Well, yesterday was the final event on the Going West calendar for this year. And the last ever of its kind: the annual steam train trip which was the original concept of the whole festival, ten long years ago will never puff again.

For those of you who may not already know it, the name of the festival originated from Maurice Gee’s novel Going West which was set in Henderson, and owed much to his boyhood memories of the area. And yep, the big final event every year for ten years, has been this whopping great steam train, huge, black, belching and hissing smoke and steam, (that's it, right, photo Gil Hanly) which they fill with writers, poets, musicians, food and wine. Then they chug from Auckland to Helensville, deep in the west … and back again.

For some reason, the fact that this was the last one completely passed me by and I promised myself some months ago that I’d definitely go next year. Then found to my horror it was not to be. However, Murray Gray and Naomi McCleary, festival organisers extraodinaire, found a place for me halfway along the main line, sitting in the only seat available, right next to, goodness me, Mr Maurice Gee. Who is, well, not a recluse, but isn't keen on interviews. We had… a bit of a chat.

But first: I arrived in the middle of lunch – 200-odd people sitting down in the historic Settlers Lodge at Waimauku, out by the Muriwai turnoff. I had missed, at the previous stop, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell (right, with Maurice Gee on the left, photo Gil Hanly) and his wife Meg, reading love poems to each other in the Little Chapel of Faith at Waikumete Cemetery.

Several people said to me that this had been extremely moving and wonderful, but to really get the significance, you must read the history of this couple. After a fairytale, love-at-first-sight beginning back in the fifties (Maurice Gee was at the party at Gill Shadbolt’s place where they met), their lives were turned into a horror story of post-natal depression, breakdowns and ECT à la Janet Frame. But they have come through it all, to emerge glowing (I do not use the word lightly), twinkling, wise and still in love. This is all in Between the Lives – partners in art, a collection of essays on celebrated NZ artists edited by Deborah Shepard. An extraordinary and inspiring book. I’ll say no more.

I did however, manage a very brief chat with them both. And came away with this: somehow we got on to the woes of the world (I think via the election) and Meg asked if I had children (they have great-grandchildren). On my assent, she said they were lucky, because she thought NZ would become ‘the ark of the world’. ‘And,’ she said, ‘if you look at this country, the shape of it is a kind of arc.’ Not quite sure what the significance is, but blow me down if she's not right.

Anyway, on to the hissing black monster train we got, and there was I down the end in this kind of shagadelic horseshoe lounge area with Gil Hanly and her camera, the Campbells, the Gee family, a couple of visitors from Hawke's Bay and Marcus Lush, who was to entertain us at the next stop – Helensville.

He did too. Half an hour of witty, self-effacing wisecracks about trains, the tragedy of trainspotting, and how he found himself saying yes to host a series about trains in NZ: ‘I realised that I was going to be doing this show, knowing nothing about trains, for a nation that wouldn’t watch it.’ How wrong he was. His life has been rather changed for the better by it in fact: the other day some geezer came up to him and said that he’d always hated him ‘because he’s funny looking’ but now he thinks Marcus is all right. Bless.

Once we’d got back on the train I had a chance to talk to Maurice. Now, this is a man who, with his 70-odd years sitting lightly on him, can look back at 27, correct me if I’m wrong, publications, but it’s over the last couple of years that his list of recognitions is er… impressive to say the very least: two of his books have made the silver screen (Fracture – adapted from Crime Story, and In My Father’s Den) and there are, he tells me, options on a few more too; he was a 2003 recipient of an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Icon Artists Award, got the $60K Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement last year; also last year his book The Scornful Moon was runner-up in the Montana awards for fiction and he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from Auckland University. A couple of other sundry awards and prizes here and there but you have to stop somewhere.

Which, after the publication of his next book Blindsight (Puffin, $35, out 4 October), he may well do. ‘This might be my last book,’ he said, with nary a trace of regret. Although he did say he has a half-finished children’s book somewhere he might have a look at. But he reckons he’s had enough really.

He started writing when he was 16. A neighbour used to invite him over to play draughts, and for every game he won, he was given a book from the man’s extensive library. He worked his way through the entire works of Dickens and it was this great writer that made him realise that he wanted to write too. Over the next few years he wrote two or three novels that didn’t work. He went teaching in Paeroa, where he ‘sowed some wild oats’ but after a couple of years got back into writing, scored a grant and went to England. That’s where it all started.

But a lot of his work comes back to his childhood in Henderson as we all know. I asked him what his clearest memories were from then. His first sight of death, was the immediate response. A couple of soldiers had decided to have a swim in the Henderson creek with their girlfriends. He was nine at the time and watching with his mates to see if the girlfriends would get their gear off. But before they could stop him, one of the soldiers dived in – at the shallow part. He broke his neck – ‘there was a big lump on the back of his neck, and a huge gash on his head … he took about ten minutes to die.’ By a twist of circumstance, the young Maurice found himself left alone with the dying man and his presumably hysterical girlfriend while everyone else had gone to get help. I could see from his eyes as he told me this that he could still see this scene. As you do.

His favourite activity back then was to make a canoe out of a sheet of corrugated iron: you tied the ends up and nailed a bit of wood inside to make a stern and prow, then caulked it all over with pitch and off you went. Down to the Waitemata they’d paddle, then realise they’d never get home by dark – so they’d sink the canoes and run the couple of miles along the river bank back home to dinner.

He thinks about returning to his roots but has a good life in Wellington with his wife, the attractive and twinkly Margareta. They have two grown-up daughters and Maurice has a son and two grandsons who no doubt keep them busy. I asked if the train trip made him nostalgic but got an emphatic no: ‘It's all changed. The first trip I did I got a bit of a shock that nothing looked the same. This time I didn’t even look out the window at the creek.’

We got off at the Swanson Station to see Karyn Hay read from her new book, out soon with Random House. It was expletively abrasive and will no doubt sell well. Can't see the pensioners lining up to buy it however. Andrew Fagan smoothed the ruffled feathers though, with an excellent train poem and a bit of a song. He's very good with a crowd, that boy.

Then back on for the home run. I’ll leave you with the image of Maurice in the new community hall in New Lynn, right at the beginning of the trip, where he read a few excerpts from Going West. He ended with a quote from the book about Skeat riding on a BSA motorbike with his friend Rex Petley: a perfectly chosen ode to the west (which I have chopped down just a little) that damn near brought tears to the Westies amongst the assembled throng – Bob Harvey definitely looked a bit damp round the eyes I thought.

We drove thirty miles up Muriwai beach, with the dunes on one side and slow green rollers, half a mile apart, on the other. Rex wound the Beezer up and we seemed to run on a mat of air. The wind got in my cheeks and blew my face up like a soccer ball. It whipped my chewing gum away. If we’d hit a patch of soft sand the bike would have stood on its nose and somersaulted and we’d have bounced along the beach and crackled with the breaking of our bones. ‘You’ve been a hundred miles an hour,’ Rex told me when we stopped.

Westwards became our direction. I fight the urge to become adjectival. The coast out there crushes language flat. South of Muriwai is Anawhata. Then Bethells Beach, Piha, Karekare, Whatipu. That says enough for me… We lay on the hot black sand and body surfed in the waves, and went out several times in winter and stood as close to the surf as we dared and climbed on the rocks and asked the seventh wave to take us. Once we swam, midwinter, all alone at Bethells, naked in the waves that overtopped us like walls and we came out like old bait, with the blood washed out of us, and trembled and stood bent long after we had pulled our clothes on. Our wrinkled hands could not tie our bootlaces up.
…

Rex took me riding on the Scenic Drive, Swanson to Titirangi and halfway back, the night before I caught the Limited to Wellington. We stopped at the lookout and Auckland lay spread flat winking its lights. ‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘Wellington’ (which I had never seen), ‘I must be mad.’

I would like to take this opportunity, as they say, to give a hearty round of virtual applause to the Going West team – Murray, Naomi, Rose, Lesley and Barbara for the passion and dedication and sheer hard yakka it takes to put on a world-class literary festival like this year after year. And a glass raised to the passing of the Going West Steam Train. It was pure magic.