She was the ninth of ten children. Her mother died giving birth to number ten, a little girl called Mildred, who died as a motherless infant. Until age twelve, Rosa Dorothea was simply parcelled up and handed around from family member to family member in and around Herefordshire and Wales. She always maintained that she had never been to school, and this may—or, more likely, may not—be the whole truth. Widely read and fully literate, there was every indication of a reasonable education somewhere along the line. Eventually, she was ‘saved’ by her much older sister, Agnes.

Agnes had come to New Zealand around the time of my mother’s birth as nursemaid and then nursery governess to the Levin family of mercantile fame and fortune. She was a good-looking young woman and clearly had her eye to the main chance. For fifty years I have worn a gold signet ring of hers, given to her at the outbreak of World War I by the scion of a notable expat family with a promise that there would be more when he returned from the conflict. He didn’t return. My half-century of wear has smoothed into oblivion what was once his family coat of arms. However, Agnes found someone else and married him—a Dane, a farmer of Takapau, Hawke’s Bay. After a few years of marriage he was killed in a logging accident on his farm. Obviously he had been of some substance, because his widow was able to afford several trips back to England over the years between the wars. I have a feeling that her family in England likely dreaded Agnes’s visits…Life in a far-flung colony had given her not only ideas but airs and graces well and truly in advance of what would have been her lot had she remained in rural Hereford. Less than happy with what she saw had become the lot of her youngest sister, she simply uplifted Dorothea and brought her back to New Zealand.

Barcroft, Tarrington, Herefordshire, England. A cottage on a vast estate. That’s where they were both born, along with eight others. We had little contact with our English family, but in the early 1960s my sister and I paid a visit. I don’t think either of us was quite prepared for just how humble our mother’s birthplace was. A small cottage of dry-stone construction, possibly Norman, certainly not much later than that. God alone knows how it had once accommodated a family of up to a dozen individuals. Grandfather William had been a minor farm manager, in charge of the horses, the stables.

By 1963 the landed gentry were no longer quite so well landed. The stately home had burnt down sometime during the war, and the last of the aristocratic family now made do with a rather lovely but very much smaller Elizabethan house that had in more prosperous times been the dower house or maybe vicarage on the estate. We stayed with our mother’s brother, John, in his home nearby, a delightful old half-timbered black and white house where you bumped your head going through most doorways, where going upstairs was perilous…and where the bath had pride of place in one of the bedrooms. His wife had once been lady’s maid to the lady of the manor. From time to time she still helped out the woman who had once been her mistress—for free. Noblesse oblige in reverse.

Possum Perkins was written in 1985. It is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Rosa Dorothea Taylor. While by no means my first published novel, it certainly serves to mark the beginning of my career as a full-time writer.

Between 1968 and 1973 I wrote half a dozen novels for adults. Why? Well, quite simply I seemed to have run out of anything else better to do, and it seemed like a reasonable idea at the time.

‘I’m going to write a book,’ I said to Delia, my former wife.

‘That’s nice, dear,’ she replied.