My Account
Valerie Davies was a familiar name and face on the pages of both the NZ Woman’s Weekly and the Auckland Star, throughout the 1970s and 80s. Her columns focused on parenting and other family issues, subjects she still feels passionate about today. Now living in Leigh with her husband Pat Booth, Valerie, aged 73, has just released her latest book The Sound of Water, which tells the story of two years lived in a New Zealand fishing village. The book dips in and out of Valerie’s life experiences spent in many parts of the world observing some of last century’s major events, and her encounters with “the famous and the forgotten”. It also captures the simple pleasure she finds in spending time with her family and in her garden. She spoke to Jannette Thompson ….
I was keen to self-publish the book so I could have some control over the process and the final product. I found Peter Harris, at Eutopia Press in Kaiwaka, who was brilliant and his involvement meant I was able to have input into the design and layout, and be part of the creative process. None of that is possible if you go with as established publisher. The downside, however, is that marketing the book is quite a challenge. It’s not financially feasible to put it into bookshops so I am literally selling it by word-of-mouth.
I didn’t start my working life as a writer; rather, it evolved. I came from an Army family and it was my father who arranged my appointment with a recruiting officer from the Women’s Royal Army Corp. Although I’d wanted to go to university, I was just 18 so I did as I was told. But, as it turns out, I loved every bit of the six years I served and I became the youngest captain in the British Army. My father fought in Dunkirk, North Africa, Tunisia, Italy and Egypt during the Second World War so I was 10 before he even shared a birthday with me. It’s hard to imagine the pressure families were under in wartime Britain, but one weekend my mother went away and never came back. I was six and lived with my grandmother until my father remarried some time later. He was then stationed to post-war Germany, where we lived in a flat in Belsen, which had been the home of the Beast of Belsen, Josef Kramer, the commandant of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Although I was only a child, I can still remember the atmosphere of that time. We were always aware of this mass of suffering humanity all around us, all the time. The camp survivors were angry and frustrated that the authorities wanted to repatriate them to the countries they’d come from, when all they wanted to do was go to Palestine. There was a lot of tension and civil unrest as they tried to draw the world’s attention to their cause. After Germany, I went to school in Yorkshire before the family moved to Malaya where I went to school in the Cameron Highlands. That involved travelling in an armoured car convoy through bandit-infested jungle.
My first position in journalism, if you can call it that, was as the cooking columnist on The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, where I went on to become the women’s editor. I was married to a British Army officer at the time, but when the marriage ended life took a different turn. I emigrated to NZ in 1971 with two small children and not much else – no money, no home and no contacts. I had very little confidence and literally had to start from scratch. Desperate for a job, I applied to the Auckland Star and was interviewed by the assistant editor Pat Booth who, thankfully, ignored the fact that I’d had very little journalism training and very bravely gave me a job. It was quite an old-fashioned place at the time – the dress code didn’t even allow women to wear trousers and I think my first post was as the church roundsman.
When I left Hong Kong, I’d been looking for an egalitarian, English-speaking country with a warm climate that wasn’t over-crowded. I’d been reading Keith Sinclair’s A History of New Zealand and it sounded like a wonderful society. It wasn’t until I started a regular column for the NZ Woman’s Weekly that I realised the reality was a little different. It was 1972 and the magazine received a letter from a solo mother who wrote about the raw deal solo parents received. The editor, Jean Wishart, knew my circumstances so she fired the letter over to me and told me to see if there was a story in it. I was actually appalled at what I discovered. Although solo parents were heading roughly one-in-10 families, there was no such thing as the domestic purposes benefit. The best an unmarried mother could hope for was $28 a week for the first four months if she was breastfeeding. It was why there was such a high rate of adoption at that time. When my story appeared, we were deluged with letters and I became a voice for solo parents. It is hard today to believe the circumstances some of these women were in. One letter I’ve never forgotten came from a mother whose husband had walked out leaving her with three children under five. She had to leave them alone in the house with no heating and only bread to eat, while she went to work digging potatoes to make barely enough for them to live on. Although I whole-heartedly supported the introduction of the solo parents benefit when Norman Kirk came to power in 1974, I never anticipated that it would be handed out without any sort of ‘quid pro quo’. I’d always supposed that it would be a reciprocal arrangement, whereby the girls would be expected to undertake proper training in parenting and home-making skills.
Interestingly, although I’d always considered myself very much a feminist, when I began championing children’s’ issues, this enraged some feminists of the day and I became a bit of a pariah. They quite rightly saw that because I wanted a better deal for children, this could impinge on the greater freedoms for women that they were fighting for. Interestingly, Sue Kedgley who was at the forefront of the women’s movement then, acknowledges in her book that I was the only person who gave mothering any status at that time. It upsets me to see that New Zealand has yet to put children’s welfare first. If we did, we would be pouring money into preschools and initiatives such as the HIPPY (Home Interaction Programme for Parents and Youngsters) programme. In Finland, only the top five to 10 percent of graduates are allowed to become teachers. Here, our best and brightest go into business. I also think it’s a shame that our women politicians act like men. The qualities we think of in terms of women – kindness and problem-solving, rather than aggression – just don’t seem to make it to the parliamentary forum.
Throughout the 70s and 80s, I wrote family columns for both the Weekly and the Auckland Star. As the women’s editor of the Auckland Star, I inaugurated the first weekly pullout for women, covering topics from feminism to child-rearing, to women’s achievements here and abroad. At the Woman’s Weekly by 1985, Jean Wishart had left and the writing was on the wall that the new editor wanted to modernise. My column didn’t fit the new look so I jumped before I was pushed. Pat Booth and I were married by this stage, and he was embroiled in the fight for Arthur Allan Thomas which came with a whole other set of challenges, including waking up in the middle of the night to see a grey-suited man with a stocking over his head in our bedroom. But you don’t stop writing just because you don’t have a job. During ‘retirement’ I have contributed articles to various magazines including The Listener, and published several books, among them Signposts for Solos and a 16-book series on NZ called This is the Way We Were.
We moved to this area six years ago and love living here in the peace and quiet. I’m very interested in the inner life, and how the spiritual life can help us face the challenges that life throws at us every day. I used to be an Anglican and then worshipped with the Quakers for several years, but now my spirituality comes from a place within. My grandson recently said “everything passes”, a phrase he’d heard John Banks say at his induction, and it is so true. If I had my wish, society would value kindness more than it does. I hate buzzwords such as ‘get rid of the dead wood’, with its overtones of ruthlessness and efficiency at any cost. We’d all be better off if we gave people a bit of leeway when we see them going through hard times. Life has taught me there is no substitute for kindness.
