After a life spent teaching, New Zealand poet Waiata Dawn Davies is spending part of her 86th year studying creative writing in Ireland. She talks to SINEAD GLEESON
‘I TRY TO START every day with some t’ai chi and then I clear my emails before getting down to work.” Listening to those words in the lobby of a Dublin hotel, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they’d come from a New York stockbroker. Perched on an overstuffed armchair is poet Waiata Dawn Davies, who is spending part of her 86th year on a creative-writing blitz in Ireland. Having arrived in June, after travelling alone from New Zealand, she has taken to the city with gusto.
Born in 1925, in Levin, New Zealand, Davies married a US Marine in 1943 and has had one of those bursting-at-the-seams lives. “During the war, imagine being around 500,000 young men in gorgeous uniforms, with beautiful teeth – and New Zealanders don’t have good teeth. They could do all the dances we were seeing in the movies.”
The couple had a son, but her husband was wounded in Saipan. He was taken back to the US, where he died of his injuries. Dawn received a widow’s pension from the army, but decided – despite having a young son, Frank, and this being the 1940s – to go to college to train as a teacher. “I couldn’t imagine being a widow for the rest of my life,” says Davies.
She met her second husband Dave, a Navy signalman who fought in Korea, and married him in 1953. “I taught for 50 years and it was really rewarding. Having children and a career was unheard of then, it was a terrible thing – but there were no teachers. People had their views on it, but I have never cared what most people think. My mother was a hospital matron and she taught us to think for ourselves.”
Dawn and Dave’s family expanded to eight sons (and now includes 22 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren), but it wasn’t until she retired in 1990 that there was time for writing. “I’ve been creative all my life, but at school I wanted to be either a civil engineer or a reporter, and I was told that women couldn’t plan towns and that I could only be a reporter if I stuck to the women’s pages. My father was a newspaper man and when I was 10 years old, I was doing that anyway for his paper.”
Over the years she flexed her writing muscles by writing for teaching magazines, but retirement provided time for more substantial writing. One of her short stories came second in the prestigious Katherine Mansfield competition and her work has been broadcast by the BBC. Singing at Sunrise, her first poetry collection, was published in 1993, and includes a titular poem about her name, Waiata. “It’s a Maori word meaning song.” Can she sing? “I’m 85 darling, of course I can.”
There’s an indomitable streak to Davies. “People often make assumptions about the elderly that have no base in fact. So I say to young people ‘Don’t assume old people cannot function,’ and I also say to the elderly, ‘Don’t assume that because you are old you cannot function.’”
She is taking a novel-writing course at the Irish Writers’ Centre (she’s 80,000 words in) and has found a sense of community there. “It’s an incredible set-up, in that anyone can use it. In New Zealand, all the universities have a hold on creative writing courses.”
Ireland’s literary heritage was a huge draw, but Davies has some interest in her ancestry. Her paternal grandfather grew up on the Clandeboye estate near Bangor and her maternal grandfather, surname Lyons, was Irish, but he disappeared in 1892. Both of her grandmothers are Irish, from opposite ends of the island, Cork and Tyrone.
In the Irish, she sees “inborn courtesy”, which has made her feel welcome. So how have friends and family responded to her peripatetic life? “My close friends are mostly fellow writers and they told me to keep my blog up. I talk to my sons almost daily by Skype. They probably think I am crazy but are too well brought up to say so.”
Waiata Dawn Davies’ blog is at wddavies.blogspot.com
