ROBERT FAGAN
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father "used to come in every night when I went to bed and tell me
these amazing stories-about nature mostly, and the backblocks,
aborigines, geography, geology, fish, anything that he was thinking
about; so that when he went away and I wasn't asleep yet, the room
would begin to talk to me when I was drowsy, you know. That's, I
suppose, how it all started."
Stead describes a similar spontaneous development at school:
"Such a poor fist! But as soon as I fisted cat before mat, they recognized
at school that I was a word-stringer. ... I first made my mark with a
poem written suddenly in arithmetic class, at the age of eight, of which
all is now forgotten but the line 'And elephants develop must.'" Then
at age ten came "my first novel ... on the life-cycle of the frog." Of
course Christina was going through her own biological development
of growing up; instead of shying away from biology .she exuberantly
annexed it to her discovery of literature. Moreover, at home she now
was old enough to go through the experience of stepchild, substitute
mother, and storyteller which, much later, would give her the material,
the design, and the style for her masterpiece,
The Man Who Loved
Children.
In her brief autobiographical statement in
Twentieth Cen–
tury Authors,
she summarizes this experience: "My mother died in my
babyhood, my father soon remarried, and I became the eldest of a large
family.... Eldest, and a girl, I had plenty of work with the young
children, but was attached to them and whenever I could, told them
stories, partly from Grimm and Andersen, partly invented."
At school Stead's life could remain a comedy. She almost drove a
teacher from her school with a satirical attack entitled "Green Apples,"
and then began a vast series of love poems to a woman English teacher,
called the "Heaven Cycle." For Stead this is all part of a natural
progression which leads from a child's learning-to-write essays to
schoolgirl crushes to a bizarre pre-Raphaelite scene, and her first
attempt to be published:
It
was accepted by this time at school that I was a writer; and I
accepted it simply, too, without thinking about it. ... At teachers'
college in my second year, there was a young art teacher, engaged to
be
married, who was sensitive to the charm of girlhood.... She took
us out on a sketching expedition and we stayed the night in some
country boarding-house in a pretty place.
It
was full moon, fair
weather. She called the girls to come out in the moonlight, take off
their shoes, loose their hair and dance in the moonlight, on the
grass. . .. She said she could read destiny in our hands. She took
mine, thrust it back at me with a hard look.... I was surprised, then,
when she said that if I did a book of short stories she would do the
illustrations. I did the stories, she did the illustrations, four or six;
