Books
Gavin & Delilah
by Sally Blundell
Gavin Bishop has his auntie Barbara to thank for the tight-lipped and buttoned-up Mrs McGinty, star of the classic picture book that made his name.
She’s back. Tight-lipped and buttoned-up, peering out of her scallop-curtained suburban house, clipping a terrible compliance into her garden. Soon she’ll buy an unremarkable seedling. She’ll water it. She’ll watch it grow. And grow some more. Then she’ll go inside, close the door and wonder what on earth she’s to do with the monstrous plant outside her window.
Delilah McGinty dragged her weary feet into our picture-book history 25 years ago. Since then, her transformation, from a “pain in the neck” to a neighbourhood celebrity, has kept Mrs McGinty and the Bizarre Plant in the lexicon of children’s literature. As Delilah’s neighbours cheer, “Hooray, Mrs McGinty.”
And hooray, Auntie Barbara. “We used to visit her when we were kids. She’d take us around the garden, but there was nothing there – just bare flowerbeds and a pergola with nothing growing on it. A monster plant would be a nightmare for a person like that.”
Children’s book writer and illustrator Gavin Bishop folds himself down onto his swivel office chair. The basement studio in this sedate Christchurch home seems too small for this tall, urbane man, miniaturised somehow, like the diminutive worlds he builds out of myth, history, nursery rhyme and whimsy at the student-sized desk by the window.
“Auntie Barbara was obsessed with keeping things under control,” Bishop says. “She used to pin receipts or prescriptions that she didn’t want to lose to the curtain above the sink. She had a crackle paint firescreen, a ballerina picture, a souvenir cushion from Fiji – it was all kitsch stuff, but she thought they were ‘nice’.”
They’re all there in ink and watercolour, spring-cleaned and rescanned in this new edition of Mrs McGinty, depicted with all the narrative minutiae that the writer now applies to his own story and an isolated town on the edge of Lake Wakatipu.
“We lived in Kingston, in one of four railway houses. There was no electricity, no telephone, we had no car – it was lonely. The school was a single classroom with one teacher. In winter, we’d sit in our coats until the room warmed up, drinking hot malted milk made in a big black iron kettle. I’d like to write about this one day.”
The highlight of the school term was the arrival of a grey Morris Minor driven by Mrs Diack, the arts adviser. “She would take us for the whole day. It was bliss. I didn’t really know what an artist was, and my parents had no idea what I was bleating on about, so I decided that’s what I wanted to be – an arts adviser.”
But back in Invercargill, at the Southland Technical College, a career in art meant leaving school for a signwriting apprenticeship. It took beginner teacher Trevor Moffitt to suggest the University of Canterbury’s School of Fine Arts.
By then, Invercargill had begun to pall. “It seemed small and very provincial. I remember going to Breakfast at Tiffany’s at a picture theatre in the main street. The people came out of the theatre and dispersed in a matter of minutes. There was just this great, empty canyon and I remember thinking that night, after watching Holly Golightly, that this was not where I wanted to be.”
Art school in Christchurch was Rudi Gopas and Russell Clark, the brave new world of abstract art, the writing of Jean-Paul Sartre, the illustrative lines of James Thurber. “But there was a huge movement against anything to do with illustration. The thinking of the time was that totally non-representational art was the only form of art worth doing.”
It was not until Bishop had begun his 30-year teaching career that he heard that Oxford University Press was looking for children’s picture books with a New Zealand character. A fellow art teacher suggested he give it a go.
“It was as if the clouds had opened and this big finger was pointing down at me,” says Bishop. “It was momentous. The light came on, really. There was the odd publication for children with New Zealand content, but this was revolutionary.”
Too revolutionary. Bidibidi, the story of a high-country sheep, was considered too New Zealand for the required offshore co-publication (although it was published later, in 1982). But it gave the young teacher his first experience as a children’s book artist.
“I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know how to write a picture book – it was too long, it was overwritten, it was everything I’m critical of now.”
Frustrated, determined – “I was desperate to see a book in print, I knew that that was what I really wanted to do” – Bishop began work on another book, a story based on a name from the Christchurch phone book, a suburban house in Linwood, and a 1950s woman just like Auntie Barbara.
Page 1 2 
