Alexander Gaskell Pickard 1913-2006/A. P. Gaskell 1939-1962 (2007)

The plaque in Writers' Walk in the Octagon in Dunedin, still relatively shiny and clean, as it was installed in March 2007, reads ?. P. Gaskell 1913-2006' at the top. Then after a quotation from the opening paragraphs of 'The Big Game', it reads 'Alexander Gaskell Pickard - writer, sportsman, teacher, watercolourist graduated from the University of Otago and its Rugby Team in 1936'. It is not quite accurate: Alexander Gaskell Pickard was born in Kurow in 1913 and, after a long and varied life, died in Hamilton late in 2006. A. P. Gaskell, the pseudonymous author of fiction whose stories Pickard wrote, first appeared in print, most unpromisingly, in the New Zealand Free Lance of 2 March 1939 with a story entitled 'Stolen Fruit and the Convict: Young Plotters Made Unexpected Capture', and last appeared in print as a writer of fiction in Mate in December 1 962 with a story entitled 'Poor Young Man'. The relationship between the long life of Pickard and the relatively modest span of Gaskell is exemplary, implying much about what it might have meant to be an aspiring imaginative writer in the New Zealand of the. time of Gaskell's career.Pickard, like that other writer born into a railway family, Janet Frame, had a peripatetic childhood and adolescence as his father's work required frequent shifts. He attended six primary schools and three secondary schools in Dunedin, New Plymouth, Wellington and Invercargill. He finally was able to setde at Soudiland Boys' High School in 1928, where he was an outstanding student and afiliete: proxime accessit, head prefect, lock-forward and captain of the first XV, champion boxer, and an outstanding cricketer: he went on to represent Southland as an opening medium-fast bowler from 1932 to 1947. Like yet another South Island writer from a railway family, his exact contemporary and sometime fellow Southlander and Otago student Dan Davin, Pickard depended on scholarships to advance his education. After three years' study in the sixth form at Southland Boys' High School, he won a National Scholarship and attended the University of Otago while Davin was there and, like Davin, graduated with an MA. Like Frame, he attended Dunedin Teachers' Training College and received a Dip. Ed., but unlike her he stayed in teaching, beginning as a sole-charge teacher in a back-block Maori school in the King Country in 1939-40. He joined the army in 1940 and spent a brief time in the army at Papakura Military Camp before being discharged in 1941 on medical grounds: he had 'a touch' of tuberculosis. In 1941 he took another sole-charge appointment at little Akaloa on the Banks Peninsula and in 1943 he settled into teaching at Southland Boys' High School, where he remained (with a year off in England in 1953) until transferring to Fairfield College in Hamilton in 1960. In Hamilton he and his wife Judy raised their three children and he continued with his teaching career until his retirement in 1974. He was much remembered as a teacher, and when the plaque was placed in Dunedin, the speech in tribute made by the Dunedin writer, historian, bookseller and publisher George Griffiths was as much about Alec Pickard the teacher and rugby coach under whom he studied at Southland Boys' High school as it was about A. P. Gaskell the writer. (Like the plaque, Griffiths referred only to 'The Big Game'.) Several other of Pickard's ex-pupils were present to mark the occasion.As R. A. Copland pointed out in the introduction to his 1 987 edition of Gaskell's stories, Pickard's working and social experience, not untypical of New Zealand males between the wars, had opened up for him 'virtually the whole social and geographical range of New Zealand life' as raw material for fiction, but to use it he needed 'a recognizably local idiom to work in'.1 In the later 1930s, when he began to write as A. P. Gaskell, he had never read Tomorrow, had not read any of Frank Sargeson's stories, had not read the work of the young Davin at Otago, and had taken as his models the stories of O. …