How her mother's schizophrenia and a suicide attempt shaped author Joy Cowley

Joy, Full and Fearless follows Joy Cowley's life from a painful childhood, a loveless first marriage to a love of motorbikes, planes, family and inspiring children through the written word.

Most teachers were off to help with the war effort when she was at school, Cowley, 89, told RNZ’s Nine to Noon.

“A big plus came when I was in what was the fifth form, and a retired soldier was a school teacher. He taught us in a different way, he valued art and he told us stories of the war.”

She was also telling her three sisters stories at home at night, she says.

“What I was doing, without any kind of awareness or preparation was giving us strength, because the stories were always about girls who did very brave things. But that's when, I suppose, the writing instinct started. I would have been about eight or nine.”

She and her siblings had a tough childhood growing up in Manawatu, she says, there wasn’t a lot of money around and both parents had health problems.

“We were afraid of our mother. She could be so nice and at other times she could be very difficult. I can remember us walking home from school and we were laughing about something, my sister Joan and I.

“And my mother met us with father's belt, that was a strap that hung behind the door, and she laid this into us because she said that we had been talking about her on our way home from school.”

They didn’t know, but their mother was struggling with mental health, she says, she had schizophrenia.

“We didn't understand what was wrong with our mother. And it was only when the poor woman was, I suppose, coming to my age, and they found the right way of dealing with her.

“She would curl up in a little ball and they would give her one injection. And within minutes, she would be a very normal, happy woman. So, for the last eight years of her life, we had a very good relationship with her.”

Her carpenter father died young, he had rheumatic fever which weakened his heart. He taught her woodworking, she says.

“Dad and I took 12 months to build a house. And it wasn't a big house, but I was so proud of the fact that I had helped him.

“And when the house was made, Dad bought me some workers' overalls. And that was the first time I'd had something that was shop-bought. And I was so proud of those overalls.”

Cowley also had a love of things mechanical, she had a motorcycle and wanted to learn to fly, she says.

“I had a motorbike and at weekends, I would go up to Palmerston North. And yes, I started to fly tiger moths.”

It was there she met Ted Cowley, also a flyer, who would become her first husband.

“He was a very beautiful man. And we'd been seeing each other for about six months, he became persistent.

“And he said, ‘if you don't, other girls will’ and I suppose that's when I discovered sex and I thought it was very exciting.”

She became pregnant, the two quickly married and three more children followed, but the union was built on shaky foundations from the start, she says.

“Poor Ted, he didn't know what he wanted. We had four children quite rapidly, and he loved his children. And he was a good father. And I think we were both good parents.

“Because we did lots of fun things with those children. And they still talk about them. But I had said, look, if you marry me then, you can go out with anyone you like. And he did. And then he found someone he loved, of course.”

A marital split followed and then a deeply traumatic event in Cowley’s life.

The care of the children was divided between the two, she says.

“It was just an awful, awful time. One day, they agreed that they could bring the children to me for lunch.

"This was for a few weeks, it worked, they would come in on a Sunday. On this particular Sunday, I had the lunch ready, and they phoned to say, sorry, Jenny, who was the girlfriend, is going skating. We're taking the children with us to see it.”

That was a breaking point, she says.

“Having done pharmacy [Cowley had been apprenticed to a pharmacist in Foxton when she left school] I knew that people could die from three tablets, the sleeping pills.

“I tipped the packet into my hand, put two back in case I needed them, and took all the rest. It was about 11 or 12 tablets I took.”

She slipped into a semi-conscious state, aware of light around her, she says.

“The world around me dissolved into colours and then into this golden, I can't say that it was a mist, because it was alive. I knew it, I'd always known it.

“I'd been through it many times. I was going home. That was that whole feeling.”

She came to in hospital three days later.

“I'd been found on the floor by my bed and by my sister, who thought I was dead. But in the hospital, everything seemed to have changed.

“And what the change was, there was something of that light inside me that I could feel. I came out a very strong person, actually."

In an unconscious state a doctor questioned her about the experience, she says.

“He said, ‘how do you describe yourself?,’ I said, ‘I am a cell in the body of God.’

“I didn't know why I had said that when he read it out to me and he asked me to explain it. I said, well, it was the light, the light, I felt as though I was part of it, and I was going back to it.”

A deep sense of spirituality continues to guide Cowley, who now lives in Dunedin, and she's still writing in her 90th year.

“When I was young, I used to say that I was a human being on a spiritual journey. It's the other way around, I think we're all spiritual beings on human journeys.”