It is 10.30am on a Saturday and the new Te Awhi Rito Reading Ambassador, writer Kate De Goldi, should, surely, still be in bed. Her friend, fellow writer and former neighbour, Lloyd Jones, wrote a piece about her in which he intimated that she spends almost her entire life in her bed, from which she receives visitors.
So I had a vision of her reclining in a sumptuous boudoir in a bed strewn with books and fancy pillows while wearing posh pyjamas. He described her as “lolling”.
“Oh, bloody Lloyd,” she says. “He’s such an exaggerator. Lloyd reckons that every time he came down I was lying on my bed, no matter what time of the day it was. But I wasn’t lolling. I was actually working. By reading.”
She doesn’t even own a pair of pyjamas. She wears old T-shirts. “I have been known to receive people in bed though.” I am very pleased to hear this because, otherwise, she is a disappointment.
“Well, I’m so sorry. I’ll try to think of some other bad behaviour.”
Bloody fiction writers. She might have been known to make up the odd thing herself. I was agog to know about great-uncle Curly’s scandal, which she mentions in the her lovely essay, Landscape and Memory, and which was supposed to have taken place in the 1940s.
Of course I was agog to know because who wouldn’t be?“ And the truth is, there was no disgrace, but I just used him as a character and imagined this disgrace, but I forgot that there was no disgrace.” In other words, she made it up. Anyone would think she was a bloody fiction writer.
She is, of course, a fiction writer, mainly, but not exclusively, of books for kids including the Lolly Leopold stories and ACB with Honora Lee, and books for young adults.
What she does is play with words for a living. In Eddy, Eddy there is a character called Brain who is inordinately fond of big words. Here are some: cruciferous, adumbrate, phlegmatic.
Man of many syllables
Brain is loosely based on her father, Ronald, whose parents emigrated from Italy to, of all places, the West Coast, near Greymouth. They never spoke fluent English. In Landscape and Memory she wrote: “I can still recall, driving into Greymouth, my rising excitement competing with a gathering anxiety at the thought of not being able immediately to understand my grandparents. It was an annual nervousness. Much like one’s intermittent experiences of Shakespearean vocabulary and syntax, it took some time to get the ear in, as it were, to become accustomed to Nana’s heavy accent, her limited English and to Grandad’s total lack of teeth, which seemed to complicate things still further.”
Her mother learnt to cook Italian food. That must have been quite exotic when meat and three over-boiled veges were the norm.
“It was, actually. And it did occur to me because I don’t reckon anyone else in my classes at primary school would have eaten garlic, because it just didn’t happen. It makes me wonder now if we stank.” On Friday nights her father would come home with what the family used to call “a stinky cheese”.
Her father made the study of English a lifelong pursuit. He was, like his daughter, a voracious reader. He became a lawyer. “So he had an excuse to use 27-syllable words every day of the week.” She, by the way, said in an earlier interview that he used “19-syllable words”. Bloody writers. They are all such exaggerators.
That sounds like somebody I’m talking to. “It’s totally where I got it from. He was completely in thrall to language all his life. He had a huge library of books and it was next to godliness for him, really.”
He once said to her: “‘Do you think you could actually like someone if they weren’t a reader?’ Which I found an astonishing thing for an adult to say to a young person but I knew what he meant.”
Her mother, Frances, was a professional musician ‒ the lead cellist in the orchestra that became the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra. She was also in a professional string quartet and ran a music school in Christchurch, the De Goldis’ home town, which Kate has returned to after 37 years in Wellington.
She and her two younger sisters all learnt instruments, which taught her, she believes, about the rhythm and cadence of writing.
We are talking about growing up in houses with books. I tell her about a heart-breaking RNZ interview, by John Campbell, years ago, with a young girl living in a van with her family. She loved books. She loved reading. Her greatest wish was to have a library. She read what books she could in the limited light. You don’t get an electric light source in a van. I think of her from time to time and wonder where she is now and hope that she has a room with her own library and an electric light.
The reason I was thinking of her now was because, as I clumsily attempt to explain to the new Reading Ambassador, we are having what could be called a privileged conversation. If you grow up with books, as we both did, you get a sort of head start, don’t you? We were both fairly crap at school, but we grew up with books and an electric light. The point, I suppose, is that neither of us knows what it is like to grow up in houses without books.
She knew what I meant. “Yeah, The Post wanted me to do a piece on what reading meant to me and my childhood. I’m hesitant because I know now that it was the extreme good fortune of a family, a very comfortable family, and parents whose lives had been touched by books. And I can think of one person right now who I know who was brought up in, I suppose you’d say, a dysfunctional family. They’re religious and most things about her life were supervised except for the library. Going to the library she read her way to a new way of being in the world. I think your point is very well made, Michele.”
It wasn’t but we both know what we mean. Neither of us wants to bang on about how well read we were as kids. For one thing, it’s kind of show-offy, isn’t it? For another, it makes us sound like smug little girls. I might have been; I don’t know about her. When actually it was, as she has just noted, extreme good fortune.
Who, by the way, knew that we had a Reading Ambassador, a role established by the National Library of New Zealand. Or that she is the third person to hold the title? “Well, this is one of the problems.”
Her role, she says, is in part to raise the profile of the role. “Partly through the media. Because I guess I talk about books, I want to find other means of talking about them in different media and we’re just sort of in the stages of strategising about this now.”
Book influencer
The role of the Reading Ambassador is to sell the reading of books as pleasure. A role De Goldi says she has been auditioning for over many years. She has been travelling to schools for years, reading to kids, talking to kids about reading. She has been talking about books on RNZ for, oh, about 100 years. She is 65, by the way, which she finds astonishing, as do I. She has a young, pixie-faced face and she has at times wildly bouncy hair. You could imagine her climbing a tree and reclining on a bough, reading, say, The Cow Who Fell into a Canal by Phyllis Krasilovsky or Millions of Cats by Wanda Gág.
They are two of the books she loved. We had played a game: I would tell her which books I read and loved as a child, and she would tell me hers. She is fun to play a game with. She is adept at locating the 6-year-old within. She has a boundless enthusiasm, as big as her hair, for books and talking about books and getting kids to read books.
Her own daughter was a keen reader until she reached high school and, “you know, becoming an adult and socialising was her preoccupation. And I remember once, in desperation, I offered to pay her to read during the holidays. Then I got over myself.” The daughter, now reading like mad again, phew, is 36; a son is 35. Her partner is the photographer Bruce Foster, who took the main picture of De Goldie.
A tall voice
Here is a question I know she just loves being asked: how tall is she? “I’m five foot, one and a half. I’ve never translated it to centimetres.” She must have grown taller then, because bloody Lloyd Jones again says she is five foot although he also says he is “adding an inch for kindness”.
He’s so mean, she says. We had a chat about being short because I’m also short. She said: “When you’re short there’s a slight tendency for certain types of men to, if not actually pat you on the head, figuratively pat you. Which I’ve had to experience more than once.” If we met I say, I would pat her on the head because, at five foot three and a quarter, I’d feel extremely tall standing beside her. She said, hardly sarcastically at all: “Yes, you hang onto that quarter.”
“After 20 years of talking to Kim [Hill] on the radio quite often people do recognise my voice and they’ll say, ‘Are you on the radio?’”
Then they’ll say: “‘Oh, you’re much shorter than I thought you’d be.’ And I thought, ‘Is my voice tall?’” I’m happy to say that her voice is tall. “Well, it’s loud.”
She wrote a book called The 10pm Question in which kids play a game: Which bird are you? “And I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I’d like to be a kingfisher because they’re sort of noble and watchful and beautiful.’ But my sister said, ‘No way. You’re a tūī.’ Lots of talking. I’m reasonably comfortable with public speaking and reasonably extrovert. But I do have a kind of introverted side as well.”
The loud tūī who would grow up to become a writer of much-loved books likes, fittingly, to sing. She sang in the children’s choir at church on Sundays. Her parents were devout Catholics. “But they were quite sort of ... what’s the word? They were thinking [Catholics]. They read a lot about their religion.”
She went to Our Lady of Perpetual Succour primary school in St Albans, Christchurch. She might have been a bit of a show-offy girl because she once said that she had to explain what succour meant to the other kids. She went to mass every Sunday. “I found it a mostly benign thing. All my relations were Catholic so that was kind of a norm. I remember going off to church on a Sunday and one of my parents’ friends was staying and I said, ‘Aren’t you coming to church?’ He said, ‘No I don’t believe in God.’ I was about 7 and I remember thinking ‘wow’.”
Does she believe in God? “I sort of feel that’s not really the question. I believe I value what reflection a community-worship situation gives you – a sort of meditative space. And I like the fact that, when I have had periods of going to mass, that I don’t think about myself. There is a kind of ritual that I’m deeply familiar with. And also there’s a lot of singing.”
When she does go to mass she still takes communion. She is what is known to “certain kinds of Catholics as a supermarket Catholic. Taking what I want”.
Which is what writers do. If she was a bird she wouldn’t be either a kingfisher or a tūī. She’d be a magpie, picking up glittering bits and pieces that take her fancy and turning them into magically sparkling writing.
It’s hard to think of a better qualification for a Reading Ambassador. It can’t hurt to be a bit show-offy about words either.