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The Irish Sun
7 hours ago
- The Irish Sun
I visited the UK's best seaside town with cheap beach huts, dolphins offshore and a bag of chips for only £2.25
RECLINING in the blue and white striped deckchair, a cup of tea in hand, I took in the spectacular view of the bay and kept my eyes peeled for porpoises. I've been lucky to travel to beaches in Greece, Spain, Advertisement 12 Historic beach huts at one of the UK's most stunning seaside towns Credit: North Yorkshire Council 12 Scarborough is a great British day out for families Credit: ALEX LLOYD Just over an hour's drive from my home in North Yorkshire, I've visited this stretch of Scarborough coast on dozens of occasions. But only recently was it described as one of the It's the perfect family day out and we hardly spend any money - which these days can often be impossible. Advertisement When you factor in the kids and all their gear, sandy feet, sticky hands and sun cream application, the idea of the beach can make you groan. But, I have a trick and it keeps everyone happy. When we have a whole day planned at the beach, I hire one of the town's The huts are managed by North Yorkshire County Council and cost from £50 a day to rent from 10am. And if you rent for seven days they range from £14 a day off peak to £32 a day at the height of summer. Advertisement Compare this to visiting There are 35 chalets available, with two of the rows dating from Edwardian times, making them Britain's oldest surviving beach huts. We live in picturesque seaside town where beachfront homes go for just £135k – it feels like a holiday all year round But our home for the day – number 247 – is at the end of a third row that was opened last year after the originals were demolished by a landslip in 2019. Care has been taken to ensure they match the original style of their neighbours, part of the 52-acre South Cliff Gardens, and next to the Grade II-listed Scarborough Spa. The location is at the quieter end of South Bay, known for its traditional amusements, shops and restaurants. Advertisement In the background, the 12th-century Scarborough Castle is perched proudly on the headland. There's plenty of on and off-street parking nearby. We opted for South Bay Underground, beneath the celebrated cast iron Spa Bridge and next to the Blue Roundabout, a sea-themed piece of public art. 12 Alex and her family made themselves at home Credit: ALEX LLOYD 12 Scarborough's South Bay, castle and harbour from the air Credit: Getty Advertisement It costs £10.60 for eight hours – and is free after 6pm. The town's train station is a 20-minute walk too – downhill to the huts but uphill back. Cheap check-in After picking up the keys from the chalet attendant, my two sons – Ralph, eight, and Max, five – were excited to open the yellow shutters and see what was inside. The décor is simple but extremely welcoming and clean – a classic black and red tiled floor with white walls, a white kitchen unit and a couple of wooden shelves. Use of the hut includes a sink with a washing-up bowl, a USB charging port and a wired-in kettle for making hot drinks. Advertisement There are also two deckchairs, four metal chairs and a metal table, as well as a sweeping brush, dustpan and brush, overhead lighting and hooks for your towels and bags. You need to bring your own plates, cups, cutlery and washing up liquid, as well as a cool bag for perishables and a barbecue if you are planning to cook. A rubbish bag is handy too, but there are public bins a minute away. I'd barely got the kettle on before the kids were in their swimming trunks (no awkward sandy changes behind towels today!) and heading down to the sand with their spades. The chalet's cliffside location means you're not directly on the beach, tricker with babies and toddlers. But there's a short, step-free (and buggy-friendly) stroll down to the sand, and you have an excellent bird's eye view to supervise older children as they jump in the waves and explore the rock pools. Advertisement In fact, we barely saw our two all afternoon, other than when they wanted snacks or to bring us treasures of seaweed and crab shells. 12 The huts look over Scarborough South Beach Credit: ALEX LLOYD 12 Inside is simple but has everything you need Credit: ALEX LLOYD 12 Alex and Ralph build sandcastles on the beach Credit: ALEX LLOYD Friends who live locally joined us for the trip, allowing us to split the price between two families for even better value. Advertisement This meant we got shade, electricity, deck chairs and free tea all day for £25 per family. Pals were also a font of knowledge about the bottlenose dolphins, porpoises and minke whales that We all came armed with picnics, teabags, coffee and a few cans of beer in a cooler to save money on our day out. But should we have forgotten anything, There were public loos next door, but coins were needed to access these – it's 40p per use. Advertisement Time to explore We were all blissfully happy chilling at the hut, but I grabbed my youngest son to help me explore the cheap and cheerful entertainment of South Cliff Gardens right on our doorstep. Established over the Regency and Victoria eras, it's a maze of paths, landscaped gardens, a seasonal putting green and the biggest Star Map in the UK. There's also a hillside adventure playground immediately behind the chalets – totally free to enjoy. 12 Scarborough's South Bay has plenty to entertain families and visitors Credit: Getty 12 The Funicular Railway is fun for families Credit: ALEX LLOYD Advertisement 12 The cliff-side railway was the first of its kind in the UK Credit: Alamy One attraction we did fork out for was the South Cliff Lift that connects the Cleveland Way beside the beach to the Esplanade at the top of the cliffs. Opened in 1875, it was We paid £2.50 each for a return ticket, but could easily have paid half and weaved our way back down through the gardens. When the tide came in towards teatime, we stashed our belongings inside the hut to take a look at the glitzier end of town, a ten to 15-minute walk away. The boys spent a few coins on the dazzling array of arcades at Olympia Leisure, while we also peeked into Scarborough Joke Shop and marvelled at the seasonal big wheel. Advertisement If you want to splash out, But free thrills for all can be found crossing the Spa Bridge, visiting the lighthouse on the pier or following the Scarborough Sea Wall Heritage Trail. You can't leave the seaside without partaking of some chips, so we headed to The Fishpan, serving the town since 1960. A takeaway kids' portion was only £2.25, which my two shared happily, while we grabbed massive chip butties for £3.45 each. 12 A chippie tea for the Lloyd boys Credit: ALEX LLOYD Advertisement 12 A beach hut meant we got we got shade, electricity, deck chairs and free tea all day for just £25 per family. Credit: Alamy We'd planned to enjoy them on the soft yellow sand opposite, but the seagulls were out in force and eyeing up our dinner. Not only did the beach hut prove to be an affordable day out, it was the perfect place to eat in peace – not a scavenging gull in sight. It was the perfect day, especially with the sun out, and we only spent £50, including the chalet, which was worth every penny. Splitting the cost with another family is a genius idea. Our day on the beach was an absolute bargain. Advertisement Find out more about how to hire Scarborough beach huts at
Scottish Sun
7 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
I visited the UK's best seaside town with cheap beach huts, dolphins offshore and a bag of chips for only £2.25
The Sun's Alex Lloyd bags a beach hut on the stunning coastline for a visit with her boys GRABBA THE HUT I visited the UK's best seaside town with cheap beach huts, dolphins offshore and a bag of chips for only £2.25 RECLINING in the blue and white striped deckchair, a cup of tea in hand, I took in the spectacular view of the bay and kept my eyes peeled for porpoises. I've been lucky to travel to beaches in Greece, Spain, Antigua and even Japan in my time, but on a sunny June day, you can't beat a trip to one of the UK's best seaside towns. Advertisement 12 Historic beach huts at one of the UK's most stunning seaside towns Credit: North Yorkshire Council 12 Scarborough is a great British day out for families Credit: ALEX LLOYD Just over an hour's drive from my home in North Yorkshire, I've visited this stretch of Scarborough coast on dozens of occasions. But only recently was it described as one of the best seaside towns in the UK by Condé Nasté Traveller. It's the perfect family day out and we hardly spend any money - which these days can often be impossible. Advertisement When you factor in the kids and all their gear, sandy feet, sticky hands and sun cream application, the idea of the beach can make you groan. But, I have a trick and it keeps everyone happy. When we have a whole day planned at the beach, I hire one of the town's historic beach chalets, with uninterrupted views across South Bay. The huts are managed by North Yorkshire County Council and cost from £50 a day to rent from 10am. And if you rent for seven days they range from £14 a day off peak to £32 a day at the height of summer. Advertisement Compare this to visiting Flamingo Land theme park just 20 miles away – booking an advance family ticket during the summer is at least £168. There are 35 chalets available, with two of the rows dating from Edwardian times, making them Britain's oldest surviving beach huts. We live in picturesque seaside town where beachfront homes go for just £135k – it feels like a holiday all year round But our home for the day – number 247 – is at the end of a third row that was opened last year after the originals were demolished by a landslip in 2019. Care has been taken to ensure they match the original style of their neighbours, part of the 52-acre South Cliff Gardens, and next to the Grade II-listed Scarborough Spa. The location is at the quieter end of South Bay, known for its traditional amusements, shops and restaurants. Advertisement In the background, the 12th-century Scarborough Castle is perched proudly on the headland. There's plenty of on and off-street parking nearby. We opted for South Bay Underground, beneath the celebrated cast iron Spa Bridge and next to the Blue Roundabout, a sea-themed piece of public art. 12 Alex and her family made themselves at home Credit: ALEX LLOYD 12 Scarborough's South Bay, castle and harbour from the air Credit: Getty Advertisement It costs £10.60 for eight hours – and is free after 6pm. The town's train station is a 20-minute walk too – downhill to the huts but uphill back. Cheap check-in After picking up the keys from the chalet attendant, my two sons – Ralph, eight, and Max, five – were excited to open the yellow shutters and see what was inside. The décor is simple but extremely welcoming and clean – a classic black and red tiled floor with white walls, a white kitchen unit and a couple of wooden shelves. Use of the hut includes a sink with a washing-up bowl, a USB charging port and a wired-in kettle for making hot drinks. Advertisement There are also two deckchairs, four metal chairs and a metal table, as well as a sweeping brush, dustpan and brush, overhead lighting and hooks for your towels and bags. You need to bring your own plates, cups, cutlery and washing up liquid, as well as a cool bag for perishables and a barbecue if you are planning to cook. A rubbish bag is handy too, but there are public bins a minute away. I'd barely got the kettle on before the kids were in their swimming trunks (no awkward sandy changes behind towels today!) and heading down to the sand with their spades. The chalet's cliffside location means you're not directly on the beach, tricker with babies and toddlers. But there's a short, step-free (and buggy-friendly) stroll down to the sand, and you have an excellent bird's eye view to supervise older children as they jump in the waves and explore the rock pools. Advertisement In fact, we barely saw our two all afternoon, other than when they wanted snacks or to bring us treasures of seaweed and crab shells. 12 The huts look over Scarborough South Beach Credit: ALEX LLOYD 12 Inside is simple but has everything you need Credit: ALEX LLOYD 12 Alex and Ralph build sandcastles on the beach Credit: ALEX LLOYD Friends who live locally joined us for the trip, allowing us to split the price between two families for even better value. Advertisement This meant we got shade, electricity, deck chairs and free tea all day for £25 per family. Pals were also a font of knowledge about the bottlenose dolphins, porpoises and minke whales that live in this stretch of the North Sea. It left us cursing our lack of binoculars. We all came armed with picnics, teabags, coffee and a few cans of beer in a cooler to save money on our day out. But should we have forgotten anything, the Clock Café was immediately behind us. It's famed for its scones – just check if the flag is flying to see if it's open. There were public loos next door, but coins were needed to access these – it's 40p per use. Advertisement Time to explore We were all blissfully happy chilling at the hut, but I grabbed my youngest son to help me explore the cheap and cheerful entertainment of South Cliff Gardens right on our doorstep. Established over the Regency and Victoria eras, it's a maze of paths, landscaped gardens, a seasonal putting green and the biggest Star Map in the UK. There's also a hillside adventure playground immediately behind the chalets – totally free to enjoy. 12 Scarborough's South Bay has plenty to entertain families and visitors Credit: Getty 12 The Funicular Railway is fun for families Credit: ALEX LLOYD Advertisement 12 The cliff-side railway was the first of its kind in the UK Credit: Alamy One attraction we did fork out for was the South Cliff Lift that connects the Cleveland Way beside the beach to the Esplanade at the top of the cliffs. Opened in 1875, it was Britain's first funicular railway. We paid £2.50 each for a return ticket, but could easily have paid half and weaved our way back down through the gardens. When the tide came in towards teatime, we stashed our belongings inside the hut to take a look at the glitzier end of town, a ten to 15-minute walk away. The boys spent a few coins on the dazzling array of arcades at Olympia Leisure, while we also peeked into Scarborough Joke Shop and marvelled at the seasonal big wheel. Advertisement If you want to splash out, Luna Park has fairground rides, or you can take a boat trip from the harbour. Entry to the castle costs from £16.70 for a family with one adult and up to three kids, but is free for English Heritage members. But free thrills for all can be found crossing the Spa Bridge, visiting the lighthouse on the pier or following the Scarborough Sea Wall Heritage Trail. You can't leave the seaside without partaking of some chips, so we headed to The Fishpan, serving the town since 1960. A takeaway kids' portion was only £2.25, which my two shared happily, while we grabbed massive chip butties for £3.45 each. 12 A chippie tea for the Lloyd boys Credit: ALEX LLOYD Advertisement 12 A beach hut meant we got we got shade, electricity, deck chairs and free tea all day for just £25 per family. Credit: Alamy We'd planned to enjoy them on the soft yellow sand opposite, but the seagulls were out in force and eyeing up our dinner. Not only did the beach hut prove to be an affordable day out, it was the perfect place to eat in peace – not a scavenging gull in sight. It was the perfect day, especially with the sun out, and we only spent £50, including the chalet, which was worth every penny. Splitting the cost with another family is a genius idea. Our day on the beach was an absolute bargain. Advertisement Find out more about how to hire Scarborough beach huts at
National Geographic
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- National Geographic
The original sirens in mythology weren't the seductresses we know today
Sirens torment Ulysses with their enchanting song in Herbert James Draper's 1909 painting titled 'Ulysses and the Sirens.' Draper portrays the Sirens as sexualized mermaids, consistent with other Edwardian era depictions of the creatures. © Ferens Art Gallery / Bridgeman Images For thousands of years sirens have lured sailors, haunted coastlines—and shapeshifted through myth and media. Here's how they evolved to the seductive mermaids of our modern imagination. The Greek hero Odysseus famously faces many travails as he attempts to return home following the Trojan War, from giant cannibals to enigmatic enchantresses. But one challenge stands out as perhaps the most evocative, dangerous, and enduring of them all: the sirens, with their hypnotic and mesmerizing song, who call to passing sailors. To stop is certain death. They're powerful and mysterious figures and even now, of all the creatures from Greek myths, audiences simply can't get enough of them. Sirens have been a fixture of the Western imagination since the time of Homer and the composition of The Odyssey in the 8th century B.C. They appear in the works of ancient Roman writers like Pliny the Elder and Ovid, and one even appears in Dante's Divine Comedy. They fascinated painters of the 19th century and now lend their name to television shows and the "siren-core" fashion aesthetic touted by social media creators. (Dante's 'Inferno' is a journey to hell and back.) But these mythological creatures have shifted forms dramatically over the centuries, transforming with the times to reflect society's complicated and ever-changing relationship with desire. In modern popular culture, sirens are alluring creatures of the sea, most commonly women, often sporting shimmering mermaid tails. But their ancient Greek roots weren't fishlike at all; instead, they were bird-bodied creatures associated with death. Here's how sirens have evolved over time, and why their song stays so loud in popular culture. A attic terracotta status from Greece 300 BCE shows Sirens in their original, bird-woman form. Photograph by Peter Horree, Alamy Stock Photo This artwork titled 'A Siren and a Centaur' shows how classical mythology and artistic imagination have blended together to reshape Sirens iconography. The piece portrays a bird-like siren (left) and centaur (right) in an imaginative and dynamic scene. Photograph by ART Collection, Alamy Stock Photo Homer's Odyssey is the sirens' earliest appearance. Thought to have been composed sometime in the 8th century B.C., the poem follows the winding path of the hero Odysseus as he returns home to Ithaca and his long-suffering wife from the Trojan War. Along the way, he faces Greek gods, marvels, and monsters, including the sirens. The sorceress Circe warns him about the creatures, telling him that they 'bewitch all passersby. If anyone goes near them in ignorance, and listens to their voices, that man will never travel to his home.' Odysseus plugs his men's ears with wax, so they won't be lured—but he leaves his own ears free and commands his men to bind him to the ship's mast, so he's able to hear their promises as they tempt him with the prospect of knowledge and tales of heroic deeds. (The Odyssey offers monsters and magic—and also a real look into the ancient world.) But the Odyssey is far from the only story featuring the sirens. They also appear in the Argonautica, a 3rd century B.C. epic poem following Jason and the Argonauts in their search for the Golden Fleece, where sirens are described as daughters of the river god Achelous and the muse Terpsichore. The musician Orpheus snatches up his lyre to drown out their song—but not before one member of the crew throws himself in the ocean. Tradition has it that the names of those sirens were Parthenop, Ligeia and Leucosia. Perhaps the siren's most important distinguishing feature—and the one that remains to this day—is their voice. 'It's a hypnotic voice, it lures people, makes them forget everything, in a lot of cases makes them fall asleep,' says Marie-Claire Beaulieu, associate professor of classical studies at Tufts University. 'Essentially, people become so hypnotized that they forget everything.' What do sirens symbolize in Greek culture? 'When the ancients say sirens, they mean a bird-bodied woman,' says Beaulieu. Closely associated with death, sirens' bird legs and wings show that they're liminal creatures who dwell betwixt and between. Their connection with the sea, which the ancient Greeks considered profoundly dangerous, and their wings, situate them somewhere between earth and air. Sirens were a fixture of ancient Greek funerary art, such as stele, a type of grave marker. For example, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts holds a funerary plaque from the 7th century B.C. depicting a mourning scene, in which two women flank a funeral couch that holds a corpse. Crouched underneath is a siren. Some sources, including Euripides' 5th century B.C. play Helen and Ovid's 8th century A.D. poem Metamorphoses, associate the sirens with Persephone, the goddess of spring carried off by Hades, god of the underworld, to become his queen. Some stories say they were given wings to seek Persephone. According to Beaulieu, som e sources, including the Argonautica , show sirens as the daughters of one of the Muses. 'Except that in a way, they're the Muses of death, instead of the Muses of life, because they lure people to death with this singing,' says Beaulieu. This mural from the 14th century shows a Siren playing music. During this period, the enchantresses were depicted as both bird-women and mermaids. Photograph by Heritage Image Partnership Ltd, Alamy Stock Photo How the iconography of sirens has evolved Sirens retained their bird bodies into the time of the Roman Empire and well beyond; Pliny the Elder includes them in the 'Fabulous Birds' section of his Natural History, written around A.D. 77, claiming they lull men to sleep with their song and then tear them to pieces. (Though he's a skeptic that they exist.) But over the course of the Middle Ages, the siren transformed. More and more they began exhibiting fishtails, not bird bodies. The two types coexisted from the 12th through 14th centuries at least, Beaulieu explains, but eventually the mermaid-like creature emerged as dominant. That shift is probably thanks in part to the strong Greek and Roman tradition of unrelated sea gods like Triton, as well as the sirens' association with water. But it's also thanks in no small part to the influence of Celtic folklore traditions. 'The blending is a super interesting syncretism of cultures,' says Beaulieu, pointing to 14th century tradition about St. Brendan the Navigator, an early Irish Christian whose journeys parallel those of Odysseus. Naturally, he encounters a siren on his odyssey—only this one is wholly recognizable to modern audiences as a mermaid. How Christianity has shaped Greek mythology As the physical appearance of the sirens began to shift, so did their symbolic meaning. The sirens of ancient Greece were considered beautiful—but they tempted Odysseus with songs of glory, not simply sex. Ancient Greeks were more concerned with power dynamics, so a man having sex with a subordinate woman wasn't a problem. 'You get into trouble when you have a goddess having sex with a mortal, for instance,' explains Beaulieu. "That's part of what would have given the sirens their menace." But medieval Christianity saw sex and sirens differently. They became symbols of temptation itself, a way to talk about the lures of worldly pleasures and the deceptive, corrupting pull of sin. Hence the appearance of a siren in Dante's 14th century Divine Comedy. The very same creature who tempted Odysseus comes to Dante in a dream and identifies herself as 'the pleasing siren, who in midsea leads mariners astray.' In the end, his guide and companion through the underworld (the epic poet Virgil) grabs her, tears her clothing, and exposes the 'stench' of her belly showing the medieval siren is sexually alluring but repulsive. Those medieval temptresses are unmistakably the roots of modern sirens, with their dangerously attractive songs. The association between sirens, mermaids, and temptation only grew tighter in the 19th century, when painters returned again and again to creamy-skinned, bare-breasted sirens with lavish hair. There is no better example than John William Waterhouse's turn-of-the-century painting The Siren, where a lovely young woman gazes down at a stricken, shipwrecked young sailor who looks both terrified and enthralled. The sirens of modern-day popular culture Millennia later, the sirens continue to resonate. They're even inspiration for a fashion aesthetic: sirencore, a beachy and romantic look with just a little hint of menace. Modern creatives, meanwhile, are still turning to the sirens as a source of inspiration and a rich symbol for exploring power, gender, and knowledge. Netflix's new release Sirens, which adapts Molly Smith Metzler's 2011 play Elemeno Pea and stars Julianne Moore, explicitly grapples with the mythological figure. Director Nicole Kassell told The Hollywood Reporter, 'I love the idea of analyzing the idea of what a siren is, and who says what a siren is—the sailor. It's very fun to get to go back and consider it from a female lens.' Black sirens navigate the challenges of modern-day sexism and racism in Bethany C. Morrow's 2020 A Song Below Water; a Puerto Rican immigrant falls in love with a merman on turn-of-the-century Coney Island in Venessa Vida Kelley's 2025 When The Tides Held The Moon. For many writers, sirens are an opportunity to turn old tales and stereotypes on their head, using characters who've long been reviled and distrusted for their controversial power. The Sirens by Emilia Hart is one such modern-day retelling, which weaves between the modern day, and the 19th century transportation of Irish women convicts to Australia. 'I thought this mythological creature was the perfect way to give my female characters some power back into this historical narrative,' she explains. 'I wanted to make this general comment on how we think about women and how we have this idea of women as being temptresses, and we demonize them and we overly sexualize them, as a way of trying to explain or perhaps diminish their power,' she says. In the hands of modern-day writers, the sea can become a place of transformation, freedom, and potential. And sirens can be restored to a place of power and wisdom—and, yes, a bit of danger too.
Newsroom
a day ago
- General
- Newsroom
Maurice and me, by Geoff Chapple
In the 1940s and early 1950s my family lived in a modest house at the end of First Avenue, Henderson. We were one of seven Chapple families that had moved near or actually onto Peacehaven, the rambling five-acre property where the Reverend James Chapple and his wife Florence lived on Millbrook Road, Henderson. Our households, it strikes me now, can be described as circling loyally around the larger gravitational pull of Peacehaven. Four of the Chapple daughters including Lyndahl Gee (née Chapple, born in 1907, the 11th child) stayed within walking distance of the Peacehaven alma mater. As did three sons, including my father Geoffrey. Lyndahl's second son was born on August 20, 1931: Maurice Gee. Maurice was called Moss within the family. He would later describe Peacehaven in Double Unit, one of the three small memoirs collected in Memory Pieces (2018). Moss names the two youngest Chapple sons, Dick and my Uncle Aynsley, as the boys who tended the orchard and a large vegetable garden. A small creek ran past the garden, under a brick bridge leading to the cow paddock, round the side of a wide lawn and rose garden, then into a culvert and under Millbrook Road, to dive down a waterfall into Henderson Creek. Dick was the handyman who built the mānuka summerhouse on the lawn, milked the cow, painted the name 'Peacehaven' on a board then screwed it to a barred gate at the bottom of the drive. Moss often visited with Lyndahl, and though the Reverend James was usually in his study working on the next lecture, the child still had plenty of grandfather time. Around 1941 the two grandparents moved to a new Henderson property, a bungalow set in wide grounds 300 metres along Lincoln Road. Dick dutifully screwed the nameplate of the old Peacehaven onto a new gate, and the seven descendant families remained within walking distance and continued to visit. I was born in 1944, and remember sitting on the floor of the sunroom at the Lincoln Road Peacehaven, chubby legs extended no doubt to give me a firm base as I reached out to the long helix of a skillfully peeled apple descending gradually to my outstretched hand. Some time after that the grandfather hand dropped down in front, proffering a slice of the peeled apple. That's my only memory. The Reverend James Chapple died in April 1947, so the memory is that of a three-year-old child. We went on visiting my grandmother though, and so my further memories of the Lincoln Road Peacehaven are clear. The Peacehaven sign on the gate, a mānuka summerhouse on the lawn (Dick again), a plum tree with its attendant thrush, and Florence sitting on a padded chair, an Edwardian figure with her long dresses, lace, and her blouse clasped at the neck with a cameo brooch. Florence remained at Peacehaven after her husband's death, and with each of my parents' visits, a black-booted foot would emerge from under the long dress, a pair of hands would be offered downward to steady me as I straddled the boot which then begin to swing – 'Geoffrey John, Geoffrey John, Hold your horse while I get on.' Until she too dies, aged 90. During these Henderson years my mother Dawn Chapple and Moss's mother Lyndahl Gee became close buddies. * The year is 1960. I'm 16 and it's been 12 years since my own father, Geoffrey Arnold Chapple, died at 44. Dawn and I now live with Jack Abbott, the main builder for Group Architects, and the two of them have used money from the sale of our small Henderson house to design and build a larger house in the Waitakeres. The house has wide verandahs on three sides. Two dogs stretch out there in the sun, and the land below slopes steeply away so that on two sides the verandahs overhang the Waitakere bush. Inside, the house is open plan, with a floor of waxed rata, and walls that showcase the differing native timbers. On the rimu wall, above the piano, hangs a huge reproduction of the Rouault portrait The Old King. Peacehaven 1944. Back row L to R: Dawn Chapple, Lyndahl Gee, Florence Chapple (Grandmother) Rev James Chapple (Grandfather), Ray Fergus. Front: Geoffrey Arnold Chapple (Geoff Chapple's dad) holds Bronwen, (Geoff's sister). Geoff Chapple is in utero. Moss would visit us here, and I'll have my first clear positional memory of him. The house is not exactly a salon, but some interesting people pass through. Whenever Moss called in he'd flick through our collection of vinyl LP records until he found it, placed it, and we'd fire up the turntable, its swinging arm counterbalanced sufficiently to drop the stylus and its diamond needle feather-light onto the vinyl. Two large speakers, each with a slowly pulsing black woofer and a minutely vibrating central tweeter, then gave hi-fidelity voice to the actor Marius Goring reading a translation of Garcia Lorca's 1933 lecture on art's deepest, most elusive source, The Theory and Play of the Duende. The lecture names great European art from the tail-end of the Enlightenment to Modernism. Music, poetry, dance, writing – any art form is open to duende, and Lorca's poetic flourishes are hammered out further by the actor's brio, and the sweeping arpeggios of a flamenco guitar as he unrolls his thesis: that art emerges through one or other of three arches. The muse in her robe attends the first arch – she's a prompt. The angel with her steel wings presides within the second arch – she grants breakthroughs. But the third arch is empty, a shuddering death-inflected portal where the duende is in play, where the artist is locked in a struggle with the creator on the edge of some dark pit and the unceasing winds that blow through the arch and across that artist's head carry the odour of transfiguration, of the Medusa's veil, of a child's saliva and crushed grass. Our house on any Saturday catered for various Westie drop-ins, and so there'll be four or five people sitting on a grey divan against the kauri wall, maybe with a glass of Babich red, leaning back on the big square cushions and suddenly listening, like it or not, to Lorca. The lecture references artists from Picasso to Bach, names you'd know and that draw nods and smiles from the divan people. All but Moss. I see him listening in the same way I've seen musicians sometimes listen when one of their number is onstage, and the other sits amidst the audience, not head nodding and foot tapping to the beat like the audience at large, but withheld from such a simple stimulant, and listening further in. Finally, as the needle starts scratching away on the LP's exit groove, Moss gets to his feet and murmurs a more down-to-earth Kiwi version of the third arch – probably not directly to me, but quietly, to whomever was listening and I was, for he's the only one who ever said anything memorable about that crazy record: 'You go down to where the bones are.' * The Losers (1959), Maurice Gee's most famous short story is inflected with death. It's a noir masterpiece. As night falls, the horse Royal Return, owned by the newly-engaged couple Connie Reynolds and the ex-jockey Stan Philpott, is being driven away from a race meet. Royal Return has failed to win or place. The slowly building climax that follows is paced at exactly the speed of Connie's slow realisation of what Stan is up to. She doesn't know that Stan has been desperate for a win back there in the Juvenile Handicap, that he needs money to pay a big tax fine, may not even know that the horse is insured, but she does know he's on edge. The front of the Oldsmobile lifts, responding to the drag of the float behind, lending a lightness to her fiancé's hands on the steering wheel – standard stuff, but she also sees he's more than usually aware of the car's every tug and pull of the float, and she starts to concentrate also. After a while she feels the float begin to dip a little, to sway. She asks Stan if there's something wrong, and he turns on her with an angry denial. Around then the float sags heavily at the bottom of a hill and she hears a faint scream, and then a scrape. The float is now rattling along, louder somehow, and rather than slowing down, Stan is speeding up along the flat until Connie starts yelling at him, tugging at his arm with enough force to drag the car to the roadside. They stop on the main highway to Auckland. Racehorse owners and their trainers and jockeys driving home from the race pull in behind. They prowl the float, look inside, recoil, and know exactly what Stan has done. He's soon almost as wrecked as the horse's legs – slumped at the roadside in a sea of contempt as the small crowd begins to search out a rifle to put the moaning beast in the float out of its misery. This is the horror at the centre of The Losers but nor is the story confined just to that centre. We've already been privy to conversations at the trackside Commercial Hotel that expose a sleazy racecourse world. A bored older woman acknowledges to herself a loss of compassion for a younger woman's – Connie's – doubts about her new relationship. But we've eavesdropped too on corrupt owners massaging the tote, complicit jockeys, been told of trainers with two stop watches, all the tricks of the trade. Everyone is flawed, and then in the aftermath of the horror we eavesdrop again on brutal and bullying conversations, but within the departing cars this time. We see a traumatized Connie as she blindly flees north on foot, illuminated by headlights of an approaching horse-owner's car. But within that car we hear the driver, despite his wife's entreaties, bluntly refuse to pick her up. A second horse-owner's car also overshoots Connie, but this time a wifely insistence forces the driver to back up and take Connie aboard. We're then privy, though, to that driver's feeling of revulsion as his wife tries to comfort the sobbing woman, and his relief when, in the middle of nowhere, Connie asks them to stop and let her out into the darkness. Losers all. This story was published in Landfall (1959), and Moss's next short story was Schooldays (1960), published in Mate. It's nowhere close to The Losers but it makes it into a few anthologies, and its provenance is personal to my mother Dawn, and me. I'd been refused entry to a Henderson High School dance for wearing black stove-pipe trousers, a striped shirt with the collar turned up, and the crepe-soled shoes commonly known as 'Brothel Creepers'. The shoes were on loan from my mother as a special favour to add to my magnificence that night, but I got no further than the assembly hall door, was adjudged a bodgie by prefects on guard there, and refused entry. My mother wrote a complaint to the headmaster, and the following week the phone rang in our Waitakere house. Dawn was in the shower but rushed to answer, grabbing a towel as she went. Stood dripping in the kitchen then, naked but for the towel, listening to a former New Zealand Army Major, Henderson High School's headmaster, Alf Woolcott, explaining the details of the school's dress standard, and why it was important for every school pupil to conform. The circumstances of that phone call made their way to Moss, no doubt through Dawn's good friend Lyndahl Gee, Moss's mother. Soon after, there was a more compelling event. I was part of a loose group that'd held out against another school rule – boys' hair was not to overlap the school uniform's grey shirt collar. School prefects policed the rule and were duly ignored until two prefects grabbed a 5th former, Ivan Reid, a surly, handsome boy, held him down and cut off his black locks. Word spread rapidly amongst us, and throughout the lunch-hour we paraded our martyr, shouting indignation and revenge left and right to the startled pupils lunching beside the class wing pathways. Moss asked me for details, then mixed the separate incidents into Schooldays. Gee's first novel, The Big Season (1962) These are Moss's apprenticeship years, for he already knows there's a story waiting, far beyond the compass of any short story. As yet it has no name, but he knows that he'll need the more complex skill set of a novelist to write it. There'll be novels to come, but they're only way-points to the destination. The big book will be based around the Chapples, so if that's where things are headed then maybe let's ring the bell right now for the opening rounds of this longer saga. Let's begin with a quote from Blind Road, one of the three short memoirs collected in the book Memory Pieces: 'Chapple: the name has the sound of a cracked bell. It rang through my childhood, and I noticed the flaws only as I grew older. For my mother the note was always pure.' A cracked bell? Moss! What have the Chapples ever done to you that warrants this challenge to the lustre of the family name? Let's pause right there and have a further look at the family. At the way the family has honoured social progress, progressive religion, truth itself. We've already saluted some of the 14 children fathered by the Reverend James Chapple and raised by their mother Florence on a Minister's modest Presbyterian stipend. Time to talk more, though, of the Reverend Chapple's radical demands for social and religious reform. He'll remain hugely admired by his children as they grow, but, as they reach adulthood, not by all of them. He'll win both loyalty and admiration too from the parishioners of his St Andrews Church, but not by all of them. On one occasion a renegade few have chained the church gates against his entry, forcing him to go roadside with that Sunday's lesson. The Reverend's charisma did not, though, penetrate in the slightest the grim institutions that lay beyond this circle of admirers. He was seen as a traitor to both Church and State. In 1910 he chaired the Timaru meeting of the visiting English rationalist Joseph McCabe. His Timaru Presbytery accused him soon after of various heresies, and in 1910 forced his resignation. Then as war overtook the world in 1914, he preached as a newly aligned Unitarian Minister against conscription. Disgusted by New Zealand's same-day entry into the First World War alongside Britain, he bundled the entire family aboard a steamer to San Francisco, lectured there almost two years, but was dislodged once again as, in late 1917, America entered the war. Back home they went, most of them, but three of the older girls, romantically involved with young American men by then, stayed behind. Once back home, the Reverend continued his fiery anti-war lecturing, was charged with two counts of seditious utterance at a 1917 Greymouth meeting, found guilty, and sentenced in 1918 to 11 months jail in Lyttelton Prison. Are James and Florence that dread sterotype, a Holier Than Thou couple? Maybe in 1893 when they first arrived in Bluff from Australia as Salvation Army Officers you'd get away with that call, but if I cast around for a description at the time James Chapple was ordained in 1903 as the Presbyterian Minister of St Andrews Church near Timaru, I'd call them 'Christian Humanists'. Let me recite the Reverend's touchstones – A big black lectern Bible in 12-point font, chapter and verse. Underlinings throughout, double underlinings, annotations on most pages in inks of various colours, making plain the visits and revisits of a restless intelligence. Occasional cross reference to link Biblical wisdoms to what the Reverend called 'the wider church of literature'. As in English lit – selected poems of Browning, Wordsworth, John Donne. North American lit – Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, the essays ofRalph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, the Cosmic Consciousness tome ofRichard Maurice Bucke. On into the domains of science – Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species, also – let's defang it a little by calling it foundational sociology – Karl Marx's Das Capital, and then, with Engels, The Communist Manifesto, and finally Edward Carpenter's 1908 book The Intermediate Sex and his uncompromising pamphlet Homogenic Love – No. Strike those last two references. The youngest of the 14 Chapple children certainly read and re-read them. My Uncle Aynsley, sitting in a trailer park at Palm Springs in 1992, told me that his father caught him reading the Carpenter book in the porch at the family's Henderson home, and was 'displeased'. So, a subtraction there, but let's include as a kicker, the word, occasionally glimpsed in the Chapple commentaries – 'vastation', a literary noun now vanished, but with a certain weight still – the sudden rush through the mortal frame of a thoroughgoing, vast and purifying energy. But the larger point is this. Once humanism enters the ring, then I'm sorry, but the Reverend and whoever within the family chose to read across even a few of those texts probably actually were Holier Than Thou and the only way to deal with them was to learn from Lyndahl's husband, Len Gee, who loved race horses, the tote, was an excellent amateur boxer, a first-rate builder and provider, and to turn away as Len did, throw your hands sideways to cast them off, as Len did, and mutter, as Len did – 'The bloody Chapples'. So there it is. The Bloody Chapples. Len the sceptic and Lyndahl the dreamy 11th child who's grown to adulthood imbibing the Chapple credo of integrating science into religion and equality into social relationships. She for whom the bell sounds only pure notes. To this couple will be born, on August 22, 1931, their second son, Maurice Gee. He was raised by Lyndahl to see his grandmother as a kind of saint. Florence Chapple treadling into the night to make their clothes, figuring out which hand-me-down dress goes to which daughter, solving all the internecine squabbles, making sure the boys milk the cow, and mound the potatoes along each row, then supervise or take over the peeling, quartering and casting of them into the big iron pot. As Moss grows up, Lyndahl will tell him the story from the first weeks of the Reverend's imprisonment, for she's just a hungry 11 year-old back then, waiting at the table with three other younger children while Florence takes too long to stir the stew. Florence, unable yet to turn around and serve her youngest children from that big iron pot. Florence, crying into the stew. Moss was also raised by his mother to revere, as Lyndahl herself did, the Reverend James Chapple's intellectual fight for social and religious reform, and maybe you can say he was born into a trap. The reverence contrasts with Len Gee's name for the Reverend Chapple – 'old Jimmy', though never to his face. The Reverend's emphasis on the spiritual journey from man to Man contrasts also with Len teaching Moss how to beat someone, man to man in a fist fight. Moss responds well though to his father's rough and tumble approach. He's no sissy, and as he grows up will be vice-captain of the First XV at Avondale College, also a Waitemata Rugby Club player, and he'll be drafted from there to become a Fifth Grade Auckland Rep for boys 16 and under. The Reverend James Chapple, the model for Maurice Gee's classic novel Plumb But let's forget Len for the moment, or at least reduce him to a catalyst rather than a primary cause of Moss's gradual disenchantment with the Chapples. For one thing, they're doing that to themselves. Moss can plainly see that far from inhabiting the empyrean heights of the spirit, many of his aunts and uncles are fagging away and drinking the purple wine with the best of them. For another, the Reverend James himself disappoints the young Moss on three separate occasions. The women at Peacehaven have checked the cage trap, and yes there's a rat inside going crazy, but no one wants to drown it in the creek. The Reverend Chapple arrives and doesn't want to either, so hands the cage to young Moss, and tells him go to the back hill boundary and set it free. Moss does, and watches the rat run straight back downhill towards the Peacehaven orchard. In Blind Road he'll recall his younger self – he'd be no older than eight – already thinking the Reverend Chapple is 'useless'. Nor did the grandfather, in the young Moss's opinion, adequately punish Moss and his two brothers for using breadcrumbs to lure their grandfather's tame sparrow to its death in a mouse trap. Fined sixpence from their pocket money. Told to collect stamps for a month for the old man's stamp collection. Moss was outraged. His grandfather had trained the bird to eat from his hand. Such a paltry response to such a cruel death. The third was far more serious, and plenty has already been made of it in previous writings about Moss. After years of trying, he beats his grandfather at draughts. We're now in the summerhouse at Lincoln Road. He jumps his grandfather's last two pieces, stands up, rattles the vanquished men in his hand, turns to his grandpa and I quote this moment of combined victory and disillusion from Blind Road: 'His face – perhaps it's time and imagination – darkened and shrank. 'I let you win that one,' he said . . . 'And I knew he was lying.'' Moss doesn't date this moment, but he's older now, pre-pubescent, and, forget the draughts and that disillusion. At this point also there's something more important, his own sense of self is gradually becoming incoherent. In Blind Road, Moss defines himself as partly a 'rowdy active' child, but also as a 'quieter stiller' child. That division seems something of a match for his later description of his mother Lyndahl as 'both earthy and transcendent.' He liked her earthy qualities – they chimed with the rowdy active child. But her transcendence of whatever stripe went straight into the quiet still child. 'My mother', he says, 'had access. When she struck a note, it echoed there.' The righteous echoes. Blind Road records that the 12 year-old Moss mopes for a week, can still break into sobs, days after seeing a film based on the true story of a British nurse, Edith Cavell, court-martialled for helping allied soldiers escape occupied Belgium during the first World War, and shot by German firing squad. Moss sees his mother seemingly pleased by this sensitivity. It helps fix in his mind the image of Edith Cavell – as played by an actress – as a beautiful, soulful and pure woman. His mum's approval goes on resonating inside the quiet still child. The sensitivity compounds. All woman become beautiful, soulful and pure. The sinister echoes. When Moss the enthusiastic young reader of war stories in a Chums Annual recounts to his mum how a well-thrown British hand grenade causes the German Private Schmidt's head 'to part company from his shoulders', Lyndahl reacts with horror. Fair enough, but that horror echoes inside the quiet still child as a guilt that will resonate on and on as he picks across other internal thoughts that might cause his mother pain. There's nothing in Blind Road that links these distorting effects to any rigidity within the Reverend's religious or humanist teaching. The nearest anyone got to doctrine, Moss writes, was once or twice 'God wants you to be clean and pure, your body is a kind of temple where he lives.' Moss loved his mother, and writes, 'I belonged to her, and she to me.' His mother's reactions gained immediate traction within the 'quieter, stiller' child and expanded from there, but I'll leave it to him to describe, also from Blind Road, how the quiet still child starts to participate and invent': 'I made restrictions and imperatives for myself using her feelings and beliefs as material. If she'd seen my unhappiness she would have been filled with grief, while my twisted view of right behaviour would have appalled her.' Some of this pre-pubescent stuff is complex. After the hormones cut in it's pretty simple. Here's Maurice with his victorious Auckland Seventh Grade rep team for boys of 16 and under returning by bus from an away match against Kaipara. The Auckland team has won and the home-bound busload starts up singing. The singing turns dirty. Why doesn't the coach stop them? thinks Maurice. He's the team's left winger, and he's scored two of the tries, he's happy, but now the singing triggers an all-too-familiar arousal. That bright finger-wagging layer in his brain says stop, the revved-up limbic system underneath says go. And this thing hoists upright and won't go away. When he exits the bus he'll be covering his groin with his gear bag. No-one must see. Or know. The same terrible problem in bed at night – worse. No. Yes. No. It's appalling, but he can't stop it, Yes. The long, newly hairy, anthropoidal arm reaching down, and when it's all over he's adrift and isolated in the shame that's called, in the third novel he'll later write –'Presbyterian, dong-beaters guilt.' Two further things happen that are relevant. This same 16 year-old discovers Dickens and within a single year reads every Dickens novel, so many, so fast that his English teacher at Avondale College tells him, when he sees a written list, that he's lying. Even when he's in his 80s, and writing the Blind Road memoir, Moss remains furious about this, and alerts any other teacher who might be listening out there – 'that a teenager in a feeding frenzy gulps like a shark'. Indeed, I'd say that Dickens' characters fit his mental world like a glove. Dickens, whose characters are rich in contradiction, both good and bad. Yes. Characters whose virtues and vices are extreme. Yes. Who act within ominous atmospheres. Yes, his mother has hurried him away along the Henderson Creek pathway, away from the Depression-era swagman bathing himself in a fresh-water pool. The swagger's black gaze following them as they go. He has seen the sliding of the eels. Has seen a man keen to impress his girl-friend by bouncing high on the diving board at Falls Park and jack-knifing into the tidal salt water. Breaking his neck, hauled ashore, and while others rush off to get the Police, it'll be Moss alongside the man, watching him start to die. A Marti Friedlander of Maurice Gee, late 1950s In 1948 his Mother Lyndahl sorts through the Reverend Chapple's now vacant study, and brings home a volume, lettered on the spine in gold, of Robert Browning poetry. A teenage Moss puzzles over Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. When the young knight rides up to the dark tower and blows a challenge on his horn, who is he challenging? He answers the question in Blind Road: '. . . . and slowly I came to understand, that what must emerge was Roland's other self, the evil that lies sleeping in us all, and that was what he must challenge and must fight. This bleak understanding satisfied me. So I began to break free from the trap that held me.' If the quote is read in context, that breaking free includes all the other literature he's now reading, not just Childe Roland. Nonetheless it's good to have the dark tower out in the open. The sleeping evil with one eye suddenly snapped open – it's a dominant theme in his work. When I was prepping an on-stage interview with Rachel Barrowman on her then just-published Maurice Gee: Life and Work biography, at the 2015 Going West Festival, I asked her privately if she'd ever questioned Maurice as to any direct experience of evil. The Hilary Mantel autobiography was on my mind I guess. Mantel's recollection of her seven-year-old self going out to play in the yard, and being suddenly transfixed by a sprite watching from the Long Garden. No more than a shiver in the air, but it spots her from 50 yards away. Momentarily she registers a shapeless, formless evil, about the size of a two year-old child, but insolent with it, and about to try its luck for, within the space of a thought, it jumps inside her, and the 7-year old Hilary is ever after changed, becoming a doomy girl. Rachel hadn't asked Moss that question – and so I didn't ask it onstage. Yet it seemed relevant. He keeps reading the literature, and is stabilised by it, his puritanical and sexual problems unsolved but, as he writes, 'I began to open out my life and confine my troubles to a smaller space.' I'd believe that this thirsty reading is what gave Moss the necessary vocabulary to reach down into that smaller troubled space, and, with insight and intention, to start wrenching himself free there too. Over the decades ahead, to write it out of himself. I'd believe also that the evil he makes so much of with Childe Roland is not a theological evil, but the human capacity for cruelty. He's seen cruelty in himself at Falls Park where his group finds a fat boy with his eye to a hole in the girls' changing room, and Moss joins other boys to push the fattie, jeering, punching his arms, over and over, out of Falls Park and along Edmonton Road until finally stopped by a passing truck driver. The fat boy becomes The Fat Man (Viking 1994)the controversial Junior Fiction winner at the 1995 Aim Children's Book Awards. Moss. Writing it out of himself. In January 1961 Moss set sail for London on the Castel Felice. The trip was partly time out to assess his tumultuous relationship with Hera Smith, a nurse, and she saw him off holding Nigel, their 15-month-old child. He was sailing on the New Zealand Literary Fund's dime, his reputation still riding high on the success of The Losers, now published by Hutchinson of London in a new anthology of New Zealand writing. He was bringing to that same publisher the manuscript of The Big Season (1962) a novel based around the rugby culture of a small New Zealand town. He planned to stay a year, and mixed with various Kiwi ex-pats in Europe and the United Kingdom, had two or three 'desultory' love affairs, also three sessions of psychotherapy at a London psychiatric hospital. In December he was awarded the Literary Fund's Scholarship in Letters, £500, which funded a longer stay As Moss turned back towards New Zealand in April 1962, Kevin Ireland, a loyal friend to Gee, wrote to Maurice Shadbolt his own summary of their friend's time in London: 'He has a wonderful way of turning what you or I would call having a good time into high personal tragedy – tragedy that to anyone else appears more like high comedy. If there is a heaven for the misunderstood then M.G.G. will be right in the front row of the choir.' A Jane Ussher portrait of Kevin Ireland, Gee's lifelong friend There's no malice in Kevin, only a kind of robust delight, but on Moss's behalf I'd spin the same thing a different way with a quote that lets in a bit more air. It's from the poet Rainier Rilke's self-inserted novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: 'I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of. Everything passes into it now. I don't know what happens there.' There's an alchemy in good art that's difficult to define. Maurice Gee's novels have a few examples of self-insertion too. It's worth looking up Ellie and the Shadowman where Ellie is sizing up 'Neil' as a viable partner and tries to assess his underlying technique – whether his novels work by cunning placement, or a trick of words, or his cleverness in pushing the story on. She starts to question him, not least because she senses his ignorance over a wide variety of the world's normal skills. 'I do research, he answers. Afterwards though, not before, unless I have to. But the things that made her shiver, sometimes with fear, then with delight, in what he wrote did not come from research. Or from normal intelligence . . . ' There's a 10-year interregnum now, between Hutchinson of London publishing his second novel, A Special Flower (1965), and 1975 when he finally decides to scale up the writing project that's lain fallow for 20 years, and that has sat as, he told his biographer Rachel Barrowman, 'a kind of a lump that existed at the back of my skull.' By the late 1960s he's working as a research assistant at the Turnbull Library preparing for a library diploma course. He meets a fellow researcher, Margareta Hickman, a vivacious woman he'll marry in July 1970. Later that same year their first child, Emily, is born in Napier where Moss is now Head Librarian. After on-going rows with the Chairman of the Library Committee, though, he resigns. Abigail, their second child, is also born in Napier just before Maurice finishes working out his notice at the library. In September 1972, the family shifts to Auckland. The library diploma, a short post-grad course for he already has an M.A. in English, is a meal ticket to cover off the uncertain returns of a writing career. He's now a moderately selling New Zealand author, but his royalties on sales in both the UK and New Zealand don't cover the monthly payments of a big mortgage, nor support a young family. Moss tries to settle as a librarian at the Auckland Architecture School, but the head librarian drives him nuts, and finally he lands a job as deputy librarian at the Auckland Teachers' College. At last, the right people around him, prospects for promotion, and the chance as before to write at night while retaining a guaranteed wage. On offer here was a secure career. For life, and yet – there's still that lump. It's a novel to beat the band. Well, possibly it is, but he knows that writing it will take all his skills. So also, all of his time. The interregnum, though, keeps flexing in favour of a risky decision. His ongoing anxiety about his son Nigel is about to resolve. The tumultuous years of the young Nigel Gee being pulled from New Zealand to disappear in Australia with his mother, of Maurice trying to track him down there like any dogged gumshoe detective, have finally ended in 1973. Nigel, now 13, is back in New Zealand and settling in with Len and Lyndahl, the grandparents who've become, in effect, his parents, enrolling him at Takapuna Grammar School. And the other thing. Conjugal love suits Moss. He's relaxing for the first time into a binding relationship. He loves it. Loves her. And the two Napier-born kids. Redheads. Marvellous. Too, the arc of his literary career is still rising. The leading British publisher, Faber and Faber, has taken his third novel, the psychological thriller In My Father's Den (1972), and Auckland University Press has agreed to publish his first collection of short stories, A Glorious Morning Comrade (1975). That same year, Maurice gets word that Faber and Faber has accepted another novel, Games of Choice, for publication in 1976. He's also sent Faber and Faber a story for early teens, about two red-haired children, Rachel and Theo, twins with telepathic skills. They're recruited by Mr Jones, who looks like any old guy but in fact is an alien with shape-changing powers, one who's privy to an evil spawn under Auckland. Giant slug-like creatures, the Wilberforces, are colonising the city's unseen volcanic passages, slowly gaining the strength of numbers to rise and turn the city into mud. Only an alliance of Jones and the telepathic twins can stop them, and there's a lot at stake. The threat is global. After Auckland, the world. Readers' reports at Faber and Faber aren't enthusiastic though. He also sends the manuscript to his old New Zealand publishing buddy, Robin Dudding, now editor of the literary journal Islands, who writes back, calling the story 'grey, slimy and nasty. Every good writer has to write a bummer. I think this is your bummer. Sweep it under the bed.' Still, concludes Dudding, he's read it to his kids and has to say that those kids, all six of them, loved it. Whether Under the Mountain is part of the ascending arc is uncertain, but Gee retains his hope for it, sending the manuscript onward anyway, to Oxford University Press. He's also applied for that year's New Zealand Literary Fund Scholarship, worth $6000. So then, three things: personal pressures relieved – Margareta as mother to a new family, but with useful research skills to undertake part-time work – a literary reputation still on the rise. In my Father's Den has also trialled what is, for Maurice, a new structure – a present-day narrative with extended flash-backs into the past. If the past hides some simmering secret it can suddenly converge onto the present-day narrative with explosive force. That same structure, surely, would be perfect, wouldn't it, to portray an ageing church minister, of some importance in the history of New Zealand Church and State? His beliefs then and now. His domestic relationships between his wife and children, then and now. And as past and present collide on the closing pages, a climax that might turn on what? The nature of evil perhaps. Or the nature of love perhaps. Or both. Part 2 of Geoff Chapple's memoir of Maurice Gee (August 22, 1931-June 22, 2025) will appear in ReadingRoom tomorrow (Wednesday July 23). Jennifer Ward-Lealand will read Schooldays, the Maurice Gee short story about his cousin Geoff Chapple, at an event in Auckland on August 7.
News18
2 days ago
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5 Luxe Escapes For The Perfect Monsoon Getaway
Monsoon travel: In destinations where time seems to pause and luxury is measured in shared glances, quiet moments, let romance find its rhythm and rain-soaked memory at a time As the skies open and the world slows down, the monsoon becomes more than just a season, it becomes a mood. A time to pause, reconnect, and indulge in shared moments that feel like scenes from a dream. This season, escape the ordinary and step into extraordinary experiences made for two, where mist-laced mornings, rain-drenched landscapes, and luxurious settings turn every getaway into a love story. From intimate alpine chalets and secluded island escapes to soul-soothing wellness retreats, these handpicked experiences promise not just travel but timeless memories for couples who crave meaning over material. Maldivian Majesty at JW Marriott Kaafu Atoll Island Resort Let the scent of warm rain and ocean mist guide you to this serene island retreat, where every moment feels intentionally curated. From the thatched-roof villas to overwater spa rituals, it's a place designed to help you slow down together. For the Couple: Begin with a quiet sunrise snorkel through coral gardens, followed by a private in-villa breakfast. Later, indulge in a couples' treatment at Spa by JW, and finish the day with a candle-lit vegetarian tasting menu at Riva – each course a celebration of shared taste and mood. Chic Island Mood at The Legian Seminyak, Bali Seminyak's famed coastline softens under the monsoon, and The Legian becomes a poetic oasis. Rain-kissed villas, frangipani-scented gardens, and a refined calm refresh the soul. For the couple: Begin with private sunrise yoga, then spa treatments using Balinese botanicals. Enjoy long lunches on the terrace, stroll through local galleries, and sip cocktails as rain drums on the roof—quiet moments made extraordinary. Colonial Elegance at The Grand Hotel, Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka High in Sri Lanka's 'Little England", the Grand Hotel is a wink to bygone romance – frosted windows, roaring fireplaces, and soft rain on the terrace For the couple: Settle into an Edwardian suite, sip tea in the Library Lounge, and wander among mist-wrapped gardens. Add a scenic bicycle ride or a train journey with the mountains in view, and come back to long dinners in the warm glow of Barnes Hall. The Gift of Experience: Moments That Matter Sometimes the most luxurious gift is time – uninterrupted and intentional. Whether it's a weekend road trip to a lush hill station, a spontaneous wine-and-dine experience, or a handwritten love note exchanged in a cabin tucked away in the woods – the memories you make together outlast any material possession. For the Couple: Choose presence over presents. Because what stays with us isn't what we unwrap, but what we experience together. In this season of soft rains and slower days, let your love story take center stage. These monsoon escapes aren't just getaways, they're intimate journeys that invite you to pause, reconnect, and rediscover each other. In destinations where time seems to pause and luxury is measured in shared glances, quiet moments, and unforgettable experiences, let romance find its rhythm and rain-soaked memory at a time. view comments Disclaimer: Comments reflect users' views, not News18's. Please keep discussions respectful and constructive. Abusive, defamatory, or illegal comments will be removed. News18 may disable any comment at its discretion. By posting, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
