AUTHOR Jenny Yates was 71 when she released her first romance novel, A Deal with the Devil, in 2015.
Seven years later, the great-grandmother has published 18 in total and has another nine planned.
“I’ve never felt old. I probably never will feel old regardless of what my body does.
I don’t have the mental capacity to be old.”
Jenny’s work includes two Regency-era series of four books, three anthologies and a two-book fantasy series set in Atlantis.
Her combined sales result in “quite a nice cheque” for Jenny every few months. Her childhood home, a “dreadful old monstrosity” south of Auckland, fed the future writer’s artistic imagination.
“I believe it was the first house built on the Bombay Hill. It had been a beautiful big old villa with verandahs, a tennis court out the front and peacocks on the lawn.”
Her mother grew up there years earlier, a late and sickly child. Later the old house was left derelict, until her mother inherited it when Jenny was a year old.
The family fox terrier chased rats under the rotten floors and could be lifted out through holes in the boards, and the toilet – in a dark outbuilding – was a seat over a kerosene can.
The villa’s flimsy and disconcerting walls sparked Jenny’s imagination.
“They’d stuck wallpaper over scrim. [It] would lift away; so every time the wind blew the walls would breathe in and out. It terrified our cousins when they came to stay.”
Those walls had once been covered with copies of the London Ilustrated News from 1861, and copies remained in the house. One story depicted a man being tomohawked by a warrior in Rangiriri; the other showed a lost world of fashion in Victorian England.
“[It] was about The Sins of the Crinoline in London. A man had ended up in jail for daring to touch a lady’s crinoline to push it aside so he could see an art display, and maids got into severe trouble stealing enough money to be able to buy [one].”
Jenny wonders if that sparked her fascination with historical England, the setting of most of her books.
As a child she loved reading romances. She hid away to read, snuggled up in a little hilltop volcanic crater with wide views across the Waikato.
Jenny always wanted to be a teacher, so she applied to training college on leaving school.
Her parents were conservative Methodists, so life at Ardmore Teacher Training College shocked her. She avoided the parties. But she did go to one dance in her second year, which is where she met first husband John.
“There was a Samoan band up on the stage. He was the lead guitarist and he was extremely handsome.
“Let’s just say he corrupted me. I’d meet him in Auckland and tell my mother big stories about where I was going.”
Afterwards, Jenny got her first teaching job, and became pregnant to John. There was one problem.
“I discovered he was still married at that point. We [eventually] had four children; number four was on the way before he finally got divorced and we married.”
Her parents didn’t speak to her again until their first child was born. John was violent.
“He used to bring knives in. He worked at the freezing works. When he worked.
“There was quite a lot of knives under that house. I used to throw them under there. I used to keep clothes under there [too] so if he locked me out in my nightie, which he used to do from time to time, I would have something to put on.”
John drank when younger but had dried out; then in the last year of their marriage he returned heavily to alcohol. The final straw was when he threatened to kill the children.
She left in secret, terrified John would find out where she had gone. He’d have killed them all.
The education department was understanding and secretly found Jenny work in Whangamata.
Then John died just months later.
Eventually Jenny met a new partner, and this relationship brought her to te Rohe Pōtae.
“I met Merv in Te Puke,” she said. They moved to Tokirima, near Ōhura, where Jenny accepted a teaching job. Then Merv turned violent also, so she ended that relationship after six years.
Even so, the area became her “soul place”.
“I absolutely loved the King Country … it’s still rugged and untouched, much of it, natural. I love that.”
A few years later, she and her now-teenage children lost everything in a house fire while away for the weekend.
The community rallied around and by their return, the people of Tokirima had found and furnished them a new home.
The fire consumed the manuscript of a book Jenny had written on an Olivetti typewriter during an earlier stint teaching in Papamoa.
“But it was no bad thing,” she said.
A second novel was set on the Whanganui River. It was going to be the great New Zealand novel, she had felt, but as it turned out, “It wasn’t that great.”
A publisher she approached said the work felt predictable. So she decided she might like to write predictable books – along the lines of Mills & Boons. But traditional publishers still did not respond.
This prompted a direction change into self-publishing.
“I just wanted to publish my books. I don’t care whether they make huge amounts of money, that would be nice of course, but I just wanted to get them out there and see whether anybody cared, whether anybody liked what I wrote. And they did.”
Since then, the ideas haven’t left her alone.
“I have a whole world going on in my head mostly all the time, typical writer.” She joined the group Romance Writers of New Zealand 25 years ago; local members became her closest friends. The support was everything.
“I could see people all around me doing it, and succeeding at it.” And those were the events that lead to A Deal with the Devil coming out in 2015.
It wasn’t emotionally easy, even with her life experience.
“Scary as all hell,” is how she describes the feeling of sharing that first book. “Exposing the secret life of your mind is probably daunting at any age.” Her first reaction?
Relief that her mother was no longer alive to read the story, which, like her others, was “on the sexy side.”
Despite her experiences with John and Merv, Jenny had never lost her belief in love.
While teaching at Tokirima, Jenny had started seeing a younger man named Pete, who had returned to the remote valley after a broken engagement.
“I had three goes at finding the right man in my life and I did finally get it right,” Jenny says.
Their romance started with pavlova.
“He started to pursue me in an obvious fashion. He lived alone in a house not far from where I was. He rang me and said, ‘I’ve made this pavlova and it hasn’t risen.’
I went and had a look at it and said, ‘well actually pavlovas don’t rise. You have to pile [the egg whites] up.’”
As a teacher she was cautious about revealing their relationship, but the couple ‘came out’ eventually.
“Old Fred [Blank] had built a bonfire at the golf club. Pete stood there with his arms around me; it was the first time we’d ever done something like that in public.
There was this old couple, and the wife said, “Wally, would you look at that!” The whole valley came to their wedding – and the marriage has been a success.
“We mesh on all levels. We’ve had very few serious discords in our nearly forty years of marriage.
While Jenny has been publishing her books, she has also faced life-threatening kidney problems.
Her husband has provided great support.
“I could not have done this dialysis journey without Pete, he sort of organises me. I couldn’t organise myself out of a paper bag before I started on dialysis. I was sleeping all day and just dozy as. My kidneys just were not working.
Accepting the treatment has revived her life, she says.
Jenny has advice for older women with a secret dream.
The first is to find a supportive community, like her romance writers’ group. There’s no substitute for finding others working towards the same dream.
Other than that? Just get going, she says. “For goodness’ sake, what have you got to lose?”
“It’s a shame to be waddling off into your grave, thinking there’s things you would have like to have done.”
As well as the nine more Regency Rebelles books, Jenny is penning a memoir for her grandchildren and great-grandchildren – who are “inordinately proud of me,” she said.
She hopes to stay fit enough to complete her writerly goals for the coming years.
“May I still be waddling.”
