I did not believe a word of it. Not then, and not now!

When I spent my year with them, I would go into Grandma’s bedroom and watch her while she did her hair. It was long, straight, and by then steel-grey hair which she rolled into a bun. It was quite mesmerizing watching her brush it, sitting at her dressing-table surrounded by the photos of her four children and eleven grandchildren.

Every birthday, Grandma would write us a letter. Indeed I still have the last birthday letter she wrote to me before she died. I was fifteen. In the letter there was always a ten-shilling note—a goodly amount back then. It was with one of Grandma’s birthday ten shillings that I bought my first New Zealand novel; one of Edith Howe’s last books for children, Riverside Family. I still have that, too.

I wrote Agnes the Sheep in 1988. I wrote it as therapy for failure and in order to show that I could still do something. I had failed, to my mind, quite badly. I wasn’t used to failure. After all, I had run large schools, raised a family, won elections, and had written over a dozen novels all of which had been published. Pride comes before a fall, and I am sure the experience of falling did me good. Served me right, too.

I had given up the mayoralty of Ohakune at the beginning of 1988 when the borough was amalgamated into a larger district council. I had played a full role in the amalgamation process, but decided that enough was enough and my almost accidental career in local politics was over. I thought it was time to volunteer for something totally different, and Volunteer Service Abroad (VSA) agreed and I was dispatched to Bhutan, the small Himalayan kingdom, to teach for a year or two. So far, so good. At almost fifty years of age there was no reason why I shouldn’t do something like this for a while.

It would be good to say I succeeded, but I didn’t. Almost literally I fell flat on my face. Most of Bhutan is at a fair altitude. Parts of the little kingdom are well above 10,000 feet. VSA prepares its volunteers very well, but there was never a mention that some people can have great difficulty living at a high altitude. I proved to be one of them, and I lasted no more than a few weeks before I had to be shipped back home. It didn’t help, either, that I seemed to contract a variety of amoebic dysentery and, it transpired later, an unspecified form of hepatitis.

The altitude sickness disappeared almost immediately after I was flown down to Calcutta in India, where I rested up for a week or two before flying back home. Indeed it went so quickly that I wondered whether I had imagined it. I know I didn’t. I can remember walking around Thimpu, the Taupo-sized capital of the country. The streets were not remarkably steep, but with every step I took it was like walking into a brick wall. It was all a big pity.