Memories Of Geeland

A memoir by the NZ literary great is at its evocative best when reflecting on his boyhood.

- Stephen Stratford

The first half of Maurice Gee’s memoir Memory Pieces, “Double Unit”, is a third-person account of his parents’ lives. The last section, “Running up the Stairs”, is about his wife Margareta’s life. In between is “Blind Road”, covering his childhood and youth. Maurice Gee: the man in the middle.

The 1930s Depression was hard on his parents: Len was on relief work; Lyndahl had a baby. They wintered in a shack on New Plymouth’s Ngmotu Beach and “crept away early one morning when there was no money for the rent”.

The story moves to familiar ground when they shift to Henderson or, as I think of it, Geeland: “There was no stove. Lyndahl cooked on a sheet of iron over a fire that burnt in a hole cut in a bank outside the back door.” Still, her Chapple family were nearby. The name “carried an almost mystical cachet” for Lyndahl. Not so much for her husband: “It’s not certain when Len began to think, Bloody Chapples, but he said it aloud now and then most of his married life, with amusement sometimes, and sometimes not.”