Books
The neverending story
by Sally Blundell
“Great children’s literature is for all ages,” says writer and reviewer Kate De Goldi, whose first picture book is a hot contender in this week’s NZ Post Book Awards.
A large wooden Wellington house overlooks the harbour. There are deep red sofas, large bookcases, huge expanses of window. Here Kate De Goldi, writer, reader, teacher and reviewer, lives with her partner, photographer Bruce Foster, two children and an indignant cat. Here there’s discussion of books, stories, reading and childhood. Not a memory of childhood, not some cobwebbed corner of the attic, but something that can still jump out and surprise you.
“There’s part of oneself that is still a child. When I write for kids, I’m not writing for 10-year-olds or 15-year-olds, but to that 10- or 15-year-old that is still part of me, that’s still lodged there.”
That long unfinished story of growing up.
Kate De Goldi is small, dark, slight. She has a mass of black curls, a long, still stare, a restless intellect. Anyone who has heard her fortnightly foray into books for children and young adults with Kim Hill on National Radio is familiar with the quick thoughts, the sudden detours in argument. She must have given the nuns hell.
“Actually my experience of Catholicism was quite benign. My primary school was My Lady of Perpetual Succour – don’t you love the name? It was completely idyllic. A lot of singing, a lot of laughter. We were taught by beautiful young Irish nuns. For five years I had Sister Barbara. She was fantastic, like Maria in The Sound of Music.”
Sister Barbara was one of the models for Ms Love, the astute, free-thinking, slightly arch teacher in Clubs: a Lolly Leopold Story, the picture book written by Kate De Goldi and illustrated by neighbour and artist Jacqui Colley (the book is a finalist in the NZ Post Book Awards – the winners are announced in Wellington on May 19). Clubs is a colourful jaunt through the terrifying world of schoolyard hierarchies, the are-you-in or are-you-out business of clubs. Into the fray comes young Lolly. Lolly is not a contender for the Barbie Club (her Totally Hair Barbie is now Practically Bald Barbie with a pierced belly button), the Harry Potter Club, the Kitten Club or the Lego Club. Fiercely dismissive of peer pressure, she co-founds the Grass Growing Spectators’ Club, the chief activity of which is to hang upside down from the school fort.
The book is a bright, busy, chalk-and-crayon classroom jumble, complete with blackboard notices, class registers and spelling lists. Ms Love is sardonic, ironic and never mean. She pickets the Barbie Beauty Contests and, as a member of Amnesty International, bans Kitten Club punishments.
As De Goldi’s first picture book, it was a gruelling exercise in compression: “It’s like poetry really – rewriting, rewriting, rewriting. I’m just too bloody prolix!”
Since 1988, when her story “Parkhaven Hotel” won the American Express Short Story Award, De Goldi has written three novels for young adults and a collection of stories for adults. She has won awards, hosted the TV programme Bookenz and was appointed an Arts Laureate in 2001. As well as her fortnightly slot on National Radio, she reviews books on TV1’s Good Morning programme (after the astrologer, before the cook – De Goldi delights in such details). She tutors at Victoria University’s Institute of Modern Letters, she edits Booknotes, she visits schools.
She loves visiting schools.
“The classroom is a microcosm. Every classroom has the same people in it, time and again – the timid girl, the boy you can’t bear. And the self-portraits! I love seeing how they cast themselves. When you watch young children you’re being given the gift of learning all over again. You’re remembering what you didn’t know. It’s wonderful. I’ve developed an abiding admiration for the primary school teacher. And I love form one and two kids. They have sophisticated knowledge and social élan, but they haven’t tipped over into the murky waters of adolescence.”
De Goldi grew up in a quarter-acre section in Christchurch with her two sisters, 42 cousins within running distance (“like Ping – Ping had 42 cousins”) and a matriarchal dynasty including an Italian grandmother who left her family home to sail to her flax-cutter husband-to-be in Te Puke.
“It was a hermetically sealed playground for me and my sisters. Every night after dinner my parents would sit and talk about this uncle or that aunt, talking about their individual and collective pasts. There was a natural morality to some of these stories that gave me a strong sense of self. The family is deeply seductive -territory.”
It was a family built around music (her mother was a cellist with the Christ-church Symphony Orchestra), stories and a collection of Puffin titles that grew and grew. “I had hundreds of them. I used to lie in bed and recite their titles because I knew them so well. Tragic but true.”
It was a childhood populated by A A Milne, Enid Blyton, the Bobbsey Twins and picture books borrowed from the old European couple next door. “They would invite us in for tea – we had to have tea, then they would show us the books.”
It was a “quiet obession” that spilt over into her teenage years. “I was a pain.
Erratically erratic. I loved history and English, because it was all about story. But I ignored everything else. I was always reading, but reading the wrong thing. I always seemed to be doing something else.”
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