DIANA DEKKER- The Dominion - 04/05/2013
CHRIS SKELTON/Fairfax NZ
Tilly Lloyd sometimes wishes that Unity Books had CCTV to record the thousands of interesting things that happen there.
"I hate it," she says of the idea of a profile. "When you said it's just to be about me, did I say yes to that? Having done so, we'd better make the best of it."
Lloyd, of the wild fair hair and the serious glasses, can talk forever about books, authors, publishers and Unity. She's not great on Tilly Lloyd, but she has made a comprehensive list of biographical details to help ease her through talking about herself.
She starts at the beginning. Her childhood, she says, is similar to so many of her generation.
Just to break in on her story, Lloyd is heading for 59. She used to lie about it and say she was 10 years older, relishing the compliments. But she stopped when she was 54 and said she was 64 and the guy who asked – curious as to why Unity staff were having a nip of cognac at 9am – replied: "What are you doing about KiwiSaver?"
To put her in context, Lloyd was an early stalwart of women's lib, though she insists she wasn't in "the advance guard of theory or activists".
She is an avid reader, a lover of flowers and art, gay – her partner is musician Gloria Hildred – and a -woman Wellington powerhouse in the book business. She used to be a psychiatric nurse.
"So many people then went to school and uni and swapped into another line of work. It was a kind of a normal story for our generation."
Lloyd is now in Unity's bookish backroom, her eye catching a vase of once-beautiful pink and peach roses, expired since the last literary launch. She regrets their presence and consults her dutiful notes.
"This [her life] slightly follows that story except the first seven years were intensely peripatetic. I'm from Otago. My parents started out as what was then called 'the married couple'. The woman cooked for the contractors on a run or farm and the man would be the shepherd, or the contract fencer, or in good times, the manager. My parents were working down there, on runs in east Otago. There were lots of different places. That was exacerbated by the wool and mutton slump of '66, but determined mainly by my father's alcoholism. We had 14 addresses before I left home. No, 10, one three different times, in Palmerston."
Lloyd, christened Eileen Freda, says the matriarch of her family, her Aunt Joyce, still lives there, and other relations from a big, close, warm, Presbyterian family. She still has "50 first cousins running around".
Lloyd's mother, often very isolated, was intermittently unwell. "She had a few breakdowns and they were called breakdowns." She was an immeasurably kind person, says Lloyd, "So pretty much what anyone had done was their best. Isn't that amazing?"
Her father was "an incredibly fit guy who could lay a fence in a day, was capable with dynamite, and shearing ... and drinking heavily".
"Rural New Zealand in the 50s and 60s was hard, but definitely harder for others. Class consciousness comes from those times."
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