the most annoying, the most perplexing and the most impossible question posed to any writer. Every time a coconut! It lands with a thud. Over and over again, a hundred, a thousand, many thousands of times in the past quarter -century.

I don’t know. So I invent answers—often to keep myself awake…

‘From the world around me. From the place I live, the people I know. The people I love—and don’t love! From every nook and cranny of my long life.’ And generally answered with a smile.

I guess Possum Perkins comes from the kids I have taught. It may come from the premise of opposites attracting. May even come, in tiny part, from the possums I’ve killed. The setting likely comes from an amalgam of places where I’ve lived.

My long-time friend, colleague and fellow writer Tessa Duder says that she always starts off with a character in mind—and she reckons I do, too. She may be right—she often is!

In 1984, I was awarded the Choysa Bursary for Children’s Writers, back then the only grant available to writers for the young. Most of our current crop of major writers for children and young adults have scored this award. In its day it was a major initial building block for many outstanding careers. The sum of money was not great. My grant was $7,000…and when added to my reasonable school principal’s salary in that particular tax year, well, most of it ended up in the government’s coffers. Probably more important than the actual sum was the boost it gave to a writer’s confidence, an indication that you were on the right track.

My money got doled out at a function in Wellington. Turnbull House, Bowen Street, just across from the Beehive, once a private hospital where my tonsils had been whipped out as a three-year-old. The then Minister for the Arts, Peter Tapsell, did the honours. My two boys, my father and my stepmother were with me. Two things happened when the time came for the presentation. Tapsell seemed convinced that it was my father, and not me, who was the rightful recipient, and Ivan was quite happy to go along with this travesty. However, a flunky got Peter back on the right track just in time, and then hissed in my ear, ‘For God’s sake, don’t open the envelope—it’s empty.