‘Don’t make a mess’, in tones similar to those of my mother on my announcing I had come across Jesus in our garden twenty-odd years earlier.

Delia maintains she said nothing of the sort. I know she did. Whatever…I was as good as my word. I sat down and wrote a book. I knew nothing about writing books, I had never met an author or a writer of any sort. I don’t remember the prospect daunting me too much. Ignorance is bliss.

I guess when someone starts to knit something they must start with a first stitch. So it is with writing a book. You start, not with a stitch but with a word, and then go on adding words until you have finished saying whatever it is you hope to say. In my case I ended up with a book rather than a garment.

We were living at Waiwhare, a farming district some fifty kilometres from Hastings on the Napier–Taihape road, just short of the Gentle Annie. I was the head teacher of the two-teacher school that served the district. We weren’t called the more pretentious ‘principal’ back then in the olden days, not in the primary service. It was a good little school. In truth, it could have run itself! The school was up and running, the grounds of the school and schoolhouse next door were beautifully kept (by the head teacher), and really there was not much to do, professionally or domestically. We had two very small sons, ages one and two years, a car that was not too reliable on what was then a very rough trip into town, and very little money to throw around even if we did manage to get down into the bright-ish lights of Hastings or Napier.

Nearer to Hastings than Waiwhare, on the trip into town, you pass Omahu School, previously called Fernhill School. It was here that, slightly earlier than my years in the district, Sylvia Ashton-Warner had lived and taught, along with her husband. It was here, quite likely, that she had put the finishing touches to one or more of her earlier novels, maybe Spinster. This was my initial inspiration. If Ashton-Warner could do it in surroundings not unlike my own, then why couldn’t I write a book?

In the next handful of years I certainly outdid her in quantity, if definitely not in quality. Five of my six early adult novels came out of Waiwhare.

It’s all well and good to write a book, but, having written the thing, you then have to find a publisher. Persistence may well reap its own reward, but I was sensible enough to know that my persistence would have its limitations. If that first, or maybe stretching as far as second, novel had not been picked up by a publisher, I would have thrown in the towel and moved on to trying my hand at…God knows what.

It is hard to know from such a remove how to judge my early efforts objectively. These days, if I ever talk about my first six novels I tend to disparage slightly. I know they aren’t bad. I know they aren’t very good. It’s wrong to say they are mediocre, so maybe they rest somewhere on the continuum between mediocre and goodish. They certainly found a publisher. By fossicking around bookshops and libraries I found that a likely outlet for my work would be the old New Zealand firm Whitcombe and Tombs, still a publishing house back then and with their offices in Christchurch. The late Max Rogers, publisher, accepted my first book. Not only that, he managed to score an English co-publisher, Robert Hale of London.