Getting There

Barbara Anderson

Victoria University Press

Otago Daily Times, January 24th 2009

Despite waiting until her 50s before embarking on her writing career, Barbara Anderson is critically acclaimed as one of New Zealand’s leading novelists both here and in the UK. Her long and varied life not only provides considerable material for her fiction but also makes her autobiography as interesting and idiosyncratic as any of her novels.   It traces her life through its three ages, from her childhood in Hastings during the 1920s and 30s, her years working as a teacher, mother, and Admiralty wife (she is married to Sir Neil Anderson, former Chief of Defence Staff), and finally the two decades of writing that following her fledging from Bill Manhire’s literary nest. 

Although she always dreamed of writing, these ambitions remained on hold until her other duties were completed, with her first book published only after Neil’s retirement (testament to their partnership, he types up her handwritten manuscripts).  It took her a while to find the right medium (she soon abandoned poetry, and there is a wonderfully funny and self-deprecating description of taking a play about a lesbian couple to a workshop where Renee was presenting ‘Wednesday to Come’), but the last 20 years have produced several radio plays, short story collections and eight novels in addition to Getting There.

The challenge of fitting eight decades of life into a single book is to distil the essence of that life in manageable form without losing the personality of the writer or the sense of life-as-it-has-been-lived.  Anderson presents a series of events, both pivotal and exemplary, that sum up important landmarks of her life: The ‘People’ she and her younger brother played with, a fluffy green jube produced from the pocket of the woman who helped out with the wash, relegation to cattle class on overseas trips with Neil because the naval budget couldn’t accommodate a second business-class seat. Such vignettes resemble the scenes that our own memories throw at us when we reflect upon the past, creating both a flavour and chronology of her life. 

Two things in particular stand out for me.  First is her ability to recreate the New Zealand of my grandparents, a time and place I have never experienced but which is instantly familiar because of her novels and those of her contemporaries, the first generation of truly ‘New Zealand’ writers. Second is the impression of Anderson herself as a witty, elegant, and, above all, intensely private woman.

Her peripatetic years as a navy wife must have been extremely difficult, with its constant relocations and extended periods alone with two small children, but there is no hint of resentment or bitterness to be found. Nor does she dwell over the deaths of her younger brother or eldest son, although both must have grieved her intensely.  There are glimpses of a social, vibrant and flirtatious personality in her admiration for all those handsome young men in uniform, but the relationship between herself and her husband is, by and large, off-limits.  Their pre-marriage romance covers half a page, and the description of their wedding is equally brief.  Her response to a toast to a beautiful consummation epitomises her less-is-more approach; “He need not have worried.” I finished Getting There feeling like I had met the real Barbara Anderson, a lady in the truest sense of the word. Glorious!