Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson

And then there is the family novelist. Harris descendant Richard Silcock, sorting through boxes in storage, came across a newspaper article written by his aunt Margaret Jeffery in 1962. The article, a full front page of the New Zealand Herald’s weekend magazine, including three photographs of Margaret, is a vivid account of her Nelson origins and the writing that sprang from them. In 1962 Margaret had published three of the six novels that are her primary works and was describing the draft of a fourth novel that would be published in 1964. 

Richard alerted us to the Herald article, which is undigitised, and copied out the paragraph he thought would be of most interest to us:

For some months after our move to Nelson, I lived with my great-aunt, Miss Emily Harris. In the garden behind her house, was her studio, stacked full with her life’s work, paintings of New Zealand flowers, berries and ferns. Pictures which at her death were acquired by the Alexander Turnbull Library, and which, as recently as last year, were exhibited at the Centre Gallery in Wellington.
As painting was her all-absorbing interest, she quite naturally talked to me about her work. It became as important to me as it was to her. Mapua abounded with wildflowers, they had been as much my companions as the pictures were to her. Thus we shared a common interest.

The paragraph pins down at last the exact location of Emily’s studio behind the house at 34 Nile Street. Margaret’s first-hand account of the artist in her later years is a crucial piece of information, brief but poignant. She was in her teens when she moved with her mother and two sisters from Māpua to Nelson in 1923 or 1924. She enrolled at Nelson College for Girls in April 1925, a few months before Emily Harris’s death 5 August that year.

Also of interest to us is Margaret’s observation about historical fiction:

Sooner or later, most writers begin thinking of writing an historical novel. I was no exception. New Zealand is as rich in history as all the overseas publishers keep telling us. The idea interested me enormously. But which part of New Zealand should I use for a background? As I can never write about any place I’ve not lived in, New Plymouth seemed to be the answer.
Through many visits there, I knew the town well. Its history is kept evergreen: everywhere is tangible evidence of the past. 

As I can never write about any place I’ve not lived in. Like her Great Aunt Emily, Margaret cared about accuracy and verisimilitude in her art. She is at once a historical researcher and an imaginative writer, and she is eloquent on the subject of balancing these demands.

To be a woman novelist in Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1950s and 1960s was unusual. To be published in London by genre fiction specialist Robert Hale was a feat in itself. To be given 2300 words on page 1 of the weekend magazine of the Herald is exceptional.

Margaret Jeffery was born Gretchen Constance Emily Weyergang in Hastings in 1910, eldest child of orchardist Hermann Weyergang and his wife Minnie Constance Gilbert. The Weyergangs moved to Māpua when Gretchen was almost two years old. Margaret is a translation of her German first name (Gretchen = Greta = Margareta) and she seems to have gone by it for most of her life. Her Weyergang origins don’t figure in the 1962 account of her early life, nor does her mother’s musical, artistic and literary career. A mentor, Oliver Arthur (Jock) Gillespie is nominated by the adult Margaret as a prime mover of her talent and industry, encouraging her to move to long-form fiction from the stories for children she was publishing before his intervention. Gillespie, at that time a script writer for the New Zealand Broadcasting Service (NZBS) was responsible for serialising Margaret’s first novel, The Forsaken Orchard, as a radio play in the mid-1950s.

Margaret Jeffery transcribed Emily Harris’s diaries in 1964 and submitted the manuscript to publishers AH & AW Reed in Wellington. Reed would bring out her fifth novel Cabin at Your Gate, in 1973 but the proposal to publish Emily’s diaries was declined: 

A.H. & A.W. Reed Limited.
Wellington,
15 February 1965. 
Mrs Margaret Jeffery,
17 Ngaio Road, 
Kelburn, 
Wellington. 
Dear Mrs Jeffery,
We have given a good deal of time and thought to The Diaries of Emily Cumming Harris. The appeal of a book of this type is considerable, especially when supported by illustrations from the painting of the diarist and there is an attraction in the quiet flow of days in Nelson in the 1880s. From the diaries there emerges a quite colourful but sometimes pathetic and sad picture of a small closed Victorian colonial society, with the main interest in the hopes and fears and frustrations of Emily, who is naively honest and simple, but by no means foolish. This having been acknowledged we regret that we must tell you that we are reasonably sure that there is insufficient demand to support publication of this book at the present time. Had the diaries been of a more robust period of pioneering their publication might have been possible but these gentle pages set in quiet Nelson would appeal only to the discriminating few, or so we judge the situation. 

We may be wrong in our opinion. That book would seem to be most suited to the Pegasus list but it could be that Pauls or Caxton would be interested in it. The typescript is returned under separate cover.

Yours sincerely,
Ray Richards 
Editorial Director   

[Letter and transcript of Emily Harris diary, Galpin collection, Pauanui]

Thank you, but no thank you. There was no appetite (or market) for such a book in the opinion of Reed’s editors. So Margaret turned her attention to the long-researched historical novel that would not be published until 1980. The Black Shore, published in London, is her final completed work. It brings together aspects of Margaret’s New Plymouth family history in the 1840s and 50s and ends with the outbreak of war in Taranaki in 1860. A long way from the Herald article of 1962, perhaps, but its inception glimmers in her mind even then.

Margaret Jeffery bibliography
Six published novels and one archived draft

The Forsaken Orchard. London: Robert Hale, 1955.

Too Many Roses. London: Robert Hale, 1956. Dedicated ‘To my mother.’ i.e. Minnie Constance Weyergang.

‘Ghost Flower.’ Typescript at Alexander Turnbull Library dated 1956, donated by pat Lawlor 1967. Ref: MS-1080. Draft of Mairangi written in third-person. 

Tree Without Shade. London: Robert Hale, 1958. dedicated to ‘Lowry Bay, Wellington.’

Mairangi. Christchurch: Pegasus Press; London: Heinemann, 1964. Dedicated ‘To my sister Faith.’ i.e. Faith Silcock nee Weyergang. 

Cabin at Your Gate. Wellington & Auckland: A.H. & A.W. Reed; London: Robert Hale, 1973.  

The Black Shore. London: Heinemann, 1980. Dedication: ‘For Susan and Michael.’ i.e. daughter-in-law Susan Jeffery nee Loveday and son Michael Jeffery. 

*

Margaret Jeffery, ‘Writing Habit Becomes As Pernicious As Smoking,’ New Zealand Herald, 9 June 1962, Section 3, Weekend Magazine, p.1.

Writing Habit Becomes As Pernicious As Smoking
[Text in box:] For the New Zealand authoress MARGARET JEFFERY  it was a childhood spent in the lonely Nelson countryside that introduced her to that “marvellous companion – imagination.” From the age of three, when most days she was not Margaret, but Mrs Goldfinch, mother of two boys, bookey and bunny, the gentle world of fantasy bridged the gap without playmates. In later years that imagination combined with the hard work of writing, has developed into sturdier substance in many short stories and several novels.”

It would be pleasant to say that my early childhood was spent playing in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, or some such far-flung spot. But I’m not writing fiction on this occasion. The only hanging gardens I knew were the furious thickets of broom, gorse, blackberry and manuka that clothes the now prosperous apple lands of Mapua, a district some twenty miles from Nelson.

Does one remember much at the age of three? Segments, perhaps, with the dotted lines filled in by one’s mother, until the pictures and impressions become completely indelible. We lived in a large house with an incredible number of ill-fitting french doors through which the sea breezes continually stirred.

The sea meant more than just a pleasant view. It was our one communicatory route to Nelson and we eagerly scanned its blue surface for the cockle-shell launch that made erratic appearances with mail and provisions.

There were no immediate neighbours; no other children to play with. I should have begun to mope and develop complexes: but not a bit of it. Through sheer force of circumstances, I began to take advantage of a marvellous companion – imagination.

I became Mrs Goldfinch, the mother of two boys, Bookey and Bunny. My mother, who revelled in this game as much as I, became Mrs Sparrow. Bookey was a holy terror, a sort of modified delinquent; Bunny was a do-no-wrong, and righteous as Sunday. Under the trees in the garden, lay an old ladder. Every morning, after I’d stuffed an old carpet bag with every conceivable object from the toy cupboard, I summoned my two boys, allotted them seats on the ladder rungs, and travelled for hours. During this mental globe trotting, Bookey usually got up to his pranks.

Childhood Fantasy
“Did Bookey behave?” my mother would ask, as I dragged the carpet bag back through one of the french doors. 

I’d give an exaggerated account.

“And what did you do to him, Mrs Goldfinch?”

Here the treatment never varied.

“I smacked him, and smacked him, and smacked him!” would come the prompt reply.

When my sister was born, we, my mother and I, took our respective children for walks in the afternoons. As there were no roads, we walked over the rough grassy stretches that ran toward the sea. Here, in the spring and summer, the grass was near-smothered with a particular wildflower, bright pink and plum-spotted white. These were no ordinary wildflowers, they were individual as people. I named them Queens and Princesses, and walking over them therefore required permission. 

“Will they allow us to walk over them today, Mrs Goldfinch?” my mother would ask.

“Wait a minute, Mrs Sparrow, I’ll go and ask.”

Mumble. Mumble. Mumble.

And then skipping back to the patient Mrs Sparrow:

“Yes, they say it’s quite all right.”

And so we’d proceed.

Thus a world of fantasy bridged the gap until my sister was old enough to play. By that time, roads were being gouged through the yellow clay, and settlers were coming one by one. A derelict shed half buried in the inevitable swathe of broom, was converted into a school of sorts and the first teacher engaged to cope with an assorted mixture of ages and intelligence.

Brand New School
For some years we averaged a teacher a month. Then, as the broom, blackberry and manuka horror gave way to roads linking us with Nelson, they stayed longer – a year, sometimes two. By this time I had reached standard six. How I got there was one of the seven wonders of the world! We just went on changing seats and moving up though mentally I’m sure we were still in the primer doldrums.

During these spectacular educational changes, we moved from the french door house into a new one we’d built. We had neighbours just over the fence, and there was a brand new school smelling of varnish and blackboards. And, joy of joys, a shop that opened every Monday afternoon! And there in my mind Mapua crystallised, because at the peak of this paradisian period, we moved to Nelson.

I am still hopeless at arithmetic, and to this day the sight of a “long tot” completely paralyses me with fear. On reaching Nelson, I was put into a class with some 50 girls.

And the day began – and ended for me – with a “long tot.” With the mistress pointing, each girl in turn totted up a column, swiftly changing the pence to shillings, and so on. Never will I forget my turn!

I had developed a stammer, and with this on top of my complete disability to add anything without the help of a bead frame or the surreptitious use of all my fingers, resulted in my total downfall. I became a no-hope country school moron. In all fairness I should state that I have never mastered the art of adding.

Flower Pictures
When I lived in an Auckland suburb, my Indian fruiterer gained my respect by lightning calculations of a flight of figures scribbled on a paper bag; and I’m unhappy to admit, equally mortified me by saying: “Will you check that, Mrs Jeffery?”

Just as well he knew I wrote, and that writers are said to be notoriously forgetful, because Mrs Jeffery always declined his kind invitation. She’d forgotten her glasses!

For some months after our move to Nelson, I lived with my great-aunt, Miss Emily Harris. In the garden behind her house, was her studio, stacked full with her life’s work, paintings of New Zealand flowers, berries and ferns. Pictures which at her death were acquired by the Alexander Turnbull Library, and which, as recently as last year, were exhibited at the Centre Gallery in Wellington.

As painting was her all-absorbing interest, she quite naturally talked to me about her work. It became as important to me as it was to her. Mapua abounded with wildflowers, they had been as much my companions as the pictures were to her. Thus we shared a common interest.

My career at Nelson College was inauspicious. On leaving, I did a kindergarten course and then took up kindergarten duties in Hawke’s Bay. Before my marriage, I was for several years on the staff of a preparatory school for boys.

In my new environment in Auckland, the desire to write about Mapua was gently fermenting. For some time I’d been writing children’s stories; now this was not enough. It was merely an aperitif. I wanted most desperately to write about the countryside as I’d known it, and so began “The Forsaken Orchard.”

Another Rung
“The Forsaken Orchard” took its time, both in writing and in finally becoming a book. On a series of borrowed typewriters I tapped laboriously.Never having written anything longer than a children’s story, I found that the sixty odd thousand words required (and even that is short for a novel) was really quite something, something that I had to dwell on night and day and keep warm within me, for only in this state will the words flow on to the paper.

Amateurish in parts, over descriptive in others, I plodded along, travelling on the rungs of another ladder, with my carpet bag beside me packed and overflowing with memories and Bookey and Bunny replaced by the characters in the book. Friends, fevered, or perhaps browbeaten by my enthusiasms, helped me with the final typing.

At last, with a stack of completed typescript, I momentarily walked on air. I, the dunderhead, who could never hope to add a “long tot,” or the weekly vegetable list on a paper bag, with or without her glasses, had written a novel. Yes, good or bad, it made no difference, I’d done it! It was a grand feeling – momentarily.

Radio Play
“The Forsaken Orchard” ultimately saw the light of day, as a full-length radio play produced by the NZBS before it became a book. While the fair copy was travelling to London publishers, the carbon copy was read and later adapted for radio by the late O. A. (Jock) Gillespie, who was then script writer for the NZBS.

Here, I should like to pay tribute to O. A. Gillespie. From the moment the play went on the air and I sat crouching more tearful than starry-eyed beside the radio, he became for me a sort of literary adviser, cracking the whip and urging me on. When I sent him one of my presentation copies of “The Forgotten Orchard,” I remarked that I’d done what I’d set out to do and that was that.

By return post came his reply: “get busy on your ‘higher navvying’! You must write and write… the mere act of writing and concentrating will help you immensely… you’ll keep well and happy and contented in creation…”

He was right. I began to think of the years I’d lived in Nelson. I thought and the thoughts began to warm. From them ‘Too Many Roses” came into being. Another autographed copy I could send him!

I owned a typewriter now and the writing habit was becoming as pernicious as smoking. Well nearly. My thoughts fluttered to a stand still at Hawke’s Bay, a direct contrast to Mapua. Then all the mechanism that goes into the construction of a book began to warm up. This time it was “Tree Without Shade”

Historical Novel
Sooner or later, most writers begin thinking of writing an historical novel. I was no exception. New Zealand is as rich in history as all the overseas publishers keep telling us. The idea interested me enormously. But which part of New Zealand should I use for a background? As I can never write about any place I’ve not lived in, New Plymouth seemed to be the answer. 

Through many visits there, I knew the town well. Its history is kept evergreen: everywhere is tangible evidence of the past. Edwin Harris, the father of my Great Aunt Emily, arriving there in the forties, was one of the first surveyors; and his was one of the many families who moved to Nelson at the time of the Maori wars.

In St Mary’s churchyard cemetery, I visited the grave of his son, killed as a young man at the beginning of the war. The Rev. Thomas Gilbert, my maternal great-grandfather was also an early pioneer, and wrote “N.Z. Settlers and Soldiers.”

People interested in my “historical novel” venture kindly lent me letters and diaries from which I made copious notes. I steeped myself in the tomes of the historians until I was positively weighed down with New Plymouth history. And the months dragged into years.

Most New Zealand historical novels appear set to a stereotyped formula: the heroine marries the “goody” early in the book and spends the rest of her time rushing through tree-fern and supplejack escaping the Maori tomahawk by the skin of her teeth and languishing for the “baddy.” Toward the end, in a welter of blood and war cries, she sees, through love’s true eyes, the “baddy” as the double crosser he really is, and then falls in a “happily ever after” swoon into the ever-waiting arms of her “goody” husband.

Imagination and Facts
This pattern is hard to avoid. The plot must somehow balance with the action of the background. I once read of a composer who wrote two operas at once, one with his right hand, one with his left. This is a procedure I’d highly recommend to the aspiring New Zealand historical novelist. Imagination in one hand, facts in the other!

To get New Plymouth and its history finally out of my system, I wrote another novel in which I could happily indulge myself with the “one hand” method. If I wanted the heroine to water her African Violets, there was no authenticity to refer to and say me nay: if I wanted her to make Chilli con carne, no whisper from the past could admonish: “that’s not a typical settler’s dish!”

It was fun to be unfettered and I enjoyed every moment of the six months it took me to write this book which I called “Ghost Flower,” and which has also gone to my agents.

People ask, ‘What do you do in your spare time?”

In between the usual domestic routine, I sandwich in a lot of reading. Among my favourites are the three Elizabeths – Bowen, Myers and Taylor, C.P. Snow, Laurence Durrell, Scott Fitzgerald and Truman Capote, especially his wonderful “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

On the creative side I’m interested in gardening, arranging flowers, sewing and interior decoration. I love people and enjoy meeting them. For this reason I miss my connection with the part I played on the social committee of the Auckland Festival. And yes, I even like new recipes!

After living nearly three years in Wellington, I find life full of interest here. On the social, meeting people side, there is the flourishing and active Women Writers Society and the PEN.

During this time, getting our home as we like it, my enthusiasm has been given free reign. We have a terraced garden with rock walls over which I encourage all manner of colourful plant waterfalls. Once again, as in my childhood, the hills surrounding us are brilliant with gorse and broom: but there is no ladder in the garden – only steps.

Last, but by no means least, is the new member of the household, Whisby light of Chalet, to give him his full title, our blue roan spaniel. He is as companionable to me in this somewhat isolated spot as Bunny and Bookey were to the late Mrs Goldfinch. He too has triggered off my imagination and become the hero of several recent short stories.

Quite naturally, he hopes to be in several more.