BARBARA EWING
Delver into her own diaries
Barbara Ewing once won a prize at an Auckland bar while out with her niece, in a competition she did not enter, for being ‘‘the best hippie’’ in the clothes shewas wearing anyway. She still sings songs from her adolescence— Rock Around the Clock, Crazy, andtutti Frutti. But for someone who still holds dear these things from her past, delving into her childhood diaries for her latest bookwas still, she says, a horribly difficult experience.
Ewing left her childhood home in Wellington for acting school in England in September 1962, having won a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She graduated with the 1965 gold medal, and has had a decades-long career on stage and screen, appearing in things from a one-woman show, Alexandra Kollontai (1989), about the only woman in Lenin’s cabinet, to Eastenders (2000). Since the mid-90s she has written nine successful novels, mostly historical fiction, and been translated into 12 languages.
Splitting her life between England and New Zealand, Ewing discovered early on that long-distance phone calls in the 1960s were expensive. The duration of a call was agreed upon beforehand, and operators, who connected the calls manually, would stay on the line to make sure the connection wasn’t lost.
Because of the expense, overseas calls were usually onlymade on the occasion of a birth, death, or heartbreak. But as well as the agreed-upon and paidfor minutes, operators allowed what was informally known as ‘‘oneminute crying time’’.
This is the anecdote withwhich Ewing opens, and titles, her new book, One Minute Crying Time, released on May 14. ‘‘It’s something real, it’s something about our history,’’ she says. ‘‘It’s not that I go around crying all the time, you understand, but that I felt it was a good title for what the book was.’’
And ‘‘what the book was’’ turns out to be a heartfelt, funny, selfaware, and sometimes painfully honest delve into the diaries of a young Ewing, with occasional entries reproduced word-for-word throughout the book.
When she answers the phone for our interview, it’s only half an hour after the prime minister has given the long-awaited announcement that the country will drop to alert level 2.
She’s warm, convivial, with a strong British accent and melodic voice. Although born in Wellington, she has spentmost of her adult life in the UK.
She’s in her 70s, holed up alone in a central Auckland apartment that she rents when she visits, a trip she tries tomake at least once a year. Back home in the UK, she says, there are more than 70 stairs to reach her apartment, and to make sure she’s still up to the challenge she’s been climbing the stairs outside the Auckland Art Gallery on her dailywalks around Albert Park.
This book, she says, was the hardest she’s written. Previous successes with historical novels did not prepare her for the pain and embarrassment shemet when writing her own history.
‘‘[The diaries were] a historical document. It just so happened that, instead of being about someone like William Gladstone, they were about me.’’
Reading childhood diaries isn’t something she recommends to the faint-hearted. ‘‘Don’t do it,’’ she says. ‘‘Don’t do it till you’re 100. It is extremely painful, and it’s so embarrassing.’’
They tell of a childhood in 1950s Wellington, and contain all the expected anxieties of teenage life – boys, friends, and school – and importantly, Ewing’s relationship with her mother.
‘‘One of the things that I wanted to make clear is how hard it was for women. Because there was nothing for them.’’
Women weren’t even allowed in bars, when the men would down tools at 4.35pm and trot blithely off to the pub. And they were certainly not thanked for their part in their husbands’ successes.
Ewing is herself a stepmother, and writes about her fear of turning out like her mother. She needn’t have worried.
Her father was a scholar, a teacher, and a ‘‘very, very niceman’’. He would bring her hot water bottles and cocoawhen she fought with hermother, and he never argued with hiswife in public.
‘‘But even he never mentioned his wife, never thanked her, which people do now automatically. It wasn’t the done thing. So in later years, I began to see how it was hard for her.’’
The diaries tell of yelling fights, lies about where she was going, and her struggle for an identity outside her mother’s expectations.
She carried them around the world with her, as one does a favourite childhood toy, loath to dispose of and kept with a sense of duty to their importance.
Much later, her eldest brother Andrew, who was a constant support to her throughout her life, told her he used to read those diaries – years after the time of writing – because he knew where they were kept.
The three siblings, Barbara, Andrew and Ross, shared a love of music which is apparent throughout the book, and palpable now through the phone. ‘‘Oh God,’’ she sighs. ‘‘Yes! Pop music! There’s not a lot about Bach, is there?’’
‘‘If you’re used to hearing – and I’m not going to sing well,’’ (she says, before proceeding to sing very well) – ‘Looove is amany-splendored thing’ and then you suddenly hear Tutti Frutti, well . . . youknow.’’
This newmusic was theirs, not their parents, she says. She and her brothers would go to the cinema, watch the newsreels, and practise the dances in their kitchen – often to their parents’ disapproval and the sound of breaking china.
It was the birth of rock and roll, and she’s carried a love for these songs ever since. ‘‘And what’s on the radio thisweek? Tutti Frutti. He’s only just died, days ago, Little Richard.’’
So many of her favourite songs beg to be quoted, but copyright means she has to be careful. ‘‘I think of Patsy Cline’s Crazy. When I saw it being used for a hamburger advertisement soon after they wouldn’t allow me to use it – it was thousands, thousands of pounds – I thought, what an insult to the song when it was mine,’’ she says, joking, but exasperated.
But one of the most captivating, heart-wrenching elements of the story, Ewing refuses to talk about. Her love affair with Mikaere Rangi, from her second-year language class at university, is a huge part of the book, and the catalyst for much joy, pain, and disagreement with her mother.
But when pressed formore, Ewing remains tightlipped on the other end of the phone. ‘‘If you tell your own story, you sometimes tell other people’s stories, and they may not want to tell them.’’
The story endswith her leaving New Zealand by ship, bound for England, where she would eventually earn her place as an actress on the world stage.
Acting was often her salvation. Throughout her childhood, sometimes against the wishes of her parents, she would attend acting classes, and it was a visit from her old acting teacher who resparked her love of theatre in her late teens, and got her back on stage.
She speaks with reverence of the feeling after a particularly effective performance. ‘‘The energy comes back from the audience to you, it is a particular kind of silence. And I heard it the first timewhen I heard Paul Scofield playing [King] Lear.
‘‘I have felt it myself when I’ve been on stage and it’s indescribable, it’s incredible. It’s the kind of thing that can only happen in the theatre.’’
The places Ewing writes of are much changed now, but anyonewho knows Wellington, or has walked the halls of the Hunter Building at Victoria University, will find something familiar in her story.
‘‘Oh, that lovely library,’’ she sighs. ‘‘It seems so weird now, when I saw it, how huge it was – but it was, as I was saying, so long ago.’’
Even her much-loved holiday spot at Maungatapu is long gone, bisected by the asphalt of Highway 29A that cuts through Tauranga. But some things remain constant. ‘‘I really love talking to young women and how they relate to the book,’’ she says.
‘‘I know people ofmy generation will relate to it, but I’ve talked to lots of younger women, and they all seem to relate.
‘‘So it doesn’t seem to matterwhat age you are. Being a woman is a thing that you have to navigate.’’
‘‘Don’t do it till you’re 100. It’s extremely painful, and it’s so embarrassing.’’ Ewing on reading her diaries