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21-07-2025
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Maurice and me, by Geoff Chapple
In the 1940s and early 1950s my family lived in a modest house at the end of First Avenue, Henderson. We were one of seven Chapple families that had moved near or actually onto Peacehaven, the rambling five-acre property where the Reverend James Chapple and his wife Florence lived on Millbrook Road, Henderson. Our households, it strikes me now, can be described as circling loyally around the larger gravitational pull of Peacehaven. Four of the Chapple daughters including Lyndahl Gee (née Chapple, born in 1907, the 11th child) stayed within walking distance of the Peacehaven alma mater. As did three sons, including my father Geoffrey. Lyndahl's second son was born on August 20, 1931: Maurice Gee. Maurice was called Moss within the family. He would later describe Peacehaven in Double Unit, one of the three small memoirs collected in Memory Pieces (2018). Moss names the two youngest Chapple sons, Dick and my Uncle Aynsley, as the boys who tended the orchard and a large vegetable garden. A small creek ran past the garden, under a brick bridge leading to the cow paddock, round the side of a wide lawn and rose garden, then into a culvert and under Millbrook Road, to dive down a waterfall into Henderson Creek. Dick was the handyman who built the mānuka summerhouse on the lawn, milked the cow, painted the name 'Peacehaven' on a board then screwed it to a barred gate at the bottom of the drive. Moss often visited with Lyndahl, and though the Reverend James was usually in his study working on the next lecture, the child still had plenty of grandfather time. Around 1941 the two grandparents moved to a new Henderson property, a bungalow set in wide grounds 300 metres along Lincoln Road. Dick dutifully screwed the nameplate of the old Peacehaven onto a new gate, and the seven descendant families remained within walking distance and continued to visit. I was born in 1944, and remember sitting on the floor of the sunroom at the Lincoln Road Peacehaven, chubby legs extended no doubt to give me a firm base as I reached out to the long helix of a skillfully peeled apple descending gradually to my outstretched hand. Some time after that the grandfather hand dropped down in front, proffering a slice of the peeled apple. That's my only memory. The Reverend James Chapple died in April 1947, so the memory is that of a three-year-old child. We went on visiting my grandmother though, and so my further memories of the Lincoln Road Peacehaven are clear. The Peacehaven sign on the gate, a mānuka summerhouse on the lawn (Dick again), a plum tree with its attendant thrush, and Florence sitting on a padded chair, an Edwardian figure with her long dresses, lace, and her blouse clasped at the neck with a cameo brooch. Florence remained at Peacehaven after her husband's death, and with each of my parents' visits, a black-booted foot would emerge from under the long dress, a pair of hands would be offered downward to steady me as I straddled the boot which then begin to swing – 'Geoffrey John, Geoffrey John, Hold your horse while I get on.' Until she too dies, aged 90. During these Henderson years my mother Dawn Chapple and Moss's mother Lyndahl Gee became close buddies. * The year is 1960. I'm 16 and it's been 12 years since my own father, Geoffrey Arnold Chapple, died at 44. Dawn and I now live with Jack Abbott, the main builder for Group Architects, and the two of them have used money from the sale of our small Henderson house to design and build a larger house in the Waitakeres. The house has wide verandahs on three sides. Two dogs stretch out there in the sun, and the land below slopes steeply away so that on two sides the verandahs overhang the Waitakere bush. Inside, the house is open plan, with a floor of waxed rata, and walls that showcase the differing native timbers. On the rimu wall, above the piano, hangs a huge reproduction of the Rouault portrait The Old King. Peacehaven 1944. Back row L to R: Dawn Chapple, Lyndahl Gee, Florence Chapple (Grandmother) Rev James Chapple (Grandfather), Ray Fergus. Front: Geoffrey Arnold Chapple (Geoff Chapple's dad) holds Bronwen, (Geoff's sister). Geoff Chapple is in utero. Moss would visit us here, and I'll have my first clear positional memory of him. The house is not exactly a salon, but some interesting people pass through. Whenever Moss called in he'd flick through our collection of vinyl LP records until he found it, placed it, and we'd fire up the turntable, its swinging arm counterbalanced sufficiently to drop the stylus and its diamond needle feather-light onto the vinyl. Two large speakers, each with a slowly pulsing black woofer and a minutely vibrating central tweeter, then gave hi-fidelity voice to the actor Marius Goring reading a translation of Garcia Lorca's 1933 lecture on art's deepest, most elusive source, The Theory and Play of the Duende. The lecture names great European art from the tail-end of the Enlightenment to Modernism. Music, poetry, dance, writing – any art form is open to duende, and Lorca's poetic flourishes are hammered out further by the actor's brio, and the sweeping arpeggios of a flamenco guitar as he unrolls his thesis: that art emerges through one or other of three arches. The muse in her robe attends the first arch – she's a prompt. The angel with her steel wings presides within the second arch – she grants breakthroughs. But the third arch is empty, a shuddering death-inflected portal where the duende is in play, where the artist is locked in a struggle with the creator on the edge of some dark pit and the unceasing winds that blow through the arch and across that artist's head carry the odour of transfiguration, of the Medusa's veil, of a child's saliva and crushed grass. Our house on any Saturday catered for various Westie drop-ins, and so there'll be four or five people sitting on a grey divan against the kauri wall, maybe with a glass of Babich red, leaning back on the big square cushions and suddenly listening, like it or not, to Lorca. The lecture references artists from Picasso to Bach, names you'd know and that draw nods and smiles from the divan people. All but Moss. I see him listening in the same way I've seen musicians sometimes listen when one of their number is onstage, and the other sits amidst the audience, not head nodding and foot tapping to the beat like the audience at large, but withheld from such a simple stimulant, and listening further in. Finally, as the needle starts scratching away on the LP's exit groove, Moss gets to his feet and murmurs a more down-to-earth Kiwi version of the third arch – probably not directly to me, but quietly, to whomever was listening and I was, for he's the only one who ever said anything memorable about that crazy record: 'You go down to where the bones are.' * The Losers (1959), Maurice Gee's most famous short story is inflected with death. It's a noir masterpiece. As night falls, the horse Royal Return, owned by the newly-engaged couple Connie Reynolds and the ex-jockey Stan Philpott, is being driven away from a race meet. Royal Return has failed to win or place. The slowly building climax that follows is paced at exactly the speed of Connie's slow realisation of what Stan is up to. She doesn't know that Stan has been desperate for a win back there in the Juvenile Handicap, that he needs money to pay a big tax fine, may not even know that the horse is insured, but she does know he's on edge. The front of the Oldsmobile lifts, responding to the drag of the float behind, lending a lightness to her fiancé's hands on the steering wheel – standard stuff, but she also sees he's more than usually aware of the car's every tug and pull of the float, and she starts to concentrate also. After a while she feels the float begin to dip a little, to sway. She asks Stan if there's something wrong, and he turns on her with an angry denial. Around then the float sags heavily at the bottom of a hill and she hears a faint scream, and then a scrape. The float is now rattling along, louder somehow, and rather than slowing down, Stan is speeding up along the flat until Connie starts yelling at him, tugging at his arm with enough force to drag the car to the roadside. They stop on the main highway to Auckland. Racehorse owners and their trainers and jockeys driving home from the race pull in behind. They prowl the float, look inside, recoil, and know exactly what Stan has done. He's soon almost as wrecked as the horse's legs – slumped at the roadside in a sea of contempt as the small crowd begins to search out a rifle to put the moaning beast in the float out of its misery. This is the horror at the centre of The Losers but nor is the story confined just to that centre. We've already been privy to conversations at the trackside Commercial Hotel that expose a sleazy racecourse world. A bored older woman acknowledges to herself a loss of compassion for a younger woman's – Connie's – doubts about her new relationship. But we've eavesdropped too on corrupt owners massaging the tote, complicit jockeys, been told of trainers with two stop watches, all the tricks of the trade. Everyone is flawed, and then in the aftermath of the horror we eavesdrop again on brutal and bullying conversations, but within the departing cars this time. We see a traumatized Connie as she blindly flees north on foot, illuminated by headlights of an approaching horse-owner's car. But within that car we hear the driver, despite his wife's entreaties, bluntly refuse to pick her up. A second horse-owner's car also overshoots Connie, but this time a wifely insistence forces the driver to back up and take Connie aboard. We're then privy, though, to that driver's feeling of revulsion as his wife tries to comfort the sobbing woman, and his relief when, in the middle of nowhere, Connie asks them to stop and let her out into the darkness. Losers all. This story was published in Landfall (1959), and Moss's next short story was Schooldays (1960), published in Mate. It's nowhere close to The Losers but it makes it into a few anthologies, and its provenance is personal to my mother Dawn, and me. I'd been refused entry to a Henderson High School dance for wearing black stove-pipe trousers, a striped shirt with the collar turned up, and the crepe-soled shoes commonly known as 'Brothel Creepers'. The shoes were on loan from my mother as a special favour to add to my magnificence that night, but I got no further than the assembly hall door, was adjudged a bodgie by prefects on guard there, and refused entry. My mother wrote a complaint to the headmaster, and the following week the phone rang in our Waitakere house. Dawn was in the shower but rushed to answer, grabbing a towel as she went. Stood dripping in the kitchen then, naked but for the towel, listening to a former New Zealand Army Major, Henderson High School's headmaster, Alf Woolcott, explaining the details of the school's dress standard, and why it was important for every school pupil to conform. The circumstances of that phone call made their way to Moss, no doubt through Dawn's good friend Lyndahl Gee, Moss's mother. Soon after, there was a more compelling event. I was part of a loose group that'd held out against another school rule – boys' hair was not to overlap the school uniform's grey shirt collar. School prefects policed the rule and were duly ignored until two prefects grabbed a 5th former, Ivan Reid, a surly, handsome boy, held him down and cut off his black locks. Word spread rapidly amongst us, and throughout the lunch-hour we paraded our martyr, shouting indignation and revenge left and right to the startled pupils lunching beside the class wing pathways. Moss asked me for details, then mixed the separate incidents into Schooldays. Gee's first novel, The Big Season (1962) These are Moss's apprenticeship years, for he already knows there's a story waiting, far beyond the compass of any short story. As yet it has no name, but he knows that he'll need the more complex skill set of a novelist to write it. There'll be novels to come, but they're only way-points to the destination. The big book will be based around the Chapples, so if that's where things are headed then maybe let's ring the bell right now for the opening rounds of this longer saga. Let's begin with a quote from Blind Road, one of the three short memoirs collected in the book Memory Pieces: 'Chapple: the name has the sound of a cracked bell. It rang through my childhood, and I noticed the flaws only as I grew older. For my mother the note was always pure.' A cracked bell? Moss! What have the Chapples ever done to you that warrants this challenge to the lustre of the family name? Let's pause right there and have a further look at the family. At the way the family has honoured social progress, progressive religion, truth itself. We've already saluted some of the 14 children fathered by the Reverend James Chapple and raised by their mother Florence on a Minister's modest Presbyterian stipend. Time to talk more, though, of the Reverend Chapple's radical demands for social and religious reform. He'll remain hugely admired by his children as they grow, but, as they reach adulthood, not by all of them. He'll win both loyalty and admiration too from the parishioners of his St Andrews Church, but not by all of them. On one occasion a renegade few have chained the church gates against his entry, forcing him to go roadside with that Sunday's lesson. The Reverend's charisma did not, though, penetrate in the slightest the grim institutions that lay beyond this circle of admirers. He was seen as a traitor to both Church and State. In 1910 he chaired the Timaru meeting of the visiting English rationalist Joseph McCabe. His Timaru Presbytery accused him soon after of various heresies, and in 1910 forced his resignation. Then as war overtook the world in 1914, he preached as a newly aligned Unitarian Minister against conscription. Disgusted by New Zealand's same-day entry into the First World War alongside Britain, he bundled the entire family aboard a steamer to San Francisco, lectured there almost two years, but was dislodged once again as, in late 1917, America entered the war. Back home they went, most of them, but three of the older girls, romantically involved with young American men by then, stayed behind. Once back home, the Reverend continued his fiery anti-war lecturing, was charged with two counts of seditious utterance at a 1917 Greymouth meeting, found guilty, and sentenced in 1918 to 11 months jail in Lyttelton Prison. Are James and Florence that dread sterotype, a Holier Than Thou couple? Maybe in 1893 when they first arrived in Bluff from Australia as Salvation Army Officers you'd get away with that call, but if I cast around for a description at the time James Chapple was ordained in 1903 as the Presbyterian Minister of St Andrews Church near Timaru, I'd call them 'Christian Humanists'. Let me recite the Reverend's touchstones – A big black lectern Bible in 12-point font, chapter and verse. Underlinings throughout, double underlinings, annotations on most pages in inks of various colours, making plain the visits and revisits of a restless intelligence. Occasional cross reference to link Biblical wisdoms to what the Reverend called 'the wider church of literature'. As in English lit – selected poems of Browning, Wordsworth, John Donne. North American lit – Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, the essays ofRalph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, the Cosmic Consciousness tome ofRichard Maurice Bucke. On into the domains of science – Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species, also – let's defang it a little by calling it foundational sociology – Karl Marx's Das Capital, and then, with Engels, The Communist Manifesto, and finally Edward Carpenter's 1908 book The Intermediate Sex and his uncompromising pamphlet Homogenic Love – No. Strike those last two references. The youngest of the 14 Chapple children certainly read and re-read them. My Uncle Aynsley, sitting in a trailer park at Palm Springs in 1992, told me that his father caught him reading the Carpenter book in the porch at the family's Henderson home, and was 'displeased'. So, a subtraction there, but let's include as a kicker, the word, occasionally glimpsed in the Chapple commentaries – 'vastation', a literary noun now vanished, but with a certain weight still – the sudden rush through the mortal frame of a thoroughgoing, vast and purifying energy. But the larger point is this. Once humanism enters the ring, then I'm sorry, but the Reverend and whoever within the family chose to read across even a few of those texts probably actually were Holier Than Thou and the only way to deal with them was to learn from Lyndahl's husband, Len Gee, who loved race horses, the tote, was an excellent amateur boxer, a first-rate builder and provider, and to turn away as Len did, throw your hands sideways to cast them off, as Len did, and mutter, as Len did – 'The bloody Chapples'. So there it is. The Bloody Chapples. Len the sceptic and Lyndahl the dreamy 11th child who's grown to adulthood imbibing the Chapple credo of integrating science into religion and equality into social relationships. She for whom the bell sounds only pure notes. To this couple will be born, on August 22, 1931, their second son, Maurice Gee. He was raised by Lyndahl to see his grandmother as a kind of saint. Florence Chapple treadling into the night to make their clothes, figuring out which hand-me-down dress goes to which daughter, solving all the internecine squabbles, making sure the boys milk the cow, and mound the potatoes along each row, then supervise or take over the peeling, quartering and casting of them into the big iron pot. As Moss grows up, Lyndahl will tell him the story from the first weeks of the Reverend's imprisonment, for she's just a hungry 11 year-old back then, waiting at the table with three other younger children while Florence takes too long to stir the stew. Florence, unable yet to turn around and serve her youngest children from that big iron pot. Florence, crying into the stew. Moss was also raised by his mother to revere, as Lyndahl herself did, the Reverend James Chapple's intellectual fight for social and religious reform, and maybe you can say he was born into a trap. The reverence contrasts with Len Gee's name for the Reverend Chapple – 'old Jimmy', though never to his face. The Reverend's emphasis on the spiritual journey from man to Man contrasts also with Len teaching Moss how to beat someone, man to man in a fist fight. Moss responds well though to his father's rough and tumble approach. He's no sissy, and as he grows up will be vice-captain of the First XV at Avondale College, also a Waitemata Rugby Club player, and he'll be drafted from there to become a Fifth Grade Auckland Rep for boys 16 and under. The Reverend James Chapple, the model for Maurice Gee's classic novel Plumb But let's forget Len for the moment, or at least reduce him to a catalyst rather than a primary cause of Moss's gradual disenchantment with the Chapples. For one thing, they're doing that to themselves. Moss can plainly see that far from inhabiting the empyrean heights of the spirit, many of his aunts and uncles are fagging away and drinking the purple wine with the best of them. For another, the Reverend James himself disappoints the young Moss on three separate occasions. The women at Peacehaven have checked the cage trap, and yes there's a rat inside going crazy, but no one wants to drown it in the creek. The Reverend Chapple arrives and doesn't want to either, so hands the cage to young Moss, and tells him go to the back hill boundary and set it free. Moss does, and watches the rat run straight back downhill towards the Peacehaven orchard. In Blind Road he'll recall his younger self – he'd be no older than eight – already thinking the Reverend Chapple is 'useless'. Nor did the grandfather, in the young Moss's opinion, adequately punish Moss and his two brothers for using breadcrumbs to lure their grandfather's tame sparrow to its death in a mouse trap. Fined sixpence from their pocket money. Told to collect stamps for a month for the old man's stamp collection. Moss was outraged. His grandfather had trained the bird to eat from his hand. Such a paltry response to such a cruel death. The third was far more serious, and plenty has already been made of it in previous writings about Moss. After years of trying, he beats his grandfather at draughts. We're now in the summerhouse at Lincoln Road. He jumps his grandfather's last two pieces, stands up, rattles the vanquished men in his hand, turns to his grandpa and I quote this moment of combined victory and disillusion from Blind Road: 'His face – perhaps it's time and imagination – darkened and shrank. 'I let you win that one,' he said . . . 'And I knew he was lying.'' Moss doesn't date this moment, but he's older now, pre-pubescent, and, forget the draughts and that disillusion. At this point also there's something more important, his own sense of self is gradually becoming incoherent. In Blind Road, Moss defines himself as partly a 'rowdy active' child, but also as a 'quieter stiller' child. That division seems something of a match for his later description of his mother Lyndahl as 'both earthy and transcendent.' He liked her earthy qualities – they chimed with the rowdy active child. But her transcendence of whatever stripe went straight into the quiet still child. 'My mother', he says, 'had access. When she struck a note, it echoed there.' The righteous echoes. Blind Road records that the 12 year-old Moss mopes for a week, can still break into sobs, days after seeing a film based on the true story of a British nurse, Edith Cavell, court-martialled for helping allied soldiers escape occupied Belgium during the first World War, and shot by German firing squad. Moss sees his mother seemingly pleased by this sensitivity. It helps fix in his mind the image of Edith Cavell – as played by an actress – as a beautiful, soulful and pure woman. His mum's approval goes on resonating inside the quiet still child. The sensitivity compounds. All woman become beautiful, soulful and pure. The sinister echoes. When Moss the enthusiastic young reader of war stories in a Chums Annual recounts to his mum how a well-thrown British hand grenade causes the German Private Schmidt's head 'to part company from his shoulders', Lyndahl reacts with horror. Fair enough, but that horror echoes inside the quiet still child as a guilt that will resonate on and on as he picks across other internal thoughts that might cause his mother pain. There's nothing in Blind Road that links these distorting effects to any rigidity within the Reverend's religious or humanist teaching. The nearest anyone got to doctrine, Moss writes, was once or twice 'God wants you to be clean and pure, your body is a kind of temple where he lives.' Moss loved his mother, and writes, 'I belonged to her, and she to me.' His mother's reactions gained immediate traction within the 'quieter, stiller' child and expanded from there, but I'll leave it to him to describe, also from Blind Road, how the quiet still child starts to participate and invent': 'I made restrictions and imperatives for myself using her feelings and beliefs as material. If she'd seen my unhappiness she would have been filled with grief, while my twisted view of right behaviour would have appalled her.' Some of this pre-pubescent stuff is complex. After the hormones cut in it's pretty simple. Here's Maurice with his victorious Auckland Seventh Grade rep team for boys of 16 and under returning by bus from an away match against Kaipara. The Auckland team has won and the home-bound busload starts up singing. The singing turns dirty. Why doesn't the coach stop them? thinks Maurice. He's the team's left winger, and he's scored two of the tries, he's happy, but now the singing triggers an all-too-familiar arousal. That bright finger-wagging layer in his brain says stop, the revved-up limbic system underneath says go. And this thing hoists upright and won't go away. When he exits the bus he'll be covering his groin with his gear bag. No-one must see. Or know. The same terrible problem in bed at night – worse. No. Yes. No. It's appalling, but he can't stop it, Yes. The long, newly hairy, anthropoidal arm reaching down, and when it's all over he's adrift and isolated in the shame that's called, in the third novel he'll later write –'Presbyterian, dong-beaters guilt.' Two further things happen that are relevant. This same 16 year-old discovers Dickens and within a single year reads every Dickens novel, so many, so fast that his English teacher at Avondale College tells him, when he sees a written list, that he's lying. Even when he's in his 80s, and writing the Blind Road memoir, Moss remains furious about this, and alerts any other teacher who might be listening out there – 'that a teenager in a feeding frenzy gulps like a shark'. Indeed, I'd say that Dickens' characters fit his mental world like a glove. Dickens, whose characters are rich in contradiction, both good and bad. Yes. Characters whose virtues and vices are extreme. Yes. Who act within ominous atmospheres. Yes, his mother has hurried him away along the Henderson Creek pathway, away from the Depression-era swagman bathing himself in a fresh-water pool. The swagger's black gaze following them as they go. He has seen the sliding of the eels. Has seen a man keen to impress his girl-friend by bouncing high on the diving board at Falls Park and jack-knifing into the tidal salt water. Breaking his neck, hauled ashore, and while others rush off to get the Police, it'll be Moss alongside the man, watching him start to die. A Marti Friedlander of Maurice Gee, late 1950s In 1948 his Mother Lyndahl sorts through the Reverend Chapple's now vacant study, and brings home a volume, lettered on the spine in gold, of Robert Browning poetry. A teenage Moss puzzles over Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. When the young knight rides up to the dark tower and blows a challenge on his horn, who is he challenging? He answers the question in Blind Road: '. . . . and slowly I came to understand, that what must emerge was Roland's other self, the evil that lies sleeping in us all, and that was what he must challenge and must fight. This bleak understanding satisfied me. So I began to break free from the trap that held me.' If the quote is read in context, that breaking free includes all the other literature he's now reading, not just Childe Roland. Nonetheless it's good to have the dark tower out in the open. The sleeping evil with one eye suddenly snapped open – it's a dominant theme in his work. When I was prepping an on-stage interview with Rachel Barrowman on her then just-published Maurice Gee: Life and Work biography, at the 2015 Going West Festival, I asked her privately if she'd ever questioned Maurice as to any direct experience of evil. The Hilary Mantel autobiography was on my mind I guess. Mantel's recollection of her seven-year-old self going out to play in the yard, and being suddenly transfixed by a sprite watching from the Long Garden. No more than a shiver in the air, but it spots her from 50 yards away. Momentarily she registers a shapeless, formless evil, about the size of a two year-old child, but insolent with it, and about to try its luck for, within the space of a thought, it jumps inside her, and the 7-year old Hilary is ever after changed, becoming a doomy girl. Rachel hadn't asked Moss that question – and so I didn't ask it onstage. Yet it seemed relevant. He keeps reading the literature, and is stabilised by it, his puritanical and sexual problems unsolved but, as he writes, 'I began to open out my life and confine my troubles to a smaller space.' I'd believe that this thirsty reading is what gave Moss the necessary vocabulary to reach down into that smaller troubled space, and, with insight and intention, to start wrenching himself free there too. Over the decades ahead, to write it out of himself. I'd believe also that the evil he makes so much of with Childe Roland is not a theological evil, but the human capacity for cruelty. He's seen cruelty in himself at Falls Park where his group finds a fat boy with his eye to a hole in the girls' changing room, and Moss joins other boys to push the fattie, jeering, punching his arms, over and over, out of Falls Park and along Edmonton Road until finally stopped by a passing truck driver. The fat boy becomes The Fat Man (Viking 1994)the controversial Junior Fiction winner at the 1995 Aim Children's Book Awards. Moss. Writing it out of himself. In January 1961 Moss set sail for London on the Castel Felice. The trip was partly time out to assess his tumultuous relationship with Hera Smith, a nurse, and she saw him off holding Nigel, their 15-month-old child. He was sailing on the New Zealand Literary Fund's dime, his reputation still riding high on the success of The Losers, now published by Hutchinson of London in a new anthology of New Zealand writing. He was bringing to that same publisher the manuscript of The Big Season (1962) a novel based around the rugby culture of a small New Zealand town. He planned to stay a year, and mixed with various Kiwi ex-pats in Europe and the United Kingdom, had two or three 'desultory' love affairs, also three sessions of psychotherapy at a London psychiatric hospital. In December he was awarded the Literary Fund's Scholarship in Letters, £500, which funded a longer stay As Moss turned back towards New Zealand in April 1962, Kevin Ireland, a loyal friend to Gee, wrote to Maurice Shadbolt his own summary of their friend's time in London: 'He has a wonderful way of turning what you or I would call having a good time into high personal tragedy – tragedy that to anyone else appears more like high comedy. If there is a heaven for the misunderstood then M.G.G. will be right in the front row of the choir.' A Jane Ussher portrait of Kevin Ireland, Gee's lifelong friend There's no malice in Kevin, only a kind of robust delight, but on Moss's behalf I'd spin the same thing a different way with a quote that lets in a bit more air. It's from the poet Rainier Rilke's self-inserted novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: 'I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of. Everything passes into it now. I don't know what happens there.' There's an alchemy in good art that's difficult to define. Maurice Gee's novels have a few examples of self-insertion too. It's worth looking up Ellie and the Shadowman where Ellie is sizing up 'Neil' as a viable partner and tries to assess his underlying technique – whether his novels work by cunning placement, or a trick of words, or his cleverness in pushing the story on. She starts to question him, not least because she senses his ignorance over a wide variety of the world's normal skills. 'I do research, he answers. Afterwards though, not before, unless I have to. But the things that made her shiver, sometimes with fear, then with delight, in what he wrote did not come from research. Or from normal intelligence . . . ' There's a 10-year interregnum now, between Hutchinson of London publishing his second novel, A Special Flower (1965), and 1975 when he finally decides to scale up the writing project that's lain fallow for 20 years, and that has sat as, he told his biographer Rachel Barrowman, 'a kind of a lump that existed at the back of my skull.' By the late 1960s he's working as a research assistant at the Turnbull Library preparing for a library diploma course. He meets a fellow researcher, Margareta Hickman, a vivacious woman he'll marry in July 1970. Later that same year their first child, Emily, is born in Napier where Moss is now Head Librarian. After on-going rows with the Chairman of the Library Committee, though, he resigns. Abigail, their second child, is also born in Napier just before Maurice finishes working out his notice at the library. In September 1972, the family shifts to Auckland. The library diploma, a short post-grad course for he already has an M.A. in English, is a meal ticket to cover off the uncertain returns of a writing career. He's now a moderately selling New Zealand author, but his royalties on sales in both the UK and New Zealand don't cover the monthly payments of a big mortgage, nor support a young family. Moss tries to settle as a librarian at the Auckland Architecture School, but the head librarian drives him nuts, and finally he lands a job as deputy librarian at the Auckland Teachers' College. At last, the right people around him, prospects for promotion, and the chance as before to write at night while retaining a guaranteed wage. On offer here was a secure career. For life, and yet – there's still that lump. It's a novel to beat the band. Well, possibly it is, but he knows that writing it will take all his skills. So also, all of his time. The interregnum, though, keeps flexing in favour of a risky decision. His ongoing anxiety about his son Nigel is about to resolve. The tumultuous years of the young Nigel Gee being pulled from New Zealand to disappear in Australia with his mother, of Maurice trying to track him down there like any dogged gumshoe detective, have finally ended in 1973. Nigel, now 13, is back in New Zealand and settling in with Len and Lyndahl, the grandparents who've become, in effect, his parents, enrolling him at Takapuna Grammar School. And the other thing. Conjugal love suits Moss. He's relaxing for the first time into a binding relationship. He loves it. Loves her. And the two Napier-born kids. Redheads. Marvellous. Too, the arc of his literary career is still rising. The leading British publisher, Faber and Faber, has taken his third novel, the psychological thriller In My Father's Den (1972), and Auckland University Press has agreed to publish his first collection of short stories, A Glorious Morning Comrade (1975). That same year, Maurice gets word that Faber and Faber has accepted another novel, Games of Choice, for publication in 1976. He's also sent Faber and Faber a story for early teens, about two red-haired children, Rachel and Theo, twins with telepathic skills. They're recruited by Mr Jones, who looks like any old guy but in fact is an alien with shape-changing powers, one who's privy to an evil spawn under Auckland. Giant slug-like creatures, the Wilberforces, are colonising the city's unseen volcanic passages, slowly gaining the strength of numbers to rise and turn the city into mud. Only an alliance of Jones and the telepathic twins can stop them, and there's a lot at stake. The threat is global. After Auckland, the world. Readers' reports at Faber and Faber aren't enthusiastic though. He also sends the manuscript to his old New Zealand publishing buddy, Robin Dudding, now editor of the literary journal Islands, who writes back, calling the story 'grey, slimy and nasty. Every good writer has to write a bummer. I think this is your bummer. Sweep it under the bed.' Still, concludes Dudding, he's read it to his kids and has to say that those kids, all six of them, loved it. Whether Under the Mountain is part of the ascending arc is uncertain, but Gee retains his hope for it, sending the manuscript onward anyway, to Oxford University Press. He's also applied for that year's New Zealand Literary Fund Scholarship, worth $6000. So then, three things: personal pressures relieved – Margareta as mother to a new family, but with useful research skills to undertake part-time work – a literary reputation still on the rise. In my Father's Den has also trialled what is, for Maurice, a new structure – a present-day narrative with extended flash-backs into the past. If the past hides some simmering secret it can suddenly converge onto the present-day narrative with explosive force. That same structure, surely, would be perfect, wouldn't it, to portray an ageing church minister, of some importance in the history of New Zealand Church and State? His beliefs then and now. His domestic relationships between his wife and children, then and now. And as past and present collide on the closing pages, a climax that might turn on what? The nature of evil perhaps. Or the nature of love perhaps. Or both. Part 2 of Geoff Chapple's memoir of Maurice Gee (August 22, 1931-June 22, 2025) will appear in ReadingRoom tomorrow (Wednesday July 23). Jennifer Ward-Lealand will read Schooldays, the Maurice Gee short story about his cousin Geoff Chapple, at an event in Auckland on August 7.
Times
12-07-2025
- Health
- Times
We demanded help for our sick children. We were accused of abuse
E lly Chapple was used to heated battles with social services and clinicians when she pushed to get the best care for her daughter, Ella. A rare genetic condition, combined with being deaf and blind, had left Ella with multiple complex disabilities and she needed extensive help. But Chapple had no idea that the way she fought her daughter's corner might contribute to a child protection intervention that would risk losing her for ever. Chapple's advocacy for Ella's needs, along with unfounded allegations that she had overmedicated her, raised red flags because of a rare form of child abuse known as fabricated or induced illness (FII), where parents exaggerate or cause their children's symptoms. While social services and the family courts investigated the allegations, Chapple was forced to live apart from her daughter for eight months. 'Going to ask for help turned into our worst nightmare,' Chapple said. 'We were forcibly split as a family.' Last year Ella won a civil case that found the council had acted unlawfully and breached her human rights.
USA Today
18-06-2025
- Health
- USA Today
Millions of caregivers have access to this help line. Still, they're drowning.
Millions of caregivers have access to this help line. Still, they're drowning. Show Caption Hide Caption Bradley Cooper new documentary sheds light on caregiving crisis A new documentary, "Caregiving," executive produced by Oscar-nominated actor Bradley Cooper, will explore the hidden struggles of caregivers. unbranded - Entertainment Jami Chapple feels stuck. At 54, the single mother has no income and is two months behind on rent. She's behind on her utility bills, too, and can't find work because she's busy caring for and homeschooling her 12-year-old son who is autistic and has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. 'It's so draining that there's no way to financially produce," Chapple, who lives in Wyoming, said. "Even if you want to.' The last time Chapple felt this stuck was around 2005. She was raising four children then and needed help finding food and clothes for her family, so she dialed the 211 helpline, a national program run by United Way Worldwide that connects callers to local experts who can refer them to health and social service organizations in their community. 'That lady took so much time, with such patience," Chapple said of the 211 call taker. "She gave me dozens and dozens of resources.' Chapple called 211 this time, too. But she said she wasn't eligible for the services the helpline referred her to, and the caregiver support group they connected her with is too far from her home. The 211 helpline is expanding services for caregivers like Chapple. But with 53 million caregivers in the U.S., according to a 2020 report by AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, it's not nearly enough − especially if the services 211 refers callers to start to dwindle, said Bob Stephen, vice president of health security programming at AARP. Life for caregivers might get even harder if the Senate passes President Donald Trump's so-called "big beautiful bill" which includes massive cuts to Medicaid. The proposal includes work requirements for people under 65 to access Medicaid, "many of whom would be family caregivers," said Nancy LeaMond, AARP's executive vice president and chief advocacy and engagement officer. In 2021, in partnership with AARP, 211 met the caregiving crisis by adding a Caregiver Support Program in a handful of states including Florida, Texas, Michigan, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Wisconsin. The program grew in the years that followed, and now millions more caregivers will have access to caregiver-specific support assistance as the program is being expanded to 10 more states: Alabama, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Missouri and Illinois, plus Puerto Rico. The full list of participating states and regions can be found here. His sick wife asked him to kill her. Now that she's gone, he says the loneliness is worse. Specialists help with callers' most immediate needs like food and shelter, and then get them connected to other programs that specialize in long-term support. There are about 5,000 211 phone workers nationwide, said Heather Black, vice president of 211 System Strategy at United Way Worldwide. "We're the triage," Black said. But what happens when the triage isn't enough? 211 helps caregivers who don't know they are caregivers Since 2021, the 211 Caregiver Support Program has helped more than 1 million caregivers through a combination of direct support, local community engagement and website visits, according to United Way Worldwide. Caregivers often say they didn't know they were a caregiver at the time, including celebrity caregivers like Bradley Cooper and Uzo Aduba. So when 211 specialists speak with people in need, Stephen said, they don't ask the obvious question, "Are you a caregiver?" 'Tuna breath' and death: Bradley Cooper shares memories of caring for his late father Instead, call takers are trained to listen for cues that indicate the person is a caregiver. 'It's amazing how much information people share as they tell you their story about their situation," Black said. 'You don't use the word caregiver until you've got them recognizing some of the tasks that they do," Stephen said, like driving older parents to medical appointments. Callers might ask about food, housing or utility assistance, which were the most common requests out of the nearly 17 million 211 helpline calls last year. If the caller indicates they may be a caregiver, then there are a slew of other resources 211 workers can direct them to, like transportation services, veterans' benefits, respite care, meal delivery programs and caregiver support groups. Evidently, though, some well-meaning attempts to connect people with programs are falling flat. And that may only get worse if funding cuts rattle the caregiving community's resources. Survey: The caregiving crisis is real. USA TODAY wants to hear from you about how to solve it. More help is needed, caregivers and advocates say The 211 helpline is designed to connect people to resources already in their community. But if the resources people need aren't available in that region, there's not much 211 can do, Stephen said. Chapple said 211 was helpful when she was raising her four older children back in the early 2000s, when she lived in Texas. But now that she's in Wyoming and raising a kid with a neurodevelopmental disorder, she's hitting roadblocks. Some of the referrals she got recently through 211, Chapple said, she was not eligible for. "There's not a lot of resources for my situation," Chapple said. Chapple said she doesn't have family support like other caregivers. And she's had a hard time finding a job that offers the flexibility she needs to care for her son. Her biggest needs now, she said, are rent assistance and help finding work. But she said some programs require more time to apply than caregivers have. 'There is an immense amount of time wasted for caregivers on forms," Chapple said. "Filling out forms, phone calls, research, paperwork, interviews with the health agencies and even just the emotional preparation to do those things is sometimes distressing.' The 211 helpline doesn't rely on federal funding, Stephen said, 'although the federal budget does fund many of the things that 211 connects people to.' He's worried federal cuts could further reduce the programs available for people in need, including caregivers. '211 is going to be more critical," Stephen said. "Because people aren't going to really understand what is still there." Caregiving is a labor of love, Chapple said. But it's difficult physically, mentally, financially and emotionally. She said she's had to give up a lot of the simple pleasures she used to enjoy, like taking a relaxing bath or writing songs. Sometimes, she said, she sits in her car for just 10 minutes to listen to music. That brings her some peace. 'There's no time for us," Chapple said. "There's no time for self-care. I mean, I'm lucky if I get like a shower or two a week.' Madeline Mitchell's role covering women and the caregiving economy at USA TODAY is supported by a partnership with Pivotal Ventures and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input. Reach Madeline at memitchell@ and @maddiemitch_ on X.
BBC News
18-04-2025
- Health
- BBC News
Charity to create Middlesbrough spinal injury centre garden
A charity has unveiled plans to create a garden space for patients with spinal injuries, to help aid their Garden are set to begin work on an outdoor area and garden room at the James Cook University Hospital, in Middlesbrough, for the use of those patients in the hospital's specialist department who typically need lengthy team hopes to develop "beautiful spaces" to help improve patients' physical and mental health as they is the charity's ninth project, with founder Dr Olivia Chapple OBE highlighting the incredible impact previous projects have had on patients' psychological recovery. National charity Horatio's Garden said they had raised more than two-thirds of the £1.4m they need to create the outdoor space at the Middlesbrough hospital, and expect to start building next January - with the garden projected to open to patients in Autumn of the courtyard area will include the addition of a water feature and garden room, as well as a greenhouse where patients will be able to grow plants. According to the charity, people with spinal injuries typically spend between three and nine months in hospital, and are 56% more likely to experience mental health problems, with the risk of suicide increasing fourfold. Dr Chapple cited the tough psychological battle often experienced by people with spinal cord injuries to find something that "gives them hope" following life-changing said many such patients struggled to find "a reason to look to the future with positivity", especially when they were recuperating on a public ward, sometimes with little privacy,"It's incredible the impact of these type of projects, getting involved with gardens - whether that's sitting in them, whether that's being in nature, whether that's having quiet conversations or gardening."It has a huge impact on patients, not only their physical rehabilitation but their psychological recovery as well." Nicola Wilson MBE spent five months in the north-east spinal centre, following a fall at Badminton Horse Trials in May 2022 which left her initially paralysed from the neck down and unable to feel who now acts as an ambassador for the charity, said the redeveloped outdoor space will make an enormous difference to patients, their families and staff,"You're in a ward with six other people; those blue curtains don't offer you any privacy, so to be able to come out into the garden, just enjoy the flowers, the birds, [to] have that quiet time, is just invaluable." Follow BBC Tees on X, Facebook, Nextdoor and Instagram.
Miami Herald
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
Joan Vassos says she and Chock Chapple are living their best lives not living together
After choosing each other to be their second acts, 'Golden Bachelorette' Joan Vassos and her fiancé, Chock Chapple, have decided to not live together. At least for now. While Vassos has her life in Maryland, Chapple has his in Kansas. Due to neither one wanting to uproot their respective families, the couple has chosen to split their time between each place, while also looking for a home in New York City. And while the situation has worked for them so far, in a new interview with Parade, Vassos, 62, says she is aware of the naysayers. 'Everybody looks at this like .... 'There's no way this can work because you're not together every minute,'' Vassos told Parade. 'We don't feel the same way about it,' she continued. 'We feel like we both have pretty rich lives in our 60s. You find somebody [at that time of life], chances are they have stuff going on. They have family or they have jobs or they have friend groups, or they have hobbies. So you might not need to spend every waking moment together or you might not need to live in the same city, and that's how we feel right now about it,' Vassos explained. Instead of uprooting their lives, Vassos and Chapple, 61, have made the effort to immerse themselves into each others' lives. When there is 'something fun happening' in either Maryland or Kansas, Vassos and Chapple travel to be with each other. 'He had a party at his country club on Friday night. We had a blast. I loved being there,' she explained to Parade. 'We're not living with each other, but we're kind of living our best lives,' Vassos explained. 'We get to travel and do all the fun things and be together for those, and then the mundane things of, like, me babysitting my grandkids and him going to work — he's kind of doing it by himself, which I don't need to be there [for], and he certainly doesn't want to be here with me babysitting my grandkids or taking my mom to the doctor or whatever.' And as for when Vassos and Chapple plan to say 'I do,' Vassos told Parade that they aren't in a rush, but they also won't be engaged 'forever.' 'I wanna marry Chock,' she said, but admitted that their 'journey is a little weird. ... We are doing the dating process backwards, so I feel like we have a little time of just like, we're having fun dating and not having a million things we have to do.' When the time is right, Vassos said she and Chapple will celebrate their love with an intimate ceremony. 'We don't need this big extravagant thing that you do when you're younger.'
