Creative nonfiction essays
"I didn’t like Katherine Mansfield; she was a dreadful girl", my grandmother told me. This essay, originally published in the Katherine Mansfield Society newsletter in August 2023, explores her attitude, and that of her family, to the woman who would become a highly acclaimed short story writer. Click on the photo to read it.
My efforts to pin down the family connection to the poet William Wordsworth have been like the clouds that float high above the hills and vales of the Lake District which inspired him. They're real but constantly moving; they seem sometimes to come together, then they change direction and are off again. Like family history … Continue reading Chasing clouds: tracing the Wordsworth connection
Clara Wordsworth Sargood grew up in comfort and affluence at Rippon Lea in Melbourne in Queen Victoria's time. She vividly recounts stories of a happy childhood, the heartbreaking loss of her mother, and the thrills of sea voyages to England and New Zealand.
In 1912, a well-brought-up young man on a new motor cycle knocked a young boy over on an Auckland city street. And so the lives of two families from different social worlds intersected as police and civil court cases plodded on and were reported on at length in the Auckland papers.
Amongst my grandmother's papers was a photo she had kept all her life of a young soldier who served in WW1.
Fragments of an ordinary life 