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shower scene. Back then I would never have imagined that one day I would live in the Hollywood Hills with a hazy view of the Norman Bates Motel set at Universal Studios in the valley below.
    But I don’t think our family had the funds for things like cinema outings; money was to be used for education, not entertainment or luxury items. Our mother made our clothes on her Singer sewing machine. We listened to children’s radio programmes, but there was no TV then. Oh, and there were a couple of dirt tennis courts in the area. We did play with the neighbourhood children – I was given a red tricycle for my sixth birthday and a small gang of us used to take it in turns to free-wheel it, helter-skelter, down the hill. I suppose that was the beginning of my addiction to adrenaline . . .
    You discovered that it felt good to move fast, be scared, perhaps a little out of control?
    I suppose I did. It excited me more than anything else in my life at that time. Yes, definitely it elevated my mood from everyday boredom. But apart from that, I don’t really remember having very much fun. Oh, I do remember that I tried to organize the neighbourhood children into a drama club to perform plays but, very wisely, they’d have none of it. But my parents were not particularly happy people so I suppose it never occurred to them to have fun with us. I’m not exactly sure why they weren’t happy. My father Neville came from a lively, down-to-earth family from the North Island of New Zealand. His father, Octavius, was the postmaster of Opotiki, a town in the eastern Bay of Plenty. Dad was the youngest of nine. Of the four boys in the family, two brothers – Ted and Norman – were killed in World War II (they were in the Allied Air Force), so I imagine there was considerable pressure on my father to make his mark in the world. I recently learned that Dad really wanted to go to war but Ted wrote him a letter from the South Pacific (where he was eventually killed) telling him in no uncertain terms to stay at home and hold the fort there.
    Most of the New Zealand Stephensons I’ve met are pretty laid-back and good-humoured. We are descendants of Samuel Stephenson, the son of an English sea captain – also called Samuel – who was murdered by pirates in Indonesia in 1820 when his ship
The Rosalie
ran aground. After hearing of his father’s death, Samuel junior sailed from England to try to recover his father’s assets in Indonesia, but when he failed to secure his inheritance, he moved on to New Zealand and established a trading post in Russell in the Bay of Islands. He married Hira Moewaka, a Maori woman from the Kapotai tribe whose father was probably Scottish (she also had a European name – Charlotte MacCauliffe), and the pair tried to settle down amid the volatile climate of fighting and land-grabbing that occurred between white colonists and Maori people in those days. Well, that’s the Cliff Notes – I’m romping through this bit of family history because I already wrote a whole book about what happened to my great, great grandfather called
Murder or Mutiny?
.
    My father, who told me he used to go to school bare-footed, eventually became a scientist and teamed up with my mother to form a cancer research duo. As an adult he was shy and a little insecure in social situations; however, as a parent he was a tough disciplinarian. But he had an earthy sense of humour and a rather irreverent view of the world that I regard as his greatest gift to me. I think he may have been a bit of a prankster in his youth, but I imagine my mother would have reacted pretty sourly to that kind of ‘silliness’. Early pictures of him reveal his wiry, film-star looks, although his bemused expression while holding his first child – me – suggests that he may not have been quite ready for prime-time parenthood. But then, who is?
    My mother Elsie spent her early childhood in Fiji. Her father was a businessman in Suva and her mother was a Methodist