Katie is overseas for most of the novel on a one-year student exchange in Minnesota.

As if being a solo-father to my own two sons had not been enough, in 1997 I parented for a year the first of my eight American Field Service (AFS) ‘sons’, Michael from Switzerland. Half of the story in Jerome was given to me by Michael: simultaneous with his stay here with me, there was the ongoing story of a friend of his, a Swiss girl doing an exchange year in rural Minnesota. She badly misjudged the social climate of the Midwest, announcing she was lesbian.

Agnes the Sheep was published well before The Blue Lawn. It is still around and has stayed in print for many years. While not too many copies sell these days, it was a success in its heyday. It was certainly still in the mind and memory of many when The Blue Lawn came out. I was interviewed many times in respect of the latter. There was always one inevitable question, sometimes asked tentatively and frequently more bluntly: ‘Are you gay?’ I had a stock response, ‘No one ever bothered to ask about my relationship with sheep when Agnes was published. I think my sexuality is equally immaterial this time around.’ Is it? Was it? I don’t really know.

I am very happy and content that I did write The Blue Lawn, Jerome and Pebble in a Pool. I know that they have meant something to some people. I wrote them not only for young people who might have been having a struggle with their own sexual identity and would be happy to see themselves reflected at least a wee bit in a few of the pages they read. I wrote them also for kids who are happily and heartily heterosexual in order to show them that things are not always quite so clear-cut for some of their peers. That society has moved, some would say light years, in regard to acceptance of difference, there are some things that will always remain the same. Gay men and women will always be in a minority. Although we are much better these days at respecting the rights of minorities, a minority is always a minority, and, as such, possesses an innate fragility. Constant vigilance will always be necessary in the preservation of all rights—those of minorities, most definitely so. Circa 1930, not too long before I was born, there would have been few Jewish folk in Germany and most of mainland Europe, most certainly a minority, who would have dreamt of what would be their dreadful lot a handful of years ahead. Gay people of Germany at the same time? Ditto!

III

I would not be standing here today if Mr Hamilton had not been knocked over by a hansom cab, killed stone-dead in Piccadilly Circus on the first day of his honeymoon sometime in the late 1860s, leaving a very young widow.

In 1998, I was awarded the Margaret Mahy Medal and Lecture Award by the New Zealand Children’s Book Foundation. This is what I had to say on that occasion:

That widow was my great-grandmother, and Mr Hamilton had not been given the time, or maybe the opportunity, to become my great-grandfather. Family history records nothing but the bare facts of the young man’s tragic death.

I like to think that, maybe, fully euphoric, he burst through the front doors of their hotel, calling at the top of his young lungs, ‘Eureka! I found it!’ or words to that effect, startled the horses and paid the ultimate penalty. I hope that the first night of their honeymoon had been a night of unbridled mid-Victorian passion.

Family histories are plants of strange growth. Word-of-mouth recounting tends to twist the branches of the plant more than a little.

Were Mr and Mrs Hamilton actually on their honeymoon? What were they doing in Piccadilly Circus? The offspring of solid merchant families, their homes were just around the corner. Young persons of substance might surely have been expected to have ventured further afield for their first night of connubial bliss. Who knows? Maybe they decided upon a sort of local first-night and were, on the day of the tragedy, about to board a train to Dover, then across to Calais and on to more exotic and erotic climes. This was not to be. After one of the shorter marriages on record, the young widow had to face life alone.

Victorian widowhood was no laughing matter, but there were consolations. In order to put the tragedy behind her, the young widow was packed off on a long sea voyage to, of all places, Australia! A few months at sea, a few more months frisking among the aboriginals and former convicts was just what the doctor ordered and life might be better faced afterwards. There never has been any accounting for taste! The young Mrs Hamilton was little more than a slip of a girl, and simply could not go by herself on such a weird trip. Victorian minds would have boggled. A chaperone was found.

You may now breathe a sigh of relief: at last I make it to the literary.