This week, the listener.co.nz published a story about Kiwi women war reporters, including the novelist Robin Hyde. It prompted some renewed discussion about Hyde’s life and times so we looked to our archives and found this story, where Sarah Catherall watched A Home in This World, a 2018 documentary about the Kiwi writer and journalist and her “secret son”.
Until now, the story of Robin Hyde’s secret son has been told only in writing, both about her life and in her own work. Now, at 87, the son gets to speak for himself. Derek Challis was the writer’s “illegitimate” child, born in secret in 1930, and smuggled in a basket on the ferry from Picton to Wellington. Some in Hyde’s family, including her own father, never knew he existed.
Challis’s perspective on the mother-and-son story gets a big-screen airing this month when a short documentary, A Home in This World, premieres in the Doc Edge Festival.
From his home nestled in bush in West Auckland, Challis tells viewers his birth mother had always dreamed of living in the bush, and that was one of her reasons for shifting to England when he was just seven years old. She hoped to finally make a decent living from her books, and return to buy a bush hideaway for the two of them.
By then, Challis was living with his Auckland foster parents, who eventually adopted him. A year after he talked with his mother for the final time on a park bench in Auckland Domain, Hyde died tragically in London, taking her own life after years of morphine dependency, depression, and periods in a mental hospital.
Born Iris Wilkinson in 1906 -- she adopted the name she had given to her first child, a son who had died shortly after his birth -- Hyde produced 10 books of poetry and prose, and countless unpublished writings. As a journalist, she wrote passionately about those living on the margins of society, a world she inhabited.
The film’s director, Juanita Deely, had been drawn to Hyde’s writing over the years, and resolved to find out more about her secret son.
Challis, who co-wrote the 2002 biography of his mother, The Book of Iris: A Life of Robin Hyde, says he now understands why his birth mother kept him a secret. “She was a well-known person by this time. She was quite a public figure because of her writing. Had it come out, it would have damaged her reputation. She would have lost her job. Women were fired if that happened. She was a single woman, with no background support from her family, who had to make her own way,” he says in the film.
“She had no accommodation, nothing ... that was a fairly hard grasp for a woman journalist in those days.”
Challis says he didn’t see much of his mother during his childhood, and was in foster care from age two. “Before she left for England, she spent most of the previous three years in the Avondale mental hospital [later Oakley, then Carrington] and it wasn’t considered a proper thing for a child to visit.
“When she went overseas, she was like a fairy godmother, because she would send me presents. I was very fond of my mum, but I didn’t have an intimate relationship with her.”
Her autobiographical writings left him a message: “For my son. I want that he should be loyal in friendship and gentle in love. And for his own life, bitter or sweet as it may be, the greatest gift I ask is courage.”
This article is from the New Zealand Listener’s archives and was first published in the May 19-25, 2018 edition. A Home in the World screened in the DOC Edge Festival in Wellington in 2018. Derek Challis died, aged 90, in 2021 but granted Juanita Deely permission to publish Hyde’s poems written especially for him. In 1934, then aged four years old, he had found a homemade book in his Christmas stocking. On the typed pages bound with pink ribbon were poems written for him by his mother. He treasured the gift and could recite the poems until his death. Hyde wished that the collection would be published ‘one fine day’. That wish was granted when Cuba Press released The Uppish Hen and Other Poems in 2023.
