Write at home in Wellington

Returning to Wellington, the city of her birth, after an absence ofr 30 years, writer Kirsty Gunn began her Katherine Mansfield Project. In this extract from her BWB Text Thorndon book, Gunn explores a theme she shares with Mansfield: the importance of ho

Number 75 Tinakori Rd – where her family lived, home. For in all this writing, in her stories, journals, in her letters home, are ideas of being home ... Home obsessed Mansfield.

And from the beginning, as a schoolgirl in Thorndon, the best of her early stories show glimpses of a domestic world that was familiar, established, a place of richness and of intimacy and ease – all qualities she would find hard to claim again when she left New Zealand behind and went first to London then Europe.

Wellington was always so much more than just a setting for her.

It was a potent, imaginative site, an instant ‘‘go-to’’ zone for invention and narrative and characterisation and setting.

In an essay I wrote for the New Zealand Book Council’s magazine Booknotes, in response to the question ‘‘What is it like being back in Wellington?’’, I tried to find my own way of describing a home that was both a real and a remembered place, a house, a city that was real, but something too that was constructed solely of words and so might give up the light and texture of the original in a fresh way.

And Mansfield’s rooms and gardens and social life were all around me as I tried to ‘‘tell everything’’ ...

‘At home’ in Thorndon

From the moment I stepped inside the door at Randell Cottage, 14 St Mary St, Wellington, I felt like Iwas coming home. Everything about the place was familiar – from the New Zealand timber floorboards to the very positioning of the sash windows that looked out to a garden of native trees and hydrangeas.

I had spent Wairarapa holidays in cottages like this, with a coal range in the kitchen and a lean-to pantry with a tin roof that gave off to one side. Even the kinds of prints on the wall, the blue-and-white china in the pantry, were familiar.

And thiswas Wellington. Where Iwas born and brought up. Where I went to school and spent so much time ... Exploring the Botanic Gardens and having tea in the cafes along Tinakori Rd, walking over the hill down to Old St Paul’s to hear a recital that had been organised by my father or aunt, or sitting and dreaming in the Katherine Mansfield Gardens where my parents had been photographed on the day of their wedding.

For Thorndon has always been a central part of my life, existing as it does at the centre of Katherine Mansfield’s imagination – an imagination that inspires me more than any other possessed by a writer who, like so many, had to leave her home to be able to turn it into stories.

So there I was. Suddenly back, standing in the midst ofmy past – and though I had flown out of a London spring into a Wellington winter, going from one season to another, crossing countries and oceans and time zones that turned night into day, nothing felt unfamiliar about my arrival.

Instead, that moment of opening the front door was like opening the door that would lead into my own store of memories, coming to inhabit the place where my own fiction comes from and where the stories that I make begin.

For I have always returned to a remembered and imagined New Zealand at the beginning ofmy work. My stories mostly start with my perception – like a dream – of a certain place ... A beach, a lake, a hilltop town ...

And the particular qualities of that place are stirred by recollection, the scent of the bush after rain, say, or the particular kind of gold that sits on the yellow hills just before the sun goes down. And then the writing starts to find it out, that place, in detail.

There’s a kind of roaming around in my imagination, remembering, adding, changing ... Until memory and imagination are fused and I have somewhere for my characters to live.

A sense of place is at the heart of everything Iwrite – a character in itself, really, the land and hills and water, and the way the sky is, and how it feels to be out at night.

So coming to St Mary St, turning up the steep hill off Tinakori Rd with a raging southerly at my back, seeing up ahead of me the zig-zag to Wadestown cutting into the darkness of the bush and pine trees along the tops, leaving the car on such a rakish angle that you might think it would just roll straight down to the road again and go ploughing into someone’s verandah.

All these things I saw, I sensed, I remembered ... All at once upon arriving.

With this intensity of perception, stories started taking shape immediately in my mind. How could they not?

My notebook, upon the front of which is written – in my 7-yearold daughter’s hand, and with a picture of a bunny in glasses that she has drawn and stuck on above – ‘‘My Katherine Mansfield Project’’, immediately began to fill with ideas, images, thoughts.

‘‘Thorndon has always been a central part of my life.’’

Kirsty Gunn

Author of My Katherine Mansfield Project