I knew Taika Waititi very well when he was a child. His mother lived in a tall, narrow house on Aro St, and my youngest sister had a similar house two doors down. They were both single mothers and each had a seven-year-old son. Taika and my cousin Stepan soon became best friends, and were joined by a famous three-legged dog that even in old age still went by the name Puppy Walker, and for the next ten years the three of them roamed the hills of Brooklyn and Kelburn. .
Decades later, look Jojo Rabbit in a London cinema I was struck by a similarity between Jojo and Stefan. I dismissed the idea, thinking I was imagining it, but then another year or two passed and an old photo came to light. It showed Taika, about fourteen years old, bursting into a room and raising his hand to give Stefan, who is sitting with his back to him at a table – it appears to be Christmas Day – a pair of bunny ears. I sent the photo to Taika suggesting there was evidence here from years before the author had any idea, the universe was already planning a movie Jojo Rabbit far away in the future.
Taika's response was admirably concise and succinct. Three paragraphs, each consisting of one word:
Oh.
Mine.
Goodness.
I took this as a tentative assent to the weak idea.
*
I spent ten years writing my latest book Hard at the Cloud House, about the giant Hurry Eagle, and I will admit that I still thought about it for four years before I actually started. Of course, during this long period of commitment, I occasionally wondered, “Have I gone crazy?” and “Why am I doing this?” and “Where does this end?”
What I didn't ask were the laziest questions of all the interviewers: 'Where did you get the idea from by?” Because you just don't know. You never know. Ideas come, it seems, from a very dark asteroid belt, and sometimes you see them spinning towards you decades before you consciously think about them.
*
My book also focuses on the greatest theft of Māori land, the Kemp Purchase in the South Island, carried out mainly by the Wakefield gang who, back in London, had achieved what is today called 'legislative conquest' and therefore thanked Governor Gray under control in New Zealand. They made many great promises that were never kept and amassed millions of acres for a song.
It was only when my book was almost completed that I looked back and saw that, several years before I thought of writing it, both components – a mighty eagle and the Wakefields – had presented themselves to me in one twelve-hour period. and in vibrant real life.
First the eagle: I was driving through the English Midlands on a misty winter morning when I saw a sign indicating a falconry centre. I rode in – like most people, I think, I had always wanted to visit one – and was soon equipped with a mighty glove, a leather glove, old, heavy, hard as iron and a little smelly. (The last person to wear this, I was told, was the Prince of Wales who had visited the center the day before. This was a Royal glove. If it had last been worn by the Black Prince or the Prince Regent, I would hardly have been surprised.) Following the instructions, I extended my gloved forearm, held a piece of raw meat in the other hand, and waited. Five seconds passed, then seven, then eight, and then suddenly a rush of pinions and an incredible creature emerged from the mist. I expected a hawk, or even a falcon, but this was a large eagle – the golden eagle of Eurasia, the symbol of Zeus and Jupiter and Napoleon's legions and also found on the pennant of the Wehrmacht staff wagons.
It sat on my glove and glared at me, like some kind of living machete, then snatched the meat and flew off into the mist with it. Later I read that the golden eagle weighs up to 4.5 kilograms, but the New Zealand eagle, Te Hokioi, may have reached 17 kg or 18 kg; I remembered the meeting in the fog and thought that perhaps the book was already in the process of being formed by then.
But just hours before, there was an even stranger encounter. This was during a photo exhibition that opened the night before. It was a very grand occasion. One of the snappers was the daughter of a 17 year olde Earl and the other was the legendary Wilfred Thesiger, who photographed the Marsh Arabs and the Empty Quarter in the 1940s. The show was held in a stately home in the Midlands, so stately that they even had their own beasts – a lion, tall, slender, hungry, tawny, with a very black mane, and a rhinoceros that trotted up and down, with a pugnacious attitude. to his horn. The animals were separated from the house by a deep ditch, a ha-ha, but you couldn't see it under the sill and as they walked around through the window in the twilight, the rhinoceros reminded you vaguely of a unicorn. The lion and the unicorn! I was in the heart of old, prosperous England.
Then came the dreaded sound of someone clinking a teaspoon against the stem of a wine glass. A man named Sir Humphrey Wakefield had jumped up on a chair and started a speech with the craziest opening line I have ever heard.
“Everyone in this room,” he announced, “comes from a very good family.”
“Except you,” I said.
Well, no, I didn't – I wasn't quite brave enough, but I really should have, because in my opinion the Wakefields – Edward Gibbon, Arthur, Jerningham – and their NZ Company were responsible for a large part of the racial disharmony that we were dealing with. still experience in Aotearoa. They hated the Treaty of Waitangi, tried to stop it before it was signed and later took a piece of it, preventing it from functioning properly for the next hundred years.
However, later that evening I had the pleasure of talking to Sir Humphrey.
“I'm from New Zealand,” I said. 'We know all about the Wakefields there. You know what the Māori called you, don't you?'
“No,” he said. “I don't. What did they call us?”
“Devil.”
“What does That mean?”
“The Devils.”
“Oh dear,” he said. “Maybe we didn't behave very well in New Zealand.”
“I am afraid not.”
'I'll tell you what,' he said, 'why don't you come and visit us in Chillingham? We can all talk about it, it's a very fascinating subject. By the way,” he added, “I'm starting a new nature fund. Would you like to join in?”
Well, he was a friendly and plausible baronet and I'd had some champagne, so I took out my wallet and handed him the only note I had – unfortunately twenty pounds – and gave him my name and address and so we parted ways, me to a meeting with an eagle and Sir Humphrey back to Chillingham Castle.
I never received an invitation there and never heard another word about the nature fund. A year or two later I asked the 17-year-old's daughtere dig about it.
“Oh, that?” she said. “I think it just has something to do with his livestock.”
For some reason I didn't feel irritated. On the contrary, it gave me a strange sense of privilege. It took me a while to figure out why, and then it dawned on me. Finally, I thought, I have something in common with nineteenth century iwi. Of course it was only on a modest scale, but so was I – how can I put this? – deceived by a Wakefield.
ReadingRoom is focusing on the new brilliant book on natural history all week Hard at the Cloud House by Peter Walker (Massey University Press, $38), which tells the story of the giant Haast's eagle, and is available in bookstores nationwide. Monday: the opening chapter, about the small-minded North Canterbury landowner who gave his name to the extinct eagle. Tuesday: An interview with an auto electrician who helped discover a nearly complete skeleton of the bird. Tomorrow: a review by Ashleigh Young.