Tina Shaw
All Her Lives by Ingrid Horrocks (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025), 272pp, $35
Recently I sat in on a writing workshop where participants wrote about photographs they had brought with them, using a piece of paper to divide the image into slices and examining closely what each section contained. It’s a way to fine-tune your seeing, to learn to describe what you see and to go deeper.
The nine stories in this debut collection act like those slices—focusing our view in each carefully structured story to a measured field of vision. They are moments in time, often capturing a particular zeitgeist.
‘Evie on Branch’, set in 1919, opens the collection. Evie has returned from the war to the family farm and the house their father built, where her brother Finn and sister-in-law are living. Her wartime experience makes the house seem ‘startlingly small’. The story is undercut by their father’s death from cancer and ‘the winter their father started treating her like a son, and Finn like an invalid’.
The sense of return is so evocative: ‘Homecoming was a slow wade in.’ We sense Evie’s dislocation—like modern jet lag—and her struggle with identity: there was the excitement of heading off to war, then the gross reality of it, and now this. ‘Homecoming was remembering a man with a bullet in his chest and his eyes on your chest.’ How is she to find herself again between her wartime experiences and this—the farm, her brother’s new family, her place back home? Central to the story is the photograph Finn takes of Evie perched on a tree branch over a drop. There is the recklessness of her nature, and also the hard memory of her brother’s accident, falling from a tree. The story feels novelistic, containing a world, and ends with a sense of hope.
Many of the stories end with their gaze fixed on the future, often grounded in nature, sometimes with a redemptive note, as in ‘Marvellous Instruments’. Set in 1955, this story centres on Truby King, founder of the Plunket Society, and is undercut with his views on eugenics, race and women’s roles (since rejected by Plunket). While grounded in research, the story focuses on Alna and her little sister Kenna, their childhood spent at ‘the hilltop garden’ next to the Karitane Maternity Hospital. ‘We could hardly be blamed for sneaking about, when babies were being carried up the steps to the hospital in shoeboxes.’ The Doctor is shown as kindly yet intrusive, in a scene in which he cuts a branch outside their cottage to let in the light. He is a source of inspiration to young Kenna. ‘Such a marvellous instrument, the foot,’ he tells her—she and her sister barefoot in the garden. Kenna feels ‘solid and strong, standing there in front of the Doctor’. It’s a moment of seeming understanding between them. A deeper understanding will come later.
This is a story told in two layers: the sisters in 1955 on a shopping trip into Wellington, and their childhood—the things they have avoided talking about over the years. Kenna, growing into a young woman, is caught between being ‘the loyal apprentice to the ways of the garden’ and the Doctor’s beliefs. ‘That garden was a place where a mother’s breath, the impulse to hold or feed a crying baby, could be labelled dense ignorance.’
Simmering at the heart of the story is their older sister Eileen’s teenage pregnancy and, later, the decision hanging over the sisters on their shopping trip: whether they should meet the boy who was adopted out.
These are meaty, substantial stories from a skilled practitioner, grounded in place and time, strong with social context. Take ‘The End of the Fair’, where a Pied Piper event at a local fair brings tensions to a head. Diane and Rob have been trying unsuccessfully for a baby, and now she is pregnant, though she has put off telling him. Set in 1981, the story’s backdrop is Devonport’s nuclear-free declaration, the proposed ban initiated by women’s associations, in which Di is involved. Her husband Rod, working at the naval base, is naturally on the other side. ‘They’re constantly testing. It’s one hundred percent safe.’
A faint undertow of menace is present from the start as Di deals with rats on their property. The setting builds on this: ‘the feeling of unease only shifted to the anti-aircraft guns mounted on top of the volcanic hill where we were standing: chambers and tunnels dug into the same slopes as our familiar streets and bungalows with honeysuckle and bougainvillea hedges’. There is a sense of lurking danger while, ‘inside my own body, was the smallest flicker of watery life’. It makes for an interesting juxtaposition.
These hints of menace intensify as Jack, playing the Pied Piper—‘a mixture of gross and sexy’—leads the children up the maunga. What could possibly go wrong? The scene underground in the gun-emplacement cavern is a modern-day version of the Piper’s revenge, with Jack scaring the children in the darkness with his doom-mongering.
The political hovers close in these stories, either as background or as something that defines the characters themselves. In ‘Murmuration’, Madeline—Di’s friend in ‘The End of the Fair’—has arrived in a UK city to visit her son Daniel, who has been imprisoned for an environmental action. Set ‘now’, the story captures all of our climate concerns—rising seas, bird extinction, managed retreat. Refugees are contained on a cruise ship anchored in the harbour. In a couple of decades, Daniel tells her, the museums she has been visiting will be submerged. Madeline recalls a woman who wasn’t concerned about climate change. ‘The abstraction that was the future sat so differently within people’s frames. Daniel felt it with every knotty bone of his spine.’
There are linkages to the past: the Pied Piper spinning ecological nightmares to children. ‘Daniel might as well have been forged in that fort and the kinds of conversations that surrounded it.’ Though Madeline would rather her son were not in prison.
The personal is shaped by political choices, such as the 15-year gap during which mother and son have not seen each other because of their pact not to travel by air, concerned about the CO2 emissions generated by each flight. Yet the personal cost, inevitably, rests with Madeline. ‘What kind of mother was she? So many years without seeing Daniel when she could have. That was a loss of her own making.’
An architect, Madeline tells Daniel about her rammed-earth house design, and she thinks about a container village Diana has described, like a retirement home—they are all getting older, those activists from an earlier time. Like birds, they could band together. ‘How many small groups of them would it take … to form a murmuration?’
In a poignant end sequence in the prison where the pair grow closer, Madeline sketches her son while they talk.
‘Have I captured you?’
He examined it: his image as she saw him.
‘Not yet,’ he said.
Another story that stands out, ‘The Silver Ship’, recreates Mary Wollstonecraft’s visit to a remote settlement on the Norway coast in 1795, while in France the Revolution was transitioning to a new government after a period of political turmoil. Wollstonecraft is seeking the captain of a ship that she and her lover Gilbert Imlay had commissioned to carry silver contraband seized from aristocrats, to be traded for grain at a neutral port. But the ship disappeared, along with the captain. She sets out, following rumours, determined to be compensated, leaving her baby Fanny back in London, haunted by Imlay’s unfaithfulness and in the weakened position of having forgone the social status of marriage for her ‘radical love match’.
She is operating in a man’s world and is doomed to fail. Nowhere is her situation made clearer than at the dinner hosted by the settlement’s mayor. ‘All of them were at home, in their places, each content with rich food and drink and the knowledge that they would soon share food again.’ Her own position is more precarious. ‘It suddenly seemed impossible: her, here, making her demands, believing they were in aid of some greater cause.’ Of course, the captain and the mayor, it turns out, are mates. Same old, same old. And she, ‘the mistress abandoned with her child’.
There is so much going on in this assured and absorbing story. The ending pulls threads together with a sense of physical annihilation, finding beauty in nature—‘As they lifted on the waves, she felt something of a future … her bruised heart letting go, becoming porous’—and a young woman who rows Wollstonecraft out to a hidden place to bathe, where she finds another kind of silver.
Wonderfully, the final story in the collection, ‘The Silver Ship II: A Conversation Fragment’, picks up this scene in the dinghy. Here Wollstonecraft is with her second daughter, Mary Shelley, both of them ghosts in the future, in conversation. This haunting piece acts as a fine end note to the collection.
TINA SHAW is a writer, novelist and editor. Her most recent novel is A House Built on Sand (Text, 2024).
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