After all, the land of their fathers could hardly be said to have nurtured them in any way as satisfactorily as had their new, adopted land. They may well have self-referenced themselves as ‘Scots’; their descendants, however, would only be New Zealanders, Kiwis.

Nothing that I have written can avoid being about ‘family’. Family, in all its permutations. Of course this is a self-evident truth in most fiction. I have written about warm and loving conventional families. I’ve written about families in crisis. I’ve written about dysfunctional families. I have written about love and the absence of love in families.

In Circles (Penguin, 1997), I write of the generations of a family and the myths that often grow up within a family and cloud the truth, often not intentionally, so that the end product is not quite what it seems. It’s not that lies are told; more often it is that the truth is not fully revealed and the future ends up being built on supposition. I believe I said some important things in Circles, and I continue to think it a pity that it was allowed to go out of print so quickly and just when it was beginning to be picked up and read by those for whom I had written the piece.

Now that I am getting older I have significant regrets that I didn’t ask enough questions of my mother and father or of my Taylor grandparents. There are things I would like to know, questions I would like answered. There is now no one around to answer them. It’s great that Ivan rode in the hearse to Granny’s funeral. But I have no idea what Granny was like. The one photo I have of Great-granny Mary McGregor, circa 1905, shows a very grim and dour old Scot indeed. She sits, uncompromising, dressed in black, flanked by three of her four score and more grandkids, girls aged between twelve and fourteen. What did she think about being a granny to so many? Did she ever tally up a total of them all? I would bet she didn’t remember birthdays! It doesn’t look as if she is too happy with the three in the picture. I look at the photo from time to time, not because it tells me very much in itself, but simply because the grim visage of the old girl uncannily resembles my younger sister, Janette, and I find this as amusing as Jan finds it disturbing!

Of course, it is only as we ourselves age that we really have the time or the inclination to ponder such things. I was in my mid-forties when Ivan died. I was busy. Very busy. My own two boys were teenagers. Being the single-parent of two teenage sons is work enough in itself, but there was also a home to run, books to write—not to mention my illustrious career in local government and one or two other things besides. I had scant time to worry about myself, much less Mary McGregor.

My knowledge of my father, Alexander Ivan Taylor, is somewhat spotty. Not sketchy, but spotty. A lot that I do know was filtered through my mother, and, bless her heart, accepting everything that she said as gospel was always a bit risky. I have always known—because she told me—that Ivan once had a girlfriend called Violet, who was on the scene well before Dorothea. That’s all we ever knew on this score: Father once had a girlfriend called Violet.

Born in Winton in 1904, the eldest of four—my grandparents were not good breeders by family standards—Ivan’s minuscule division of the family was one of those which escaped the grip of Southland. Not long after Ivan rode in Granny’s hearse, my grandparents moved their little lot to the North Island. First to Norsewood, then to Palmerston North and, finally, around 1920, to Petone where my grandparents would live for their rest of their hardworking and highly respectable lives.