Ruth
Park: A Celebration
Elizabeth Riddell writes on A Fence around the Cuckoo
What, essentially, we have to know about Ruth Park is contained in the dustjacket of A Fence around the Cuckoo (1992). The truth is in the innocent curve of the cheek, the softly folded mouth, the naive springy curls of hair over the forehead. Ruth Park as person and writer is safely here.
She has endured into the market with novels and children's books. The Muddle-Headed Wombat escapes me because I have no grandchildren to give him to. Her novels are not on my bookshelves because I have pressed them upon others to read and they have never returned them. (There must be an answer to this sort of over enthusiasm, but no one seems to have found it.) But I do have A Fence around the Cuckoo, the survivor of several copies. I cherish it for passages like this:
On a still hot morning . . . The tide went out and didn't come back in. This was not a spectacular event. The sea did not roll up like a scroll, like the sky in Revelations. It quietly withdrew . . . [We] were fooling around in the shallows in the dinghy at the time, and I felt this withdrawal abruptly, as though the water had been yanked away from underneath. We bumped and dragged on the stony bottom . . . The water went east, steadily and inexorably. There was no fuss of waves, no sound except gentle lapping. It went out so far we could no longer see it; there was a ruffling line of steely glitter in the middle of the Gulf, and that was all (p. 153).
This was the morning of the New Zealand earthquake that tumbled the Napier Cathedral to the ground. But Ruth and her little cousin, Fraser, and his dog known as 'the beard' were in the dinghy. If you look at a map you will see that on the beach at Glen Afra, on the Firth of Thames, which is itself on the Hauraki Gulf, one would not expect the landscape to change.
Ruth seems to have been always conscious of the enormous number of people in her life and of the family events that went on just over her head. These were not just family events, but events that in more formal situations would not have penetrated her childish day-to-day perceptions. This was partly because of the aunts. The aunts, her mother's sisters, leap off the page of A Pence around the Cuckoo - Wendela, Teresa, Rosina, and Auntie Willy who ran away from home when she was eighteen. The aunts had strong wills and fiery tempers. Their temperaments tended to make those of other women seem boringly low key. With scholarships and dogged attention to the children's pages of the New Zealand newspapers, Ruth got herself to high school in Auckland, where a nun spoke admiringly of an Australian boy named D'Arcy Niland, who was as keen - if that were possible - on writing as Ruth. The nun suggested they should write to one another, exchanging literary ideas, but Ruth had enough occupations and turned down the idea. Well, that's life for you. Fate, or Chance, is not to be disobeyed.
I first met D'Arcy when he was earning his living by day cleaning railway carriages and writing at night. I was putting together a little magazine, printed on rough newsprint, one of those little magazines that somehow seemed to survive through what was indeed the Great Depression that changed Australia even more than did Gallipoli. D'Arcy would sit opposite me at my modest editorial desk, alert for me to quiz him about some exotic word. 'Well, you know what it means', he would say. That made two of us; not enough, as he would admit. As well as enjoying all the plain beautiful words of the language, he was a pushover for the odd one out.
Language people, story tellers, I find in her what she found in him, 'a kind of stone age honesty, abrasive courage, durability'.
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