I have the medals he won. He had been an athlete. I think he held the New Zealand record at some time during the 1920s for either the five or ten miles. He came near selection for an Olympic team—possibly for the games in Antwerp. He played tennis. Maybe Violet had been his mixed-doubles partner? Apparently he was very good at tennis. On all of these grounds I must have been a great disappointment to him as a son, but he never showed it. Thank God, my younger brother and sister excelled in areas where I certainly failed.

My poor father. He gave up on teaching me to drive. It was just too perilous. Good God, I only drove the car into a river once! Oh, the shame, the ignominy of it all. Margaret, Hugh and Jan, all driving, fully licensed, on just about their fifteenth birthdays…I was to be in my twenties when Hugh, a teenager, told me he was sick to death of being my chauffeur and I could afford a car of my own and he would come and buy it with me and teach me to drive the bloody thing. He did.

Ivan had also been a musician. A good one, too. It’s hard not to be when you grow up in a Salvation Army family and you are trained on the cornet and trombone. In the 1930s he played the saxophone, at least semi-professionally, in a top Wellington dance band. The band’s vocalist was Daisy Basham, whose voice would be even more fully utilized in her later career as radio’s Aunt Daisy. Semi-professional was probably just about as far as you could go in those days of grey Depression. His music career lasted for a number of years, possibly until he married.

Probably, according to Mother, Ivan’s Salvationist days had ended with him being kicked out of the band at age fourteen when he had shoved his swimming togs down into his cornet or trombone or whatever in order to go for a quick swim after morning service. He had forgotten they were there and, as he tootled into the opening bars of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, out they shot. Now it is certainly easy to pick holes in this one. Firstly, your 1920s togs, even for boys, were not as skimpy as latter-day Speedos. You would probably need a bassoon to accommodate them rather than a cornet, and on top of all that you would need lungs as big as an elephant’s in order to expel the obstruction.

No. I think he simply parted company with the Army. He was certainly not anti-religious, nor irreligious; that would have been difficult given both his own background, and then my mother’s wide-ranging forays into faith. But it wasn’t for him. He told me, well before he died, that he wanted no religious service for his funeral. His wishes were respected.

Around the time of my father’s death in 1987, I wrote two novels. Both succeeded, and exceeded my expectations for them. By this stage in my writing career I didn’t feel too self-conscious placing the word ‘writer’ in any little box where I needed to list my occupation.

I had worked out very early on, before I gave up teaching, that in order to survive financially from my writing, I needed two things: a mortgage-free house and to be prolific in my output of books.